Gladwell on How David Beats Goliath
You want to get nuts? Come on! Let's get nuts!
-- Michael Keaton, in Batman (1989)
Typically amusing new Malcolm Gladwell piece in the current New Yorker on how "David beats Goliath". The gist: David has to break the roles and essentially go nuts. Here are two key 'graphs:
“[Artificial intelligence program] Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality,” Lenat explained. “What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn’t have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn’t know enough about the world.” So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, “socially horrifying”: send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.
This is the second half of the insurgent’s creed. Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coördination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable—a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way.
Worth reading in its entirety. At the very least, and even if this isn't Gladwell's intent, you'll understand why traders are such a pain in the ass to deal with.