Well, as an entrepreneur who is 10 years into a venture where most of my mentors thought my time was better spent on whatever was hot at the time (big data?) I can say that the perception of rationality is, like all things really, very subjective.
I see something and they don't. I think I'm right and they think they're right. But I see what I see, and I want to go for it. I might end up being wrong, but ultimately the journey to that particular place is one of the sincerest forms of self expression I've found, and I can't do that as easily if I too heavily depend on the eyes of others.
> ultimately the journey to that particular place is one of the sincerest forms of self expression I've found
This hits me hard, and thank you for expressing it.
I'm currently building a strange SaaS which brings me joy. I have no customers and a handful of people that have tried it out. I promote it here on HN every chance I get as I am shameless. It's called Adama ( https://www.adama-platform.com/ ) and it started as a way to build online board games.
Now, I have no idea how to market it, and I'm still developing it on variety of fronts. My focus is super diluted and chaotic, and I try to reign it only to discover more shiny things.
The true beauty of life is that there no right way to experience it. When viewed through the lens of an artist, much is subjective. Who is to say my idea is bad? Well, yeah, it is full of silliness, but that's the fun of it. Perhaps, I am wasting my life, but what then is the point of life?
I've come to believe that faith (which I sorely lack in a spiritual sense) is an important part of being human. I have faith that Adama is a great way for me to spend my time, and I'm currently trying to embrace the creative side of life.
Hey, it looks like you're trying to do something cool and different.
Awesome.
May I ask that you check out some of these dead links that may be giving people a bad impression of you?
On here, [0], the link to [1] is dead.
Same with this[2], here[3].
There may be others.
Edit:
Now that I've had a chance to read a bit about what you're doing, I've got to ask, you talk about boardgames, have you built a really straightforward boardgame prototype?
Like one I could find online and understand as a complete project, preferably as an example or starter template for a new user?
It could be for a trivial boardgame, but an actual boardgame, so settlers of catan for example?
My #1 problem at the moment is focusing, but I'll share the rough plan I am hoping to commit to for the coming weeks.
First, I am seeking a balance between low latency awesomeness and durability. I'm super not happy with the RDS implementation of how I persist game state, so I'm writing directly to disk with a periodic back-up and cold storage migration. I plan on writing about this more on the blog.
Now, this is the wrong priority from a business growth perspective, but it brings me joy.
Second, I am going to ship a new @web aspect where the Adama server can be a read-only web server for assets, json, and other fun things. This is needed for the IDE so assets (i.e. images) can be uploaded and attached to a document and then served publicly.
Third, for actually shipping board games, I'm de-prioritizing how I think about the WYSIWYG editor and focusing on just HTML via RxHTML. RxHTML is a new templating thing that I'm working on which I will post details about in the coming month, but the gist is that I can take a HTML template and then reactively bind it to a tree such that DOM updates are seemless and minimal. I intend to write a post on my own personal despair of dealing with modern JavaScript tooling.
Fourth, I am going to get the web portal online with just a text editor (currently evaluating code mirror) such that I can onboard people quickly with just their email and they can get to typing.
Fifth, with super minimal IDE, I can then introduce examples for a variety of games and applications which can be one-click instantiated.
Sixth, with one-click instantiation, I'll build a reflection base UI where people can send messages to a document and see the document with pretty printing. This will let people actually play a game in a sense as a developer.
Seven, I'll add rxhtml to the minimal IDE and then people could make reactive reports/UIs.
At this point, the vision can start to manifest of Adama as a roblox like website for board games. Now, it is worth noting or pondering "where is the customer in all of this?" and I'm currently the customer.
Sorry about that, I was being unclear, is this visible anywhere? Can I look at how you've done it?
In my experience authoring systems can fall into two broad categories:
1. You can think in them, so they're a useful space to prototype and if you're lucky the output is good enough to ship.
2. You can't easily think in them, but they have other positive qualities, they're performant for example, or target a wide array of platforms, so you sketch out ideas elsewhere and once you've worked out what you're trying to do, pull it in.
