Comment by bdr7r6 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bdr7r6 | Hacker News Reader

Thats the point. Its all about how much risk you are willing to take. Thats what startups are supposed to represent - the risk takers of the population for whom the story has a high likelihood it wont end happily ever after.

Check out the Explore-Exploit Tradeoff which tells us what the Carrying Capicity of a group for risk takers is. Its never been high. Maybe 5% of any population. Out of which 4.99% fail. With those odds populations cant have everyone taking risk. Such populations sooner or later go extinct.

Attention Economy/Social Media/News Media realized risk taking captures attention. It helps Elon to raise funds, mesmerize customers and employee etc before anything is even built. So everyone starts signalling they are risk takers when really its about something else.

> With those odds populations cant have everyone taking risk. Such populations sooner or later go extinct.

Not trying to be a jerk, but there is a logical fallacy here. If you've ever read the Selfish Gene the central idea is that there is a common misunderstanding that animals/societies evolve for "the good of the population". A population is better understood as a collection of individuals with each being a collection of genes, and really it is each gene that is trying to replicate itself. Applying it to your example, a risk-taking gene with .998% chance of failure would probably not replicate itself successfully, unless the .002% of individuals that succeed were quite prolific at procreation. The good of the population does not really come into it.

Selfish Gene story is detached from how systems survive environmental change and unpredictability. Thats where Explore Exploit Ratio comes in. And how many Explorers a population can sustain has an upper limit. Which is always low. The Limit is not dependent on whether people are explorers or exploiters but on resources available in the environement around them which is constantly changing.

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