I read something by a smart person that basically said: "90% of attempted X have failed, therefore X won't be viable."
The problem is that what that person really should have said was: "90% of the attempted X up to now have failed, therefore unless the underlying conditions have changed, X won't be viable."
Here's an example, adapted from a real situation in the past, with disguised (and simplified) numbers; smart person would have spoken up in year 20 and said: "people have been trying that for 20 years now, and trying in ever increasing numbers of attempts, and over 90% of the attempts have failed."
(click for bigger)
And while that's true, by the year 25, sixty-eight percent of all attempts made that year succeed! The secret is a change in underlying conditions (could be infrastructure, social acceptance, technology, economics, or other change).
The details of the model are the following:
1. Number of attempts in year $N$ is $A[N] = 2^{N-1}$.
2. Given a probability of success $p[N]$ in year $N$, the number of successes is the expected number (so we get rid of any stochasticity, for simplicity only):
$S[N] = p[N] \, A[N]$.
3. The probability of success in year $N$ is given by a deterministic difference equation,
$p[N+1] - p[N] = (a + b\, p[N]) (1 - p[N])$,
where the parameters $a$ (innovation rate) and $b$ (imitation rate) are between zero and one, with the specific values for the model above being $a=0.00001, b=0.6$, and $p[0] = 0$.
In other words, very slow innovation, but a large imitation rate (which leads to slow adoption at first then a cascading effect at some point, before saturation sets in).
[The general form of this process is called a Bass model of evolution (used to analyze product diffusion in the past); I don't like it for data analysis or decision support (for a variety of technical reasons), but it's a convenient model for simulation when we take the parameters as given.]
Here's a real-world example of things changing, possibly one of the reasons of the current interest (institutional as well as individual) in cryptocurrencies:
But some people have this blindness: that just because something has been tried before and hasn't worked then, it must never work. And that something could be SpaceX landing its boosters, or the feasibility of Bitcoin, electric vehicles, small nuclear reactors, etc.
Fear is the mind killer. And not just for scions of House Atreides.
