10 ms·

"Attrition is a group statistic. It doesn't apply to me."

185 points by arram 14y ago

Kylekramer 14y ago
Ignoring base rates is a great idea until you are hit by a base rate. And by definition, you are probably going to be hit by a base rate. Everyone who succeed and failed all thought they were an special individual.
thetrumanshow 14y ago
Most people don't win the lottery. Statistically speaking, you almost always lose. So why play, right? Sometimes, its okay to ignore the statistics and hope for the best. Sometimes, its okay to stop hoping and start believing, even if the odds are grim. Selection bias does teach us one useful thing. That you don't win if you give up.
- sageikosa 14y ago
  Ignoring the odds only helps if you are flying the Millenium Falcon through a statistically overly-dense asteroid field, and that's arguably only because you have the sister of a Jedi (and daughter of a Sith) on board. In every other case, you are better off using your resources on something with a more reliable return on resource investment.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    The Force is not a Field of Luck +1. She wasn't piloting.
    - marssaxman 14y ago
      It is, however, a Field of Plot Device. She wasn't piloting but she was essential to the story, so the probability-function collapsed in a way that preserved her ability to contribute to further events.
    - sageikosa 14y ago
      I did say arguably. And Jedi do make other people operate "better", at least from some of the scant reading I did.
  - thetrumanshow 14y ago
    If that were true, there would never be any entrepreneurs. Employment is safer than a startup, for example. Now weighing your comment against really long odds like the lottery, its definitely more correct. The point I wanted to make is that its fine to hope in things that are seemingly unattainable, and to be somewhat ignorant of the realities. Imagine, for example, how bad college basketball would become if players started realizing just how long the odds are in the path to wealth through the NBA. It turns out, a lot of our economy runs on hope.
    - noname123 14y ago
      A lot of college ball-players knowing that they aren't going to make it to the pro's, transition into coaching, parlay their athletic prestige into a corporate position etc. Just because you are gambling with your life doesn't mean you can't gamble better. Problem is when people get delusional about what they can achieve vs. the reality. Most people are born and remain losers. My motto in life is to preserve my capital, so I can lose for as long as possible.
      - thetrumanshow 14y ago
        The kids who start playing at a young age don't generally start out dreaming of selling out for slightly better odds at some point later in life. They have their eyes set on their heros and they go as hard as they can. Its only later that they become realistic in their expectations. I am trying to weakly correlate this concept to startups. You have to start out dreamy-eyed enough to start. You can deal with reality later. When Scott Mace and I started CalendarHub and applied to YCombinator in the same year as Justin Khans Kiko, we weren't shooting for lifestyle business. We were shooting for Get-Bought-By-Google or bust. Reality set in later. That was my start, at least I started :).
    - sageikosa 14y ago
      The lottery is controlled purely by the odds, the outcome is stochastic. Playing my own devil's advocate: C3P0 states the odds for successfully navigating an asteroid belt, but Han doesn't want the odds, mainly because C3P0 hasn't stated the odds for Han Solo succesfully navigating an asteroid belt. Han works best when he doesn't know how often other people fail.
- garry 14y ago
  The lottery is one where everyone pretty much has equal odds of success. Individuals, especially in startups, tend not to have equal odds at all. It's a game of skill, not luck.
  - jpdoctor 14y ago
    > It's a game of skill, not luck. I'm gonna guess that you didn't found a company at the Nasdaq peak in April of 2000.
  - abstractbill 14y ago
    It's a game of more skill than the lottery, sure. But it's still largely a game of luck.
  - thetrumanshow 14y ago
    I don't exactly disagree, but I would say there are enough things outside of your control that luck does play a part. However, to your point I believe that (with great skill, appropriately applied) you can bend the odds in your favor. What I really wanted to do in that comment was espouse what the article is selling... positivity/hope.
- senthilnayagam 14y ago
  in my high school, in 1989 in India, my maths teacher was into single digit lotteries, which give a 10% win chance for lowest prize money. with his maths, statistics, patterns, trends, he increased his odds to 30-70%, I have seen him when he is 100% sure, he would be travelling 100 miles to different places just to buy all the lotteries
  - gwern 14y ago
    > with his maths, statistics, patterns, trends, he increased his odds to 30-70%, I have seen him when he is 100% sure, he would be travelling 100 miles to different places just to buy all the lotteries Those payouts must've been pretty decent to justify so much time and effort. (Or perhaps he was, unfortunately, not also into economics.)
    - senthilnayagam 14y ago
      at todays conversion rate one lottery was about 4 cents, and price money was about 20 cents. these lotteries were preprinted with the numbers and available only at lottery vendors across the town, one vendor would have about 20-100 of the same number, so if he believed he would win, he will buy one number each for the predicted number and one for one random number and then buy those 2 in volume of hundreds across the town. it was pretty addictive
      - gwern 14y ago
        So let's see... You say he had a 70% chance of winning, so if the prize money was 20 cents, each ticket had an expected value of 0.720=14 cents but a cost of 4 cents so a net of 10 cents. I'm not sure what you mean by '20-100 of the same number' - he could only buy 20-100 from each vendor? Let's say he can buy 100 at a vendor (if they're the same number and so the entire batch will win or lose, then that renders the expected net value a little worse a fit but whatever) , that's 10 cents 100 or 10 dollars. In the US, minimum wage tends to come out around $7, so if he can hit one vendor per hour then I suppose he'd be showing a reasonable profit. But you also need to take into account wear and tear on vehicles, risk of accidents, planning your life around the lottery... I suspect with those included, it'd still be net-positive but not really that great a use of time and effort. Personally, I'd be doing it more for a fun write-up than to make money.
soup10 14y ago
Extreme determination is a rare and powerful thing. Combined with some talent, luck, humility and hard work, one can accomplish anything.
jiggy2011 14y ago
You still need a backup plan, I assume that if you fail special forces selection you get to keep your job in the regular military. If your startup goes bad, make sure it doesn't leave you in an untenable financial situation regardless of how optimistic you are.
- comrade_ogilvy 14y ago
  That is actual wisdom. It is okay to lie to yourself about your odds of success, if you have done your homework and have a viable Plan B. Having the "best plan" is usually only possible in hindsight. My observation is that the most successful people are not necessarily the ones with the best plan, but those who act decisively on good plans and know how to pick themselves up with an even better attempt after a failure. I do not really see how failing to enter special forces has a huge downside. Even not succeeding offers the opportunity to learn.
crntaylor 14y ago
If you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything. Except compute an uncomputable function. Or transmit information faster than the speed of light. Or simultaneously measure the speed and momentum of a particle with errors whose product is less than half the planck constant. But apart from that, anything.
