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Comment by _curious_ | Hacker News Reader

"well I did X and I'm successful so clearly X must work!"

If they did something...and that thing was successful then by definition that thing they did...it works, right?

The broken thought-process there is mostly about when you take a shotgun approach that involves many different things that could all individually pan out (or not); or which could all be multipliers for one-another (or not.) If, in the end, you succeed, you end up believing that everything you tried was a necessary part of your success. When, in actuality, you might have succeeded despite some of those approaches, rather than because of them. They might have been actively harmful to your success, but just not harmful enough to overcome the other successful things you tried.

In another instance, people who try one main thing (e.g. applying to a particular college) but who succeed entirely through no effort of their own (e.g. through nepotism), will end up thinking that what they did mattered.

"The broken thought-process there is mostly about when you take a shotgun approach that involves many different things..."

This sounds like quite the qualifier...which is fine, but I think it's important to take your response/reasoning into a much more narrow hypothetical.

I mean, we're talking about advice for running a startup here—an entrepreneur would be an idiot to not do everything possible to give themselves multiple independent avenues to success (e.g. do multiple forms of inbound advertising; attempt product-market fit with multiple markets; etc.)

I've worn a tiger-warding talisman around my neck for years, and so far I haven't been attacked by a tiger.

Is it fair of me to assume that this talisman works, and that I can safely climb into a tiger enclosure?

I would think unless and until you have tested that hypothesis (wearing of the talisman in a tiger rich environment) it's an invalid conclusion.

Now if you have successfully avoided tiger enclosures and subsequently not been attacked by any tigers, (regardless of what you are wearing) that method probably works ;)

No, it could have worked for a reason independent of the thing.

It certainly worked for them. But results are not typically indicative of risk, so anyone doing X may doom themselves by doing something that doesn't work in their special context.

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