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know of any work applying ergodicity to innovation? As in, if 1 in a 100 wild ideas (in some broad sense) will pay off in 1 year, then 1 wild idea might pay off for sure if the bunnytrail is pursued for 100 years...
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(I believe this to be true btw... almost any wild idea, if pursued for long enough in a sufficiently open-ended way, will eventually get somewhere new and interesting)
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I think of hedgehogs over long time horizons as people with a pet theory for which they seek confirmation/disconfirmation over time, with a scientific mindset of quality dependent on talent ranging from crackpot to effective. INTJs trying to build a theory of everything for eg
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So I think ergodicity applies more to foxes than hedgehogs here, because hedgehogs have a more totalizing/systematizing filter that creates a kind of tunnel vision. Taleb has elements of both hedgehog and fox turtleness.
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More speculatively, weasels and cacti, which are degenerate foxes and hedgehogs in my model, can be seen as the result of *failure* of each strategy to pay off. Foxes whose small bets never pay off turn into weasels. Hedgehogs whose totalizing theories don't work turn into cacti.
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