24 ms·

The Carrot Problem

573 points by deadcoder0904 3y ago

Jeff_Brown 3y ago
I'm really glad to have a word for this now. It makes me wonder how many carrot problems I've fallen for myself, or have been intending to fall for )not realizing they are carrot problems) and haven't got around to yet. Also how many other ideas I would like to have a word for.
the_gipsy 3y ago
So, "lying".
- iandanforth 3y ago
  A specific and interesting form of lying! The pantheon of lies is rich enough to warrant additional terminology :)
  - cauliflower2718 3y ago
    Are there other examples that you particularly like?
    - solarbubblewate 3y ago
      The fallacy of the undistributed middle is particularly prevalent. However, in practice it is usually hidden in implications rather than explicitly stated. For example: 1. Murder is a crime. 2. We should be tough on murder. 3. Therefore, we should be tough on crime. (Deliberately) Omitted: Jaywalking is a crime. Should we be tough on jaywalking?
      - ocrow 3y ago
        We should legalize jaywalking, since it was an invention of the car industry to deflect attention from how dangerous their products were (and are) and is unnecessary for a functioning society. I realize you're using the example rhetorically, but still ... that is what we should do about jaywalking.
        solarbubblewate 3y ago
        And now we illustrate the 2nd-order of the fallacy of the undistributed middle. 1. Situation X in my mind is jaywalking. 2. We should legalize Situation X. 3. Therefore, we should legalize jaywalking. (Accidentally?) Omitted: Situation Y is jaywalking. Should we legalize Situation Y?
  - swayvil 3y ago
    Oh there's a whole lying taxonomy and nomenclature. Be assured of it. But only the members of the inner house are allowed to see it. It is restricted technology.
    - solarbubblewate 3y ago
      Two of my favorites are "Affirming the Consequent" and the logically equivalent "Denying the Antecedent". How about you?
_8j50 3y ago
Another possible term for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
- hk__2 3y ago
  And another related concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
  - almostnormal 3y ago
    One entity provides advice, a different one applies it. Cargo cult: The advice is applied incorrectly. Carrot problem: The advice is provided incorrectly. How to distinguish the two, without understanding the details? Looking at what worked doesn't help. Checking the motivation for providing the advice is asymmetric. Any other ideas?
- Horffupolde 3y ago
  “Sandbagging” fits better.
- solarbubblewate 3y ago
  Another wiki describing the term: https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Parallel_Construction https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Parallel_Construction
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  That is something different. There is no deceit or hidden information (well not necessarily). Where as a carrot problem needs there to be deceit and hidden information.
  - _8j50 3y ago
    Yes there is, that's the whole point actually
bombcar 3y ago
There’s an offshoot of this where they don’t know why anything worked, so they ascribe success to the things they hope worked.
- 123pie123 3y ago
  I was thinking the same. Luck also plays a huge part in this area, but will the highly paid managers admit this or even know about it no - they'll say it's down to <insert absolutlty anything they can make up>
  - bombcar 3y ago
    They admit luck plays a huge part - but only bad luck destroying their perfect plans.
- leoc 3y ago
  Viz. the screenwriter William Goldman’s “Nobody knows anything” from his book Adventures in the Screen Trade. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-08-11-ca-807-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-08-11-ca-807-st... https://variety.com/2018/film/opinion/william-goldman-dies-appreciation-1203030781/amp/ https://variety.com/2018/film/opinion/william-goldman-dies-a...
codeulike 3y ago
So a bit like big corporations making tons of money through monopolies, regulatory capture and corporate welfare, but then having to pretend their success was down to 'the market'
the_snooze 3y ago
>For this reason, Carrot Problems greatly increase the value fo being an "insider". >There's some fields where it really might be true that you can learn everything you need to know by reading books at the public library. But anytime people are succeeding for reasons they won't admit in public, it's hard to get a grasp on the situation unless you have private back-channels. I feel this is a natural response when you're in a low-trust low-signal-to-noise-ratio environment. You have to keep things close to the chest and limit access, or else you'll spend all your time sifting through the noise. For example, the best way to reach me is by phone. But it's not enough to know my phone number to successfully reach me; you have to be in my private circle for me to pick up and respond. Everyone else is likely just scammers and telemarketers.
- bonoboTP 3y ago
  It's also often the case that a lot of the hands-on day-to-day practical things are simply not very prestigious and can't be published in a way that they will appear in the "public library" or academic journals. It's not even necessarily that people want to withhold that knowledge to reduce competition, but simply the effort of writing it all up properly is not worth it. The same time could be spent working on something that results in a prestigious publication. Of course sometimes people will altruistically draft up such things in blog posts. But then again, anything people write passes through their own internal filter of "will this make me look good?" so ultimately, you can only see the real tips by closely working with and watching with successful people. For example many of these people may work ridiculous hours and sacrifice on their personal relations. Now try posting that on Twitter and you'll be crucified that you are encouraging unhealthy culture and you are a bad person for posting this. So most people don't bother.
dale_glass 3y ago
You should be suspicious of anyone outlining their strategy for success. Because if I was lucky enough to stumble upon some great hack to make lots of money, why would I be telling people about it? Either I get competition, or I might get whatever loophole I was abusing closed. So either I'm lying, or what I'm saying isn't possible to reproduce, or the usefulness of the technique ran out and now I'm just trying to squeeze a few more dollars by telling the tale, or I'm actually stupid and about to see my business model crash and burn.
- edgineer 3y ago
  "Success" could include a type of "business model" but other positive-sum games, too.
- TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
  Exception: you’ve exited and have nothing to lose by sharing
  - kurthr 3y ago
    Beware the, "I'm already a bitcoin billionaire so I'll share my secret to success". Either they're lying about the Lambos, or they suddenly got less greedy. One of those is more likely.
    - throwaway290 3y ago
      Unless they charge for the advice in which case it would be obvious, maybe they just know that keeping more people buying it is required for it to keep value
    - a1369209993 3y ago
      Or their actual secret to success is "Buy a bunch of bitcoin when it cost less than a dollar.", and any subsequent success is a artifact of that non-replicable starting point.
    - ilyt 3y ago
q_andrew 3y ago
As someone who went into a STEM field without any family connections to STEM, I have definitely been stuck eating carrots and not knowing why it didn't work. Interestingly, the human brain tells itself carrot stories all the time: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-hidden-prospect/201802/do-you-really-know-why-you-do-the-things-you-do https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-hidden-prospect/... tldr: patients with split brain hemispheres will reflexively make up explanations for decisions made by the other half of their brains. Fascinating stuff, and makes me wonder how many things I've done that serve my subconscious' ulterior motives.
- bennettnate5 3y ago
  I'd love to hear more about what kinds of carrots you were fed coming in from a non-STEM background. For me, the one I can remember was a family friend recommending I stick to an engineering field (mechanical, electrical, civil, etc.) rather than CS because "there was much more money to be made in those fields". Thankfully I stuck to what I liked, which was coding.
  - isaacremuant 3y ago
    Even if you made less with coding, there's also a life balance question on the trade-off of doing what you like VS pure money quantity. Long term, you want to enjoy your day to day, in any kind of endeavour and the good can get you through the bad.
- nathan_compton 3y ago
  I don't dispute the split hemispheres story but I don't think its particularly informative about normal cognitive function. I mean missing the connection between your brains is a pretty extreme situation.
hinkley 3y ago
