11 ms·

On Cumulative Advantage and How to Think About Luck

248 points by imartin2k 9y ago

jpfed 8y ago
It's an interesting exercise to try to design board games that have economy-like systems. You'll notice that it's very easy for rich-get-richer effects to emerge. Now, rich-get-richer effects can be desirable in a board game in which the starting conditions are perfectly symmetric and luck plays no role, because the more skilled player is going to the one to acquire that snowballing advantage. But in asymmetric games, or games in which luck creates asymmetry, rich-get-richer effects obscure the relative skill of the players.
- Xylakant 8y ago
  I don’t think that rich-get-richer effects are desirable in any game (1) since that makes the game degrade into a lopsided endgame where the poor have no shot at winning the game, leading to frustration. A game should always allow a shot at winning to stay interesting. (1) unless it’s an educational game aimed at demonstrating the effect.
  - PaulRobinson 8y ago
    Monopoly is perhaps one of the most widely played and popular board games in the World. It was intended to have a rich-get-richer side effect. The original intent was to demonstrate this phenomenon.[1] It's almost impossible to design a game with an economy where this does not happen, unless you mimic real-World societies where they have avoided it (e.g. Scandinavian countries). This is not a popular point to make to most Americans, but that does not make it any less true. [1] http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170728-monopoly-was-invented-to-demonstrate-the-evils-of-capitalism http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170728-monopoly-was-inven...
    - EliRivers 8y ago
      Monopoly is perhaps one of the most widely played and popular board games in the World Which is itself, perhaps, an example of this effect at work. Monopoly is boring to play and contains very little engaging gameplay [1]; a winner quickly emerges and the game then becomes a long grind in which everyone just wants it to be over. There are so many board games that are simply better and more fun in every way, yet time after time someone pulls out a Monopoly set for no good reason other than it has some kind of unfair, unjustified mindshare advantage. [1] If one plays by the actual rules, it's thankfully over a lot faster, but everyone seems to play by rules that force it into a long, painful endgame.
  - chongli 8y ago
    A game should always allow a shot at winning to stay interesting. While that sounds good in principle, it doesn't always work so well in practice. I have played board games that were designed that way and I began to realize that my choices early on did not matter very much. This had the effect of making the whole game feel pointless until the last turn where somebody would quickly grab the win.
    - danharaj 8y ago
      What is best in game design is the ability to end the game quickly once a decisive advantage has been gained, but with various chances to screw up and lose the advantage.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      Many games handle it poorly. The idea is to disincentivize poor planning and poor decisions such that winning becomes more difficult, but never so much that it becomes impossible. No matter what the situation is, a player should ideally be able to see a path to victory, or at least a spiteful form of failure, it just might involve rather significant gambles. The player on top should also ideally feel that their position is constantly one poor decision and some really bad luck away from being taken from them. Hidden information is frequently employed to this end, allowing players to imagine that their opponents are in a better or worse situation than they actually are, as well as providing the opportunity to intentionally deceive others about one's position.
  - openfuture 8y ago
    Chess is “rich get richer” but you can still win in the end. These two dynamics (endgame vs snowballing) are not necessarily coupled that tightly (unless in the hands of skilled player which is the whole premise).
  - bambax 8y ago
    Yes, that's the problem with Monopoly for example, once you start winning you can't lose (losing / can't win).
    - kartan 8y ago
      > Yes, that's the problem with Monopoly It is the problem of it "as a game", but it was the original goal design. It is a lesson on how capital can accumulate and leave people without options. Monopoly is derived from The Landlord's Game, which was created by Elizabeth Magie in the United States in 1903 as a way to demonstrate that an economy which rewards wealth creation is better than one in which monopolists work under few constraints[1] and to promote the economic theories of Henry George and in particular his ideas about taxation. (From Wikipedia)
hari_seldon_ 9y ago
Not from the article, but this makes me think of something that we learned back in my college probability course: "wealth gravitates towards the wealthy." Even in fair games and situations, it is much harder to come out ahead when you start out behind. Think of how the house always wins in Vegas, or how a random walk can experience heavy drift.
- guiscreenshots 9y ago
  The house always wins because all of the games have a negative expected value, not because the house starts out with more money than you.
  - downer56 9y ago
    The house uses its wealth to construct an environment that only houses games with negative expected values.
  - cbanek 9y ago
    But the house needs enough money to keep playing to even out the random fluctuations over time to make it to that expected value. For example, a craps table has a negative expected value for the players, and positive expected value for the house. But on a winning streak (these streaks are fairly common, just like losing streaks) the table might lose money if you look at the period of a few hours.
    - basementcat 9y ago
      That is why casinos have insurance policies. Sometimes they do not accept bets beyond a certain size. https://www.distinguished.com/Site/programs/hospitality-and-restaurants/hotel-casinos-and-gaming/ https://www.distinguished.com/Site/programs/hospitality-and-...
      - blackflame7000 8y ago
        Pot-Size limits don't impact hot or cold streaks.
paul7986 9y ago
Is one of things they lack a solid moral fiber and will do whatever to win(lie, cheat, steal, exaggerate, fake things.. fake a reality that doesn’t exist, etc)?
- deviationblue 9y ago
  It may not be something covered by the article, but this is not false. And those who don't do it, are not virtuous paragons or whatever- they either haven't done it, didn't think of it, or got caught.
- psyc 8y ago
  Don’t you mean Envisioning the Future?
dkural 9y ago
The article is mathematically unsound and provides no proof or model whatsoever of what they claim.
- vertexFarm 9y ago
  I think it's meant more as a thought experiment than an actual formal proof.
- gwern 9y ago
  I am a little surprised that it just provides a simulated model; Yahoo ran a famous experiment which does exactly what demonstrates his point about randomness and media success being only weakly correlated with success: "Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market" http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.p..., Salganik et al 2006; Salganik & Watts 2009, http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_watts09.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_watts09.pdf "Web-Based Experiments for the Study of Collective Social Dynamics in Cultural Markets"; http://cultural-science.org/FeastPapers2008/AlexBentley1Bp.pdf http://cultural-science.org/FeastPapers2008/AlexBentley1Bp.p... ; "Leading the Herd Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3785310/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3785310/ , Salganik & Watts 2008.
  - dkural 8y ago
    Great links! I agree with the general truth of the phenomenon described & your references do a much better job demonstrating this.
otalp 9y ago
