Indeed. The number of votes this has received is an amusing insight into how many people must upvote based on origin and not content. If this were published on some anonymous medium blog, it would be lucky to be +2.
So...you are agreeing with me that this has been upvoted based on origin and not content, and you're just repeating what I said to reinforce the point?
Origin and context give extra meaning and weight to content. That seems trivially true to me. If Paul Graham writes this then that means the topic is on the mind of someone influential and important in our community, thus it is worthy of scrutiny and thought, thus worthy of an upvote.
Hacker News is not some game where people compete to create content with maximum merit. It is a source of new content relevant to this community.
Same here, you constantly wonder if what your thinking is truly unique.
I believe the key is figuring out when your view is unique. What I have been doing is asking people questions on their view of a problem or something I am thinking about and looking at the deltas there. I have not thought about it with the term delta. Maybe looking for deltas would be another addition to the toolkit when searching for insights.
I prefer to use the term contradictions. Sometimes that leads you to further insights.
And you spend most of your life trying to prove how special you are, instead of productively producing things and playing with the world that is also shaping them?
People tend to forget that ideas are worth nothing. It's not that hard to build a model of the world which would be parametrisable for any possible outcome.
Then those parameters would be defined by your experience, which requires you to get out of your mind and earn on the outside.
It seems my comment was not precise enough. The result is the following assumptions being made:
1. The thinking/insight/ideas is in pursuit of proving my own special nature
2. The thinking/insights/ideas are purely theories and have no practical application
Notice that the word "problem" was used. What is meant here an actual problem that I am trying to solve with actual practical implications.
Let me clarify what I mean, using concrete examples:
In product development/startups/business space: "My customers are telling me their problem is X, but what they are doing or how they are doing it is Contradictory. Why is this?"
"Two customers have completely different and contradictory views on what feature/problem is important to them, why is this?"
The actual purpose is to understand your customer better so you can cater for what they actually need.
This part is confusing, can you clarify what you mean:
"Then those parameters would be defined by your experience, which requires you to get out of your mind and earn on the outside"
Right now I would say that I have some insights that I feel are really unique and interesting, at least to me, and maybe a few friends.
However, they aren't monetizable to fans or marketable to employers. This has been fairly evident to me after a year of youtubing and twittering and twitching and etc.
So, even though I enjoy it, I really start to question if my ideas are actually that great, or if the addressable market is just not very large.
It's a shame that a lot of these jurisdictions are also "where the jobs are".
Fortunately, we are much more likely to be affected by so many other dangerous things rather than home invasion that there's just many things to be anxious about ^.^
Anxiety is caused by a form of ruminating about the future in which you focus on uncertainty. Get out there and eliminate all uncertainty and you will feel your anxiety disappear! Tell your boss you feel unappreciated, talk to strangers, and generally do things that you feel anxious about.
If your anxiety is so strong that you can't do those things, then get therapy! It changed my life, and a good therapist can change yours as well.
I don't see any connection between what I wrote and your reply.
In any case, you are wrong about the cause of anxiety. That might be a cause of it, but there are plenty of other causes. See in particular the "medical causes" section of http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/anxiety/sympto...
It can be a symptom of an underlying illness.
I think it's great that you are sharing your personal experience. This can help others. But saying "and a good therapist can change yours as well" is a dangerous thing. It worked for you but you can't know for sure if it will work for others.
Share your experience but don't tell others that your way will work for everyone.
The OP seemed to indicate a mild social anxiety to share their ideas, not a crippling, clinical anxiety that requires professional attention, so "stop being anxious" is a perfectly valid piece of advice. IMO the easiest way to get over imposter syndrome is to "fake it till you make it," which is another way of saying "stop being anxious and do it anyway."
[T]he more general the ideas you're talking about, the less you should worry
about repeating yourself.
Organisms are used to train over and over to get better at things. Certain abilities are innate, like a calf knows to stand up as soon as out of the womb. But to stand firmly the calf has to keep trying.
When it comes to an idea, I believe that the broader I present the idea, the easier it is to start a conversation, because others are more likely to show interest, and eventually reach the point you find a focus point. However, I still repeat myself, because I wouldn't invent a whole new dialogue next time I bring up the same broad idea with another person.
On the other hand, I feel developing a product (startup or not), the more general the idea is, the harder for me to explain my ideas concretely, much like films have leading roles. The ideas present by the film can be broad, but you don't want camera rolling on 200 actors in 1 hour 30 minutes, would you? Your message can be interesting and novel, but I am going to be lost.
