Tropophilia In Action!
Tropophilia in action takes advantage of the convexity bias, it gains from disorder, volatility, uncertainty, disturbances, randomness, chaos, and stressors.
In the words of Nassim Taleb (author of “The Black Swan” and “Antifragility”) there are seven rules for ‘Antifragility’ (which come pretty close to Tropophilia in action):
- Convexity is easier to attain than knowledge
Under some level of uncertainty, one benefits more from improving the payoff function than from knowledge about what exactly one is looking for.
2) A “1/N” strategy is almost always best with convex strategies (the dispersion property)
Reducing the costs per attempt, compensate by multiplying the number of trials and allocating 1/N of the potential investment across N investments, making N as large as possible. This minimizes the probability of missing rather than maximizing profits should one have a win. Research payoffs have “fat tails”, with results in the “tails” of the distribution dominating the properties; the bulk of the gains come from the rare event, i.e., “Black Swan” e.g., 1 in 1000 trials can lead to 50% of the total contributions — similar to the size of companies (50% of capitalization often comes from 1 in 1000 companies).
