Not sure what you want to know. To me, the interesting aspect is the unique challenges of making high-stakes decisions in ultra high-uncertainty situations where you never receive any feedback signal on most of your calls. And the little you do get is greatly delayed or buried in ambient noise. Yet, due to the size of the infrequent prize, the game can still be worth playing... if you can find and hold a slight edge.
There aren't a lot of professional careers which require skill and years of experience yet are flooded with so many false positives, false negatives, and "we'll never even knows". Domains where playing at a world-class level only takes being right 5% of the time - are just hard to reason about. It can feel like a sadistic casino where 97% of blackjack hands have no clear winner, yet sometimes hitting on 20 is the optimal call. But other times standing on 12 is the best strategy. But it's not entirely random. There are real signals. It's just hard to identify which are real, which are red noise and which are just mapped backward.
With so many false positives and false negatives it's easy to end up chasing black swans (random outlier events). Or to just settle for trying to please your boss, whose own track record is probably closer to astrology than strategy. My best meta-takeaway is to focus on thoroughly mapping the decision space, carefully track and map all the signals, even build a taxonomy of signal types if you can. Then relentlessly optimize the decision making process over the actual outcomes. Why? Because in such 'wicked' domains, sometimes the wrong decision process can still score winning results. And other times, an optimal decision process can yield a string of losses. Your job depends on figuring which is which before it's obvious to other expert players.
As for the book reader in the TFA, I suspect a lot of his value isn't in his a binary "go / no go" call. It's accurately mapping the strengths and weaknesses of a particular title and suggesting where to place it in the studio's current decision matrix. And, on a good day, maybe spotting non-obvious ways the property could be developed.
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Not sure what you want to know. To me, the interesting aspect is the unique challenges of making high-stakes decisions in ultra high-uncertainty situations where you never receive any feedback signal on most of your calls. And the little you do get is greatly delayed or buried in ambient noise. Yet, due to the size of the infrequent prize, the game can still be worth playing... if you can find and hold a slight edge.
There aren't a lot of professional careers which require skill and years of experience yet are flooded with so many false positives, false negatives, and "we'll never even knows". Domains where playing at a world-class level only takes being right 5% of the time - are just hard to reason about. It can feel like a sadistic casino where 97% of blackjack hands have no clear winner, yet sometimes hitting on 20 is the optimal call. But other times standing on 12 is the best strategy. But it's not entirely random. There are real signals. It's just hard to identify which are real, which are red noise and which are just mapped backward.
With so many false positives and false negatives it's easy to end up chasing black swans (random outlier events). Or to just settle for trying to please your boss, whose own track record is probably closer to astrology than strategy. My best meta-takeaway is to focus on thoroughly mapping the decision space, carefully track and map all the signals, even build a taxonomy of signal types if you can. Then relentlessly optimize the decision making process over the actual outcomes. Why? Because in such 'wicked' domains, sometimes the wrong decision process can still score winning results. And other times, an optimal decision process can yield a string of losses. Your job depends on figuring which is which before it's obvious to other expert players.
As for the book reader in the TFA, I suspect a lot of his value isn't in his a binary "go / no go" call. It's accurately mapping the strengths and weaknesses of a particular title and suggesting where to place it in the studio's current decision matrix. And, on a good day, maybe spotting non-obvious ways the property could be developed.