Definition of Crazy

From Zanecorpwiki

Most readers will be familiar with Einstein's famous aphorism regarding insanity. In my 33 years, I've seen plenty of people destroy themselves for lack of understanding on this point, companies run to the ground again and again in the same way, and wasted enough of my own time to know the truth of these words.

At the same time, though, we should all be very thankful for the insane.

For millennium, people tried to cure sickness with generally more negative outcomes than positive. Legend has it^{[notes 1]} Edison tried thousands of variations before funding a economically viable light bulb. How many people killed themselves in attempts at powered, fix wing flight? All--if the old news reels we see all the time are to be believed--with almost no hint of success.

To be fair, not all these people weren't doing "the same thing". You could even argue that medieval doctors who were convinced that bleeding people was a good way to cure disease were victims of a kind of societal insanity. So I'm not arguing against the point, but augmenting the basic theory.

My point is that lots of things were impossible until they weren't. The "venture capital" business model looks like a game of Hunt the Wumpus in which the actors stumble blindly through a trap filled came inhabited by a deadly monster. Most times (like 80-90%) you end up with abject failure. Sometimes, you manage to live long enough to have some limited success, and every once in awhile (like 1-2% of the time) you get off a blind shot and score big. Based on the success rate, we're forced to conclude that success is largely a matter of blind luck, and that's okay.

What I'm talking about is a kind of rational crazy. At first, you may think it's crazy to try and try again, and after every failure just try again, all the time knowing the chance of success is slim. But what if the rewards of success are huge, and the cost of failure relatively low? For the most part, failure comes with relatively low cost. It would be crazy to actually Hunt the Wumpus in person--a proposition that ends in almost certain death. It's not so crazy to keep plunking money into the startup slot machine where the payoff is so big as to make up for all the failed attempts.

Notes

1. ↑ And it's almost surely legend. I looked for some source for the "Edison tried X number of times before making the light bulb" and the only thing interesting I found was some guy saying he'd looked and found nothing.