[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.