For some people, this is a non-problem, they've internalised a system well enough that they can do everything in one place.
If you can show what a prototype looks like, people can start looking at what you're producing and see where this fits in their toolbox of useful tools. Or they can point out gaps they perceive which you can look at and think about whether fixing those perceived gaps is within the vision of your tool or not. Maybe you're just not wanting to solve that use-case =)...
I would also suggest setting aside a day and showing what you currently have to some people who design games, either as amateurs or experts and see what feedback they give you. You may already have something they want to use, or you may find blockers that prevent them from using it. The mom test[0] may be useful here if you are collecting feedback to discern useful feedback from platitudes.
If you're not interested in doing this because you're building primarily for yourself, that's cool. I just think that this might be a useful exercise to work out if people would be more willing to engage with what you're building and what if anything might be holding them back from doing so =)...
This encodes all the rules for the backend. Basically, you will see a lot of tables and then control flow is by a state machine (#state_machine_label { /* code to run */ }) which then asks players via channels and await.
For legal reasons, I don't have the poorly done UI available. However, a neat design aspect is that I can have poorly written AI make decisions to play the game to test it.
My appreciation for the game has grown and depth of the rules has made me a beast.
I am in a strange boat since I'm trying to reconcile some of my insights with my passions. On one hand, I'm still in this process of describing the deep things my career has gave me ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31567549 ) and then having fun.
Leg two is I invest into tooling for me to make games.
Leg three is where I get to making games.
I'm currently looking at what is the medium between Leg two and three. I had a plan of building a game engine specifically for board games, and I even made a WYSIWYG editor. I recently started to break off the WYSIWYG editor as a standalone component (which you can see at http://ide.adama-platform.com/solo/ ; click 'single item (and new)' to put a box up which you can drag around). It's made in Rust and very exciting.
I still loving have the WYSIWYG editor as a part of the leg two strategy, but now I'm focusing on just making HTML work using this new rxhtml thing I'm working on. I'm optimistic that rxhtml will be a cheaper investment than dealing with all the npm crap. I'm writing another essay on this in regards to the current mess that is the JavaScript. The thesis is that, at the end of the day, the front-end challenge is to make HTML with good UX which is then responsive to input and data changes. With a reactive back-end, it's very easy to turn the browser back into a dumb terminal.
The first product to build within the minimal IDE is a "The Crew" clone since my friends and I have exhausted both the space and sea version.
One thing that I've realized is how hard this strategy is. First, it is slow AF. Second, the gradient of difficulty of pitches; the SaaS may as well be rocket science and the IDE is currently vaporware (but I believe it will be more accessible) and if I just made a single game then people could play it.
Once I get some of the investments into a tidy shape that make me warm and fuzzy on the inside, I'll definitely focus on the various communities. Thanks for your thoughts. Also, I ordered the mom test book.
Just a heads up, the battlestar code is pretty large, so you might want to code / use as an example a simpler game and then if anyone asks if it can be used for more substantive games, point to the updated and working version of the battlestar code.
That way people can see:
- You have a working thing
- There's a nice entry point tutorial
- They have some example code to look at of more complex example for when they have to build something larger, which is super useful besides reference documentation that people rarely provide.
In fact lots of small examples of things are probably going to be useful for you, as lots of people you're going to be engaging with are going to want to copy / paste stuff.
Lots of luck and please post a Show HN when you're next releasing something!
Indeed, a key point is the definition of rationality. You can argue that everyone acts rational: they make choices based on some internal logic that makes sense to them at the time of decision-making. Whether that is the flip of a coin (Twoface) or even what seems most fun and chaotic to them at that moment (Joker).
As far as I know, the fact that the logic used needn't be consistent was already known from psychology (people can provide a motivation for their choices relying on arguments that cannot possibly have actually factored in to their decision-making process).
So that also applies to entrepreneurs, apparently.
What? This seems to be biased towards success, you're only a rational entrepreneur if you end up being successful, and undertaking a venture without a positive expected value is irrational.
