The Carrot Problem: sharing the secret of your success

The Carrot Problem seen via Hacker News:

In World War II, the story goes, the British invented a new kind of onboard radar that allowed its pilots to shoot down German planes at night.

They didn’t want the Germans to know about this technology, but they had to give an explanation for their new, improbable powers.

So they invented a propaganda campaign that claimed their pilots had developed exceptional eyesight by eating “an excess of carrots.”

If you’re going to trick people into doing something pointless, eating excessive carrots seems like one of the better ones. Still, there’s an issue: people who believed the propaganda and tried to get super-sight would be spending time and effort on something that couldn’t possibly solve their issue.

I’ll call this a Carrot Problem.

Once you look for Carrot Problems, you see them everywhere. Essentially, any time someone achieves success in a way they don’t want to admit publicly, they have to come up with an excuse for their abilities. And that means misleading a bunch of people into (potentially) wasting their time, or worse.

I love the name, but this is genuinely good insight. I think I’d distill the problem a bit more fundamentally down to this: successful individuals or organizations rarely have an interest in sharing what made them successful; most of them time in fact, they are heavily disincentivized from doing so.

The reasons aren’t necessarily nefarious: even if you have done nothing immoral or illegal, sharing the secret of your success simply creates more competition for you, which is counter-productive for you.

Further, you may not actually even know what made you successful! Oh you might think that you know: it was definitely all your hard work, or connections, or unique idea, etc. but chances are that in reality you had a generous dose of luck¹ without which it all would have been for nothing.

Keep this in mind whenever you encounter the success story of a famous person or rich company: chances are that even if the story is accurate and true and they are not trying to make you eat carrots, it is unlikely to be reproducible, as it will almost inevitably fail to account for all the hidden “lucky” factors.