Am I the only one is getting pretty bored of "formula for success" content?
This essay and other's like it, without evidence or data, implies that some of us know the formula for success. I get it, the things that change convention are unconventional at first. This is the definition of unconventional. I agree with the general vector of his essay but this is just boring to me.
Here is my formula for success (in case anyone cares): Enjoy life, try to make the world better, be a good person, go towards your passions (whether for hobby or career) and cultivate relationships because that seems to be the thing people regret most when they die.
Now, let's move on to to the actual unconventional ideas and observations.
This article is (yet another) attemp to romanticize and put to pedestal 'startup with a novel idea'. It is worth to mention that trying to trick/persuade/convince (choose freely) thousands (literaly) of people to go this path, benefits tremendously ycombinator - not the persuaded founders. Because for YC if only few are (hugely) successfull they win. Not so for the other thousands. The fact that few means 200 here, does not change that 'other' means around dozens of thousands.
Startups with 'right but not novel' are also GOOD. But they are muuuuch worse for YC. YC is not seeking all investments to end with modest returns. YC is seeking few, but with HUGE returns.
Pay attention also, that ycombinator itself is in the 'right, but not inventive' camp. It's like 'selling investing advices', while in the same time, author makes money on sth completly different (advices :). BAD ADVICES, to be exact.
p.s. I'm also tired on romanticizing airbnb in literally 3 paragraph (search for airbeds if you missed it). This is a pattern.
I agree with you entirely. To add to your point, we readers aren’t an an average of a simulation. We are a single path. So, this advice works for the those that reap benefits of the average but it may not be the advice suited for individuals.
“Jump off a cliff because statistically, one of you may fly”.
Money has logarithmic utility. If you build a successful company, your gain is proportional to logarithm of its profit. But your investor's gain is directly proportional to the profit.
So the investor will try to convince you to aim for 300% profit with 50% probability (compared to your original plan), because for the investor this simply means +50%. For you, it mostly means -50% probability, because the difference between having e.g. $10M or $30M is negligible compared to the difference between having $10M or nothing.
But what is the problem for those for who it doesn't work? How much do they get to lose? If they don't get accepted to the YC, they lose very little and it's just a short detour in their lives, certainly not the most boring or frustrating one, something to remember. If they get accepted to the YC, they clearly win vs the average folk because they get to know so many influential people and see how the world-class stuff gets done.
For example, i've been doing custom development for more than 20 years, made several million in the process, built over 130 project and i still don't have a slightest idea of how it's done - because every single of my client's projects failed - and i would be more than delighted to see how projects succeed first-hand even if the project wasn't mine.
I feel your example is a good portrayal of a life pretty much well-lived: you made money doing something you enjoy, met tons of people and fed your curiosity.
But according to this essay, you followed a BAD path not innovative enough, and the hidden reason why it's bad is because it will never generate any sort of profit for YC.
Now if you had tried 3 or 4 startups in that same timespan, burned through all your life savings, did not make several millions in the process, and failed all you endeavours, you will be applauded by YC.
Why ? because the more people exist like you, the better it is for them.
> trying to trick/persuade/convince (choose freely) thousands (literaly) of people to go this path, benefits tremendously ycombinator - not the persuaded founders.
Why so negative
It can be fun for the founders also if the startup fails, and not always anything to regret
At this point, honestly the only YC startup they seem to be romanticizing is Airbnb. I've only heard of a few casual mentions (from Michael Siebel I think) of Brex or Segment or any of the other startups.
Largely, successful people have little idea what they did to succeed at something. I observed this first in others and then in myself when trying to teach others.
One reason is - like PG says - the inclination for activities is more nature vs nurture than we like to think. We want the success to be caused by our choices and intelect. When it was largely chosen for us at birth.
Another aspect is post fact rationalization. Again like he says the unconscious mind decides first. Then the rational part tries to explain the choice but it often fails even to identify it, let alone pinpoint the reasons for it.
Third: teaching is mostly done through example and practicing toghether. Simple words are very ineffective at passing on experience.
And finally successful actions depend on context. For example what makes appropriate bussiness conduct varies from culture to culture, varies in time as the culture changes, is different even in the same culture depending on social class, etc. And these are just some points in the infinite variable group I called context.
All this makes such articles pretty much pointless as a recipe for success. But I'm not sure it is intended as that. There is value in the text, it's just not all true and all applicable to everybody. But then which text is?
Extremely well-written comment! Enjoyed reading it.
To answer your last question I'd say my takeaway is "apply critical thinking to everything, this article included". As you and others point out, PG suffers from survivorship bias and likes to post-hoc rationalize how genius he was.
That definitely isn't something to learn from. One could analyze his career and maybe extract some valuable lessons from it. However I am not even sure PG is a good example at all; once some critical mass is accrued the rest of the success is pretty much inevitable.
So maybe the conclusion is: strive to achieve that critical mass with all your might? Could be.
> Largely, successful people have little idea what they did to succeed at something
Well said. However, most don't seem to realize. There are people who are perfectly willing to pontificate using literally any situation and relating it to their success. Not sure, if it is them or the rest of the plebs who seek their views and put them on a pedestal.
I think you missed the point of the article. It explains why Bob is better than Sally in job A, but Sally is better than Bob in job B. Perhaps you figured that out, but I can't see that from your response, so I'll give you why this was so impactful for me. I went into Aerospace Engineering thinking that I'll be able to design radically different looking airplanes. After two degrees, three internships, three years of employment and several promotions, I quit the industry and started from scratch as a tech entrepreneur looking for a more fulfilling career path. I genuinely believe I could have avoided that whole AE thing if I had been exposed to this article at the right time.
What would have been the right time? When you were a student studying during your first degree or your second? In hindsight, I think it is almost dubious to assume that exposure to this article would have helped you at any given time in the past. It's quite possible you would not have come to the same realization about tech entrepreneurship had you not obtained your AE and had the experiences that you did.
Fair enough - one article alone probably wouldn't have had the full impact. But I am envious of the generation of current high schoolers who can read HN all day. After a year or so, I imagine you can reprogram your mind quite a bit. Back in the late 90s, access to information like this was much more limited.
What you are getting from HN at your current age with your experience, is not the same that what your young self would have gotten from the same content
I learned that working at Google pays a ton and not that hard to get in there. So I learned to code and got a job at Google and made a lot of money thanks to HN. My life got a lot easier thanks to that.
I feel the value of HN is greatly reduced once you are more familiar with the industry. But to an outsider this site is gold.
I'm really good at math so I knew that learning the algorithmic thinking wouldn't be hard. All I needed to do was learn to program and learn algorithms. For people with a different skillset it wouldn't be as easy, but reading about it online made me realize that it wouldn't be hard for me.
I mean, when you read about interviews and the problems people struggle with you get a sense of what it is. When I read those I thought "That doesn't seem hard, I can do that!", so I did.
I would like to say that I am young and I remember getting turned on to podcasts and reddit and good books when I was 15 or so, and being exposed to rational thought and discussion did a lot for my development I think.
Occasionally I stumble upon an old article posted here and start reading, lamenting the missed opportunities if I'd only seen this article x years ago. Then a bit further into it I start feeling like I have read it before, and I suspect I often have.
Right this moment I am asking myself how to shift more traffic from paid to organic. I created a list of about 10 ideas, the one at the top of that list being so out there that I had to immediately share it with the team. About half of the team members loved it and thought it will be the best thing ever, and the other half thought it's too expensive and we shouldn't risk so much money on an unproven concept that could fail completely. So the takeaway is quite clear - there might be something there, but I need to come up with an MVP that can be tested quickly (eg: 2 weeks) and cost-efficiently (eg: two weeks of one person's time).
Let me contrast that with my career from 20 years ago. My Master's thesis was to calculate the flight performance of an aircraft that ended up having its maiden flight 5 years later. Essentially, an entirely mathematically-driven exercise where you apply a well-known methodology to calculate a deterministic problem. I got bored of that pretty quickly and went into flight testing, thinking that I could keep my mind active by being more hands-on in my work. I quickly learned that flight testing is all about reading regulations and checking the aircraft for compliance. Sure, there is some flying involved, but nowhere enough to keep you stimulated every day.
If you're reading those two paragraphs above, one will appeal to you more than the other. It doesn't mean that one career path is fundamentally better or worse, it's more about what does YOUR mind need to be stimulated? Do you prefer nondeterministic challenges or would you rather apply existing processes and be super precise and accurate? Do you prefer quick turnaround times, or would you be happier knowing that there is 5 years' worth of budget for you and your team of hundreds of people to complete a project? Whatever your conclusion, you're not wrong - it just has to be right for you. I think PG's essay helped explain this.
> I quickly learned that flight testing is all about reading regulations and checking the aircraft for compliance. Sure, there is some flying involved
I recently watched some videos of people doing plane checklists; one had an error within two minutes, another had only one pilot doing the checklist while the other was away. I've also heard that humans skipping items or entire checklists is a general problem. Out of curiosity, would people with borderline or genuine OCD be a good fit for this? (Would it be practical to factor out the "checklist compliance" into a separate person? Seems like "remaining calm in an emergency, quick thinking, judgment and reflexes", and whatever else I might imagine are best for the pilot are at best orthogonal to "obsessive following of checklists".)
The pilots I know also like a lot of order in the rest of their lives (matching plates, keep their tools in order, just the sort of daily-life organization that is somewhat alien to me). Not to the point of clinically-diagnosed OCD, because I don't think these pilots have intrusive thoughts and compulsions -- they just get positive feelings from having things organized and slightly more deterministic.
> > I went into Aerospace Engineering thinking that I'll be able to design radically different looking airplanes.
> What is it you're doing as an entrepreneur you find so rewarding?
The aerospace industry rewards making minor improvements to conventional airplanes rather than building something novel. Entrepreneurship rewards building something new and "radically different", which is what he was looking for in the first place.
Counterpoint: exceedingly few tech entrepreneurship companies are doing anything at all that is really new and "radically different". Most are doing rather small and unimaginative things that make money by doing some equivalent of selling more ads.
If the GP commenter was working at, for example, SpaceX (a large aerospace company), I can 100% guarantee their work would be more meaningful and rewarding than at basically any startup I've ever encountered. It often seems like it's a unique conceit of the HN community to think that most of the tech startups floating around here are really doing much more than established companies.
What's your definition of meaningful and rewarding? I'm an entrepreneur because I love waking up every day and do whatever I feel like. Nothing can be more rewarding for me. I'm not even that interested in what I'm building and it's certainly not something unique or special but it pays the bills and lets me be free.
For myself and most people in my circle of friends it's roughly: actively advancing the level of humanity. That means different things to different people - for some it's working on autonomous vehicles, for others it's space exploration, for others it's fighting climate change or poverty, etc. I think this is also related to age, though. When I was younger, most people I knew thought freedom and money were the best possible things in life.
I 100% get where you're coming from, but allow me to offer a counterpoint to your counterpoint. I don't know anyone who works at SpaceX, but a bunch of my classmates went to work for ULA (their competitor). I imagine that SpaceX is better managed, but the nature of work is the same - you're either calculating things using conventional wisdom, or you're writing simulations or coming up with other ways to achieve higher performance or save money. Either way, the work is slow and highly co-dependent on a million other moving parts. Once a project is complete, your ownership is unlikely to be higher than a tiny fraction of 1 percent. Also, at least at ULA, you better excel at selling your work internally.
On the other hand, SV is littered with names of people who single-handedly turned unprofitable late-stage tech companies into major successes. There's less regulation, stakes are lower, capital requirements are lower, less of the available landscape has been claimed, and the industry lends itself well to the power of computation. It's a little bit like trying to get rich in 18th century England vs 18th century USA. Would it be fair for US farmers to claim that they are doing "radically different" work compared to their English counterparts? Perhaps the work looked similar ("put food on the table"), but the rules and opportunities were vastly different and created different outcomes for individuals (as in - the smartest/most fit/hardest working people got more out of their work).
I respect your perspective, but it's one I mostly see in younger people. It's basically that personal achievement and being able to single-handedly deliver things are the most meaningful outcomes of work. The perspective that I've come to accept is that very few things that actually impact the world can come about this way. We didn't put men on the moon because some genius did all the calculations and fabrication himself (even von Braun was only one part of a very large organization), we did it because thousands of smart and determined people set aside their personal ambitions to work together on something great. The downside of this, of course, is that everyone is effectively a cog in the machine and it's easy to get demoralized that your contributions don't mean much.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you want to actually change the world, you're unlikely to do actually do it at a tech startup. You're instead likely to talk a lot about it while the real world-changing things are happening elsewhere. But you'll probably be happier at the startup because you get more of that magic combination of autonomy, teamwork, and quickly tangible results. I just personally get frustrated that almost every startup and its employees act like they're working on the biggest problems in the world when they just... aren't.