Something like telling a person that went to Las Vegas, did some gambling, had a good time, and lost money that they're irrational and enjoyed their vacation wrong.
Being an entrepreneur means watching your college friends be more successful than you in all the ways society expects us to be successful… likely for a very long time. Your parents will ask why you haven’t yet bought a house or why you have no retirement savings. Partners will question if you’ll ever be rich despite all the sacrifices.
If the process of entrepreneurism wasn’t so deeply satisfying to those of us who need to pursue it, nobody would ever do this. It doesn’t pencil mathematically.
Personally, in my thirties, I don't believe most people are rational in any consistent way. I think people that are perceived as rational tend to have good filtering and pushback mechanisms available to them, which also entails cultivating a friend-group that will provide those things without judgement and elevate you for the outcomes rather than the minutiae in between.
Pretty much everywhere IN THE PRESENT. When reading this statement, people will immediately come to mind with several canonical examples. What's funny is, those examples will almost invariably be targeted at the political opposition in a way that's almost diametrically opposed.
People, throughout history and the present, share some things in common: a strong affinity for contempt over other groups of people leading them to all manner of false belief and irrationality, and a certainty over their own correctness.
And in saying that... Here I am, expressing contempt over some poorly defined group of people with some hint of a suggestion that I am immune.
Funny, also in my thirties, I view almost-everyone as almost-always rational. The issue is instead in the analysis, which leaves out externalities or associated risks that the "specification of rationality" doesn't take into account. I've really never encountered a person who made an irrational decision, just one where I didn't fully understand the total calculus going on in their head.
almost out of my thirties, consider myself perpetually interested in chasing and studying rationality for the last 25 years or so, and consider most of the population certifiably insane and I'm an alien anthropologist ferrying between mental institutions.
It's not all bad though, on a lot of the empirical economic work I've done a lot of people appear what I'd call "weakly locally rational": a rationality effect seems to effect people in aggregate and determines the direction they move, and tends to be the biggest effect, though the aggregate doesn't move perfectly in accordance with what rationality would expect. It also depends very much on framing: they are "locally majority rational" in the context of their frame of reference, but not in terms of the macro-world: which makes sense, because we're finite creatures who can't actually take in all the information, have limited processing ability, and each have different access to information and historical experiences. so most of us do the best with the limited experience of what we got and how we understand the world.
You can't evaluate rationality in context of small number of samples of a fat tailed distribution with wide uncertainty bands. Besides, startups can be a kind of success even in failure based on opportunities that arise as a result.
I really dislike the concept of "rationality", or at the very least the way it gets used. I'm sure there are cases where everyone would agree that someone is behaving irrationally, but a lot of the time the label of "irrational" hides assumptions about value and tolerance for risk.
If an entrepreneur decides to prioritize certain factors over others, who's to say that's "irrational"? Is there an objectively correct way to run a business? I just find the whole idea so tiresome.
"Rational" doesn't mean correct, it only means "logical". For example, a neural net for discriminating between cats and dogs is, in general irrational - and yet it does so better than anything based on pure symbolic logic.
Humans are inherently irrational. We try to emulate rational behavior because a logic gives us certainity and lets us feel secure about the outcomes, but we are physically incapable of acting in a logical way for several reasons. We don't have enough data to make a fully justified decision in every situation, and if we did, it would still cost too much energy for our meat brains to actually compute those decisions.
So we approximate rational behavior, making statistical guesses. With enough data (experience), those guesses are good. Other times, your guesses are bad. Sometimes you have barely any data at all and are forced to choose between several options that all carry risks, so you go with your instinct. Is it rational? No, but it might have been the least bad choice, as in real-world, real-time situations, failure to make any choice whatsoever is itself a choice, and usually a bad one.
ps: I come from the AI field so I have no idea how any of this relates to economics.
> For example, a neural net [...] is, in general irrational
I'd argue the opposite.
Rationality is using a reasoned approach to decision making. In a neural net, that reasoning is embedded in the net. You may disagree with its conclusion or its internal steps, but it does follow a clear line of reasoning.
