This strategy is low-risk but also low-reward. The most successful people in life often gain expertise in some specific, changing area, then get extremely lucky to have it pan out.
I think of the Admiral Chester Nimitz. All of his peers studied and worked on battleships because that's what the Navy had done for hundreds of years. But when WW2 entered the scene, Nimitz - the one guy studying the rapidly-changing area of submarines and aircraft carriers - was the one promoted to the highest command.
“I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”
Eh, this is kind of an odd statement here... He did take something that didn't change much and applied a lot of rapidly changing high technology to it. Much like Walmart before them, they did something kind of like everyone else was doing, but but their high risk, high reward twist on top of it.
Interesting that he identifies three things and then comments on the two which really ARE obviously true long term and not on the third which is much more debatable.
When I go to Amazon I'd often prefer a smaller selection of items for common categories, with better price/quality tradeoff information, and an assurance that I wasn't going to get an inferior substitute.
Not that it's an EASY problem to solve, particularly at Amazon's scale, but it's also the thing where it's most likely that a customer will come up and say "Jeff, I just want to be able to order a USB key that has the capacity it claims without having to wade through thousands of shady vendors".
I want to like this article but I think it really underplays the nature and (modern) frequency of black swan events. If I were to take the advice of this article in 1994, I would be going full bore into telephony and set-top internet boxes that attach to 4:3 SD televisions.
This sort of thinking works. . . until it doesn't. It's how we get the vintage zeerust type of Sci-Fi works.
- Ebooks will, of course, be delivered to your TRS-80 after you dial a phone number to buy it from a print catalog.
- Daily news will never go out of fashion (there's always -something- happening!) but printing newspapers creates a bunch of waste. People will, instead, buy a single newspaper that they keep and exchange at a 'newsstand' where your old paper is erased and a new edition printed on top, for a small fee.
Extending this idea beyond technical topics is why I stopped bothering to put effort into most humanities or liberal arts and advise those younger than me to do the same. Most new work in the sciences is driven by an obvious gap in current theories or disagreeable data. Dramatic exaggerations of "scientific revolutions" aside, the relationship of the old to new knowledge is generally as either a subset, a superset, or an approximation of the other. See Newtonian to relativistic to quantum physics. See set theory to arithmetic etc. If you got a PhD in physics in the 70's and didn't learn a thing since, you're still in a great position to help a teenager with their homework.
This is simply not true of a subject like women's studies or even psychology. If your knowledge of these subjects froze in the 70's, at best your attempts to help a teenager with those subjects would result in eye rolls and at worst you being literally labelled as evil. Why invest time and effort into a subject where the reward over any gulf of time is so slight or is even negative?
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm saying it's definitely moved. It's just moved in such a way that almost all of the new knowledge replaces rather than extends or builds on the old knowledge. Thus almost all effort learning the old knowledge was a waste and we can expect the same for learning it today.
Edit to respond to your edit: And I'm most definitely considering non-financial gains and losses. Consider my example of a PhD in psychology from the 70's, do you think it's a net positive to believe transgendered people have a pathology? Or that we should destroy the frontal lobes of unhappy housewives with icepicks?
I don't think so. Considering thinkers like Jung and biochemist-cum-philosophers like Hofmann came along before much of that nonsense, and whose work was pushed aside with the good old American south paw for several decades. Thankfully with some more recent movement on the pharmacological front (re: resuming research into psychedelic molecules), as well as some doors opening on old estates (re: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Book_(Jung)) that there are new advances all of the time. Even Jung claimed he was just giving new language to ancient wisdom, even ideas he thought were at one point all his own.
"What's old is new again." Your chosen examples were a brief spout of practice brought about by the brutality of a now waning but once unbridled materialistic industrial power—not the end of psychology (or the humanities at large) as a meaningful study.
I think you're looking for only a certain type of reward and ignoring many others.
If you study women's studies in the 70s then maybe you can't help someone with their homework today. Ok, so in a sense you're less well off because you can't do something that someone who studied physics can do?
But women's studies today is different because the field has moved on to much, so much has been exposed in the way that women are treated in our society, so much has been changed for the better, huge impacts have been made on people's lives etc. And people who have worked in the field have contributed to this. Have they really had a negative reward in your eyes?
I wouldn't dispute that the field of women's studies has positively impacted society. So have the sciences. Assuming their impact was similarly positive, we're back to the question of where are you now if your major investment in these fields was 30 or more years ago (as a way of predicting what an investment today would reap). My claim is that because science is more additive in how it builds itself that your older knowledge is more useful today.
And I can literally say that many who studied women's studies and related fields in the 70's have had a negative reward. There is simply no scientific analog to JK Rowling and the battle between "waves" of feminist in the sciences.
