The competitive advantage of not knowing you’re wrong
When not knowing the odds improves your chances
yakupyavuz /Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks
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“A great challenge of life: Knowing enough to think you are right, but not knowing enough to know you are wrong.”
— Neil deGrass Tyson
“Ideas are so fragile,” Sir James Dyson reflected in a recent interview.
He would know, given the extraordinary determination it took to protect the very fragile idea he spent a lifetime pursuing: a bagless vacuum cleaner.
Dyson originally found it so difficult to raise money for his idea that he still owns 100% of Dyson Limited, his maker of “cyclonic” vacuum cleaners (which really are so, so much better than the ones with bags).
Because such ideas are “so easily knocked away” by people who know how unlikely they are to succeed, Dyson warns prospective inventors and entrepreneurs that “experts are dangerous.”
Experience, he argues, doesn’t just add knowledge — it adds reasons to 1) not try things and 2) stop trying hard things.
This is why he hires students as young as 17 to work at Dyson.
“If you’re experienced, you know why not to do something or how not to do something,” he explains. “Whereas if you’re naive and you’re a young engineer…you don’t have that negativity.”
Having endured such expert negativity himself, Dyson now values the naivety he needed to ignore it.
“I love naivety,” he says, “because it creates a different way of doing things, and we’ve got to find different ways of doing things all the time.”
Similarly, Henry Ford was universally told that his different way of doing things wasn’t worth pursuing: An internal combustion engine could never compete with steam engines.
Ford persisted, of course, and steam engines were soon on the road to extinction.
“That is the way with wise people,” he wrote in his autobiography. “They are so wise and practical they always know to a dot just why something can’t be done. They always know the limitations.”
Like Dyson, Ford therefore preferred employees with “a state of mind in which nothing is impossible.”
“The moment one gets into the ‘expert’ state of mind,” he warned, “a great number of things become impossible.”
Most of the time, those things really are impossible.
But the opportunity cost of not pursuing the impossible is high: Dyson is now a $20 billion company and the Ford Motor Company is still making four million cars a year.
Such unlikely success stories are evidence that, in business, naivety and ignorance can be competitive advantages.
“If I ever wanted to kill opposition by unfair means, I would endow the opposition with experts,” Ford quipped. “They would have so much good advice that I would be sure they would do very little work.”
Startup investor Paul Graham makes a similar argument, valuing youthful naivety over expert experience.
“One reason the young sometimes succeed where the old fail,” he says, “is that they don’t realize how incompetent they are.”
This lack of insight allows youthful entrepreneurs to profit from a form of deficit spending — borrowing confidence from assumed future success: “When they first start working on something, they overrate their achievements,” Graham explains. “But that gives them confidence to keep working, and their performance improves.”
Dyson, for example, so overrated his ability as an engineer he believed it would take him just one year to build a commercially viable cyclonic vacuum cleaner.
It took him 14.
Had he foreseen that, it’s unlikely he ever would have gotten started — so it’s good that he naively didn’t.
“Someone clearer-eyed,” Graham adds, “would see their initial incompetence for what it was, and perhaps be discouraged from continuing.”
Dyson never got discouraged.
“I’d get up excited every morning,” he later recounted of his time spent building 5,127 non-working prototypes. “Even though I knew it probably wouldn’t work, there was always that chance it might.”
Never change, crypto
Crypto ideas are often easily — and often rightly — dismissed: Luna, memecoins, NFTs.
But I admire the industry’s enthusiasm, against all expert advice, in repeatedly pursuing them.
Because the enthusiasm, however naive, does occasionally pay off: Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins.
Sometimes it’s an old idea that crypto reinvigorates with seemingly no knowledge of past failures, as with prediction markets.
Sometimes it’s an idea that people naively refuse to give up on — like Zcash.
On the whole, it’s been a disappointing year for crypto, but the recent success of things like prediction markets and Zcash is evidence that the industry’s youth, inexperience, disregard of experts and unrealistic persistence are all competitive advantages.
Crypto in 2025 is not as youthful as it was when, say, Jai Bhavnani co-founded Rari Capital at the age of 18 in 2020.
And the industry is getting ever more populated with experts coming over from traditional finance.
So it might be losing some of the naive edge that Dyson, Ford, and Graham so value.
But maybe there’s a happy medium to be found?
Dyson was encouraged when people kept telling him his idea for a new kind of vacuum cleaner would never work: “The more it was turned down, the more I realized I had something,” he said, “because they never really gave a good reason.”
In 2026, crypto will continue to be told by many experts it won’t work — often for good reasons.
Its success might be a function of which ones it judiciously ignores.
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