There's a similar experience I've seen with YouTube. The first hundred subscribers(assuming you don't ask friends and family to subscribe) is always the hardest, and even if you're putting out higher quality content than the big channels, it's difficult to break that barrier. Once you cross that barrier, getting from 100->1000 usually takes half the time, and it becomes successively easier to get more views and subscribers with less effort. Once you're in the hundred thousands you can earn a decent side-income from just putting out a video a day, and once you're in the millions you can be set for life with little effort assuming you don't have high production costs. It is a snowballing effect, but most people never cross the initial tough barriers(after 10k, it becomes relatively easy to keep growing). In order to cross it, it either involves luck, or you have to know someone more popular than you who can boost your channel.
- michaelbuckbee 9y ago
  Out of curiosity, how difficult would it be to "buy" your way in? I'm thinking you could more or less hire influencers to recommend your channel/content?
  - otalp 9y ago
    I doubt the really big ones would do it - and anyone moderately successful is still going to ask for like thousands of dollars. But yeah, if you have money to burn that can probably boost you - but most people don't, so it again favours the people who already have an advantage.
  - blackflame7000 9y ago
    There are actually many businesses predominately in Asia or India that sell clicks/likes
- CryoLogic 9y ago
  In my experience growing a successful(ish?) YouTube channel, the initial barrier was more like 10k subs. I don't even upload anymore and still get hundreds of subs per month. But the way YouTube works is a bit more difficult. Higher subscriber counts get you higher CPM rates. Higher CPM rate videos place higher in search. I've actually seen this myself in my own competing videos. YouTube really pushes video CPM rate in search. So on YouTube, the barrier to entry is extremely difficult. To hit 10k subs I had to do tons of marketing, guest posts, bought some advertising. 10-20k? Just post a video every week. 20-30k? Just post a video every month or two.
api 9y ago
Examples like King/Bachman are the sorts of things that to me debunk the notion of meritocracy and support things like wealth redistribution and affirmative action. If success is largely a product of randomized path-dependent effects and feedback loops, then success is not really earned. It's basically lottery winnings. That being said I'm not sure I accept that premise universally. It seems like this is true in domains that are popularity contests: pop culture, politics, etc., but I have no proof of that and have never seen anyone do any kind of comprehensive analysis of it. Maybe I just don't want to believe that success beyond a certain point is random.
- mpweiher 9y ago
  > [King/Bachman] debunk the notion of meritocracy Not sure that is correct, because (if you agree that King is good), you do need to be good to be successful, and I think that is what meritocracy wants to accomplish for society: that those who are successful are good, rather than bad. For society, it is not necessary that everyone that's good is also successful, just that the bad doesn't rise to the top (too much). What it debunks is the (incorrect) corollary that if you are not successful, you must be bad/lazy (or that if you are good you are guaranteed to have success). Which of course does not follow (A→B does not imply not(A)→not(B)), particularly if there are multiple necessary factors for success, such as for example quality AND luck/path dependencies. If it is quality AND luck, then it's not the same as lotto, though the random part does play a role. And yes, wealth redistribution makes a lot of sense for societies, and yes, the "no success → bad/lazy" fallacy is often used to justify not having such mechanisms.
adnzzzzZ 9y ago
I really dislike when people focus on luck this much. If you have in your mind the notion that luck is real and that it affects the outcome of your efforts in any way, sooner or later (and often times without really noticing that you're doing it) you will use that notion to excuse your failures and to explain away other people's successes, and that will prevent you from achieving your goals as fast as you would have otherwise. While it is useful to understand the nature of how markets operate and the role of luck in them, I find that worrying too much about this is harmful for my personal development and that taking a stance that is something like "luck doesn't exist" is more useful. http://ssygen.com/posts/luck http://ssygen.com/posts/luck
- affinehat 8y ago
  You can't lump together all forms of luck into a single "objectively true, pragmatically false" category without considering the magnitude of impact luck has on what you intend to do. In the extreme, playing the lottery is almost entirely luck, and it's very much pragmatic to believe that it is so. It's not a binary choice between 0% luck / 100% power, and 100% luck / 0% power. There's a whole continuum in between, and the exact luck/power breakdown for any given action is a matter of objective fact. Where we run into trouble is when our perception of the breakdown does not match the objective reality, and we waste our time on impossible tasks or don't bother to try tasks that could have benefited us. And the breakdown of luck/power is objectively skewed in favor of power for those who are white, and skewed in favor of luck for those who are minorities. So while white privilege and white supremacy might both be wrong, they are certainly not wrong to the same degree. While privilege is a view closer to the objective reality and is thus probably overall beneficial as long as you don't take it too far. Likewise for feminism/incel.
  - adnzzzzZ 8y ago
    As I've stated in the article, it's about the mindset you take and not what is objectively true. You're not helping minorities by pointing out that their success in life will be mostly due to luck, you're just giving them excuses to not try harder.
gravity_123 8y ago
Winning and losing have a lot to do with confidence and ability to take risks. Winning reinforces confidence which allows one to take more risks if they have a growth mindset(also equally important). PS: The add-on[1] I use to avoid redirects doesn't like these medium hosted blogs. These links redirect to medium[2] which redirects to original link and I am stuck in an infinite loop. [1]:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/skip-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/skip-redirect... [2]:https://medium.com/m/global-identity?redirectUrl=https://ofdollarsanddata.com/why-winners-keep-winning-4e7f221f5b84 https://medium.com/m/global-identity?redirectUrl=https://ofd...
victor106 8y ago
This explains a similar phenomenon with paper clips https://youtu.be/F-I-BVqMiNI https://youtu.be/F-I-BVqMiNI
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
whack 8y ago
Theoretically, the wide availably of user-reviews on sites like Amazon and GoodReads, should allow unknown writers to gain visibility and reach the full market of readers who would enjoy that book. The fact that JK Rowling has failed in her anonymous writings, points towards the great opportunity that still exists for platforms/apps that can surface great books from unknown authors. On a tangential note, it would be amazing if the guild/union of authors collectively agreed that all books will be published anonymously for the first year, with the author's name only revealed after the first year anniversary. This would allow newer authors to step out from the shadow of the established ones. I doubt this will ever happen of course, but I think we would see so much more dynamism in the industry if it ever did.
- underwater 8y ago
  Solving the visibility problem is only a problem for uneatablished authors, not readers. I would guess that most people are happy to read something from an author hey know rather than taking a chance on another author who is “better”.
  - SuoDuanDao 8y ago
    I would fall outside your supposition - the few creators whose work is so good I know I'll enjoy it don't produce as much media as I consume. All else being equal I'd prefer novelty when taking a chance on content. I actually thought that was the default.
