11–20 of 195 posts
I love this mini-essay. The counter to this is that it'll be harder to raise capital for un-fashionable problems. If you pitched "ML for sandwich makers" right now you could raise a million bucks because so many VCs are making fashionable bets on ML.
It was more charming when he had to work hard to make his points known.
But hey, fame, right? Just famous people things.
There's so much more to say in this case, though! How do you avoid the traps? Waving a wand like "Just love something" leaves far too much to the imagination. Pointing at a prior essay at loving your work is helpful, but different.
Often, you have to actively offend people in order to find good problems to work on. The idea that people have devoted their lives to the wrong thing is inherently offensive to them. That's a point not covered here.
For example, I imagine that a lot of people who've studied 3D rendering for their entire lives are about to feel very outdated the moment neural network renderers displace them. And that's also a good counterexample to the point that "Often, the best place to search for new ideas is a place thought fully explored." It might often be true, but it's not always true.
And then there are the in-betweens. Bitcoin was in a field both thought fully explored (crypto + finance) and also unexplored, in a certain sense.
> If you can find a new approach into a big but apparently played out field, the value of whatever you discover will be multiplied by its enormous surface area. If you found something in a big, fashionable field with a huge surface area (cough ai/ml cough), wouldn't this multiplier apply to that fashionable field, too?
So, essentially, yes - fashionable fields will be well explored; the essay is about not getting sucked into fashionable problems in whatever field you're working in.
As a long-time pg supporter, it pains me to say this: I think at this point pg could write anything and it would show up immediately with critical acclaim. It was more charming when he had to work hard to make his points known. But hey, fame, right? Just famous people things. There's so much more to say in this case, though! How do you avoid the traps? Waving a wand like "Just love something" leaves far too much to t…
Some of his essays, no one else could have written them and brought a fresh, nuanced perspective.
These couple paragraphs wouldn’t get any attention if not for the name of the writer. Maybe that’s fine—great writers have their share of banality—but does reveal how susceptible we are generally to brand name over substance.
Particles (individual humans or small groups) move around in problem space as particles with position and velocity. Each individual's movement is influenced by its best known position locally but also the the best known global positions in the search-space. When better positions are found by others, individual change their course (take hints) and move towards them.
The problems would be the same. Too much randomness and it's just a random search. Too much convergence leads to local optimums.
As a long-time pg supporter, it pains me to say this: I think at this point pg could write anything and it would show up immediately with critical acclaim. It was more charming when he had to work hard to make his points known. But hey, fame, right? Just famous people things. There's so much more to say in this case, though! How do you avoid the traps? Waving a wand like "Just love something" leaves far too much to t…
At the other end, it is laborious to go through a well researched long-form articles.
I really like Drew Devaults blog [1] - I think he strikes a great balance between tweet-like articles (pg, daringfireball) and something extremely verbose (Stratechery).
As a long-time pg supporter, it pains me to say this: I think at this point pg could write anything and it would show up immediately with critical acclaim. It was more charming when he had to work hard to make his points known. But hey, fame, right? Just famous people things. There's so much more to say in this case, though! How do you avoid the traps? Waving a wand like "Just love something" leaves far too much to t…
December 2019
I've seen a similar pattern in many different fields: even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the contributors are promoted, because they've all worked on similar things.
Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding who to read. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into reading fashionable people's navelgazing.
If you want to try reading unfashionable people's works, one of the best places to look is fields that people think have already been fully explored: essays, Lisp, venture funding – you may notice a pattern here. If you can find a new author in a big but apparently played out field, the value of whatever you discover will be multiplied by its enormous surface area.
The best protection against getting drawn into reading the same things as everyone else may be to genuinely love what you're reading. Then you'll continue to read even if you find the same blogs as other people and think that it's too marginal to matter.
edit: pg's original reads like copypasta and I have no regrets
How can a statement like that be made? Is there some kind of authoritative directory of 'the smartest, most imaginative people' being 'surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on'.
Implied I guess Paul means 'who I've met or who I know of'. So then say that.
It's a big world out there. Who knows what anyone is working on or what they are thinking or have tried and why they haven't pursued it.
This is a bit like saying 'people love their dogs and will do anything for them if they are sick'. Just a general statement of opinion by one person (and generally accepted as being correct) but based on not anything even close to being scientific and/or backed up by any actual data. That part is fine. But if that is the case state it as such and not some absolute. Why does this matter? Because when someone like Paul writes something it will be taken by others to be some kind of important thought or fact.