Paul Graham Keynote at PyCon

I think he addressed this - the way to solve big, world-changing problems is to start by solving ordinary, day-to-day problems and then expand from that. If you start by saying "I'm going to solve poverty", about a year in everyone will say "Why haven't you solved it yet?" and you'll find it very hard to find people to help you. You end up accomplishing far less than if you said "I'm going to help a hundred underprivileged but talented high-school kids find colleges that are appropriate for them and give them their best shot of getting in."

I found that one of the worst and hardest mental habits to kick was the notion that I had to do "big, important things". Because big, important things are ill-defined, and your success metrics aren't clear. It's very easy to kid yourself into thinking that you're promoting justice for all, right up until you're 20 years in and the world is still not a just place. And then you have a mid-life crisis, think you're a failure, and give up.

It's much better if you can point to specific and yet often underwhelming-sounding instances of "I made this person's life better" or "I let this person do something he otherwise would not have been able to". A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, and all that.

With the extra benefit that had Colubus not stumbled upon an unknown continent, he would have died.

I don't think my job is anywhere as risky.

#3 is a doozie, and we've been working on it at Greplin. I think we can break it down into some subcategories:

* Notification emails that are very time-specific in their relevance. "Reminder: Coffee with Chuck at 3:25 today" or "Thank you for your reservation for a party of 4 at Alice's Restaurant at 7:30 tonight." You care about these a lot, until you have coffee with Chuck and abruptly stop caring.

* Things that are nice to have pass through your consciousness at some point. Amazon shipping confirmation emails, GitHub comment notifications, etc. Interestingly, most of these are mostly noise; when I get an Amazon confirmation email, the part I care about could fit in a Tweet: "Your Dromiceiomimus Plushie has shipped via USPS, with tracking number 54989086, and will arrive between Tuesday and Friday".

* Mailing lists. I have Gmail set up to tag all these and skip my inbox, which seems to be about right. The weird thing about mailing list emails is that almost all of them are explicitly marked as such -- there are several unofficial MIME headers for this -- and yet the default behavior for every email client I know if is to simply stick them in the inbox like any other email.

* Crap I don't care about. "Save up to 25% on useless ornamental doilies!!!1". The only part of this that I care about is the Unsubscribe link. I believe Gmail can auto-unsubscribe you if you mark these as spam.

Of course, while it's fine to break it down like this, the trouble starts when you start trying to actually extract useful information from emails so you can present users with a better view of their inbox. It's officially a Hard Problem, though like a lot of hard problems, you can get something useful with a lot less effort than getting something perfect.

What would you like from your inbox? For obvious reasons, I'm very interested. :-)

I agree with everything you said. Yet, I don't think that's where Mr. Graham was taking this (though I haven't heard the actual speech, but, for the purpose of this discussion, let's assume that the summary has, indeed, captured its spirit). I think that his advice focused on how to build a successful business - important, sound, advice for any professional, but hardly a source of inspiration, which, I guess, was his intention.

Anyway, as I said, I don't really have a problem with anything he said in particular. Some of the things actually made me think. My only issue is the premise that engineers should be inspired by business. Case in point: "it would be great if a startup could make a lot of cpus look to the developer like 1 cpu... the expected value of working on it might be really high. why high: web services. programmers like convenience." I would have said that with a compiler like that, scientists would be able to design new drugs more quickly, or that a manned mission to mars could be done more easily, or... I don't know. But his example (at least as it appears in the notes) is web services.

Again, he was talking about how to come up with ideas for a start-up, which is a business, I guess, so the talk was very much to the point. But even if Mr. Graham believes that start-ups are where smart engineers should spend their best years and bright minds because start-ups are what makes the world better - and he does indeed seem to believe that - I think he should have at least discussed why it is that bright young people should strive to build high-risk fast-growing businesses, rather than, I don't know, go work for the government or an NGO. It is as if many engineers just assume that the best path for an accomplished engineers is in the fast-money business. Engineers should be agents of freedom, of equality, of innovation and even social justice. I just don't like it that nowadays engineers in certain fields are automatically associated first with money, as if they were stock brokers or something. This is important because history has shown that smart as they are, scientists and engineers were often very easily manipulated into serving some terrible causes. They are easily manipulated because they are drawn to solving problems rather than thinking about whether they should be solved in the first place.

For example, an easier delivery of entertainment "content" is a problem for an engineer. But is it a problem worth solving? From a business perspective - certainly. From a human perspective - possibly. I don't know. But young engineers eager to learn from an experienced colleague are already trained to think about how to solve problems. They're even trained to find problems to solve. But they should be inspired to think about why it is that a problem requires solving, and to consider whether there are other, more worthy, undertakings. Again - in the end they'll do whatever it is that they're doing now. Only that shouldn't be their inspiration.

Also, big things don't have to be well defined. They should just hang up there as a source of inspiration. Big things, not rich people.

You're making the assumption that being able to perform well in tougher classes at school means that you are smart.

People drop out from technical studies into humanities because they did not perform well academically in their technical studies. Just because a group of people can perform better at school than another group of people are not smarter. One group is better at school. And school is not an indicator as smartness. Just because a class is harder does not mean that the people who do well in it are smarter. Performance at school is not a direct indicator of smartness.