Fashionable Problems
paulgraham.com
Fashionable Problems
1–10 of 195 posts
Re: Fashionable Problems
#2If you want to try working on unfashionable problems, one of the best places to look is fields that people think have already been fully explored: essays, Lisp, venture funding – you may notice a pattern here.
Do people really think the fields of essays, LISP or venture funding are fully explored?
Re: Fashionable Problems
#3Agree. It is also a good reason for having multidisciplinary interests so we might have different ideas for looking for very different solutions to problems.
Re: Fashionable Problems
#4Is this the first PG essay that was composed on Twitter?
Re: Fashionable Problems
#5If you want to try working on unfashionable problems, one of the best places to look is fields that people think have already been fully explored: essays, Lisp, venture funding – you may notice a pattern here. Do people really think the fields of essays, LISP or venture funding are fully explored?
I think so? They’re all expanding, of course... but none have really changed that much over the past few decades. There’s a ton more VCs than there were a decade ago, but has it really changed as a field? People tweak the formula a bit, but we haven’t seen a shift in the same way YC shifted things. To a lesser extent, pg was one of the first “tech essayists” (now it’s a genre, http://waitwho.is).
I don’t think pg is saying they’re being ignored, but rather that there’s a sense of “yup we figured it out, let’s just iterate slowly on it”.
(I will say I can think of much better examples, but I don’t blame pg for picking the three examples that sum up his entire career. He picked those three things when nobody else cared.)
Re: Fashionable Problems
#6If you want to try working on unfashionable problems, one of the best places to look is fields that people think have already been fully explored: essays, Lisp, venture funding – you may notice a pattern here. Do people really think the fields of essays, LISP or venture funding are fully explored?
Mmm, no. Which is why I really don’t get this post. The advice seems to boil down to something like : “don’t work on something fashionable! Do something like VC funding with a twist, or your own take on essays!” (which seems to be very fashionable).
Re: Fashionable Problems
#7If you want to try working on unfashionable problems, one of the best places to look is fields that people think have already been fully explored: essays, Lisp, venture funding – you may notice a pattern here. Do people really think the fields of essays, LISP or venture funding are fully explored?
I think the meaning is that they were at one time, namely, the time he got started on them.
Re: Fashionable Problems
#8I love this mini-essay.
The counter to this is that it'll be harder to raise capital for un-fashionable problems.
If you pitched "ML for sandwich makers" right now you could raise a million bucks because so many VCs are making fashionable bets on ML.
Re: Fashionable Problems
#9> If you can find a new approach into a big but apparently played out field, the value of whatever you discover will be multiplied by its enormous surface area.
If you found something in a big, fashionable field with a huge surface area (cough ai/ml cough), wouldn't this multiplier apply to that fashionable field, too?
Re: Fashionable Problems
#10> If you can find a new approach into a big but apparently played out field, the value of whatever you discover will be multiplied by its enormous surface area. If you found something in a big, fashionable field with a huge surface area (cough ai/ml cough), wouldn't this multiplier apply to that fashionable field, too?
Well I guess you can't see AI as a played out field yet. More likely it is just starting to take off. Say you find a new exciting spin on ERPs to replace e.g. SAP solutions that will have a large surface area. At least that is how i read the linked post.