- crazygringo 14y ago
  Do you really believe that, or are you being sarcastic? Because I hate to tell you, someday you'll collide with real life. If you put your mind to it, can you become president? Chances are simply, no. A lot of people have put their mind to it, like Romney, McCain, Hillary, Kerry... it's not like they were lacking in motivation or desire. So... no, sometimes, no matter how hard you want something, you are not going to achieve it. I know there's a big self-help movement, believing in attracting positive energy, believing in yourself, and whatnot... but a lot of people can't seem to always tell the difference between realistic expectations and self-delusion.
  - crntaylor 14y ago
    > Romney, McCain, Hillary, Kerry They probably just didn't want it enough. If they'd really thought positively, if they'd just visualised themselves in the position they wanted to be in, they'd all be president now. And if you're going to say "but what about their opponents?". Well, if they believed in themselves enough, then they'd be president too. If Romney and Obama both believed in themselves, then they'd both be president. Now that's the power of positive thinking.
    - delluminatus 14y ago
      So you were being sarcastic. Having said that, positive thinking and motivation are very important factors in goal achievement. It's often the case that when someone fails to accomplish something, it's because there was simply something else more important to them that inhibited their effort.
      - 14y ago
lelandbatey 14y ago
I feel like not being realistic about your odds is a very dangerous game to play. Sure, you can maybe grit your teeth and bear it. But you also might totally burn out doing something unrealistic. This applies to more than just start ups: It's very rare that you can succeed through sheer stubbornness, many times you'll just end up hurting yourself.
- benevpayor 14y ago
  I think he's trying to say that there's a difference between your odds and the population odds. The key is to know thy self.
jeremyjh 14y ago
I'm sure most people in his selection group felt the same way, and most of them failed. We only write blog articles about the exceptional ones.
RyanZAG 14y ago
Special forces training is taken by a large number of people - some of these people are just chancing it, hoping they will be able to push through anyway but not really prepared or ready for it. Others, like your brother, are fully prepared. When looking at a base rate, it's important to understand the different divisions inside that base rate and the reasons people drop out. In special training, the reasons people are likely to drop out are because they aren't physically fit enough to cope. This gives your a brother a good indication - he likely knows others of similar fitness to him who passed. The key here is that there isn't much randomness involved - either you are fit enough or you aren't. Startups are a completely different ballgame. The main factors behind dropping out are a complete mystery - team composition, relationships, lucky deals with investors, hitting your marketing in at the same time some other big player pulls out or pitches in - the list is endless and impossible to even fully understand. Basically what I'm trying to get at is that comparing something you have complete control over (special forces training) vs something you don't (a startup's success) is not a great analogy. However you're still correct anyway - the best indicator of whether a startup succeeds is whether or not they try in the first place! So it's always best to try and ignore the baseline.
- joelandren 14y ago
  I'd argue that special forces training is not a matter of complete control, I'm sure that people bump up against physical limitations (eyesight, coordination, etc.) that would allow them to be a regular soldier, but they never know until they try. Similarly, things like carefully choosing your co-founders, advisors and investors... doing good customer development, understanding your market better than anyone, give you more control over your fate. Nothing is absolute, but the analogy seems apt to me: You're not a statistic.
- dgreensp 14y ago
  I disagree. Statistics about start-ups also ignore how prepared people are, and how committed and talented they are. Many personal achievements in life are a "complete mystery" to many or most observers, or to science, or to mainstream intellectual discourse, but they still draw on rare and special qualities of individuals. Even if you don't "control" the outcome, that doesn't mean it's not a function of who you are (in the broadest sense).
utopkara 14y ago
Startup success and lottery wins are very different things. You don't get better at lottery as you buy more tickets over the years; but you get better at your trade as you do it more and more, even if you fail at each previous attempt to start a company. If you see it as a lottery, then it doesn't make sense for people to try starting their own companies after several failed trials when they reach some middle age, as they really don't have much time left. But, it is just the opposite, because they are actually much better at seeing pitfalls and bs, and are a lot more likely to be successful. So, the statistics do matter, you just need to know the kind of statistics that apply. As a rule of thumb, in real life, it is usually not the lottery kind.
PaulHoule 14y ago
This is one of the Five Hazardous Attitudes that make you an accident-prone person, a risk factor identified by the FAA http://www.avhf.com/html/Evaluation/HazardAttitude/Hazard_Attitude_Intro.htm http://www.avhf.com/html/Evaluation/HazardAttitude/Hazard_At... Reduce your risk and improve your expectation values by rationally using decision theory and correcting the systematic sampling biases in your head.
- quaunaut 14y ago
  No, it isn't. This isn't him saying, "It won't happen to me" just because, it's that it doesn't apply because he's taking the necessary precautions. He's doing everything he can- and other people won't affect HIS rate of failure.
  - calinet6 14y ago
    Yes, they will, and that's what makes him failure-prone. When outside influences do come along that affect his expected outcome, he will be disrupted instead of scientifically understanding the situation, and his role as an individual who is not the center of the universe.
    - quaunaut 14y ago
      You are way too deterministic.
      - PaulHoule 14y ago
        No, I'm a Bayesian. When you know there is sampling error (luck) it makes sense to blend a little bit of the distribution of the group in with each individual. For instance, if you look at baseball hitters for a season ordered by batting average, probably the guy at the top of the list got lucky (sampling error) and the guy at the bottom of the list had bad luck. The real batting average is a hidden variable that we can only see through sampling. A good estimator of an individual's batting average can use the group distribution as a prior against the individual distribution as an observation -- this regresses the individuals back towards the mean, which is a realistic way to perceive uncertainty.
caseydurfee 14y ago
Reminds me of Steven Jay Gould's classic "The Median Isn't the Message": "If the median is the reality and variation around the median just a device for its calculation, the "I will probably be dead in eight months" may pass as a reasonable interpretation. But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions. Therefore, I looked at the mesothelioma statistics quite differently - and not only because I am an optimist who tends to see the doughnut instead of the hole, but primarily because I know that variation itself is the reality. I had to place myself amidst the variation." http://www.cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.html http://www.cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.html
