Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

No More “Insight Porn”

jakobgreenfeld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 323 posts

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#31

Post by lumost »

enos_feedler wrote: post #4

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…

Consider how ineffective this advice is then. What decisions can you make? You could take this to mean that you should follow your gut, or not. Does it share anything useful for formulating a decision? And why is this approach better than the alternatives?

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#32

Post by bowsamic »

BoredPuffin wrote: post #27

Another piece of "Insight Porn" labelled as "No more insight porn", how ironic. 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…

It is indeed quite ironic. This article would have landed much better had it not tried to make a better version of the insight porn that it criticises so much. Just listing the problematic content would have been better.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#33

Post by fouric »

I really like this idea!

You can find it in all sorts of places. Here's one in video games: there are a lot of League of Legends videos by a channel called "Skill Capped" that each claim to have "one neat rule" or "5 mistakes to watch out for" to help you get better at the game. The only problem? The "one rule" is something like "don't do this thing unless you know that there's an 80% chance that it'll work" - and that's the hard part, that the video does nothing to help with.

I think that this is another flavor of "insight porn" where the video portrays itself as boiling down something hard into a simple insight - yet that insight is tautological, not useful, and/or skips the hard part.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#34

Post by koonsolo »

feintruled wrote: post #23

His six hour day thing reminds me of a wheeze a manager tried in my old company when it was coming up to crunch time. He sent an 'inspirational' email where he said that if we all were to simply work an extra few hours after work each day, then four hours on each of Saturday and Sunday, then - voila - we would magically find ourselves with the equivalent of an 8-day week. I don't think many took him up on this. Thoug…

This resembles a meeting I had in the past. The manager said we all had to work a little harder because the company was doing bad. He suggested to stay an extra hour every day.

He then concluded with "Oh yeah, and Li is going to take over my tasks for the next 2 weeks, because I'll be on holiday".

No kidding!

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#35

Post by ChildOfChaos »

anthropodie wrote: post #11
minihat wrote: post #7

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.

When there's is so much to consume one does wander do we really need this much to survive or to be a better self? I mean people have been living on this planet for 1000s of years without access to as much info as today.

We also have such limited time/attention/energy.

If you take the time a lot of people spend consuming content, like insight porn / productivity porn etc and instead spent that time doing more and reflecting more, you'd still likely be in a better place than the consumer

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#36

Post by bowsamic »

suction wrote: post #24
EmilyHughes wrote: post #19

Why does everything have to be some kind "porn" nowadays. Does anybody seriously think this is funny?

Does everything nowadays? I think the analogy to porn at least here is fitting. The idea porn as a word to mean "of no substance, for easy consummation, from morally questionable sources, to make a quick buck off desperate people" quite accurately describes all these "insight gurus", which to me are grifters.

That's not what it means. Look at subreddits like /r/historyporn or /r/earthporn. These do not mean porn in any kind of derogatory sense. It literally means nothing more specific than "lots of content that people like". It really does not carry a derogatory connotation, or at least it is most widely used in positive ways

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#37

Post by closedloop129 »

>When I’m consuming non-fiction content, I try to write down specific experiments I can try that put the things I “learned” into practice.

Could you turn this into a social network where people cooperate to do these experiments? It could be used to figure out which ideas are helpful and it could be used to help people when they are stuck implementing an idea.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#38

Post by swayvil »

notacoward wrote: post #26
swayvil wrote: post #12

>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 they really are trying to package their trick in a way that's universally useful, but failing. ...or their "trick" was really 100% incidental to their success, which sprang from causes they'd rather not reflect upon.

Oh, and he's got a newsletter. It's beside the point but seriously lol.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#39

Post by bombcar »

MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #28

I got super lucky. I started a company and didn’t really have any meaningful traction. I was about to shut it down. Walking out of the grocery store one night after work, I passed by my former manager when I was an intern. We got to talk for about 30 seconds, mentioned my company, she asked me to email her. I did, and that very quickly led to my first big customer which makes me about double what a FAANG swe would ma…

"Get lucky" is always the key - however, you can increase your "luck surface" by doing certain things (for example, you couldn't have gotten lucky if you hadn't started the company, nor if you hadn't bothered to talk to people).
Post reply on HN