I had to deal with that (digital) six sigma crap because Jack Welch had not yet left a giant crater in the ground and so people thought he was a wizard. He helped bring us the mass layoff and made tons of money dumping PCBs into the river. Apparently wells there are still toxic without treatment.
- robocat 3y ago
  You are demonstrating the inverse-carrot-problem: six-sigma was not invented by Welch and he was only one of many that talked about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma
re-thc 3y ago
The carrot problem is that there are too many rabbits.
- CosmicShadow 3y ago
  or is that an opportunity?...
swayvil 3y ago
1) People want X 2) Tell people a big lie about how to acquire X. 3) Chortle, possibly profit.
parentheses 3y ago
I think this is a good mental model to employ, but also has the potential to poison positivity. Hard work and perseverance can (and IME often does) lead to success. There's this attractive narrative that any outlier success is entirely built from seedy/unethical/immoral/corrupt acts. This narrative helps to justify and excuse mediocrity. Instead, we should be asking the hard questions which may encourage harder/smarter work and perseverance.
- Rexxar 3y ago
  I would say that hard work and perseverance are always necessary at some point but not always sufficient for success.
  - winwang 3y ago
    I find that people place too much emphasis on "hard" work and not the "right" work. Personally, I know too many people who have worked their butts off... on the wrong problems. It's quite simple to continue sweating on the same path, if not easy. But it feels like people prefer difficulty to complexity. Of course, even working hard on the right problems carries no guarantee. Yet, life isn't about guarantees, but about rigging the dice in your favor.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    It's pretty much "if your success depends on luck you still have to show up and start rolling the dice"
- isaacremuant 3y ago
  It depends on the type of success you are after. Doing well and creating great stuff can be due to hard work but raising to certain positions of power definitely requires gaming the system in ways that can be seen as anti ethical or at least counter to the alleged ethos of the company, group, etc. People in different hierarchies end up optimizing for their careers and detract from any Analysis that will conclude otherwise, putting themselves in positions where they have always someone to deflect to and focus on personal branding over real results because, in the end, it's what allow them to also have real results some times. It's an "end justifies the means" and "it's the name of the game". It becomes more and more buteocratic, political and networkey the higher you climb/interact. Those will be very interested in talking abour merit ( pretending others are "mediocre") and fairness while playing under different rules
atleastoptimal 3y ago
There are deliberate carrot problems, where the successful person deliberately misleads their audience as to the source of their success, and non-deliberate ones, where the successful people themselves doesn't understand why they are successful so tell people the narratives that make them feel the best about themselves. You see this often when someone with prodigious genetic ability doesn't want to admit to others or themselves that their success was determined before they were born, and not due to hard work or some immeasurable character trait.
- achenet 3y ago
  I think there's a lot of truth to the quote "hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard". For top .0001% success in some fields (most sports, for example), you need genetic qualities AND hard work.
- opportune 3y ago
  I think it’s not that people with prodigious abilities don’t want to attribute that to their success so much as mentioning that as a factor comes across as very narcissistic and unlikeable (even if it’s true) unless you are literally an Einstein/Von Neumann type. For example, even Terry Tao has enough humility to self censor himself not to attribute his success to being a far-outlier-genius. In fact I’d bet a lot more people think to themselves that they are only successful because they are a genius than there are geniuses. Because it’s even more likely that coming from a highly rich or well connected family is truly the key factor in their success, and people would would much rather attribute success to talent or intelligence than daddy. It is definitely true though that prodigious talent isn’t by itself sufficient to be successful. Also, intelligence helping you is kind of a given - it’d be like an NBA player saying “being 6’8” really helps”. There are a lot of really tall people not in the NBA and a lot of prodigiously talented people who aren’t conventionally “successful” either.
  - seabass-labrax 3y ago
    > ...people would would much rather attribute success to talent or intelligence than daddy. Where does one get intelligence from? Your intelligence is inherited from your parents (just like any other physical characteristic), so if your biological parents have an extensive influence on your upbringing, it's completely possible that both nature and nurture, almost your entire existence, all your qualities, can be reasonably attributed to the family into which you were born.
HumblyTossed 3y ago
Secret to success: Rich parents and luck Another secret to success: Have enough luck to make up for not having rich parents.
- achenet 3y ago
  I like to believe consisently making good decisions is also part of success, but I'm not that successful yet. Also, if "luck" is factors outside of your control, having rich parents would count as luck. :)
DanHulton 3y ago
This is a great way to describe all those "buy my book to learn how to make money online!" scams. The real way to make the money is to trick people into buying the books/courses/doodads, but you can't actually _say_ that. (Or if you do, you have to do so in such a way that you're pretending you're letting the buyer become part of the "inside club", so they don't feel tricked, they feel like they can start tricking people now, too. Very classic con strategy.)
rossdavidh 3y ago
Another example: when I realized that most of the commercially successful bands that got played on the radio when I was young, including a few that I liked, were there because of payola, not because their music was better or their work ethic or whatever. They were probably better at sucking up to the gatekeepers who would pay off radio stations (illegally) to play their songs.
- nunez 3y ago
  This one is super interesting. If you listen to the Solid Gold Oldies channel on Music Choice, you'll, of course, hear The Beatles, Elvis, Beach Boys and others like them, but you'll also hear LOADS of songs you might recognize from artists you've never seen before! If you read their Wikipedia entries (well, the artists that have one anyway; many have been memory-holed), while they benefited from payola, not only did their careers not really go anywhere after that one hit or two, but because of how recording contracts were structured back then (one full record, usually several, with a few mandatory Christmas songs and almost none of your creative input), once those records ultimately didn't sell, they were kicked from the record and never recovered. Not even sucking up was enough to guarantee a decent career in music, even if your song hit the air waves! (I'm mentioning SGO since payola was big back then. Payola was outlawed years later, but given that iHeartRadio/Clear Channel basically bought out most of the radio stations in the US and control entire playlists, has it _really_ gone away?)
jsunderland323 3y ago
Damn. My mom told me carrots would improve my eyesight when I was little and I've lived with this my whole life. This article ruined my sense of accomplishment after eating carrots but I loved it.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  How interesting - I remember being told this as a child too! Now I know its origin. Where are your parents from? My family is British, but I am curious to know whether the British propaganda had any impact on German culture too, and also whether it was exploiting a pre-existing belief that consuming carrots improved vision.
  - jsunderland323 3y ago
    My mother is American. Her parents met during ww2 in Brazil, where my grandfather was stationed. So maybe it was a lie that permeated those involved with the war at the time. I accused her of spreading fake news this morning after reading this and she couldn’t recall where she had heard it. I just asked my wife, who is from Hong Kong, if she had heard this as a child and she said she had not. Her grandparents were really young during the war and Brits and Cantonese were pretty segregated until after ww2, so it might make sense that this didn’t reach her family.
- mbwgh 3y ago
  As a German, I can at least say that the propaganda worked here, as intended :)
- DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
