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Elon Musk on First Principles

blog.microlancer.com

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Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#71

Post by stinkytaco »

thangalin wrote: post #54
stinkytaco wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the life of me I can't find the link right now, but it was from Pat and Bingo Card Creator. He requires an account for troubleshooting and support purposes. The vast majority of support is from first time/free users and when they did not create an account, support was a headache at best and impossible at worst. Perhaps there were other solutions for him, but if you can get people to create an account and it makes…

A/B testing could determine whether my hypothesis is correct, which is: more people will use and share a site if an account is not required to use its minimal functionality (think pastebin, jsfiddle, and Wikipedia) because account creation is a barrier to usage. Thought-experiment. Imagine two nearly identical websites: one requires registration and the other does not. What site will people be more likely to use? The…

Sure, but one really has to ask themselves whether it's worth that trouble.

I'm certainly not saying you are wrong, but looking at a product like Bingo Card Creator -- something that's really only worth keeping up if the work is minimal and the profit's fairly steady -- I doubt I'd go to the trouble.

And as someone who works for a public service institution, the "only registered accounts can contact support" is a nice sentiment, but rarely works in practice. What ends up happening is that people didn't read that particular piece of fine print and now their pissed that you won't help them and you'll never make that conversion to a paid account. Obviously Pat tried it your way and made the determination that it would be better for his product’s future to limit engagement.

You're working on the assumption that engagement and conversion of the maximum number of people is the sole goal. Perhaps there are other considerations that creator has.

It's nice to work from first principles, but once the product is on the ground, you really have to revisit your own goals for the product to make a determination what will work best.

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#73

Post by ademarre »

cbhl wrote: post #26

I have this habit of highlighting text as I read, and on this website, I find that the text is gray and the highlight is a very similar shade of gray. Does this bother anyone else?

Hear, hear! Yes, I do that too and noticed the same when reading from microlancer.com.

I think it drives my coworkers crazy when they're looking over my shoulder reading from the same screen.

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#74

Post by _delirium »

jlgreco wrote: post #24
Radim wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occult drivel. Where on earth did you read that about Magnus Carlsen? To say good chess players (not to say grandmasters, let alone world champions) don't calculate moves borders on insulting.

Obviously their actions are calculated, unless you pull in some notion of a non-materialist brain (some sort of strange "dualism" for which there is no evidence), everything they do is calculated in the strict sense. Saying that is missing the point of what is being said though. He is saying that Carlsen does not perform some of these calculations at the same "level of consciousness". For instance, I know that if I h…

That part happens atop a huge logical base, though, a creative supplement that distinguishes the fine shades of world-class expertise among those with huge amounts of knowledge and analytic ability. Carlsen, like everyone who is competitive on a high level in chess, has spent a large amount of time accumulating vast stores of factual knowledge and analytical skills. He knows the opening books, he knows the end-game solutions, he knows basically all the heuristics that have been developed. On top of that, he makes some brilliant creative plays, but not in place of it. Someone who did not have a high-level grounding in rigorous chess theory as their basis would never make it anywhere in modern chess, no matter how intuitively brilliant.

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#75

Post by jlgreco »

_delirium wrote: post #74
jlgreco wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously their actions are calculated, unless you pull in some notion of a non-materialist brain (some sort of strange "dualism" for which there is no evidence), everything they do is calculated in the strict sense. Saying that is missing the point of what is being said though. He is saying that Carlsen does not perform some of these calculations at the same "level of consciousness". For instance, I know that if I h…

That part happens atop a huge logical base, though, a creative supplement that distinguishes the fine shades of world-class expertise among those with huge amounts of knowledge and analytic ability. Carlsen, like everyone who is competitive on a high level in chess, has spent a large amount of time accumulating vast stores of factual knowledge and analytical skills. He knows the opening books, he knows the end-game s…

I think you can say that, to various extents, for all forms of "intuition". The only reason I can intuitively bang through basic arithmetic is because I spent plenty of time as a child studying it, and doing it over and over again until the skill started to "become a part of me". Large amounts of practical experience or rigorous formal education both fill more or less the same role in creating a basis on which intuition about something can emerge.

