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Fashionable Problems

paulgraham.com

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Re: Fashionable Problems

#41

Post by cjblomqvist »

rgbrenner wrote: post #23

I think pg understates the problem. It isn't just fashionable. Think about how the solutions we use today evolved. Someone had an idea originally and certain decisions were made about that approach.. those that best adapted to the conditions of the time were successful... rinse and repeat over several decades. Those ideas that preserved the past were more likely to succeed because they preserved the ecosystem that al…

Many insights to be made by this comment. One that is easily missed is how hard it is to fight against the existing ecosystem/assumptions. I've found that a lot of people either don't, or make a point of challenging everything. A strategy they've worked fairly well for me so far is to challenge one(!) assumption after a lot of careful analysis, and then try to adapt to the ecosystem as best as possible. Most revolutionary things are not made in one big bang, but in many incremental steps. They only look like big bangs in hindsight.

Even the nuclear bomb was fairly incremental, with truly a big bang in the end.... (pun intended ;)

Re: Fashionable Problems

#42

Post by majos »

This post sorely lacks evidence for its big first claim:

> 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 space of possibilities has been explored, because they've all worked on similar things.

Anyone want to step in with some examples? Without them, the thrust of the essay seems to be: "If only other people understood what problems are worth working on! Especially in the well-studied areas of essays, Lisp, and venture funding! Too bad they do not. Well, goodbye."

Re: Fashionable Problems

#44

Post by est31 »

> Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems.

This makes no sense. The concepts of "conservative" and "fashionable" are almost polar opposites. Becoming a musician or an actor is fashionable and the dream of many. But it won't bring any money to most people who choose that career. It's no conservative choice. Instead, it's conservative to go into STEM, law or finance. But those fields are "boring". The pattern repeats inside a field as well. It's conservative to be a cobol coder or a DOS expert, and you'll certainly make money. But it's not fashionable. How come you aren't building a cryptocurrency using self driving car that has a drone port on the roof! It results in the woke fields being overrun with very smart and capable people and capital, while tons of fields that use slightly outdated stuff are ripe for harvest but nobody is around to do it.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#45

Post by mvp »

gist wrote: post #20

> Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems. 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'. Impli…

Most of his essays have that wise old man who has seen the world kind of vibe to them. If anybody else writes the same things without the success he has had it will be ridiculous to read.

I don't think anybody who reads his essays is looking for any scientific report based on facts. They are looking for some sort of confirmation that they are not crazy when they have similar thoughts.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#46

Post by franze »

mmahemoff wrote: post #38

"Fashionable solutions" are a related phenomenon to fashionable problems. Solving a problem the same way as everyone else (and often expecting a better result). Both are widespread.

"Fashionable Solutions" are major problems. An actor with lack of experience solves a challenge (a challenge coming from of a million+ times solved problem) not with a proven solution, but with a fashionable one (one that currently has some mindshare and good PR). the research most of the time is looking at alternatives that try to solve the similar thing in the same fashionable way. therefore no real research was done.

an example: a fashionable solution for a static webpage is a fashionable static site builder, a unfashionable solution is an HTML page.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#47

Post by icebraining »

shrubble wrote: post #29

In this thread a guy talks about using the Q language and then someone else jumps in and says 'it's not scalable etc.' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854793 What if all this cloud/k8s / serverless stuff is really all piffle? What if running stuff on dedicated hardware ends up a better solution in some fashion?

It may be fashionable and overused, but I don't think we can talk about the cloud as if it was still something new and unknown. By now I think one can already do an informed decision on which to use for a particular problem.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#48

Post by simonh »

est31 wrote: post #44

> Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems. This makes no sense. The concepts of "conservative" and "fashionable" are almost polar opposites. Becoming a musician or an actor is fashionable and the dream of many. But it won't bring any money t…

I think here by conservative he means doing what everybody else is doing. Risk averse. Following the mainstream. Going into COBOL May have been a conservative choice 40 years ago, but not anymore. The conservative choice is to go with the herd.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#49

Post by stephenamills »

rgbrenner wrote: post #23

I think pg understates the problem. It isn't just fashionable. Think about how the solutions we use today evolved. Someone had an idea originally and certain decisions were made about that approach.. those that best adapted to the conditions of the time were successful... rinse and repeat over several decades. Those ideas that preserved the past were more likely to succeed because they preserved the ecosystem that al…

"Ideas that diverged too much from the existing successful tech had a huge obstacle in their way: they had to recreate all of the existing solutions in their new model.”

You’re so right! There are great examples of companies that preserved the existing ecosystem of solutions (Facebook with PHP, Microsoft with C++, Google with Java and C++, maybe also Amazon with Perl 5 and C++).

There are also great examples of successful companies that in a certain sense did or had to do things in an entirely new model (WhatsApp with the Open Telecom Platform, F5 Networks with their data center FPGA-powered hardware load balancers, Tesla and SpaceX, and so on).

There are also great examples of companies that did both, where they preserved an existing ecosystem but also added another ecosystem on top to fix flaws (NeXT Computer with Smalltalk and C, Stripe with the modern version of that as Ruby and Go, Twitter with Ruby and Java, so on).

Microsoft is the best example of a company that can succeed even with what seems like a crazy choice. Almost everything being written in C++ sounds insane to the point of being business suicidal, but they worked hard enough to make it work. If Microsoft can succeed in the ways that they have with C++, and if Facebook could succeed for as long as they did with PHP, and Instagram can allegedly succeed with Django[1], then anyone can succeed with anything as long as you can endure the stress that a seemingly peculiar decision might cause you. And those standard ecosystems that they chose all had immense benefits, they just also had some pretty immense weaknesses as well (Powering 500 million daily users primarily with Python scripts?? That just seems pretty crazy to me, if it’s true).

[1]Still very unclear about how much Python actually powers the web services behind Instagram. " rel="nofollow">https://instagram-engineering.com/tagged/python>.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#50

Post by bartread »

est31 wrote: post #44

> Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems. This makes no sense. The concepts of "conservative" and "fashionable" are almost polar opposites. Becoming a musician or an actor is fashionable and the dream of many. But it won't bring any money t…

> It's conservative to be a cobol coder or a DOS expert...

For most people entering a career in tech over the last 20 years those haven't been a consideration, never mind a choice (conservative or otherwise).

Nowadays the conservative choices in the sense that PG is talking about here are Java, .NET, Python, C++, C, and possibly AWS and Amazon. But these are also what the market demands.

You will get paid, and probably quite well, but they are not adventurous choices.

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