  Good lies have some basis in truth. Vitamin A deficiency will damage eyesight, and carrots have a lot of vitamin A so they'll prevent deficiency. So your mom wasn't totally off.
mercurialsolo 3y ago
Business advantages only exist with some degree of information asymmetry. People only want to share this over when either they are not playing the game or the market incentivizes open sharing (e.g. patent systems for innovation). Unfortunately for business outcomes or in case of war advantages - it has the exact opposite incentive - sharing this leads to loss of market share, more competition, chances of leaks and enemy knowing about your tactics and investing in R&D.
snthd 3y ago
The carrot misdirection had sincerity behind it. That doesn't apply to the other examples, so I don't think it's a good term to use.
- porkbeer 3y ago
  How is a literal psyop sincere?
tantalor 3y ago
"dark patters" -> "dark patterns"
- ubac 3y ago
  thanks, fixed!
derefr 3y ago
This is one reason the field of behavioral economics is important to society: there are things that an individual or company would never publicly admit to doing — but which they're fine to admitting under NDA, to be used as a datapoint in an anonymized dataset used in academic research. So, while no individual company will tell you that everyone's using dark patterns or hiring their friends, behavioral economists can put forth evidence-backed arguments that this is the case — and so save you the trouble of bothering to chase the Carrot.
- hammock 3y ago
  There is a great quote I read here about how your life changes once you are read into valuable info that no one else has. It was Daniel Ellsberg giving advice to Henry Kissinger when he first got his security clearances: >You will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36364718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36364718
  - esafak 3y ago
    See also Bruce Schneier's essay on the same subject, discussed just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37091989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37091989
jwie 3y ago
I'd believe the thing about the carrots was about marketing for carrots before tricking the Germans. It's not like such things haven't been done. In the states there are plenty of scams (marketing) to convince us to eat more grains, or drink milk, or consume more {product}. Don't see why it wouldn't be the same anywhere else. We had a whole cartoon character dedicated to convincing people to eat spinach, which we were wrong about being particularly beneficial as well. These kinds of things, even when well intentioned, have secondary, harmful effects, that far outweigh their purported benefits.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  Spinach is delicious though, so if you can eat it, I would also suggest you do. It is especially nice when mixed in with wet dishes like pasta or boiled rice.
chefandy 3y ago
While the carrot problem is real, it alone doesn't explain the shittiness of rich people's advice on becoming rich. So much opportunity is either created or destroyed by external circumstances that we don't perceive, let alone control. Since we all subconsciously write our own creation myths, it's not easy to discover and attribute forces that we aren't aware of when looking back on our life paths. The perennial bullshit self-explanation is hard work. How hard they work is one thing that they can control, and they know they worked hard, so they assume it had more of an effect than it did... and in turn, others that worked less hard didn't succeed. For example, they might assume that their uncle was willing to set up that meeting with their first big client because they worked hard enough to be worthy of it, rather than realizing that others who worked as hard or harder lacked a connected uncle.
- bruce511 3y ago
  Very few business success stories credit luck with being a root cause. But in real life luck (or "chance" , if you prefer) plays a part, sometimes a significant part. It was lucky that John and Paul went to school together. It was lucky they got on together and became good friends. Thanks to that luck ee got the Beatles. Of course it (usually) takes -more- than just luck, but dig deep enough and its there.
  - simonh 3y ago
    The tricky side of that is how to distinguish between luck and opportunity. Loads of people might be friends at school with someone with a great complementary talent, or have a connected uncle, or happen to start a business in a sector that about to really take off. They may even think about the opportunity and how to take advantage of it, but for whatever reason they don’t. So there are multiple factors. Some initial lucky opportunity, the insight to spot it, the willingness to take a risk on it, and hard work to see it through.
    - edmundsauto 3y ago
      Frequency and quality of opportunity is also a luck factor.
noduerme 3y ago
Here's another carrot problem: You see people all around you appearing to be cooler and more popular by proclaiming there's no point in working hard because the whole system is rigged. Not working and riding to the top of HN on your cynicism sure is tempting if you can justify it. But you don't know whether the people who claim that are actually secretly successful and just trying to win points by appealing to popular discontent. And you won't find out whether studying and working could have made you successful, because now you feel it's not worth trying. Even in the slacker 90s where we were all convinced we'd never earn as much as our parents, the self-pitying cynicism wasn't this rampant.
- robocat 3y ago
  For example it is cool to be anti-capitalist - and many people knocking capitalism are just signaling for status: https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/ugh-capitalism https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/ugh-capitalism (probably HN off-topic because politicised.)
opportune 3y ago
I don’t think you can ever really learn from what a person says helped them do X. You have to look at the person themselves and try to figure out what about them made X happen - people have too much of a blind spot comparing themselves to the world outside their bubble, or understanding how other people perceive them. They lack the perspective to really know what about them is different For example most successful founders and CEOs in my experience may say taking meeting notes or setting a high bar helps. But really what helped is that they had personality traits leading to these behaviors which are what truly drove the benefits - they are meticulous and detail oriented so they want to use writing to nail down ideas, they set high standards for themselves and others so they do whatever it takes to avoid a bad hire or lazy decision. It would be considered impolite for the CEO to say that about themselves, and maybe they don’t even notice how much of an outlier they are in those traits, so instead you get told the effect rather than the cause of their success. Someone without those traits trying to ape out the processes won’t be able to realize the benefits. Similarly I think to a degree the whole “be connected or privileged from birth” is meant to be taken implicitly rather than ignored altogether, sometimes. Nobody wants to launch into a discussion about social class or inequality in some PR puff piece that’s like “oh mr startup ceo why are you so rich and successful”. Like in tennis nobody is going to say the secret to success is to have tiger parents and access to facilities and training from a young age that 99% of people can’t afford. When people say “leverage your connections” they’re kind of saying Joe Average without connections is out of the game until they build those connections, but politely.
jancsika 3y ago
> Various companies make a lot of money by implementing "dark patterns", such as getting customers onto subscriptions and then making it hard for them to cancel. They can't admit that this is why their revenue went up, so they make a bunch of claims about how their success comes out of [various beneficent strategies], but anyone who tries to replicate the success by using those lovely strategies is liable to go broke. This bullet point makes me wonder if there are situations where newcomers end up beating the original company because consumers are willing to pay an enormous premium just to avoid the dark patterns. Carrot solutions? :)
- bell-cot 3y ago
  Reaction... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nobody_ever_went_broke_underestimating_the_intelligence_of_the_American_people https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nobody_ever_went_broke_undere... And plausibly "nobody ever made money by overestimating the intelligence..."
- n_ary 3y ago
  Indeed there are. I pay high premium to alternatives, which has monthly cancel options. Some of these cost me > ~35-40% long-term, but it reassuring that, if I am suddenly in misfortune or tight spots, I could rapidly rid myself of some luxuries in a blink. :)
- csin 3y ago
  Or you are liable to go broke thinking your site can make money with only the "lovely strategies" without the "dark patterns".
