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This piece is an interesting complement: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-nauseous/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-

by npilk 5y ago

This piece is an interesting complement: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-nauseous/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-... "This also explains why so few futurists make any money. They are attracted to exactly those parts of the future that are worth very little. They find visions of changed human behavior stimulating. Technological change serves as a basis for constructing aspirational visions of changed humanity. Unfortunately, technological change actually arrives in ways that leave human behavior minimally altered. Engineering is about finding excitement by figuring out how human behavior could change. Marketing is about finding money by making sure it doesn’t."

joe_the_user 5y ago
While that's an appealing idea and much as I like Venkatesh Rao, I think the explanation is simple in a different way. Making money on investments isn't generally about know something will happen sometime in the future. It's about knowing exactly when that something will start to pay off. And that knowledge is much more wrapped in small details. Amazon spent ten years losing money but had investors who believed it would even eventually make it, which it did. Determining whether Amazon would have been a good investment at the start wasn't about knowing ecommerce would work, it was about noticing things like committed Amazon's investors were, etc, etc.