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bonoboTPyesterday at 8:42 PM1 replyview on HN

The question is, why does anyone take the word of a company seriously which will agree with any idea if you pay them? After several iterations of this game (decades by now), someone would surely say "nah, we don't care about these charts and whitepapers, we know that the company who made them will agree with anything for money, so it's still a NO"

My hunch is that in fact they won't agree with just any idea. There is a limit to how extreme the idea can get, though probably the filter is indeed weak. Still, without this filter, people would propose even wilder ideas that maximize their own expected payoff at the expense of other players, so just the fact that it has to be signed off by an external party is still enough information for the powerful decision makers that they are willing to fund their services.


Replies

caminantetoday at 1:58 AM

Nah. They're conflicted and goal seek backwards from your wacky vision.

Look at NEOM in Saudi.

McKinsey took 130M in a year to recommend a 500B investment in a 105 mile city in the desert. Sunk 50B and project was revised to take 50 years and 8 trillion.

It's impressive salesmanship how they were able to bilk such a large sum and support interim approvals for the regime to launder favors. I can see people wanting that "conflict."