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Value is created by doing

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Value is created by doing

#101

Post by jqm »

chii wrote: post #90
jqm wrote: post #86

I've never agreed with the idea that labor is the "sole" or even "primary", source of value. For example, I find nothing more valuable than clean air and water. Off topic, but I believe this should be the basis for funding society rather than appropriating a portion of people's productive labor. Land is valuable. But you don't really "own" it because no one made it. Likewise the Aluminum in a can or the steel in your…

> consumption is discouraged and production rewarded. how can this both be true? if consumption is discouraged, then what would be the reward for production? if it is something that is to be consumed, then by definition consumption is desirable. If the reward is not something that is consumed, the what is that reward?

I'm not sure I understand your point. Or maybe you don't understand mine.

Mine is that one should be taxed on the use of land and materials (which, from a larger perspective, belong to society and humankind as a whole) rather than on innovation and labor (which is, from a larger perspective, a form of theft and slavery).

By taxing like this, you reward innovation and production while discouraging wanton consumption of resources (leading to more efficient use of resources and more investment in innovation).

Re: Value is created by doing

#102

Post by mindcrime »

If you can’t figure out to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, go work for SpaceX (joining a great company is a much better plan than starting a mediocre one).

I love Altman's stuff, but I'm not so sure I agree with "joining a great company is a much better plan than starting a mediocre one". Why? Because no matter how great a company is, if you're an employee, you're still just an employee. You have a "boss" (OK, maybe, just maybe Valve aside), somebody who has you "under their thumb" and who can boss you around and redirect your energy and time, and/or fire you at a whim. And it doesn't matter how great your boss is, or how much you like him/her, you still have "a boss". That sucks. It sucks major donkey balls.

Well, it does for certain kinds of people anyway. It's a mindset thing. I cannot stand having a "boss" in the traditional sense. I'd much rather be running my own show, no matter how mediocre it is (assuming it gets at least to the point of qualifying as a "lifestyle business" and I can pay myself enough to pay the rent).

And yeah, yeah, I know that "you always have a boss" in a sense. Pedants don't bother replying to this. I'm not talking in metaphorical senses or generalities here. A Board of Directors, or "the market" or "your customers" are your "boss" in a metaphorical sense, but that's not the same thing as having one discrete person who can come into the room and go "Sooooo, Peter, you DID get the memo about how we're putting the NEW cover sheets on the TPS reports now, riiiiight? Yeeaaaaaaaaah" and yank your chain.

Re: Value is created by doing

#103

Post by thrush »

sheetjs wrote: post #21
natural219 wrote: post #11

All advice is a two-way street. I think at this point, the proverbial "advice market" is saturated with this idea that "doing" is far superior to "thinking". This is because, traditionally, hackers tend to lie squarely on the "thinking too much" end of the spectrum. I'm interested to read at least one post on the opposite advice -- what happens when you're too heavy on the "doing" end of the spectrum? Are there examp…

> Are there examples of startups failing because of too much emphasis of execution? Plenty, and we see it every day, except they don't call it "failure by doing too much". They call it things like "not understanding the target market" or "focusing on features rather than experience" (more generally "not thinking enough")

This is exactly what the Lean Startup talks about. Granted, I feel like the post was targeting the topic of procrastination more so than anything else. By Sam's logic, brainstorming and analyzing your business's market would fall under the territory of "doing", while reading and writing on hacker news may not.

Re: Value is created by doing

#104

Post by thrush »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #83
nostromo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what happens when you're too heavy on the "doing" end of the spectrum? technical debt

I'll add to that... Technical Debt = When you coded without thinking AND your project is successful and growing. It's debt because now you have to go back and fix/change the code. Technical Grant = When you coded without thinking BUT your project is NOT successful and fails. It's a grant because it saved you time. Most projects / startups fail so for most people "Just Do It" works better. Plus the product you envisio…

Have you ever heard of the concept of Technical Investment? Sometimes one's skill level simply makes it really difficult to avoid technical debt, but as you gain experience, your skill level rises and your code begins to minimize debt more and more. Rather than spend your time refactoring, if you spend that same time improving your skill then the loss of debt in the future may outweigh the debt you've already accumulated at each step.

Improving skills can take the form of learning a new tool (css -> sass), a new programming pattern (like currying and monoids in functional programming), and more along those lines.