Edit: forgot to mention. I know two people who left ULA for similar reasons to you and went to SpaceX. They loved working at SpaceX in comparison to ULA because the level of company ambition, speed, and impact was so ridiculously higher. However, one of them left SpaceX to go to a smaller aerospace startup and the other is now at Raytheon for the superior work-life balance. I'm not sure what the lesson is there...
Won't address SpaceX though I know people there, but I too used to be on a track with an emphasis on individual accomplishment (academic mathematician) -- a lot about single-handed delivery. Sometime in my late 30s I realized that unfortunately, haha, the most impactful accomplishments are team efforts. To do big work, I realized I should find the right team. I am still working out what this means for my own career, but it's a huge change in mindset. And I'm working at a large, old-ish corporation now, and I think we are slowly & painfully changing how something very practical gets done.
ULA is definitely not like SpaceX and is not a competitor at this point. ULA is failing due to the exact problems that you describe and if your rocket is not reusable, it cannot compete outside government launches at this point. The only other rocket company that I see competing at the moment is Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin (and we are still waiting for the first New Glen launch). SpaceX is different with Elon Musk leading the engineering. Move fast, iterate, everyone working on the project should understand the whole vehicle so that people can see when making radical changes is the way forward. SpaceX was building carbon fiber pieces for their next rocket after the Falcon 9/Heavy, and completely scrapped that idea and went with a steel hull instead. About a year later the new design is going to launch up to 15km and land in the next few weeks.
Elon Musk comes from the start-up world and he is hoping to get to Mars himself, so he is in a hurry. I would say if you can get a job there, you should. If you have not already, check out reddit/r/spacex for lots of interesting stuff about the company and what they are doing. You might want to apply to work there if you are looking for a fast paced aerospace company.
There is also the startup called Boom that is working on building a supersonic passenger plane. They have just finished a smaller human-piloted supersonic test plane to prove out their ideas and hope to have the commercial airplane in service by 2025.
These companies are both run by people that started in software and then moved to aerospace without any other real prior experience in the field. Maybe you can have a similar route with founding a successful software company and then, with that success, found an aerospace one of your own. Good luck.
I wish! I left AE before I realized that more recently opportunities started opening up for entrepreneurially-minded engineers. The whole quadcopter space was probably a pretty good opportunity for people with a background in AE.
I don't know, but I rather hear sporting/fitness advice from someone that won NBA finals, or the soccer World Cup, then just some random loser. The winner at least can tell you how they did succeed personally, even if they have no comprehensive studies with data.
On the other hand, you are just a random guy from the internet, and offering advice with no data at all.
You might be broke and posting from your mom's basement, or from the top of a penthouse that you bought from building successful companies/startups.
We don't know, so your advice will be treated like: just another opinion, from a internet rando/keyboard warrior, and everyone has opinions.
I listen to PG as he has been more right then wrong, also he was very successful, multiple times, and is single handedly a major contributer to many products I use.
Many successful people overrate their personal characteristics and underrate the degree to which they were merely in the right place at the right time and such. Fortune favors the prepared, of course, but I personally believe there are far more people in the world who are adequately prepared for success who do not succeed because they are under-resourced or poorly connected.
And yet... those who stay in the game and who try new things regularly get “lucky” while those who quit, don’t develop and learn from a process, and who try the same methods over and over don’t get lucky.
It is far too simple to say that it is only luck. Persistence and good processes often lead to “luck”.
Which is to say you are right: if you keep showing up at stuff you will eventually get lucky. Luck can only happen to those who try and get lucky. Our real world resembles an MMORPG game -- you need a team for 98% of everything -- then I'd say both you and your parent poster are correct.
Hard to say. There are knock-on effects from being highly successful. If you win the lottery and subsequently become a highly successful investor, for example, there’s a clear element of chance. You may have the latent abilities of an investor and the skills to fully realize them, but without the opportunity afforded by a windfall you would never find out.
With sufficiently large population, someone will randomly win against unlikely odds. For example, if there is a 1% chance your startup will succeed, but one million people try it, statistically one of them will have 3 successful startups in a row even without being better than average.
Though, realistically, the chance should increase for the following attempts, because you can reuse some resources and contacts you gained with the first success. The first startup is like "I need to succeed within three years, or return to a regular job to pay my bills". But if it succeeds, the second startup is like "I can keep trying as long as I want to, no pressure".
It's funny you mention taking advice from successful pro athletes. I'm reminded of a great essay, "How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart" by David Foster Wallace.
He writes about his admiration for a successful pro tennis athlete, her intensity and dedication to her sport, and her strangely vacuous response to the question "How do you do it Tracy?" - which she answers with some vague platitudes. His point is: very successful people are so busy being successful, they're so deeply immersed in their craft, that they don't seem to even have the conscious introspective wherewithal to articulate what it is they're doing. Everything they know about their craft and their life is just so tacit to them. They've either never taken the time to really introspect, again because they're so caught up in just winning and getting things done, or they're just genuinely incapable of gleaning any wisdom from what it is that they do. So maybe it's not particularly useful to take advice from these people after all.
Now, this is probably the case for most such people, but there is a very small minority that do eventually cultivate the ability to articulate their internalized understanding and wisdom of their success to others. Maybe PG is one of them. Maybe not.
This is an almost ironic response to the article for a couple of reasons that caught my attention (read: not a bad response, just somewhat ironic).
The first was mentioned by someone else in the thread whose response i can't find again due to opening this in a different device: why is it more valuable to hear advice from winners than, say, a failure from their mother's basement as you put it? In relation to the article's key point, that's very conventional (hence the irony) :)
The second thing I noticed was the assumption that a successful person knows their success or could explain it to anyone -- I haven't found this to be true and can personally attest that I can rarely explain my own to someone else. But there are definitely other reasons I can't, not least I'm just a poor explainer.
I found the article intriguing for a lot of reasons, not least of which is I always see a bit of myself in nerd content like it. I found myself thinking of all the conventions I absorb and recall when I realized I'd absorbed them. On the other hand, I'm renown in my family and among friends as completely unconventional and am generally The Weirdo. The resolution of that tension is intensely interesting to me. How I see all the conventions in myself, but near no one else seems to see it that way at all.
More to the point: given the option, I'll read the advice of a failure in a heartbeat and ponder it for days. I've never found advice from "pros" or success stories to be nearly as interesting. If you can, explain why opinions from winners is more interesting to you. Genuinely intrigued and curious to hear a different perspective.
Someone who failed because of doing everything obviously wrong from the start... that would be boring.
But someone who almost succeeded, and then failed because of X... if you want to try the same thing, you probably want to know about X. You probably want to know about X regardless, because it may generalize to other situations.
It's fine to listen to him. And your logic is sound. And I am in my parent's basement. My post was firstly a question and secondly an opinion on this type of content. So, it's good to know you appreciate it and might be at a different place in your evolution in content consumption. We are all different and get benefits from different things. Just wanted to know where others stood.
> I don't know, but I rather hear sporting/fitness advice from someone that won NBA finals, or the soccer World Cup, then just some random loser. The winner at least can tell you how they did succeed personally, even if they have no comprehensive studies with data.
> On the other hand, you are just a random guy from the internet, and offering advice with no data at all.
You're throwing half of the information away. You need to know not just what to do, but also what not to do. Losers can teach you about mistakes, injuries etc.
I don't see that here. I see someone trying to figure out things that interest him. As for unconventional ideas and observations, here's one:
Political extremists [...] think themselves nonconformists, but actually they're niche conformists. Their opinions may be different from the average person's, but they are often more influenced by their peers' opinions than the average person's are.
The material of that bit may not be unusual, but its precision and density certainly are, and the fact that it coins a great name for the phenomenon (niche conformism) easily clears the bar for "unconventional idea/observation" in my book. Also, there's nothing formula-for-successy there. You might be missing the best reasons for reading these things?
yeah but the funny thing is it applies to the VC and tech scene more than to almost anything else. Tech people are niche conformists, a lot of them read the same books, speak the same language, share the same hobbies, look the same, and copy each others ideas.
Copying something well and then deluding yourself or others into thinking you've dug up novelty is in fact one of the best sales strategies there is.
Paul is also not accurate in one important way. Investors, by definition of how they make money, can't be too novel. They only can be ahead of the curve, because if you're so independent minded that the market doesn't catch up with what you believe you don't make any money. They're not independent-minded so much as they know what others want when they don't yet know it themselves. That's a different thing.
The phenomenon is called "conformity." Nothing in it ever suggested it only applies to large groups. Reading the first paragraph of Wikipedia will tell you as much.
Nonetheless, people do in fact make that mistake -- such as the niche conformists PG mentions -- so it is worth rebutting, and doing so in an understandable manner. The fact that you may not have seen a particular mistake, does not mean the mistake is not out there (and personally, based on my own experience, I'd say this one is rather common).
> cultivate relationships because that seems to be the thing people regret most when they die.
Dying regrets are bullshit, because those people actually made conscious choices not to invest into such relationships on a daily basis and would do it again if they were in the same situation. I don't buy it.
1. Find a way to afford time to focus on what you care about.
2. Repeat step 1.
For a lot of people, step 1 is a steady job so they can do things they care about outside of work with family and friends. For others, it’s finding time to work on a project or startup you care about.
Ultimately, buying your own time back is the key to it all. What that key unlocks is up to you to decide.
This article is self-contradictory. The premise of the article is that you have to be unconventional and do things others aren't do to be successful. And then the author "proves" the premise by saying, "just like all these other successful people did!"
The formulae are all driven by survivorship bias anyway.
It can simultaneously be true that to be successful in your field, you need to be unconventional relative to that field, and also that the means and methods for being usefully unconventional transfer across fields.
"This article is self-contradictory. The article says good programmers write code in a way that doesn't cause surprises for the reader. But the only way for a program to be totally unsurprising is if it's an exact copy of another program which already exists!"
...
"The formulae are all driven by survivorship bias anyway."
In PG's case, he's had a chance to observe a lot of startups, both successes and failures.
But even aside from this, survivorship bias is mainly a problem in the presence of downside risk. Let's say we look at Olympic champions and find that they all trained really hard. You cry: "Survivorship bias! It could be that you will train really hard and not become an Olympic champion!" Yes. It could be. But since the risks of training hard are relatively low, you may as well go ahead and train hard if being an Olympic champion is a serious goal for you.
Perhaps I'm misusing the term or using the wrong term. Could by hindsight bias. I'm talking about when a person a group accomplishes something, looks back at what they did, and they tries to decide post hoc which of the things they did contributed to their success.
He claims you have to be unconventional to be successful in pursuits which reward independent thinking. He named at least one profession where being conventional is desirable: an administrator.
> Here is my formula for success (in case anyone cares): Enjoy life, try to make the world better, be a good person, go towards your passions (whether for hobby or career) and cultivate relationships because that seems to be the thing people regret most when they die.
A nice mantra. Not dissimilar to the top of PG's to do list. There he also describes "the biggest regrets of the dying"..
"Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy."
> This essay [...], without evidence or data, implies that some of us know the formula for success.
PG isn't claiming to know "the" formula for success, or that anyone else knows it (I doubt there could be such a thing). He's identifying and exploring traits that, from his considerable experience, seem to correlate with business success in a very narrow field, startup companies.
I get your point and I get the reason people like to find correlations. I just think reducing dimensionality of really complex stuff is a waste of our time unless your purely talking about investing/gambling and increasing your odds on many bets. It just doesn’t help the “single path” people out there (maybe it wasn’t intended to). We aren’t an average of a simulation, we are just one scenario.
Analogy (because I love analogies): “Seems like people over 7 feet tall make great basketball players.” This is great but it’s much more interesting that a guy named Muggsy Bogues made it to the NBA at 5 foot 3 inches.
I think that's why PG's discussion of whether and how a motivated individual can change or enhance these attributes is interesting, along with the observation that strength in one can make up for relative weakness in another.
I think your analogy fails in that hanging out with tall people can't make you taller. Exceptions to general rules are interesting, but don't have much predictive or explanatory power.
I wouldn't consider this as a formula for success but a sounding board. Most times we are lost in complexities of life and choices, articles like these enable us to get back and re-think, provide clarity. They should be considered as triggers or questions that we should be asking ourselves than a formula.
Then move on and find something that is more helpful for you?
