You should be suspicious of anyone outlining their strategy for success.<p>Because if I was lucky enough to stumble upon some great hack to make lots of money, why would I be telling people about it? Either I get competition, or I might get whatever loophole I was abusing closed.<p>So either I'm lying, or what I'm saying isn't possible to reproduce, or the usefulness of the technique ran out and now I'm just trying to squeeze a few more dollars by telling the tale, or I'm actually stupid and about to see my business model crash and burn.
There are deliberate carrot problems, where the successful person deliberately misleads their audience as to the source of their success, and non-deliberate ones, where the successful people themselves doesn't understand why they are successful so tell
people the narratives that make them feel the best about themselves. You see this often when someone with prodigious genetic ability doesn't want to admit to others or themselves that their success was determined before they were born, and not due to hard work or some immeasurable character trait.
While the carrot problem is real, it alone doesn't explain the shittiness of rich people's advice on becoming rich. So much opportunity is either created or destroyed by external circumstances that we don't perceive, let alone control. Since we all subconsciously write our own creation myths, it's not easy to discover and attribute forces that we aren't aware of when looking back on our life paths. The perennial bullshit self-explanation is <i>hard work.</i> How hard they work is one thing that they <i>can</i> control, and they know they worked hard, so they assume it had more of an effect than it did... and in turn, others that worked less hard didn't succeed. For example, they might assume that their uncle was willing to set up that meeting with their first big client because they worked hard enough to be worthy of it, rather than realizing that others who worked as hard or harder lacked a <i>connected uncle</i>.
I think this is a good mental model to employ, but also has the potential to poison positivity.<p>Hard work and perseverance can (and IME often does) lead to success. There's this attractive narrative that any outlier success is entirely built from seedy/unethical/immoral/corrupt acts. This narrative helps to justify and excuse mediocrity. Instead, we should be asking the hard questions which may encourage harder/smarter work and perseverance.
I don’t think you can ever really learn from what a person says helped them do X. You have to look at the person themselves and try to figure out what about them made X happen - people have too much of a blind spot comparing themselves to the world outside their bubble, or understanding how other people perceive them. They lack the perspective to really know what about them is different<p>For example most successful founders and CEOs in my experience may say taking meeting notes or setting a high bar helps. But really what helped is that they had personality traits leading to these behaviors which are what truly drove the benefits - they are meticulous and detail oriented so they want to use writing to nail down ideas, they set high standards for themselves and others so they do whatever it takes to avoid a bad hire or lazy decision. It would be considered impolite for the CEO to say that about themselves, and maybe they don’t even notice how much of an outlier they are in those traits, so instead you get told the effect rather than the cause of their success. Someone without those traits trying to ape out the processes won’t be able to realize the benefits.<p>Similarly I think to a degree the whole “be connected or privileged from birth” is meant to be taken implicitly rather than ignored altogether, sometimes. Nobody wants to launch into a discussion about social class or inequality in some PR puff piece that’s like “oh mr startup ceo why are you so rich and successful”. Like in tennis nobody is going to say the secret to success is to have tiger parents and access to facilities and training from a young age that 99% of people can’t afford. When people say “leverage your connections” they’re kind of saying Joe Average without connections is out of the game until they build those connections, but politely.
This is one reason the field of behavioral economics is important to society: there are things that an individual or company would never publicly admit to doing — but which they're fine to admitting under NDA, to be used as a datapoint in an anonymized dataset used in academic research.<p>So, while no individual company will tell you that everyone's using dark patterns or hiring their friends, behavioral economists <i>can</i> put forth evidence-backed arguments that this is the case — and so save you the trouble of bothering to chase the Carrot.
This is a great way to describe all those "buy my book to learn how to make money online!" scams. The real way to make the money is to trick people into buying the books/courses/doodads, but you can't actually _say_ that. (Or if you do, you have to do so in such a way that you're pretending you're letting the buyer become part of the "inside club", so they don't feel tricked, they feel like they can start tricking people now, too. Very classic con strategy.)
