Jan 2, 2019 · 46m · a16z
a16z Podcast | Seeing into the Future -- Making Decisions, Telling Stories
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of the a16z Podcast, host Sonal Chokshi, Chris Dixon, and author Steven B. Johnson explore advanced strategies for long-term, high-stakes decision-making. They examine how cognitive tools, narrative simulations, group diversity, and decentralized technology frameworks enable individuals and organizations to navigate complex, multi-variable futures.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The host holds 11.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The host as informed peer 4.3 Guest teaching 3.8 Guest disagreement 1.0 The host pushing back 1.8
speaking balance: gold is the host, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 26:26 Questioning the point of deliberate decision-making
Sonal directly questions whether deliberate decision-making is even worth attempting given our inability to predict second-order effects, forcing Steven to defend his book's central premise.
Hardest push from the host ▶ 26:26 Sonal pushes back on predictive decision frameworkSonal challenges the guest's framework by asking why bother making a deliberate decision if second and third order effects are fundamentally unpredictable.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 18:49 Explaining the hidden profiles dynamic in decision-makingSteven introduces the technical psychological concept of hidden profiles, educating the hosts on how group dynamics favor shared knowledge over unshared expertise.
The host holds their own ▶ 33:30 Chris articulates crypto incentive and software architecture theoryChris takes the lead in explaining how cryptographic incentives function as network self-healing mechanisms, demonstrating clear host domain mastery.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The host as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The host pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scenario Planning and the Role of Storytelling | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Chris offers a real-world example of oil company scenario planning, and Steven expands on Peter Schwartz's three scenario narratives (better, worse, weird). | |
| Multigenerational Choices, Superintelligence, and Science Fiction | 3 | 4 | 0 | 1 | Steven discusses multigenerational choices, while Chris and Sonal add context regarding climate change as a political issue and science fiction as a simulation tool. | |
| Limitations of Lab Studies and Complex Personal Decisions | 5 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Chris advocates for history over academic lab testing when analyzing complex systems and draws parallels between 1980s machine learning and modern simulations. | |
| Literary Novels and History as Human Simulations | 4 | 4 | 0 | 1 | Steven frames literary fiction as evolutionary cognitive simulations, with Chris bringing in Aristotle's view on emotional distance in tragedy. | |
| Group Decision Dynamics, Diversity, and Hidden Profiles | 2 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Steven educates the hosts on group decision dynamics, explaining how diversity outperforms raw IQ and introducing the concept of hidden profiles. | |
| Forecasting: Foxes vs. Hedgehogs and Polymathic Hobbies | 5 | 4 | 2 | 4 | Sonal points out an apparent tension between specialized expertise and fox-like polymaths. Sonal and Chris share examples from Xerox PARC and tech side projects. | |
| Extreme Time Horizons: Long Now and Interstellar Messages | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Steven describes METI interstellar messaging, while Sonal connects the topic to Cixin Liu's Three-Body Problem and the Dark Forest concept. | |
| Expanding Options, the High Line, and Optimal Extremism | 4 | 4 | 2 | 5 | Sonal challenges the core utility of long-term decision making if unforeseen consequences are inevitable, prompting Steven to explain how decision strategies improve outcomes. | |
| Open Protocols and Decentralizing the Internet | 6 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Chris outlines the problem of internet platform centralization, while Steven credits Chris's prior writings for inspiring his New York Times piece on open protocols. | |
| Cryptographic Incentives and Embedded Software Governance | 7 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Chris demonstrates deep domain expertise in crypto protocol architecture, explaining how Bitcoin's whitepaper is primarily an incentive design system. | |
| Practical Tools: Pre-Mortems and Bad Events Tables | 5 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Steven presents pre-mortems and bad events tables, while Chris elaborates on how top venture investors and entrepreneurs systematically order and mitigate risks. | |
| Weighted Moral Algebra and Machine Intelligence as Decision Partners | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Sonal links Ben Franklin's moral algebra to statistical variable weighting in linear models, and Steven describes machine intelligence as a partner in decision-making. |
Statements from this episode (27)
Steven B. Johnson: The most consequential decisions are slow decisions
“The decisions that really matter the most are slow decisions, are decisions that have a much longer both time span in terms of how much time you spend deliberating them, and then also the time span of their consequences.”
Johnson: Pros and cons lists remain the primary decision tool since 1837
“That technique of creating a pros and cons list, basically that was state of the art in 1837, 1838. And it's still kind of state of the art for most people. That's the one tool they have for making a complicated decision.”
Dixon: Historical outcomes are more often unexpected than linear
“And the funny thing, at least if you look at history, the weird is often the case, right?”