Sure there is! The thread that binds it all together is history. Understanding what's going on with JK's axe she's grinding starts in the 1970s with the rise and splintering of the Radical Feminist movement, the rise of Radical Lesbian Feminism and in particular the seminal book for what people now call TERFs, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male written in 1979 by Janice Raymond. Absolutely nothing uttered by JK is her own original idea and you can trace them all the way back to where they actually came from and what was going on in history at the time that precipitated them.
Gender studies is basically history + philosophy but focused on a particular topic.
Correct (and bonus points for mentioning Raymond, we should hang out). But, and maybe I'm misunderstanding but aren't you just emphasising my point? As you show, Rowling is in many way a good 70's feminist but according to today's feminist, she's bad. In fact, she's considered a monster. Compare to a 70's physicist: They might be considered outdated for not knowing the proposed extensions to the standard model or that the standard model was empirically justified but nothing they believe is now considered wrong. The only conclusion to draw is that the field of feminism/women's-studies is known to peddle... for lack of a better term, anti-knowledge. Rowling would be better off today being ignorant of everything she was taught in the 70's.
I guess it depends on what you think the point of gender studies is, because I've never really seen it as a how to guide for feminists with a prescriptive "here's what's right or wrong." To me it's about giving you the tools to understand and critically examine feminist writings and the social dynamics at play that inspired them with the goal of, for lack of a better phrase, letting you "see the matrix." When it all clicks you can express your own thoughts and explain the ideas that people feel but can't quite grasp.
So it's less important that people view Raymond, Jeffreys, or Greer as wrong on their treatise of transgender persons (because it wasn't as if they didn't face plenty of criticism in their day) because it's still important to the history of feminism and informs so much of modern discourse. I don't think you just throw away everything in response to new information because the before was wrong, but that the history becomes even more important because it's the key to understanding where we are now.
My takeaways from their writings isn't necessarily a right or wrong thing but that they very eloquently and with more detail and awareness than you could ever ask for explain their own feelings that reflect the understanding and attitudes toward trans people at time. Today I think people would recognize those feelings as transphobia (or I suppose wokeness if you're one of their descendants) but right or wrong the knowledge is still useful.
trying to compare the humanities here is not something you can do in good faith. they are not subjects based on any manor of objective truth and are mostly a personal endeavor of introspection on how you treat yourself and others.
re: the 70's, yeah a lot of people had bad opinions back then, but its also not hard to form evergreen good ones
Personally I agree with you that women's studies or psychology aren't sciences or even coherent subjects, but in the majority they themselves present as such and thus here I take them--speaking of good faith--at their word for the sake of argument.
And regarding lots of bad opinions in the 70's, that's partially my point. There was nothing in mainstream physics or computer science that is now looked back on as being as wrong as thinking trangendered people are insane. There's something fundamentally different (and you and I know what it is but I will here leave it unstated) that allows the humanities to veer more deeply into incorrect territory. To reiterate: this makes them a terrible educational investment.
> There was nothing in mainstream physics or computer science that is now looked back on as being as wrong
Not exactly the same kind of "wrong", because, well, how could it be? But just a few days ago I was explaining in a comment here why nobody in academia teaches recursive descent parsers.
None of these fields are in actuality the study of human nature. They are the study of our interpretation of human nature. Interpretations change constantly.
Until we can simulate the brain at the lowest level and have accurate quantitative symbolic theories of higher level structures of the brain derived from the low level simulations... our interpretations will remain largely bullshit and guesswork and thus subject to rapid and constant change.
> They are the study of our interpretation of human nature.
Every study is the study of our interpretation of something.
> Interpretations change constantly.
Yes, that's what intellectual progress looks like.
> our interpretations will remain largely bullshit and guesswork and thus subject to rapid and constant change.
And, yet, because we are human and must interact with humans all the time, we have to do the best with the meager tools that we have to reach as much understanding as we can.
>Every study is the study of our interpretation of something.
But there is a clear difference between quantitative results validated by the scientific method versus "interpretations" from philosophy and the humanities.
>Yes, that's what intellectual progress looks like.
Usually scientific results don't change as fast as they do in the humanities. Physical models like gravity, entropy, motion do not change much because of the scientific validation. However, in the humanities any new idea can replace the current idea much more quickly because neither idea has a high degree of verification, thus the humanities are subject to change much more rapidly then STEM.
>And, yet, because we are human and must interact with humans all the time, we have to do the best with the meager tools that we have to reach as much understanding as we can.
Ideally yes, practically speaking this is not exactly what's been going on in the humanities arena of academia. Much of what we're seeing involves heavy radical leftist politics getting embedded these groups.
Not all of the humanities are this way but much of it is. I would look to evolutionary biology and anthropology which are part of the "sciences" to study what it is to be "human" rather than "humanities".
