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Comment by imjk | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to come off too critical, but I'm curious how we the HN community can move away from this sort of survivorship bias cynicism without discounting it entirely. I openly acknowledge that survivorship bias is a very real phenomenon that can be easily overlooked, but every time a story about a successful entrepreneur or angel/vc pops up, there's the tendency to discount every thing that is being said as survivorship bias, as if there's nothing else to be learned from the story. These comments tend to overwhelm the discussion in their prevalence. I think it puts a overall cynical attitude in the community that I've seen overtake other entire online communities of entrepreneurs. I really hope it doesn't do the same here.

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Even Chris Sacca says it in the video: "It's almost like the game is rigged". He got lucky at the beginning and now that he has tons of money he can afford to diversify his portfolio enough to be able to buy all the lottery tickets. On top of that, he has become the legendary Chris Sacca, so the probability that the next big thing won't be presented to him at a very early stage is very low.

So it's not only the survivorship bias, you have to add to that the Matthew Effect [1].

And I'm not denying that he is probably smart, has people skills, hard worker... The thing is that, in my opinion, there quite a few Chris Saccas out there that never got as lucky as him. So the survivorship bias here doesn't nullify all his work, since he showed that if you do the things his way you can get the chance to become the next Chris Sacca. It only shows, that even if you follow his path you can still fail.

I realized that people that don't see the survivorship bias tend to view people that do as cynical pessimists that downplay the hardwork of the Chris Saccas of the world. But this is just a problem of perception, at least in my case, I admire the Musks, the Jobs, the Gates, the Buffets... of this world. However I realize that in order to become like them, it takes more than just hard work and a vision, you have to get lucky and preferably be born white, to well educated and relatively wealthy parents, in the right country, be sent to a good school...

I like to consider myself a realist, if somebody gave me 80% of the lottery tickets I will probably be really hopeful that I will win, but if I only have 0.001% of the tickets I won't probably even remember to check the outcome. I want to believe that that does not make me an optimist in one case and a pessimist or a cynic in the other.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect

What would be an intelligent way to find those individuals just as talented and bright as the Musks, Jobs, and Gates of the world that weren't lucky enough to get the right lottery ticket?

I would imagine those who can develop a way to uncover the hidden talent that can be 90% as effective as the above names at 10% of the cost would really be onto something.

Musk, Jobs and Gates, to use your examples, are/were all phenomenally driven people. I'm not sure you find hugely driven people as much as are eventually confronted with them.

Nassim Taleb once said something interesting on this subject like:

"You need skills to get a BMW. You need skills and luck to become Warren Buffet. Journalists later wrote 'Taleb says Buffet has no skills!'"

I'm honestly not sure the cynicism is a bad thing.

I'd say the HN community has a higher than average grasp of statistics (the same could probably be said about many other entrepreneur communities) As such, when we see something which all broad statistics tell us is "one in a million" occams razor directs you to assume that it is in fact one in a million.

That "let's be extremely doubtful given a high bayesian prior suggesting that the doubt is legitimate" occurs strikes me as a wonderfully pragmatic viewpoint. If someone really wants to convince me there's some "trick" to being that one in a million they have to go against all of the evidence I've been presented thus far to say that simply doesn't happen. (evidence coupled with the fact that these sorts of news sources have a history and incentive aligned with the "how to strike it rich" style articles.)

> I'd say the HN community has a higher than average grasp of statistics

No, just no. From my experience as an engineer that's transitioned into finance, I assure you that engineers and developers have the WORST pre-conceptions about statistics as applied to investing. All of those have to be unlearned fast at the start of a finance career. Took me years to fully adjust.

Would you please share the examples as this would be useful to the engineers in HN.

Fascinating - I'd have thought the opposite. Any examples?

I like the idea of a "luck surface area" which suggests that the more you put yourself out there the more likely you are to be that one in a million.

If you Google it you'll probably get a better explanation than I gave.

I get what you're saying, and it seems totally fair. If all of the possible paths any human can take are the space of all outcomes, and there is some extremely sparse set of volumes within that space that are "one in a million successes", your likelihood of finding that success will be directly related to the amount of coverage you can explore.

I don't mean to suggest there isn't an aspect of hard work here. Like many other side posters say, diligence is certainly a component to "making your own luck" which can be well expressed within the concept of a "luck volume". (Even things like opportunity and family connections fit in nicely by expanding the set of vectors you can follow)

You might like the idea, but there are millions of people who work hard, who are smart and don't get anywhere.

Of course, because they're unlucky. Most of them realize that. The mentally healthy accept it, and then ignore it.

I think that the disconnect in this thread is between people who make their decisions based on what is true and those who make it based on what is useful. The former see the factual reality - that a lot of success comes down to luck - and then conclude "And therefore it doesn't matter what I do..." The latter see the factual reality - that a lot of success comes down to luck - and then conclude "But I can't control my luck, however I can control my luck surface area, and my preparedness, and my judgment". They shrink their world down to the parts that they do have control over and don't let the stuff that's out of their control worry them too much; after all, it's not like they're going to get a better outcome by thinking about that.

The wiser of the latter group always remember that there is still a lot of luck in any success or failure that they have, but there's a lot of psychological pressure to either believe luck doesn't exist or to let it rule your life.

No doubt. But if I solely punch the clock then what is going to be the impetus for my success? If I create and network then I have to believe my chances for success are at least a little bit better. Are you suggesting otherwise?

Or as the phrase goes, it takes ten years of hard work to be an overnight success.

The problem with (and complaint about) the top comment isn't cynicism, it's emptiness. It really just says "there is survivorship bias" with nothing specific about the shared article. It's not interesting.

It's definitely interesting if lots of top 'content' is actually just lottery winner stories, in which case I might consider spending some of my HN time reading the local casino's profile on their recent slot winners.

I'd argue that stories about lotto winners are more honest than stories about successful VCs and entrepreneurs, as the writers usually are up front about the odds of winning the lotto. It's often one of the major facts cited in the article: Joe Smith's lottery win was 1-to-2 million! When writing about lotto winners, nobody pretends that the winners had a system. Even if the winner says something like "I always play my birthday numbers LOL" it's never presented as causing positive EV. While non-luck-based factors may play a role in investment success, they are all that tends to be written about.

Chris Sacca admits himself that if Twitter hadn't been his first investment [1], you'd never have known his name - he spent every dime he had (plus a few thousands of dollars he didn't) in their seed round. It's not cynical to mention survivorship bias. It's the name of the game to not hear about the failures.

[1] http://gimletmedia.com/episode/1-how-not-to-pitch-a-billiona... (You'll need to listen for a bit.)

Because otherwise HN becomes an echo chamber for "aspiring entrepreneurs" who think that it's easy becoming a billionaire. Most people here forget that 95% of all startups fail, even in this environment.

There are just way too many exogenous variables to any exchange within a market to give an individual credit for success. As a founder, I know that my inputs and the inputs of my team are necessary but not sufficient to achieving market/financial success.

I think we need to be addressing instead the problem of causality as relates to success and trying to decouple success from individual inputs.

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