But yeah, on HN topics like "I quite FB", "security is hard", "Google is evil", etc are common here, but I still comment on those topics when I feel like to. My responses are usually similar, but I might add new thoughts, or rephrase what I had written before. I called this introspection. I believe we are not comfortable repeating ourselves, because we want to be interesting and original, but we still have the urge to try to perfect our speech the next time someone asks.
There's also a class of valuable insights that are general and not surprising, but rather obvious. For these, the challenge is that no one previously had the insight to observe and state what is obvious. Maybe the surprise for these isn't in the truth but rather that no one had stated them before.
The essay describes a 2x2 grid with axes of generality and surprise. Things that are suprising and general are valuable. Things that are general but unsurprising are platitudes, and things that are specific but surprising are gossip. The essay itself is a platitude.
It misses an important element that may seem obvious but isn't: truth. Some insights are indeed, general and surprising, but when examined closely, turn out to be false.
That's what happened to many of the ideas presented by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, fast and slow. He obviously aimed for "general and surprising" but accepted as solid results the outcome of lone, irreproducible experiments.
We (our current culture -- it wasn't always like that) love originality and "surprises", but as a rule, the more surprising the result, the more scrutiny it should withstand.
Circulating ideas where people disagree about whether or not they're true is an excellent way to discover things. Not just whether the particular ideas true, but why or why not, and where the uncertainty comes from.
In your example, perhaps the most lasting value of priming studies is a much greater understanding of how p-hacking actually misleads us. Everyone knew that it could in theory, but it was general and surprising that entire fields could have an apparent scientific consensus entirely based on p-hacking and file drawer effects.
Maybe we will learn... but maybe not. From Daniel Kahneman himself:
> there is a special irony in my mistake because the first paper that Amos Tversky and I published was about the belief in the “law of small numbers,” which allows researchers to trust the results of underpowered studies with unreasonably small samples. (...) Our article was written in 1969 and published in 1971, but I failed to internalize its message.
What you describe is the setup. The key point of the essay lies in the later part about the delta of novelty and how useful an insight can be in relation to its novelty and generality.
I saw this essay as a process to come up with an interesting idea. He's even applying this process to the essay itself. Start with something general and iterate until you find something novel. Maybe he's there, maybe something is not quite right but it's another step in the gradient ascent random walk.
I think "Repeating close variations on your usual theme unlocks far more value than you'd expect given minimal novelty value" is a surprising result. I utterly buy it.
The advice I give which has produced the single biggest deltas in outcomes is "Charge more." It is so simple that I could literally print it on T-shirts and wear it to any event which discusses pricing. People know it is my catchphrase and sometimes I get knowing laughter when I say it...
... and then a few minutes later they've agreed to try charging more, despite having an accurate model which suggests "Hah, I bet when we ask Patrick about our new pricing he is going to ask us what it is, think about it for less than five seconds, and then suggest charging more." They knew what I'd say before I even got in the room, but even the tiniest marginal connection to their own pricing grid / customers / data pushes them to actually try it.
Are you actually surprised (isn't that just "practice makes perfect", a platitude), or is "more value than you'd expect" just telling you to be surprised?
> think "Repeating close variations on your usual theme unlocks far more value than you'd expect given minimal novelty value" is a surprising result. I utterly buy it.
I was hoping for an example, but your example of repeating your catch phrase doesn't quite fit imo. There's no variation. Is there a variation of your catch phrase or message you're not mentioning here?
This is not true as often you find surprising things that are not general which ARE NOT GOSSIP. To stay with the physics theme, the Schwarzschild solution of general relativity is a very special one and I don't think anybody thinks that black holes are gossip.
And it is certainly not surprising that amateurs in general forget that F = ma is only valid if the mass does not change. The more general expression is F = dp/dt, where p is the momentum. But this, of course, is also only valid in inertial systems. It's not really important to the article but it does kind of annoy me that he uses the most special case of an expression in an argument about it being general.
He could have actually made the point about generality by comparing this expression to the most general one for the force (in a frame of reference that accelerates). That would have also shown why generality can quickly become infeasible in practice. If he knew how many approximations people make in the real world, not because they want to, but because they HAVE TO, his worldview might be a different one.
I feel like he's trying to make a point about a very specific scenario but doesn't mention it explicitly. Instead he tries to be general and therefore fails to understand that his view doesn't actually apply in general.
Theoretical entities called "black holes" cannot exist in finite universe (no matter the perspective changes that are applied). The result (if I understand it correctly) applies to a universe in which there is a single massive body and universe is eternal.
Hence, if time dilation exists (under increasing levels of gravity) "black hole" cannot form in any finite time. Since there are many massive bodies in our universe, solution to problem is not applicable.
So, in that context, "black holes" ARE GOSSIP!!!!