- calinet6 14y ago
  He certainly had a way of bringing out the beauty in truth. What he's saying here really is useful, since he's also recognizing the variation. He knows that he is not the median or mean, but a point somewhere in the field among other points. The median does not exist; it's only an abstract measure of the wide range of variation and commonality. However, it would be foolish (or, as he puts it, optimistic) to place yourself blindly at the top of the bell curve without evidence to support that. As Gould (bless his heart) says in the paragraph following that: "I possessed every one of the characteristics conferring a probability of longer life: I was young; my disease had been recognized in a relatively early stage; I would receive the nation's best medical treatment; I had the world to live for; I knew how to read the data properly and not despair." He was a scientist. He had evidence and reasons for believing he lied where he did among the statistics. He didn't choose to believe that, he deduced it. If someone has good reasons for believing they're going to be better than the average, more power to them. They're simply making an intelligent conclusion. But you can't choose to be successful by sheer willpower alone. You have to make a case for it; build evidence that proves it. I don't see that here. I don't see it with most people who believe this sort of anti-statistical nonsense. All I see is a misunderstanding of statistics; a lack of respect for the variation and where you are likely to lie within it. You have to understand that before you try to do better.
dvt 14y ago
Contrary to most commenters here, I've recently started to embrace "being a statistic." I think completely understanding where you stand (on the normal curve) is not only important when helping you prepare for taking an exam, approaching a girl, or launching a startup, but also important for the many (many) inevitable failures. You will be able to deduce what you did right, what you did wrong, how to improve, etc. given where you started. I think that embracing your inner statistic is a good, if not great, idea. Don't be depressed because you're not that special snowflake, instead try to understand where you are, where you want to be, and what, exactly, you have to do to get there. If there's a 99% chance that you won't get from where you are to where you want to be doing whatever it is you're doing, either amend your goals or do it a different way. Sometimes there's no shame in folding.
- calinet6 14y ago
  Understanding the truth will always guide you right; denying it will lead you astray.
- kybernetikos 14y ago
  > Sometimes there's no shame in folding. Actually, a correct fold is one of the most skillful things you can do in poker. That's why James Bond will never be a good poker player.
  - ryguytilidie 14y ago
    Why would you ever fold if you always have the best hand?
calinet6 14y ago
Aww. I bet the person who won the lottery thought they were special, too. Clearly, there is a grand misunderstanding of statistics here. In order to make yourself an exception to the statistics, you're going to have to scientifically explain how you are going to become better. Everyone believes they're better. How are you, truly, going to go above and beyond? Do you have better connections than the average? Do you have the experience needed? Do you have a better idea which is downright guaranteed to succeed? If you can answer Yes to all of those questions, congratulations, you are the average Startup Individual, and the statistics do apply to you. You're going to have to work really hard, have all the right things fall into place, and do everything right, and even then you still have an extremely large chance of failure. It is the nature of the situation. Starting a startup isn't like playing the lottery. You have maybe 20% more control over your outcome. But 80% is still in the hand you're dealt, both as a person and as a company. Make the best of it.
- jjb123 14y ago
  "Have all the right things fall into place..." is a misconception that is actually far from the truth in my opinion. Most successful startups win because they go after SUCH a large market that they're able to be quite wrong about a lot, but they're right about a few key things (one of which is often thinking it's a massive market when others don't).
  - calinet6 14y ago
    Yeah, there are a lot of determining factors which really boost the probability of success, and that is certainly one of them. I'd say most people think they have a huge market though. How do you separate out the ones who are right (and thus the special person for whom the statistic didn't apply) from the failure cases (who believed in essentially the same preconditions but were incorrect/implemented wrong/didn't move quick enough/had some extenuating circumstance/didn't get funding/had the wrong partner/hired the wrong dev/didn't pivot/failed). That's why experience is such a key factor—if you've already done it 3 times you have a lot higher chance of making the right decisions along the way. I'm not saying it's entirely luck, but it's not deterministic either.
- 14y ago
cbsmith 14y ago
Classic case of not understanding statistics and probabilities...
bjliu 14y ago
"...we've found a very serious problem: no matter how carefully we select the mean, no matter how patiently we make the analysis, when they get here something happens: it always turns out that approximately half of them are below average!" -Richard Feynman
D-Train 14y ago
Meh, I agree with him... if only because I'm one of those guys who cares about how I perform. It's like being in the gym... I'm not going to be the strongest guy in the room, but what I do care about is how progress. At the end of the day, I don't care how others do it outside of learning from how others didn't succeed and those who did.
WalterSear 14y ago
So is survival rate.
baqbeat 14y ago
You are not a special snowflake.
Detrus 14y ago
What if he broke more than his ankle? Obviously he was mentally and physically prepared for the course. But a course is predictable. Startup economics are more like combat, you can be the best soldier but an IED finds you.
MattBearman 14y ago
"Who cares what statistics show? Look at medicine. 80% of people with pancreatic cancer die within 5 years and 95% of appendectimies occur with zero complications. But we both know cases of pancreatic cancer patients that lived and appendicitis patients that unfortunately passed. Statistics mean nothing to the individual" - Dr. Cox (Scrubs) That quote has always stuck with me since I saw that episode, if you enter a situation knowing statistics of outcomes, it can affect how you perform.
- sopooneo 14y ago
  And maybe it should affect what (if not how) you perform. If you are probably going to die soon, maybe you would feel your life best spent in a different way than if you had decades left.
justin_vanw 14y ago
Although I like the sentiment, I disagree with the accuracy of this. Attrition is a group statistic. It doesn't apply to you if and only if you are exceptional in some way. Otherwise, it applies to you even more. In the specific example, his brother knew he was so much harder than his peers that he could do something incredible, like run for miles with a broken ankle. That mental toughness is how he was exceptional, and why he could be confident that he would be one of the people that made it.
- kybernetikos 14y ago
  You're probably giving him too much credit. I've seen interviews with people before they embark on these kinds of courses, and every single one of them said that they really wanted it, that it was the most important thing in their lives, and that the group statistic didn't apply to them. Some of them made it. Many of them didn't.
specialist 14y ago