So a bit like big corporations making tons of money through monopolies, regulatory capture and corporate welfare, but then having to pretend their success was down to 'the market'
Yes but there is also the inverse carrot problem. E.g. if the pilots have radar, they are more liable to rely on it and neglect other aspects of flying. Similarly in business, it is simply harder for folks who grew up rich to develop the level of grit that comes natural to the less privileged.<p>I may sound like a rich apologist, but please believe me when I say it is harder to spend 10 hrs a day cranking on a risky startup if you know you can be clubbing with daddy's money
>For this reason, Carrot Problems greatly increase the value fo being an "insider".<p>>There's some fields where it really might be true that you can learn everything you need to know by reading books at the public library. But anytime people are succeeding for reasons they won't admit in public, it's hard to get a grasp on the situation unless you have private back-channels.<p>I feel this is a natural response when you're in a low-trust low-signal-to-noise-ratio environment. You have to keep things close to the chest and limit access, or else you'll spend all your time sifting through the noise. For example, the best way to reach me is by phone. But it's not enough to know my phone number to successfully reach me; you have to be in my private circle for me to pick up and respond. Everyone else is likely just scammers and telemarketers.
Here's another carrot problem:<p>You see people all around you appearing to be cooler and more popular by proclaiming there's no point in working hard because the whole system is rigged. Not working and riding to the top of HN on your cynicism sure is tempting if you can justify it. But you don't know whether the people who claim that are actually secretly successful and just trying to win points by appealing to popular discontent. And you won't find out whether studying and working could have made you successful, because now you feel it's not worth trying.<p>Even in the slacker 90s where we were all convinced we'd never earn as much as our parents, the self-pitying cynicism wasn't this rampant.
> Various companies make a lot of money by implementing "dark patterns", such as getting customers onto subscriptions and then making it hard for them to cancel. They can't admit that this is why their revenue went up, so they make a bunch of claims about how their success comes out of [various beneficent strategies], but anyone who tries to replicate the success by using those lovely strategies is liable to go broke.<p>This bullet point makes me wonder if there are situations where newcomers end up beating the original company because consumers are willing to pay an enormous premium just to avoid the dark patterns.<p>Carrot <i>solutions</i>? :)
I had to deal with that (digital) six sigma crap because Jack Welch had not yet left a giant crater in the ground and so people thought he was a wizard.<p>He helped bring us the mass layoff and made tons of money dumping PCBs into the river. Apparently wells there are still toxic without treatment.
Damn. My mom told me carrots would improve my eyesight when I was little and I've lived with this my whole life. This article ruined my sense of accomplishment after eating carrots but I loved it.
Another possible term for it:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction</a>
Carrots can improve your eyesight <a href="https://www.drlatter.com/blog/do-carrots-actually-improve-your-eyesight-the-truth-about-your-diets-effect-on-your-eyes" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.drlatter.com/blog/do-carrots-actually-improve-yo...</a>
I'm really glad to have a word for this now.<p>It makes me wonder how many carrot problems I've fallen for myself, or have been intending to fall for )not realizing they are carrot problems) and haven't got around to yet.<p>Also how many other ideas I would like to have a word for.
I'd believe the thing about the carrots was about marketing for carrots before tricking the Germans.<p>It's not like such things haven't been done. In the states there are plenty of scams (marketing) to convince us to eat more grains, or drink milk, or consume more {product}. Don't see why it wouldn't be the same anywhere else.<p>We had a whole cartoon character dedicated to convincing people to eat spinach, which we were wrong about being particularly beneficial as well. These kinds of things, even when well intentioned, have secondary, harmful effects, that far outweigh their purported benefits.
The formula for success is not a sum of factors, it's a multiplication of factors.<p>Yes, you need luck to be > 0. But you better have hard work also > 0, or you won't have any success anyway.<p>No, the sales and marketing guys are not parasites leeching off your hard work because you're the one wrinting the code. It's not S + C, it's S * C.<p>No, it doesn't matter how good and productive you are, if you don't know how to search for jobs, pass interviews, etc, you won't have a job.<p>And not wanting to work hard because "you need luck anyway" is not a winning strategy.
