11–20 of 231 posts
Meta: I can't believe how often xkcd nails it.
Like Bo Burnham said: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q-JgG0ECp2U
When I saw the comic in my feeds this morning I immediately thought of Darius Kazemi's XOXO talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_F9jxsfGCw
Thank you
What else would you do instead? More often than not I see this point abused by lazy or negative people to justify not doing anything useful. Yes there's survivorship bias, you try to adjust for that, and draw inspiration from the positive parts of the better and more realistic examples. Just because the system is rigged against you, doesn't mean you shouldn't try to achieve things. Not trying to achieve things is dec…
Not instead, but in parallel: check cases of those who failed in the same area and lost it all / went to jail / broke their life, among with less stressful outcomes. Bad thing is, losers rarely write success stories, so there is always a big risk in "being like Gates or Jobs".
It's indeed worth to take survivorship bias into account. But if you put too much emphasis on survivorship bias then you would think that everything is completely random and use "survivorship bias" argument as an excuse to do nothing. I'm highly recommend to listen Peter Thiel's speech "You are not a lottery ticket": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZM_JmZdqCw
Biases and fallacies (up to a point) are not end-all.
Gambler's fallacy makes sense if you're throwing dice, not if you're improving yourself, trying different things and walking the distance
Here's the thing with survivorship bias, they might not answer with something that's a guarantee of success (because nothing is), but they won't answer with something that's catastrophic.
It's indeed worth to take survivorship bias into account. But if you put too much emphasis on survivorship bias then you would think that everything is completely random and use "survivorship bias" argument as an excuse to do nothing. I'm highly recommend to listen Peter Thiel's speech "You are not a lottery ticket": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZM_JmZdqCw
Humans just seem to be wired for cargo cult. If I make the same mistakes as the one who got unreasonably lucky, I'll end up in the same improbable spot.
What if we humans had a predisposition to "Cargo-Cult" in order to strive to advance our race? Some sort of memetic gene. A sort of selfish gene if you will. People would argue striving to be like a TED speaker or Kim Kardashian or (INSERT_CELEB_NAME_HERE) is superficial, dumb and shallow. Yet those people are better positioned to survive given our society doesn't change. I would be interested to see if their was som…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiedler_contingency_model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vroom–Yetton_decision_model
In your example, I'm taking "celebrities" as leaders; Kim Kardashian for instance being "Relationship Oriented" and perhaps reflecting the desire of her followers for maintaining stability and comfort.
The rougher, more "Hunter Gatherer" style traits, perhaps channelled by modern political personalities perhaps reflect followers who are in more uncertain circumstances and who are looking for economic growth and an stabilisation of their situation.
What else would you do instead? More often than not I see this point abused by lazy or negative people to justify not doing anything useful. Yes there's survivorship bias, you try to adjust for that, and draw inspiration from the positive parts of the better and more realistic examples. Just because the system is rigged against you, doesn't mean you shouldn't try to achieve things. Not trying to achieve things is dec…
>What else would you do instead? Acknowledge when luck was the major reason for your success. Don't stand in front of a room of people and tell them if they weren't so damn lazy, they could have hundreds of millions of dollars as well. In other words, if luck played any major part in your success, you really have no justification in lecturing people on how to be good at something.
No, theres no silver bullet, especially not in small/easy/silly lifestyle variations (meditation, eating granola, not having furniture etc), but then that's far from what most inspirational business stories are about.