Let the "GOSSIP" wars commence.
Other than that, I think you make some very salient points, especially about the approximations that we make and the validity of those approximations to the specific applications/situations being studied.
Yes, the current understanding is that general relativity breaks down inside of black holes and, to understand how it really works, we need a quantum theory of gravity.
However, I would not call it gossip since, by your reasoning, anything could be gossip then. I understand gossip as being something unimportant but the Schwarzschild solution was a major milestone in the understanding of general relativity. Moreover, all scifi movies considering wormholes and such, can be traced back to the usual visualization of the black hole distorting space time. Pretty consequential discovery I'd say.
You miss the point that the Schwarzschild solution was for a very specific universe that does not in any way match ours. Hence, saying that the solution is applicable to our universe and WILL give rise to the theoretical entity know as a "black hole" is pushing the solution well beyond it actual applicability.
Much as I like good SF (and even mediocre SF), I believe there is enough evidence to say that our understanding is very incomplete and that GR (though it give some good approximations in general) may be a complete furphy.
Our problem at this time is that any time conflicting evidence comes up. it tends to get either buried or ignore or those bringing it up get ad hominem attacked.
If the evidence is obviously incorrect then it should be a simple matter of showing exactly how it is incorrect. My observations of the actions of the proponents of GR are that they tend towards dogmatism and and not discussion, ridicule and not rebuttal.
If odd things are found, then the prevailing theory (in this case GR) should be able to fairly handle these discrepancies.
F = ma is interesting because there are universal forces like electricity, gravitation and electromagnetism that we use for our daily life. Moreover there is a marriage between maths and physics since acceleration is the second derivative of space with respect of time. If you are a new Newton you should create the new concepts and develop the new maths to create a surprising step forward. Looking for a word that goes from gossip to F=ma is like using a telescope to watch a worm. Concepts are about frameworks and using a right scale to focus concepts.
There are also the platitudes that everybody knows but that nobody does anything about.... Oftentimes there is virtue in simply being unusually conscientious.
>that territory tends to be picked clean, precisely because those insights are so valuable
People often think that a field has been 'picked clean' and conclude that either no further progress is possible or that further discoveries are going to be rare and incremental.
e.g. "the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals" -- Michelson, 1894
But there are always deep problems and this implies that unlimited progress is possible. The really big discoveries can happen at any time and are of an unpredictable nature, not least because they affect multiple fields. They leave behind plenty of smaller problems for everyone to pick up.
"the more general the ideas you're talking about, the less you should worry about repeating yourself"
A rule-of-thumb I've generally followed when brainstorming is "never write down the ideas". And if at all possible, try to forget them, good or bad. It inevitably forces me to re-think the ideas "from scratch". I've never been worried that an idea would escape me or that I would forget it, as I think the exercise of re-thinking ideas from scratch has helped me build a relatively solid mental model of the world. I feel that, with practice, this method of brainstorming has started bringing me to the solid / useful (general / surprising) ideas faster.
It has likely, over the years, added weeks or possibly months worth of time that I've spent brainstorming the same (general) ideas over and over.
As an aside, I can't say for sure how you use the term "brainstorming" here, but there is plenty of evidence that classic-style brainstorming in groups leads to less ideas, and less creative ideas.
When I was forced by my boss to teach designers brainstorming, against my better judgement, I instead made this slideshow summarising my frustrations and what I would suggest people do instead:
Nice presentation. Something I've seen a lot over the decades is internal politics. One huge advantage of not using a brainstorming team is 99.999999% of humanity is more creative by sole mass of brain power than the team will be (Six billion people vs a team of ten people) so almost all good ideas, for any problem, will be discovered outside the team.
If the team is in charge as a group of doing the brainstorming, 99.999999% of the good ideas will come from non-team individuals who will be automatically shot down as "not your job" "work on your own team" and similar primate dominance games. If you brainstorm individually, that 99.999999% of good ideas has a better change of getting implemented. Groups hate outsiders (and by extension, their ideas), without a boundary there is no group.
Another internal politics problem is reward. Teams exist to funnel all success upward and channel all failure downward. Everyone knows if they actually have a solution its wasted on the team unless they're the leader. There are financial and career pressures for teams to fail so individuals can keep the fruits of their labor, so to speak. This can lead to very low team performance.
Thanks, although I personally feel it's more like a decent article disguised as a bad powerpoint (text overload) - works better when sharing it afterwards though.
I've been told it's better live when I combine it with barely-contained frustration - turns out to be a very relatable experience for many.
I have been lucky enough to never have been in an organisation with a dedicated brainstorming team, but your description definitely sounds like how it would play out in reality. Thanks for sharing, now I know it's a red flag.