  - whack 8y ago
    The visibility problem affects the readers as well. Consider the ~million readers who enjoyed reading the Bachman/King books after the author's identity was revealed. There are probably a 100 other "Bachmans" out there whose books they would have enjoyed reading as well, possibly even more than their favorite King books. Except that because of the author's lack of visibility, they never discovered these works. Yes, the readers aren't "losing" anything. But nevertheless, they have still missed out on something they would have enjoyed.
    - 8y ago
hyperpallium 8y ago
Stephen King vs Richard Bachman is a wonderful illustration of market vs merit. Does merit have similar increasing characteristics? Does it apply in non-competitive contexts? Market success, notoriously, has non-merit factors: a comment on reddit has to have merit to get a few votes. But to go from a few to thousands, it has to be early, visible in the thread, the thread has to be visible, the story has to be visible on the front page, it has to stay there a long time. ("karma train") One of the sub-factors is people like to read what others read - regardless of quality - in order to be on the same page, get the same jokes and references etc. To know what's going on - like the news.
- TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  Like Stephen King himself said, the experiment did not have enough time to reach maturity. I don't think it's contradictory to suggest that reputation is a component of merit. Most people do not succeed, yet those who do have a habit of succeeding over and over again. And so when you view something with an unknown track record it's expected value is going to be much lower than something from an author with a track record of dozens of successes. In today's era where reviews and award often consider many factors besides just the book quality alone, they've become quite useless. So how are people supposed to find new books? You end up going from a handful of reviewers who tend to like the material you like, or by going to the same author over and over. In either case, it takes new entrants some significant amount of time to reach their full potential. I don't think this inherently means the market is broken.
  - hyperpallium 8y ago
    To suggest that reputation is a component of merit is a category error. Reputation isn't part of merit; it doesn't cause merit. Merit may cause reputation. You probably mean reputation has some positive correlation with merit, so that reputation can be used as a predictor of merit. And of course, you're right. However, I wasn't addressing how consumers can ascertain merit, but whether merit has similar increasing chacteristics to market success, as described in the article. That is, if someone starts with a little extra merit than someone else, does it also compound as they practice? I wanted to exclude competitive factors. For example, Gladwell's Outliers claims that Canadian hockey players have birthdays biased to part of the year, and that this was because the slight age difference makes child players more successful against their sub-year younger opponents in the same age-group. They get more practice and confidence, and get selected for extra training. But, this competitive aspect gives an artificial advantage to players who are slightly relatively better. And also, this advantage is not present just once, but every time they play, for years. BTW both the points you and I made regarding the merit-market relationship are mentioned in the literature posted by gwern https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17052074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17052074 (last link): > in part because people use the popularity of products as a signal of quality—a phenomenon that is sometimes referred to as “social” or “observational learning” (Hedström 1998)—and in part because people may benefit from coordinating their choices; that is, listening to, reading, and watching the same things as others (Adler 1985). - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3785310/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3785310/
ChuckMcM 8y ago
The story about name recognition is perhaps more important. A publisher was giving advice to would be authors and their advice was until you had at least one and possibly two best sellers it was always more valuable to give away your books than sell them. This was because the barrier to reading a new book is so much higher for an author the reader doesn't yet "know" than one that is a known quantity.
- Buttons840 8y ago
  So don't sell any books until I have a best seller?
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    Publishers are often very confused about how publishing works.
  - ChuckMcM 8y ago
    That wasn't what I took away from that publisher's statement. I heard it to mean that in the beginning getting your name out was very important. And while the Oatmeal famously lampooned "exposure" as something that might be valuable, building one's "brand" is a thing.
- SneakerXZ 8y ago
  There is another bias where things that are free must be lower quality or there is some catch so I would be careful with that.
arnold8020 8y ago
I was wondering about this in the context of the 80-20 rule, and believe I have a simple answer. Basically you need two things: 1) Some slight advantage 2) The network effect, that is, the probability of competing depends on the current winnings. If you have these two things, you get 80-20 like distributions, you get the explanation for why winners keep winning. If you are interested, you can find my simulation and analysis at http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~arnold/research/80-20/ http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~arnold/research/80-20/ Kind of shocking how well this works. The intuition is, why has coke won, well they had some initial advantage, and so they won a bit. Now that they have won a bit, they can finance themselves into more competition. For example, they can place themselves into more stores, into more restaurants etc. Now they get a chance to compete more.
- static_noise 8y ago
  Your rules are basically "the winner takes it all in the long run". This is similar to reality but real actors can disappear. Individuals have a limited lifespan. Their offspring have slightly different abilities. Corporations/Nations/Organizations are run by individuals (chosen not randomly) and may face technological/political challenges but here it's not clear that these structures need to disappear. Do you see a good way to factor in these things?
  - arnold8020 8y ago
    Interesting that you see it as 'winner takes all'. Wondering why you say that. The simulation can be run in various ways. When I run with rules: r1) Actors have normally distributed abilities, r2) Actors are chosen randomly based on current winnings, the more you have won, the more you compete, r3) Winner of competition wins one point from the loser, You get interesting results, for example, in the two columns below, the left is Household income in 1970 broken into quintiles. The right column is simulation results. 4.1% 6.7% 10.8% 11.5% 17.4% 16.0% 24.5% 23.3% 43.3% 45.6% Interesting how well the top 3 or 4 quintiles match between the simulation and the real world data. If you run the simulation with different rules, the real world quintiles do not match the simulation quintiles nearly as well. You can tweak the simulation to see this as well. The simulation can be tweaked to handle cases such as inheritance, so an actor with different ability inherits the wealth of a past actor. It would be interesting to see how many generations it takes to loose the wealth to test the adage that wealthy families loose their wealth in 3 generations. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/globe-wealth/eroding-family-fortunes-how-the-cycle-can-be-broken/article33757468/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/globe-wealth/... Ill try it and get back to you.
ec109685 8y ago
