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Fashionable Problems

paulgraham.com

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Re: Fashionable Problems

#51

Post by rbavocadotree »

majos wrote: post #42

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…

Two areas where I have a little experience:

Economics: There are surprisingly little people studying very large, grand, topics such an inequality. You've probably heard of the handful of economists that do. It's unfashionable due to the influence of the Chicago school and it's focus on free market principles, as well as many other factors.

Physics: Good luck getting any interest or funding if you are not studying the currently dominant theory in your field (even if there has been no progress in decades).

Re: Fashionable Problems

#52

Post by bawolff »

Seems like a lot of weirdly defensive people in this thread.

But the essay doesnt really seem that revolutionary more common sense. If you want to make an impact, dont work in an oversaturated field. The low hanging fruit is probably already picked and other people will probably get there before you do. But you also dont want to work in a field nobody cares about as noone will care. Working on a problem with proven demand, but seems "boring" and hasn't changed much recently is a good bet, as there is probably new insights you can apply and new contexts that have appeared since last time there was a frenzy for that field.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#53

Post by gist »

dang wrote: post #31
gist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am actually surprised that PG doesn't feel uncomfortable about the 'acclaim' that he is getting for writing many of the things he has said that are not related to anything he has expertise in. Reminds me of celebrities who opine about politics with their thoughts (sometimes not always with PG). Paul is authoritative on many topics. General thoughts about life and people are great to hear what he thinks. Why not? Bu…

They're essays. The word means 'attempt' and the genre has always been about non-expertise. Montaigne was the ultimate non-expert.

My thought is that Paul should view his essays at least as seriously as someone who is writing an important college application essay given who the audience is (college admissions in that case; HN readers in this case among others). Or maybe someone writing an opinion piece for a newspaper that is widely read and taken as significant.

Imagine as an extreme (and not what PG is doing) if someone writing an 'essay' were to express objectionable stereotypes about people (women, minorities, certain women). [1] The point is if you have a following I think you need to take what you write (essay or not) more seriously. After all PG for whatever reason with his essays typically has several people review before posting which appears to not be consistent in a small way with the fact that an essay (by what you are saying) is about non-expertise. If that is the case why do you need others expertise to vet it before posting?

[1] If it's someone's point of view why does it bother people so much when it's expressed if they are stating it as their impression and not fact?

Re: Fashionable Problems

#54

Post by jbverschoor »

cjblomqvist wrote: post #41
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 revoluti…

The problem is that multi-layered problem solving is superhard to execute. It's not that it's hard to find a solution that would be orders better, but it's just that it's risky, as it's an all-or-nothing path. It at least requires a lot of confidence for the existing market.

With waterfall-kind of planning, that would work. Unfortunately it got a bad name in the '90s and early '00s. The wild-west of inexperienced developers, who needed to solve business problems they didn't understand, combined with clients who didn't understand technology.

I believe this is a great period to do bigger things, and you see this happening with for example SpaceX, Tesla and Apple: space is happening again, companies are creating super specialized and complex ICs, there's actual business value and consumer value being produced, and projects are reasonably on time with these companies. This in constract with companies who, what it seems, do more of an iterative approach: Facebook, Google, Amazon. No huge innovation going there.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#55

Post by Traster »

StavrosK wrote: post #11
nostromo wrote: post #8

I love this mini-essay. The counter to this is that it'll be harder to raise capital for un-fashionable problems. If you pitched "ML for sandwich makers" right now you could raise a million bucks because so many VCs are making fashionable bets on ML.

So what? Raising is not success.

It's often a pre-requisite for success. It doesn't matter how good your idea is, if you can't get it implemented and supported by a sales team, support team etc. it isn't going to work.

There are brilliant ideas out there, but very few of them are brilliant and require 0 resources to achieve.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#56

Post by simonh »

majos wrote: post #42

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…

> This post sorely lacks evidence...

It’s a blog, not a peer reviewed scientific journal.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#57

Post by bawolff »

stephenamills wrote: post #49
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 succe…

I don't see why writing an operating system and surounding tools in C++ is a crazy decision (I'm assuming you meant windows & desktop apps by saying microsoft). Certainly not in the early 90's, but if you have a big codebase of that already, sticking with it doesn't seem crazy to me.

People make too much of a fuss over the differences between programming language. There are some important differences (whether or not memory safe is a big one, but it is hardly critical to a succful bussiness) but by and large the difference between using say php, python, etc for your program is superficial in the extreme.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#58

Post by account73466 »

majos wrote: post #42

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…

I am wondering how far the essay would go if it were not from PG.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#59

Post by lazyjones »

People are different, but I cannot imagine how someone could seriously work on (as in: devote their whole working time to, by their own choice, as an entrepreneur, researcher or hobbyist rather than an employee or student) problems they don't genuinely love. Sure, some do it for the money, but then they probably just love money and found a promising opportunity to earn it.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#60

Post by galfarragem »

What I understand from PG words is that people, even the creative ones, by lack of courage or macro vision are not a 'Elon Musk' and go with the herd building yet another crypto or yet another SAAS.
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