Johnson: Scenario planning builds agility even when predictions prove wrong
“The predictions don't even have to be right on some level for it to be a useful exercise, because a lot of this is about recognizing the uncertainty that's involved in any of these kinds of choices. It's creating a mindset that's open to unpredictable events. …”
Johnson: Science Fiction Serves as a Vital Long-Term Decision-Making Tool
“This is why science fiction is such an important kind of cognitive tool because you run these alternate scenarios of the future and they help us kind of imagine what direction we should be steering in, even if they're made up stories.”
Johnson: Sci-fi predicts the future more accurately than official forecasters
“I mean, I certainly think that you would find more things that ended up happening in fictional accounts than, you know, official people making predictions about the future outside of a fictional context.”
Dixon: Studying history is the only way to predict the future
“My bias has always been Towards history, for example, like the only way you're ever going to possibly get a lens on how to predict the future is to read a lot of history and understand how these things work because they're such complex systems that you're not …”
Dixon: Requiring Testability Dramatically Narrows the Scope of Research
“When you require everything to be testable, You also dramatically narrow the things that can be tested.”
Dixon: Computer simulations will become mainstream for testing complex decisions
“It feels like simulations today are this kind of fringe group. Over time, like, it just seems like a far better way to test these really complex things.”
Johnson: Computer simulations of complex personal emotional choices remain far off
“And that we don't have the luxury of simulating an alternate version of our lives. Cause we can't do that yet. We probably won't be able to do that for a long time, particularly the kind of emotional Complexity of choosing to marry someone or something like th…”
Johnson: Diverse, lower-IQ groups outperform homogeneous, high-IQ groups in complex decisions
“You take groups of high IQ individuals who are all from the same, say academic background or economic background and have them make a complicated group decision. And then you take a group of actually lower IQ people, but who come from diverse fields, professio…”
Johnson: Diverse members make insider groups more creative without even speaking
“The presence of difference in a group makes the kind of initial kind of insiders more open to new ideas. If you have kind of an insider group, a homogeneous group, and you bring in folks who bring some kind of difference, even if they don't say anything, the i…”
Johnson: Famous political experts predict the future worse than random chance
“All the experts are like worse than a dart throwing chimp at predicting the future. And the more famous you got, the worse you were at”
Steven B. Johnson: Breakthrough innovators are defined by having many hobbies
“A lot of the people who really are able to have these big breakthrough ideas, One of their defining characteristics is that they have a lot of hobbies.”
Steven Johnson: Extraterrestrial civilizations contacted by Earth will be more advanced
“By definition, they are going to be more advanced than we are, which is a whole complicated reason why that is, but they will be.”
Steven Johnson: Interstellar messaging consequences are delayed by thousands of years
“What I just love about it is just because of the speed of light and the distance you have to travel to these planets, this is a decision that by definition can't have a consequence for at least, you know, 5000 to 50,000 years, depending on the planet you're ta…”
Johnson: Framing choices as binary 'whether-or-not' options drives decision failure
“And folks have looked at one of the key predictors of a failed decision is it was a whether or not decision. There was just one alternative, like, should we do this or not?”
Johnson: Important ideas enter the mainstream from the margins of society
“So sometimes ideas that are important and that need to happen come into the mainstream from the margins.”
Dixon: Oculus would never have been funded without initial crowdfunding
“We were investors in, in Oculus, and I don't think Oculus would have ever gotten initially funded had it not been for the crowdfunding.”
Johnson: Blockchain Models Are Needed for Sustainable Open Internet Protocols
“Some of the blockchain Models and some of the token economy stuff that, that you've written about as a way of creating sustainable business models for open protocols, basically, which is what we really kind of need.”
Dixon: The Bitcoin white paper is essentially eight pages of incentives
“And one of the fascinating things about the Bitcoin white paper is it's essentially, you know, eight pages of incentives.”
Johnson: Crypto marks first time governance is built into software code
“But now really for the first time, the governance is actually built into the code”
Chris Dixon: Good Entrepreneurs Systematically Mitigate Ranked Risks
“Good entrepreneurs are very good at doing premortems, ordering the risks, and then systematically trying to mitigate them, right?”
Steven B. Johnson: Google's Self-Driving Patent Includes 'Bad Events Table'
“The original patent that Google filed for the self-driving car projects. Included in it is this thing they call the bad events table.”
Johnson: Machine intelligence will become key component of decision-making diversity
“The diversity is actually going to be also machine intelligence too, right? And increasingly, Part of that intellectual cognitive diversity is going to involve machine intelligence.”
Steven Johnson: Tetlock's superforecasters possess high openness to experience
“Tetlock's predictors the super forecasters that we talked about, they were, they had that personality trait in, in spades in general.”
Johnson: Novels train brain empathy systems better than other art forms
“Novels, in a sense, train the, kind of, empathy systems in the brain because you're sitting there like projecting your own mind into the mind of another listening to their inner monologue, their kind of consciousness in a way that almost no other art form can …”