Luck surface area

I referenced Cate Hall's post about agency in the context of poker the other day. But there's much more than poker there, including the notion of "luck surface area." Some notes: Cate notes that caring about luck surface area has a skeptical basis. If it were easier to know what meetings would be fruitful, "meet anyone in the domain" wouldn't be as good a strategy. (One of my favorite stories is this one about Arthur Rock: he tracked his investments carefully and calculated that he would have done as well looking only at the quality of the talent and ignoring the actual business pitch.) Cate's discussion also suggests that luck-maximizing approaches also maximize for other things: because relevance might be anti-correlated with important kinds of novelty, "I'm courting luck" might also be described as "I'm avoiding over-indexing on either relevance or novelty." What feels like sheer luck might sometimes be effects of getting semirandom inputs in the right bundles (see here and here).…