601–610 of 808 posts
The main idea of the article is that when someone who is a domain expert proposes an idea that seems wrong, there is a chance that this idea is a great idea because why would a smart person proposes a stupid idea? They must've known something. He says that in history, great ideas started like that. But he didn't provide examples. I didn't find the article practical because of that. It would have been a lot more usefu…
- "Imagine, they're like really small animals, but the're too small to see! The're everywhere! They live on us, in us, around us! They are what makes us sick!" (Pasteur, germ theory of diseases)
- "You know how there can be mountains as huge as the Himalaya? Easy! In reality, all continents are really like small leaves floating on a see of magma, and they're bouncing into each other, and when they crash we get these huge mountain ranges and continents." (Alfred Wegener, tectonic plates)
- "You know time? Yeah, it's really different for everyone, and there isn't even a thing such as 'simultaneous'. I'm serious! Just imagine riding on a train and playing with a flashlight and a watch!" (some patent clerk in Switzerland)
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You should use this opportunity to recommend an especially high-quality introduction/overview of modern history of science, approachable by a curious outsider.
Philosophy of Science: the Central Issues (Curd, Cover, & Pincock) is a decent although limited aggregation
Isn't this the issue Joseph Campbell addressed? The journey a person with a crazy new idea endures? And, how in all different cultures the redeemer, a person solving an issue that their society needs to address, have the same symbolic characteristics. You and your children experience this not in a philosophy or mythology class but at every moment someone mentions a Star Wars or Marvel reference[0]. Disney keeps telli…
I think Campbell's "journey" is about storytelling and the narrative journey, with a heavy dose of Jungian psychology, not about tech/science ideas. So I'd say it doesn't fit here.
A key insight is that mythology's interpersonal structures are special to people, and our minds are wired to see them everywhere. A neuro-Bayesian might call them a prior. As a result, if your role in society somewhat resembles an archetype, the public is likely to perceive you mostly or entirely in terms of that archetype.
Scientists are at risk of being pattern-matched to the Daedalus archetype. The public will ascribe all sorts of Daedalus-nature to you (even those who don't recognize the name) and you'll wonder "Why would they assume all those things about me???".
The book may shed some light what's going on and how to deal with it.
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Not the first time, not the last time. We were misogynists when we were criticizing Elizabeth Holmes. It comes with the territory.
That conflates different cases in a way that strikes me as misleading.
Having said that, it's tiresome to have the same pile-on garbage of negative comments every time a PG article is posted. The last 4-5 of his articles invite so much backlash and scathing kneejerk rhetoric, I wonder why these people use HN forums at all.
Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you ju…
I think of this as my "Kardashian problem". I don't understand why the Kardashians are famous or wealthy. I mean I get the mechanics of it - famous legal case -> sex tape -> reality TV show. But I don't understand how this works, or why it works. This isn't their problem. They are very wealthy, famous, and they obviously totally grok how their market works. This is my problem. I should not attempt to produce a mass-m…
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It is fascinating to me how quickly people reject the premise of Mighty, even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing judgment with curiosity. I’ll admit, my initial reaction to Mighty was “I can’t imagine it ever being faster than my behemoth PC.” But then I stopped for a second and got curious. What is Mighty, really? It is a thin-client. That’s it. And are thin-clients a bad thing? Well, if latency is an…
> Where’s the use-case where near-zero latency is vital? I would say typing is a pretty big one. It is extraordinarily unpleasant when typing lag is anywhere above maybe 50ms,and even worse when it is variable, like it would inevitably be if going over the Internet. It's even worse with mouse movements, where occasional spikes in lag can ruin your day.
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> but if it succeeds, good on Suhail! Well, not exactly. There's plenty of people who have been successful at, frankly horrible things. I count this kind of "not your computer, ours" rent seeking change as "bad if successful".
I don't really buy this. A lot of complaints are about the privacy of the whole ordeal. That's kind of moot considering Google has access to all of my banking emails, Dropbox has access to all of my invoices, Apple has access to all of my photos, and Equifax already leaked my SSN years ago. Most of my life already doesn't happen on my personal locked-down device.
Let me be clear: we plan to charge a subscription. That's our only business model.
I think we can improve privacy and security for most users who have trouble managing it. For instance, we can patch Chrome zero-days (many have occurred this year) a lot faster for everyone.
What we offer today is a faster way to use applications that do own your data so you can be much more productive and hopefully enable a new set of applications never before possible.
We help improve decentralization of the web over duopolies like Apple/Windows. We make the browser more powerful, not less.
We improve the market share of Linux as a consumer computing OS as it underlies our tech.
In time, we might be open to people owning their own hardware and running Mighty on it but I think a lot of people will prefer we make it "just work" for now. I don't view either world as mutually exclusive.
If there's an opportunity to research making things trustless, we'll work on that.
I can think of a few examples of crazy ideas being dismissed. I remember seeing this post where someone was trying to figure out if it was possible to verify that a photo was either undoctored or else that someone went through a lot of trouble to hack the camera hardware of a phone. The post started off in the vein of, "Here's this idea, and even though it sounds crazy, I can't convince myself that it's a bad idea." The peanut gallery had all sorts of reasons that it was a bad idea -- I think my favorite reason was that it would be immoral to try to provide this capability. Paul's essay suggests a few reasons that this crazy idea might have generated such a personal attack.
Crazy new ideas are uncomfortable. I'm reminded of "Pitch Anything" by Oren Klaff, which describes the "croc brain" that protects the higher functioning parts of our brain by trying to discard anything that is uncomfortable. A crazy new idea challenges our worldview, so it's going to be uncomfortable.
There's a class of ideas that engineers are comfortable with: incremental improvements. If there's a framework in place to evaluate an idea, it doesn't make people so uncomfortable. By extension, if an idea is non-incremental, meaning it's a crazy new idea, then since it makes us uncomfortable, it should be rejected immediately.
I remember a conversation about the value of an idea. There's the school of thought that ideas are worthless -- a monkey with a typewriter can hammer out ten ideas before their breakfast banana. Another viewpoint recognizes that good ideas are important starting points, but after that the only thing that matters is hard work.
My feeling is that crazy new ideas are more like a lottery ticket: probably worthless. I don't know, maybe the peanut gallery is right. Since the lottery ticket is probably worthless, the easiest thing to do is to toss them all in the trash before checking them against the winning numbers.
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I think of this as my "Kardashian problem". I don't understand why the Kardashians are famous or wealthy. I mean I get the mechanics of it - famous legal case -> sex tape -> reality TV show. But I don't understand how this works, or why it works. This isn't their problem. They are very wealthy, famous, and they obviously totally grok how their market works. This is my problem. I should not attempt to produce a mass-m…
Luck seems to play a big role in the celebrity market