[logicallee]

yes and no. If as a game you were given eight years to read and learn (but not take with you) whatever documentation you wanted about technical knowledge (only), and then sent back to New York in 1860 with $1,000,000 in 1860 bills and the goal of the game is to make as large a fortune as you can in 20 years... then it should be obvious to anyone that the ideas you would have are incredibly valuable...literally priceless. They represent without exaggeration trillions of dollars of research over 155 years.

You can patent entire industries and fundamental advances. The hard part is just choosing what to focus on, that you can actually do in 1860 starting with $1,000,000 and maybe the patent system (though it's probably unfair that you're using a time machine - this is likely quite immoral as you're not the true inventor of anything.)

And then doing it.

In other words: the outcome of the game is about execution. But what you're executing is idea. The two go hand in hand. You have a real chance to become worth 2015$ 1 trillion within the 20 years - or generate a one-million fold return on the million. You can be worth as much as entire continents. But you have to do it right.

For starters, you have to be someone whose brain can ship those technical ideas back to 1860 in one piece. This is quite similar to someone with an idea today. Not everyone qualifies.

[mattzito]

While you are mechanically correct, your ideas would absolutely be hugely valuable, you have the benefit of already knowing what macroeconomic trends and historical events will happen.

Put another way, you could probably make exactly the same amount of money, if not more, with a "back to the future 2" scenario where you had zero ideas, but had a chart of various events that you could wager on or invest based on.

When we look at it from that perspective, it's only execution - can you correctly execute about the information you already have.

Soooo - yeah, it's not a great analogy. In general, having a perfect knowledge of what happens makes for bad analogies.

[logicallee]

Well, I said you can only use technical knowledge. If you really want to be anal about the analogy then the game is you can only dictate technical knowledge to someone in 1860 (or I guess show them diagrams, but only of technical things - you are not allowed to talk about anything else) and give them starting capital. Then how well you do at the game depends on the ability of the person you picked to...execute. (As well as understand the technical knowledge they've been dictated/shown) It's not hard to understand what I'm getting at. But if you pick someone who can't understand the ideas, you won't do well at the revised game.

Why this is a workable analogy is because this really is similar to the position that founders with technical ideas are in. They have this vision that something can more or less work - but even if it does they still have to execute on it. That's my point.

Everything you dictate in this revised game is 100% guaranteed to work, because you're reading it straight out of technical manuals for the scientists who build these things today. But that still doesn't make a company that manufacture these things pop out of thin air. You can transfer a very large part of a $1 trillion in R&D back in time -- the ideas; but you won't suddenly have a company as a result. Someone still has to make it all and sell it all.

As an example, even if Babbage had invented modern transistors, he didn't "almost" create Intel and IBM. These companies as such are quite separate from the idea.