111–120 of 808 posts
This video is relevant. They talk about "openendedness", serendipity, the tyranny of objectives, the evolution of ideas (and biology), inventing new problems not just solving problems. There are important implications in AI. Kenneth Stanley - Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned on Machine Learning Street Talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E&t=3016s
Graham's obviously inspired by some Kuhnian paradigms here, but in Grahamiam fashion, he doesn't cite anything to back it up. What I find interesting where he calls most people conservative is how when I'm discussing VCs, YC, etc with non SV people is we talk about how conservative they are. YC's business model for years was predicated on finding talent (kids) that was undervalued, underpaying them (10k was the initi…
This is a great essay. I follow similar logic when assessing bitcoin. 1. Listen to as many viewpoints as possible 2. Remove the people who are not domain experts 3. Remove the people who are blinded by their own financial interests or ego. 4. Remove the people who are influenced by social pressures ( good and bad ) 5. Assign probabilities to the remaining viewpoints evenly. 6. Repeat steps 1-5 and chart the progressi…
Who exactly is a "domain expert" in bitcoin? The whole thing was created by an anonymous developer 10 years ago, and all of the so called "domain experts" are johnny come latelys who smelled a quick buck.
I wonder if most people realize this? In my experience, it seems like a characteristic that defies intellect and education. Incredibly smart people are, if anything, someone's more dismissive of new ideas because of their confidence that it just won't work.
I agree with the general gist of this, however the crux is that most ideas that turn out to be revolutionary just don't originate within the accepted circle of domain experts, exactly because being a domain expert makes you more unlikely to think out of the box. Google didn't come out of Yahoo. Napster wasn't founded by music industry execs. Friendster didn't evolve into Facebook. Match.com didn't invent Tinder. It's…
Larry Page and Sergey Brin were domain experts - they were doing a PhD dissertation on mapping and indexing the web.
The other businesses you mention aren't all that crazy; they just needed good implementation.
Graham's obviously inspired by some Kuhnian paradigms here, but in Grahamiam fashion, he doesn't cite anything to back it up. What I find interesting where he calls most people conservative is how when I'm discussing VCs, YC, etc with non SV people is we talk about how conservative they are. YC's business model for years was predicated on finding talent (kids) that was undervalued, underpaying them (10k was the initi…
> There's nothing original there, it's the business model of carpetbaggers and robber barons. How boring. Indeed. Venture capitalism is still capitalism, with all its abuse and exploitation.
As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel corona-virus within a year. These companies didn’t do it out of good will, they did it because they knew they could make money. Many socialist countries are struggling because it turns out it’s hard to force people to produce innovation without the right incentive structures in place.
If you want to blame anyone blame God for making human nature this way. Capitalism is just the system that is most effective at tapping human psychology to push people to produce the best possible work.
A crazy idea is just betting a majority is wrong. What makes it smart is not about being right, it's that you have figured out how to make money if the consensus is vulnerable or wrong.
Some of the the biggest startups and plays of the last decade were bets against conventions and rich country taboos like letting strangers crash on your couch, driving strangers around in your car, straight women wanting anonymous hookups and the normalization of sex work, non-technical people using cryptography, working class people investing in alterantive assets - let alone understanding what a short squeeze is enough to execute one, watching movies on little laptop screens.
What makes an idea 'crazy' is that it is against one that people align with because the alignment itself means being aligned to power. Most of what people believe, they do so because it works for them, and by works I mean aligns them to what they percieve to be powerful. Most money seems to be made getting short weaker middle class conventions.
A crazy idea is making the call that an emperor has no clothes. I suspect the secret to getting short naked emperors is not so much a track record for upholding convention, but rather, a track record of suviving.
Very interesting. This sounds like a response to the Mighty [0] launch which Paul Graham has been defending on twitter recently after an outcry from some of the 'hardcore' developers such as Jonathan Blow [1] and Casey [2]. [0] https://www.mightyapp.com/ [1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 [2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224
My hang up with Mighty isn’t about their idea or their technology or their execution. It’s impressive to see what they’ve done. My issue is that it’s not a product I could feel good recommending to anyone, at least at the high pricing that was proposed in the last discussion. In an era of $999 M1 Macs (and even cheaper AMD laptops) and readily available financing options, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to throw the…