Unfortunately given the nature of what is being studied the high bar of quantitative validation cannot be fully deployed in either of the previously mentioned fields. Instead the fields rely on a limited amount of statistics and logical deduction. This is still a significantly higher bar than most of the humanities.
> But there is a clear difference between quantitative results validated by the scientific method versus "interpretations" from philosophy and the humanities.
True. But that presumes that the scientific method is a superior or perhaps only way to gain understanding. Deciding whether that's true can't be done using the scientific method itself. The humanities (in particular, the philosophy of science) is one framework for evaluating the scientific method itself.
> Physical models like gravity, entropy, motion do not change much because of the scientific validation.
Sure, because atoms are a hell of a lot simpler than brains and societies.
You're absolutely right about this exception. I would even say it "proves the rule" as the technical act of playing an instrument is so transparently unchanging.
From a certain eastern philosophical point of view, it makes sense to focus on what doesn’t change to reach a level of comfort with one’s self—which is to say, we become selfless in the process, which is the goal of that philosophy.
From a western philosophical tradition, everything is in flux: in a continuous state of change, from actuality to potentiality. The goal of this philosophy is to find purpose, to become something more.
As with most things, the push and the pull go together. The answer is likely in recognizing the time and place for both philosophical points of view: being, and becoming.
Talked to a lawyer yesterday who works in an area where the key laws haven't changed in 90 years. He's built an excellent career based on deep knowledge of those laws.
I would recommend not to only focus on the things that don't change, but look at how things that do change impact the things that don't.
For example, very few customers have "new" problems. The problems of society have existed for decades or centuries.
Almost everything maps back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, therefore, when looking at the new, it should be viewed in the impact it has on things that don't change.
The author's example of the internet being a Black Swan, I believe, is wrong. Sci-Fi had been writing about such a network for over a century. The thing that didn't change was our desire for knowledge. The internet was the new library initially, and the internet was able to expand into other needs that didn't change.
I feel like it is better to take both a macro view and a micro view.
We work in the neurotech and sleeptech space. From a macro perspective, sleep, and the health impacts have not changed, so we focus on solving that problem. The micro-details is that we now have the technology to serve that need, that is something that does change, and will continue to change.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 90.6 ms ] threadI think of the Admiral Chester Nimitz. All of his peers studied and worked on battleships because that's what the Navy had done for hundreds of years. But when WW2 entered the scene, Nimitz - the one guy studying the rapidly-changing area of submarines and aircraft carriers - was the one promoted to the highest command.
The title should've been: "Focus on things that don't change (initially)"
“I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”
When I go to Amazon I'd often prefer a smaller selection of items for common categories, with better price/quality tradeoff information, and an assurance that I wasn't going to get an inferior substitute.
Not that it's an EASY problem to solve, particularly at Amazon's scale, but it's also the thing where it's most likely that a customer will come up and say "Jeff, I just want to be able to order a USB key that has the capacity it claims without having to wade through thousands of shady vendors".
Any long-term software, really. What you're building will, if it's big enough, essentially be a snapshot of a moment in tech.
This sort of thinking works. . . until it doesn't. It's how we get the vintage zeerust type of Sci-Fi works.
- Ebooks will, of course, be delivered to your TRS-80 after you dial a phone number to buy it from a print catalog.
- Daily news will never go out of fashion (there's always -something- happening!) but printing newspapers creates a bunch of waste. People will, instead, buy a single newspaper that they keep and exchange at a 'newsstand' where your old paper is erased and a new edition printed on top, for a small fee.
It should be mostly about "communication"
> televisions, news
Same, "entertainment", and "know about latest events"
This is simply not true of a subject like women's studies or even psychology. If your knowledge of these subjects froze in the 70's, at best your attempts to help a teenager with those subjects would result in eye rolls and at worst you being literally labelled as evil. Why invest time and effort into a subject where the reward over any gulf of time is so slight or is even negative?
There are dividends outside of financial. If you can't see them then maybe you should study some psychology.
Edit to respond to your edit: And I'm most definitely considering non-financial gains and losses. Consider my example of a PhD in psychology from the 70's, do you think it's a net positive to believe transgendered people have a pathology? Or that we should destroy the frontal lobes of unhappy housewives with icepicks?
"What's old is new again." Your chosen examples were a brief spout of practice brought about by the brutality of a now waning but once unbridled materialistic industrial power—not the end of psychology (or the humanities at large) as a meaningful study.
If you study women's studies in the 70s then maybe you can't help someone with their homework today. Ok, so in a sense you're less well off because you can't do something that someone who studied physics can do?
But women's studies today is different because the field has moved on to much, so much has been exposed in the way that women are treated in our society, so much has been changed for the better, huge impacts have been made on people's lives etc. And people who have worked in the field have contributed to this. Have they really had a negative reward in your eyes?
And I can literally say that many who studied women's studies and related fields in the 70's have had a negative reward. There is simply no scientific analog to JK Rowling and the battle between "waves" of feminist in the sciences.