My oncologist told me "Statistics are not people." I was about to undergo a bone marrow transplant. At the time, mortality within the first year was 90%. But I was much healthier initially than most other patients, because I had different medical history. Plus, I'm one tough SOB.
- _delirium 14y ago
  > But I was much healthier initially than most other patients, because I had different medical history. That just seems like you need better statistics. More sophisticated cancer-prognosis models typically do take initial health and medical histories into consideration.
cletus 14y ago
His brother is correct: statistics are a group property, or rather, they are they description of what happened with a particular group. When when you start making predictions you're talking probability not statistics. Statistics may inform probability but there can be issues with this (eg bad sample, insufficiently sized sample, failure to identify the underlying characteristic(s) such that samples are actually flawed and so on). The problem we have with a species is that we conflate the two. This comes up with highly political issues such as racial profiling. Imagine a situation in a southern border state where statistically more illegal aliens are Hispanic in both absolute and relative terms (meaning absolute number and relative percentage of their given populations). I say this not as a fact but as a non-judgemental scenario to make a point: law enforcement will likely, consciously or subsconsciously, make different suspicions based on such external characteristics. Is this fair to the individual? Of course not. It borders on an assumption of guilt. People of Middle Eastern descent who regularly fly I'm sure are cursed with this kind of suspicion when almost all of them have done absolutely nothing wrong. Anyway, as to special training, a relative of mine was married to a guy who went through SAS training (and passed). To those who think this is simply an issue of being sufficiently physically fit, you couldn't be more wrong. Now you have to be sufficiently fit for it to be possible to pass but after that it's a mental issue. They put these guys through mentally strenuous situations: sleep deprivation followed by interrogation, psychological profiling and the like. His brother has another point though: on an individual level you should never assume you're going to fail (or succeed for that matter) based on group statistics. Engineering is currently male-dominated but no woman should ever take that as evidence that they can't do it as an individual. Nor should any man assume a specific woman is less likely to be capable, etc.
- gz5 14y ago
  Nothing wrong with stats. They are what they are. Problem is when we then apply them to individuals. Then we are unfairly stereotyping the individual.
  - gambiting 14y ago
    Car insurance is the prime example of unfairness and being punished for the actions of others, purely because of statistics.
jes5199 14y ago
We're doing motivational posters here now? Okay, we can do that. I recommend: the Tao of Programming http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html
- mappu 14y ago
  Related reading: The Codeless Code http://thecodelesscode.com/contents http://thecodelesscode.com/contents and ESR's Rootless Root http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/
nezaj 14y ago
I've always viewed statistics as information about aggregates. Anything can happen when N = 1
coldtea 14y ago
>He explained that statistics are created for groups, not for individuals. As an individual, it's not relevant to you. He went on to pass the course on a broken ankle. That makes me think about some startup founders. Their companies should have died, since most die. They should have given up, since most give up. But, somehow they willed their company to exist. Startup failure is a group statistic, it doesn't apply to you. Yes. Also known as "survivorship bias". Fact is, the brothers of all the other people who attended that course could have (and might had) said the exact same things to their brother. And most of them would be proven wrong. Group statistics are indeed about groups. It's our way to predict what the most likely outcome is for individual members of a group taken at random (or all other things being equal).
- unoti 14y ago
  >Fact is, the brothers of all the other people who attended that course could have (and might had) said the exact same things to their brother. And most of them would be proven wrong. Exactly. But those people don't talk about it a decade later. And that's selection bias.
abc_lisper 14y ago
This is a very acute observation. It applies to you, but not in a way you think. In fact, as an individual it probably means the opposite to you. Check out Douglas Hofstadter's GEB, for a really enlightening take on the topic. Check index for "Aunt Hillary"
michaelochurch 14y ago
This is why there are so many graduate students who can't find jobs. The prospects (acceptable for STEM, dismal for all else) are published, but people who are used to being the "1 in 10" fail to realize that, when it counts, they likely will be. The other 9, it turns out, are Ivy-educated smart people just like them. This might apply to VC-istan as well, although I think founders are less delusional about it than employees. Founders become EIR if the thing flops; employees think the business is "fully de-risked" (because they're told that to justify the 0.0x-percent equity slices) and that they're guaranteed to actually get the executive positions they were promised (ha!).
dools 14y ago
Classic survivorship bias scenario. Nevermind that all the other people in the course went in with equally inspiring slogans like Failure Is Not An Option tatooed across their buttocks. Some people fail, sometimes it's going to be you.
shokwave 14y ago
60% of people drop out[0] - before you knew this, you had an 60% chance of dropping out. Now you know the statistics, you can go about exerting effort to end up in the 40% that don't drop out. And that number - 60% to 40% - tells you a little bit about how much effort you're going to need to put in (not much). 90% of startups fail[1] - now you know that, you want to put yourself in the 10% that don't. 90% to 10% is a bigger gap to jump than 60 to 40, so it's going to be a lot harder. 0,1: not actual statistics
_delirium 14y ago
Between this article and the beekeeping one, HN isn't making a good showing on the day for scientific literacy.
phil 14y ago
This is more or less the same point that Stephen Jay Gould made in "The Median Isn't the Message:" http://people.umass.edu/biep540w/pdf/Stephen%20Jay%20Gould.pdf http://people.umass.edu/biep540w/pdf/Stephen%20Jay%20Gould.p...
edanm 14y ago
This is The Biggest Lie Entrepreneurs Tell Themselves (tm). You hear about the fact that only 10% of startups succeed, but you tell yourself "I'm better than them". pg himself reinforces this notion by saying things like "some founders have a 0% chance of success, others a 95% chance". pg is right, in a sense, but there is very little way for you to know whether you really are "better" than others. Very few people actually know what makes a startup successful, so there's that. On top of which, the people who are taken into account in the 10% statistic includes, among others, people who are building their 5th startup, the sons of highly influential politicians, personal friends of movie actors, etc. It includes people 30 years in a particular industry, with tons of insider knowledge, who decided to build a product in that industry. And it includes other 21 year olds with stars in their eyes, and nothing more. This isn't to say "don't build a startup". That's a different conversation, and depends a lot on your goals in life. But most people are in the startup game at least partially for the money. And for the purposes of calculating your potential earnings, unless you have a good reason why you're special, pay attention to the damn statistics!

