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How to Think for Yourself

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Think for Yourself

#431

Post by jfengel »

eloff wrote: post #359
Hongwei wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but I strongly disagree with your assertion that building a business is a zero-sum game. At the basic level, a farmer who sows a field and harvests a crop is making the world one harvest richer, and no one poorer. Ditto for the carpenter making a table or mechanic fixing a car. PG addressed this long ago: http://paulgraham.com/gap.html Scientists turn money into knowledge. Entrepreneurs turn knowledge into mone…

Value and compensation aren't necessarily coupled. Think of school teachers. It's clearly an incredibly valuable job preparing the next generation of society, but pays a miserable wage before the intervening of unions, and still not great even with that. But there's more teachers available in the labor market compared to demand than computer programmers, so the latter command a much higher salary. Even though I would…

I'm not even sure it's true that there are more teachers than programmers. But the pool of money for paying programmers is large and expanding, because we can easily calculate the value they produce, while the monetary value of teaching is harder to measure.

It doesn't help that teaching is presented as a "caring" profession, that you do for the love of your charges. Teachers don't threaten to jump to a different school district for more money, and when they campaign for more money, they're presented as not caring about the students. Nobody expects programmers to have any loyalty, so they get to demand money.

I would love to have schools fight to get the most talented teachers, instead of settling for "any woman who likes kids". (Those "caring" professions are usually ones associated with women.) I'd love to see school systems compete with software companies and research institutions, and to have school districts run by the people who might otherwise run Fortune 500 companies. But that won't happen without money, and until we start deciding to pay for it, we're going to get a lot of mediocre teaching.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#432

Post by Animats »

The physical separation of Lockheed's Skunk Works may have had this as a side benefit.

That mindset produced the big corporate labs of the 1950s to 1970s - Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM Research, Sarnoff Labs, the Department of Energy labs, the NASA centers, etc. They got impressive results. But in time, they stagnated, working hard on the wrong problems. You have to have a well defined goal to make that work.

Of course, at the other extreme, we have the brogrammers making webcrap. "Agile" is not likely to lead to independent thinking. It's a system for keeping nose to grindstone.

We're seeing a very strong push towards political conformity, but it's bipolar. On one side, we have groups where saying there are only two genders can get you fired. On the other side, we have groups which think whatever Trump said today is gospel. This is not getting us anywhere useful.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#433

Post by 93po »

kanox wrote: post #426
mcguire wrote: post #410

" Ditto for essayists. An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring. You have to tell them something new. " How come I know exactly where this essay is going? It is yet another "start-up founders are genetically, intellectually, and emotionally superior; the rest of the muggles are so envious." Does Paul think everyone except startup founders works on an assembly line? " You see this especially…

Hackernews is a garbage community.

It's as garage as capitalism in general in my opinion.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#434

Post by mindfulplay »

I can perhaps grasp the independent thinking when applied to the initial thinking for startups such as AirBnB and Stripe. But what I find insulting is that beyond this simple nugget of an idea, most of what these startups do is very conventional.

AirBnB to me reeks of the same VC funded attitude to expand their moat and eviscerate all competition with less than reputable thinking: they rarely care about customers and very much focused on competition. This isn't any spectacular independent thinking beyond that simple idea at the beginning. Similar to Twitter's beginning from an idea bored down on a napkin.

I think these companies are filled with very conventional people with very conventional thinking. But the VC folks can claim superiority in thinking they are solving the world's problems with independent thinking within some circlejerk.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#435

Post by krona »

lisper wrote: post #256

> There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. As someone who once made their living as a scientist, I can tell you from firsthand experience that while this is technically correct, the conclusion PG wishes to draw from this: > One of the mos…

And yet many of the greatest mathematicians produced their best work before their 30th birthday.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#436

Post by texasbigdata »

Arubis wrote: post #421

Over the years, I've found PG's essays much less compelling. As some sibling comments here have noted, there's a level of self-assuredness that feels increasingly disconnected from reality, like PG's become a synecdoche of SF VC-fuelled startup culture as a whole. Whether that's him changing, or me, or the world, I'm not certain--but I still look forward to them simply because the ensuing discussions here on HN tend…

I mean if you’re a human and you’re trying to generate weekly content or similar, there should be some kind of s-curve in your production function. No one is novel enough to come up with new ideas ad infinitum (sp?). Dudes been writing for how many years?

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#437

Post by pontus »

mcguire wrote: post #414
pontus wrote: post #406

I really appreciate the message in this article. I think another way to partition the world is into zero-sum and non-zero sum situations. In non-zero sum situations it's more important to be correct than novel, but in zero-sum situations it's important to be both correct and novel. One example I like to think about is the following: imagine having two boxes (A and B), one on each side of a football field. Exactly one…

You regard innovation as a zero sum game? (Paul specifically says that to be successful, a founder has to be right and everyone else wrong.)