Why the need to trash it, (complete with fashionably dragging in gender, race, economic inequality and political ideology), because it doesn't resonate with you?
I got a lot out of it, and am glad he took the time to write it.
I actually find this advice (taken literally) to be the best advice for thinking for yourself. Teach others and you’ll find yourself opening up to new viewpoints on topics versus “learning” the same topic.
It seems worth noting that although this essay doesn't have a lot of the way in evidence/data, it is likely informed by PG's extensive experience as a startup investor. I would guess that YC has a proprietary dataset of the startups they've funded that they use to test hypotheses etc.
Like many of pg's essays there's an unqualified glorification of being independent. For example the suggestion that hiring conformist people is something that just happens. It seems more likely that companies more or less consciously hire such people, because a company where everyone thinks independently would be one where everyone wants to do something different, and nothing would get done, no one could agree on anything.
Bryan Caplan in his book The Case Against Education suggests that employers value college degrees partly as a signal of conformism, and that that's the reason college is so hard to replace.
(His theory is the college signals three things: Intelligence, discipline and conformism. It would be easy to signal first two things in some other way, but the very fact that you think you know better how to signal them proves that you're some kind of smartass who's inevitably going to cause trouble.)
I also often notice a self-serving conclusion that you should quit your comfy corporate job (and perhaps create a startup?). In this particular essay, it's close to the bottom:
"Is there a way to cultivate curiosity? To start with, you want to avoid situations that suppress it. How much does the work you're currently doing engage your curiosity? If the answer is "not much," maybe you should change something."
> you should quit your comfy corporate job (and perhaps create a startup
That's not what he's saying. That's just one possible interpretation of it. You could also keep the job and pick up an interesting hobby, or just change jobs. It's not like it's bad advice only given out to serve his own interests. It's actually obvious sounding advice.
If you notice this often, maybe it's because in an essay that long, there will likely be some passage that can be interpreted as "quit your job and start a startup", especially considering PGs usual topics.
> That's not what he's saying. That's just one possible interpretation of it.
That why I put "perhaps" in my characterisation of what he's saying - even if 0.1% of people decide that the solution to them "not thinking for themselves" is to create a startup, pg comes out ahead.
But it is a weak characterisation because you can construe basically anything anyone has ever done to be a selfish action, and in this case the evidence isn't particularly strong. It's not like the whole essay is telling you to act in PGs interest. Basically you're assuming selfishness because in one possible interpretation of one sentence, it's possible for PG to derive any benefit at all. I don't think it's even possible to write an essay where that's not the case.
No, he is not hinting that. In fact society would most benefit of certain percentage of conventional thinkers and certain percentage of independent thinkers. And society should have different kind of people and personalities to fulfill different roles. No role is necessarily morally superior or whatever.
But he is focusing on how to live better as an independent thinker and how to get maximum out of independent thinkers. He is not stating that being independent is superior or that everyone should be this way.
> When I meet someone who knows a lot about something unusual (which includes practically everyone, if you dig deep enough), I try to learn what they know that other people don't.
To me, this comes off as a quite paranoid. Confirmation bias is a real thing: if you seek how any particular essay is self-serving, you will find it in every single essay. If everything is self-serving, then it's not a meaningful signal.
Being independent is mostly negative. Prison is full of independent thinkers. However the small share of independent thinkers who actually got many things right are way more valuable than any conventional thinker as it is them who push society forward. Glorifying them is absolutely warranted.
The value that an independent thinker is able to create is usually predicated on a large amount of more conventional thinkers. No need to pit the two against eachother, or glorify the one any more than the other.
I think you completely missed the point. Really not sure what independent thinkers have to do with prisons. Some of those may be thinkers who got into prison, but that’s a really small fractions. Prisons are filled with mostly non-thinkers who got there after their impulses led them on a wrong path.
> Bryan Caplan in his book The Case Against Education suggests that employers value college degrees partly as a signal of conformism, and that that's the reason college is so hard to replace.
Some of the best recruiting advice I ever heard is that college degrees signal you can complete things. Most worthwhile objectives involve a fair amount of drudgery.
You can prove that you can complete things in other ways though.
A degree shows you can complete things that you are told to. I.e. conforming.
A lot of people seem to come out of university and be somewhat useless in a workplace.
I think that's because university is 4yrs of doing what you're told, so by the time you come out your default mode is, "wait for someone to tell me what to do".
I think that is a far stronger signal from it than signalling conformism.
It suggest a degree of commitment and ability to navigate bureaucratic nonsense, having some social capital and family resources, etc. which are skills and attributes people value.
I think a mix of conformity and independent thinking is important. Conformity is hardwired into us, and I assume that came from evolution as a means to help our survival, though I can't say I understand to what extent. I remember an off hand remark a friend made, but it says a lot: "If people see someone riding a Segway, they will go and beat him up." First, I think that is hilarious. Partly because it is true. This says a lot about our nature. Maybe this urge helps us work together? Of course, a certain amount of new thinking is needed too, or else we wouldn't get anywhere.
> Bryan Caplan in his book The Case Against Education suggests that employers value college degrees partly as a signal of conformism, and that that's the reason college is so hard to replace.
That is such an interesting book that I'm surprised there is any HN discussion about it.
> Bryan Caplan in his book The Case Against Education suggests that employers value college degrees partly as a signal of conformism, and that that's the reason college is so hard to replace.
Perhaps, but in high-skill fields most qualified people will be graduates regardless. Whatever you think of college degrees as an employer, most of your employees will have them.
It's not entirely obvious demand for formal education is driven by the industry.
It's tautologically true that college signals conformism since most (in a given field) go. And companies may indeed use it as a signal for conformism (or lack of the opposite). But it doesn't necessarily follow that the industry actively thinks college is uniquely good at creating this signal.
>Bryan Caplan in his book The Case Against Education suggests that employers value college degrees partly as a signal of conformism, and that that's the reason college is so hard to replace.
I dunno how true this is. I think it is more because it signals above average IQ although I think conformity may play a role too.
It's mostly a mix of this and financial means in terms of explanatory power. HN seems to routinely forget that about 64% of Americans 25+ don't have anything beyond a high school degree. Since financial means also probably correlates with employee potential, the signal works in the same direction regardless of the explanation.
The people who were smart enough to go to college but didn't broadly fall into two buckets: (1) insufficient financial means, (2) nonconformists. I strongly suspect the latter group are statistical outliers.
Accept the duality of your human nature. You think as a collective and as an individual at the same time.
It's a matter of budget. When you do things that don't matter too much to you, you are damn happy to think exactly like the next guy, reusing the existing knowledge as is without a second thought.
For instance: how do you boil an egg? For all I care, I leave it in boiled water for 10 minutes. I am more than happy to never challenge this conventional wisdom because I'm spending all my time trying to think out of the box while searching for a new sorting algorithm.
Now put a chef in my place. They could have their own specialized/unconventional boiling technique while saying all sorting can be done with bubble sort.
Always restrict your conclusions within the appropriate context. For every person different things matter, you can't think for yourself for every piece of knowledge. There isn't enough time. If people didn't copy and follow along (while inovating in their special domain) we would still live in the stone age
It takes extreme discipline to know what you should question vs. what you shouldn’t. There’s a line from some famous SVite that agrees with your sentiment - something about picking the right horses and more about focusing on the right things.
A lot of this ‘how to boil a perfect egg’ competition comes not from the love of the pursuit (personally I have a much better day with a soft yolk), but because of the ‘prestige games’ we play with each other to prove we are not inadequate.
It’s a joy to learn from someone who truly wants to share, not position. To them they’ve discovered this wonderful way to do X that maybe you’ll love too — but to hear advice from folks that wish you worship them in return for their advice, is almost a negative sum game.
These articles walk a fine line, and many times it takes a live discussion for the intent to be measured.
Agreed. Also, there is a spectrum between extreme skeptisism vs not questioning at all
For instance, getting back to the egg example, questioning what is the best way way to boil the egg can reveal to you a few known unconventional methods. But then you are on square 1 again, are you going to question those newly learned methods that others have put so much time in figuring out or just conform and accept them as they are?
The point is, it's not a black a white situation: I care for X, I don't care for Y. It's more of a: I care a little for X, I care a lot for Y and I don't give a damn about Z. Leading you to questioning various topics in different depth
> When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?"
This is one of my favorite things to do, though the list of people who will talk to me again after I do it is very short. (Edit: To be extra clear... While this is a bitter pill - I do not like it when others do it to me - I do find it to be very effective for reinforcing good faith in close, trusting relationships. I also do appreciate when others use this question on me; the temporary frustration/discomfort is worth reminding me to center myself.)
When someone is feeling outraged about something (often politics) simply ask: "but are they correct?" The answer is almost always: "I'm not sure" (myself included). When doing this to myself, this is often enough for me to shrug off the outrage and realize that I actually do not care. It really doesn't matter to me what political statements a mayor from a town in another state made.
> In the most independent-minded people, the desire not to be told what to think is a positive force.
This subject implies another that is closely related, and is my biggest complaint about ads. Ads try to tell you what to think, and they are sometimes successful. But more importantly, they tell you what to think _about_, and they are much more successful at this. I like being focused on the problems that I have, and ads try as hard as they can to take that focus away.
While this activity can be useful, I think it is simultaneously at the root of many of our social problems today.
You cannot ask this question about literally everything. Well, you can, but you'll end up questioning things that are universally accepted (Which way is North? Is gasoline flammable?). So naturally you dial it back, and you ask questions only about things that seem wrong, or that you particularly care about.
The corollary is that you are going to decide subjectively (and somewhat arbitrarily) that some things are not worth questioning. And just like that, everybody has made their own independent assumptions about the truth, and we can no longer have discussions about a common set of facts.
The cure is not just questioning facts "more". The cure is actually aligning as a society about what we accept as true so that we can converse about the other things. But, that means less independent thinking, paradoxically.
What’s happening in our culture seems more like a case of several competing conventions, split on tribal lines, rather than individuals thinking their way to unique positions.
Do you think this is only uniquely happening now? I can’t think of a time on earth that hasn’t happened, implicitly or explicitly. (Depending on your definition of “tribe”...tribe of one?). The exceptions don’t last long: Nazi Germany, Mao’s China (Xi’s?), Stalin’s Soviet Union...
Never has it been easier to see this clearly, though, than in the current era of instant access and sharing of information and opinion.
But in the US, individuals thinking on their own is almost a core cultural value. Although more honor'd in the breach than in the observance in some circles.
Not just because the founding of the US was based upon a break with convention of colonization and an hereditary royalist system. Most immigrants (at least before the age of air travel) made a radical permanent individual decision to leave the Old World and come to the Americas, when most around them were staying. So it is in the DNA, so to speak.
Still a core value to most in the US, I would venture to say. We honor self-reliance and unconventionality when we read Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman for example. Might be a more significant core value for the heartland of the US than the coastals. Farming will do that to a person.
You folks are still reading Emerson and the like, right?
> that means less independent thinking, paradoxically.
This is indeed the paradox of our times. An accelerated technology shift (the global computer network) has generated large amounts of people who are rationally self-reliant to a fault, since they are either the only ones in their social circles who understand the new tech or the only ones who can spend a lot of time reading stuff from the internet. This cult of "independent thinking" leads them down dark alleys for which they simply don't have the necessary preparation (conspiracies, flat earth, etc), but from which they cannot get out (because admitting your own reasoning is wrong is extremely difficult).
How do you get out of flat-earth on your own, without re-living centuries of astronomic research? How do you get out of moonlanding negationism, without personally examining all the retrieved moon rocks? How do you get out of antivaxxing, without personally living through pestilence? (well, at least Covid19 should help with that...)
I guess it's a balance. Society simply would not hold if we all were radical independent thinkers, since we'd be constantly questioning everything that we cannot individually and immediately determine as true. A degree of conformism is actually necessary for progress of any sort.
Shared culture and norms are necessary for social harmony, and reduce the costs of law enforcement. Social harmony generally makes people happier as long as they are included in the mainstream, while internalized law enforcement frees up money for other uses. I see those as the main advantages of conformity.
I think however that it's generally true that conformity diminishes progress and positive change. Whether that's worth the loss of a shared culture depends. I think the current state in the US where there are two cultures which divide the population into two modes is harmful, since it makes society fractious and hostile. We could do for more conformity, now.
However if that were to shift back to a mass culture with various countercultures chafing against it, I think then more independent thinking would be good. I think mass cultures are the rule rather than the exception now, and most other places could do for more independent thinkers.
> How do you get out of flat-earth on your own, without re-living centuries of astronomic research? How do you get out of moonlanding negationism, without personally examining all the retrieved moon rocks? How do you get out of antivaxxing, without personally living through pestilence? (well, at least Covid19 should help with that...)