185 points by arram 14y ago

Ignoring base rates is a great idea until you are hit by a base rate. And by definition, you are probably going to be hit by a base rate. Everyone who succeed and failed all thought they were an special individual.

thetrumanshow 14y ago

Most people don't win the lottery. Statistically speaking, you almost always lose. So why play, right? Sometimes, its okay to ignore the statistics and hope for the best. Sometimes, its okay to stop hoping and start believing, even if the odds are grim. Selection bias does teach us one useful thing. That you don't win if you give up.

sageikosa 14y ago
Ignoring the odds only helps if you are flying the Millenium Falcon through a statistically overly-dense asteroid field, and that's arguably only because you have the sister of a Jedi (and daughter of a Sith) on board. In every other case, you are better off using your resources on something with a more reliable return on resource investment.
- saraid216 14y ago
  The Force is not a Field of Luck +1. She wasn't piloting.
  - marssaxman 14y ago
    It is, however, a Field of Plot Device. She wasn't piloting but she was essential to the story, so the probability-function collapsed in a way that preserved her ability to contribute to further events.
  - sageikosa 14y ago
    I did say arguably. And Jedi do make other people operate "better", at least from some of the scant reading I did.
- thetrumanshow 14y ago
  If that were true, there would never be any entrepreneurs. Employment is safer than a startup, for example. Now weighing your comment against really long odds like the lottery, its definitely more correct. The point I wanted to make is that its fine to hope in things that are seemingly unattainable, and to be somewhat ignorant of the realities. Imagine, for example, how bad college basketball would become if players started realizing just how long the odds are in the path to wealth through the NBA. It turns out, a lot of our economy runs on hope.
  - noname123 14y ago
    A lot of college ball-players knowing that they aren't going to make it to the pro's, transition into coaching, parlay their athletic prestige into a corporate position etc. Just because you are gambling with your life doesn't mean you can't gamble better. Problem is when people get delusional about what they can achieve vs. the reality. Most people are born and remain losers. My motto in life is to preserve my capital, so I can lose for as long as possible.
    - thetrumanshow 14y ago
      The kids who start playing at a young age don't generally start out dreaming of selling out for slightly better odds at some point later in life. They have their eyes set on their heros and they go as hard as they can. Its only later that they become realistic in their expectations. I am trying to weakly correlate this concept to startups. You have to start out dreamy-eyed enough to start. You can deal with reality later. When Scott Mace and I started CalendarHub and applied to YCombinator in the same year as Justin Khans Kiko, we weren't shooting for lifestyle business. We were shooting for Get-Bought-By-Google or bust. Reality set in later. That was my start, at least I started :).
  - sageikosa 14y ago
    The lottery is controlled purely by the odds, the outcome is stochastic. Playing my own devil's advocate: C3P0 states the odds for successfully navigating an asteroid belt, but Han doesn't want the odds, mainly because C3P0 hasn't stated the odds for Han Solo succesfully navigating an asteroid belt. Han works best when he doesn't know how often other people fail.
garry 14y ago
The lottery is one where everyone pretty much has equal odds of success. Individuals, especially in startups, tend not to have equal odds at all. It's a game of skill, not luck.
- jpdoctor 14y ago
  > It's a game of skill, not luck. I'm gonna guess that you didn't found a company at the Nasdaq peak in April of 2000.
- abstractbill 14y ago
  It's a game of more skill than the lottery, sure. But it's still largely a game of luck.
- thetrumanshow 14y ago
  I don't exactly disagree, but I would say there are enough things outside of your control that luck does play a part. However, to your point I believe that (with great skill, appropriately applied) you can bend the odds in your favor. What I really wanted to do in that comment was espouse what the article is selling... positivity/hope.
senthilnayagam 14y ago
in my high school, in 1989 in India, my maths teacher was into single digit lotteries, which give a 10% win chance for lowest prize money. with his maths, statistics, patterns, trends, he increased his odds to 30-70%, I have seen him when he is 100% sure, he would be travelling 100 miles to different places just to buy all the lotteries
- gwern 14y ago
  > with his maths, statistics, patterns, trends, he increased his odds to 30-70%, I have seen him when he is 100% sure, he would be travelling 100 miles to different places just to buy all the lotteries Those payouts must've been pretty decent to justify so much time and effort. (Or perhaps he was, unfortunately, not also into economics.)
  - senthilnayagam 14y ago
    at todays conversion rate one lottery was about 4 cents, and price money was about 20 cents. these lotteries were preprinted with the numbers and available only at lottery vendors across the town, one vendor would have about 20-100 of the same number, so if he believed he would win, he will buy one number each for the predicted number and one for one random number and then buy those 2 in volume of hundreds across the town. it was pretty addictive
    - gwern 14y ago
      So let's see... You say he had a 70% chance of winning, so if the prize money was 20 cents, each ticket had an expected value of 0.720=14 cents but a cost of 4 cents so a net of 10 cents. I'm not sure what you mean by '20-100 of the same number' - he could only buy 20-100 from each vendor? Let's say he can buy 100 at a vendor (if they're the same number and so the entire batch will win or lose, then that renders the expected net value a little worse a fit but whatever) , that's 10 cents 100 or 10 dollars. In the US, minimum wage tends to come out around $7, so if he can hit one vendor per hour then I suppose he'd be showing a reasonable profit. But you also need to take into account wear and tear on vehicles, risk of accidents, planning your life around the lottery... I suspect with those included, it'd still be net-positive but not really that great a use of time and effort. Personally, I'd be doing it more for a fun write-up than to make money.

soup10 14y ago

Extreme determination is a rare and powerful thing. Combined with some talent, luck, humility and hard work, one can accomplish anything.

jiggy2011 14y ago

You still need a backup plan, I assume that if you fail special forces selection you get to keep your job in the regular military. If your startup goes bad, make sure it doesn't leave you in an untenable financial situation regardless of how optimistic you are.

comrade_ogilvy 14y ago
That is actual wisdom. It is okay to lie to yourself about your odds of success, if you have done your homework and have a viable Plan B. Having the "best plan" is usually only possible in hindsight. My observation is that the most successful people are not necessarily the ones with the best plan, but those who act decisively on good plans and know how to pick themselves up with an even better attempt after a failure. I do not really see how failing to enter special forces has a huge downside. Even not succeeding offers the opportunity to learn.

