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A comment on Things I will tell my kids if they become entrepreneurs [slides]. Parent comment

Re:Things I will tell my kids if they become entrepreneurs [... by BigMan555 on Monday October 31, 2016 @01:14PM (#12838760)
How does it have the same impact on outcome? You're talking about the associative property of multiplication but he's saying the luck factor can either reduce your success to 0 or multiply the outcome of your endeavor by 1000. It obviously does have an impact (note: the results of .9 * .9 * 1000 and .9 * .9 * 1 are different numbers).
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Re:Things I will tell my kids if they become entrepreneurs [... by throwawayReply on Monday October 31, 2016 @01:37PM (#12839017)
They're different numbers, but it makes no difference in terms of how far along the possible scale you are.

If I score money as 0-1 and luck as 0-1000, then I have a possible overall score out of 1000.

If I score 0.3 on money and 600 on "luck" then I've scored 180 out of 1000, or 18%.

Or if both are 0-1 then I'd have scored 0.3 and 0.6, and overall scored 0.18 out of 1, which is still 18%, it's just the absolute number that has changed.

But the absolute number isn't important in a scale which doesn't have meaningful units.

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Re:Things I will tell my kids if they become entrepreneurs [... by BigMan555 on Tuesday November 01, 2016 @04:15AM (#12844129)
I understood the absolute number to be of significance as the goal (eg. the absolute number is however many millions $ you'll make as outcome). But point taken, I don't think this was thought through :)
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