Rational actually seems to have several meanings. The two most common ones being "reasoned" (thought through logically), which seems to be the meaning you are thinking of and "correct" (making a good decision given the information available).
Many bad arguments are made due to conflating these meanings. So much so that I inclined to agree with the grandparent that talking about things being "rational" or not isn't very helpful.
There are objective standards for rationality, although we rarely have enough information to evaluate other people according to them. One example of an objective standard is whether or not all of the things you say have a fifty-fifty chance of happening, taken together, do indeed happen half the time. Another objective standard is whether or not you change your stated goals after the fact to make yourself feel more successful.
There are no end of objectively irrational behaviors, although we rarely have enough insight into other people's lives to identify them, or the clarity of mind, accuracy of memory and commitment to reflection to see them in ourselves.
I don't think it's as objective as you think. There are many circumstances where someone might make a completely rational decision while still being utterly wrong, because they didn't have the information available to them to make a better decision.
A serviceable but vacuous definition is "the procedure by which a decision is reached." Note that it is vacuous in that it imposes no constraints (not even repeatability/consistency), so anything that results in a decision fits the definition.
It is serviceable because if you want a better definition, you have to argue deviations/changes - eg consistency. You'll find it to be a choice, not a requirement. Eg: Batman's Joker behaves according to his rules. The end result may be unpredictable, but that doesn't mean the decision process doesn't follow his rules.
I didn't list "always succeeds" as a standard for rationality. I said, "chances they say are fifty-fifty turn out like they expected fifty percent of the time." If someone ascribes an 80% chance to each of 1000 possible events, and 800 of them happen, they are almost certainly rational.
Surprised entrepreneurs prize this so much. I feel like being irrational is a necessary ingredient to starting a successful business. The rational don’t bother trying or give up too quickly.
Descartes put it well: "Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess." [1]
Entrepreneurs are no exception.
However, I don't think entrepreneurs have a reputation of being infallibly rational. Scientists are much closer to having that kind of status, so I think studying their irrationality would be more interesting.
I don’t think the general public sees entrepreneurs as inherently rational, but many entrepreneurs, especially Silicon Valley types, certainly think that of themselves.
I don't think the study says anything particularly surprising. It's well known that people are often not as rational as they think they are, and this is especially true of entrepreneurs. They are often so confident in their own abilities and judgment that they fail to see when they are making mistakes. This can lead to them making poor decisions and ultimately to the failure of their businesses.
Agreed. The American cultural conception of entrepreneurship includes delusion, failure, unethical behavior (recent TV series come to mind).
Scientists and possibly medical professionals are still intuitively treated as rational and correct. Just think about how people shorting consensus medical or scientific opinion are treated in popular media / society compared to those criticizing entrepreneurs and capitalists.
I think you got your use of the words criticizing and shorting swapped around. :-) (not that I wouldn't love to be able to short studies that I think will be understood in the fullness of time to be flawed.)
The best anybody can aspire to is being rational some of the time; no human is rational all of the time. Anybody who thinks they're rational all the time is only demonstrating just how irrational they are, by believing something so irrational about themselves.
I've also changed the title in an attempt to avoid the shallow-generic style of comment which this thread has unfortunately filled up with. (Submitted title was "Study shows entrepreneurs who see themselves as rational, aren’t always rational".) The paper's own title isn't likely to lead to any better discussion, since we all know the answer already, or assume we do.
I mean, the whole point of entrepreneurship is to focus on the upside and have protection from the personal risk of ruin, so it's not surprising that it would distort their thinking generally.
> entrepreneurs create a decision rule comprising a limited set of factors (e.g., the potential for growth) and selectively focus on these factors while paying less attention to and/or ignoring others (e.g., risk of going into default, period of underperformance).
It's quite interesting that economy and economic progress doesn't require rationality, i.e intelligence. Just like in evolution, randomness, copying of successful strategies and survival of the fittest are needed for economic progress. Whatever ends up happening is always post-rational, because everything that is rational survives.