crntaylor 14y ago

If you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything. Except compute an uncomputable function. Or transmit information faster than the speed of light. Or simultaneously measure the speed and momentum of a particle with errors whose product is less than half the planck constant. But apart from that, anything.

crazygringo 14y ago
Do you really believe that, or are you being sarcastic? Because I hate to tell you, someday you'll collide with real life. If you put your mind to it, can you become president? Chances are simply, no. A lot of people have put their mind to it, like Romney, McCain, Hillary, Kerry... it's not like they were lacking in motivation or desire. So... no, sometimes, no matter how hard you want something, you are not going to achieve it. I know there's a big self-help movement, believing in attracting positive energy, believing in yourself, and whatnot... but a lot of people can't seem to always tell the difference between realistic expectations and self-delusion.
- crntaylor 14y ago
  > Romney, McCain, Hillary, Kerry They probably just didn't want it enough. If they'd really thought positively, if they'd just visualised themselves in the position they wanted to be in, they'd all be president now. And if you're going to say "but what about their opponents?". Well, if they believed in themselves enough, then they'd be president too. If Romney and Obama both believed in themselves, then they'd both be president. Now that's the power of positive thinking.
  - delluminatus 14y ago
    So you were being sarcastic. Having said that, positive thinking and motivation are very important factors in goal achievement. It's often the case that when someone fails to accomplish something, it's because there was simply something else more important to them that inhibited their effort.
    - 14y ago

lelandbatey 14y ago

I feel like not being realistic about your odds is a very dangerous game to play. Sure, you can maybe grit your teeth and bear it. But you also might totally burn out doing something unrealistic. This applies to more than just start ups: It's very rare that you can succeed through sheer stubbornness, many times you'll just end up hurting yourself.

benevpayor 14y ago
I think he's trying to say that there's a difference between your odds and the population odds. The key is to know thy self.

jeremyjh 14y ago

I'm sure most people in his selection group felt the same way, and most of them failed. We only write blog articles about the exceptional ones.

RyanZAG 14y ago

Special forces training is taken by a large number of people - some of these people are just chancing it, hoping they will be able to push through anyway but not really prepared or ready for it. Others, like your brother, are fully prepared. When looking at a base rate, it's important to understand the different divisions inside that base rate and the reasons people drop out. In special training, the reasons people are likely to drop out are because they aren't physically fit enough to cope. This gives your a brother a good indication - he likely knows others of similar fitness to him who passed. The key here is that there isn't much randomness involved - either you are fit enough or you aren't. Startups are a completely different ballgame. The main factors behind dropping out are a complete mystery - team composition, relationships, lucky deals with investors, hitting your marketing in at the same time some other big player pulls out or pitches in - the list is endless and impossible to even fully understand. Basically what I'm trying to get at is that comparing something you have complete control over (special forces training) vs something you don't (a startup's success) is not a great analogy. However you're still correct anyway - the best indicator of whether a startup succeeds is whether or not they try in the first place! So it's always best to try and ignore the baseline.

joelandren 14y ago
I'd argue that special forces training is not a matter of complete control, I'm sure that people bump up against physical limitations (eyesight, coordination, etc.) that would allow them to be a regular soldier, but they never know until they try. Similarly, things like carefully choosing your co-founders, advisors and investors... doing good customer development, understanding your market better than anyone, give you more control over your fate. Nothing is absolute, but the analogy seems apt to me: You're not a statistic.
dgreensp 14y ago
I disagree. Statistics about start-ups also ignore how prepared people are, and how committed and talented they are. Many personal achievements in life are a "complete mystery" to many or most observers, or to science, or to mainstream intellectual discourse, but they still draw on rare and special qualities of individuals. Even if you don't "control" the outcome, that doesn't mean it's not a function of who you are (in the broadest sense).

utopkara 14y ago

Startup success and lottery wins are very different things. You don't get better at lottery as you buy more tickets over the years; but you get better at your trade as you do it more and more, even if you fail at each previous attempt to start a company. If you see it as a lottery, then it doesn't make sense for people to try starting their own companies after several failed trials when they reach some middle age, as they really don't have much time left. But, it is just the opposite, because they are actually much better at seeing pitfalls and bs, and are a lot more likely to be successful. So, the statistics do matter, you just need to know the kind of statistics that apply. As a rule of thumb, in real life, it is usually not the lottery kind.

PaulHoule 14y ago

This is one of the Five Hazardous Attitudes that make you an accident-prone person, a risk factor identified by the FAA http://www.avhf.com/html/Evaluation/HazardAttitude/Hazard_Attitude_Intro.htm http://www.avhf.com/html/Evaluation/HazardAttitude/Hazard_At... Reduce your risk and improve your expectation values by rationally using decision theory and correcting the systematic sampling biases in your head.

quaunaut 14y ago
No, it isn't. This isn't him saying, "It won't happen to me" just because, it's that it doesn't apply because he's taking the necessary precautions. He's doing everything he can- and other people won't affect HIS rate of failure.
- calinet6 14y ago
  Yes, they will, and that's what makes him failure-prone. When outside influences do come along that affect his expected outcome, he will be disrupted instead of scientifically understanding the situation, and his role as an individual who is not the center of the universe.
  - quaunaut 14y ago
    You are way too deterministic.
    - PaulHoule 14y ago
      No, I'm a Bayesian. When you know there is sampling error (luck) it makes sense to blend a little bit of the distribution of the group in with each individual. For instance, if you look at baseball hitters for a season ordered by batting average, probably the guy at the top of the list got lucky (sampling error) and the guy at the bottom of the list had bad luck. The real batting average is a hidden variable that we can only see through sampling. A good estimator of an individual's batting average can use the group distribution as a prior against the individual distribution as an observation -- this regresses the individuals back towards the mean, which is a realistic way to perceive uncertainty.

