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Out of the 3 "Insight Porn" examples linked in the article, I think the Paul Graham essay seems out of place. I know I know, this is hacker news. Yet another person sticking up for pg. But I just don't think this essay (or others) is really trying to boil some dream/goal into steps. In fact, in the "How to get startup ideas" referenced in this post, pg says: "So if you can't predict whether there's a path out of an i…
* "Your perception of [practice] is wrong". Networking isn't sales or marketing, it's helping each other and building things together without sending invoices.
* "You value the wrong things". You are paid to create value, not write code. Negotiation skills pay more than technical skills [1][2]
* "The world doesn't work that way". A lot of the content you read is sponsored [3]
* "You're doing something unpleasant". Don't ask to ask [4]
[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
[2] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
Though to be fair to him, it was very specific and actionable advice!
Why does everything have to be some kind "porn" nowadays. Does anybody seriously think this is funny?
I think the invitation to subscribe to the author's newsletter at the bottom of the page is ironic. Love the label "insight-porn" though. Concisely captures the nauseous feeling of ingesting your 100th self help book.
>PS: Looking for More?
>If you’d like to get more honest strategies and proven frameworks for winning in life and business, then simply join my free newsletter here.
... which yeah, sounds like, "Sign up for some insight porn!".
>Many people that truly accomplished amazing things, when asked for the key to their success come up with some framework or playbook ... It’s just that people love to say things that make them look good. Or they really are trying to package their trick in a way that's universally useful, but failing. Because that's hard. Because people differ widely in the way they see and think. It's SO much easier to assume that th…
...or their "trick" was really 100% incidental to their success, which sprang from causes they'd rather not reflect upon.
And when do people like the author start labelling any over-doing, over-indulging behaviour "porn"?
Should I expect in a few decades time that people binge-watching documentary will give birth to "doco-porn"?
Catchy marketing at its worst.
On the topic though, beneath whatever words he put on top it's an age-old idea that until you start doing something hands-on, it'll be hard to tell what you already know and what you don't.
The advice giving and taking is not a new concept, and data-driven is not going to change it. If one doesn't like handling slimy things, no matter how good a piece of cooking advice is - it's not going to help. Imagine capturing meat can be slimy in datasets.
My advice: get lucky.
My insight porn version: 10 easy steps I used to get $500K ARR and how you can do it too
I'm totally with the author - what he calls 'insight porn', I think of as 'grind porn' - as underneath the 'insights', I believe what the genre is really selling is the paradigm that you're not achieving enough, and you need to work harder, and because there are only so many hours in the day, you need to work smarter too, and to do that you need our insights to help you be much more efficient. So I'd take it a step f…
> It’s so, so simple.
Complexity is overwhelming us all. Who doesn't want simplicity? Simplicity is to thinking what convenience is to labour. All you must do is reject all that baggage of education, moral struggle and "overthinking" things, and embrace the banal.
Behind many "Epiphanies", IMHO, is a message to "Let us do your thinking for you".
Why does everything have to be some kind "porn" nowadays. Does anybody seriously think this is funny?