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It's a fallacy (though a very commonly held one) that if x% of people succeed at some task, the chances you will succeed are x%. That's only true for tasks whe

by pg 13y ago

It's a fallacy (though a very commonly held one) that if x% of people succeed at some task, the chances you will succeed are x%. That's only true for tasks where aptitude is not a factor.

wslh 13y ago
The competition factor is also very important: if the world population (and entrepreneurs) growth by 400% it is possible that the "same" few companies will reach the billion (adjusted by inflation)
ScotterC 13y ago
However, it's quite easy for us to believe our aptitude will make us the exception. Adding a numerical grain of salt is helpful for the evaluation.
jpwagner 13y ago
sort of. if i have 10 coins, 9 of which have 44.4% chance of heads and 1 has 100% chance, choosing a coin at random and flipping it has 50% chance of heads overall. sure, there is one outstanding coin. the "fallacy" is true when you look at the whole rather than the individual factors, which include aptitude in some cases so i guess you're correct on the last point.
TheBiv 13y ago
Color me dense, but I don't understand this point. The author clearly had aptitude to be successful, but if we were to randomly put a percentage on his aptitude that weighted him above the average, it would still probably be less than 0.00%
- gdubs 13y ago
  It means that statistics are useful until you try to apply them to an individual. While a statistic may hold true for an entire population, the converse does not logically follow for an individual. I think the fallacy may be "over generalization".
  - TheBiv 13y ago
    Thank you very much for the breakdown! The connection to the article would be that we shouldn't overgeneralize a percentage of success for an individual?
    - gdubs 13y ago
      Right. An analogy would be saying "people who eat over 6000 calories a day are, as a rule, overweight". It's a logical fallacy to turn around and say "Michael eats over 6000 calories a day, therefore he is overweight". It's statistically very likely, but in this case Michael is a olympic swimmer with 10 gold medals. It's been a long time since my logic class in college, but the rule of 'statistics are great until you try to apply them to an individual' has always stuck in my mind. Probably because statistics are often one step removed from 'stereotypes'.
    - nostrademons 13y ago
      One easy counter-example is "50% [well, technically a bit less, but ignore that for now] of humans are capable of getting pregnant. You are human. Therefore, there is a 50% chance that you are capable of getting pregnant." This ignores the fact that there is another very obvious discriminant - namely, sex - between people who are capable of getting pregnant and people who are not. If you are male, your chance is 0%, if you are female your chance is [close to] 100%, and it is fairly easy to tell without actually trying to get pregnant which one you are. This also comes up all the time in data-science and A/B testing of products. Frequently you'll end up with results like "This change decreased revenue by 3%." Sounds bad, right? Except then you drill into your results and find out that there was a bug in the implementation of the change in IE6, which decreased revenue by 100% on that one browser which happens to be 5% of traffic, and find that your change actually increased revenue by a percent or two, but that one slice cost you all the benefit and more. You fix the bug and happily start making more money. Always slice your population. Many times blanket probabilities tell you nothing unless you know what's causing them.
  - the_watcher 13y ago
    Correct. The value of statistics like these come in making generalizations, which require massive data sets to be applicable (hence generalization rather than specialization). It's akin to in baseball, an average of x% of pitches are hit for home runs. This will likely be fairly accurate over the course of the season across all players, but would not be a useful stat to look at in predicting what a pitcher would do at the plate (or an MVP level hitter for that matter).
lgieron 13y ago
Without knowing beforehand how your own aptitude fares compared to others, that x% is the best estimator though.
ccarpenterg 13y ago
I agree and I think a bayesian approach is more suitable. For instance, the probability of getting into YC: P(getting into YC | sold a startup, graduated from Stanford/MIT, worked on/built something awesome, etc) Or the chance of building a $1B company: P($1B company | you're in SV, $100MM in funding, etc)
larrys 13y ago
Agree and same as a statistic of chance of "getting hit by lighting" or any activities that doesn't take into account where someone is located or even whether an indoor or outdoor location. For example are there any statistics on the chance of getting hit by lighting while playing golf outdoors with a storm within 50 miles? Vs. in general? And what if you calculated the chance of starting a billion dollar company in Bentonville Ark (Walmart) which has a population of 38k (which no doubt was way less when Sam Walton decided to locate there). Not bad "odds".
elwell 13y ago
Thank you; was hoping I wouldn't have to be the one to say that.
lelandbatey 13y ago