Gender studies is basically history + philosophy but focused on a particular topic.
So it's less important that people view Raymond, Jeffreys, or Greer as wrong on their treatise of transgender persons (because it wasn't as if they didn't face plenty of criticism in their day) because it's still important to the history of feminism and informs so much of modern discourse. I don't think you just throw away everything in response to new information because the before was wrong, but that the history becomes even more important because it's the key to understanding where we are now.
My takeaways from their writings isn't necessarily a right or wrong thing but that they very eloquently and with more detail and awareness than you could ever ask for explain their own feelings that reflect the understanding and attitudes toward trans people at time. Today I think people would recognize those feelings as transphobia (or I suppose wokeness if you're one of their descendants) but right or wrong the knowledge is still useful.
re: the 70's, yeah a lot of people had bad opinions back then, but its also not hard to form evergreen good ones
And regarding lots of bad opinions in the 70's, that's partially my point. There was nothing in mainstream physics or computer science that is now looked back on as being as wrong as thinking trangendered people are insane. There's something fundamentally different (and you and I know what it is but I will here leave it unstated) that allows the humanities to veer more deeply into incorrect territory. To reiterate: this makes them a terrible educational investment.
Not exactly the same kind of "wrong", because, well, how could it be? But just a few days ago I was explaining in a comment here why nobody in academia teaches recursive descent parsers.
Surely one of the most unchanging aspects of life that affects us every day is human nature.
Until we can simulate the brain at the lowest level and have accurate quantitative symbolic theories of higher level structures of the brain derived from the low level simulations... our interpretations will remain largely bullshit and guesswork and thus subject to rapid and constant change.
Every study is the study of our interpretation of something.
> Interpretations change constantly.
Yes, that's what intellectual progress looks like.
> our interpretations will remain largely bullshit and guesswork and thus subject to rapid and constant change.
And, yet, because we are human and must interact with humans all the time, we have to do the best with the meager tools that we have to reach as much understanding as we can.
But there is a clear difference between quantitative results validated by the scientific method versus "interpretations" from philosophy and the humanities.
>Yes, that's what intellectual progress looks like.
Usually scientific results don't change as fast as they do in the humanities. Physical models like gravity, entropy, motion do not change much because of the scientific validation. However, in the humanities any new idea can replace the current idea much more quickly because neither idea has a high degree of verification, thus the humanities are subject to change much more rapidly then STEM.
>And, yet, because we are human and must interact with humans all the time, we have to do the best with the meager tools that we have to reach as much understanding as we can.
Ideally yes, practically speaking this is not exactly what's been going on in the humanities arena of academia. Much of what we're seeing involves heavy radical leftist politics getting embedded these groups.
Not all of the humanities are this way but much of it is. I would look to evolutionary biology and anthropology which are part of the "sciences" to study what it is to be "human" rather than "humanities".
Unfortunately given the nature of what is being studied the high bar of quantitative validation cannot be fully deployed in either of the previously mentioned fields. Instead the fields rely on a limited amount of statistics and logical deduction. This is still a significantly higher bar than most of the humanities.
True. But that presumes that the scientific method is a superior or perhaps only way to gain understanding. Deciding whether that's true can't be done using the scientific method itself. The humanities (in particular, the philosophy of science) is one framework for evaluating the scientific method itself.
> Physical models like gravity, entropy, motion do not change much because of the scientific validation.
Sure, because atoms are a hell of a lot simpler than brains and societies.
Your ability to play a guitar or piano will stay relevant far longer than any programming knowledge.
You may find it even more useful over the long term.
...this is a skill that is difficult to develop, hard to teach, and impossible to test (if somebody can do it)
Things that will change are the other-side-of-the-coin for things that don’t.
I wrote it with kids and newcomers in mind, but I believe the advice is more generally applicable
From a western philosophical tradition, everything is in flux: in a continuous state of change, from actuality to potentiality. The goal of this philosophy is to find purpose, to become something more.
As with most things, the push and the pull go together. The answer is likely in recognizing the time and place for both philosophical points of view: being, and becoming.
For example, very few customers have "new" problems. The problems of society have existed for decades or centuries.
Almost everything maps back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, therefore, when looking at the new, it should be viewed in the impact it has on things that don't change.
The author's example of the internet being a Black Swan, I believe, is wrong. Sci-Fi had been writing about such a network for over a century. The thing that didn't change was our desire for knowledge. The internet was the new library initially, and the internet was able to expand into other needs that didn't change.
I feel like it is better to take both a macro view and a micro view.
We work in the neurotech and sleeptech space. From a macro perspective, sleep, and the health impacts have not changed, so we focus on solving that problem. The micro-details is that we now have the technology to serve that need, that is something that does change, and will continue to change.