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Researchers and Founders

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Researchers and Founders

#31

Post by allenu »

Tarrosion wrote: post #17

A small point only tangential to the main point of this post, but something I've noticed about Sam's writing before: Is anyone else offput by the phrase "best people"? I get (or at least hope) it's a shorthand for "best at their respective job of researcher/founder," but it really seems to reduce people's innate worth and goodness to this single dimension in a somewhat unnerving way.

My issue with it is that a hand-wavy qualification that communicates only what you want it to mean.

How does one define "best" at all in this context? If you devote all your efforts to researching a problem no one is looking at and still come up with nothing, are you still considered one of the "best people"? What if you are researching a problem many others are investigating and then do find something new? It feels very much like hindsight bias to apply such a moniker.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#32

Post by underdeserver »

vikramkr wrote: post #24
underdeserver wrote: post #4

I wonder what these differing qualities are, then. It sounds very generic, but I've found it to be true. If I spend time thinking about what's the best way forward, then just do it, relentlessly and persistently, and with a healthy disregard for cynicism and disbelief from others, I get a lot done. It also reminds me of the concept of "taking ideas seriously": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8jyAdRYbieK8PtfT/taking-…

In the link you posted, there's a disclaimer that the author no longer endorses the post. Do you know why/is there an updated post from the author? I'm curious what changed in the author's thinking and what particularly they no longer agree with.

I just noticed that too. No idea.

I also disagree with a lot of how the idea is presented in that text, but the idea itself - that if you get convinced of a basic point, you should extract the second, third, fourth and fifth order effect of that idea - is profound.

It reminds me of a story of a startup that did cybersecurity for SCADA systems, for factories. They would connect to diagnostics APIs, do anomaly detection, and could then alert on any cyber attacks.

Turns out factories are extremely sensitive to downtime (millions lost per hour of downtime), and a lot of them operate under "if it works don't touch it". So they pivoted - instead of actively tapping APIs, they would passively sniff network traffic, draw a picture of the network and what talked to what, and do anomaly detection on that.

But reality took the passivity idea seriously - and the value to factory operators ended up being visibility into the network topology. The company pivoted away from cybersecurity and into analytics and made a lot of money.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#33

Post by jononor »

arikr wrote: post #22
Tarrosion wrote: post #17

A small point only tangential to the main point of this post, but something I've noticed about Sam's writing before: Is anyone else offput by the phrase "best people"? I get (or at least hope) it's a shorthand for "best at their respective job of researcher/founder," but it really seems to reduce people's innate worth and goodness to this single dimension in a somewhat unnerving way.

No. It seems clear to me he's talking about the best people in those groups from the perspective of their work output.

Work output as in financial success/reward, prestige or impact, or something else?

Re: Researchers and Founders

#34

Post by bonoboTP »

This post would not survive blind review, though.

The author's brand makes it look very insightful but if you look closely it's really cliche. Yeah, no shit, successful people work hard on important problems, they have small-scale laser focus and also large-scale vision.

Seems like the wisdom tree has been plucked, these startup wisdom blogs are getting emptier and emptier (see also Paul Graham...).

Re: Researchers and Founders

#35

Post by cossatot »

Frost1x wrote: post #18
cossatot wrote: post #2

I'd love to hear a bit more about the differences. I've spent my adult life in research environments (academic, nonprofit and industrial R&D) and while much of the activity seems entrepreneurial (particularly grant writing), the overarching structural differences between building something for profit vs. for the public good makes a lot of aspects of building a business a bit mysterious to me.

As much time as I've also spent time in R&D through industries, over the years it's moved from R&d to R&D to r&D... approaching D. The two, IMO, are converging. There's awfully skinny budgets for most research these days and so much focus on 'success' (short term ROI) and '[financial] sustainability' (translating research into products/services in business form). This is growing ever more true even in basic research,…

Yeah I am with you on this. In my current role, I can do R in as much as it links with D. But really I spend a lot of time building that ampersand rather than R or D specifically: constructing a framework to translate research results into a product, testing that product and then being able to guide the research based on the performance of the product.

That is in and of itself interesting, and the work (making earthquake forecasts and seismic hazard/risk models) is generally fun and has a lot more positive human impact than studying earthquakes because they are simply fascinating geophysical phenomena. But there are regularly a lot of great research ideas that go unexplored because we don't have the resources or immediate incentive to investigate them.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#36

Post by yt-sdb »

bonoboTP wrote: post #34

This post would not survive blind review, though. The author's brand makes it look very insightful but if you look closely it's really cliche. Yeah, no shit, successful people work hard on important problems, they have small-scale laser focus and also large-scale vision. Seems like the wisdom tree has been plucked, these startup wisdom blogs are getting emptier and emptier (see also Paul Graham...).

Right? Feels like an absurdly low-effort attempt at "thought leadership" with easily made connections to recently popular topics like Hamming and that ML guide. As a researcher, I have also thought about the similarities between starting a lab / research agenda and a startup, but this is a superficial analysis.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#37

Post by vzidex »

> They are creative idea-generators—a lot of the ideas may be terrible, but there is never a shortage.

I feel like I almost never have creative ideas - the entirety of my (short) engineering career has been spent working on school projects, contributing to a design team, or set projects at work.

Am I screwed if I want to be successful as a computer engineer? (specifically hardware)

Re: Researchers and Founders

#39

Post by war1025 »

vzidex wrote: post #37

> They are creative idea-generators—a lot of the ideas may be terrible, but there is never a shortage. I feel like I almost never have creative ideas - the entirety of my (short) engineering career has been spent working on school projects, contributing to a design team, or set projects at work. Am I screwed if I want to be successful as a computer engineer? (specifically hardware)

> Am I screwed if I want to be successful as a computer engineer?

Being able to do the work is really all it takes to be "successful" in the sense that you can support yourself and pay the bills.

Beyond that, it really depends on what your definition of "success" is. One of the biggest realizations on the path to maturity is that "success" has a different definition for basically every individual.

Re: Researchers and Founders

#40

Post by switz »

vzidex wrote: post #37

> They are creative idea-generators—a lot of the ideas may be terrible, but there is never a shortage. I feel like I almost never have creative ideas - the entirety of my (short) engineering career has been spent working on school projects, contributing to a design team, or set projects at work. Am I screwed if I want to be successful as a computer engineer? (specifically hardware)

Absolutely not -- in fact, being self-aware of your deficiencies is hugely important. You should find people that compliment your skillset. Not everyone needs to be a creative firehose. If you're capable of understanding and implementing other people's visions, you'll find a lot of success in almost any industry.

But also keep in mind -- creativity is a muscle that can be flexed. Don't sell yourself short. Work on it.

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