While true, so, so much of your life is luck (or more accurately, good fortune through chance, only affected by positioning). While your chances may not exactly be 0.00006% that you'll succeed, I doubt that you can improve them to more than about 0.0001%. Truly, we don't get where we get because of our capacity or our ability (in most cases). We get lucky, a lot, and we can't really change that.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  We get lucky, a lot, and we can't really change that. That depends on how, exactly, you define "luck". I posit that a lot of what people call "luck" can be manufactured, or at least cultivated through directed action. Remember the article that showed up here a while back about "How to date a supermodel"? The premise was that if you want to date a supermodel, you have to move to a city where there are lots of supermodels, and hang out at the places where supermodels shop, work out, dine, etc., and you have to start conversations with supermodels, blah, blah.. So if one of you buddies shows up next year dating a supermodel, everybody is probably going to go "Dude, that's amazing, you are SO lucky!" And this will completely ignore the fact that he did a lot of things to create the opportunity. It's SUCH a cliche, but I guess cliches exist for a reason, so I'll just come back to: Luck = Preparation + Opportunity
  - lelandbatey 13y ago
    That is true, to some extent. That's why I elaborated a bit and said that it's "...good fortune through chance, only affected by positioning."
  - timr 13y ago
    "The premise was that if you want to date a supermodel, you have to move to a city where there are lots of supermodels, and hang out at the places where supermodels shop, work out, dine, etc., and you have to start conversations with supermodels, blah, blah.." Likewise, if you don't want to date anyone at all, you move to silicon valley and work on a startup! (Kidding! sort of...)
    - 13y ago
mbateman 13y ago
Yes, this is like telling a newlywed that s/he has a 50% chance to eventually get divorced. True for the population, irrelevant for the individual. When one has a more direct knowledge of the relevant factors, it's crazy to make a decision based solely on into what demographics one falls.
- colmvp 13y ago
  > Yes, this is like telling a newlywed that s/he has a 50% chance to eventually get divorced. FWIW, I really dislike it when people perpetuate the myth that 50% of marriages end in divorce. We actually have no idea what the true percentage is, and I think they myth got started because people compare the annual marriage rate with the annual divorce rage.
  - mbateman 13y ago
    Yes, divorce demography is complicated! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_demography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_demography But I was just being illustrative; my point applies even if it's 20% or 80%.
    - zentropia 13y ago
      If divorces happens 50% of the times and 100% of the people marries believing they are not going to divorces that means 50% are wrong
      - mbateman 13y ago
        Also true! There's a small literature in philosophy that worries about paradoxes in this area. But regardless of how that turns out, it seems safe to say that you shouldn't avoid getting married because of divorce demography, and you further shouldn't think of your marriage's chance of success in purely demographic terms. You instead need to pay attention to features on the ground like how you handle disagreements, your sex life, etc.
      - theorique 13y ago
singlow 13y ago
Does 0.00006% factor in how many companies are started with goals that have no billion dollar potential? While any company may have an outlying chance of accidentally coming up with a billion dollar idea, most have business plans that would never scale to a billion dollar valuation no matter how well executed or lucky they are. I'm curious whether this statistic is only based on the success of those companies that are _trying_ to get there.
avalaunch 13y ago
You're right but you're speaking to the title of the article only which is unfortunate because the article is really good but the title itself isn't representative of it. Normally this wouldn't be an issue but with you being you it's the number one comment and now the entire conversation on hacker news is revolving around the title. The article makes some really great points about solving meaningful problems vs starting a startup for it's own sake. It further makes great points about eliminating luck in the process and offers actionable advice on how to do that. I think that would be the subject of a much better conversation.
baddox 13y ago
No, it's true if you don't have more specific data regarding other factors like aptitude. It's no different than saying "if you live in the United States you have a life expectancy of 79 years." Obviously, with more information (are you obese? are you wealthy? do you have certain genetic predispositions to disease? etc.) each person can get a more specific life expectancy, but that doesn't change the life expectancy of the country.
photorized 13y ago
Exactly. Unlike lightning, success doesn't just happen to you. So, all these "stats" are meaningless.
vannevar 13y ago
Your observation is only true if aptitude is an independently measurable quality. If the only way to measure aptitude is to say that those same x% of people must have it because they succeeded, then no, it is not a fallacy.
- pg 13y ago
  As someone in the business of measuring aptitude, I can tell you with some confidence that it is. (If it weren't, we could save ourselves weeks of effort each batch reading applications and doing interviews, and instead just choose randomly among the applicants.)
  - vannevar 13y ago
    I certainly understand and respect your belief. But as far as I know, there is no objective proof that your filtering process is actually any better than choosing randomly. Consider a gardener who believes they can predict which seeds will bloom best. They select a few seed from a package, water and nurture them for weeks, then point triumphantly to the blooms and say, "See! They've done so much better than the ones I left in the package."

