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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

311–320 of 808 posts

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#311
> The rewards for working on new ideas are weighted by the value of the outcome. So it's worth working on something that only has a 10% chance of succeeding if it would make things more than 10x better

This is the primary point here - the "crazy idea" may (and likely does) have a low probability of being correct and succeeding, but with an outsized reward it may still be worth pursuing. This is, almost by definition, the correct way of looking at it.

Also note that he's talking about crazy ideas from "reasonable domain experts", not your run of the mill crazy.

This is not just a response to Mighty - he's been talking about this for years.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#312

In case someone missed the story, Paul Graham is indirectly talking about the feedback received by Mighty App. And in this particular case, I don't think this is a valid defense. First, he clearly has too much skin in the game to be credibly neutral about it. Second, he avoids addressing the main critique about this "new tech". People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is infeasible or not valuable, bu…

Maybe this is a terrible stance but if the idea pisses off Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori, I wouldn't take that as a bad sign. jblow and Casey are brilliant programmers and I mean them no disrespect, but their philosophies are certainly in the vein of prescriptive, "correct" ways of writing code. Namely you should write code that is fast and efficient. Unfortunately (or not, depends on your view), programmers do no…

This is related to programmers tribes.

Casey and Jon and from the engineering tribe. The cool stuff tribe is what I call the business oriented tribe.

But I think you're missing the point.

The technical merits of Mighty is a secondary problem.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it literally means "being invested in something" regardless of the rest.

No it's not regardless of the rest. It implies actual risk. Some rich dude losing a dime is not skin in the game, unless the phrase is meant as completely meaningless masturbation. "Skin" implies an actual impact, otherwise it's just "in the game".

You are making it all about money but things like reputation, legacy, and ego can easily be "skin in the game".

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>"Recent case in point: public health authorities telling the public that masks are useless and even harmful during the pandemic (presumably to avoid shortages) and then reversing their stance when masks became abundant." I agree with your general point, but my interpretation of those events has additional axis: 1. Masks are in shortage, and may not protect you, and public doesn't know how to use them and will proba…

And then, when they finally got around to actually applying some science to the question, the message became, "Surgical and (decent) cloth masks will protect others from yourself, and may also protect you." I can't track down papers atm, but, on a more anecdotal level, there have been quite a few case studies of superspreader events where the people who were wearing masks were much less likely to contract the illness…

> The big problem here was that, early on, nobody knew exactly how the virus spread. So, in the interest of caution, they picked the worst case scenario, aerosol transmission, and speculated based on that assumption. And a cloth or surgical mask probably won't protect the wearer very well in that case. But it turns out that droplet transmission seems to be the better model.

So close but so far.

At a minimum please give https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... a read. The real story is that SARS-2 does spread through aerosols whereas droplet transmission is pure unproven dogma. The paper I linked goes into some reasons why that is the case (for ex the fact that transmission is more likely close to someone doesn’t actually provide strong evidence for droplet xmission)

EDIT: I should add that even if it were primarily droplet transmission - which I very much doubt - masking would likely still fail for the stated goal (source control) in a community setting due to improper usage. And improper usage doesn't just mean "the mask is below your nose", it means "you're not changing out the mask the moment it gets damp", "you're touching your mask with unwashed hands", "you're touching your hands with unwashed mask", "you're standing closer to your conversational partner to compensate for the fact that masks muffle hearing" (But to your point, you already correctly hinted at the fact that if aerosol transmission is the dominant transmission mode, then masks don't work even in theory, let alone in practice.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#317
A practical application of this perspective, and one that has a lot of virtues is:

When evaluating a crazy new idea (particularly something like a product or business), don't bother asking "will this work?" because no one truly knows, but rather ask: "if this does work, then what are the implications?"

Pg has quite a track record here by being an early investor in textbook crazy new ideas like Airbnb, Coinbase, etc. "Will this replace a chunk of the hotel market? Unclear, but if it does, it will be a huge and valuable business."

For folks talking about Mighty, its through this lens that pg is thinking about it. "Will it work? Is it better than alternatives? Who knows... But if the vision does pan out, I think it's more obvious to see how this could be a big and important business."

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#318

I don't like how Paul's writing always gets hundreds of likes just because it's by him. Not everything he writes is amazing. I wish there wasn't such a cult around him.

This essay is a frustrating read, because you can feel his condescension towards critics (oh, they must be envious, or taking cheap shots), and you get a window into his headspace in which he believes that his way of examining the world and arriving at substantially the same beliefs is the only correct way.

But to be quite honest, many PG essays fit this same basic structure, whereby some venture or belief of his is introduced in a slow-burn way, with lots of short sentences light on content as if trying to sound off-the-cuff but way too authored to sound convincingly so, and then a dispassioned but complete teardown of the critics of the idea. A subversion of an appeal to historical authority thrown in for good measure. He always comes across as the understated luminary whose low opinion of the clueless hordes or meddling schemers below him is emotionlessly obvious, and anyone who disagrees is clearly a meddling schemer because of envy or fear or some other existential insecurity, because his seldom-mentioned achievements ought to speak for themselves about the supremacy of his approach.

But what's especially frustrating about this essay is that it's clearly precipitated by the dismissive public reaction towards the Mighty app -- an observation shared by many others in this thread -- but this is intentionally unacknowledged by him, presumably so that he can pontificate about the bravery of weird ideas the envy and fear of others on his personal blog without soiling the name of a business venture he backed. But it's also evidence that with a simple Twitter beef, you can get under his skin -- a sad fact you'd be forgiven for doubting if you hang on every word of his essays.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#320
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like they don't understand that (seemingly) forgotten archiectural principle of the internet which says that the "intelligence" goes in the ends: i.e. the leaves are smart, the nodes are as dumb as pipes. Thus they insist on making the nodes (the servers) smart and the clients (leaves) dumb.

It’s the first I’d heard of this axiom. Can you give an example of that in a real architecture? I think about a central server with multiple terminals on a network. There the node is the beefy boi and the terminals are just I/O devices. Kind of similar to what MightyApp is doing - except with fewer privacy concerns :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_principle

It is not an axiom though, but rather an architectural guideline that comes with its own set of trade-offs and must be applied judiciously.

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