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As always, seeking lessons by studying only the successful suffers from nasty selection bias. Maybe most new industries come from crazy people, but you're proba

As always, seeking lessons by studying only the successful suffers from nasty selection bias. Maybe most new industries come from crazy people, but you're probably not one of them. Most crazy people just lose everything being crazy.

sammalloy 4y ago
> Most crazy people just lose everything being crazy Rich crazy people are known as eccentrics, precisely because they don’t lose their wealth and safety net.
heavyset_go 4y ago
Agreed and there's a big difference between having a weird idea and mental illness, and it's strange to see them conflated. Most people who end up like Kanye, for example, don't become insanely rich, they end up alienating everyone in their lives if they don't take care of themselves, and eventually end up in prison, institutionalized, homeless or dead.
- afarrell 4y ago
  This is an important thing to keep in mind when engaging with institutions which make most of their money from outliers. Their incentives are not aligned with the stability of your mental health. (Though they don’t follow their incentives perfectly because institutions are still made of humans who care about people)
- Juliate 4y ago
  Exactly. No one is an island. The supporting network around you also plays a significant part.
deleted 4y ago
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relativ575 4y ago
And as usually the case when people brought up selection bias, or survivor bias, you made the assumption that he only studied the successful. He never said he did. I agreed that most attempts to invent new industries ended up in failure, by either crazy or regular people. That's because it's insanely hard to do so in the face of competition by the incumbents, not to mention going against the opinion of logical and well reasoning smart people, who are of course right 99.9 % of the time. For those who succeeded however, they are crazy -- as defined by the author -- most of the time. I think that's what the author intends to convey. If you can think of any new industry that invented by "normal" people who work within the system, I'd love to hear.
- civilized 4y ago
  I am discussing what was actually written - that is what "study" refers to in my comment. The article talks about only the successful. I see no point in speculating about what the author may have thought about but omitted from the article.

sammalloy 4y ago

> Most crazy people just lose everything being crazy Rich crazy people are known as eccentrics, precisely because they don’t lose their wealth and safety net.

heavyset_go 4y ago

Agreed and there's a big difference between having a weird idea and mental illness, and it's strange to see them conflated. Most people who end up like Kanye, for example, don't become insanely rich, they end up alienating everyone in their lives if they don't take care of themselves, and eventually end up in prison, institutionalized, homeless or dead.

afarrell 4y ago
This is an important thing to keep in mind when engaging with institutions which make most of their money from outliers. Their incentives are not aligned with the stability of your mental health. (Though they don’t follow their incentives perfectly because institutions are still made of humans who care about people)
Juliate 4y ago
Exactly. No one is an island. The supporting network around you also plays a significant part.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

relativ575 4y ago

And as usually the case when people brought up selection bias, or survivor bias, you made the assumption that he only studied the successful. He never said he did. I agreed that most attempts to invent new industries ended up in failure, by either crazy or regular people. That's because it's insanely hard to do so in the face of competition by the incumbents, not to mention going against the opinion of logical and well reasoning smart people, who are of course right 99.9 % of the time. For those who succeeded however, they are crazy -- as defined by the author -- most of the time. I think that's what the author intends to convey. If you can think of any new industry that invented by "normal" people who work within the system, I'd love to hear.

civilized 4y ago
I am discussing what was actually written - that is what "study" refers to in my comment. The article talks about only the successful. I see no point in speculating about what the author may have thought about but omitted from the article.