caseydurfee 14y ago

Reminds me of Steven Jay Gould's classic "The Median Isn't the Message": "If the median is the reality and variation around the median just a device for its calculation, the "I will probably be dead in eight months" may pass as a reasonable interpretation. But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions. Therefore, I looked at the mesothelioma statistics quite differently - and not only because I am an optimist who tends to see the doughnut instead of the hole, but primarily because I know that variation itself is the reality. I had to place myself amidst the variation." http://www.cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.html http://www.cancerguide.org/median_not_msg.html

calinet6 14y ago
He certainly had a way of bringing out the beauty in truth. What he's saying here really is useful, since he's also recognizing the variation. He knows that he is not the median or mean, but a point somewhere in the field among other points. The median does not exist; it's only an abstract measure of the wide range of variation and commonality. However, it would be foolish (or, as he puts it, optimistic) to place yourself blindly at the top of the bell curve without evidence to support that. As Gould (bless his heart) says in the paragraph following that: "I possessed every one of the characteristics conferring a probability of longer life: I was young; my disease had been recognized in a relatively early stage; I would receive the nation's best medical treatment; I had the world to live for; I knew how to read the data properly and not despair." He was a scientist. He had evidence and reasons for believing he lied where he did among the statistics. He didn't choose to believe that, he deduced it. If someone has good reasons for believing they're going to be better than the average, more power to them. They're simply making an intelligent conclusion. But you can't choose to be successful by sheer willpower alone. You have to make a case for it; build evidence that proves it. I don't see that here. I don't see it with most people who believe this sort of anti-statistical nonsense. All I see is a misunderstanding of statistics; a lack of respect for the variation and where you are likely to lie within it. You have to understand that before you try to do better.

dvt 14y ago

Contrary to most commenters here, I've recently started to embrace "being a statistic." I think completely understanding where you stand (on the normal curve) is not only important when helping you prepare for taking an exam, approaching a girl, or launching a startup, but also important for the many (many) inevitable failures. You will be able to deduce what you did right, what you did wrong, how to improve, etc. given where you started. I think that embracing your inner statistic is a good, if not great, idea. Don't be depressed because you're not that special snowflake, instead try to understand where you are, where you want to be, and what, exactly, you have to do to get there. If there's a 99% chance that you won't get from where you are to where you want to be doing whatever it is you're doing, either amend your goals or do it a different way. Sometimes there's no shame in folding.

calinet6 14y ago
Understanding the truth will always guide you right; denying it will lead you astray.
kybernetikos 14y ago
> Sometimes there's no shame in folding. Actually, a correct fold is one of the most skillful things you can do in poker. That's why James Bond will never be a good poker player.
- ryguytilidie 14y ago
  Why would you ever fold if you always have the best hand?

calinet6 14y ago

Aww. I bet the person who won the lottery thought they were special, too. Clearly, there is a grand misunderstanding of statistics here. In order to make yourself an exception to the statistics, you're going to have to scientifically explain how you are going to become better. Everyone believes they're better. How are you, truly, going to go above and beyond? Do you have better connections than the average? Do you have the experience needed? Do you have a better idea which is downright guaranteed to succeed? If you can answer Yes to all of those questions, congratulations, you are the average Startup Individual, and the statistics do apply to you. You're going to have to work really hard, have all the right things fall into place, and do everything right, and even then you still have an extremely large chance of failure. It is the nature of the situation. Starting a startup isn't like playing the lottery. You have maybe 20% more control over your outcome. But 80% is still in the hand you're dealt, both as a person and as a company. Make the best of it.

jjb123 14y ago
"Have all the right things fall into place..." is a misconception that is actually far from the truth in my opinion. Most successful startups win because they go after SUCH a large market that they're able to be quite wrong about a lot, but they're right about a few key things (one of which is often thinking it's a massive market when others don't).
- calinet6 14y ago
  Yeah, there are a lot of determining factors which really boost the probability of success, and that is certainly one of them. I'd say most people think they have a huge market though. How do you separate out the ones who are right (and thus the special person for whom the statistic didn't apply) from the failure cases (who believed in essentially the same preconditions but were incorrect/implemented wrong/didn't move quick enough/had some extenuating circumstance/didn't get funding/had the wrong partner/hired the wrong dev/didn't pivot/failed). That's why experience is such a key factor—if you've already done it 3 times you have a lot higher chance of making the right decisions along the way. I'm not saying it's entirely luck, but it's not deterministic either.
14y ago

cbsmith 14y ago

Classic case of not understanding statistics and probabilities...

bjliu 14y ago

"...we've found a very serious problem: no matter how carefully we select the mean, no matter how patiently we make the analysis, when they get here something happens: it always turns out that approximately half of them are below average!" -Richard Feynman

D-Train 14y ago

Meh, I agree with him... if only because I'm one of those guys who cares about how I perform. It's like being in the gym... I'm not going to be the strongest guy in the room, but what I do care about is how progress. At the end of the day, I don't care how others do it outside of learning from how others didn't succeed and those who did.

WalterSear 14y ago

So is survival rate.

baqbeat 14y ago

You are not a special snowflake.

Detrus 14y ago

What if he broke more than his ankle? Obviously he was mentally and physically prepared for the course. But a course is predictable. Startup economics are more like combat, you can be the best soldier but an IED finds you.

MattBearman 14y ago

"Who cares what statistics show? Look at medicine. 80% of people with pancreatic cancer die within 5 years and 95% of appendectimies occur with zero complications. But we both know cases of pancreatic cancer patients that lived and appendicitis patients that unfortunately passed. Statistics mean nothing to the individual" - Dr. Cox (Scrubs) That quote has always stuck with me since I saw that episode, if you enter a situation knowing statistics of outcomes, it can affect how you perform.

sopooneo 14y ago
And maybe it should affect what (if not how) you perform. If you are probably going to die soon, maybe you would feel your life best spent in a different way than if you had decades left.

justin_vanw 14y ago

Although I like the sentiment, I disagree with the accuracy of this. Attrition is a group statistic. It doesn't apply to you if and only if you are exceptional in some way. Otherwise, it applies to you even more. In the specific example, his brother knew he was so much harder than his peers that he could do something incredible, like run for miles with a broken ankle. That mental toughness is how he was exceptional, and why he could be confident that he would be one of the people that made it.

kybernetikos 14y ago
You're probably giving him too much credit. I've seen interviews with people before they embark on these kinds of courses, and every single one of them said that they really wanted it, that it was the most important thing in their lives, and that the group statistic didn't apply to them. Some of them made it. Many of them didn't.

specialist 14y ago

My oncologist told me "Statistics are not people." I was about to undergo a bone marrow transplant. At the time, mortality within the first year was 90%. But I was much healthier initially than most other patients, because I had different medical history. Plus, I'm one tough SOB.