by pg 13y ago

It's a fallacy (though a very commonly held one) that if x% of people succeed at some task, the chances you will succeed are x%. That's only true for tasks where aptitude is not a factor.

wslh 13y ago

The competition factor is also very important: if the world population (and entrepreneurs) growth by 400% it is possible that the "same" few companies will reach the billion (adjusted by inflation)

ScotterC 13y ago

However, it's quite easy for us to believe our aptitude will make us the exception. Adding a numerical grain of salt is helpful for the evaluation.

jpwagner 13y ago

sort of. if i have 10 coins, 9 of which have 44.4% chance of heads and 1 has 100% chance, choosing a coin at random and flipping it has 50% chance of heads overall. sure, there is one outstanding coin. the "fallacy" is true when you look at the whole rather than the individual factors, which include aptitude in some cases so i guess you're correct on the last point.

TheBiv 13y ago

Color me dense, but I don't understand this point. The author clearly had aptitude to be successful, but if we were to randomly put a percentage on his aptitude that weighted him above the average, it would still probably be less than 0.00%

gdubs 13y ago
It means that statistics are useful until you try to apply them to an individual. While a statistic may hold true for an entire population, the converse does not logically follow for an individual. I think the fallacy may be "over generalization".
- TheBiv 13y ago
  Thank you very much for the breakdown! The connection to the article would be that we shouldn't overgeneralize a percentage of success for an individual?
  - gdubs 13y ago
    Right. An analogy would be saying "people who eat over 6000 calories a day are, as a rule, overweight". It's a logical fallacy to turn around and say "Michael eats over 6000 calories a day, therefore he is overweight". It's statistically very likely, but in this case Michael is a olympic swimmer with 10 gold medals. It's been a long time since my logic class in college, but the rule of 'statistics are great until you try to apply them to an individual' has always stuck in my mind. Probably because statistics are often one step removed from 'stereotypes'.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    One easy counter-example is "50% [well, technically a bit less, but ignore that for now] of humans are capable of getting pregnant. You are human. Therefore, there is a 50% chance that you are capable of getting pregnant." This ignores the fact that there is another very obvious discriminant - namely, sex - between people who are capable of getting pregnant and people who are not. If you are male, your chance is 0%, if you are female your chance is [close to] 100%, and it is fairly easy to tell without actually trying to get pregnant which one you are. This also comes up all the time in data-science and A/B testing of products. Frequently you'll end up with results like "This change decreased revenue by 3%." Sounds bad, right? Except then you drill into your results and find out that there was a bug in the implementation of the change in IE6, which decreased revenue by 100% on that one browser which happens to be 5% of traffic, and find that your change actually increased revenue by a percent or two, but that one slice cost you all the benefit and more. You fix the bug and happily start making more money. Always slice your population. Many times blanket probabilities tell you nothing unless you know what's causing them.
- the_watcher 13y ago
  Correct. The value of statistics like these come in making generalizations, which require massive data sets to be applicable (hence generalization rather than specialization). It's akin to in baseball, an average of x% of pitches are hit for home runs. This will likely be fairly accurate over the course of the season across all players, but would not be a useful stat to look at in predicting what a pitcher would do at the plate (or an MVP level hitter for that matter).

lgieron 13y ago

Without knowing beforehand how your own aptitude fares compared to others, that x% is the best estimator though.

ccarpenterg 13y ago

I agree and I think a bayesian approach is more suitable. For instance, the probability of getting into YC: P(getting into YC | sold a startup, graduated from Stanford/MIT, worked on/built something awesome, etc) Or the chance of building a $1B company: P($1B company | you're in SV, $100MM in funding, etc)

larrys 13y ago

Agree and same as a statistic of chance of "getting hit by lighting" or any activities that doesn't take into account where someone is located or even whether an indoor or outdoor location. For example are there any statistics on the chance of getting hit by lighting while playing golf outdoors with a storm within 50 miles? Vs. in general? And what if you calculated the chance of starting a billion dollar company in Bentonville Ark (Walmart) which has a population of 38k (which no doubt was way less when Sam Walton decided to locate there). Not bad "odds".

elwell 13y ago

Thank you; was hoping I wouldn't have to be the one to say that.

lelandbatey 13y ago

While true, so, so much of your life is luck (or more accurately, good fortune through chance, only affected by positioning). While your chances may not exactly be 0.00006% that you'll succeed, I doubt that you can improve them to more than about 0.0001%. Truly, we don't get where we get because of our capacity or our ability (in most cases). We get lucky, a lot, and we can't really change that.

