The Partial Control Fallacy
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The Partial Control Fallacy
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Re: The Partial Control Fallacy
#2This is such a useful concept! Surely someone gave it a name much earlier, right?
Edit: The closest thing that came to mind is the idiom "penny-wise and pound-foolish".
Re: The Partial Control Fallacy
#3I think this is called bikeshedding.
Re: The Partial Control Fallacy
#4It's a great point, too bad the author is focused on loserisms like winning competitive awards. Most ironic of all is applying for a Thiel fellowship because it's prestigious.
From "Competition is for losers" (http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-l...):
"Always prioritize the substance of what you're doing. Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games. They're endlessly dazzling, and they're always endlessly disappointing.” -Peter Thiel
Re: The Partial Control Fallacy
#5> Applying that to the above, and you can see that, if I worked infinitely hard on my essays, I could only make my apps 11% better versus not doing anything at all. (At least to the extent that it really does follow that rubric [the essay being worth ten percentage points of 100], even if I submit a blank essay.)
This is wildly incorrect. Assuming you have a perfect score on every other part of the rubric, the maximum improvement you can get through the essay is 11% of your non-essay score. Without that assumption, the maximum improvement is positive infinity percent.
Re: The Partial Control Fallacy
#6It's a great point, too bad the author is focused on loserisms like winning competitive awards. Most ironic of all is applying for a Thiel fellowship because it's prestigious. From "Competition is for losers" ( http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-l... ): "Always prioritize the substance of what you're doing. Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games. They're endlessly dazzling, and…
> Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games.
Easy to say if you're a billionaire.
Re: The Partial Control Fallacy
#7It's a great point, too bad the author is focused on loserisms like winning competitive awards. Most ironic of all is applying for a Thiel fellowship because it's prestigious. From "Competition is for losers" ( http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-l... ): "Always prioritize the substance of what you're doing. Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games. They're endlessly dazzling, and…
> Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games. Easy to say if you're a billionaire.
An entrepreneur needs to create some unique value. That won't happen if you're following the same path as many others. Prestigious paths are very competitive, and they're competitive for precisely the reason that so many people are pursuing them. Thus competition is for losers.
Which is a better direction? Investing your energy in solving a problem where no good solution exists today? Or competing for a corner office?
Re: The Partial Control Fallacy
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games. Easy to say if you're a billionaire.
An entrepreneur needs to create some unique value. That won't happen if you're following the same path as many others. Prestigious paths are very competitive, and they're competitive for precisely the reason that so many people are pursuing them. Thus competition is for losers. Which is a better direction? Investing your energy in solving a problem where no good solution exists today? Or competing for a corner office…
> If you're going to succeed as an entrepreneur, you need to create some unique value.
That's a way to succeed.
> That won't happen if you're following the same path as many others.
Yep, and that's why Valve and Epic shouldn't have bothered entering the FPS goldrush after Id and 3D Realms owned the market. :|
> Investing your energy in solving a problem for others where no good solution exists today? Or competing for a corner office?
How about doing what gets me paid? A lot of investors are seemingly more than happy to blow money on mundane rehashes of ideas in hopes of betting on the best rehash. There is no shame in being the not-quite-as-good rehash, if you get paid along the way.
Talking about "solving problems for others" is just a way of grandstanding pretending there's any more legitimacy to your narrowly-defined path of success as anything else. Lawyers and finance folks aren't solving anything new for others, and yet they're better compensated than any of us.
Jesus, stop buying this bullshit...it is how we (developers and entrepreneurs) are getting taken advantage of.
EDIT: Also, how is spying on consumers and modeling their data making the world a better place or solving a new problem, exactly? At least Transium was kinda new in the search tech space. :|
Re: The Partial Control Fallacy
#9I think this is called bikeshedding.
Bikeshedding is from Parkinson's law of triviality [1], which essentially says that deciding trivial issues takes a disproportionate amount of time - partly because there are many ways it could be done, and partly because non-trivial issues are hard to comprehend and are therefore easy to agree with.
This differs from the OP, where it is the ability to control an issue that is to blame - in Parkinson's law control is equal yet understanding is not.
Though of course the relation is strong.
Re: The Partial Control Fallacy
#10> Applying that to the above, and you can see that, if I worked infinitely hard on my essays, I could only make my apps 11% better versus not doing anything at all. (At least to the extent that it really does follow that rubric [the essay being worth ten percentage points of 100], even if I submit a blank essay.) This is wildly incorrect. Assuming you have a perfect score on every other part of the rubric , the maxim…
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