If you combine that with brainstorming being misused for identifying problems (instead of solutions to known problems) like I mention early on, things probably get even worse.
I figured - the way you described your process wouldn't fit the systematic brainstorming style :)
Anyway, I think get what you're saying with not writing things down: you're forcing yourself to start from the ground up, so the result matches the problem better. Having said that, I wonder if this isn't more dependent on how you note things down and organise your thoughts, because like others have mentioned here, I would have lost a lot of ideas if not for short scribbles.
You may like this quote from John Steinbeck's 'East of Eden':
> Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.”
I usually write down everything and then go back through and determine what's worthwhile. There's almost always gold that I never would have remembered had I not written it down.
There is a risk here that one might trick themselves into believing they've made good progress in developing an idea, when if they had attempted to write it down in some detail, the fuzziness of our internal thought processes would be revealed and the perceived rigor of the idea would be revealed as somewhat illusory.
I've found this phenomenon to reveal itself even more explicitly when attempting to explain some of my more complex thoughts in detail to others.
I think the benefit you are aiming for can be achieved by making an effort to revisit prior ideas with fresh perspectives and from different angles, and then later comparing and contrasting the different attempts.
My personal image about this topic is the fact that the general relativity theory is more advanced than the special relativty theory.
It reminds me that creating something more general is harder than creating something specialized for a specific problem. For programmers this seems to be obvious, but for others this is counter intuitive.
For me, general and surprising things are coming in the form of "X doesn't seem to work".
The reasoning goes like this: X is described like a good thing and a lot of resources poured in it. But there are documented failures of X - are they spurious or causes by X not actually doing what is advertised?
More often than not the working answer "it probably doesn't work" which is often "a thing you can not say" due to general consensus, good feelings and above mentioned amount of resources poured in X.
For example, Yugoslavia had what was described as the most progressive ethnic minorities policy in the world (regarding official languages use, representation of minorities, etc, etc), and then it violently fell apart in a series of ethnic conflicts.
This guy pretends to be an intellectual but is the biggest wannabe I know. He tried to block the latest Steve Jobs film because it showed how much of an asshole Jobs was
Paul Graham is running out of ideas these days. (Partly joking).
This goes on to my same discovery: Life itself is a constant process of incremental trial and error builds-up. Over a few billions years, you get something out of it (human being playing snapchat)
If you keep counting from 0 to an infinitely large number, at some numbers you'll "discover": Windows 7, Windows 7 Korean Language, Microsoft Office, OSX, and every other game that human designed and developed. Plus a bunch of other software from alternate realities that compile on our machines. Cool.
The process the human are doing is not much different (albeit one can argue that it is much more efficient than stupidly counting) "Everything" is already there. The new Audi A4? It was already "possible".
If there is one thing that will change the future, it is our discovery of the link between "abstract" and "real" concepts. They share some important points that I'd not be surprised that "real" and "abstract" are the same thing/continuum. Like space and time.
That's an interesting thought. Just want to point out that complexity theory from Computer Science fits nicely into this, because it asks, not what is "possible" (e.g. finding all programs by counting all the integers), but what is possible within limited resources, like e.g. time.
A nice addition to the thought that, theoretically, even if you can find the Windows 10 source code by counting all integers, you can't actually do it within the lifetime of the universe without a smarter algorithm.
You can always find the successor of a given integer, but there's not really an analogous process for human discovery, where it's easy to go in circles. The process really is that different.
Are there theoretical situations where random searches are guaranteed to be complete on infinite spaces given "infinite time" (probability of finding solution approaches 1)?
Wooosh. That would be a relevant answer if I had asked about the practice of writing drafts and having friends go through them in general.
My point was different: several drafts and editors were needed for this tiny and banal result?
It's like seeing someone ordering a $10,000 AGA cooker, buying all kinds of spices, herbs and fresh ingredients, amassing several Kitchenaid appliances, getting into an apron and a chef's hat, and then proceed to make ...a grilled cheese sandwich.
May be if the sandwich was going to be consumed by one person. But this "sandwich" will be read by thousands. Well worth the effort of three reviewers.
If you expect thousands, and have 3 reviewers, at least come up with a decent sandwich. Or, failing that, just don't show anything at all until you got something good.
PG lets his inner circle read all of his posts first, whether it's strictly necessary or not. Also, I thought it was commonly accepted that a lot of work goes into distilling simple expressions of ideas.
>Also, I thought it was commonly accepted that a lot of work goes into distilling simple expressions of ideas.
That's only for when you actually distill complex ideas into simple expression. E.g. explaining a complex subject in a succinct and simple to understand way, like Feynman's lectures.