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jrflowers 3y ago
I like how the author has established “The Carrot Problem” as a novel concept that cannot be explained as “the stuff that happens after people lie”
- bonoboTP 3y ago
  But it's much more specific than that. I know that it's common in such blogs to introduce useless neologisms and reinvent established concepts, but this seems to warrant it enough. It's specifically that success often relies on something that its user doesn't want to admit (either to stop competition, as in the war example, or just because the tool is socially unacceptable or wouldn't make them look good), but they also don't want to say "I won't tell you, it's a secret" and instead they make up some other reason that actually doesn't work. This is way more concrete than just "what happens after people lie". Many lies aren't about reasons and recipes for success.
MrPatan 3y ago
The formula for success is not a sum of factors, it's a multiplication of factors. Yes, you need luck to be > 0. But you better have hard work also > 0, or you won't have any success anyway. No, the sales and marketing guys are not parasites leeching off your hard work because you're the one wrinting the code. It's not S + C, it's S * C. No, it doesn't matter how good and productive you are, if you don't know how to search for jobs, pass interviews, etc, you won't have a job. And not wanting to work hard because "you need luck anyway" is not a winning strategy.
smitty1e 3y ago
The "Carrot Problem", itself, is operational deception covering for the real tradecraft on offer: OPDEC => https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA293799 https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA293799
sam1r 3y ago
My concise way of paraphrasing this: “ when what you’re aiming for doesn’t add up directly “ No carrots or distractions involved.
boringuser2 3y ago
The anabolic steroids thing isn't really elucidated properly. The problems regarding this, that make it a true carrot problem, are as follows: 1. Enhanced athletes aggressively claiming to be and marketing themselves as natural for explicit monetary incentives. 2. Enhanced athletes claiming to achieve amazing things naturally for obvious incentives and mitigation of disincentives. Generally, the notion that any top athlete isn't "enhanced" is absurd. Anabolic steroids are a huge boost, trust me. Wink wink nudge. You go from being a mere mortal to feeling powerful, and your physical recovery is completely changed. You become wolverine. Enhanced athletes claiming to be natural because they don't want to get in trouble and telling you to do pyramid supersets isn't really a problem because it's probably going to work (hypertrophy isn't hard, it's easy) and it's pretty obvious they're enhanced. You don't need steroids to get decent results, pretty much everyone has a base capacity for this. Enhanced athletes explicitly claiming to be natural for monetary incentives can harm people financially and physically, and this is a wildly popular grift.
doctor_eval 3y ago
A very successful friend of mine once said... There are two secrets to being successful: 1. Don't explain the secret to your success.
- naveen99 3y ago
  The chess way is to prepare for your opponents best move.
- naveen99 3y ago
  That might only help against weaker opponents. Also if stronger opponents adopt the same strategy, you will learn less also.
naveen99 3y ago
Well at some point someone was told about onboard radar and it was the truth… people lie and people tell the truth. There are infinite lies and fewer truths. But truths are consistent, and lies are hard to keep consistent.
exegete 3y ago
This is a problem but the fact we know the real reason for the US pilots’ success was not carrots shows we (eventually) got the correct information. So the question is - how does this happen today? Journalists investigating companies? Analysts giving insight into what is happening behind the scenes? Whistleblowers?
- travisjungroth 3y ago
  The steroids thing is a great example that shows that “we” don’t know things. Even when the information is out there some don’t have access to it and some don’t believe it. For every pro bodybuilder or shredded Hollywood actor using steroids (many, to put it lightly), there are tons of people following their routines and diets, thinking it will lead to similar results. Not all that much research and critical thinking will show that that’s not going to happen. This isn’t really an answer to your question, but the bummer is that even someone like the people you listed telling the truth isn’t enough. Shit, tons of people still believe the thing about carrots.
  - deadcoder0904 3y ago
    yes, i thought john cena like body was achievable. but after working out for 4 years consistently, i can pretty much say its nigh impossible. if you want to bulk up like that, you need steroids. yes, even john cena like body which doesn't look that huge but its huge & can't be done without steroids. heck, the liver king used the carrot problem incredibly to his advantage. he told people he got big eating liver. only after he made his $100m empire did he admit to it on andrew schultz podcast.
- deadcoder0904 3y ago
  insiders knowing about stuff like this. i have heard you can't get big in hollywood/bollywood if you don't exchange sexual favors. that's why they all protect rapists, sexual assaulters, etc... there's a reason those who complain about sexual assaults, rape, etc... have their careers finished rather than the opposite. like epstein's connections are not known bcz they are all in on it. everyone has skeletons in the closet. i mean it wouldn't be hard to get away with murder/rape if someone were rich. sounds like sci-fi but i find it real after hearing those dubai stories. this is just one example. 3 examples op listed were also terrific. one such case is recent. someone who is a recent graduate got a job through connections (nepotism?) & makes a lot of salary than others working the same position while doing little to no work. this is a personal experience of someone close. then there's black hat tactics startups use that they can't admit to. like airbnb using #1 hacker. or someone using leaked databases to find emails. i saw a recent startup that matched twitter accounts with emails when twitter database got leaked. i'm sure that person is telling people some other story on how he got emails. once you look at it, you'll find a lot of carrot problems in life. the reason why i posted it last night as soon as i found it.
marsupialtail_2 3y ago
Yes but there is also the inverse carrot problem. E.g. if the pilots have radar, they are more liable to rely on it and neglect other aspects of flying. Similarly in business, it is simply harder for folks who grew up rich to develop the level of grit that comes natural to the less privileged. I may sound like a rich apologist, but please believe me when I say it is harder to spend 10 hrs a day cranking on a risky startup if you know you can be clubbing with daddy's money
frankest 3y ago
So that’s why YC is orange :)
samstave 3y ago
Beutifully written, however, there has been a term for this for a long time : "Shiny Object" as well as "Squirrel!" Are these different, they seem the same to me if your thinking about them on the same level?
ankitg12 3y ago
Hits the bulls eyes. That's why it's important to keep your mind always open and question everything. But how much you can question is also limited by cognitive limits we have as humans. SO the only thing you can actually trust is your own direct experience. I have found many books to be useless just because of this reason.
berniedurfee 3y ago
I’d be curious to know if there was a spike in the price of carrots after that story came out.
ChumpGPT 3y ago
There are many reasons why people become rich. I'm not talking about the guy who saves his entire life and has a comfortable retirement. I'm talking about the very rich. You have the folks who inherit wealth and there is a lot of that. But the folks who are self made, the guys and gals who went from zero to millions, 99% of it was being at the right place at the right time or knowing someone that helped them along. This applies to youtube stars all the way to successful entrepreneurs who somehow built a 100 million dollar business. Are there outliers, of course, but they are far and few between. So the point is hard work and determination is about 1% of the equation and luck is the other 99%. Like my brother likes to say, I would much rather be very lucky than very smart. Just saying......
aerialfrog 3y ago
Carrots can improve your eyesight https://www.drlatter.com/blog/do-carrots-actually-improve-your-eyesight-the-truth-about-your-diets-effect-on-your-eyes https://www.drlatter.com/blog/do-carrots-actually-improve-yo...
siavosh 3y ago
I think this describes most of what I see on my LinkedIn feed.
dudinax 3y ago
"security through obscurity" as an insult. Sorry, but obscurity is a big part of security. Always has been, always will be.

