Are you assuming elite college admission counts are rigid in the count of people admitted because of real teaching constraints or reducing the supply of prestige?
I'd be willing to bet that grit has a lot less to do with successful founders than luck and/or access to a lot of money. There are way more unsuccessful founders filled with grit than successful ones.
The reason there are so many books on grit is because it's a very compelling lie that anyone can succeed if they just try hard enough without giving up. It's useful for the person who hasn't succeeded because it gives them hope. It's useful for the person who has succeeded because it implies that they earned/deserve what they have because they were better than others or tried harder than others did. These are lies, but they are comforting to a lot of people and so they sell a lot of books. Books that say things like "Be born to wealthy parents, preferably in a rich nation or your odds of success are highly unlikely, then also get really lucky" just aren't going to sell as well.
The thing is, an "unsuccessful" startup founder filled with grit has many side-opportunities after the fact despite her "failure". Founding a startup is so risky that these side benefits are actually a far bigger part of the draw, since success is ultimately just as rare as a winning lotto ticket - compare the number of failed startups with the handful of unicorns, and it's pretty much in the same ballpark.
Because you need effort + the ability to create value, not one or the other. Some people have one but not the other and seek out help to bridge the gap.
Yes, also effort is something a person can influence directly, while ability cannot or only indirectly (education ...) so it makes sense to focus on things people can influence, but but achievement is the ultimate target.
I don't believe in the least that the only thing a person can influence directly is brute effort, and that's the argument you'd need to make in order to build a case for "effortocracy" over rewarding good outcomes. A whole lot of effort out there in the real world is wasted due to entirely preventable errors and mistakes.
> And why is grit such a good indicator of successful founders?
Based on what? Biographical accounts by successful founders?
Nassim Taleb's Fooled By Randomness [1] covers the topic of mis-attribution of some causal factor X (i.e. grit) to some phenomena (i.e. business success) that can be effectively explained solely by randomness. In the specific case of successfully starting a business, causal factors are often mis-attributed post-facto through a lens that blatantly ignores survivorship bias [2].
is grit not required to make it to land in the survivorship bias pool? If your first failure is too hard on you and you quit, then, by definition, you can't succeed. Maybe grit doesn't count when everything goes your way always. I'm not sure anyone has experienced success without grit, but I could be entertained by anecdotes.
The vibe coders would tell you: you don't. You test the program, or ask the LLM to write tests for you, and if there are any issues, you ask it to fix them. And you do that in a loop until there are no more issues.
I imagine that at some point they must wonder what their role is, and why the LLM couldn't do all of that independently.
Of course! And yes, a Locus appears to be very close in concept to a strange attractor. I am especially interested in the idea of the holographic principle, where each node has its own low-fidelity map of the rest of the (graph?) system and can self-direct its own growth and positioning. Becomes more of a marketplace of meaning, and useful for the fuzzier edges of entity relationships that we're working with now.
Shortly, yes to all. We actually had an experiment going from theory of mind to emotion, but it's hanging right now since I feel the models aren't quite there yet and it yields diminish returns relative to effort. But could easily be revived. Minsky isn't my fav though, I'm leaning more toward Newell/Simon and friends from that generation.
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