A random contrarian idea

There is a question I love asking during job interviews: What important truth do very few people agree on with you?

I am obviously not the author of this brilliant question. It comes from Peter Thiel, the (nowadays controversial) first investor of Facebook. The best example of a contrarian thinker/businessman is Elon Musk. Here is why:

• People used to say that batteries are too expensive and too big to make electric cars. Elon thought the contrary, and by checking how batteries were made, he realized the sum of the parts was not that expensive, and that there were for sure better ways to assemble those. That’s how Tesla was built and that I am dreaming of owning their new electric car.
• People used to say that only NASA could fly to Mars, and that it was too expensive for a private company to do such a thing. Elon Musk thought the contrary; he thought that it was costly because the rockets were NOT re-usable. So he created Space X, and designed rockets that are re-usable and will be potentially able soon to fly some people to Mars.

So, obviously, when I ask the contrarian question to a candidate, I am always eager to hear something super original or mind blowing. Maybe I could find the Elon Musk of videogames?!

Unfortunately, so far, the answers I got were somewhat disappointing, ranging from “I believe in an after-life” to “The Matrix movies are bad movies”. That’s not very encouraging to be honest.

So of course, dear reader, you’re gonna ask me: “If you’re so smart, what would YOU answer to that question hu?!”. And I’m glad you asked!

Here is what I think: most of the people think randomness is a negative thing, but I don’t.

To introduce my point, let me give you my view on a few common situations where randomness is key.

Randomness and Sports

Let’s start in sports: what is Diego Maradona very famous for? His Hand of God goal, when he scored a critical goal using his hand during the World Cup Quarter Finals in 1986. The referee should have refused to validate the goal, but well, he made a mistake and Argentina won that game.

And even if it happens all the time in soccer (see here), FIFA still does not use video replay to ref the games. They will give you many reasons, but I am gonna give you mine: referee mistakes are part of the game. Yes, you read that right. Whether you like it or not, the fact the referee is a human that makes random mistakes adds some extra unpredictability to the game, making it way more fun to watch. And let’s be honest, it’s also fun to blame on the referee for when your team is losing.

This is partially why more people prefer playing poker to chess. Chess is a perfect game; if you are better than your opponent, you will beat him 99.9% of the times. So, there is no way I’d beat Kasparov for instance.

Contrary to chess, poker is a game of both skills AND luck. Randomness adds accessibility to this game. Of course, on the long run, a pro poker player will beat any day your home game player Uncle Joe. But, on one hand, Uncle Joe could beat a pro player. Imagine you play a basketball game against Michael Jordan, and you beat him. That’s totally doable against the Michael Jordan of Poker! Isn’t it great?! You would hope it happened to you right?!

And that’s actually it: randomness is very often disguised as hope. And even when randomness can be thought as “bad hope”, I do not think it is that bad. A sane person buying a lottery ticket isn’t really buying it for the money; the person buys it to buy hope — they buy a ticket to anticipated happiness; and hope goes with excitement in many cases. Just look at the face of the people playing craps in casinos…

Talking about games, I see that more and more people think that e-sport can become mainstream; but I’m not so sure about that. There is no referee, and when you see these guys playing, you understand that the randomness factor is almost null. So this makes e-sport closer to chess than to poker IMHO. And so that is not as mainstream as what gamers might think. We will see if I was right in a couple of years.

Now, let’s see another reason why I think randomness is good…

Randomness and Diet

Your mom always told you that it is very important to have 3 meals a day, everyday, at the same time. Right? What if I told you that actually introducing randomness to your diet was actually healthier?

If you check the diet of our ancestors, they were definitely not having 3 meals per day, everyday, at the same time. They were totally unable to predict exactly when they would eat, since this was relying on how successful their hunt trips were. So, due to the very random nature of their food intake, they were doing what we call nowadays a random Intermittent fasting (yes that is quite fashionable these days). And what science is now finding out, is that fasting can be healthy. Yes, you read it correctly: randomly skipping meals would be healthier than your 3-meal-a-day plan. It could even help killing cancer cells!

For the lazy readers, I am gonna explain the science in a very short (and so not super accurate) way. Basically, when you eat, your “primal” body thinks it is time to build muscle and store fat in anticipation of a potential starvation period. This state lasts for about 3–5h. The problem with our current way of life is that it means we almost never get the proper time to be in a Fasted mode.

But why would you want to be fasted? Actually fasting is great for our bodies: we use that time to clean the body via a process called autophagy. Basically, the body eats all the cells that are too old or damaged. Thus the link between fasting and fewer cancer instances (since cancer is made of damaged cells). And potentially an impact on aging since the body destroys the old cells.

Also, since we do not have any food, we start burning fat to feed the body. (No you do not need sugar to feed your brain, that is also a misconception. Check any article on ketosis to understand how it works)

Now, an important thing : as said above, our ancestors were unable to predict when they would eat. So the theory is that we should actually randomly fast if we want to optimize our cleaning potential. That’s why I personally try to sometimes randomly fast at least twice a week in order to maximize my health potential.

If you wanna geek out more on this, you can read Art de Vany’s book on the Paleo Diet; and about fasting, you have this great book by Dr Valter Longo, in italian only for now unfortunately.

Randomness and Decision making

Look I am not saying that all your decisions should be based on randomness. But, in cases when there both sides of your decision look even, randomness is the best way to take a decision. Because randomness is fair to everyone.

For instance, a soccer game will always begin with a coin toss to define who picks which side of the soccer field. If you think about it, there could be many other ways to decide that. Like:

• You take the first name of the 2 captains of each team, and the letter closer to “A” picks sides
• The team that won the previous game chooses again; or the contrary.
• The referee picks the team he prefers to choose sides first
• etc…

In the examples above, you can clearly see that there could be some objections as to how the choice is fair or not. But if you flip a coin (and the coin is not rigged of course), randomness will act as a totally objective judge. Randomness is never biased, and thus your best help when you got a dilemma to solve.

With all that said, I am not sure yet how I could apply that to change something about the world; Elon Musk created many mind blowing companies with his contrarian thinking, but so far, I only have participated in the creation of videogames. But maybe, one day, I will be able to find an industry or a specific thing where randomness could really have a positive impact. I just need to find what :)

What about you? What’s your contrarian idea? Please post it in the comments, I’d love to read new takes on “common” ideas and pre-conceptions.

Hey! Thanks so much for reading me! I’m so lucky to have you! If you can leave a comment or even just like the post, that would mean the world to me :) Thanks!