573 points by deadcoder0904 3y ago

I'm really glad to have a word for this now. It makes me wonder how many carrot problems I've fallen for myself, or have been intending to fall for )not realizing they are carrot problems) and haven't got around to yet. Also how many other ideas I would like to have a word for.

the_gipsy 3y ago

So, "lying".

iandanforth 3y ago
A specific and interesting form of lying! The pantheon of lies is rich enough to warrant additional terminology :)
- cauliflower2718 3y ago
  Are there other examples that you particularly like?
  - solarbubblewate 3y ago
    The fallacy of the undistributed middle is particularly prevalent. However, in practice it is usually hidden in implications rather than explicitly stated. For example: 1. Murder is a crime. 2. We should be tough on murder. 3. Therefore, we should be tough on crime. (Deliberately) Omitted: Jaywalking is a crime. Should we be tough on jaywalking?
    - ocrow 3y ago
      We should legalize jaywalking, since it was an invention of the car industry to deflect attention from how dangerous their products were (and are) and is unnecessary for a functioning society. I realize you're using the example rhetorically, but still ... that is what we should do about jaywalking.
      - solarbubblewate 3y ago
        And now we illustrate the 2nd-order of the fallacy of the undistributed middle. 1. Situation X in my mind is jaywalking. 2. We should legalize Situation X. 3. Therefore, we should legalize jaywalking. (Accidentally?) Omitted: Situation Y is jaywalking. Should we legalize Situation Y?
- swayvil 3y ago
  Oh there's a whole lying taxonomy and nomenclature. Be assured of it. But only the members of the inner house are allowed to see it. It is restricted technology.
  - solarbubblewate 3y ago
    Two of my favorites are "Affirming the Consequent" and the logically equivalent "Denying the Antecedent". How about you?

_8j50 3y ago

Another possible term for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

hk__2 3y ago
And another related concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
- almostnormal 3y ago
  One entity provides advice, a different one applies it. Cargo cult: The advice is applied incorrectly. Carrot problem: The advice is provided incorrectly. How to distinguish the two, without understanding the details? Looking at what worked doesn't help. Checking the motivation for providing the advice is asymmetric. Any other ideas?
Horffupolde 3y ago
“Sandbagging” fits better.
solarbubblewate 3y ago
Another wiki describing the term: https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Parallel_Construction https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Parallel_Construction
quickthrower2 3y ago
That is something different. There is no deceit or hidden information (well not necessarily). Where as a carrot problem needs there to be deceit and hidden information.
- _8j50 3y ago
  Yes there is, that's the whole point actually

bombcar 3y ago

There’s an offshoot of this where they don’t know why anything worked, so they ascribe success to the things they hope worked.

123pie123 3y ago
I was thinking the same. Luck also plays a huge part in this area, but will the highly paid managers admit this or even know about it no - they'll say it's down to <insert absolutlty anything they can make up>
- bombcar 3y ago
  They admit luck plays a huge part - but only bad luck destroying their perfect plans.
leoc 3y ago
Viz. the screenwriter William Goldman’s “Nobody knows anything” from his book Adventures in the Screen Trade. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-08-11-ca-807-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-08-11-ca-807-st... https://variety.com/2018/film/opinion/william-goldman-dies-appreciation-1203030781/amp/ https://variety.com/2018/film/opinion/william-goldman-dies-a...

codeulike 3y ago

So a bit like big corporations making tons of money through monopolies, regulatory capture and corporate welfare, but then having to pretend their success was down to 'the market'

the_snooze 3y ago

>For this reason, Carrot Problems greatly increase the value fo being an "insider". >There's some fields where it really might be true that you can learn everything you need to know by reading books at the public library. But anytime people are succeeding for reasons they won't admit in public, it's hard to get a grasp on the situation unless you have private back-channels. I feel this is a natural response when you're in a low-trust low-signal-to-noise-ratio environment. You have to keep things close to the chest and limit access, or else you'll spend all your time sifting through the noise. For example, the best way to reach me is by phone. But it's not enough to know my phone number to successfully reach me; you have to be in my private circle for me to pick up and respond. Everyone else is likely just scammers and telemarketers.

bonoboTP 3y ago
It's also often the case that a lot of the hands-on day-to-day practical things are simply not very prestigious and can't be published in a way that they will appear in the "public library" or academic journals. It's not even necessarily that people want to withhold that knowledge to reduce competition, but simply the effort of writing it all up properly is not worth it. The same time could be spent working on something that results in a prestigious publication. Of course sometimes people will altruistically draft up such things in blog posts. But then again, anything people write passes through their own internal filter of "will this make me look good?" so ultimately, you can only see the real tips by closely working with and watching with successful people. For example many of these people may work ridiculous hours and sacrifice on their personal relations. Now try posting that on Twitter and you'll be crucified that you are encouraging unhealthy culture and you are a bad person for posting this. So most people don't bother.

dale_glass 3y ago

You should be suspicious of anyone outlining their strategy for success. Because if I was lucky enough to stumble upon some great hack to make lots of money, why would I be telling people about it? Either I get competition, or I might get whatever loophole I was abusing closed. So either I'm lying, or what I'm saying isn't possible to reproduce, or the usefulness of the technique ran out and now I'm just trying to squeeze a few more dollars by telling the tale, or I'm actually stupid and about to see my business model crash and burn.

edgineer 3y ago
"Success" could include a type of "business model" but other positive-sum games, too.
TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
Exception: you’ve exited and have nothing to lose by sharing
- kurthr 3y ago
  Beware the, "I'm already a bitcoin billionaire so I'll share my secret to success". Either they're lying about the Lambos, or they suddenly got less greedy. One of those is more likely.
  - throwaway290 3y ago
    Unless they charge for the advice in which case it would be obvious, maybe they just know that keeping more people buying it is required for it to keep value
  - a1369209993 3y ago
    Or their actual secret to success is "Buy a bunch of bitcoin when it cost less than a dollar.", and any subsequent success is a artifact of that non-replicable starting point.
  - ilyt 3y ago

q_andrew 3y ago

As someone who went into a STEM field without any family connections to STEM, I have definitely been stuck eating carrots and not knowing why it didn't work. Interestingly, the human brain tells itself carrot stories all the time: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-hidden-prospect/201802/do-you-really-know-why-you-do-the-things-you-do https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-hidden-prospect/... tldr: patients with split brain hemispheres will reflexively make up explanations for decisions made by the other half of their brains. Fascinating stuff, and makes me wonder how many things I've done that serve my subconscious' ulterior motives.

bennettnate5 3y ago
I'd love to hear more about what kinds of carrots you were fed coming in from a non-STEM background. For me, the one I can remember was a family friend recommending I stick to an engineering field (mechanical, electrical, civil, etc.) rather than CS because "there was much more money to be made in those fields". Thankfully I stuck to what I liked, which was coding.
- isaacremuant 3y ago
  Even if you made less with coding, there's also a life balance question on the trade-off of doing what you like VS pure money quantity. Long term, you want to enjoy your day to day, in any kind of endeavour and the good can get you through the bad.
nathan_compton 3y ago
I don't dispute the split hemispheres story but I don't think its particularly informative about normal cognitive function. I mean missing the connection between your brains is a pretty extreme situation.

hinkley 3y ago

I had to deal with that (digital) six sigma crap because Jack Welch had not yet left a giant crater in the ground and so people thought he was a wizard. He helped bring us the mass layoff and made tons of money dumping PCBs into the river. Apparently wells there are still toxic without treatment.

robocat 3y ago
You are demonstrating the inverse-carrot-problem: six-sigma was not invented by Welch and he was only one of many that talked about it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Sigma

re-thc 3y ago

The carrot problem is that there are too many rabbits.