Find a way to get rationalists out of believing that these examples are an accurate representation of the beliefs of the conspiracy world in general, and you may be well on your way to a universal solution. But watch out for that first step, it's a doozy.
This essay provides a lot of the necessary advice to accomplish such a thing, but I suspect one must actually possess sufficient unconventionality to exercise it, not just perceive oneself to possess it.
I think you misunderstand the purpose of these examples. They're not meant to be typical representations; they're meant to be non-controversial representations, allowing us to discuss the thought processes involved without having the conversation derailed by people who honestly believe the example.
Perhaps. If, for the sake of argument, we accept that as true...might it be also true that they are other things, simultaneously?
Who knows what ideas (and communications of ideas) really are, how they really work, what influence they exert on the very fabric of the environment (this infinitely complex, magical soup that we refer to as reality) in which they (and we) are contained, and what the infinite, recursive downstream consequences are of this influence.
At the end of the day, they "are what they are" and "do what they do", and the same applies to their (unseen, unrealized, misunderstood) systemic consequences. We can culturally deny such things (just as conspiracy theory culture collectively denies many things) all we want, but this does not stop it from being actually true. Mother Nature does not require our agreement when organizing the structure and affairs of the universe, but we may mind a great deal when the system she has designed (that we rarely try to truly understand) serves up the consequences of any wilful ignorance that we may be guilty of (see: Planet Earth, 2020).
An extremely large number of people confidently (and sincerely) make claims that seem to suggest they have a deep, accurate understanding of all this complexity. My intuition suggests that these people may not actually be as correct as they perceive themselves to be.
>> Find a way to get rationalists out of believing that these examples are an accurate representation of the beliefs of the conspiracy world in general, and you may be well on your way to a universal solution.
This is but one instance of a much larger problem. But solve this one, and you may have unknowingly solved many others.
FTA:
You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is to cultivate an attitude of skepticism. When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out loud. I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say.
"Saying things out loud" certainly has consequences (which come in many forms....loss of friends, ostracization, downvotes, etc). I wonder...might there also be some downstream systemic consequences to not "saying things out loud"...like for example when some of the things that are not said out loud are ~unpopular/unpleasant to ponder, but also true and extremely important.
He mentions in the next sentence: "I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say"
> When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out loud. I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say.
Absolutely a clear signal that their belief is emotional. If you step on that toe just make it clear that you aren't questioning them at all, in fact, "you agree with them... you just wanted to know some sources to point to when those other nosey people who question our beliefs do so"... and diffuse the situation.
You really just want to make the other person feel "heard" and respected for their opinion, if that's the level at which they communicate.
Most people just want to feel some control over their lives, so telling them they're wrong and trying to reframe their reality might not ultimately be a positive, as long as their beliefs allow them to remain predictable and act within reason in their society.
What's their motivation? If it is to knowingly start and propagate lies, then you're obviously not going to get them to change. If it's to parrot falsities to feel control or look smart (what I believe PG is referring to as "conventional-minded"), figure out ways to subtly shift that without making it clear you're undermining them, if that's your motivation. It doesn't have to be all or nothing unless you're a cult leader or protecting a loved one from a con.
But then, hey, why is your reality the correct version of reality?
There's a side-effect here. If you're interacting in a place where straight-up calling bullshit on someone is socially unacceptable (HN, Wikipedia talk pages, many professional settings), then your first suggestion will simply take the place of calling bullshit and have the same effect.
> straight-up calling bullshit on someone is socially unacceptable
I think it's not about social acceptance. It is unacceptable because if you call them bullshit without giving good reasons why you think so it is not advancing the discussion in any good way. You are not contributing anything except your personal opinion.
If you do have good reasons to explain why you think they are wrong you don't need to call them names because you can just provide the correct reasoning instead.
Exactly. It's definitely cognitively dissonant to say to someone, "You're wrong, let me see your facts... but I don't have facts about why you're wrong."
I think something to reiterate is that it never goes well when you tell the other person that you disagree with them. A person is not just one idea, they're made from thousands... You're merely disagreeing with one idea, and that should be made clear when you're speaking with them. Regarding the parent comment's terminology of "calling bs", that's a bit of a harsh way to put it, or approach it, if you're trying to reconcile a difference of opinion over a single idea, and not fundamentally pointing at another person and saying, "You are your one bad idea and I don't like either."
Definitely agree. It's difficult to convey that level of charm / diplomacy via text, for me at least. Body language and other props being available also play a big role in making someone switch focus, and at least feel positively about the overall interaction, even if I ultimately agree to disagree (and state that, or not).
If I feel as though the online recipient of my messaging isn't receptive, there's really no need to contend in the first place. I don't have to change everyone's mind, nor is it really my place to do so ...
> hey, why is your reality the correct version of reality?
Exactly, it is about the question "why?". Why are your reasons for believing something more plausible. But that is not the mindset of an emotionally charged person.
Was the election rigged? A Trump supporter would say "Of course it was". But a judge in Pennsylvania had a good response to Giuliani (who was trying to argue it was): "... Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here".
> Why are your reasons for believing something more plausible. But that is not the mindset of an emotionally charged person.
Unfortunately, that is so. But usually, that person's motivation is to feel understood, valued, respected, and safe within the reality / status quo they've come to understand is their best guess. When you realize their specific fears, it makes it easier to empathize and work with them on seeing from other perspectives, and that those perspectives don't threaten them, even though they are not innately familiar or intuitive initially... But that can be quite challenging.
I'm not sure what Giuliani's motivations are, but if they aren't emotional on a personal level, they aren't his own fears, which doesn't work the same way...
Good point. People are afraid of being wrong not only because they don't want to lose an argument, but because if they are wrong about one thing, it might turn out they are wrong about many things. Thinking that you understand the world gives you comfort.
Its enough to demonstrate nonsocial results, IMHO. Especially when dealing with mailed paper ballots, and computerized tabulators.
No way Biden outperformed Obama with Black voters in key swing states and underperformed him everywhere else!
The results in some of these ridings has the hallmarks of election fraud. This is why its still not getting certified by so many states. And I predict will go to legislature to pick electors in those states
I love (and identify with) the sentiment of your last paragraph. One of my favorite cities is Sao Paulo. All outdoor advertisements were banned in 2006.
When it's appropriate to do so, and it's information that can be verified you can say, "Where did you get your information/Where did you learn that?" which may be slightly less confrontational.
If it's just an opinion, well, you might ask "how did you arrive at that conclusion?" or you might smile and say, "Oh,
yeah?"
I find it interesting that conventional thinkers are described as "sheep" in this article. In my experience, most people who I thought were shallow or "conventional" thinkers were not. Rather, they cared about different things than I did. They were independent thinkers, questioning assumptions, in the field where they were expert or passionate, and conventional thinkers everywhere else because they want to save their mental energy for the areas they care about the most.
I agree. A few years ago, I read “The Conquest of Happiness” by B. Russell, and he made a compelling argument that living a boring life may be a prerequisite for great work in certain fields. One can imagine that in 500 years, we’ll still talk about results from Terry Tao—who I suspect is boring and conventional in many ways—while totally forgetting the work of exciting and controversial thinkers today.
In my experience most people are sheep. I rarely encounter people who think independently about very much at all. And I'm sure they all would think the above didn't apply to them. Especially with politics I notice most people just pick a red or blue team or equivalent in their country, and inherit all their positions - which blows my mind.
I also think it doesn't apply to me, but I worry about how really independent my thinking is.
My advice is not to worry about it. Figure out what you want to think most about and seek truth. If other people find a different truth, try to learn from it. It's that simple.
If other people find a different truth, one of us is wrong. If it's the majority with a different truth I'm honest enough with myself most of the time to realize it's probably me who's wrong. But sometimes I will stand my ground anyway, not usually out of stubbornness, but because I'm confident that my analysisis correct. I don't think my odds are actually great in these cases, but just occasionally I might have found the truth before the rest of the world, and that can be valuable.
> If other people find a different truth, one of us is wrong.
2+2=4. But it also equals 8/2, 4.00000, and 25% of 16. What I've found in my experience is that when people disagree, they can both be right, and most often, the heart of the disagreement is not what is true, but what is _important_.
Another thing I've found to be true is that if you don't understand what someone is saying, they probably know something that you don't. These two findings don't seem related at first, but they are.
On math, I would argue those are all equivalent and equally right.
On politics different positions are rarely equivalent, but you're right that there's almost always truth on both sides and it's really expressing differing views of priorities and values. However, if you rank them by "which is best for human well-being" there is a best answer even if we can't know it. So one can't use this as a easy out "all opinions are equally valuable" kind of thing, which is just nonsense. Though one could argue that prioritizing "human well-being" is a value judgment, which it is.
I also agree with your last point, it's usually me who's misunderstanding something in that case upon digging deeper.
However, there are also classes of things that are objectively true like whether climate change is happening as a result of human activity. Or whether a politician said X or not when there's a video of them saying X. It's never 100% certainty in life, but some things are known sufficiently well that there's almost no chance of them being wrong.
On those latter points, I'd go back to much of the disagreement being how much it matters. On balance, I agree with taking preventative actions because of the risk of global catastrophe. But I recognize that I don't know the future. There's a nonzero chance that global warming is less catastrophic than people expect, perhaps because we invent technological mitigations or because the Earth offsets the warming for cyclical reasons or in some kind of natural reaction to rising temperatures.
On balance, I believe we should work to reduce emissions and mitigate greenhouse gases, but I realize that it is just that, a belief, and I may be wrong.
I think long term there's a chance global warming is just what the Earth needs. We have a pattern of ice ages, and if you think global warming is bad imagine an ice age. We grow most of our food at latitudes in the northern hemisphere that would no longer have a long enough growing season. We might one day find ourselves in a position of having to burn coal or release methane on purpose to ward off an ice age.
However, there's no question it's going to be horrific to adapt to meanwhile. There's also a question of how much warming do we need to prevent an ice age, because ideally we'd want to stop there. Nobody asks these questions seriously though, and it could likely end ones career as a scientist to talk about it.
This is true. If I wanted to have independent thoughts for things I believe basically because most people believe them, I would not have the time to do anything else. Some people have this drive and capacity but most don't.
Taken to it's logical conclusion, these people would end up committed because they can't stop questioning the nature and fabric of reality. You'd basically end up catatonic.
> There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel.
As someone who once made their living as a scientist, I can tell you from firsthand experience that while this is technically correct, the conclusion PG wishes to draw from this:
> One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are.
is very wrong, at least in the domain of scientific research (and probably others as well, but scientific research is the area in which I can speak with some authority). In order to make scientific progress, you have to understand the conventional wisdom. The reason for this is that the conventional wisdom in science is the product of about 350 years (and counting) of hard work by an awful lot of smart people. Those people explored a lot of wrong ideas on the way towards discovering the right ones, and if you are unaware of this history and just strike out on your own thinking that you are so much more brilliant than any other human who has ever walked the planet before you, you are much more likely to go down a well-known dead-end than you are to discover something new. I wasted about ten years of my life learning this lesson the hard way.
Being skeptical of the conventional wisdom can be useful, but keeping yourself intentionally ignorant of it is generally a bad plan.
The huge difference between tech startups and science is that in science, the conventional wisdom has recorded justifications and collected evidence that you can look up and understand, while in tech startups the conventional wisdom is advice made up by businessesmen who succeeded once, or sometimes succeeded zero times, and shared over drinks at the local pub. The usefulness gap between scientific knowledge and cultural knowledge is wide, and nowhere wider than business.
This a million times. You could further prove your point by bringing up some specific examples:
- Webvan vs Instacart. Prior to Instacart, the conventional wisdom was that grocery delivery doesn't work as a standalone business, and that hypothesis was based on the Webvan data point.
- GM vs Tesla. GM's failure with their EV1 was frequently used against Tesla in their early stages. But GM's decision to abandon their project had nothing to do with market demand, and was instead entirely a politically driven decision.
- Concorde vs Boom. Building a supersonic commercial airliner was assumed to be a futile exercise for over 50 years, despite massive changes in regulations, advancements in technology, and overall market demand.
There are so many more, but these are the ones that instantly came to my mind.
An unrelated point that might be worth making: two of those startups are from YC, and the third one was funded by a guy with $100m burning a hole in his pocket. So while going against conventional wisdom has its merits, it does seem that the funding might turn out to be more difficult than for more conventional startups. I suppose this has to do with many VC funds' focus on certain investment themes, which are used to raise their funds and serves as a de facto contract with the GPs. One only has to look at the funding history of Airbnb - even USV couldn't wrap their head around the concept, and Sequoia bought into the concept but then struggled to match them with one of their existing investment themes (I forgot how they finally did it, but I recall it was a bit of a stretch).
