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The thing is, success is non-ergodic! Once you start succeeding, you lose the ability to systematically experiment with your own success factors because it has *already* altered your decision environment!
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If you a) have a reputation for success, however strong b) have been telling a story about it with confidence and self-assurance c) people have believed in, adapted to, and responded to it... Well... it's a self-validating theory.
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This is the "reality distortion field." It takes a while for it to grow to Steve Jobs size and power, but it is visible fairly early on a success trajectory of any sort. I've met enough people "before" and "after" that I've now seen it multiple times.
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The more you succeed, the more people around you will adopt complementary patterns of effective behavior to ride your coat-tails, and the more they'll reinforce the theory of success. This will make the next time you tell your story even MORE confident and self-assured.
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It's a bit like a stock market effect, where a stock goes up and up and up because more money pours in, and up to a point, actually makes future success more likely.
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Notice the positive feedback effect here: you are confidently espousing a theory of success, backed by a track record... the confidence and success attract ever-more talented people hoping to leverage your "formula" to succeed themselves. Proven winners attract likely winners.
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The problem here is that your chances of being *right* about the world don't actually increase at the same rate as your chances of *succeeding* in the world. You're going viral like a meme, not converging on an ever-truer theory of the world.
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Ok, to continue. Here's where the crackpot connection comes in. A charismatic epistemology is something like a flat earth theory that's not just approximately locally true, it is increasingly exactly true over time.
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