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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#741

Post by fullstackchris »

randomsearch wrote: post #722
mumblemumble wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true, but we shouldn't forget survivor bias here. We tend to focus on the stories of successful founders. To some extent, those are even the only ones we hear about. Because of that phenomenon, there is absolutely no incompatibility between the existence of disruptive startups, and the opinions of more conservative voices. Similar to how there's no incompatibility between the existence of people who win the lott…

> but we shouldn't forget survivor bias here Hi HN, entrepreneurial scientist here. You have just given me an idea. Maybe I shouldn't be posting this buried in the comments but can always be reposted elsewhere. "survivor bias" This is a constant talking point in HN. It allows anyone to plausibly dismiss absolutely any advice from a successful entrepreneur (no offence to the poster here intended, they may be right - i…

Ah, there was some guy on a podcast, I think Sam Harris or Tim Ferriss, that was writing a book and / or publishing on exactly this type of research. They reviewed like 500 some startups and how they failed (or succeeded) it was one of the first scientific based studies like that... would love if someone browsing could comment the name if this rings a bell, I'd have to hunt it down...

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#742

Post by simonh »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #587
geebee wrote: post #388

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…

It's a soap opera played out as though it's real life and on social media, and soap operas have been popular since the 1930s.

IMHO the reality and social media aspects of it get all the attention and people focus on those and think it's something entirely new and unprecedented, but really they're just force multipliers. Soap + reality and social media. That's it. The things that actual make it engaging are exactly the same as those in any soap, but even soaps are powerful enough that they can bend some people's reality.

I once saw an interview with the star of a popular soap here in the UK. He played a despicable character that manipulated and betrayed the people about him, especially women. He said that at a certain point when his character was particularly nefarious he had to avoid going out in public. Quite frequently he would be walking down the street and a woman (it was always a woman) would start screaming and shouting at him, telling him how horrible he was, and he should be ashamed of himself. Some of them even threw things at him. An actor in a TV show, it wasn't even a reality show, this was long before they even started. (Dirty Den in East Enders).

A lot of people consuming this stuff, even the explicitly fictional dramas, have a lot of problems distinguishing between reality and fantasy. They will sometimes even acknowledge they know it's just a show, while also directing abuse at the actors. Deliberately blur the boundary between fiction and real life, as reality shows do, and the brew becomes even more viscerally engaging.

Given this, things like qAnon become a lot more understandable. There are a _lot_ of people who are just out and out fantasists. If there are enough to make actors hide at home, that means there are some on almost every street in every city or town in the world all the time.

Edit: https://www.digitalspy.com/soaps/eastenders/a27088763/soap-v...

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#743

Post by slightwinder »

shard wrote: post #615
marcus_holmes wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The other replies to your comment don't seem to address your fundamental point that the Kardashians and their kind are in a different category than other celebrities. Their skills are not acting or singing or sports, but rather generating news to keep themselves in the headlines. I don't really recall this being a category until the start of reality TV, and even then it was short-lived after the shows ended. It wasn'…

I don't think this category is entirely new. Drama and gossip always was a prominent topic among people, even before global media was a think. But what shifted over time was the quality of content that was allowed to surface in media. In the 80s and 90s cheap trash-content became a think, to feed the growing demand for content, and to lower the costs of production, but also because people learned more about the culture of modern media. And with this movement, many types of content which were former just local stuff that people did privatly, became professionalised for TV and pushed to the whole world. So it really was just a matter of time till even parasocialicer made their appearence.

