Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

Re:Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas by tomjen3 on Saturday March 10, 2012 @06:33AM (#3687597)

Oh please. Humanity is pretty much the definition of a species that should, in all probability, have died out on a multitude of occasions over the years and I am not just talking about the world wars and Nuclear Bombs, but things like the plagues, Spanish flu and all the rest of the diseases; the host of predators for which we are no match at all (a standard monkey is stronger than all but the best trained humans), the environment we inhabited (today that is not much of an issue) when we left Africa (why do you think we left? Properly because stronger tribes where pushing us further and further away and the alternative was dead on the shore), when we left the jungle, when we went to Siberia (again almost certainly pushed by stronger tribes) and when we went to Europe (same reason) where we had to fight the Neanderthals. Basically humanity has been on the winning sides of terrible odds since we started out. Don't forget that we nearly didn't make it in Africa (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080424-human...).

No wonder we love and underdog -- there is no greater under dog than humanity.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas by lutorm on Saturday March 10, 2012 @10:53AM (#3687956)

There is an amusing passage in "The Black Swan" about how a turkey would estimate its own life expectancy as Thanksgiving draws closer...

Don't confuse the fact that we've been lucky not to go extinct yet with evidence that we won't, especially when you being around to make that inference is conditional on said luck.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas by Jach on Saturday March 10, 2012 @08:42AM (#3687756)

Amusingly that's not a bad argument that we're living in a simulation. Disregarding any particular human, humanity itself has done remarkably well against the odds in the same sense that story-book characters do remarkably well against the odds and that, at least when they're on a winning trend, player-controlled populations (whether in Populous, C&C, etc.) do well against the video game's odds or against other players.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas by wladimir on Monday March 12, 2012 @04:58AM (#3692763)

Isn't that mostly survival bias at work? No matter what the odds were, the winners write history. If we had died out in one of the steps along the way, we wouldn't be here writing about it.

Once humanity spread around the world, the odds of a natural catastrophe killing all of us at the same time became very low (limited to planetary-scale distasters).

Only since the industrial revolution we've been on a more dangerous path toward central points of failure. On a geological time scale, that's only a very short time. But we've been testing our luck really hard.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas by egypturnash on Monday March 12, 2012 @04:59AM (#3692766)

Or perhaps it's an argument for multiple realities. There may be uncountable parallel timelines where humanity died out at every possible point during our history.

That said I get the simulation theory feeling pretty solid sometimes, to the point where grappling with it is one of the major themes of the graphic novel I'm in the middle of...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas by jacquesm on Saturday March 10, 2012 @08:12AM (#3687729)

> No wonder we love and underdog -- there is no greater under dog than humanity.

Tell that to the Dodo, the Quagga, the Javan Tiger and the Thylacine. And many others besides.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas by jodrellblank on Saturday March 10, 2012 @09:52AM (#3687853)

Weak and winning is "underdog", weak and losing is "loser".

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas by lutorm on Saturday March 10, 2012 @10:47AM (#3687941)

By that definition, every loser that hasn't yet lost is a winner. There is no way to tell the difference except hindsight. I bet the dinosaurs told themselves that they were totally different than all those other weak-ass species that had joined the annals of history 76 Myr ago...

[ Parent | on HN ]