> J.K. Rowling published a book called The Cuckoo’s Calling under the pen name Robert Galbraith only to be outed by someone performing advanced text analysis with a computer. That is highly misleading. She was outed by a person with inside knowledge (anonymous tip), which was confirmed by automated text analysis. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-did-computers-uncover-jk-rowlings-pseudonym-180949824/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-did-comput...
- petters 8y ago
  Further, they only compared Rowling to three other authors and Rowling ended up second in at least one of the tests. The analysis likely did not prove anything by itself.
lucky_dawg 8y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with the article that success ultimately boils down to luck and not much else. Not even kidding, the harder I work, the luckier I get!
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  So if not everyone, then at least the majority of all people worldwide who work very hard will be successful. I think reality shows this not to be true, hundreds of millions of very hard workers who even exhaust their bodies towards an early and broken death would probably disagree. You are already lucky by birth. Even apart from one's own family, we are placed into environments consisting of culture, institutions and tools developed over millennia. How much the place of one's family within one's own society plays a part depends, some countries are better at letting people from all kinds of families develop, in many others there is a large inheritance factor within families, where family income has a high correlation with one's own lifetime income.
- hari_seldon_ 8y ago
  Maybe we can think of it as everyone having a lottery ticket, but certain things can increase your odds. When it comes to startups, for example, VCs are often arguing that just being closer to them in SV can help your chances. The neighborhoods we grow up in, the schools we attend -- they all influence that "luck" number for each person!
eanzenberg 8y ago
Is this surprising? My first criteria for choosing a restaurant is, are there people already there? Unless I’m passionate anout the domain and am willing to give up substaintial personal time, I’m not interested in discovering new talent or being a guini pig.
- lostlogin 8y ago
  It’s interesting to watch how seating is arranged by staff, particularly early in the night. Early customers or ones that they want to be seen are seated near the front or by the window.
  - mkagenius 8y ago
    > or ones that they want to be seen are seated near the front or by the window This will piss me off now whenever they offer a table in the corner.
    - lostlogin 8y ago
      It’s funny when you get a window first time, but turn up with a kid the next time and get the overflow room upstairs.
incompatible 8y ago
Does this happen in software too? Would Git be languishing unknown on SourceForge if it hadn't been written by Torvalds? Edit: I'm sure it's a big factor in app stores.
- crispyporkbites 8y ago
  Potentially It actually puts me off writing some OSS libraries as it’s hard to know if anyone will appreciate them. If you already have an audience you know you’ll get some feedback and initial users / contributers.
  - aaronbrethorst 8y ago
    I think, as a rule, you're better off extracting OSS libraries from things you've built. That way you know that you are already appreciating them.
- im3w1l 8y ago
  I'm sure it does. But it goes both ways. Because if you're famous people will start using it based on trust and if it turns out to be crap people will feel betrayed and be angry and you'll lose the trust.
  - bartread 8y ago
    It does indeed. Think Peter Molyneux and Godus.
    - incompatible 8y ago
      If they are famous they can probably withstand the occasional flop, although I suppose writers, actors etc., have been known to fall out of fashion entirely.
      - bartread 8y ago
        The manner of the flop is important as well. The reason Peter Molyneux's reputation has taken such a pummelling over Godus is the way he handled - or mishandled - the crowdfunding.
incompatible 8y ago
The article didn't even mention the field where the effect seems to be biggest: visual arts. The value of a painting depends almost entirely on the fame of the artist, as I understand it.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  That's because the value of this kind of art, in this context, is as a form of social signaling. The actual talent of the artist, and the meaning the work communicates to the owner, these are not really considerations for this metric.
montrose 8y ago
Instead of his vague recommendation to "accept luck as a primary determinant in your life," I recommend reminding yourself that although luck may be a necessary condition for success, it is not a sufficient one.
- mattbierner 8y ago
  For a literal take on the role of luck in life, read “The Dice Man”.
wxyyxc1992 8y ago
天之道，损有余以补不足；人之道，损不足以奉有余。 It is the way of heaven to diminish superabundance, and to supplement deficiency. it is not so with the way of man. he takes away from those who have not enough to add to his own superabundance.
jeffdavis 8y ago
Cumulative advantage has always seemed obvious to me and not terribly intereeting. I'm more interested in why it doesn't dominate in a completely out-of-control way. For instance, we know small companies often win against much larger ones.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  > we know small companies often win against much larger ones We do? They do? It seems to me that this statement requires context in order to say much of anything. I don't know what to do with it as a standalone general statement. Do they win when the far larger business actually cares, in head-to-head competition? I doubt that happens very often. When counting the successes there also is significant danger of survivorship and selection bias because the David vs. Goliath story resonates so deeply with human listeners. Or do they win when the larger business doesn't even know it is in the race, like an ant screaming at an elephant oblivious to its existence "this pebble is mine"? I'm sure the chances of success here are pretty good.
  - jeffdavis 8y ago
    Why does the large company not understand the race when it has such great cumulative advantage? How did the giants of today get to be giant in a 20-year span when they started out tiny? And why didn't the giants of 20 years ago use their cumulative advantage to get even larger?
    - ItsMe000001 8y ago
      I don't see what your reply has to do with anything I wrote.
sammorrowdrums 8y ago
There's too much noise out there. I don't think it's purely market advantage. People are buying from authors they already like because they can't read all the books, so they look for books that are from an author they already like or ones that manage to breach their noise filter. Same with music, there's probably thousands of bands you would love and songs you would list among your favourites, if only you would give them an equal chance of listening, but that's not how we usually behave. Yes the market recognises this behaviour and tries to push past success because they get a great return, but familiarity and noise floor are powerful.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Yes, this seems more like a demonstration of how strong branding is in crowded fields.
amelius 8y ago
Reminds me of this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16618385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16618385
pimmen 8y ago
This is also a very good reminder of why discrimination takes a long time to defeat. The moment we legislate that we shouldn't discriminate by race, gender or religion the capital gained from all the advantages is skewed towards to the oppressors and the playing field is not leveled yet.
pps43 8y ago
I think that instead of adding one marble at each step, it's better to add a fixed percentage of existing marbles, e.g,, 0.25%. This will better approximate the processes that are being modeled. But then the effect shown in the article will disappear.