A mere simple expression of something banal to begin with shouldn't take lots of work, the same way writing "The sun is hot, we should better not walk on it" shouldn't.
The drafts were probably longer and worse. It's pretty normal to need a few people for feedback. Like the other commenter said, it's normal in writing.
The fact that PG does this (even with longer essays actually) bothers me to no end and always has. It's as if he doesn't have confidence in what he is saying. Or as if he thinks that what he is saying has some earth shattering implications or impact. [1] And it's not printed in a book. He could easily change it and update it after reading what others said afterwords.
I can understand if he were to write an opinion piece for a major newspaper. Or perhaps having Jessica give it the once over. Or another person with no need to acknowledge or thank them.
And it's certainly not representative of the world that the rest of us operate in when posting comments here on HN. You know the downvotes and gray out comments when someone doesn't like what we have said or doesn't agree with it.
How about an essay on why he has people read his essays before posting them?
One other thing. I don't think honesty requires someone to even give thanks like he does. I think that detracts from the essay and doesn't add to it. There is no requirement to give acknowledgement in that fashion if you are getting help in that way. Assumes the help is minor if the help is major you have to question why someone even is writing essays.
Lastly, I think this sets a bad example for younger people on the way up. The reason? You have to learn from your mistakes and from the brutal honesty of people and how they react to what you say. While this is not importantly to PG (he has already made it) I think constantly having others 2nd guess what you do is not the path to being able to think on your own feet.
[1] Like he is a world leader, or a corporate CEO, and has to tread carefully for fear of a bad outcome from his words.
I don't think you deserve the downvotes for expressing your opinion.
However, there's nothing wrong with having trusted friends read your work. In fact, it shows respect to your readers, especially if you have a megaphone as PG does. Thanking your editors is polite and that is something we could use more of.
Paul Graham doing what he does best. Pseudo-philosophical musings with no basis or any kind of rigorous pass through. Why is this gaining visibility? If anyone else had posted this it'd never see the light of day on here.
> It's not true that there's nothing new under the sun. There are some domains where there's almost nothing new. But there's a big difference between nothing and almost nothing, when it's multiplied by the area under the sun.
I found that statement the most insightful of the essay. Helped me resolve some cognitive dissonance.
Whether there really are totally new things and not just existing things in new packaging depends on which level of abstraction you stop at with when analyzing. For example, at a very high level you could say that the Internet as a whole is really just a very advanced/efficient printing press. (And automation like the printing press or assembly line, just efficiently organized production.)
That level of abstraction may be less than helpful, unless there are insights to be gleaned from where the internet is going by looking at printing press technology. Their impacts on empowering the masses are similar, but they each encouraged/enabled network effects to consolidate much power (newspapers and goog/fb) and thereby effectively countering much of the effect.
I was thinking recently about idea cross-pollination, and that kind of hits the same gap. Most of the time, it doesn't really lead anywhere interesting. But every once in a while, you get that perfect combination of a few different domains that just explodes.
208 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadLike, I'm not sure what he's trying to get at.
If Paul Graham writes an essay then that is relevant to Hacker News so it should be upvoted regardless of whether it is shit.
Hacker News is not some game where people compete to create content with maximum merit. It is a source of new content relevant to this community.
I guess all I can do now is hope that whoever is listening can see the value in incremental change :)
I believe the key is figuring out when your view is unique. What I have been doing is asking people questions on their view of a problem or something I am thinking about and looking at the deltas there. I have not thought about it with the term delta. Maybe looking for deltas would be another addition to the toolkit when searching for insights.
I prefer to use the term contradictions. Sometimes that leads you to further insights.
People tend to forget that ideas are worth nothing. It's not that hard to build a model of the world which would be parametrisable for any possible outcome.
Then those parameters would be defined by your experience, which requires you to get out of your mind and earn on the outside.
1. The thinking/insight/ideas is in pursuit of proving my own special nature 2. The thinking/insights/ideas are purely theories and have no practical application
Notice that the word "problem" was used. What is meant here an actual problem that I am trying to solve with actual practical implications.
Let me clarify what I mean, using concrete examples: In product development/startups/business space: "My customers are telling me their problem is X, but what they are doing or how they are doing it is Contradictory. Why is this?"
"Two customers have completely different and contradictory views on what feature/problem is important to them, why is this?"
The actual purpose is to understand your customer better so you can cater for what they actually need.
This part is confusing, can you clarify what you mean:
"Then those parameters would be defined by your experience, which requires you to get out of your mind and earn on the outside"
Right now I would say that I have some insights that I feel are really unique and interesting, at least to me, and maybe a few friends.
