From the perspective of the 98% who fail sure it’s bad. On the other hand from the perspective of the sovereign they work for risking 500 men for an empire is an excellent bet. That’s a wildly asymmetric payoff there.

People here should be familiar with this dynamic.

It's sad to see the submission being used as another reason to remind people of the role of luck in human affairs. That take on things involving noted individual success is a little too trendy now.

Aside from being overdone, the reason it bothers me is because it distracts from so many other points. In this case, it distracts from the main point of the article which is that not having a fallback position leads to higher commitment. It's a lesson larger than just the warfare and politics examples given. It has very broad applicability in life.

> not having a fallback position leads to higher commitment

That's what the article claims, but that doesn't necessarily make that statement accurate.

There's no proof Cortez et. al.'s troops actually felt higher commitment as a consequence of having their ships burned - we are expected to conclude that's what happened, but we have only Cortez's word to tell us this and an article demonstrating selection bias.

You can't think of an example from your own life? Imagine feeling less committed at a job and not really feeling like looking for another yet. Then, you're fired while being on the hook for all of your living expenses. You become committed to the new search then because there's no backstop.

This is a natural human response. Relatable even without testimony from Cortez's troops.

As an example from my own life, Job hunting has often been the other way round - when I have had no job, I would take anything - shelf stacking at a supermarket comes to mind. But I remember going through a period of fast turn around when I worked full time but spent most lunchtimes calling and emailing for my next job and literally tripled my salary in 12 months.

So sometimes having the backup plan let's you make better choices.

It's very easy to imagine the opposite being true and Cortez' troops falling into despair as their leader supposedly turned insane and ordered them to destroy their most valuable assets. Goes for your example too: Maybe not all people are extremely motivated by severe setbacks in life.

Not all, sure. But enough to make it real. Evolution has reinforced the trait over millennia. We wouldn't be here otherwise.

There are plenty of counterexamples of this. Like every parolee who reoffends

Cortes had a whole civilization behind him. Hundreds to thousands of years of people trading ideas and creating more and better tech. Aztecs were just isolated by themselves with a handful of other natives since they arrived in North America. Obviously the side with better tech will always win, and that's why it only took a few hundred Spaniards to take over hundreds of thousands of Aztecs.