248 points by imartin2k 9y ago

It's an interesting exercise to try to design board games that have economy-like systems. You'll notice that it's very easy for rich-get-richer effects to emerge. Now, rich-get-richer effects can be desirable in a board game in which the starting conditions are perfectly symmetric and luck plays no role, because the more skilled player is going to the one to acquire that snowballing advantage. But in asymmetric games, or games in which luck creates asymmetry, rich-get-richer effects obscure the relative skill of the players.

Xylakant 8y ago
I don’t think that rich-get-richer effects are desirable in any game (1) since that makes the game degrade into a lopsided endgame where the poor have no shot at winning the game, leading to frustration. A game should always allow a shot at winning to stay interesting. (1) unless it’s an educational game aimed at demonstrating the effect.
- PaulRobinson 8y ago
  Monopoly is perhaps one of the most widely played and popular board games in the World. It was intended to have a rich-get-richer side effect. The original intent was to demonstrate this phenomenon.[1] It's almost impossible to design a game with an economy where this does not happen, unless you mimic real-World societies where they have avoided it (e.g. Scandinavian countries). This is not a popular point to make to most Americans, but that does not make it any less true. [1] http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170728-monopoly-was-invented-to-demonstrate-the-evils-of-capitalism http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20170728-monopoly-was-inven...
  - EliRivers 8y ago
    Monopoly is perhaps one of the most widely played and popular board games in the World Which is itself, perhaps, an example of this effect at work. Monopoly is boring to play and contains very little engaging gameplay [1]; a winner quickly emerges and the game then becomes a long grind in which everyone just wants it to be over. There are so many board games that are simply better and more fun in every way, yet time after time someone pulls out a Monopoly set for no good reason other than it has some kind of unfair, unjustified mindshare advantage. [1] If one plays by the actual rules, it's thankfully over a lot faster, but everyone seems to play by rules that force it into a long, painful endgame.
- chongli 8y ago
  A game should always allow a shot at winning to stay interesting. While that sounds good in principle, it doesn't always work so well in practice. I have played board games that were designed that way and I began to realize that my choices early on did not matter very much. This had the effect of making the whole game feel pointless until the last turn where somebody would quickly grab the win.
  - danharaj 8y ago
    What is best in game design is the ability to end the game quickly once a decisive advantage has been gained, but with various chances to screw up and lose the advantage.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    Many games handle it poorly. The idea is to disincentivize poor planning and poor decisions such that winning becomes more difficult, but never so much that it becomes impossible. No matter what the situation is, a player should ideally be able to see a path to victory, or at least a spiteful form of failure, it just might involve rather significant gambles. The player on top should also ideally feel that their position is constantly one poor decision and some really bad luck away from being taken from them. Hidden information is frequently employed to this end, allowing players to imagine that their opponents are in a better or worse situation than they actually are, as well as providing the opportunity to intentionally deceive others about one's position.
- openfuture 8y ago
  Chess is “rich get richer” but you can still win in the end. These two dynamics (endgame vs snowballing) are not necessarily coupled that tightly (unless in the hands of skilled player which is the whole premise).
- bambax 8y ago
  Yes, that's the problem with Monopoly for example, once you start winning you can't lose (losing / can't win).
  - kartan 8y ago
    > Yes, that's the problem with Monopoly It is the problem of it "as a game", but it was the original goal design. It is a lesson on how capital can accumulate and leave people without options. Monopoly is derived from The Landlord's Game, which was created by Elizabeth Magie in the United States in 1903 as a way to demonstrate that an economy which rewards wealth creation is better than one in which monopolists work under few constraints[1] and to promote the economic theories of Henry George and in particular his ideas about taxation. (From Wikipedia)

hari_seldon_ 9y ago

Not from the article, but this makes me think of something that we learned back in my college probability course: "wealth gravitates towards the wealthy." Even in fair games and situations, it is much harder to come out ahead when you start out behind. Think of how the house always wins in Vegas, or how a random walk can experience heavy drift.

guiscreenshots 9y ago
The house always wins because all of the games have a negative expected value, not because the house starts out with more money than you.
- downer56 9y ago
  The house uses its wealth to construct an environment that only houses games with negative expected values.
- cbanek 9y ago
  But the house needs enough money to keep playing to even out the random fluctuations over time to make it to that expected value. For example, a craps table has a negative expected value for the players, and positive expected value for the house. But on a winning streak (these streaks are fairly common, just like losing streaks) the table might lose money if you look at the period of a few hours.
  - basementcat 9y ago
    That is why casinos have insurance policies. Sometimes they do not accept bets beyond a certain size. https://www.distinguished.com/Site/programs/hospitality-and-restaurants/hotel-casinos-and-gaming/ https://www.distinguished.com/Site/programs/hospitality-and-...
    - blackflame7000 8y ago
      Pot-Size limits don't impact hot or cold streaks.

paul7986 9y ago

Is one of things they lack a solid moral fiber and will do whatever to win(lie, cheat, steal, exaggerate, fake things.. fake a reality that doesn’t exist, etc)?

deviationblue 9y ago
It may not be something covered by the article, but this is not false. And those who don't do it, are not virtuous paragons or whatever- they either haven't done it, didn't think of it, or got caught.
psyc 8y ago
Don’t you mean Envisioning the Future?

dkural 9y ago

The article is mathematically unsound and provides no proof or model whatsoever of what they claim.

vertexFarm 9y ago
I think it's meant more as a thought experiment than an actual formal proof.
gwern 9y ago
I am a little surprised that it just provides a simulated model; Yahoo ran a famous experiment which does exactly what demonstrates his point about randomness and media success being only weakly correlated with success: "Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market" http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.p..., Salganik et al 2006; Salganik & Watts 2009, http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_watts09.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_watts09.pdf "Web-Based Experiments for the Study of Collective Social Dynamics in Cultural Markets"; http://cultural-science.org/FeastPapers2008/AlexBentley1Bp.pdf http://cultural-science.org/FeastPapers2008/AlexBentley1Bp.p... ; "Leading the Herd Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3785310/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3785310/ , Salganik & Watts 2008.
- dkural 8y ago
  Great links! I agree with the general truth of the phenomenon described & your references do a much better job demonstrating this.