However, they aren't monetizable to fans or marketable to employers. This has been fairly evident to me after a year of youtubing and twittering and twitching and etc.
So, even though I enjoy it, I really start to question if my ideas are actually that great, or if the addressable market is just not very large.
Good luck !!! :)
Stop being anxious, go out in the world and see what your ideas are worth.
- Capitalism would define their value on how much you'd earn from these ideas.
- Writers would value them based on how many readers buy your books.
- Developers would value them based on how many contributors your open-source projects has.
- Or die and keep your diary and maybe in 50 years you will turn out to be the genius who saw the future.
But still - none of that absolutely requires anyone to be anxious.
Oh thank god, now I'm cured! That's all I needed!
/s
"Oh, you mean all I need to do to fall asleep, is just close my eyes and go to sleep?!"
In all seriousness, I mean, who doesn't have anxiety, right? If someone broke into your house, you'd start feeling anxious.
I focus on building things, on going outside and being happy.
And yet people still don't buy my product or offer me a job ^.^
If that doesn't make anyone start wondering what might be wrong, then I'd like to know more.
I'd start feeling murderous.
Namely NYC and Boston, especially if you are using a gun.
It's a shame that a lot of these jurisdictions are also "where the jobs are".
Fortunately, we are much more likely to be affected by so many other dangerous things rather than home invasion that there's just many things to be anxious about ^.^
This implies that anxieties themselves have no causes.
> Stop being anxious
I'd like to see your advice on other things. "Stop being sick!", "Stop being afraid of spiders!", "Stop being introverted!"
If your anxiety is so strong that you can't do those things, then get therapy! It changed my life, and a good therapist can change yours as well.
In any case, you are wrong about the cause of anxiety. That might be a cause of it, but there are plenty of other causes. See in particular the "medical causes" section of http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/anxiety/sympto... It can be a symptom of an underlying illness.
Share your experience but don't tell others that your way will work for everyone.
When it comes to an idea, I believe that the broader I present the idea, the easier it is to start a conversation, because others are more likely to show interest, and eventually reach the point you find a focus point. However, I still repeat myself, because I wouldn't invent a whole new dialogue next time I bring up the same broad idea with another person.
On the other hand, I feel developing a product (startup or not), the more general the idea is, the harder for me to explain my ideas concretely, much like films have leading roles. The ideas present by the film can be broad, but you don't want camera rolling on 200 actors in 1 hour 30 minutes, would you? Your message can be interesting and novel, but I am going to be lost.
But yeah, on HN topics like "I quite FB", "security is hard", "Google is evil", etc are common here, but I still comment on those topics when I feel like to. My responses are usually similar, but I might add new thoughts, or rephrase what I had written before. I called this introspection. I believe we are not comfortable repeating ourselves, because we want to be interesting and original, but we still have the urge to try to perfect our speech the next time someone asks.
It might have been easier to understand if bound to real world examples.
That's what happened to many of the ideas presented by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, fast and slow. He obviously aimed for "general and surprising" but accepted as solid results the outcome of lone, irreproducible experiments.
We (our current culture -- it wasn't always like that) love originality and "surprises", but as a rule, the more surprising the result, the more scrutiny it should withstand.
In your example, perhaps the most lasting value of priming studies is a much greater understanding of how p-hacking actually misleads us. Everyone knew that it could in theory, but it was general and surprising that entire fields could have an apparent scientific consensus entirely based on p-hacking and file drawer effects.
> there is a special irony in my mistake because the first paper that Amos Tversky and I published was about the belief in the “law of small numbers,” which allows researchers to trust the results of underpowered studies with unreasonably small samples. (...) Our article was written in 1969 and published in 1971, but I failed to internalize its message.
We simply want to believe.
The advice I give which has produced the single biggest deltas in outcomes is "Charge more." It is so simple that I could literally print it on T-shirts and wear it to any event which discusses pricing. People know it is my catchphrase and sometimes I get knowing laughter when I say it...
... and then a few minutes later they've agreed to try charging more, despite having an accurate model which suggests "Hah, I bet when we ask Patrick about our new pricing he is going to ask us what it is, think about it for less than five seconds, and then suggest charging more." They knew what I'd say before I even got in the room, but even the tiniest marginal connection to their own pricing grid / customers / data pushes them to actually try it.
I was hoping for an example, but your example of repeating your catch phrase doesn't quite fit imo. There's no variation. Is there a variation of your catch phrase or message you're not mentioning here?
And it is certainly not surprising that amateurs in general forget that F = ma is only valid if the mass does not change. The more general expression is F = dp/dt, where p is the momentum. But this, of course, is also only valid in inertial systems. It's not really important to the article but it does kind of annoy me that he uses the most special case of an expression in an argument about it being general.
