009 - Luck of the Draw

A common pattern of Cognitive #Bias I used to apply when thinking of our Startup’s work was the familiar “If Only We Had…” fallacy of reasoning. You too may have thought to yourself, if only we had…:

  • A sleeker demo and UI… - The attention of influencers and news… - That one big investor… - Our first services deployed… - …and so on.

We simplify and focus on specific aspects to try and get one thing done at a time, telling ourselves a story about how our hard work will pay off. However, as Daniel Kahneman and others in research have frequently pointed out, that reasoning doesn’t describe the world we live in.

Reality is unequal, unfair, and largely random. Storytelling cognitive biases like anchoring, framing, just-world hypothesis, and survivorship bias paint a much more coherent picture, but that picture is just an appealing and easily remembered fairy tale.

In life in general, but particularly in low-validity environments like #VC #investing and #Startups, a combination of “luck”, persistence, and gradual improvement makes the difference. Even doing everything right doesn’t guarantee success, it only improves your odds.

What drives this point home is looking back and seeing the many previous “If only we had” lines of thinking where the goal was accomplished. When such a milestone is accomplished, however remarkable, you only get another roll of the dice, not a guarantee. In the case of our work, I look back and see:

  • Demonstrating #superintelligence and adversarial robustness in software (2019)

  • Demonstrating ethical robustness and a dozen other milestones in software (2020)

  • Publishing a method of engineering the next systems to operate in real-time (2021)

  • Demonstrating the first case study, giving policy advice to a country, and publishing the solution to the #Alignment Problem (2022)

  • Demonstrating the first software system to exceed average human performance at cognitive bias detection (2023)

None of these events resulted in our work suddenly receiving public or investor interest, because humans aren’t rational, as demonstrated by Antonio Damasio. All of our achievements still swim in the chaotic soup that is our globalized society. It goes against many moral systems of belief to recognize how no mechanisms yet exist to reward merit, making this chaotic factor of “luck” all the more difficult to accept.

Nevertheless, persistence and gradual improvement in the absence of “luck” have already led us to achieve what major tech companies and other startups have failed to even approach with orders of magnitude more resources available to them. With or without “luck”, we can continue to accomplish far more.