
Exceptionalism - kevin
http://www.aaronkharris.com/exceptionalism
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seren
This is only tangentially related, but the same pattern applies to government
looking at how various policies are implemented in other country. Most often
it is used as a shining example of success, but I seriously doubt you can
import a policy without understanding first why it works in the first place,
which is often much harder to grasp.

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marcus_holmes
this seems to go hand-in-hand with the survivor bias thing. Don't study just
the successful startups, because you don't know if what they did contributed
to their success without also studying the unsuccessful startups that did the
same thing.

I call this the "thousand monkeys problem". If a thousand startup monkeys do a
thousand random things, then some proportion of them will be successful
because statistics. The reasons for their success will be random (i.e. like
the article says, some combination of luck, timing, personality, etc). Just
studying the successful monkeys will give no insight as to what made them
succeed, the entire population needs to be studied.

In other words, "25 things that successful startup founders did" is useless
without the " and that unsuccessful founders didn't do" bit.

