Beating the narrative fallacy

…is really hard. You can fully comprehend the fallacy, its origins in cognitive psychology, its neuroscientific basis, even its status as an emergent behavior of billions of interacting neurons, neurotransmitter concentration gradients, and nonlinear electrical signals (and hell, even its status as an emergent behavior of putting some amino acids in a primordial stew and waiting 4 billion years). But you still can’t beat it.

I guess the more general lesson here is that self-awareness is over-rated. When people (who I don’t want to talk to for a long period of time) ask me what I do, I usually say “imagine a stereotypical computer science startup person”. This usually ends the conversation, but there’s some problems with it. a) it’s not really true and b) it kinda is true though. A desire to avoid being a wantrepreneur (also called a “startup tard” by the PI types) doesn’t keep you from being one. I don’t want to be trying, I want to be doing. Great sentiment but not worth anything. It’s like I’m fulfilling the one stereotype I actively try to avoid. And I’m clearly resigned to this in some corner of my head considered that the best heuristic I can give people for what I do is this stereotype.

So back to the narrative fallacy. The reasons made up for why certain people are successful are probably 100% bullshit. Actually I’m gonna revise that down to 99.99% because there is one line of reasoning I think trumps all others. And (not sure if this is fruit of the poisonous tree or something) Elon Musk claims it is one of his great differentiating strengths: “first principles thinking”. He warns against thinking by analogy and instead insists that his ability to “see through the fog of war” comes from his physics background and associated deductive skills. When he looked at the problem of how to build a rocket, he made a detailed spreadsheet that factored in various material and machining costs or individual components. He didn’t take the cost of the Space Shuttle, give himself an I’m-an-Internet-billionaire markdown, and draw that number in the sand.

So the epic conclusion is that the people who are as successful as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk found their own way, and that’s all we really can say with certainty. It helps to roll your eyes whenever you hear a reason, however plausible-sounding, for any outcome in any human system. There’s a great bi-directional coupling between an emotion and it’s physical manifestation, might as well take advantage of it.

Every sufficiently complicated system can be gamed (see blackjack, the Massachusetts lottery, and frequent flyer miles). And life is sufficiently complicated. And that’s it. That’s how one little trick made Elon Musk a billion dollars. cue eye roll Wow I’m so self-aware.