CosmicShadow 3y ago
or is that an opportunity?...

swayvil 3y ago

1) People want X 2) Tell people a big lie about how to acquire X. 3) Chortle, possibly profit.

parentheses 3y ago

I think this is a good mental model to employ, but also has the potential to poison positivity. Hard work and perseverance can (and IME often does) lead to success. There's this attractive narrative that any outlier success is entirely built from seedy/unethical/immoral/corrupt acts. This narrative helps to justify and excuse mediocrity. Instead, we should be asking the hard questions which may encourage harder/smarter work and perseverance.

Rexxar 3y ago
I would say that hard work and perseverance are always necessary at some point but not always sufficient for success.
- winwang 3y ago
  I find that people place too much emphasis on "hard" work and not the "right" work. Personally, I know too many people who have worked their butts off... on the wrong problems. It's quite simple to continue sweating on the same path, if not easy. But it feels like people prefer difficulty to complexity. Of course, even working hard on the right problems carries no guarantee. Yet, life isn't about guarantees, but about rigging the dice in your favor.
- ilyt 3y ago
  It's pretty much "if your success depends on luck you still have to show up and start rolling the dice"
isaacremuant 3y ago
It depends on the type of success you are after. Doing well and creating great stuff can be due to hard work but raising to certain positions of power definitely requires gaming the system in ways that can be seen as anti ethical or at least counter to the alleged ethos of the company, group, etc. People in different hierarchies end up optimizing for their careers and detract from any Analysis that will conclude otherwise, putting themselves in positions where they have always someone to deflect to and focus on personal branding over real results because, in the end, it's what allow them to also have real results some times. It's an "end justifies the means" and "it's the name of the game". It becomes more and more buteocratic, political and networkey the higher you climb/interact. Those will be very interested in talking abour merit ( pretending others are "mediocre") and fairness while playing under different rules

atleastoptimal 3y ago

There are deliberate carrot problems, where the successful person deliberately misleads their audience as to the source of their success, and non-deliberate ones, where the successful people themselves doesn't understand why they are successful so tell people the narratives that make them feel the best about themselves. You see this often when someone with prodigious genetic ability doesn't want to admit to others or themselves that their success was determined before they were born, and not due to hard work or some immeasurable character trait.

achenet 3y ago
I think there's a lot of truth to the quote "hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard". For top .0001% success in some fields (most sports, for example), you need genetic qualities AND hard work.
opportune 3y ago
I think it’s not that people with prodigious abilities don’t want to attribute that to their success so much as mentioning that as a factor comes across as very narcissistic and unlikeable (even if it’s true) unless you are literally an Einstein/Von Neumann type. For example, even Terry Tao has enough humility to self censor himself not to attribute his success to being a far-outlier-genius. In fact I’d bet a lot more people think to themselves that they are only successful because they are a genius than there are geniuses. Because it’s even more likely that coming from a highly rich or well connected family is truly the key factor in their success, and people would would much rather attribute success to talent or intelligence than daddy. It is definitely true though that prodigious talent isn’t by itself sufficient to be successful. Also, intelligence helping you is kind of a given - it’d be like an NBA player saying “being 6’8” really helps”. There are a lot of really tall people not in the NBA and a lot of prodigiously talented people who aren’t conventionally “successful” either.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  > ...people would would much rather attribute success to talent or intelligence than daddy. Where does one get intelligence from? Your intelligence is inherited from your parents (just like any other physical characteristic), so if your biological parents have an extensive influence on your upbringing, it's completely possible that both nature and nurture, almost your entire existence, all your qualities, can be reasonably attributed to the family into which you were born.

HumblyTossed 3y ago

Secret to success: Rich parents and luck Another secret to success: Have enough luck to make up for not having rich parents.

achenet 3y ago
I like to believe consisently making good decisions is also part of success, but I'm not that successful yet. Also, if "luck" is factors outside of your control, having rich parents would count as luck. :)

DanHulton 3y ago

This is a great way to describe all those "buy my book to learn how to make money online!" scams. The real way to make the money is to trick people into buying the books/courses/doodads, but you can't actually _say_ that. (Or if you do, you have to do so in such a way that you're pretending you're letting the buyer become part of the "inside club", so they don't feel tricked, they feel like they can start tricking people now, too. Very classic con strategy.)

rossdavidh 3y ago

Another example: when I realized that most of the commercially successful bands that got played on the radio when I was young, including a few that I liked, were there because of payola, not because their music was better or their work ethic or whatever. They were probably better at sucking up to the gatekeepers who would pay off radio stations (illegally) to play their songs.

nunez 3y ago
This one is super interesting. If you listen to the Solid Gold Oldies channel on Music Choice, you'll, of course, hear The Beatles, Elvis, Beach Boys and others like them, but you'll also hear LOADS of songs you might recognize from artists you've never seen before! If you read their Wikipedia entries (well, the artists that have one anyway; many have been memory-holed), while they benefited from payola, not only did their careers not really go anywhere after that one hit or two, but because of how recording contracts were structured back then (one full record, usually several, with a few mandatory Christmas songs and almost none of your creative input), once those records ultimately didn't sell, they were kicked from the record and never recovered. Not even sucking up was enough to guarantee a decent career in music, even if your song hit the air waves! (I'm mentioning SGO since payola was big back then. Payola was outlawed years later, but given that iHeartRadio/Clear Channel basically bought out most of the radio stations in the US and control entire playlists, has it _really_ gone away?)

jsunderland323 3y ago

Damn. My mom told me carrots would improve my eyesight when I was little and I've lived with this my whole life. This article ruined my sense of accomplishment after eating carrots but I loved it.

seabass-labrax 3y ago
How interesting - I remember being told this as a child too! Now I know its origin. Where are your parents from? My family is British, but I am curious to know whether the British propaganda had any impact on German culture too, and also whether it was exploiting a pre-existing belief that consuming carrots improved vision.
- jsunderland323 3y ago
  My mother is American. Her parents met during ww2 in Brazil, where my grandfather was stationed. So maybe it was a lie that permeated those involved with the war at the time. I accused her of spreading fake news this morning after reading this and she couldn’t recall where she had heard it. I just asked my wife, who is from Hong Kong, if she had heard this as a child and she said she had not. Her grandparents were really young during the war and Brits and Cantonese were pretty segregated until after ww2, so it might make sense that this didn’t reach her family.
mbwgh 3y ago
As a German, I can at least say that the propaganda worked here, as intended :)
DonsDiscountGas 3y ago
Good lies have some basis in truth. Vitamin A deficiency will damage eyesight, and carrots have a lot of vitamin A so they'll prevent deficiency. So your mom wasn't totally off.

