Forking Paths

If 90% of startups fail, why would you think winning wasn't mostly chance? Regardless of how many people work hard and grind, you can still fail (and most do, that's just life). Some are more lucky than others, and capital begets capital. Once you've "won" enough, it becomes much harder to lose, even if you make terrible forward decisions and run off the inertia of past wins (Twitter). Bezos built Amazon, but also has sunk somewhere between $10B and $20B into Blue Origin and it is still not terribly successful, for example, and demonstrates that even with resources and skill that success is potentially out of reach.

So, while I think the startup model is a fine way for investors to get exposure to an asset class that is the equivalent of 0DTE options, for the startup ecosystem to enable participants to play in the fiat that falls from those investment decisions, and perhaps some value to be generated, I would hazard that the model would not scale to meet the needs of the aerospace and defense marketplace at this time. All that is needed is skilled engineers and manufacturing practitioners to be enabled to do their best work, while keeping out of their way. Airbus demonstrates this, imho. They employ almost 150k workers, and successfully deliver products to customers that aren't fraught with manufacturing defects. They also have a book of work into the next decade, demonstrating customer confidence in the product and the…

Would you count group hunting as “highly complex social behavior”? It’s not just a numbers thing, they communicate and coordinate with the group.

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/23/nx-s1-5120912/octopuses-and-fish-hunt-enforce

Octopuses also build colonies, using coconut shells and other tools.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18281-octopuses-use-coconut-shells-as-portable-shelters/

https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-discover-underwater-city-full-gloomy-octopuses

https://mashable.com/article/octopus-garden-colony-deep-sea-discovery

They can also solve human made puzzles.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0152048

As for knowledge transfer, we know that they can teach other how to perform certain tasks. But beyond that, there seems to be a lack of research. Do they have complex language and can they transfer abstract “ideas”? My guess would be yes, but they communicate through color changes in ways that we have a hard time understanding. It seems likely that birds and whales have complex language, but we haven’t cracked the code on that even though their communication is much more like ours. Hopefully we find out some day.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/

https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-evolution-of-stupidity-and-octopus

Forget the quality of the data, you can give the same data to different researchers and get wildly different conclusions. [1, from 2, from 3]

(Disclaimer: not my area of expertise.)

[1] N. Breznau et al., “Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty,” PNAS, October 2022, URL: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2203150119

[2] B. Klaas, “The Crisis of Zombie Social Science.” The Garden of Forking Paths. https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-crisis-of-zombie-social-science

[3] The crisis of zombie social science (20 points, 2 days ago) – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44272057