For what its worth, in 07 I had Andy Rachleff as an instructor and we did a case study on Webvan, and Andy's conclusion was that if he had to do it over he'd still invest in Webvan because the business was sound, it was just a bit too early.
There's certainly at least as many opinions about business as there are people working in the private sector, and most are probably wrong, but the fundamental workings of business aren't entirely a random number generator. You can use tools of business to determine the viability of a particular approach, at which point you're left with figuring out the timing and execution of that idea.
Unfortunately the bias against negative results in scientific publications cause a lot of scientific dead-ends to be non-public as well.
A lot starting researchers (such as PhD students) that are left without adequate supervision are likely to reach a dead-end someone previously encountered but did not publish anything about.
I have not been directly involved in academic research, but from what I understood, results gets published, whether they met the goals or not. It is still novel and valuable to publish why this certain approach or idea did not work as expected as long as you followed scientific standards.
I’m sorry you’re being downvoted just because you have a wrong impression of how scientific publishing works.
Nobody is looking for wrong answers, there are simply many uninteresting ways to screw things up. If you are able to publish a wrong result in a worthwhile journal, a lot of right results have to be in it, which I guess makes your work “right”.
I know of people who researched topic X with the assumption to find Y. But they did not find Y and rather found out that their setup was insufficient to provide meaningful answers. So they wrote and explained about why this setup did not work for the original question and published it and moved on.
And this makes sense, because they achieved novel information the next student could improve on. So published about a dead end, or not?
Seems like that depends on what kind of conventional startup wisdom you're thinking about. For example, from what I've read about SaaS business plans, the conventional approach is drawn from the experiences and data of hundreds (or thousands?) of SaaS companies. It's not done with scientific rigor, but it's not individual founders making hasty conclusions based on their own outcomes either.
Understanding the conceptual model behind a SaaS business plan, the kind of metrics that people find valuable and concrete techniques that other companies have found effective seems worth doing even if you have your own theory or approach that's explicitly different—for the same reasons lisper mentioned for scientific knowledge, just at a smaller scale.
I single out SaaS not because it's necessarily more systematic than other tech business plans—I suspect that it is, but don't have a real basis for that—but because I've read more about that than other kinds of companies. I'm sure there is a lot of valuable collective knowledge for any sort of product or company you want to build and the advantages you get from learning that should outweigh any priming effect the knowledge has, as long as you are intentional in deviating from the "conventional" path.
My thoughts went to SaaS startups in particular when reading the essay - most are highly conventional and seem largely a result of VC-like market analysis and application of a well-honed SaaS playbook, not some place where unconventional and novel thinking is deployed and benign ignorance of a market is desirable. The only surprise as an outsider is really the size some markets turn out to be, not the decision to go into the market nor the solution settled upon.
This suggests to me many/most are started by people looking for a relatively conventional experience, just with a bit more appetite for risk. None of the attributes for these positions are required in much greater degree than elsewhere in tech - curiosity, resistance to being told what to think, or fastidiousness to truth. Perhaps it's a testament to YC's success that the choice to found a startup is more accessible to 'conventional thinkers' these days. No value judgment - we should let a thousand flowers bloom! - but the conflation of startups to the above attributes of 'independent thinkers' is perhaps overblown.
But that's collective wisdom for how to do something - not collective wisdom that something can't be done. If the industry had decided that SaaS was impossible, that would be an example of collective wisdom to ignore.
I think this may attest to the value of (apparent) novelty/innovation in PG's sphere. Seeming unconventional and disruptive has better ROI than spending years mining the history of human thought.
He doesn't do science, he funds and markets products. He's competing to capture pieces of a finite pie, not creating knowledge. More broadly, he promotes a zeitgeist which has made him wealthy. I wonder if this has something to do with his efforts to maintain some semblance of "thought leadership", even if it means recycling tired content.
Sorry but I strongly disagree with your assertion that building a business is a zero-sum game. At the basic level, a farmer who sows a field and harvests a crop is making the world one harvest richer, and no one poorer. Ditto for the carpenter making a table or mechanic fixing a car. PG addressed this long ago: http://paulgraham.com/gap.html
Scientists turn money into knowledge. Entrepreneurs turn knowledge into money. It's a virtuous cycle. Scientists lament that they don't get their "fair share" but it's wrong to blame innovators, better to reevaluate their own economic strategy. What if we had private research institutes turning out cutting edge research? Or vertically integrated ones that commercialized their own discoveries, like Spacex?
Value and compensation aren't necessarily coupled. Think of school teachers. It's clearly an incredibly valuable job preparing the next generation of society, but pays a miserable wage before the intervening of unions, and still not great even with that.
But there's more teachers available in the labor market compared to demand than computer programmers, so the latter command a much higher salary. Even though I would say many deliver much less value to society.
Or negative value like Facebook engineers. Sorry, I couldn't resist that cheap shot, and I do believe Facebook is a net negative for society.
I'm not even sure it's true that there are more teachers than programmers. But the pool of money for paying programmers is large and expanding, because we can easily calculate the value they produce, while the monetary value of teaching is harder to measure.
It doesn't help that teaching is presented as a "caring" profession, that you do for the love of your charges. Teachers don't threaten to jump to a different school district for more money, and when they campaign for more money, they're presented as not caring about the students. Nobody expects programmers to have any loyalty, so they get to demand money.
I would love to have schools fight to get the most talented teachers, instead of settling for "any woman who likes kids". (Those "caring" professions are usually ones associated with women.) I'd love to see school systems compete with software companies and research institutions, and to have school districts run by the people who might otherwise run Fortune 500 companies. But that won't happen without money, and until we start deciding to pay for it, we're going to get a lot of mediocre teaching.
> because we can easily calculate the value they produce,
I am not trolling but I would really, really like a citation on this. I hear this sentiment so often but nobody ever produced that calculation. Would be great (or maybe not ;)) for negotiations going forward.
I mean it in the simplistic sense that we can sum up the revenue of the software industry. That's not really a complete calculation but it's clearer than trying to measure the value add of teachers.... even though it's arguably more.
well, the software industry is filled with non-software engineers. and if you go with the revenue angle, what do you do with companies that don't produce "value" (i.e. product doesn't sell)?
It wasn't my intention to claim that it could be calculated exactly. It was my intention to point out the distinction between software engineers, where there's a bottom line somewhere to be counted, and teachers, where the bottom line is effectively impossible to calculate.
This isn't about how much programmers are worth, but about why it is we get away with paying teachers so little while programmers are paid so much: their contribution to a corporate profit. The details are beyond the scope of the post.
"and to have school districts run by the people who might otherwise run Fortune 500 companies"
What bothers me with this "race for the best", is that there is a finite amount of people running fortune 500 companies.
My main problem with the school system is that even good teachers can't teach their full potential with all the outside constraints regulating their classes.
> At the basic level, a farmer who sows a field and harvests a crop is making the world one harvest richer, and no one poorer.
Not quite true; the farmer using that land to grow crops is externalizing an opportunity cost onto those who might use that land for something else, e.g. for the carpenter's workshop or the mechanic's garage. Same with the water consumed by those crops. With these natural and finite resources, there very much is a zero-sum game, since your use of that resource is at everyone else's expense.
This is something Graham entirely misses in his article: the wealth, contrary to his core assertion, does flow from a common source, specifically land. The wealthy, in turn, are such specifically because they happened to be the ones able to control that land at the exclusion of everyone else. This was the basis of Henry George's advocacy for a land value tax.
"But YellowApple," I can already hear, "${ARBITRARY_FAANG}'s wealth ain't tied up in real estate!" Au contraire. Their software is developed in offices that consume land. Their hardware is built in factories that consume land. Their hardware is further constructed from materials extracted from that land. It's land all the way down, and the company externalizes those opportunity costs on everyone else. That is where the injustice in their wealth lies; it is unjust for them to reap the benefits of that land without adequately compensating the rest of society for the opportunity cost the members thereof now bear.
Every drop of water on Earth has been "consumed" many, many times over. It doesn't just get used once and then disappear.
There may be localized shortages of water (e.g., in California), but that doesn't mean that the Earth's water overall gets "used up", in any meaningful sense.
That ain't what I'm saying. Every inch of land on Earth has been "reused" many times over, too. That doesn't change the fact that there's a finite amount of it, and the possession of any quantity of it is at the expense of everyone else needing it. Same goes for water; yes, the water itself doesn't magically disappear, but of the 1,386,000,000 cubic kilometers of water on this planet, if you're storing a trillion of those km³ for yourself in water tanks, that's a lot less that other people can use.
That is: as defined above, consumption ≠ destruction, but rather consumption = possession.
(This ain't even mentioning the distinction between actual potable water v. water contaminated with salt or outright toxins - and the resulting labor and energy costs of converting the latter back into the former. It also ain't even mentioning the labor and energy costs of moving water from where it's abundant to where it's scarce.)
> All the water tanks in the world don't add up to a trillion km³. Not by many orders of magnitude.
You're missing my point: that hoarding water is at the expense of anyone else who needs water. One milliliter, one gigaliter, doesn't matter; that's still less for everyone else unless and until it is released, and during that time the mere storage of that water externalizes an opportunity cost on everyone else needing that water.
> The sun does that for free, and has done for billions of years.
Right, because the sun magically drops all precipitation into lakes and rivers, and not a drop of it into the oceans. I'm sure the sun has some sort of tracking system that realizes which molecules of water come from where and puts them right back whence they came, right?
> You're missing my point: that hoarding water is at the expense of anyone else who needs water.
Someone with a water tank in (say) Seattle, Washington is not "hoarding water" "at the expense" of someone in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, because there is no practical way of getting the "hoarded" water from Washington State to Ethiopia. If the Seattleite doesn't "hoard" that water, it's going to run straight into Puget Sound. It's not going to somehow appear at a tap in Addis Ababa.
> Right, because the sun magically drops all precipitation into lakes and rivers, and not a drop of it into the oceans.
Now you're just strawmanning. Of course a lot of it falls on the oceans. But enough of it falls on land that the hydrologic cycle continues, as it has for billions of years.
I think fundamentally you're just wedded to the the idea that water gets "used up" in the same sense that, say, oil, gets used up.
> Someone with a water tank in (say) Seattle, Washington is not "hoarding water" "at the expense" of someone in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,
Well it sure ain't contributing to the "hydrologic cycle" if it's in a water tank. That's a tankful less water in that cycle. And multiply that by everyone else storing water, and before you know it that's a noticeable impact globally, including both for Addis Ababa and the rest of Seattle.
This is, mind you, precisely why a lot of municipalities don't take kindly to people collecting rainfall, or to people damming up streams or rivers without doing the necessary due diligence on ecological impact assessment. There are downstream impacts to these seemingly-innocuous things.
> I think fundamentally you're just wedded to the the idea that water gets "used up" in the same sense that, say, oil, gets used up.
Nowhere have I even suggested that to be the case, and yet somehow you think I'm the one strawmanning here. If you're going to deliberately ignore my point and substitute it for one that's obviously false, then why even bother to respond?
> Sorry but I strongly disagree with your assertion that building a business is a zero-sum game.
It isn't either/or. Nearly all businesses do "create value". Nearly all businesses also compete for a limited supply of customers, because nearly all markets can produce more outputs than are needed.
The ratio between the two matters a lot to the character of the company.
I agree with you completely. There are certainly rent-seeking businesses that do not create value (or net value?). And the majority of businesses are competing in (disrupting) existing markets.
Even if they don't increase total consumer spending by offering better products and winning market share, they do increase consumer _wealth_. I'm glad I can buy a 65" 4k TV for as much as my parents paid for a 15" CRT 20 years ago, adjusted for inflation.
That's the median outcome. Then you get outliers like the sewing machine that greatly increased the productivity of vast amounts of workers, making those users much richer and society wealthier because clothes got cheaper.
I find it disingenuous to claim, as the OP did (perhaps unintentionally), that innovators are bad faith actors playing a zero sum game. Surely that's the exception, not the norm. Just as there are bad actors in academia and any other profession.
> I find it disingenuous to claim, as the OP did (perhaps unintentionally), that innovators are bad faith actors playing a zero sum game. Surely that's the exception, not the norm. Just as there are bad actors in academia and any other profession.
