Destiny? Or Luck? Or Beer?
You know the drill right? It doesn’t matter how insane the odds are, the plucky protagonist will win out in the end? Heck, Hollywood has been churning these movies out forever (Rocky Balboa, John McClane, Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt, ….) and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. I mean, yes, it’s now turning into Teams of Protagonists (Ethan Hunt and Friends, Marvel movies,…), but the underlying point is pretty much the same — Impossible Odds + Grit = Success . Hollywood, as usual, is not much more than a reflection of our culture. We see the same stories playing around us over and over and over again. Take Generative Adversarial Networks (•) for example. Ian Goodfellow came up with the idea for them during a beer-soaked argument , stayed up all night coding to prove his friends wrong, and — BOOM! — it worked on the first try! /via https://xkcd.com/1827/ The thing is, this doesn’t work as a strategy! Survivor bias is a powe...