Deconstructing the Fortune Teller

Posted on August 13, 2020. Filed under: Uncategorized |

I’ve been thinking more about seeing the present clearly vs predicting the future as venture investment frameworks (after writing about it yesterday), and it occurs to me that they are more related than I initially considered. To me, “seeing the future” is just an exercise in game theory. Even a basic product-centric approach to investing can be reduced down to a simple game, which is “if this is the best product today, then people will buy it tomorrow.” My supposition is that fortune teller investors who “predict the future” tend to spike in game theory, whether that be conscious or subconscious. In seeing the future, everything can be reduced to if/then statements, and the further out you see, the more consecutive or parallel if/then statements you have strung together. The interesting thing about fortune telling, is that there are many confounding and intertwined variables that influence one’s confidence level in the “ifs” upon which they rely and orient. I think great fortune tellers can hold a bunch of different, and not necessarily obviously related, lines of game theory concurrently in state, and in doing so, experience unusual confidence in the set of ifs they consider true en route to the terminal state. So back to the two frameworks, even though they appear at odds, in addition to game theoretic superpowers, fortune tellers are actually heavily dependent on seeing the present clearly. If they get the present wrong, they begin their game at the incorrect starting point (they fuck up the first if)…and even if all subsequent moves/logic are sound, they’ll end somewhere off the mark. Maybe these two approaches to venture investing aren’t such odd bedfellows after all…