I didn't intend to claim bad faith. As you point out there are surely bad actors in any field. More common, I think, is the (most likely subconscious) Lippmann effect: "We are peculiarly inclined to suppress whatever impugns the security of that to which we have given our allegiance."[0]
>>Even if they don't increase total consumer spending by offering better products and winning market share, they do increase consumer _wealth_. I'm glad I can buy a 65" 4k TV for as much as my parents paid for a 15" CRT 20 years ago, adjusted for inflation.
I think this depends of how are you calculating the cost of things. In this day in age, misery wages and huge negative externalities have more to do with cheap clothes and appliances than the sewing machine, imho. The later mostly contributed on how many of them you can make by the second, but you still need farms of people to work them.
It's not fixed though. You may think the market for cars only has so much demand, but if you can make a car cheaper, demand goes up. This is one of the most fundamental laws of microeconomics (the non bullshit part of economics.)
There are definitely some zero sum games, I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out a nuance. The market for eyeballs/attention is zero sum. Netflix famously thinks of its competition as everything outside of Netflix including "real life."
> Netflix famously thinks of its competition as everything outside of Netflix
Is that true or just marketing? Is Netflix seriously competing against every other type of industry? How could it survive if there was nothing but Netflix? Or are they so megalomaniac that they are trying to take over the pharmaceutical industry too? And agriculture? And military? I can't believe.
I don't think building a business is zero-sum in principle. Your point about a farmer creating value is well taken. Our present measures of economic value are notoriously short-sighted though (i.e., willing to ignore hard-to-quantify externalities); did the green revolution create value? It vastly improved yield, but if we don't make serious changes in the next 50 years, it will destroy the viability of agriculture. Value creation is rarely unambiguous.
I would also argue that many VC-backed startups are more about finding unexploited niches or catabolizing existing sectors of the economy than creating new material wealth.
I agree with you that current market incentives do not capture externalities like environmental harm. (eg. soil erosion, in the case of a farmer who doesn't rest his fields)
I hope to convince you to hate the game, not the players. So that we can focus our efforts at the root cause. And to take a measured approach: it's not all bad. I'd rather have our current quality of life (in Canada) than to live in a pre-industrial world in the longhouses of the Aboriginal Peoples who used to live where I do. It seems romantic, but I'm sure I'd be a terrible hunter. I choose to believe that human progress will continue to solve the problems we face, in time. Because historically we always have. Let's root for more Elon Musks instead of hating on the average capitalist.
There are only two ways civilization gets more stuff, and that’s by either by making the current amount of material go twice as far, making twice as many homes and phones, or we mine it out of the earth.
> He's competing to capture pieces of a finite pie
this is an odd way to describe investing. this would more accurately describe the founders themselves, competing for a finite pool of VC dollars without necessarily having a viable product.
FWIW, I agree with the rest of your post. while I enjoy some of PG's posts, he often makes the classic mistake of presuming that expertise in one specific area makes his opinion on other topics relevant.
> Being skeptical of the conventional wisdom can be useful, but keeping yourself intentionally ignorant of it is generally a bad plan.
I can vouch for that.
I write software, but my original training was as an EE. My software development methodology was almost entirely self-taught.
This has been both good and bad. I will sometimes come up with some really interesting orthogonal approaches, but I will also sometimes "reinvent the wheel," with a naive approach.
Experience has taught me to seek out prior art, and established patterns. My creative way may still be the best way, but I've learned that is not always the case.
I think ordering of exposure makes a difference. Being submersed in prior art and then trying to come up with something novel is much harder or less likely than having conviction around a novel idea/experience and then digging into prior art to strengthen your offering.
Uh that's entirely wrong. If you don't even know the tools available to the state-of-the-art, then how can you begin to build new things?
For example, in cryptography, if you don't know know about basic things like elliptic curves and hash functions, how are you going to solve any big problem?
Bitcoin is probably an example of this. I really doubt its creator knew about the state of the art in the field, yet he still created the state of the art in the field.
But yes, you are unlikely to do state of the art math without extensive education. However most other fields aren't like that, software engineering included.
As an EEE graduate myself I hear you. But now that I work in pure IT where I write programs for customer's requirements where nobody cares about a rock solid product vs a shiny new one that can ship next week (and I believe that was the context the article was written), and I hate to admit this - can't fault the author here.
And, like most kinds of work these days, science progress is mainly collaborative, rather than the result of one independent thinker.
pg seems predisposed to dichotomous thinking. This could be about his rhetorical style. It's easier to write an essay, or a screenplay, with good guys and bad guys. The world is more like a novel now, with multiple independent processes in shades of gray.
The difference between true genius and your regular old smart person is that it takes about all the brainpower the smart person has to understand something that's pretty complicated, and their thinking then becomes locked in. The effort not only cements their conceptual understanding; it cements their emotional attachment to their understanding. By contrast, the genius has the brainpower to understand a thing, understand alternative explanations just as well, and then innovate beyond all that.
People have a tendency to do more of what works for them. People with more raw intelligence have lower cost (effort) in considering multiple possibilities and keeping them all alive in their heads at once. (I'll assume just for this paragraph that "raw intelligence" is a thing, and means what I want it to mean.) If other, less capable people attempted to do the same thing, they would get hopelessly confused and be unable to decide or act. So for them, it is smarter to stick to conventional wisdom; they'll be more likely to get a positive outcome.
Combine that with the fact that different people have different interests, inclinations, and abilities in different areas, and the result is that the whole dichotomy of "conventional vs unconventional" quickly falls apart.
"One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are. "
Is to be aware of them, and to be aware that they may not be correct, or they may be correct and there are better and more effective beliefs now (new theories, but they may not be as well proven, yet), and better ways in the future (new theories/frameworks that aren't proven, or can't yet exist due to other lacking ecosystem components like technology or math or thought processes (Like open source back in the day, and then it won).
My response to all this is to consciously be aware of what I know and how old it is, and that there are probably better ways to solve these problems, or simply engineer the problem away (e.g. better password policy vs simply replacing it with SSO with good MFA).
>Being skeptical of the conventional wisdom can be useful, but keeping yourself intentionally ignorant of it is generally a bad plan.
Yes, I agree with this. It follows along the lines of the saying: You must learn the rules before you can break them. With that said, I have seen many 1st year graduate students spend weeks/months going through the literature only to come up with project ideas that are close derivatives of published works. This usually happens because a student put too much focus on absorbing the "conventional wisdom" of the field rather than starting with a question and seeing what research has already been done to address it.
However, there are plenty of scientists who disagree with this sentiment. I had a colleague who would quote Feynman, "I never pay any attention to anything by experts. I calculate everything myself." Maybe that works if you are Feynman, but I seem to recall John Preskill saying that he didn't think this mentality served Feynman well, at least in his later years.
In many domains of science I will agree with you: success in physics is unlikely if you don't have a strong physics background.
But many modern technologies are much less mature. For example, a good general background in software engineering helps, but following state of the art is not critical (and may be counterproductive) for building new products. My 2c.
This used to be true for scientists too, 100 or more years ago.
Body of human knowledge is much bigger now-a-days. It takes 4 yrs honors and first 1/2 yrs in PhD to even begin thinking about fundamental research. That number is likely higher for some other fields (like doctors I guess).
>Body of human knowledge is much bigger now-a-days
that's what Einstein' contemporaries could have said as well.
The growing body of human knowledge is increasingly noise, bad or redundant theories, with entire gigantic fields based on wrong assumptions and fueled by groupthink and premature optimization, just like 100 or 500 years ago. Deep specialization is not always helpful and often detrimental for fundamental research as it assumes deep indoctrination into consensus theory of the day.
Thinking about fundamental research can start once one learns the fundamentals which doesn't take more than a few years in a breadth-first search manner. You don't have to cover all the branches of that giant tree, some of the branches don't have a right to exist in the first place and some are incredibly redundant or marginal improvements of the core parent idea.
I think redundancy and noise have definitely increased because more people are involved in research. So the only think that might be harder now vs. 100 years ago is filtering signal from noise. But the internet, and the rise of search engines is actually pretty helpful with that.
There are certain classes of creative work that especially turn this essay on its head: writing a textbook, typesetting a page, creating a film as an homage to a particular time period or genre. To do these things exceptionally well means noticing and meticulously following conventions that nobody realized existed before you did.
My mother raised me to think for myself, it was a heavy emphasis of my upbringing and important for her.
However I'm now in situations where the world is divided and asking questions (in order to make my own mind up) is considered some kind of admission of guilt for being part of the "other".
For example: Asking someone why they think immigration is good/bad. If it's a belief they hold, I'm interested in knowing the thought process and making my own conclusions based on something I might not have known. But the act of asking the question makes the person, who may not have put too much original thinking in; quite defensive.
There's another drawback here too: which is that you can't experience everything. I can't live with the experiences of an American Black Woman who emigrates to England as a White English Man who lives in Sweden; it's just not possible, thus it requires strenuous effort to empathise.
There will always be a line in which we just have to take things at face value, in computer terms "understanding the contract" between components.
Thinking for yourself is overrated as society is not built for it if you want to fit in.
> However I'm now in situations where the world is divided and asking questions (in order to make my own mind up) is considered some kind of admission of guilt for being part of the "other". For example: Asking someone why they think immigration is good/bad. If it's a belief they hold, I'm interested in knowing the thought process and making my own conclusions based on something I might not have known. But the act of asking the question makes the person, who may not have put too much original thinking in; quite defensive.
It may be a matter of knowing when to stop. My personal experience is that most people will try to answer even sensitive questions when you approach them with genuine interest and make some effort to formulate questions in a way that doesn't imply some sort of value judgement. If this is difficult, just be explicit and explicitly say you're not trying to judge or offend them.
Sure enough, you'll hear people make an argument that you find unconvincing, or they may not answer the exact question that you asked, and some people will even admit they don't know why they believe something. When that happens, you'll have to accept that as their answer (and draw your own conclusions in silence).
People do get hostile when you keep "nagging" - asking more and more questions - when it's clear that they aren't interested in the subject or haven't thought about it much. To the other person it feels like you're either trying to make them feel stupid or change their mind. And you're getting none the wiser anyway because those who do not get offended will just make up their "reasons" on the spot.
Obviously avoid the mistake to ask someone for their opinion, and then immediately returning the "favor" by giving your opinion on the matter.
> Thinking for yourself is overrated as society is not built for it if you want to fit in.
I agree that if you want to fit in, thinking for yourself is counterproductive. But I also think society has more escape hatches for unconventionally minded people than it ever has, and if you don't care about fitting in the penalties have never been lower.
But does it? The strenuous effort part? Empathy doesn’t require strenuous effort, it can’t be that hard to relate to the core struggles of anyone you don’t know yet, surely you’d have to be some sort of magician to empathise at the granular level even with someone that looks like you (not sure how relevant that is but seems to be important to you), comes from the same school and now lives on the same block of flat as you do, as they could have gone through life having the complete adverse experience from yous, but at the core level, as long as you’re not some sort of social anosognostic, it’s not that hard to relate to what complete strangers from obscure environments feel/want/think like.
This is easily tested by simply taking a trip to some remote place you don’t speak the language and you’ll see how quickly empathy kicks in and how soon ‘conversations’ are happening where you totally relate to what they are going through perhaps not as much as they can relate to what you’re going through you lunatic explorer of the subconscious. Then with time as you learn their language, well, fuck it, as long as you are wearing some shade of grey you will fit right in where you are right now and wear your mask.
> it can’t be that hard to relate to the core struggles of anyone you don’t know yet,
The issue is more in the relating to struggle that you never went through and never observed. In order to relate, the other person would need to be unusually great at expression what it is like, what constrains they have and you would also have to be very good listener.
I think questioning someone's ideology or beliefs to their face has never and will never win them as a friend. These things generally aren't rationally founded anyway. If you ask about some political issue, you're going to get regurgitated talking points and tribalism, not a thesis. I think it's quite rare to meet someone willing to suspend belief for a bit and engage in unbiased debate, or at least I haven't met too many. This line of thinking can be helpful in a technical context though.
"Questioning someone's beliefs" doesn't have to mean "tell the idiot why I'm right and they're wrong in the form of a series of questions".
If you ask with sincere interest and an open mind, and avoid passing judgment on the answers you get (including with nonverbal cues), the person you're questioning will generally feel flattered, not attacked. This is how good journalists get people to open up to them.
If they aren’t “fastidious about truth” probably. If they are, and they know you are being “curious”, you will likely have a cool, engaging conversation on your hands.
> But the act of asking the question makes the person, who may not have put too much original thinking in; quite defensive.
