By necessity, entrepreneurs are self-delusional.

Most are easily intelligent enough to realize how long their odds really are. Furthermore, they have the intellect to appreciate the true effort they have to make before they reach financial payback.

Any reasonable person with the math skills to visualize risk vs. reward will usually walk away --but not the quintessential entrepreneur.

This is not a flattering trait. For this reason, it is rarely, if ever, associated with successful entrepreneurs.

Most entrepreneurs are, unfortunately, very much like gambling addicts. It is also unfortunate that the casinos (app stores) don't provide accurate information about risk vs. payoff.

> By necessity, entrepreneurs are self-delusional.

Unlike VCs, entrepreneurs have no spread of risk. It is important to realize that it is in the interest of the VC that the entrepreneur remains delusional.

Entrepreneurs != startup founders.

A successful developer, for example, starting their consultancy/agency has a high chance of building a successful venture.

Small companies as in 5-50 people can be really stable and proffitable. Ramp up in good times, lay off in bad etc. the trick is to proffitably get there a soon as possible. Being a 1 person consulting shop is much more of a grind and has less upside.

I believe this article misses its own point. I'll keep it short.

“I” is a lie. There is no “I”.

The brain has two halves, right and left. The right side is spacial. The left side is lingual. Generally.

Both halves of the brain receive stimuli from our senses and build models of the environment that are optimized for their respective roles.

This gives each of us two models which we use to navigate our environment: a spacial model and a lingual model. These models each run in their own hemisphere and are very different from each other in both function and form.

The spatial model is innate. We are born with it. The lingual model, we acquire. (We must learn language before we hit puberty or we lose the capacity to do so. Search for “linguistics Genie” or “linguistics wolf boy” for details.)

Rather, this article is a commentary on the fact that practically all schools fail us.

In school, we sit in class, exposed primarily to lingual input. We consequently build an effective lingual model of explicit rules of our world. But but we are left to our own devices to build our spatial model, which we do from our own activities while following the “explicit rules” we know.

Every once in a while, we stumble upon some visual/real world representation that allows our spatial side to realize a concept that is well known to the lingual side.

The trouble with neural networks is that they're just good enough to keep us from continuing to question our assumptions about human intelligence.

A thousand years ago, even Ptolemy's geocentric model was good enough. After all, it offered an effective means for simulating and predicting planet movement and solar eclipses. But it was complex. It took men of "great learning" to understand the solar system according to Ptolemy's model --something that most current grade schoolers understand intuitively.

In all likelihood, concepts like string theory and neural networks are comparable traps for us today. This is not a pleasant thought. So we're not motivated to search for better alternatives until the current model evidences an insurmountable flaw.

I'm not saying that string theory or the neural network approach is wrong. Obviously it's not. Just remember that Ptolemy's model wasn't wrong either, at least with regard to the moon.

> Just remember that Ptolemy's model wasn't wrong either, at least with regard to the moon.

Yes, it was, even with regard to the moon. Though, since the Earth-Moon barycenter is within the Earth, it may have managed to be tolerably wrong with regard to the Earth-Moon system. But, still wrong.