Anyway, I don't think that we disagree on the actual point here, that claiming that somebody has "intuition" isn't somehow attributing their proficiency to the occult.

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#76

Post by gnaritas »

thangalin wrote: post #62
gnaritas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so leveraging all the work that has gone into making e-mail secure is a win. What? Email isn't close to secure.

The point is that e-mail vendors (e.g., Google, Microsoft) have dedicated far more resources and effort to securing their e-mail software (e.g., GMail, Hotmail) than start-ups will, or can, dedicate for their own authentication component. (For example, how often are all GMail passwords been stolen?) I am suggesting that the authentication process for e-mail is far more secure than what a start-up could produce to aut…

One can hardly count on users always having one of the big provider mail accounts and beyond the big providers, most email is still sent across the wire unencrypted. Email isn't generally script kiddy proof, let alone NSA proof.

While I like the idea of login via email link, it's only good if the login link expires very quickly.

Email is not an auth mechanism, if you want to rely on the big providers to do auth, they have systems specifically for that already.

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#77

Post by enraged_camel »

sillysaurus2 wrote: post #59
coffeemug wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasoning from first principles is ahistorical, and that is why it so rarely works in the real world. No. Reasoning from first principles is hard , and that is why it so rarely works in the real world. It's not enough to be contrarian, you have to be contrarian and right, and that's really, really, really hard. Most people reason from first principles, come up with a bunch of bad ideas, and then blame it on inertia a…

It's because I'm a bad chess player, and most people are bad at reasoning from first principles. Elon Musk is one of may be five people in the world who can actually pull it off. Hero worship is mistaken. The reason you're bad at chess is because you believe you're bad at chess, so you don't practice. Similarly, most people don't believe they can be Musk, so they don't even try.

Well yes, most people don't make millions of dollars from a successful exit, so they literally don't have the resources to try to build a car company and a space company and run them simultaneously.

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#78

Post by diminoten »

This reminds me of the S/N Meyers-Briggs definitions (Sensing vs. Intuition)[0].

Sensing is about analogy; we go with what exists, what I can upvote/pin/like/snap, and I improve upon it. I iterate until I've created something that we know already exists but in an improved way. We take what exists

Intuition is about what this article calls "first principals"; we notice the trends, the underlying reasons why we upvote/pin/like/snap and try to create something that satisfies that need. Or we find a new need and try to fill it. Doesn't matter.

So Elon Musk is saying something entirely[1] un-new[2] - that N types work better in entrepreneuring than S types. Common theory, no clue if it holds water.

[0] - http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-bas...

[1] - http://www.keirsey.com/4temps/inventor.asp

[2] - http://www.businessinsider.com/myer-briggs-personality-style...

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#79

Post by tempestn »

There's a great example of this kind of thinking on the homepage right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6736001. The last sentence in the article:

“But first, this problem needed someone like Jorge,” he said. “An obstetrician would have tried to improve the forceps or the vacuum extractor, but obstructed labor needed a mechanic. And 10 years ago, this would not have been possible. Without YouTube, he never would have seen the video.”

Re: Elon Musk on First Principles

#80

Post by tunesmith »

Double_Cast wrote: post #41
Radim wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, that concept I'm familiar with. In fact, I think that's a rather common feeling, not even exclusive to chess or pros. Intuition (whatever that is) plays a great role, especially at the top level.

"Noobs use approximately 95% calculation and 5% intuition, whereas a grand master has a ratio closer to 40% calculation and 60% intuition." I vaguely paraphrased this from a paperback chess guide of mine (hopefully more credible than the internet). According to my guide, grand masters can effortlessly memorize the positions of realistic matches. But for "nonsensical chess matches" where the positions were randomly ge…

I think we're talking about two different uses of the word "intuition".

One is basically to grok. To understand so deeply that you don't have to do the calculations anymore - you can just "feel" the truth, based off of the prior work you did.

The other use of intuition is isn't necessarily connected to prior calculation or heavy effort. Whether it's a rule-of-thumb, a gut feeling, a flash of insight or a lateral leap.

Reasoning from first principles isn't a good counterbalance to the first definition, and that's because the person doing the intuiting has already internalized those first principles.

But it is an effective counterbalance to the latter, for various reasons already discussed.

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