You and I must not be around the same kinds of project or gamblers
You can gamble your money away very slowly in any casino. No casino would even have a license if the house odds were anything like what investment in a high tech, pharma, green startup, or investment film or other entertainment vehicle. Yet those projects happen every day.
In my examples, people most certainly do know the odds.
But so what, people make decisions on incomplete information all the time.
So you are saying Silicon Valley and Hollywood (among others) are built on faith-based industries and financial structures?
Not to break into your roll, here, but you can’t really expect that throwing out a cite to a book without even a summary like that is going to impact the discussion much.
True, but the link is to the comments page. I will let the comments speak for me only because I am too busy to participate fully here. Give it a look-see… based on your description of your work in this thread, I especially recommend it. I have faith you will agree
OK, well I think it will be valuable because it presents empirical research into the actual decision making strategies we use when making complex decisions with incomplete information, often under additional stress, such as time pressure.
This are the sort of decisions where people in this thread have posited their own hypotheses about how people react, and so it seems germane.
While I am only partway into the book, I have a feeling that “faith” is not part of the model that results from the research, despite the suggestions from our beloved correspondents here.
It also is the sort of research that at least started out as a basic research without any expectations, and someone asked about that as well.
Hell, yes. It is well understood that no one knows what makes a movie sell. I didn’t participate, but there was a thread about whether Avatar was more like Titanic or Waterworld. Some people put half a billion bucks into that movie, which could have been the biggest disaster in Hollywood history. Sure Cameron has a track record - but so did Michael Cimino.
In Silicon Valley a VC knows 90 - 95% of the startup he funds will flop. He may not have faith, but every single CEO of every one of those startups does.
I haven’t seen business plans, but I have seen grant proposals for the NSF small business program, which has a business plan, and some of them would make a Baptist blush. I’ve never seen any odds for these, not that I would believe in them anyhow.
Sure there is some empirical data - but the theist can point to the Bible and a church which has been around for a long time, which seems empirical to him. As for risk, he probably buys into the Pascal’s Wager thing.
I never have been interested in joining a startup, which might be tied into my lack of faith in general.
I think this kind of faith is actually beneficial, since I doubt anyone would jump into anything without it. Faith in the face of evidence isn’t. The guy asking for another round of funding for his venture to sell 50 pound sacks of dog food over the Web is just as much at sea as the Creationist believer.
There is an awful lot of research into this going on today. It is called Judgment Decision Making, and my daughter is working on it in grad school. She’s working on how and why people save. I’m bugging her to look at how engineers make tradeoffs, which is not faith-based, btw.
We are wired in ways that affects our decision making. I see he talks about simulation - does he also talk about availability. To some Californians, the concept of snow on a mountain in the fall is not available, since they live far from it. When they simulate their hike, they don’t include the case of sudden cold. These are the people who go up on mountains with only light jackets.
I read and have written a lot of those business plans. At that point, few companies even have a CEO. And the entrepreneurs are not working on faith, they are making an educated bet against a cost-reward calculation. They are fully aware of the long odds, but go on because of the potential rewards. This is very very different from faith. I have personally spoken with at least a thousand entrepreneurs over the years, I can not recall a single one that planned to , or was basing the business on “faith” rather than a calculated risk. Not one.
But that is because you have scientists or what have you, not business people, involved at that stage. Truth be told, same thing happens with independent filmmakers, and I have spoken with many hundreds of them about this matter also.
No, it is because you are not comfortable with the risks/rewards as you percive them. You make the same types of decisions every day in your daily activities - you don’t drive against traffic, you don’t parachute off the side of buildings, you don’t get into the ring with Mike Tyson. Others do all those things,not because they have faith, but because at the time they make the decision, they judge the risk/reward to be worth it based on whatever empirical information that have, incomplete as though it may be.
I jump into things that are high risk/high reward all the time. Andn I have zero faith. I have a friend who will be leaving for a (repeat!) humanitarian mission soon into a country closed to Westerners, very very dangerous and he is not a man of faith. I wouldn’t go with him because I don’t see the risk/reward for me, having different skills, as worth it.
Nonsense. You just don’t understand the decision making process people like that use.
Read the book I linked above, then come back and tell us if you feel differently, OK?
Heh, I’d say that Pascal’s Wager is about as far from faith as religious stuff gets - it’s rather explicitly an appeal to gambling logic instead (to use the term as upthread), requiring no faith at all. (Assuming you accept its premises anyway, which obviously require a rather shuttered and incorrect view of the options.)
I’m still of the belief that a lot of what you’re calling faith is actually gambling - For example iirc the Avatar movie was made becuase Cameron wanted to make the movie (he wrote, directed, and producted it, didn’t he?) not due to faith on his part in its financial success, and the other people who were involved in financing and promoting it were gambling on its financial success, based not on blind faith but rather every scrap of information they had available to them, including Cameron’s prior track record. If it had been a flop that doesn’t mean they had misplaced faith - it means that their gamble didn’t pay off, and they always knew that was a possibility. But movies make big money when they succeed, so they’re worth a great deal of calculated risk.
Again, the difference here may be that that to qualify as faith in my book, you have to believe in excess of what is justified. A Cameron movie like that justifies a certain amount of confidence in an investor, I’d say.
Maybe this author is among the pioneers of the field. His work dates back a ways.
One of his premises is that we DON’T list alternatives and evaluate them in making the types of decisions he is researching, even if they are engineers where you might expect they would.