otalp 9y ago

There's a similar experience I've seen with YouTube. The first hundred subscribers(assuming you don't ask friends and family to subscribe) is always the hardest, and even if you're putting out higher quality content than the big channels, it's difficult to break that barrier. Once you cross that barrier, getting from 100->1000 usually takes half the time, and it becomes successively easier to get more views and subscribers with less effort. Once you're in the hundred thousands you can earn a decent side-income from just putting out a video a day, and once you're in the millions you can be set for life with little effort assuming you don't have high production costs. It is a snowballing effect, but most people never cross the initial tough barriers(after 10k, it becomes relatively easy to keep growing). In order to cross it, it either involves luck, or you have to know someone more popular than you who can boost your channel.

michaelbuckbee 9y ago
Out of curiosity, how difficult would it be to "buy" your way in? I'm thinking you could more or less hire influencers to recommend your channel/content?
- otalp 9y ago
  I doubt the really big ones would do it - and anyone moderately successful is still going to ask for like thousands of dollars. But yeah, if you have money to burn that can probably boost you - but most people don't, so it again favours the people who already have an advantage.
- blackflame7000 9y ago
  There are actually many businesses predominately in Asia or India that sell clicks/likes
CryoLogic 9y ago
In my experience growing a successful(ish?) YouTube channel, the initial barrier was more like 10k subs. I don't even upload anymore and still get hundreds of subs per month. But the way YouTube works is a bit more difficult. Higher subscriber counts get you higher CPM rates. Higher CPM rate videos place higher in search. I've actually seen this myself in my own competing videos. YouTube really pushes video CPM rate in search. So on YouTube, the barrier to entry is extremely difficult. To hit 10k subs I had to do tons of marketing, guest posts, bought some advertising. 10-20k? Just post a video every week. 20-30k? Just post a video every month or two.

api 9y ago

Examples like King/Bachman are the sorts of things that to me debunk the notion of meritocracy and support things like wealth redistribution and affirmative action. If success is largely a product of randomized path-dependent effects and feedback loops, then success is not really earned. It's basically lottery winnings. That being said I'm not sure I accept that premise universally. It seems like this is true in domains that are popularity contests: pop culture, politics, etc., but I have no proof of that and have never seen anyone do any kind of comprehensive analysis of it. Maybe I just don't want to believe that success beyond a certain point is random.

mpweiher 9y ago
> [King/Bachman] debunk the notion of meritocracy Not sure that is correct, because (if you agree that King is good), you do need to be good to be successful, and I think that is what meritocracy wants to accomplish for society: that those who are successful are good, rather than bad. For society, it is not necessary that everyone that's good is also successful, just that the bad doesn't rise to the top (too much). What it debunks is the (incorrect) corollary that if you are not successful, you must be bad/lazy (or that if you are good you are guaranteed to have success). Which of course does not follow (A→B does not imply not(A)→not(B)), particularly if there are multiple necessary factors for success, such as for example quality AND luck/path dependencies. If it is quality AND luck, then it's not the same as lotto, though the random part does play a role. And yes, wealth redistribution makes a lot of sense for societies, and yes, the "no success → bad/lazy" fallacy is often used to justify not having such mechanisms.

adnzzzzZ 9y ago

I really dislike when people focus on luck this much. If you have in your mind the notion that luck is real and that it affects the outcome of your efforts in any way, sooner or later (and often times without really noticing that you're doing it) you will use that notion to excuse your failures and to explain away other people's successes, and that will prevent you from achieving your goals as fast as you would have otherwise. While it is useful to understand the nature of how markets operate and the role of luck in them, I find that worrying too much about this is harmful for my personal development and that taking a stance that is something like "luck doesn't exist" is more useful. http://ssygen.com/posts/luck http://ssygen.com/posts/luck

affinehat 8y ago
You can't lump together all forms of luck into a single "objectively true, pragmatically false" category without considering the magnitude of impact luck has on what you intend to do. In the extreme, playing the lottery is almost entirely luck, and it's very much pragmatic to believe that it is so. It's not a binary choice between 0% luck / 100% power, and 100% luck / 0% power. There's a whole continuum in between, and the exact luck/power breakdown for any given action is a matter of objective fact. Where we run into trouble is when our perception of the breakdown does not match the objective reality, and we waste our time on impossible tasks or don't bother to try tasks that could have benefited us. And the breakdown of luck/power is objectively skewed in favor of power for those who are white, and skewed in favor of luck for those who are minorities. So while white privilege and white supremacy might both be wrong, they are certainly not wrong to the same degree. While privilege is a view closer to the objective reality and is thus probably overall beneficial as long as you don't take it too far. Likewise for feminism/incel.
- adnzzzzZ 8y ago
  As I've stated in the article, it's about the mindset you take and not what is objectively true. You're not helping minorities by pointing out that their success in life will be mostly due to luck, you're just giving them excuses to not try harder.

gravity_123 8y ago

Winning and losing have a lot to do with confidence and ability to take risks. Winning reinforces confidence which allows one to take more risks if they have a growth mindset(also equally important). PS: The add-on[1] I use to avoid redirects doesn't like these medium hosted blogs. These links redirect to medium[2] which redirects to original link and I am stuck in an infinite loop. [1]:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/skip-redirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/skip-redirect... [2]:https://medium.com/m/global-identity?redirectUrl=https://ofdollarsanddata.com/why-winners-keep-winning-4e7f221f5b84 https://medium.com/m/global-identity?redirectUrl=https://ofd...

victor106 8y ago

This explains a similar phenomenon with paper clips https://youtu.be/F-I-BVqMiNI https://youtu.be/F-I-BVqMiNI

deleted 8y ago
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whack 8y ago

Theoretically, the wide availably of user-reviews on sites like Amazon and GoodReads, should allow unknown writers to gain visibility and reach the full market of readers who would enjoy that book. The fact that JK Rowling has failed in her anonymous writings, points towards the great opportunity that still exists for platforms/apps that can surface great books from unknown authors. On a tangential note, it would be amazing if the guild/union of authors collectively agreed that all books will be published anonymously for the first year, with the author's name only revealed after the first year anniversary. This would allow newer authors to step out from the shadow of the established ones. I doubt this will ever happen of course, but I think we would see so much more dynamism in the industry if it ever did.

