Is it all just chance?

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita – The Predictionieer’s Game:

Conversely, the notion that the developments that make up history are primarily a series of chance events seems equally odd to me. Why fight over ideas, select governments, build armies, fund research, promote literacy, create art, or write histories if all we are doing is twiddling our thumbs while chance developments sund us bouncing around like the physicist’s particles? How can anyone deny strategic behavior and its consequences when we are surrounded by it in almost everything we do?

To be sure, the world as we know it could have swung one way or the other. That’s why neither the past nor the future follows an inevitable path. There are always chance elemnts behind which ways things, but those cahnce events rarely decide the future.

Changing one’s self

Bo Parfet – Die Trying:

The vast majority of people have goals. They want to work out; they’d like to eat healthier food; they have their eye on a new job; they want to start their own company; they’re trying to become better parents. They want to change and they want to improve. Yet, while they talk about this, within themselves they usually remain the same, year after year. So how do you change? One way is to make minor adjustments over the course of a lifetime. Another is the transition that occurs in response to the death or near death of a loved one. And then there are those individuals such as myself who want to change dramatically and relatively quickly. Born with limited ability, we achieve this by saying that we’re sick and tired of living a regular existence, and we stop outside the ordinary by knowingly putting ourselves in life-threatening situations, facing adversity like we’ve never done before.

Scalable Startups

Steve Blank – Defining the Scalable Startup:

A “scalable startup” takes an innovative idea and searches for a scalable and repeatable business model that will turn it into a high growth, profitable company. Not just big but huge. It does that by entering a large market and taking share away from incumbents or by creating a new market and growing it rapidly.

Connectivity Matters

Marc Andreessen:
I grew up in rural Wisconsin, okay? No access to information relating to rest of the world except for whatever was in the public library, right, for which I could probably thank Andrew Carnegie or somebody like that way back when.

Charlie Rose:
Right.

Marc Andreessen:
But like no connection to current events, no connection to the idea that you can start your own business. No connection to new technology. No connection to anything. I mean, you know. So you take every kid living in a rural community in the US, you take every kid living in the inner city, you take every kid growing up in the developing world, and you give them access to the world, they will be so much better educated. They’ll be so much more aware.

Is culture always key?

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita – The Predictionieer’s Game:

Diplomats are convinced that a country’s name is an important variable that helps explain behavior. That’s why the State Department continues to be organized around country desks, just as the intelligence community is organized around geographic regions. Leaders of multinational corporations take much the same view. When they have a problem in Kazakhstan, they call their guys in Kazakhstan to find out what to do. That seems eminently reasonable. Yet it is terribly inadequate for solving most problems.

Certainly knowing about places and how different they might be is important, but not as important as knowing about people and how similar they are, wherever they are. I have not arrived at this view lightly nor, I hope, in ignorance. After all, the training that led to my Ph.D. molded me into a South Asia specialist. I even studied Urdu for five years and did field research in India, so I certainly respect and value area expertise. But area studies alone are a poor substitute for the marriage of knowledge about places and the deep understanding of applied game theorists about how people decide. Surely we would think it ridiculous if chemists believed that oxygen and hydrogen combine differently in China than they do in the United States, but for some reason we think it entirely sensible to believe that people make choices based on different principles in Timbuktu than in Tipperary.