Honestly, this is a good thing. Don't talk to these people. Over time I've found friends that I can discuss rationally with about many of their disparate experiences, them being from various races, genders, nationalities, and other such factors.
there's a degree of social intelligence involved with your examples. It's not really about "thinking for yourself", as everything is about context. uou don't have to completely become the other person in order to empathize. For most people it does not require strenous effort.
evolution is all about the ability to fit in. this includes the ability to be your own person with your own opinions. a well adapted person can do that and still being a part of the group/society
> However I'm now in situations where the world is divided and asking questions (in order to make my own mind up) is considered some kind of admission of guilt for being part of the "other".
I think this is partly because the rules or conventions that allowed rational discussion in good faith have been hacked by those acting in bad faith. The sad truth is that good faith discussion has been utterly rhetorically hijacked by things like "just asking questions" so when someone is genuinely asking questions you are assumed to be acting in bad faith. I have no idea what the answer to that is other than to find people you can trust to have these conversations with. And the danger is a lot of the people you think you can trust are just more people acting in bad faith.
Conventional-minded people don't like to think of themselves as conventional-minded. And in any case, it genuinely feels to them as if they make up their own minds about everything. It's just a coincidence that their beliefs are identical to their peers'.
I'm not sure about this. I think people are aware of what is conventional, and that's why they gravitate towards it. It's a risk-mitigation strategy, or in the case of curiosity, the explore-exploit trade-off at work.
Life presents you with a bewildering array of options. It greatly helps to establish what the conventional choice is. It will generally be the safe option, a path well-trodden. You can try to reverse-engineer why it became the conventional choice, gain an appreciation of its advantages, maybe tweak things to find a slightly more optimal solution for your personal circumstance... but sticking with convention qua convention is generally justified. People don't 'accidentally' make the same choices as most others, they deliberately identify what is conventional and follow that path. Go to university, buy a house with a mortgage, get a car on PCP, marry before having children, etc etc
Likewise for a small child there is no downside to curiosity, only upside. As an adult, there is an awareness that you need to earn your daily bread, before all else. Working with people who seem to just follow flights of fancy, risking their livelihood, can be infuriating.
And then there is the whole meta-question of conventional thoughts versus conventional statements. If you believe something that is widely disbelieved, and you speak up, you're sticking your neck out. When I see people do this I tend to get the impression they have not really calibrated their bet on being right against the reputational risk they are assuming.
While I agree that there are professions where thinking unconventional thoughts is especially important, there's a flipside to this which is missed in this essay: they're professions where being wrong is not catastrophic. VC's can invest in many startups, and a few successes can make up for a lot of failures. It's ok to be wrong a lot, if a few big successes (i.e you were right when everyone else was wrong) can make up for that.
But, most professions are not like that. I don't want my surgeon, car mechanic, plumber, or accountant to be the sort who is rarely in agreement with their peers. If they are wrong half the time about things which everyone else knew the right answer to, but also half of the time they are right when everyone else is wrong, I'm still much worse off. Being unconventional is only a good thing if the consequences of being wrong are much less bad, than the benefits of being correct when others are all wrong.
You are missing the part about being fastidious about the truth. Nobody cares about people who are "unconventional" in a way that is at odds with reality. Conventions are merely cognitive shortcuts we use to apply previously determined knowledge. Sometimes that knowledge grows out of sync with the world, or there is a newer, better understanding of the world that represents an improvement, and we need to replace or update the convention. This is where we need unconventional thinkers to question assumptions and test new ways of doing things. Yes, even in fields like surgery and plumbing.
Do you think the current state of knowledge in surgery is perfect and cannot be improved? If not, you are depending on people to question the current conventions.
I promise you the first plumber who proposed the waterless urinal was met with a lot of resistance from other plumbers "That's not how we do things", "That will never work" etc. etc. It doesn't mean he's also going to design your house so that shit has to flow uphill. Nobody is proposing that you just throw out conventions at random for the sake of calling yourself unconventional.
Over the years, I've found PG's essays much less compelling. As some sibling comments here have noted, there's a level of self-assuredness that feels increasingly disconnected from reality, like PG's become a synecdoche of SF VC-fuelled startup culture as a whole. Whether that's him changing, or me, or the world, I'm not certain--but I still look forward to them simply because the ensuing discussions here on HN tend to have some gold in them.
Edit: typo on “synecdoche” (original was “synecdouche,” which could be read as clever/juvenile but was simply unintentional).
Also: my original phrasing (which I’ll leave intact above for context) was vague; I specifically meant to express that the more recent essays resonate less with me than the older ones once did. I haven’t reevaluated the older essays; it’s been ages since I went through them.
Your view of PG and SV culture is following the standard sentiment curve. Just like the culture at large.
20 years ago we were the innovative pioneers shaking up the all-powerful old guard, and everybody loves to root for the underdog.
Now we’re the new seemingly all-powerful incumbents (look at the top 5 S&P 500 companies right now). Underdogs no longer.
You can see this very clearly in media coverage of Silicon Valley over the past 15 years. Look at Google. It’s gone from “Google is our savior and the greatest corporation to ever exist,” to “Google is an evil destructive power bent on world domination.”
Was either characterization ever true? Of course not. The truth has always been in the middle.
You’re seeing what has always been there...But viewing it with an overly critical lens this time, whereas last time you viewed everything overly optimistically.
You’re ignoring the good stuff now, when you used to ignore the bad stuff.
I think you make a very good point, especially with the Google answer.
But I don’t know if that shift in sentiment is unwarranted. The Google of 2005 was nothing like the Google of 2020.
When Google was just a search company, they were purely innovators. Google indexed the internet better than anyone else.
But Google now is pretty bloated. Chrome, Android, Gmail, Docs/Drive, YouTube. The thing is, your gripes with one product affect your perception of all Google products. If you don’t like Chrome, your YouTube experience might be degraded, and you might resent Google’s increasing influence on web standards.
I’m not saying it’s bad that Google has made a lot of useful things work. But Google has lost its magic.
The same can be said of Facebook. Young people flocked to it a decade ago. It was new, it was magic. Now it’s bloated too (Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus), and has its own set of unique issues.
It’s like how some people prefer bands that haven’t become mainstream yet. I prefer small companies because they are still on their toes trying to make better products. Google and Facebook don’t care about you as a user anymore, they’re too big to care.
Apple, Amazon, Microsoft... they too have lost that magic with age and size.
They’ve become boring. Boring is a recipe for disruption.
But there wasn't that much bad stuff to ignore in the past - because it wasn't that bad. Google did not have that much influence or power, so their bad tendencies (assuming they have been the same throughout their lifetime) were just benign. There is no point in holding up a big magnifying glass on underdogs - things can't go horribly wrong. But it is completely justified to hold the powerful accountable, and that's what people are doing now.
But I think this further proves the point. Google had already grown a search monopoly 15 years ago while everybody was still fawning over them and thinking they were going to give us all free internet via flying balloons and self driving cars.
We just assumed they would use their powers for good and not evil, because we were judging them overly optimistically. We ignored the bad.
Now that they've been cemented as a dominant incumbent, we've seen the other side and judge them with a hyper-critical eye. We've forgotten the frustrations of life under the old guard. We take Google for granted, and ignore the good when discussing them now.
Of course, Google has always been both a useful product and dangerous given its power. Rationally, we knew all of this was true 15 years ago. But emotionally, we were unable to correctly evaluate the risk.
While I agree (and would describe the issue as a kind of insularity), I find that PG's essays still have a fair amount of value – if I had to put some kind of measure on it, I'd say that for his older ones I found value in 80-90% of a given essay, while the more recent ones like this, it's closer to 40-50%. Using this one as an example, I disagree with many of the assertions in the first section, some in the second, and find the third to be quite solid.
In particular, his take on the nature/nurture aspect of thinking for yourself is something I disagree with. He specifically notes that he got a fair amount of fastidiousness about the truth from his father and cites high school as a bad place for independent-minded people due to social mechanics – both things that I feel point in the other direction.
I'd go so far as to say that most education systems beat the curiosity out of children with great effectiveness and encourage conformism, and given the lack of classes like philosophy and critical thinking, thinking for yourself has become something mostly passed from parents to children because the parents that have it find it important that their children learn it. I don't think there's anything stopping a great portion of the population learning to evaluate information they receive critically, or qualify the quality of their own knowledge – in fact I'd say it's not only possible but becoming essential, as these seeming once-a-generation satanic panics are beginning to tire me out.
Yeah, there's nature-nurture stuff going on, but there is also a strange inability to grapple with context shifts. What is “conventional” is changing, and an idea which seemed “independent” is no longer.
This is why Alan Kay’s talks about the same are nicer. He is explicit about “you find yourself in a pink world surrounded by pink things and then you have a blue thought which could take you out of the plane of your existence... but you have been to school, to church, you have othe things to do today, and so you squash it—it becomes a ker-splat. But every once in a while you have an unguarded moment, maybe in a shower or waking up, where those things don’t kick in quite so fast and instead your idea gets to suddenly expand for a bit, it becomes a ker-pow. The scientific term for these is ho-lee-shiiit.” It’s not something that is unavailable to others, it is a common human experience.
Then he defines something similar to pg’s idea, but more grounded in two preferences: are you more interested operationally in getting your tasks for today done, or are you more interested in an idea for its own sake even if it doesn't have pragmatic function? And are you intimidated by the reactions of your peers (to whom the blue thought seems insanity?) or do you not care what anyone thinks?
Finally, our inability to invent the future is generally traced to our funding sources. These sources prize innovation, producing an amazing version of whatever is already out there and really perfecting it, rather than discovery or invention, heading out in a risky direction where you don't know what the tasks are, and you just have a vague dream but no idea what challenges you are going to face. He usually mentions NSF proposals, the ones that are successful say here is what I'm going to do and here is how I will do it.
> are you more interested operationally in getting your tasks for today done, or are you more interested in an idea for its own sake even if it doesn't have pragmatic function
This is such a discriminatory way of thinking. For some of us, our "tasks for the day" are full of interest, complexities and possibilities. For a lot of us, our "tasks for the day" are repetitive, prescribed and uninteresting.
Please find a way to talk about people's individual psychology without making it contigent on their relationship to however they make a living.
> for his older ones I found value in 80-90% of a given essay, while the more recent ones like this, it's closer to 40-50%.
This is almost certainly a part of my reaction to PG's latter works; since the earlier stuff felt so spot-on to me at the time, there's an element of anticipation and disappointment when that resonance, once readily available, isn't there. And....that's _okay_. The earlier stuff still happened. I, and PG, and the world have all changed. Poo-tee-weet.
> there's a level of self-assuredness that feels increasingly disconnected from reality
There's a unique type of hubris that comes from operating in the startup/VC world for a long period of time. On a long enough timeline, investors and founders alike start to forget that selection bias has shaped their perspective of who is successful. The failed investments and bankrupt startups are quickly forgotten, almost as if they never existed. What's left is a few home run investments and headline startup founders that get to rewrite their history to make their success seem obvious from the start.
It's also a side effect of coaching early startup teams. Startups are hard and often spend more time looking like failures than successes in the early days. Advisers and investors get into a rhythm of praising their founders to rebuild confidence and energize the teams. It's common for investors to tell their companies that they are uniquely talented or exceptional as a way to short-circuit any doubts that their problem space is too hard for anyone to conquer. Spend enough time telling people that they are one in a million, exceptional, and not like the general population and eventually you'll start believing it too.
This essay feels a lot like the advice we received as an early stage startup: It's what we wanted to hear, maybe what we needed to hear to keep going, but it's not necessarily generally true advice that can be applied to all situations. If you're a startup foundering experiencing doubts, this type of writing can provide a kick in the pants that you need to keep going. If you're not in the startup world, it just feels out of touch.
I don't think it's actually a unique form of hubris. This is a common discussion point in the politics of class. The wealthy quickly come to convince themselves of their own greatness & deservedness. Elements of luck, failures, and aid from others are all removed from the personal narrative. You wind up with a tautology; I made it because I am great, and because I am standing here, I must be great.
It's hard & uncomfortable to think that you are just as lucky as you are good, and that others equally deserving (but less lucky) have nothing.
It's sort of like power of positive thinking / self help book stuff, but for nonconformism and thinking differently. Even if repetitive and sometimes lacking rigor, I'll probably keep reading everything he posts. I could use that influence.
Is that because you believe the contents obvious to all, or because the explanations and presentation of concepts would not impact those who might stand to benefit?
I mean if you’re a human and you’re trying to generate weekly content or similar, there should be some kind of s-curve in your production function. No one is novel enough to come up with new ideas ad infinitum (sp?). Dudes been writing for how many years?