He could have actually made the point about generality by comparing this expression to the most general one for the force (in a frame of reference that accelerates). That would have also shown why generality can quickly become infeasible in practice. If he knew how many approximations people make in the real world, not because they want to, but because they HAVE TO, his worldview might be a different one.
I feel like he's trying to make a point about a very specific scenario but doesn't mention it explicitly. Instead he tries to be general and therefore fails to understand that his view doesn't actually apply in general.
Hence, if time dilation exists (under increasing levels of gravity) "black hole" cannot form in any finite time. Since there are many massive bodies in our universe, solution to problem is not applicable.
So, in that context, "black holes" ARE GOSSIP!!!!
Let the "GOSSIP" wars commence.
Other than that, I think you make some very salient points, especially about the approximations that we make and the validity of those approximations to the specific applications/situations being studied.
However, I would not call it gossip since, by your reasoning, anything could be gossip then. I understand gossip as being something unimportant but the Schwarzschild solution was a major milestone in the understanding of general relativity. Moreover, all scifi movies considering wormholes and such, can be traced back to the usual visualization of the black hole distorting space time. Pretty consequential discovery I'd say.
Much as I like good SF (and even mediocre SF), I believe there is enough evidence to say that our understanding is very incomplete and that GR (though it give some good approximations in general) may be a complete furphy.
Our problem at this time is that any time conflicting evidence comes up. it tends to get either buried or ignore or those bringing it up get ad hominem attacked.
If the evidence is obviously incorrect then it should be a simple matter of showing exactly how it is incorrect. My observations of the actions of the proponents of GR are that they tend towards dogmatism and and not discussion, ridicule and not rebuttal.
If odd things are found, then the prevailing theory (in this case GR) should be able to fairly handle these discrepancies.
There are no "stupid" questions.
PG sometimes meanders into actual meaning. But the likes of Tim Ferris or Seth Godin absolutely excel at this drivel.
People often think that a field has been 'picked clean' and conclude that either no further progress is possible or that further discoveries are going to be rare and incremental.
e.g. "the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals" -- Michelson, 1894
But there are always deep problems and this implies that unlimited progress is possible. The really big discoveries can happen at any time and are of an unpredictable nature, not least because they affect multiple fields. They leave behind plenty of smaller problems for everyone to pick up.
A rule-of-thumb I've generally followed when brainstorming is "never write down the ideas". And if at all possible, try to forget them, good or bad. It inevitably forces me to re-think the ideas "from scratch". I've never been worried that an idea would escape me or that I would forget it, as I think the exercise of re-thinking ideas from scratch has helped me build a relatively solid mental model of the world. I feel that, with practice, this method of brainstorming has started bringing me to the solid / useful (general / surprising) ideas faster.
It has likely, over the years, added weeks or possibly months worth of time that I've spent brainstorming the same (general) ideas over and over.
When I was forced by my boss to teach designers brainstorming, against my better judgement, I instead made this slideshow summarising my frustrations and what I would suggest people do instead:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EYyS4AtRhNa6i299R_RB...
Not that think that what I suggest is perfect either, but it seems to be a bit better aligned with how ideation works.
Hope it will be of use to you all! :)
If the team is in charge as a group of doing the brainstorming, 99.999999% of the good ideas will come from non-team individuals who will be automatically shot down as "not your job" "work on your own team" and similar primate dominance games. If you brainstorm individually, that 99.999999% of good ideas has a better change of getting implemented. Groups hate outsiders (and by extension, their ideas), without a boundary there is no group.
Another internal politics problem is reward. Teams exist to funnel all success upward and channel all failure downward. Everyone knows if they actually have a solution its wasted on the team unless they're the leader. There are financial and career pressures for teams to fail so individuals can keep the fruits of their labor, so to speak. This can lead to very low team performance.
I've been told it's better live when I combine it with barely-contained frustration - turns out to be a very relatable experience for many.
I have been lucky enough to never have been in an organisation with a dedicated brainstorming team, but your description definitely sounds like how it would play out in reality. Thanks for sharing, now I know it's a red flag.
If you combine that with brainstorming being misused for identifying problems (instead of solutions to known problems) like I mention early on, things probably get even worse.
"Show HN: [Title]" with an explanation in the comments?
Anyway, I think get what you're saying with not writing things down: you're forcing yourself to start from the ground up, so the result matches the problem better. Having said that, I wonder if this isn't more dependent on how you note things down and organise your thoughts, because like others have mentioned here, I would have lost a lot of ideas if not for short scribbles.
> Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.”
Makes me feel I should write them down, and revisit/expand on them properly..
I've found this phenomenon to reveal itself even more explicitly when attempting to explain some of my more complex thoughts in detail to others.
I think the benefit you are aiming for can be achieved by making an effort to revisit prior ideas with fresh perspectives and from different angles, and then later comparing and contrasting the different attempts.
It reminds me that creating something more general is harder than creating something specialized for a specific problem. For programmers this seems to be obvious, but for others this is counter intuitive.
The reasoning goes like this: X is described like a good thing and a lot of resources poured in it. But there are documented failures of X - are they spurious or causes by X not actually doing what is advertised?
More often than not the working answer "it probably doesn't work" which is often "a thing you can not say" due to general consensus, good feelings and above mentioned amount of resources poured in X.
https://www.amazon.com/What-Do-You-Idea/dp/1938298071
This goes on to my same discovery: Life itself is a constant process of incremental trial and error builds-up. Over a few billions years, you get something out of it (human being playing snapchat)
If you keep counting from 0 to an infinitely large number, at some numbers you'll "discover": Windows 7, Windows 7 Korean Language, Microsoft Office, OSX, and every other game that human designed and developed. Plus a bunch of other software from alternate realities that compile on our machines. Cool.
The process the human are doing is not much different (albeit one can argue that it is much more efficient than stupidly counting) "Everything" is already there. The new Audi A4? It was already "possible".
If there is one thing that will change the future, it is our discovery of the link between "abstract" and "real" concepts. They share some important points that I'd not be surprised that "real" and "abstract" are the same thing/continuum. Like space and time.
A nice addition to the thought that, theoretically, even if you can find the Windows 10 source code by counting all integers, you can't actually do it within the lifetime of the universe without a smarter algorithm.
You can always find the successor of a given integer, but there's not really an analogous process for human discovery, where it's easy to go in circles. The process really is that different.
Are there theoretical situations where random searches are guaranteed to be complete on infinite spaces given "infinite time" (probability of finding solution approaches 1)?
This (a very basic 400 word essay/post) needed "drafts" and 3 people going through them?
I like some of PG's essays, but this one just has a couple of trivial insights.
My point was different: several drafts and editors were needed for this tiny and banal result?
It's like seeing someone ordering a $10,000 AGA cooker, buying all kinds of spices, herbs and fresh ingredients, amassing several Kitchenaid appliances, getting into an apron and a chef's hat, and then proceed to make ...a grilled cheese sandwich.
That's only for when you actually distill complex ideas into simple expression. E.g. explaining a complex subject in a succinct and simple to understand way, like Feynman's lectures.
A mere simple expression of something banal to begin with shouldn't take lots of work, the same way writing "The sun is hot, we should better not walk on it" shouldn't.
I can understand if he were to write an opinion piece for a major newspaper. Or perhaps having Jessica give it the once over. Or another person with no need to acknowledge or thank them.
And it's certainly not representative of the world that the rest of us operate in when posting comments here on HN. You know the downvotes and gray out comments when someone doesn't like what we have said or doesn't agree with it.
How about an essay on why he has people read his essays before posting them?
One other thing. I don't think honesty requires someone to even give thanks like he does. I think that detracts from the essay and doesn't add to it. There is no requirement to give acknowledgement in that fashion if you are getting help in that way. Assumes the help is minor if the help is major you have to question why someone even is writing essays.
Lastly, I think this sets a bad example for younger people on the way up. The reason? You have to learn from your mistakes and from the brutal honesty of people and how they react to what you say. While this is not importantly to PG (he has already made it) I think constantly having others 2nd guess what you do is not the path to being able to think on your own feet.
[1] Like he is a world leader, or a corporate CEO, and has to tread carefully for fear of a bad outcome from his words.
However, there's nothing wrong with having trusted friends read your work. In fact, it shows respect to your readers, especially if you have a megaphone as PG does. Thanking your editors is polite and that is something we could use more of.
The simple things are good to be reminded of, on a regular basis, that's why :)
I found that statement the most insightful of the essay. Helped me resolve some cognitive dissonance.
Whether there really are totally new things and not just existing things in new packaging depends on which level of abstraction you stop at with when analyzing. For example, at a very high level you could say that the Internet as a whole is really just a very advanced/efficient printing press. (And automation like the printing press or assembly line, just efficiently organized production.)
That level of abstraction may be less than helpful, unless there are insights to be gleaned from where the internet is going by looking at printing press technology. Their impacts on empowering the masses are similar, but they each encouraged/enabled network effects to consolidate much power (newspapers and goog/fb) and thereby effectively countering much of the effect.