Paradoxically, you can't be a human and be rational and consider yourself to be rational. You need to work within the limits of the human mind and body. Depending on the circumstances of your body your bias, impulses, and ability to rationalize things changes completely.
A rational interpretation of the question "are you rational?" is if you are rational relative to other humans, not that you are a theoretically perfect rational being. Same thing as how "are you tall?" means relative to humans, if you answer "I'm not tall, a skyscraper is tall! No human is tall!" then you didn't understand the question.
> A rational interpretation of the question "are you rational?" is if you are rational relative to other humans, not that you are a theoretically perfect rational being.
Experience with people who tout their own rationality has shown me that such people rarely recognize the limits of their rationality. More often than not, they think themselves some sort of rational demigod gracing the irrational masses with their very presence.
Yes, which is why you shouldn't trust what people say about themselves, and why sometimes you shouldn't say things that are true about yourself since people will take it the wrong way. You find many smart people not calling themselves smart, because many people think that smart people shouldn't call themselves smart, so the smart thing to do is to say that you just were lucky or worked hard etc, because that is what people want to hear.
Meta communication like that makes it really hard to gather much information from what people say though, but there is still some informational value in it. If you find some statistical correlation between people saying they have attribute X and what they do otherwise, then that means something. For example, people who are good at X tend to say that they are good at X. Not everyone who is good at X will say it, and some who are bad at X will say they are good anyway, but it still adds some bits of information you can use.
I apologize if this counts as a shameless plug, but entrepreneurs who are self-destructive has been my main theme for several years now. I wrote a fairly popular book about one particular case, which I think illustrates the overall problem. "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps" is a detailed look at how a particular entrepreneur, with a great idea, managed to sabotage themselves:
Or also, from George Bernard Shaw, "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Rational actor theory is one of those 'fundamentals of modern neoclassical economics' things that makes the whole discipline look patently ridiculous. Here's a good discussion of the issue, and some remedies:
> "Historians can remedy this. They can enrich economic analyses by tracing the rise and fall of particular emotions and emotional norms, for many feelings have prompted capitalist behavior and should be studied historically. We need a social history of selfishness—the feeling presumed to be central to market behavior. The word selfish entered the English language only in the 1640; self-interest joined it in 1649. That new words were created suggests that new behaviors—as well as concerns about them—developed as markets expanded."
No. Family values are much more universally accepted than Christianity. Also, Christianity isn't a taboo, so no one needs to "dog whistle" anything about it.
> Also, Christianity isn't a taboo, so no one needs to "dog whistle" anything about it.
As a direct justification for US laws, religion is taboo. Family values are dog whistled all the time in that context, and in other contexts where someone wants to pretend that their particular interpretation is just common sense regardless of big religious factors.
"Family Values" is most certainly a dog whistle for Christianity, particularly when Christians are attempting to smuggle religiously motivated ideas into public policy and especially during the George W Bush era. Variations on this phrase are incorporated into the names of many, many evangelical political organizations and publications.
It is true that almost all Christians are proponents of family values. But it's in no way exclusive to them. For example, a Muslim would probably support very similar ideas.
No, that's wrong. The phrase "family values" is very strongly tied to Evangelical Conservative politics, and particularly to the neocons who waged a literal war on Muslims soon after coming to power. You've got a bible verse as your bio so I think I can hazard a guess as to your position.
The Google Ngram graph on this phrase is interesting:
> particularly to the neocons who waged a literal war on Muslims soon after coming to power.
I don't have a lot of sympathy with neocons, but I'm pretty sure their attacks on Muslims weren't because they thought Muslims were destroying family values or something.
> You've got a bible verse as your bio so I think I can hazard a guess as to your position.
:-) Yes, but I'm not a Christian.
The Google Ngram is certainly interesting. But my counter argument is that before the 60s, family values were so ingrained in society that they weren't subject to much debate.
I see something and they don't. I think I'm right and they think they're right. But I see what I see, and I want to go for it. I might end up being wrong, but ultimately the journey to that particular place is one of the sincerest forms of self expression I've found, and I can't do that as easily if I too heavily depend on the eyes of others.