_delirium 14y ago
> But I was much healthier initially than most other patients, because I had different medical history. That just seems like you need better statistics. More sophisticated cancer-prognosis models typically do take initial health and medical histories into consideration.

cletus 14y ago

His brother is correct: statistics are a group property, or rather, they are they description of what happened with a particular group. When when you start making predictions you're talking probability not statistics. Statistics may inform probability but there can be issues with this (eg bad sample, insufficiently sized sample, failure to identify the underlying characteristic(s) such that samples are actually flawed and so on). The problem we have with a species is that we conflate the two. This comes up with highly political issues such as racial profiling. Imagine a situation in a southern border state where statistically more illegal aliens are Hispanic in both absolute and relative terms (meaning absolute number and relative percentage of their given populations). I say this not as a fact but as a non-judgemental scenario to make a point: law enforcement will likely, consciously or subsconsciously, make different suspicions based on such external characteristics. Is this fair to the individual? Of course not. It borders on an assumption of guilt. People of Middle Eastern descent who regularly fly I'm sure are cursed with this kind of suspicion when almost all of them have done absolutely nothing wrong. Anyway, as to special training, a relative of mine was married to a guy who went through SAS training (and passed). To those who think this is simply an issue of being sufficiently physically fit, you couldn't be more wrong. Now you have to be sufficiently fit for it to be possible to pass but after that it's a mental issue. They put these guys through mentally strenuous situations: sleep deprivation followed by interrogation, psychological profiling and the like. His brother has another point though: on an individual level you should never assume you're going to fail (or succeed for that matter) based on group statistics. Engineering is currently male-dominated but no woman should ever take that as evidence that they can't do it as an individual. Nor should any man assume a specific woman is less likely to be capable, etc.

gz5 14y ago
Nothing wrong with stats. They are what they are. Problem is when we then apply them to individuals. Then we are unfairly stereotyping the individual.
- gambiting 14y ago
  Car insurance is the prime example of unfairness and being punished for the actions of others, purely because of statistics.

jes5199 14y ago

We're doing motivational posters here now? Okay, we can do that. I recommend: the Tao of Programming http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html

mappu 14y ago
Related reading: The Codeless Code http://thecodelesscode.com/contents http://thecodelesscode.com/contents and ESR's Rootless Root http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/

nezaj 14y ago

I've always viewed statistics as information about aggregates. Anything can happen when N = 1

coldtea 14y ago

>He explained that statistics are created for groups, not for individuals. As an individual, it's not relevant to you. He went on to pass the course on a broken ankle. That makes me think about some startup founders. Their companies should have died, since most die. They should have given up, since most give up. But, somehow they willed their company to exist. Startup failure is a group statistic, it doesn't apply to you. Yes. Also known as "survivorship bias". Fact is, the brothers of all the other people who attended that course could have (and might had) said the exact same things to their brother. And most of them would be proven wrong. Group statistics are indeed about groups. It's our way to predict what the most likely outcome is for individual members of a group taken at random (or all other things being equal).

unoti 14y ago
>Fact is, the brothers of all the other people who attended that course could have (and might had) said the exact same things to their brother. And most of them would be proven wrong. Exactly. But those people don't talk about it a decade later. And that's selection bias.

abc_lisper 14y ago

This is a very acute observation. It applies to you, but not in a way you think. In fact, as an individual it probably means the opposite to you. Check out Douglas Hofstadter's GEB, for a really enlightening take on the topic. Check index for "Aunt Hillary"

michaelochurch 14y ago

This is why there are so many graduate students who can't find jobs. The prospects (acceptable for STEM, dismal for all else) are published, but people who are used to being the "1 in 10" fail to realize that, when it counts, they likely will be. The other 9, it turns out, are Ivy-educated smart people just like them. This might apply to VC-istan as well, although I think founders are less delusional about it than employees. Founders become EIR if the thing flops; employees think the business is "fully de-risked" (because they're told that to justify the 0.0x-percent equity slices) and that they're guaranteed to actually get the executive positions they were promised (ha!).

dools 14y ago

Classic survivorship bias scenario. Nevermind that all the other people in the course went in with equally inspiring slogans like Failure Is Not An Option tatooed across their buttocks. Some people fail, sometimes it's going to be you.

shokwave 14y ago

60% of people drop out[0] - before you knew this, you had an 60% chance of dropping out. Now you know the statistics, you can go about exerting effort to end up in the 40% that don't drop out. And that number - 60% to 40% - tells you a little bit about how much effort you're going to need to put in (not much). 90% of startups fail[1] - now you know that, you want to put yourself in the 10% that don't. 90% to 10% is a bigger gap to jump than 60 to 40, so it's going to be a lot harder. 0,1: not actual statistics

_delirium 14y ago

Between this article and the beekeeping one, HN isn't making a good showing on the day for scientific literacy.

phil 14y ago

This is more or less the same point that Stephen Jay Gould made in "The Median Isn't the Message:" http://people.umass.edu/biep540w/pdf/Stephen%20Jay%20Gould.pdf http://people.umass.edu/biep540w/pdf/Stephen%20Jay%20Gould.p...

edanm 14y ago

This is The Biggest Lie Entrepreneurs Tell Themselves (tm). You hear about the fact that only 10% of startups succeed, but you tell yourself "I'm better than them". pg himself reinforces this notion by saying things like "some founders have a 0% chance of success, others a 95% chance". pg is right, in a sense, but there is very little way for you to know whether you really are "better" than others. Very few people actually know what makes a startup successful, so there's that. On top of which, the people who are taken into account in the 10% statistic includes, among others, people who are building their 5th startup, the sons of highly influential politicians, personal friends of movie actors, etc. It includes people 30 years in a particular industry, with tons of insider knowledge, who decided to build a product in that industry. And it includes other 21 year olds with stars in their eyes, and nothing more. This isn't to say "don't build a startup". That's a different conversation, and depends a lot on your goals in life. But most people are in the startup game at least partially for the money. And for the purposes of calculating your potential earnings, unless you have a good reason why you're special, pay attention to the damn statistics!