mindcrime 13y ago
We get lucky, a lot, and we can't really change that. That depends on how, exactly, you define "luck". I posit that a lot of what people call "luck" can be manufactured, or at least cultivated through directed action. Remember the article that showed up here a while back about "How to date a supermodel"? The premise was that if you want to date a supermodel, you have to move to a city where there are lots of supermodels, and hang out at the places where supermodels shop, work out, dine, etc., and you have to start conversations with supermodels, blah, blah.. So if one of you buddies shows up next year dating a supermodel, everybody is probably going to go "Dude, that's amazing, you are SO lucky!" And this will completely ignore the fact that he did a lot of things to create the opportunity. It's SUCH a cliche, but I guess cliches exist for a reason, so I'll just come back to: Luck = Preparation + Opportunity
- lelandbatey 13y ago
  That is true, to some extent. That's why I elaborated a bit and said that it's "...good fortune through chance, only affected by positioning."
- timr 13y ago
  "The premise was that if you want to date a supermodel, you have to move to a city where there are lots of supermodels, and hang out at the places where supermodels shop, work out, dine, etc., and you have to start conversations with supermodels, blah, blah.." Likewise, if you don't want to date anyone at all, you move to silicon valley and work on a startup! (Kidding! sort of...)
  - 13y ago

mbateman 13y ago

Yes, this is like telling a newlywed that s/he has a 50% chance to eventually get divorced. True for the population, irrelevant for the individual. When one has a more direct knowledge of the relevant factors, it's crazy to make a decision based solely on into what demographics one falls.

colmvp 13y ago
> Yes, this is like telling a newlywed that s/he has a 50% chance to eventually get divorced. FWIW, I really dislike it when people perpetuate the myth that 50% of marriages end in divorce. We actually have no idea what the true percentage is, and I think they myth got started because people compare the annual marriage rate with the annual divorce rage.
- mbateman 13y ago
  Yes, divorce demography is complicated! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_demography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_demography But I was just being illustrative; my point applies even if it's 20% or 80%.
  - zentropia 13y ago
    If divorces happens 50% of the times and 100% of the people marries believing they are not going to divorces that means 50% are wrong
    - mbateman 13y ago
      Also true! There's a small literature in philosophy that worries about paradoxes in this area. But regardless of how that turns out, it seems safe to say that you shouldn't avoid getting married because of divorce demography, and you further shouldn't think of your marriage's chance of success in purely demographic terms. You instead need to pay attention to features on the ground like how you handle disagreements, your sex life, etc.
    - theorique 13y ago

singlow 13y ago

Does 0.00006% factor in how many companies are started with goals that have no billion dollar potential? While any company may have an outlying chance of accidentally coming up with a billion dollar idea, most have business plans that would never scale to a billion dollar valuation no matter how well executed or lucky they are. I'm curious whether this statistic is only based on the success of those companies that are _trying_ to get there.

avalaunch 13y ago

You're right but you're speaking to the title of the article only which is unfortunate because the article is really good but the title itself isn't representative of it. Normally this wouldn't be an issue but with you being you it's the number one comment and now the entire conversation on hacker news is revolving around the title. The article makes some really great points about solving meaningful problems vs starting a startup for it's own sake. It further makes great points about eliminating luck in the process and offers actionable advice on how to do that. I think that would be the subject of a much better conversation.

baddox 13y ago

No, it's true if you don't have more specific data regarding other factors like aptitude. It's no different than saying "if you live in the United States you have a life expectancy of 79 years." Obviously, with more information (are you obese? are you wealthy? do you have certain genetic predispositions to disease? etc.) each person can get a more specific life expectancy, but that doesn't change the life expectancy of the country.

photorized 13y ago

Exactly. Unlike lightning, success doesn't just happen to you. So, all these "stats" are meaningless.

vannevar 13y ago

Your observation is only true if aptitude is an independently measurable quality. If the only way to measure aptitude is to say that those same x% of people must have it because they succeeded, then no, it is not a fallacy.

pg 13y ago
As someone in the business of measuring aptitude, I can tell you with some confidence that it is. (If it weren't, we could save ourselves weeks of effort each batch reading applications and doing interviews, and instead just choose randomly among the applicants.)
- vannevar 13y ago
  I certainly understand and respect your belief. But as far as I know, there is no objective proof that your filtering process is actually any better than choosing randomly. Consider a gardener who believes they can predict which seeds will bloom best. They select a few seed from a package, water and nurture them for weeks, then point triumphantly to the blooms and say, "See! They've done so much better than the ones I left in the package."