There is no deterministic secret sauce

Deterministic secret sauces are very attractive — follow this recipe and you will 100% successful is a very enticing draw.

However, we live in the real world and real world systems contains too many variables to predict for and it becomes highly impossible for a single static solution to work for a constantly changing external environment.

In fact, our biology has recognised that through billions of years of evolution, there is no one-way to raise your hand up. Your brain takes in massive amount of data in realtime to make constant adjustments and correct for errors while the hand is moving in order to raise the hand up. The randomness and variability of the environment means that there is no way to actually raise the hand up via a static pre-programmed instructions.

In dating, a common thread is asking and receiving relationship advice. It seems that people like to gravitate towards ‘dating strategies’ of what works and what doesn’t and to derive some set of instructions on what to say at each step or what to do at each step. However, the eventual realisation is that there is no secret sauce, a person can act the same way and say the same things and yet result in completely different outcomes. There are too many variables at play, the personality compatibility mechanism is exceedingly complex, the episodic events that occur is variable and all the surrounding environmental influences can affect the outcome.

Sometimes, there is no sure-fire way to tackle a problem, it always depends on the surrounding information, which is often too complex to be represented by words. A well-trained neural network is required to solve this problem. This well-trained neural network is non-deterministic and the answers will depend based on a million factors.

For this reason, I tend to avoid high promises of learning some secret strategy to be successful. YC for example claims that by following it’s philosophy it results in a much higher rate of a comp anybecoming a unicorn. But the truth is, every single founder is different, every market is different, there is realistically no way to ensure that whatever YC philosophy is going to work for every company.

There is no secret strategy and it is foolish to believe and search for such a secret strategy.

The only thing we can do is to rely on is to identify patterns from daily life, factorise those patterns, test those patterns in the real world. We cannot rely on other people to tell us what the secret trick is, the secret trick is different for everyone. What is important is to cultive our ability to conduct passive factorisation, to improve the speed in which we can generalise experiences and find unique patterns, generalise them and apply them in new situations.