And with parasocialicer I mean the type of people who's main effect is to be someone who'se existence people can enjoy, without delivering anything actually skillfull outside of social interaction. Similar to cat- or dog-content.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#744

Post by slightwinder »

bserge wrote: post #729
marcus_holmes wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's actually a lot of "Kardashian-like" people out there these days. People literally throw money at girls talking to a camera, taking photos of themselves and their lives and/or playing games. I still don't quite understand why :D

People, not girls. There are actually more men than woman with that livestyle. Unless you are also consider Instragram-Influencers who are selling beauty-products. But those usally don't play games.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#745

Post by slightwinder »

regextegrity wrote: post #597
marcus_holmes wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think your problem is treating the success of the Kardashians as deterministic

Considering there are now many many more of those type of people on youtube and instagram, I would not call it undeterministic. Sure, there is many luck and several variables involved; not many can do the same, especially not on that scale. But the general process of how it works is today known enough for other people succedding too.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#746

Post by TeMPOraL »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #646
allenu wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't remember tech people poo-pooing some of the examples you gave as "couldn't you..." I think you're looking at these examples with too fine a lens of implementation, especially in retrospect. the web: I was a teen when people started using local "freenets" to connect to a text-only web and I think most people who tried it were amazed that you could instantly view content somebody on the other side of the…

Thanks, I was looking for this comment. Most of the examples he gave just seem like absolute straw men to me: > The web: couldn't you just transfer a file to an open port and use a rendering tool to view it? Did anyone actually ever say this? The web was clearly a technological advancement that most tech people realized out of the gate. > Wikis: couldn't you just update a web page? It was pretty obviously apparent wi…

> > The web: couldn't you just transfer a file to an open port and use a rendering tool to view it?

> Did anyone actually ever say this? The web was clearly a technological advancement that most tech people realized out of the gate.

I don't get why we're even talking about it. The original example is nonsense. The web literally does what that example says - pushes byte streams to computers that use a rendering tool to view them.

Arguably, what made the web popular wasn't HTTP per se. The two core ingredients were, in my opinion, DNS infrastructure and that "rendering tool", AKA. web browser. Together, they made it easy to publish files and let random people access them. Arguably, the third leg would be the tag in early HTML, which kept everything glued together while it expanded exponentially.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#747

Post by api »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #595
marcus_holmes wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s surfing. The wave is luck, but the successful ones know how to get up on the board and ride it.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#748

Post by tomhoward »

yellowbanana wrote: post #731
tomhoward wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as Mighty keeps providing a better experience than the local browser on the average user's own device, they'll have utility for a significant number of people. Developers still need to provide satisfactory-enough performance to the bulk of their audience. Mighty is for the users in the right tail who are willing to pay for better-than-satisfactory. There's no reason to believe that right tail will ever disapp…

Yes and mighty will keep increasing prices as the developers can now ship any horribly optimized thing. Mighty can succeed yes, but it's success would be bad for the ecosystem. Centralized processing of all computing, would just make current issues like censorship, security issues worse.

> developers can now ship any horribly optimized thing

No, they can't. Only the right-tail power users will ever pay for this. Unless almost all of a product's users are in that group, the developers still need to offer satisfactory performance to the rest of their users, or be vulnerable to a new competitor.

> Centralized processing of all computing, would just make current issues like censorship, security issues worse.

People keep saying this. I doubt even Mighty believes they or their paradigm will take over "all computing" - just the niche that really needs it. Even a small market share can make them a big/successful company, but without making the whole internet significantly more centralised than it already is. I don't get the panic.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#749

Post by pclmulqdq »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #595
marcus_holmes wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The problem with luck is that people who are extremely skilled at something seem to usually get inordinately lucky. Part of skill involves setting yourself up to get lucky.

To some degree, problems of luck are also problems of volume: if you are president #45 and you have a 5% chance at creating a viral tweet, tweet 50 times and you will get one.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#750

Post by tome »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #174

Seems like the privacy implications of this are not worth it for any serious company. I was watching Rudy Giuliani yesterday on youtube, talk about how the FBI accessed and monitored his iCloud account for over a year. Which included his privileged lawyer/client information. If they can do that to a president's lawyer, while he's defending the president. They can do it to anyone.

Do you have a source for that? It seems extremely implausible for a number of reasons.
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