Business advantages only exist with some degree of information asymmetry. People only want to share this over when either they are not playing the game or the market incentivizes open sharing (e.g. patent systems for innovation).<p>Unfortunately for business outcomes or in case of war advantages - it has the exact opposite incentive - sharing this leads to loss of market share, more competition, chances of leaks and enemy knowing about your tactics and investing in R&D.
The anabolic steroids thing isn't really elucidated properly.<p>The problems regarding this, that make it a true carrot problem, are as follows:<p>1. Enhanced athletes aggressively claiming to be and marketing themselves as natural for explicit monetary incentives.<p>2. Enhanced athletes claiming to achieve amazing things naturally for obvious incentives and mitigation of disincentives. Generally, the notion that any top athlete isn't "enhanced" is absurd. Anabolic steroids are a huge boost, trust me. Wink wink nudge. You go from being a mere mortal to feeling <i>powerful</i>, and your physical recovery is completely changed. You become wolverine.<p>Enhanced athletes claiming to be natural because they don't want to get in trouble and telling you to do pyramid supersets isn't really a problem because it's probably going to work (hypertrophy isn't hard, it's easy) and it's pretty obvious they're enhanced. You don't need steroids to get decent results, pretty much everyone has a base capacity for this.<p>Enhanced athletes explicitly claiming to be natural for monetary incentives can harm people financially and physically, and this is a wildly popular grift.
Another example: when I realized that most of the commercially successful bands that got played on the radio when I was young, including a few that I liked, were there because of payola, not because their music was better or their work ethic or whatever. They were probably better at sucking up to the gatekeepers who would pay off radio stations (illegally) to play their songs.
This is a problem but the fact we know the real reason for the US pilots’ success was not carrots shows we (eventually) got the correct information.<p>So the question is - how does this happen today? Journalists investigating companies? Analysts giving insight into what is happening behind the scenes? Whistleblowers?
As someone who went into a STEM field without any family connections to STEM, I have definitely been stuck eating carrots and not knowing why it didn't work.<p>Interestingly, the human brain tells itself carrot stories all the time:<p><a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-hidden-prospect/201802/do-you-really-know-why-you-do-the-things-you-do" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-hidden-prospect/...</a><p>tldr: patients with split brain hemispheres will reflexively make up explanations for decisions made by the other half of their brains. Fascinating stuff, and makes me wonder how many things I've done that serve my subconscious' ulterior motives.
Hits the bulls eyes. That's why it's important to keep your mind always open and question everything. But how much you can question is also limited by cognitive limits we have as humans. SO the only thing you can actually trust is your own direct experience. I have found many books to be useless just because of this reason.
The "Carrot Problem", itself, is operational deception covering for the real tradecraft on offer: OPDEC => <a href="https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA293799" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA293799</a>
Beutifully written, however, there has been a term for this for a long time : "<i>Shiny Object</i>" as well as "<i>Squirrel!</i>"<p>Are these different, they seem the same to me if your thinking about them on the same level?
Well at some point someone was told about onboard radar and it was the truth… people lie and people tell the truth. There are infinite lies and fewer truths. But truths are consistent, and lies are hard to keep consistent.
There are many reasons why people become rich. I'm not talking about the guy who saves his entire life and has a comfortable retirement. I'm talking about the very rich. You have the folks who inherit wealth and there is a lot of that. But the folks who are self made, the guys and gals who went from zero to millions, 99% of it was being at the right place at the right time or knowing someone that helped them along. This applies to youtube stars all the way to successful entrepreneurs who somehow built a 100 million dollar business. Are there outliers, of course, but they are far and few between.<p>So the point is hard work and determination is about 1% of the equation and luck is the other 99%. Like my brother likes to say, I would much rather be very lucky than very smart.<p>Just saying......