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No More “Insight Porn”

jakobgreenfeld.com

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Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#271

Post by LouisSayers »

holoduke wrote: post #228
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…

It's always easy to say it's luck. But I don't think it is. You created opportunity. And that's the key thing. Create opportunities. As many as possible. I did something similar. Started with a dollar a day. Ended up with several thousands a day. The only thing I consider luck is the fact that a grew up in a stable family in a rich country where I got faced with computers at a very early age. I received enough time t…

There's an irony that people don't even recognise that they are already relatively more wealthy than much of the world when talking about "rich people".

We do create our own luck to a certain degree and for anyone born in a first world country we have so many opportunities all around us - many simply choose poorly.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#272

Post by ravi-delia »

vharuck wrote: post #102
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…

>"if you're the right sort of person, you have the right sort of hunches" To me, this sounds like a line from a multi-level marketing pitch. It sounds like they're saying "This may not apply to you," but a lot of people will hear "There are chosen people (and you're probably one of them)." It reminds me of the Calvinism sect of Christianity. They believed in predestination for salvation: God has always known who be a…

> So there was no point in trying to be virtuous, because the outcome was set before you were born.

Yeah, but just because Omega already either put the money in the box or didn't doesn't mean you should act like it doesn't matter. God is omnicient, and sees whether you'll get into heaven, but curiously enough at the end of the line we see it's the people who did virtuous deeds which wound up there. As you can't see the stamp on your soul, you might as well act like your actions will decide it, since the outcome of your choices is what God looked at when He stamped you in the first place.

It's a fairly pointless objection seeing as I doubt either of us are Calvinists, but their take on Predestination annoyed me when I learned about it, especially since they acted virtuously anyway (or pretend virtuously, whatever)!

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#273

Post by theonething »

vharuck wrote: post #102
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…

>"if you're the right sort of person, you have the right sort of hunches" To me, this sounds like a line from a multi-level marketing pitch. It sounds like they're saying "This may not apply to you," but a lot of people will hear "There are chosen people (and you're probably one of them)." It reminds me of the Calvinism sect of Christianity. They believed in predestination for salvation: God has always known who be a…

I see PG's quote as true, but hard to swallow.

The truth is you do have to be the right kind of person to be successful (in this context, successful at startups). A person born with severe retardation or another mental incapacity is not the right kind of person to be successful at startups.

The right kind of person has the genetic makeup, personality type, upbringing and/or access to resources to become successful. Not everyone has this and that's okay. And also, you (usually) don't know if you're the right kind of person until you try. So if you want to, try and keep trying until you don't want to anymore.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#274

Post by borroka »

bombcar wrote: post #39
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).

There is another layer here, which is how much you increase the "luck surface" by doing certain things. Is it 10%, so you move from 1% probability to have "success" to 1.1%? Or 50% from 30 to 45%?

Increasing the luck surface sounds smart and insightful and I have been guilty to use the term quite nonchalantly myself, but without quantification and direction of the luck-surface actions, it means very little.

In the specific case discussed, apart from the "building a company" part which is admirable but kinda to be taken for granted when selling services, it sounds like walking increased their luck surface. Had he taken a Uber or gone to a different store, maybe the company won't be here (guessing). I continue to call it luck.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#275

Post by Miserlou57 »

deltree7 wrote: post #237
nickff wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, one extreme example is buying lottery tickets; it's the best way to expose yourself to the potential upside of winning the lottery, yet the expected value is quite negative. That example is quite bracing, but I think it points out that there are many ways to build this 'luck surface', and the expected values of each are probably very different, and likely situational.

Expected value is really a dumb way to evaluate lottery tickets. I can't believe even supposedly good mathematicians use it. The next dumb way to evaluate lottery tickets is to compare it with other long odds (lightning strikes, marrying your favorite actor). If you want to play along, the probability of you winning the lottery is 10000000000000x more favorable than the probability of you existing in this universe. B…

I had an argument with my boss about this. He is a business owner and pretty successful one, and he calls the lottery a poverty tax, or a stupidity tax. If it were a game you play in Vegas, then he’d be right.

It’s my opinion that just buying one ticket, for say $2, essentially is a trivial and inconsequential amount of money that exposes you to incredible upside. Imagine if the ticket only cost a penny. At that point it’s practically free, but free exposure to life changing wealth. I don’t know if that counts as zero to 1 according to Peter Thiel, but it’s basically zero to something, for essentially nothing

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#276

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#277

Post by soulofmischief »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #265
soulofmischief wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my friends went to space and had her life radically changed last year, and the opportunity entirely arose from the fact that she is one of the kindest and nicest people you will ever meet, and if you were tasked with filling the seat on that rocket, she'd be on the top of your list. She got "lucky" in the sense that narrowly surviving bone cancer as a kid gave her a compelling story, but it's everything she di…

I saw the netflix documentary about that mission and Hayley was basically the main character.

That documentary was pretty good. It's awesome seeing her leverage the whole situation, interviewing with so many people, joining the SpaceX medical team, she really took the inspiration part of inspiration 4 seriously. Both her and her brother are very kind, her brother is decent at smash bros too.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#278

Post by [deleted] »

matwood wrote: post #106
nicbou wrote: post #22

Some types of insight is still valuable, and tends to stick longer: * "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 are paid to create value, not write code. When I was in college in the late 90s I was fortunate enough to figure this out through experience. First, there was a real fear all programming jobs were going to be outsourced. So I decided I needed programming + something else (in this case business). Second, as a sophomore I got a job at a small custom software shop in town (it was the late 90s - if you had a pulse…

[deleted]

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#279

Post by zigman1 »

rograndom wrote: post #56
bombcar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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).

Not just getting lucky, but being ready to get lucky. If they didn't have the company or the product already, bumping into the former manager wouldn't be enough. And I think I've just given the type of advice TFA is railing about :)

Ross Brawn said in his book about strategy that the luck is preparation waiting for opportunity

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#280

Post by p3rls »

pm215 wrote: post #210
rsanek wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rough self-talk from Marcus Aurelius in this passage. Not a big fan of this kind of approach personally. I've found that if I need to do this kind of self-motivation, I should be thinking much higher-level for the causes -- why do I not want to get out of bed? Perhaps I'm not working on the right thing, and need to change careers? Or perhaps I'm not dealing with something emotionally that is preventing me from doing…

Yeah, MA is very keen on the separation between brain (what he calls the "directing mind") and body, to the extent that he thinks it's possible for the brain to ignore pain because that's the body's problem, and it's only something that makes the brain feel bad if the brain chooses to feel bad about it. If your philosophical framework looks like that then it's not really conducive to "fix the things in the outside wo…

MA was a sage, but as Seneca said we do not have to be a sage. We should instead content ourselves with walking the same path, if at a crawl.

But really, what negative external could be more intractable than the hordes of Germans lining upon the Rhine and Danube? And yet MA rose up each morning to deal with them as seen in that documentary with Russel Crowe

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