What is failure?

by on April 21, 2007 at 6:49 am in Education | Permalink

Robin Hanson writes:

I’ll take credit for creating some ideas the world has found useful, but I have completely failed both the market test and the academic test.  That is, I can’t convince any business to let me join them to deliver my ideas at scale, and I can’t convince any top journal to publish my ideas.

Prediction markets are now known by all the people who read the top journals, so the final complaint may reflect an underrewarded Robin but not a failure of Robin.  I also doubt if businesses will ever bite the bullet and adopt prediction markets on a large scale.  The very reason we resort to a firm, rather than the market, is to build consensus and morale, not to forecast the truth.  Prediction markets would tend to break down firms, but of course they still can flourish in Arrow-Hahn-Debreu space.  Here is my previous post on why businesses don’t leap on the bandwagon.  The pointer is from Chris Masse.

6 comments

Bernard Yomtov April 21, 2007 at 9:55 am

I absolutely agree with Hanson that “creativity” in business is hugely overrated. As he says in his BW article, everyone wants to be a Big Thinker. But I think he overlooks something when he writes

“What society needs is not more creativity or suggestions for change but better ways to encourage people to focus on important issues, identify the most promising ideas, and tell the right people about them. But our deification of creativity gets in the way.”

What we also need is people who know how to implement new ideas, and are willing to do the hard work of attending to all the details and problems that the Great Visionary never thought of and can’t be bothered with. One problem with the “deification of creativity” is that it provides an excuse for a lot of lazy, self-important individuals to proclaim themselves Innovators, and thereby avoid doing any work.

knackeredhack April 22, 2007 at 10:26 am

I think I’m familiar with the real symptoms of failure, both personal and corporate. On a personal level, the loss of serotonin when you most need it to convince others would be an important one I think. Perhaps Robin needs a “kick” there to help get his ideas adopted.

And my coffee mug reminds me every day of a quotation attributed to Churchill:-

“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”

Has Robin used a prediction market to predict whether prediction markets should be successful?

BTW, creativity is not over-rated, but frequently and generally overlooked. If it were not, the world would surely be a better place. When the world is perfect, I think we can start to argue there is a creativity surplus. Creativity in my book is actually doing stuff, not thinking it.

Ramudu April 23, 2007 at 3:58 pm

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