mercurialsolo 3y ago

Business advantages only exist with some degree of information asymmetry. People only want to share this over when either they are not playing the game or the market incentivizes open sharing (e.g. patent systems for innovation). Unfortunately for business outcomes or in case of war advantages - it has the exact opposite incentive - sharing this leads to loss of market share, more competition, chances of leaks and enemy knowing about your tactics and investing in R&D.

snthd 3y ago

The carrot misdirection had sincerity behind it. That doesn't apply to the other examples, so I don't think it's a good term to use.

porkbeer 3y ago
How is a literal psyop sincere?

tantalor 3y ago

"dark patters" -> "dark patterns"

ubac 3y ago
thanks, fixed!

derefr 3y ago

This is one reason the field of behavioral economics is important to society: there are things that an individual or company would never publicly admit to doing — but which they're fine to admitting under NDA, to be used as a datapoint in an anonymized dataset used in academic research. So, while no individual company will tell you that everyone's using dark patterns or hiring their friends, behavioral economists can put forth evidence-backed arguments that this is the case — and so save you the trouble of bothering to chase the Carrot.

hammock 3y ago
There is a great quote I read here about how your life changes once you are read into valuable info that no one else has. It was Daniel Ellsberg giving advice to Henry Kissinger when he first got his security clearances: >You will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36364718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36364718
- esafak 3y ago
  See also Bruce Schneier's essay on the same subject, discussed just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37091989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37091989

jwie 3y ago

I'd believe the thing about the carrots was about marketing for carrots before tricking the Germans. It's not like such things haven't been done. In the states there are plenty of scams (marketing) to convince us to eat more grains, or drink milk, or consume more {product}. Don't see why it wouldn't be the same anywhere else. We had a whole cartoon character dedicated to convincing people to eat spinach, which we were wrong about being particularly beneficial as well. These kinds of things, even when well intentioned, have secondary, harmful effects, that far outweigh their purported benefits.

seabass-labrax 3y ago
Spinach is delicious though, so if you can eat it, I would also suggest you do. It is especially nice when mixed in with wet dishes like pasta or boiled rice.

chefandy 3y ago

While the carrot problem is real, it alone doesn't explain the shittiness of rich people's advice on becoming rich. So much opportunity is either created or destroyed by external circumstances that we don't perceive, let alone control. Since we all subconsciously write our own creation myths, it's not easy to discover and attribute forces that we aren't aware of when looking back on our life paths. The perennial bullshit self-explanation is hard work. How hard they work is one thing that they can control, and they know they worked hard, so they assume it had more of an effect than it did... and in turn, others that worked less hard didn't succeed. For example, they might assume that their uncle was willing to set up that meeting with their first big client because they worked hard enough to be worthy of it, rather than realizing that others who worked as hard or harder lacked a connected uncle.

bruce511 3y ago
Very few business success stories credit luck with being a root cause. But in real life luck (or "chance" , if you prefer) plays a part, sometimes a significant part. It was lucky that John and Paul went to school together. It was lucky they got on together and became good friends. Thanks to that luck ee got the Beatles. Of course it (usually) takes -more- than just luck, but dig deep enough and its there.
- simonh 3y ago
  The tricky side of that is how to distinguish between luck and opportunity. Loads of people might be friends at school with someone with a great complementary talent, or have a connected uncle, or happen to start a business in a sector that about to really take off. They may even think about the opportunity and how to take advantage of it, but for whatever reason they don’t. So there are multiple factors. Some initial lucky opportunity, the insight to spot it, the willingness to take a risk on it, and hard work to see it through.
  - edmundsauto 3y ago
    Frequency and quality of opportunity is also a luck factor.

noduerme 3y ago

Here's another carrot problem: You see people all around you appearing to be cooler and more popular by proclaiming there's no point in working hard because the whole system is rigged. Not working and riding to the top of HN on your cynicism sure is tempting if you can justify it. But you don't know whether the people who claim that are actually secretly successful and just trying to win points by appealing to popular discontent. And you won't find out whether studying and working could have made you successful, because now you feel it's not worth trying. Even in the slacker 90s where we were all convinced we'd never earn as much as our parents, the self-pitying cynicism wasn't this rampant.

robocat 3y ago
For example it is cool to be anti-capitalist - and many people knocking capitalism are just signaling for status: https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/ugh-capitalism https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/ugh-capitalism (probably HN off-topic because politicised.)

opportune 3y ago

I don’t think you can ever really learn from what a person says helped them do X. You have to look at the person themselves and try to figure out what about them made X happen - people have too much of a blind spot comparing themselves to the world outside their bubble, or understanding how other people perceive them. They lack the perspective to really know what about them is different For example most successful founders and CEOs in my experience may say taking meeting notes or setting a high bar helps. But really what helped is that they had personality traits leading to these behaviors which are what truly drove the benefits - they are meticulous and detail oriented so they want to use writing to nail down ideas, they set high standards for themselves and others so they do whatever it takes to avoid a bad hire or lazy decision. It would be considered impolite for the CEO to say that about themselves, and maybe they don’t even notice how much of an outlier they are in those traits, so instead you get told the effect rather than the cause of their success. Someone without those traits trying to ape out the processes won’t be able to realize the benefits. Similarly I think to a degree the whole “be connected or privileged from birth” is meant to be taken implicitly rather than ignored altogether, sometimes. Nobody wants to launch into a discussion about social class or inequality in some PR puff piece that’s like “oh mr startup ceo why are you so rich and successful”. Like in tennis nobody is going to say the secret to success is to have tiger parents and access to facilities and training from a young age that 99% of people can’t afford. When people say “leverage your connections” they’re kind of saying Joe Average without connections is out of the game until they build those connections, but politely.

jancsika 3y ago

> Various companies make a lot of money by implementing "dark patterns", such as getting customers onto subscriptions and then making it hard for them to cancel. They can't admit that this is why their revenue went up, so they make a bunch of claims about how their success comes out of [various beneficent strategies], but anyone who tries to replicate the success by using those lovely strategies is liable to go broke. This bullet point makes me wonder if there are situations where newcomers end up beating the original company because consumers are willing to pay an enormous premium just to avoid the dark patterns. Carrot solutions? :)

bell-cot 3y ago
Reaction... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nobody_ever_went_broke_underestimating_the_intelligence_of_the_American_people https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nobody_ever_went_broke_undere... And plausibly "nobody ever made money by overestimating the intelligence..."
n_ary 3y ago
Indeed there are. I pay high premium to alternatives, which has monthly cancel options. Some of these cost me > ~35-40% long-term, but it reassuring that, if I am suddenly in misfortune or tight spots, I could rapidly rid myself of some luxuries in a blink. :)
csin 3y ago
Or you are liable to go broke thinking your site can make money with only the "lovely strategies" without the "dark patterns".