underwater 8y ago
Solving the visibility problem is only a problem for uneatablished authors, not readers. I would guess that most people are happy to read something from an author hey know rather than taking a chance on another author who is “better”.
- SuoDuanDao 8y ago
  I would fall outside your supposition - the few creators whose work is so good I know I'll enjoy it don't produce as much media as I consume. All else being equal I'd prefer novelty when taking a chance on content. I actually thought that was the default.
- whack 8y ago
  The visibility problem affects the readers as well. Consider the ~million readers who enjoyed reading the Bachman/King books after the author's identity was revealed. There are probably a 100 other "Bachmans" out there whose books they would have enjoyed reading as well, possibly even more than their favorite King books. Except that because of the author's lack of visibility, they never discovered these works. Yes, the readers aren't "losing" anything. But nevertheless, they have still missed out on something they would have enjoyed.
  - 8y ago

hyperpallium 8y ago

Stephen King vs Richard Bachman is a wonderful illustration of market vs merit. Does merit have similar increasing characteristics? Does it apply in non-competitive contexts? Market success, notoriously, has non-merit factors: a comment on reddit has to have merit to get a few votes. But to go from a few to thousands, it has to be early, visible in the thread, the thread has to be visible, the story has to be visible on the front page, it has to stay there a long time. ("karma train") One of the sub-factors is people like to read what others read - regardless of quality - in order to be on the same page, get the same jokes and references etc. To know what's going on - like the news.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Like Stephen King himself said, the experiment did not have enough time to reach maturity. I don't think it's contradictory to suggest that reputation is a component of merit. Most people do not succeed, yet those who do have a habit of succeeding over and over again. And so when you view something with an unknown track record it's expected value is going to be much lower than something from an author with a track record of dozens of successes. In today's era where reviews and award often consider many factors besides just the book quality alone, they've become quite useless. So how are people supposed to find new books? You end up going from a handful of reviewers who tend to like the material you like, or by going to the same author over and over. In either case, it takes new entrants some significant amount of time to reach their full potential. I don't think this inherently means the market is broken.
- hyperpallium 8y ago
  To suggest that reputation is a component of merit is a category error. Reputation isn't part of merit; it doesn't cause merit. Merit may cause reputation. You probably mean reputation has some positive correlation with merit, so that reputation can be used as a predictor of merit. And of course, you're right. However, I wasn't addressing how consumers can ascertain merit, but whether merit has similar increasing chacteristics to market success, as described in the article. That is, if someone starts with a little extra merit than someone else, does it also compound as they practice? I wanted to exclude competitive factors. For example, Gladwell's Outliers claims that Canadian hockey players have birthdays biased to part of the year, and that this was because the slight age difference makes child players more successful against their sub-year younger opponents in the same age-group. They get more practice and confidence, and get selected for extra training. But, this competitive aspect gives an artificial advantage to players who are slightly relatively better. And also, this advantage is not present just once, but every time they play, for years. BTW both the points you and I made regarding the merit-market relationship are mentioned in the literature posted by gwern https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17052074 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17052074 (last link): > in part because people use the popularity of products as a signal of quality—a phenomenon that is sometimes referred to as “social” or “observational learning” (Hedström 1998)—and in part because people may benefit from coordinating their choices; that is, listening to, reading, and watching the same things as others (Adler 1985). - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3785310/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3785310/

ChuckMcM 8y ago

The story about name recognition is perhaps more important. A publisher was giving advice to would be authors and their advice was until you had at least one and possibly two best sellers it was always more valuable to give away your books than sell them. This was because the barrier to reading a new book is so much higher for an author the reader doesn't yet "know" than one that is a known quantity.

Buttons840 8y ago
So don't sell any books until I have a best seller?
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  Publishers are often very confused about how publishing works.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  That wasn't what I took away from that publisher's statement. I heard it to mean that in the beginning getting your name out was very important. And while the Oatmeal famously lampooned "exposure" as something that might be valuable, building one's "brand" is a thing.
SneakerXZ 8y ago
There is another bias where things that are free must be lower quality or there is some catch so I would be careful with that.

arnold8020 8y ago

I was wondering about this in the context of the 80-20 rule, and believe I have a simple answer. Basically you need two things: 1) Some slight advantage 2) The network effect, that is, the probability of competing depends on the current winnings. If you have these two things, you get 80-20 like distributions, you get the explanation for why winners keep winning. If you are interested, you can find my simulation and analysis at http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~arnold/research/80-20/ http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~arnold/research/80-20/ Kind of shocking how well this works. The intuition is, why has coke won, well they had some initial advantage, and so they won a bit. Now that they have won a bit, they can finance themselves into more competition. For example, they can place themselves into more stores, into more restaurants etc. Now they get a chance to compete more.

static_noise 8y ago
Your rules are basically "the winner takes it all in the long run". This is similar to reality but real actors can disappear. Individuals have a limited lifespan. Their offspring have slightly different abilities. Corporations/Nations/Organizations are run by individuals (chosen not randomly) and may face technological/political challenges but here it's not clear that these structures need to disappear. Do you see a good way to factor in these things?
- arnold8020 8y ago
  Interesting that you see it as 'winner takes all'. Wondering why you say that. The simulation can be run in various ways. When I run with rules: r1) Actors have normally distributed abilities, r2) Actors are chosen randomly based on current winnings, the more you have won, the more you compete, r3) Winner of competition wins one point from the loser, You get interesting results, for example, in the two columns below, the left is Household income in 1970 broken into quintiles. The right column is simulation results. 4.1% 6.7% 10.8% 11.5% 17.4% 16.0% 24.5% 23.3% 43.3% 45.6% Interesting how well the top 3 or 4 quintiles match between the simulation and the real world data. If you run the simulation with different rules, the real world quintiles do not match the simulation quintiles nearly as well. You can tweak the simulation to see this as well. The simulation can be tweaked to handle cases such as inheritance, so an actor with different ability inherits the wealth of a past actor. It would be interesting to see how many generations it takes to loose the wealth to test the adage that wealthy families loose their wealth in 3 generations. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/globe-wealth/eroding-family-fortunes-how-the-cycle-can-be-broken/article33757468/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/globe-wealth/... Ill try it and get back to you.

ec109685 8y ago

> J.K. Rowling published a book called The Cuckoo’s Calling under the pen name Robert Galbraith only to be outed by someone performing advanced text analysis with a computer. That is highly misleading. She was outed by a person with inside knowledge (anonymous tip), which was confirmed by automated text analysis. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-did-computers-uncover-jk-rowlings-pseudonym-180949824/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-did-comput...

petters 8y ago
Further, they only compared Rowling to three other authors and Rowling ended up second in at least one of the tests. The analysis likely did not prove anything by itself.

lucky_dawg 8y ago

I wholeheartedly agree with the article that success ultimately boils down to luck and not much else. Not even kidding, the harder I work, the luckier I get!

