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Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: Crazy New Ideas

#771

Post by lvs »

dang wrote: post #765
lvs wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure that a community idolizing the utterances of a winning gambler isn't what makes everything worse?

There are many things making things worse, and one does not rule out another, so that question is a bit of a distraction. I'd like to know what you think you gain by being so mean. Surely that's not the kind of person you want to be? The idea that this community "idolizes" PG is trivially disproven by glancing through any recent thread on his writings, including this one.

There is some irony in invoking ad hominem arguments while claiming my critique is a distraction. I'm simply acting as an arbiter of which intellectual sausage makes the world worse, just as you are. We have different opinions about which wurst is worse. If your view of reality is that these people don't idolize a gambler masquerading as a philosopher, then I'd absolutely love to agree with you if I could.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#772

Post by luckyd »

The carnivore paradigm is a great example, Paul. It's infeasible to diehard carnivores that one could live (and thrive) without animal protein. We evolved as humans on animal protein. Our deep addiction to this results in massive environmental damage using modern technologies to raise and hunt (obliterate) animal populations at scale- 77 billion land animals and 2.4 trillion fish annually. I'm betting on Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and all the new startups in the plant/lab meat space!

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#773

Post by financialize »

_ot4t wrote: post #222

This post seems to be in response to the recent Mighty app. To me, the main problem lies in what VCs think pass as 'tech'. The mighty app website made it sound it like it was some novel revolutionary app. I was hoping it was really something clever like what the Cloudflare people or even game streaming companies do. But nope. It's significantly worse: it's literally slapping together existing tech and calling it nove…

I don't understand how no one at any point wondered whether it was a good idea to render web pages on a server they did not control. Mighty has investors, are these same investors using the product?

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#774

Post by [deleted] »

aerosmile wrote: post #770
sombremesa wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, you can actually go through the list of companies YC has funded on the website and most of them are out of business today (as you’d expect based on the stats on VC backed ventures). Of course, nobody talks about those.

I am struggling to understand what you're trying to say. Technically what you said is perfectly correct, but in a "the sun goes up in the morning and comes down in the evening" kind of a way. I doubt there are many people on Hacker News who don't realize that most VC backed ventures fail. What would have been more insightful is a conversation around relative benchmarks. For example, "do YC companies fail at a higher…

[deleted]

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#775

Post by sombremesa »

aerosmile wrote: post #770
sombremesa wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, you can actually go through the list of companies YC has funded on the website and most of them are out of business today (as you’d expect based on the stats on VC backed ventures). Of course, nobody talks about those.

I am struggling to understand what you're trying to say. Technically what you said is perfectly correct, but in a "the sun goes up in the morning and comes down in the evening" kind of a way. I doubt there are many people on Hacker News who don't realize that most VC backed ventures fail. What would have been more insightful is a conversation around relative benchmarks. For example, "do YC companies fail at a higher…

I'm trying to say: 'Of course, nobody talks about those.'

Since it's soooo obvious that we should all hide our failures and glorify our successes without questioning this practice (I did say 'of course'), I understand how you missed the point.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#776

Post by gofreddygo »

IgorPartola wrote: post #629
gofreddygo wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this as a pessimism/optimism spectrum. We are on the extreme left if we can reliably predict successes and on the extreme right if we can reliably predict failures. As we pick a few datapoints (Dropbox, Coinbase, Airbnb) and we average it out, we are pushed towards the left. More data we pick (colorlabs for example, and I'm sure many others) we are pushed more towards the right. Most popular article dealing wit…

To expand on your model, I think our ability to predict success and our ability to predict failure are separate things not on a continuum with each other but orthogonal metrics. We need to count false positives and false negatives here. I predict that HN is no better at predicting success than average. It might be better than average at predicting failure but given the distribution that might not be that hard: if you…

> I predict that HN is no better at predicting success than average

I can't fully agree on this. In a fair game (coin toss) your chances are just that, average. In a game where your experience, network and wealth can influence the outcome, things can be different. This is common in the enterprise market.

In the consumer market (which isn't more fair, but just works differently), that model fails miserably, that's where we start seeing the failures of the predictions and bets made.

What I see happening, is the vested parties (VC, Founders, investors) trying to cherry pick data points (from both markets), and then bragging about how they are good at predicting in both markets, but when you add in more data you see, that is not the case.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#777

Post by shard »

867-5309 wrote: post #727
shard wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think you're giving them a lot more credit than is due. they are merely puppets poorly acting out situations scripted by people who do understand how to market their products

That's no different than actors and singers, who act out situations scripted by their publicists and managers who understand how to market their products. Regardless, we are talking about the kind of product that's being sold, which is fundamentally different than those sold by actors and singers.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#778

Post by dang »

lvs wrote: post #771
dang wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many things making things worse, and one does not rule out another, so that question is a bit of a distraction. I'd like to know what you think you gain by being so mean. Surely that's not the kind of person you want to be? The idea that this community "idolizes" PG is trivially disproven by glancing through any recent thread on his writings, including this one.

There is some irony in invoking ad hominem arguments while claiming my critique is a distraction. I'm simply acting as an arbiter of which intellectual sausage makes the world worse, just as you are. We have different opinions about which wurst is worse. If your view of reality is that these people don't idolize a gambler masquerading as a philosopher, then I'd absolutely love to agree with you if I could.

I suppose you could say that my question were an ad hominem argument if it were an argument, but it's not - it's a question. Your comments shocked me by how mean they were, even relative to the other stuff that I read on here. And I have vague memories of having been shocked in the past by how mean you were on other occasions—I don't remember anything specific, but I have a residual Pavlovian wince about it. All of that made want to ask you why.

Re: Crazy New Ideas

#779

Post by shard »

slightwinder wrote: post #743
shard wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cultu…

Certainly there's nothing new under the sun. The difference is the degree in which these people are prominent in media and the zeitgeist, to the point where they make a comfortable living from this work.
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