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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Actually it could go either fox or hedgehog or what calls turtles. The key is to stay in a compounding interest epistemic bunnytrail for long enough, not the cognitive style.
Fox = make 100 pots
Hedgehog = make the best pot
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I think is on to something here. The key to being an effective hedgehog (vs cactus) is the open-ended way that the hedgehog pursues the singular wild idea. The key to being an effective fox is not volume of ideas, but skillful curation of ideas.
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And this assumes ergodicity. Only ergodic challenges can be met by either a fox or a hedgehog. If non-ergotic, it is probably better suited to one or the other.
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Tagging the right Joe Edelman this time and untagging the wrong one. I think Joe's turtle archetype refactors the right bits of fox and hedgehog into one actually notion.so/Turtleocracy-4 so you could say we're talking 2 flavors of turtle
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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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Foxes over a long horizon otoh are more like training a pattern recognition for long-term patterns, placing small bets along the way, and doubling down on the ones that pay off.
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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.
Dropping this link in here for anyone following this thread who doesn't know what I'm talking about
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