Let there be more biographies of failures • Hacker News Board

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#141

Post by sradman » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 8:04 AM UTC

mjfl wrote: post #95

the problem with wanting to write biographies of failures is the same problem with publishing negative results in science: there are too many failures, and too many ways to fail. It's like entropy - there are so many ways to do something wrong that it's not very efficient to learn how to do something by enumerating all the ways you cannot do it. Much rarer is success, which is why it's more worth the time to study. M…

> Was Nikola Tesla a failure?

He was a brilliant innovator that added value to the world. He was a failed entrepreneur that did not recapture part of the value he created. That makes him a huge success in my books but I wish he was more comfortable and content in his final years.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#142

Post by roflc0ptic » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 10:07 AM UTC

iroh2727 wrote: post #98

roflc0ptic wrote: post #24

The whole TV show “Halt and Catch Fire” was basically about serial failure by a bunch of technically minded narcissists. I’ve never related more to a television show. Notably, it got ignominiously cancelled. I think failure is bad entertainment.

How is HACF bad entertainment? Greatest show ever IMO

I'm saying I like it a whole lot. I'm just saying I think it had limited appeal because it wasn't really the hero's story archetype. Or even an anti-hero archetype.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#143

Post by roflc0ptic » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 10:09 AM UTC

mikestew wrote: post #74

prepend wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved that show and think it finished rather than was cancelled. But many of the folks I recommended it to, didn’t like it. Various reasons provided but I remember stuff like “depressing” and “failure” coming up a lot.

I grew up in that era, and maybe that's the problem, but it struck me as a poorly-done "Mad Men" for geeks. The nostalgia wasn't just tacked on, it was duct-taped and painted bright green to make sure you noticed. One scene that stands out in my mind was when the older business owner is ordering some US Robotics modems. As the scene cuts away from him with a phone in his hand: "Of course I want the V.32!!!11!" I crin…

For us youngsters, I think that was probably a necessary move - I don't know what I'm supposed to feel nostalgic for, so by making it obvious enough, I could vicariously imagine "Oh, I bet other people are supposed to be feeling nostalgic right now." shrug

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#144

Post by b3kart » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 11:16 AM UTC

bongoman37 wrote: post #137

mjfl wrote: post #95

the problem with wanting to write biographies of failures is the same problem with publishing negative results in science: there are too many failures, and too many ways to fail. It's like entropy - there are so many ways to do something wrong that it's not very efficient to learn how to do something by enumerating all the ways you cannot do it. Much rarer is success, which is why it's more worth the time to study. M…

Biographies of failures are not the same as negative results in science. A negative result has value and it may not be as sexy as a positive result but should be published if not for anything more than to prevent other people from going down the same path or to add more data in meta studies. Also, negative or positive depends on how the original hypothesis is framed. One person could claim that X has no effect on Y a…

I don't think negative vs. positive is a useful bifurcation here, both for biographies and scientific results. I'd rather we do interesting/surprising vs boring/expected. In other words, can we learn something from this? There are biographies of "failures" that are full of wisdom and reflection, as well as biographies of "successes" that have stumbled upon the success without so much as a second thought, and vice versa. Same for scientific results.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#145

Post by colineartheta » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 3:43 PM UTC

pototo666 wrote: post #85

I think of this topic this very morning. I am entering the fourth month of second entrepreneurial attemp. It feels harder than my last attemp, which failed. I have no funding (yet) and I have a child now. I can't keep 8 hours straight sleep. Will my body cracks? I interviewed my mom this morning, who failed her several attempts in business and got lupus erythematosus. She said that she never felt tired at that time.…

The very obvious answer is no, nobody should ever work so hard as to hurt their health.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#146

Post by mdip » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 4:26 PM UTC

Judgmentality wrote: post #63

mdip wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure; but nobody who takes the 1000x risk does so believing they don't hold something that reduces that 1000x risk, either, whether deluded in that thinking or not. My Dad knew the statistics about his chances for success, and he had a very realistic picture (which turned out to be true) of what those statistics would look like when the variable being applied was "him". But the 1000x risk issue applies in some ways.…

> Maybe the HN crowd has different problems in this area than the world-at-large, but "an unrealistic expectation of success in business" is not common among grown-ups. Have you never met someone who opened a restaurant? Peter Thiel actually uses this as a talking point. The surest way to lose money is to open a restaurant, and yet there are always people lining up to do so.

  > Have you never met someone who opened a restaurant?

Yes, two actually. Restaurants are incredibly difficult businesses to succeed in. But, to answer your question: my brother-in-law ran a pizza/sub restaurant in a small town, and a friend of mine ran a fancy restaurant in a resort town.

Both of them are tricky situations. My brother-in-law sold his business after being moderately successful (he did it full time and made a living for himself, but it was a lot of work for what he took home). He sold to form a new business with his wife, which is very successful. My brother-in-law, though, had no loans and started the business while living with mom/dad so had it failed, he'd have been out his "life savings (at 22) with no paycheck coming in". He ended up with a business that could sustain itself and him, and did so for a few years, but just barely.

My friend's fancy restaurant completely failed. His restaurant was one of the best places I've ever eaten[0], located in a lake-house town where my family has a vacation house. He lived upstairs with his family, and the place was packed during the summer, but he couldn't charge what he needed to charge to re-coupe the cost of the quality of food he served. His business failed, he moved out of town and went back to teaching but I believe he's opened up a new place out of state, recently.