In a very broad nutshell, he suggests analysis and decision making is more “template based”. IOW, observations matched against experience and expectations, then take the first option as best until it proves otherwise, then repeat. That is a ridiculously brief summary, and I am only halfway in, so don’t take it without a ton of salt, but that is the general direction he is headed.
Totally with you it is not faith based.
Yes, I think that is covered. Mental Simulation seems to be a big part of his model. I expect as I continue on in the book, he will show you can only simulate what you already have some experience with.
I’m sure they say that, since “I believe” doesn’t sound good on a business plan, and I’m sure they get told the odds all the time. But do you think they are really motivated by the fact that there is a 20 to 1 chance their incredibly hard work will be for nothing? Maybe, but it isn’t the case for the ones I know.
The people who write these grants are small business owners, not usually scientists. The technical parts are actually more realistic than the business parts.
The more traditional NSF grants are from scientists. Those are not faith-based, since typically the researcher spends some of his last grant doing experiments to give evidence for his next one.
That’s trivially correct. But the person who chooses one faith over another because of a belief in salvation (as opposed to better music) is making the same decision. I don’t know if the book goes into this, but it is clear that people are terrible at judging risks and rewards. Spreadsheets don’t help much, really.
What percentage of the business plans you’ve been involved with get the startup’s market share right? How does confidence (or faith) that they can beat the odds add to the internal risk/reward calculation?
How does the book handle the crash? It is clear from testimony that the concept that the housing market could go down was not available to the investment houses (or to the people who got subprimes, but you can forgive them a bit more.) I’m not saying that they were driven by faith, but the same mechanisms that made them screw up can delude a startup.
The expected value of a high risk, high reward bet can be positive. The question is whether faith in my sense leads people to misjudge the risks.
I seriously doubt many people choose one [religion] over another because of a belief in salvation - to do this you would have to believe in both religions’ afterlives simultaneously and then choose between them as if either were an option. As best I can tell (as an outsider), the usual approach to acquiring faith in a religion’s dogma is to get it by adding up the ‘evidence’ of infuencial people telling you what is true, and influencial people telling you how to interpret various experiences you may have. And then having faith beyond that to remove any doubt that may slip in. Perhaps with some people it’s a matter of choice, but I think that’s pretty uncommon.
I’m pretty sure it’s almost completely incomparable with a person deciding to engage in risky activities becuase they think they can beat the odds and that the benefits are worth the risk.
No, for most, they are motivated by the fact that despite those odds, the rewards of success are worth the poor risk. No different than any other gamble in that regard, including buying a lottery ticket, or jay walking across a busy street.
And how they define success varies too, but for many if not most, the rewards are altruistic. Maybe something will survive even a business failure. Maybe something will be learned that will make the next time useful. Maybe it is a personal growth experience. Maybe they fed their families in the meantime, it varies, but that element is there. We are talking about human beings after all.
OK, well there you have it. They know the technical aspects better than the business aspects. Just like an indie director knows how to make a film better than to run it as a business. That doesn’t make them faith-based, it just makes them possibly weaker as business plans than they might be under other circumstances.
No, both are just rhetorical devices for persuasion that are conventional among the parties involved. There is no faith involved, just convention and execution.
OK, for the sake of argument, let’s say he is. And he might in fact be.
That doesn’t mean that is faith based either, it just means the choices to be decided are about faith. In fact, he has weighed the (possibly incomplete) evidence as gathered from reading or discussion, and chose the outcome he is most comfortable with.
Consider it another way: What if a person decides to abandon their church and become atheist? By your example, that would be faith based but how?
I don’t agree with that per se. Can you clarify please? ISTM the times people have taken absurd risks are very rare - note “Darwin Awards”. Beyond that, I dunno, we all live to see another day.
Spreadsheets calculate what you ask them to calculate.
Depends on the type of business, the stage of the business, the nature of the market. Not all business plans speak in terms of market share, although that is something I am pushing for in the film world. It is a novel concept let me tell you
Read the book I linked to, it is about precisely this question, and it is pretty readable.
It is published in 1998/1999.
It is a report of research on decision making strategies, not a book about economic analysis anyway.
It was available to everybody. I passed on taking such a loan, even with a real estate agent/broker father because it didn’t make economic sense to me. I asked him to step me through it several times over the years, and it always looked bad for precisely the reasons it turned out to go bad.
I have no special knowledge about that that could not or was not available to others. We all have different experiences and abilities to analyze it, but the analysis was available and not complex. I reject outright any claim otherwise.
But beyond that, everyone made their decisions based on the incomplete info they had, and the risk/reward comfort they had at the time.
Everyone.
No different than buying a bottle of Coke at 7-11 in that regard.
As long as we agree there was zero faith involved, that’s as far as I would go.
I am not aware of a single startup that was “deluded”, and I knew a lot of them in the dot-com era, some wildly successful even today, some among the spectacular wrecks, and many in between.
Every single one of them operated the same way between the company, their backers, and their customers and partners: Judge the risk/reward, make your choices, and see what happens.
Than the answer is most commonly no, because I am not aware of times when faith enters the equation at all.
I can imagine some places peple might say they have faith in the outcome, but that is only a verbal manifestation of expression of their non-faith based judgments of the risk-reward ratio. We have a weak vocabulary for that really.
Faith, hope, both might be used. Faith is not hope and vice versa. I would say if you hear someone say “I have faith in the business plan” they mean “I hope it works out, given the work we have done to assess the risk/reward ratio and do our best”.
No faith at all is involved, if it really is, run run run, because you have a business being run on religious principles only, not rational ones. (note this does not mean you can’t run a religious business on non-faith bases, christian-themed music and film are fair vehicles for investment on a non-faith basis.)
