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> to encourage success Scammers, arbitrage stock-traders, and opioid drug marketers can also achieve success... On the other hand, some endeavors "succeed" by

• dgb23 7y ago
  > You don't think of your "daily plumbing success". Initially I had to laugh at this one, but why not? Robustness is something that seems to be very hard to measure, communicate and sell until something bad happens. I think one of the IT fields that is struggling with this is security, because the problem is most apparent there.
  • yourapostasy 7y ago
    > Robustness is something that seems to be very hard to measure, communicate and sell until something bad happens. This is endemic to business and is especially widespread in contemporary American-style business, and the general case seems to be a failure in pricing all kinds of tail risk. I suspect a key challenge in this space is the unsolved principal agent problem. I think the principal agent problem is rampant because pricing information is extremely lossy information compression; only the grossest outcomes are recorded in the market. Those who exploit the principal agent problem rely upon externalities to succeed, and those externalities are not timely or fine-grained reflected in the compressed/price information. Reputation systems lossily add the missing information back into the market as a side-channel. But what externalities to record is a whole other can of worms.