ItsMe000001 8y ago
So if not everyone, then at least the majority of all people worldwide who work very hard will be successful. I think reality shows this not to be true, hundreds of millions of very hard workers who even exhaust their bodies towards an early and broken death would probably disagree. You are already lucky by birth. Even apart from one's own family, we are placed into environments consisting of culture, institutions and tools developed over millennia. How much the place of one's family within one's own society plays a part depends, some countries are better at letting people from all kinds of families develop, in many others there is a large inheritance factor within families, where family income has a high correlation with one's own lifetime income.
hari_seldon_ 8y ago
Maybe we can think of it as everyone having a lottery ticket, but certain things can increase your odds. When it comes to startups, for example, VCs are often arguing that just being closer to them in SV can help your chances. The neighborhoods we grow up in, the schools we attend -- they all influence that "luck" number for each person!

eanzenberg 8y ago

Is this surprising? My first criteria for choosing a restaurant is, are there people already there? Unless I’m passionate anout the domain and am willing to give up substaintial personal time, I’m not interested in discovering new talent or being a guini pig.

lostlogin 8y ago
It’s interesting to watch how seating is arranged by staff, particularly early in the night. Early customers or ones that they want to be seen are seated near the front or by the window.
- mkagenius 8y ago
  > or ones that they want to be seen are seated near the front or by the window This will piss me off now whenever they offer a table in the corner.
  - lostlogin 8y ago
    It’s funny when you get a window first time, but turn up with a kid the next time and get the overflow room upstairs.

incompatible 8y ago

Does this happen in software too? Would Git be languishing unknown on SourceForge if it hadn't been written by Torvalds? Edit: I'm sure it's a big factor in app stores.

crispyporkbites 8y ago
Potentially It actually puts me off writing some OSS libraries as it’s hard to know if anyone will appreciate them. If you already have an audience you know you’ll get some feedback and initial users / contributers.
- aaronbrethorst 8y ago
  I think, as a rule, you're better off extracting OSS libraries from things you've built. That way you know that you are already appreciating them.
im3w1l 8y ago
I'm sure it does. But it goes both ways. Because if you're famous people will start using it based on trust and if it turns out to be crap people will feel betrayed and be angry and you'll lose the trust.
- bartread 8y ago
  It does indeed. Think Peter Molyneux and Godus.
  - incompatible 8y ago
    If they are famous they can probably withstand the occasional flop, although I suppose writers, actors etc., have been known to fall out of fashion entirely.
    - bartread 8y ago
      The manner of the flop is important as well. The reason Peter Molyneux's reputation has taken such a pummelling over Godus is the way he handled - or mishandled - the crowdfunding.

incompatible 8y ago

The article didn't even mention the field where the effect seems to be biggest: visual arts. The value of a painting depends almost entirely on the fame of the artist, as I understand it.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
That's because the value of this kind of art, in this context, is as a form of social signaling. The actual talent of the artist, and the meaning the work communicates to the owner, these are not really considerations for this metric.

montrose 8y ago

Instead of his vague recommendation to "accept luck as a primary determinant in your life," I recommend reminding yourself that although luck may be a necessary condition for success, it is not a sufficient one.

mattbierner 8y ago
For a literal take on the role of luck in life, read “The Dice Man”.

wxyyxc1992 8y ago

天之道，损有余以补不足；人之道，损不足以奉有余。 It is the way of heaven to diminish superabundance, and to supplement deficiency. it is not so with the way of man. he takes away from those who have not enough to add to his own superabundance.

jeffdavis 8y ago

Cumulative advantage has always seemed obvious to me and not terribly intereeting. I'm more interested in why it doesn't dominate in a completely out-of-control way. For instance, we know small companies often win against much larger ones.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ItsMe000001 8y ago
> we know small companies often win against much larger ones We do? They do? It seems to me that this statement requires context in order to say much of anything. I don't know what to do with it as a standalone general statement. Do they win when the far larger business actually cares, in head-to-head competition? I doubt that happens very often. When counting the successes there also is significant danger of survivorship and selection bias because the David vs. Goliath story resonates so deeply with human listeners. Or do they win when the larger business doesn't even know it is in the race, like an ant screaming at an elephant oblivious to its existence "this pebble is mine"? I'm sure the chances of success here are pretty good.
- jeffdavis 8y ago
  Why does the large company not understand the race when it has such great cumulative advantage? How did the giants of today get to be giant in a 20-year span when they started out tiny? And why didn't the giants of 20 years ago use their cumulative advantage to get even larger?
  - ItsMe000001 8y ago
    I don't see what your reply has to do with anything I wrote.

sammorrowdrums 8y ago

There's too much noise out there. I don't think it's purely market advantage. People are buying from authors they already like because they can't read all the books, so they look for books that are from an author they already like or ones that manage to breach their noise filter. Same with music, there's probably thousands of bands you would love and songs you would list among your favourites, if only you would give them an equal chance of listening, but that's not how we usually behave. Yes the market recognises this behaviour and tries to push past success because they get a great return, but familiarity and noise floor are powerful.

pjc50 8y ago
Yes, this seems more like a demonstration of how strong branding is in crowded fields.

amelius 8y ago

Reminds me of this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16618385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16618385

pimmen 8y ago

This is also a very good reminder of why discrimination takes a long time to defeat. The moment we legislate that we shouldn't discriminate by race, gender or religion the capital gained from all the advantages is skewed towards to the oppressors and the playing field is not leveled yet.

pps43 8y ago

I think that instead of adding one marble at each step, it's better to add a fixed percentage of existing marbles, e.g,, 0.25%. This will better approximate the processes that are being modeled. But then the effect shown in the article will disappear.