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We Have Learned Nothing

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Re: We Have Learned Nothing

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Racing competition is flattened through regulation(oversimplified). All drivers have the same car. Drivers skill and fearlessness is the deciding factor. I came here to basically say this about running a company- but your comment was a better launching point. As someone who has run several companies over the last 25 years and has read and or tried nearly ever "method" mentioned... Im now running a company where Im ab…

I can't think of a single race where drivers are required to drive "the same car", by any reasonable definition of same. Not stock cars, F1, Nascar, demolition derby...

You all are being idiots. Im done. There is so much nuance to all of this that I did not include. Key words are Flattened by Regulation... Have you ever read a damn rule book? Stock, improved, modified, class, my god.

Good bye, never again. Hacker news is a lost cause.

Signing out.

Re: We Have Learned Nothing

#62
post #26

The fact that the survival rate of startups hasn't improved doesn't show that our knowledge hasn't improved. Startups are competitive, with only 1 or 2 VC-scale winners per market. So, the claim is like "race car technology hasn't gotten better, because there's still only one winner per race."

Exactly. If you would launch a startup with principles from 100 years ago you probably wouldn't stand a chance in most industries.

Re: We Have Learned Nothing

#63
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They have not succeeded yet. Reproducing an ASML machine is a piece of cake. Okay, not a piece of cake but definitely doable. The problem is that you cannot sell your reproduction in rich countries because the US government will threaten you with sanctions and US companies will screech "patents!".

> Reproducing an ASML machine is a piece of cake. Okay, not a piece of cake but definitely doable. The problem is that you cannot sell your reproduction in rich countries because the US government will threaten you with sanctions and US companies will screech "patents!". ... An argument that may not convince China and Russia, who have a track record of ignoring it - I doubt it is a significant reason why they have no…

>I doubt it is a significant reason why they have not achieved semiconductor manufacture tooling parity.

It's not enough to reproduce just the work of asml, you basically have to reproduce their entire supply chain, because, same reason, their suppliers will have trouble obtaining export permissions.

Re: We Have Learned Nothing

#64

If you believe that an achievement involves skill, and that people can hone than skill, then I think you should believe the people who have done it know on average good advice about how to do it. You don't have to accept the premise, you may believe that many people simply got lucky, and no skill is involved. I think most of us do believe that skill is involved in starting a business, so let's just assume it is. I th…

He's a pretty successful angel/early stage VC investor so he's not some random guy. His point doesn't seem to be that there's nothing to be learned building a successful business but that the existing methods are so formulaic they drive profits down since everyone copies the same ideas. Looking at the recent batch of AI companies that are being funded this does seem to be what's happening.

Re: We Have Learned Nothing

#65
post #50

I'm just delighted that someone else read Feyerabend, Popper and Kuhn. I would add Giddens and even Graeber to that list, both are disruptive in their own way. About 25 years ago I adopted anthropology as a lens to investigate behaviour of tech companies and teams. It's not let me down. The most important thing I got from Feyerabend, Graeber and Sylvia Ashton-Warner was the invitation to colour outside the lines (tho…

I have added the two works mentioned in the post by Kuhn and Fayerabend to my reading list. I have read some of Greabers work and while idealistic/unrealistic in some parts I really like the antidote to "popular" thoughts/theory. Can you recommend other books/works? I have "Small is Beautiful" on my reading list already. I wanted to read it after Conviviality, but never got to it after I abandoned Conviviality - but…

"Small is Beautiful" is sort of a difficult read. I picked up a copy of "Small Is Beautiful in the 21st Century: The legacy of E.F. Schumacher" by his daughter Diana Schumacher. It hits all the main points while being a little better organized.

I went a little nuts with modern anthropology and absolutely adore Giddens. He was actually the person I was visiting in London when I bumped into Graber. "The Consequences of Modernity" is a bit dense and filled with jargon, but I love it.

There was another post I commented on and mentioned "Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More," and while it's not a general-purpose discussion of how we model social systems, it is a great read. It's where the word "HyperNormalization" comes from and tells the story of the last generation of soviet citizens who noticed things weren't working too well, but grew up in a world where there were no alternatives to state bureaucracy and politics.

I also read a fair amount about pedagogy since I'm interested in structured systems of developing denotational systems for modeling human knowledge with the objective of communicating said knowledge. I love Sylvia Ashton-Warner. She wrote an autobiography called "Teacher" that's worth a read. I hung out with Seymour Papert and Cindi Solomon when I was a kid, so I have to mention Mindstorms. And Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" has some interesting bits if you can handle the 70s communista jargon. It's not full-on marxist, but if you're sensitive to such things, it can be distracting. But... what they all have in common is a framework for how to communicate (potentially) complex models and knowledge maps.

Read everything you can find by Jung, McLuhan and Claude Levi-Strauss.

"Eros and Magic in the Reniassance" by Ioan Cuilianu. Then read it again because it's hard to figure out what you just read when you only read it once.

For fun I've read some of the articles and books by Rory Sutherland.

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