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jrflowers 3y ago

I like how the author has established “The Carrot Problem” as a novel concept that cannot be explained as “the stuff that happens after people lie”

bonoboTP 3y ago
But it's much more specific than that. I know that it's common in such blogs to introduce useless neologisms and reinvent established concepts, but this seems to warrant it enough. It's specifically that success often relies on something that its user doesn't want to admit (either to stop competition, as in the war example, or just because the tool is socially unacceptable or wouldn't make them look good), but they also don't want to say "I won't tell you, it's a secret" and instead they make up some other reason that actually doesn't work. This is way more concrete than just "what happens after people lie". Many lies aren't about reasons and recipes for success.

MrPatan 3y ago

The formula for success is not a sum of factors, it's a multiplication of factors. Yes, you need luck to be > 0. But you better have hard work also > 0, or you won't have any success anyway. No, the sales and marketing guys are not parasites leeching off your hard work because you're the one wrinting the code. It's not S + C, it's S * C. No, it doesn't matter how good and productive you are, if you don't know how to search for jobs, pass interviews, etc, you won't have a job. And not wanting to work hard because "you need luck anyway" is not a winning strategy.

smitty1e 3y ago

The "Carrot Problem", itself, is operational deception covering for the real tradecraft on offer: OPDEC => https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA293799 https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA293799

sam1r 3y ago

My concise way of paraphrasing this: “ when what you’re aiming for doesn’t add up directly “ No carrots or distractions involved.

boringuser2 3y ago

The anabolic steroids thing isn't really elucidated properly. The problems regarding this, that make it a true carrot problem, are as follows: 1. Enhanced athletes aggressively claiming to be and marketing themselves as natural for explicit monetary incentives. 2. Enhanced athletes claiming to achieve amazing things naturally for obvious incentives and mitigation of disincentives. Generally, the notion that any top athlete isn't "enhanced" is absurd. Anabolic steroids are a huge boost, trust me. Wink wink nudge. You go from being a mere mortal to feeling powerful, and your physical recovery is completely changed. You become wolverine. Enhanced athletes claiming to be natural because they don't want to get in trouble and telling you to do pyramid supersets isn't really a problem because it's probably going to work (hypertrophy isn't hard, it's easy) and it's pretty obvious they're enhanced. You don't need steroids to get decent results, pretty much everyone has a base capacity for this. Enhanced athletes explicitly claiming to be natural for monetary incentives can harm people financially and physically, and this is a wildly popular grift.

doctor_eval 3y ago

A very successful friend of mine once said... There are two secrets to being successful: 1. Don't explain the secret to your success.

naveen99 3y ago
The chess way is to prepare for your opponents best move.
naveen99 3y ago
That might only help against weaker opponents. Also if stronger opponents adopt the same strategy, you will learn less also.

naveen99 3y ago

Well at some point someone was told about onboard radar and it was the truth… people lie and people tell the truth. There are infinite lies and fewer truths. But truths are consistent, and lies are hard to keep consistent.

exegete 3y ago

This is a problem but the fact we know the real reason for the US pilots’ success was not carrots shows we (eventually) got the correct information. So the question is - how does this happen today? Journalists investigating companies? Analysts giving insight into what is happening behind the scenes? Whistleblowers?

travisjungroth 3y ago
The steroids thing is a great example that shows that “we” don’t know things. Even when the information is out there some don’t have access to it and some don’t believe it. For every pro bodybuilder or shredded Hollywood actor using steroids (many, to put it lightly), there are tons of people following their routines and diets, thinking it will lead to similar results. Not all that much research and critical thinking will show that that’s not going to happen. This isn’t really an answer to your question, but the bummer is that even someone like the people you listed telling the truth isn’t enough. Shit, tons of people still believe the thing about carrots.
- deadcoder0904 3y ago
  yes, i thought john cena like body was achievable. but after working out for 4 years consistently, i can pretty much say its nigh impossible. if you want to bulk up like that, you need steroids. yes, even john cena like body which doesn't look that huge but its huge & can't be done without steroids. heck, the liver king used the carrot problem incredibly to his advantage. he told people he got big eating liver. only after he made his $100m empire did he admit to it on andrew schultz podcast.
deadcoder0904 3y ago
insiders knowing about stuff like this. i have heard you can't get big in hollywood/bollywood if you don't exchange sexual favors. that's why they all protect rapists, sexual assaulters, etc... there's a reason those who complain about sexual assaults, rape, etc... have their careers finished rather than the opposite. like epstein's connections are not known bcz they are all in on it. everyone has skeletons in the closet. i mean it wouldn't be hard to get away with murder/rape if someone were rich. sounds like sci-fi but i find it real after hearing those dubai stories. this is just one example. 3 examples op listed were also terrific. one such case is recent. someone who is a recent graduate got a job through connections (nepotism?) & makes a lot of salary than others working the same position while doing little to no work. this is a personal experience of someone close. then there's black hat tactics startups use that they can't admit to. like airbnb using #1 hacker. or someone using leaked databases to find emails. i saw a recent startup that matched twitter accounts with emails when twitter database got leaked. i'm sure that person is telling people some other story on how he got emails. once you look at it, you'll find a lot of carrot problems in life. the reason why i posted it last night as soon as i found it.

marsupialtail_2 3y ago

Yes but there is also the inverse carrot problem. E.g. if the pilots have radar, they are more liable to rely on it and neglect other aspects of flying. Similarly in business, it is simply harder for folks who grew up rich to develop the level of grit that comes natural to the less privileged. I may sound like a rich apologist, but please believe me when I say it is harder to spend 10 hrs a day cranking on a risky startup if you know you can be clubbing with daddy's money

frankest 3y ago

So that’s why YC is orange :)

samstave 3y ago

Beutifully written, however, there has been a term for this for a long time : "Shiny Object" as well as "Squirrel!" Are these different, they seem the same to me if your thinking about them on the same level?

ankitg12 3y ago

Hits the bulls eyes. That's why it's important to keep your mind always open and question everything. But how much you can question is also limited by cognitive limits we have as humans. SO the only thing you can actually trust is your own direct experience. I have found many books to be useless just because of this reason.

berniedurfee 3y ago

I’d be curious to know if there was a spike in the price of carrots after that story came out.

ChumpGPT 3y ago

There are many reasons why people become rich. I'm not talking about the guy who saves his entire life and has a comfortable retirement. I'm talking about the very rich. You have the folks who inherit wealth and there is a lot of that. But the folks who are self made, the guys and gals who went from zero to millions, 99% of it was being at the right place at the right time or knowing someone that helped them along. This applies to youtube stars all the way to successful entrepreneurs who somehow built a 100 million dollar business. Are there outliers, of course, but they are far and few between. So the point is hard work and determination is about 1% of the equation and luck is the other 99%. Like my brother likes to say, I would much rather be very lucky than very smart. Just saying......

aerialfrog 3y ago

Carrots can improve your eyesight https://www.drlatter.com/blog/do-carrots-actually-improve-your-eyesight-the-truth-about-your-diets-effect-on-your-eyes https://www.drlatter.com/blog/do-carrots-actually-improve-yo...

siavosh 3y ago

I think this describes most of what I see on my LinkedIn feed.

dudinax 3y ago

"security through obscurity" as an insult. Sorry, but obscurity is a big part of security. Always has been, always will be.