Yeah, I've always had a knack for it but a lot of people in my family do not. It was a bit of a shock to me that the patterns you use to get what you want out of a search engine aren't obvious to most people, but I guess that's why search engines are tending away from structured queries like "or" searches.
Group selection is largely discredited, of course.
But! Richard Dawkin's selfish gene theories go the other way and argue for natural selection working on the gene-level instead of the individual level.
It seems like group selection but it is more like population dynamics and selection pressures for traits in a population. If a gene becomes too prevalent in a population it's advantages become disadvantages and an individual has less chance of surviving. If it is too scarce, an individual has a large advantage and a higher chance of surviving and passing the gene on.
It would be limited to traits where the phenotype results in more successful competition with the same species.
True, but hard to adjudicate. The problem is how do you differentiate between people who don't pivot because they think the next feature will make them successful and are justified in doing so, versus people who do the same thing but really should pivot? It's tricky because we have all of the following examples:
- People whose initial idea isn't working, but who pivot and immediately hit product market fit.
- People who launch the exact same thing once a year and it finally becomes a huge hit after the fourth time.
- People who pivot quickly and fail, whereas they would have probably been successful had they pushed the original idea to its logical conclusion.
- People who pivot after five years and become wildly successful, but where it's unclear if they would have been as successful had they had pivoted sooner.
- People who pivot and become successful when they would have been better off shutting down and starting over. (e.g. Derek Sivers)
This hits home a lot for me because I always strongly favor the strategy of building some optionality into the product, both for my own startup and when doing consulting, on the assumption that we're probably directionally correct but may be wrong on some specifics (e.g. how a feature should work, who the early adopters will be, what the economy will be like in the future, what the cash flow of the business will be like on any given day, etc.) And I take a lot of shit both for not committing 100% to one specific product and go-to-market strategy, and also for not pivoting fast enough when something isn't working. Go figure.