Granted, a huge problem with technical debt comes when your playing with a team, and if X people are going to be using your code, but it takes Y time to explain how that code works, then if takes Z time to refactor that code, and only W time to explain after the refactoring. Then, if XY > Z + XW, refactor every time!

Re: Value is created by doing

#105

Post by sirgawain33 »

theoh wrote: post #44

Seriously, this _is_ the labor theory of value. Don't know why the other comment to point this out is dead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value It's completely inadequate. See, for example http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_a...

Great link to the talk, thank you. I haven't seen a good TED talk in years, but this was an exception.

That said, I agree with the other comments in this thread that linking the blog post to the Labor Theory of Value doesn't really make sense. I don't see anywhere in the post that defines "work" in a way that excludes activities that generated perceived value.

I think an interesting follow up conversation is to consider what "doing" really means. The Rory Sutherland talk you link makes a compelling case that there is an entire class of activities that generate value for a product/service but that you cannot directly measure in terms of material result (at least not right away) e.g. Frederick the Great spending time convincing people that potatoes are good wouldn't have tangible results until much later when demand rose.

Re: Value is created by doing

#106

Post by chris_mahan »

erusev wrote: post #66
chris_mahan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This morning I talked about working as a dishwasher in a restaurant with a coworker. I last did that when I was 18, more than 25 years ago, but I remember how hard it was (busy Chili's on University Drive in Fort Worth TX, next to TCU). There was a lot of working, but not a lot of thinking. And you get wet too.

Did you find a better job by just thinking?

Thinking I needed to get a better job was the first step.

Re: Value is created by doing

#107

Post by Futurebot »

DorintheFlora wrote: post #38
wlievens wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True indeed. Some ideas are really valuable, and I think it's mainly those that are well-informed, committed to a specific market (typically a niche) and ripe for execution. Maybe it's because many of the ideas in the "ideas are nothing" category are twitbook/fourit/squaresnap/flickchat/... clones, rather than ideas like "let's build a product for market X using tech Y to reduce problem Z".

I think it's a little more complicated than that. If you pay close attention to behavior, you can infer what people really think, on a deeper level than what they admit to. We have concepts for that in spiritual and psychological realms but not really in the realm of business. We have ideas like karma and Akashic records and the subconscious and Freudian slips. In crime/law (police, courts), we have ideas concerning…

We do have a word for that in econ/business: revealed preference. In the business world and the ones you mentioned, however, it's not always a reliable indicator; people routinely do things they do not want to do due to loyalty, face saving, fear, coercion, group pressure, and a pile of other things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference

Re: Value is created by doing

#108

Post by themusicgod1 »

Crito wrote: post #97
zeidrich wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average geek doesn't know a lot about hard sciences. The average geek is self taught and knows how to impress other people with scientific language. Rarely do I run into "geeks" that make me think, "Wow, this guy could write a novel paper on this". More often it's more a matter of "Wow, this guy knows just enough to completely misunderstand the subject but speaks like he has all the answers."

You should hang out with better geeks. Geeks that do , instead of just talk.

I do not think that you'll find geeks who do without gaping holes in their knowledge.

Re: Value is created by doing

#109

Post by godDLL »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #80
blah32497 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"what happens when you're too heavy on the "doing" end of the spectrum?" I can't think of a startup, but I can think of people like that. The first people that come to mind are the Mythbuster people. Very handy, very good at cranking out their ideas into meat-space - but my impression is that there is very very little critical thinking. This is probably in large part due to the demands of TV (You need cool gadgets an…

Experiments? When I go to the circus and watch a lion NOT eating the lion tamer, I can't conclude 100% of the lions won't eat people.

You have definitely not been thinking too much about that one.

Re: Value is created by doing

#110

Post by arvinjoar »

natural219 wrote: post #11

All advice is a two-way street. I think at this point, the proverbial "advice market" is saturated with this idea that "doing" is far superior to "thinking". This is because, traditionally, hackers tend to lie squarely on the "thinking too much" end of the spectrum. I'm interested to read at least one post on the opposite advice -- what happens when you're too heavy on the "doing" end of the spectrum? Are there examp…

I found out my mother was replacing thousands of duplicate rows in excel by hand, had she thought about it and googled the problem she would have been done in a few seconds, instead of a few days.
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