Predicting the future is a random access process, but inventing the future is a serial process. Most of us (me included) engage with the future the wrong way around: predicting it serially as a narrative, inventing it random-access via spaghetti on the wall pseudo-experiments.
Conversation
Replying to
Invention: Don’t confuse experimentation with coin-tossing/dice-rolling iid trials.
The power of an experiment is proportional to the length of the serial chain of linked hypotheses it is part of. A 2-link hypothesis chain is 4x more powerful than 2 parallel experiments.
1
3
15
If you experimentally test a first stage and second stage rocket design, you have a launcher to orbit. If you test 2 first stage designs, you have 2 first stage designs. 2 half rockets.
Serialized parlayed bets = create future. Parallel bets = futz around feeling futuristic.
1
2
15
Somehow, agility and iteration have gotten conflated with *small* experiments or worse, *partial* experiments. The risk/return profile of an experiment is a product of the steps in longest chain. You can’t lower risk or increase returns by increasing number of first-steps.
1
1
13
That approach is for people investing in the future rather than trying to invent it. Don’t invent like an investor or invest like an inventor unless you have O(n^2) resources, n=number of hypothesis *chains*
1
9
I have no idea why I’m tweeting this shit. Yet another of my massively parallel idea explorations driven by misguided intuition that 100 tweets will somehow equal 1 blog post 😂
9