Yes and no. If I wanted to start a social network today, it would not be sufficient to just clone Facebook because the space is already so saturated (it's zero-sum). I would have to have something very novel. If, however, I wanted to start a social network back in the early 2000s, I think it would have been sufficient to clone Facebook because the space was not yet saturated. This is not to say that it would have worked out, of course. Most likely I would have been crushed by Zuckerberg.

When a new technology emerges, there will be a lot of "obvious" ideas that are ready to be "plucked", but as that technology matures, these obvious ideas become saturated, effectively turning the space into a zero-sum game. For example, in the early days of the app store / mobile revolution, I think there were a lot of reasonably straight-forward ideas out there ready to be executed on, e.g. Uber. I'm not saying that Uber was necessarily obvious to everyone, but I don't think that the idea of summoning a taxi from your phone would have been met with comments like "that's crazy, nobody would ever want that." However, if you wanted to come up with a startup around mobile today, you'd be better be very novel because pretty much everything obvious is already taken.

Looking at trends today like autonomous cars, I think there are plenty of reasonably obvious ideas that we all sort of expect will be part of the first generation of applications (shipping, robo-taxies, last-mile delivery). That's not to say that they're easy to implement or by any means are guaranteed to succeed, but I don't think that they'll necessarily be super controversial.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#438

Post by aerosmile »

whatshisface wrote: post #346
lisper wrote: post #256

> There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. As someone who once made their living as a scientist, I can tell you from firsthand experience that while this is technically correct, the conclusion PG wishes to draw from this: > One of the mos…

The huge difference between tech startups and science is that in science, the conventional wisdom has recorded justifications and collected evidence that you can look up and understand, while in tech startups the conventional wisdom is advice made up by businessesmen who succeeded once, or sometimes succeeded zero times, and shared over drinks at the local pub. The usefulness gap between scientific knowledge and cult…

This a million times. You could further prove your point by bringing up some specific examples:

- Webvan vs Instacart. Prior to Instacart, the conventional wisdom was that grocery delivery doesn't work as a standalone business, and that hypothesis was based on the Webvan data point.

- GM vs Tesla. GM's failure with their EV1 was frequently used against Tesla in their early stages. But GM's decision to abandon their project had nothing to do with market demand, and was instead entirely a politically driven decision.

- Concorde vs Boom. Building a supersonic commercial airliner was assumed to be a futile exercise for over 50 years, despite massive changes in regulations, advancements in technology, and overall market demand.

There are so many more, but these are the ones that instantly came to my mind.

An unrelated point that might be worth making: two of those startups are from YC, and the third one was funded by a guy with $100m burning a hole in his pocket. So while going against conventional wisdom has its merits, it does seem that the funding might turn out to be more difficult than for more conventional startups. I suppose this has to do with many VC funds' focus on certain investment themes, which are used to raise their funds and serves as a de facto contract with the GPs. One only has to look at the funding history of Airbnb - even USV couldn't wrap their head around the concept, and Sequoia bought into the concept but then struggled to match them with one of their existing investment themes (I forgot how they finally did it, but I recall it was a bit of a stretch).

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#439

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

Arubis wrote: post #421

Over the years, I've found PG's essays much less compelling. As some sibling comments here have noted, there's a level of self-assuredness that feels increasingly disconnected from reality, like PG's become a synecdoche of SF VC-fuelled startup culture as a whole. Whether that's him changing, or me, or the world, I'm not certain--but I still look forward to them simply because the ensuing discussions here on HN tend…

.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#440

Post by galaxyLogic »

Karunamon wrote: post #265
lowcodetv wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely a clear signal that their belief is emotional. If you step on that toe just make it clear that you aren't questioning them at all, in fact, "you agree with them... you just wanted to know some sources to point to when those other nosey people who question our beliefs do so"... and diffuse the situation. You really just want to make the other person feel "heard" and respected for their opinion , if that's t…

There's a side-effect here. If you're interacting in a place where straight-up calling bullshit on someone is socially unacceptable (HN, Wikipedia talk pages, many professional settings), then your first suggestion will simply take the place of calling bullshit and have the same effect.

> straight-up calling bullshit on someone is socially unacceptable

I think it's not about social acceptance. It is unacceptable because if you call them bullshit without giving good reasons why you think so it is not advancing the discussion in any good way. You are not contributing anything except your personal opinion.

If you do have good reasons to explain why you think they are wrong you don't need to call them names because you can just provide the correct reasoning instead.

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