Did they both expect to be successful? Yes. And since I didn't know Andy (fancy place) prior to his restaurant, I can't say for sure what his thinking was going into it, but the first year he was open he admitted that he knew he was taking a huge risk -- there is literally no business between October and May, and previous fancy places like this have failed regularly in that city. It's a bummer -- this place was amazing.

[0] It was a place you could go on the weekend and were bound to run into a local celebrity/basketball/football/baseball player; it busy/reservation only but small. He was only open Thu-Sun, everything locally sourced and the menu that day based on the best of what he could find (usually bought that morning).

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#147

Post by the_greyd » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 4:32 PM UTC

olivertaylor wrote: post #12

Amen! I've found that 9 times out of 10 successful people follow the same advice and believe the same things as unsuccessful people (at least they SAY they do). So it's really useful to look at people who failed yet followed the same advice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

If I understand, we are talking about a very narrow definition of success and failure here, professional success which is recognition, fame and riches? That seems to be a rare product of being lucky; where what you like doing and what you have an aptitude for, is exactly what's needed by the society in the field you're working in. Then you need to know the right people and be in the right place to get the recognition for it. All these things need to align, so it doesn't surprise me that these are rare events. And if you do happen to be one of the successful people it often deludes you to think it had something to do with YOU, rather than it mostly being a product of all the circumstantial things beyond you.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#148

Post by mdip » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 4:39 PM UTC

carbonguy wrote: post #71

Judgmentality wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe the HN crowd has different problems in this area than the world-at-large, but "an unrealistic expectation of success in business" is not common among grown-ups. Have you never met someone who opened a restaurant? Peter Thiel actually uses this as a talking point. The surest way to lose money is to open a restaurant, and yet there are always people lining up to do so.

Are you making the argument that "people who think it's a good idea to start restaurants" are representative of "grown-ups?" I think you're right insofar as you point out that opening a restaurant is a fraught enterprise, but I don't really think that refutes the comment you're responding to - the overwhelming majority of adults don't open restaurants, even though there are always plenty of dreamers who think it's a…

  > "people who think it's a good idea to start restaurants" are representative of "grown-ups?"

I laughed at this one, but there's a lot to that statement. My theory on why restaurants fail at such a disproportionate amount compared to other, similar, businesses is that the average American, observing a restaurant hundreds of times in their life, feels they have a pretty good idea of what it takes to make one work. Looking at the difference between what the consumer pays for food versus what they pay for it at a restaurant gives the impression that there's a large margin, as well. Everyone, in one way or another, knows how to cook but few know how to cook well, at scale.

All that to say, for some people, it probably is a really good idea to open a restaurant. There are examples of extremely successful restaurants all over the country and restaurateurs who are capable of taking a pile of cash, picking a location/staff and turning the pile into profits. It's easy to under-estimate the skills required to do this when a quick walk/drive leads you to a row of successful (struggling) restaurants, all packed to the gills[0] charging 10 times grocery prices for food/liquor and think "I can do that".

And I'd agree with you -- that's not really representative of a "grown-up"[1]

[0] Because you showed up there on Saturday just like everyone else.

[1] I used that term over "adult" as it implies emotional maturity but wasn't sure it'd be clear. :)

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#149

Post by the_greyd » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 4:42 PM UTC

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #87

olivertaylor wrote: post #12

Amen! I've found that 9 times out of 10 successful people follow the same advice and believe the same things as unsuccessful people (at least they SAY they do). So it's really useful to look at people who failed yet followed the same advice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

I think the important bit is to pay attention to what the successful do differently from common sense advice, not the bits that everyone follows. For example, Elon Musk's housing choices when traveling, Steve Jobs' higher education, Tesla's approaches to thinking.

I don't think those are the defining factors of why they got famous or successful out of all the highly intelligent and hard working people out there. The fact that they got famous brings light to their ideas, which makes you think there's something special about them.

You'd be surprised to find many many many highly intelligent people out there with clever way of doing things, and I'd argue no less intelligent than elon musk or jobs or any other famous person. Our culture right now worships successfuly entrepreneurs as Gods with amazing brains who cracked the problem, but really it's more of luck and being at the right place at the right time.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#150

Post by mdip » Thu, Mar 18, 2021, 4:45 PM UTC

gwerbret wrote: post #57

mdip wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thinking is that many of the kinds of engineering failure stories you refer to are about the failure, itself, or the victims of the failure (Therac-25, for example), but not often primarily about a single individual's life of failure (or even a single individual's sole role in a failure). They might also be about the engineering teams/groups involved (Challenger explosion) and sometimes about a specific engineer (…

> What I hate when I'm reading these things is the colorful, biography-like nonsense that major publications (and self-important "journalists") like to toss into stories I've noticed that many supposedly serious, non-fiction books written in the past two decades begin (and are liberally interspersed) with such "prose"; I personally find it so irritating that I invariably drop the book immediately and read no further.…

  > I imagine it represents an effort, across the publishing industry, to make non-fiction books more appealing to the general public.

I'd never thought about that, but I think you're right. And it really comes off distastefully -- like the writer feels they're so important that we must care about his job rather than the product. It's a sort of "code smell" for journalism for me, like the journalist is trying to personalize the story so that I feel a connection with them and accept whatever narrative they're trying to create.