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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

If I was a person trying to find talented people with potential to do great things, and I cared about the quality of my selection process, I think doing things like that would be extremely necessary.

You can't improve what you can't measure.

But is the goal of these sorts of things often actually to select the best?

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Why would Cowen want to actually empirically test their skills? They're getting articles about their supposed mystical powers written up right now. Why risk tossing that away and find out for real, with very limited upside?

Right: if PR and kudos for yourself is the point, you don't want to test it.

But if you want to do this sort of thing for some sort of "making the world a better place" reason... or want to actually truly select the best... you gotta test it!

You should email him and ask him if he's considered this. Of all funders, he seems like one of the most likely to consider doing this (and given some of the people he funds, it may actually be possible to run some sort of experiment while minimizing moral hazard). I'm fairly certain he'd at least answer the question though.

What’s in it for him? Wouldn’t he be even happier to be actually helping his companies succeed rather than just picking them? If he finds 2N great companies, you’re asking him to pass up half of the money he could make... to prove... that he doesn’t actually benefit the companies that he invests in, and only selects them?

The goal is certainly the reverse: get the full return, and demonstrate that it's not just your name and address book that are helping.

And yes, this requires you to be very self-reflecting and open to the possibility of being wrong, but is it truly so hard to imagine that someone would rather know than not know?

But why is it better (for him, for anyone) for his success to come from one avenue than another? If he knows "companies I invest in tend to succeed," it's hard to see why he would skip over a great company, possibly allowing them to fail. It might even be considered unethical if that company produces something useful to the world.

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