> Over the years, I've found PG's essays much less compelling. As some sibling comments here have noted, there's a level of self-assuredness that feels increasingly disconnected from reality
This most likely comes from spending not only a long time but also a large amount of time around 'a certain type of person' more than anything.
Maybe an example is how many people reacted to those workers who delivered packages, food or pumped gas when the pandemic first set in with lock-downs in some states. All the sudden it was as if those people were pure gold in a way that they never even existed or were thought about before (by certain people).
1. Start by following someone's else advice, about how to think for yourself. That should work. Because why not?
2. In case it did not work out, for whatever reasons, became an autist, in whatever way you can. Not that it is possible, or that you will really understand anybody after the fact, but hey.
3. Still interested? Learn a different (alternative) language (semantics), based on nothing (emptiness) at all. You may start by giving me money, in return, i will give you nothing and not say much or anything. Then you'll achieve something like no.2. (Warning, you may go mad or broke or both). Afterwards, you'll probably start doing things, that you have not been able to think about before, achieving the ultimate goal. Warning: you'll be someone else by then.
4. What is psychoanalysis?
5. If you are reading this, then you are using words and language invented by someone else. Therefore you are not thinking for yourself.
6. Attend transformational festivals, until you will know why are they called that. You may still not think for yourself afterwards, but you may think in a different way.
2a. Then you not only will start thinking for yourself. You will also start overthinking about why Apple didn’t put macOS on the iPad Pro, or why your friends don’t care about org-mode.
As far as a practice of mindful examination: yes, this makes sense. Examining your thoughts, and the spoken assertions of others, is valuable if only to train critical thinking.
I do think it's possible to prize independence in this regard too much, though. Taken to the extreme, it's a sort of personal not-invented-here syndrome: it can shut you off from valuable sources of ideas and mentorship, and cause you to endlessly re-tread mental ground that's already been covered. Taking the successful scientist as an example: they "stand on the shoulders of giants", and their "independent" thoughts are only possible because they're immersed in, and actively synthesizing, lots and lots and lots of "conventional" thought.
The "independent" breakthrough is just one small iteration on heaps of "conventional" thought. The "independent" product is just one small iteration on heaps of "conventional" technology. It's the deep familiarity with the "conventional" part, and thinking through what all that really means and makes possible, that makes the "independent" part possible.
So: are you really thinking independently? Or are you just thinking blindly, without that familiarity?
For those railing against this essay, who feel that PG is fluffing himself up and patting himself on the back like a nerdy middleschooler -- you've missed the big point, badly. PG writes unapologetically, directly, and simply, and this may pattern match to a naive middleschooler, but you are letting your base instincts cover up the fact that PG is wise, has earned his stripes, and is sharing his wisdom, unapologetically, directly, and simply.
He knows exactly the kind of backlash he will receive and is prompting you for it intentionally. He's not writing for you or to you, and he cares not a whit what you think.
He's writing to and for people like him, trying to help them put words and clear thought to vague understandings and apprehensions they've been wrestling with.
He's not self-aggrandizing but student-aggrandizing, as the headmaster of a school of thought that he values deeply. If you hate the headmaster or his style or the school of thought, that's wonderful, but it's not at all relevant to his aims. I hope this sheds some light on the bigger picture for those unaware.
> For those railing against this essay, who feel that PG is fluffing himself up and patting himself on the back like a nerdy middleschooler -- you've missed the big point, badly. PG writes unapologetically, directly, and simply, and this may pattern match to a naive middleschooler, but you are letting your base instincts cover up the fact that PG is wise, has earned his stripes, and is sharing his wisdom, unapologetically, directly, and simply
Being unapologetic, direct and simple doesn't make someone wise. Being wise makes someone wise.
PG's essays read more and more like cut-rate Plato. Somehow, no matter where things begin, the topic eventually turns to "only I and my buddies should run Athens".
Or: he got rich in a historical paradigm shift, in a societal system built around preserving personal wealth.
Lots of people got rich in the dot com boom, and their opinions are even today uninteresting and trite. I suggest you stop arguing to authority and take his essays on their own merit, which is a different approach than the rose-colored glasses you're using.
> He's writing to and for people like him, trying to help them put words and clear thought to vague understandings and apprehensions they've been wrestling with.
Ah, yes, he's writing an article about how to think for yourself to the people who already think like him. So if we don't think like him, but rather in an independent way, then it makes sense that we wouldn't agree with this article. Got it!
Ha, you jest, but you bring up a subtle point. There are degrees and dimensions of similarity. For example, two people who uphold a principle of freedom of speech may nonetheless completely disagree on any particular issue. But they are very similar in an important way.
Do you value independent thinking? If so, what part of the article did you most disagree with?
> Do you value independent thinking? If so, what part of the article did you most disagree with?
I wholeheartedly value being creative and coming up with fresh ideas, but I don't see how this is in any way connected to an innate property of being either "conventional-minded" or "independent-thinkers".
You could take his first four paragraphs (about scientists, investors, startup founders and essays) and continue as follows:
This is why it's important to be creative and be able to come up with new ideas — even in the most well-established places. In this essay I will share various techniques I use to stay creative.
But no, instead he divides the world into two categories ("independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture"), says that you'll be most happy by doing your predestined work ("which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you're going to be unhappy"), and also outright says there are certain jobs that one of these groups can't do successfully.
Independent thinking itself isn't a virtue. As someone else pointed out, prisons are full of nonconventional thinkers. The Time Cube guy has independent thinking out the wazoo.
New ideas, like speech, are good or bad on their own merit.
Fair enough, but there is a structure and pattern to independent thinking relative to the universe of things we care about. By analogy, consider John Boyd's OODA loop. He broke down goal-seeking behavior into a 4 part loop: Observe Orient Decide Act.
Now, some numps decided that they would then teach people to be better thinkers by having them step through this loop deliberately. i.e. We will teach you to reach your goals but first you must Observe. Next Orient, blah blah blah. This is not what John Boyd was teaching. Everyone does the OODA loop naturally. But if you break down goal-directed behavior into the OODA loop, as an analysis tool, you can find the techniques that are particularly effective versus those that aren't working very well. And if you can find things that speed up an OODA loop, or compromise your opponent's OODA loop, you can have outsized success with an otherwise "dull tactic".
PG's essay is kind of like that. He's saying: here's how I think about independent thinking, how to recognize it, where it works, and where it doesn't. It's mostly descriptive and analytical, but nuggets of prescription are sprinkled in there as well. It's written for himself, in that it helps him organize his own thoughts, but primarily it is written for the benefit of his audience. It will glance off people uninterested in accepting its ideas but benefit those are similar to him in important ways. He's not "telling them how to think independently" but helping them be more effective in the use of that tool.
I think there's more to it than that. Because conformity, especially social conformity among one's peers, is rampant - defenses need to be shored up to guard against this constant push toward conformity. Because all of us are caught up in our lives, it's helpful to take a moment, Read PG's latest, and reflect if has anything worthwhile for you. I like the Grateful Dead's Box of Rain: "Believe if you need it, or leave it if you dare."
"He's writing to and for people like him, trying to help them put words and clear thought to vague understandings and apprehensions they've been wrestling with."
In other words, the conventionally unconventional? Those who are independent, but only in the right way?
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand pg. The wisdom is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical business most of the insights will go over a typical reader’s head. There's also pg’s positivistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Sam Altman literature, for instance.
It's not a defense of pg. That comment is paraphrasing a well-known meme about the Rick & Morty cartoon [1]. Someone wrote something very similar about Rick & Morty (though it's likely that it was itself a joke parodying R&M's toxic fandom). So I'd say it's an attack on pg's fandom.
It feels like independent mindedness and conventional mindedness is a false dichotomy and that most people are somewhere between each depending on the subject and context.
Moreover if you subscribe to the dichotomy you're probably doing a poor job of creating an environment that encourages people to be independent minded.
At the organizational level it feels completely normal that it will become more conventional within it's own bubble as it grows. Companies are mostly trying to move in one direction and having lots of independent people off doing their own thing runs counter to that. Other similar structures follow this pattern as well. Part of it is cultural norms developing but part of it is recognizing that a company is very much exerting pressure on the people that work within it. Which is probably why founders find it easier to talk to other founders as they both have the luxury of the freedom to think independently within this context as they are steering the company itself.
You see this with attempts at internal startups or R&D teams where independence is encouraged but it's impossible or hard to spin anything out of them because you end up bumping back into the company pressures trying to do so. You're basically asked to "go do something amazing" ... "but not like that!"
Personally I love small companies primarily for the autonomy it provides and as a designer really value applying myself to different problems. So I get the joy of independence but I think I'm fairly conventional on other topics.
This reminds me, a long time ago I saw a couple of videos of Steve Jobs at a retreat for Next Computers (in the early phase of the company); now can only find an edited version. I was surprised to see how market analysis his argumentation was driven; while they created something great, he didnt sound independent minded but more like subject to his customers.
I think if you pick apart Jobs’ vision statements, you can infer that he decided long ago on a type of customer he wanted to sell products to, as did Bill Gates.
While it’s news to me that he was numbers driven, I’m not necessarily surprised. Those numbers didn’t make him pander (much), while in other hands numbers often do.
It's a spectrum and I'm not sure that Paul would dispute that, he might define the bottom 60 percent of the spectrum as "conventional-minded" and the top five percent as "independent-minded", especially if we think this trait increases superlinearly as we move up the quantile distribution. This dichotomization lowers the resolution but can work practically
Right but it's not even a single spectrum. It varies by topic and context. You can be an independent thinker in some regards but highly conventional in others. As others have pointed out this essay is actually highly conventional for a certain point of view. So whether you're viewed as a conventional or independent minded person is also a subjective factor of the community around you.
Some of my biggest regrets are doing what I thought was best when I should have done what everyone else was doing. This ranges from from not buying an overpriced house 20 years ago, to not partying at college, to following some interesting but unpopular technology. Its not all bad doing things your own way but you have to be careful about straying too much.
I have a very persuadable personality, and despite my anxiety in social interactions, I was often pushed into things that everyone was doing, but I wasn't enjoying doing. So much time was spent playing games I don't like, doing sports that weren't my strength.
When I reflect on my younger years, I'd probably had been less sullen and depressed if I allowed myself to stay in my apartments, studying, making music, and just not concerning so much about people's invitations. I should've just taken the damn violin classes instead of going to tennis courts; or written my damn novel, instead of going to the party watching people drink alcohol and blow on ping-pong balls.
For those who enjoy parties, they were fond memories. For me, they only exacerbated my loneliness.
There are two realizations that came to me too late: 1). I don't need to appease to every interests of my immediate circle to maintain friendships; it's in fact somewhat counter-productive. 2). however niche a hobby is, there are probably enough people also doing it to give me enough society, especially in the age of internet.
By first asserting to myself my actual passions, and seeking friends based on that, I actually get a broader circle of friends in a more organic way.
I've had similar experiences. I find both your post and the immediate parent valuable because they contrast different ways we can choose to interpret experiences many of us have. I've certainly regretted not doing some kinds of things and then regretted doing very similar types of things. For me, the "best" posture isn't a fixed default but varies depending context and even the phase of life I was in at the time.
Over the years, PG has written other useful essays on leveraging better mental models when facing uncertainty, increasing situational awareness in spite of contextual or cultural biases and applying Bayesian reasoning toward more effective life choices. My key takeaway has been that I'm now less likely to beat myself up over past mistaken choices, as long I had...
1. Evaluated the decision with diligence appropriate to the value or risk I perceived.
2. Applied the most appropriate mental model I had.
3. Was not knowingly in conflict with my core values at the time (given my current resources, abilities and maturity).
This helps me learn and grow from my major mistakes while reducing unproductive rumination and inappropriate self-blame. Considering alternative possible context and motivations in the absence of information helps me avoid leaping to unjustified conclusions. This has led to being more reflective and understanding when it comes to the mistakes of others. The tangible benefit externally has been improved relationships with family, friends and co-workers. Internally, I seem to accrue negative emotional life baggage at a lower rate than before.
I know that feeling. It's led me down some dead ends. Proof of correctness, 30 years too early. Ragdoll physics by spring-damper methods, 20 years too early. Mobile robotics, which never took off. Legged robot locomotion, which only works if you can lose a lot of money on it.
I once thought Gopher was the future, that spread-spectrum would beat TDMA, that video over the Internet was too inefficient to be useful, and that web design, like book design, would stabilize and become routine.
This hit so close to home that I had to comment. I can completely relate. I tried to be different and chose a path that ended up wasting 3 years of my life with nothing to show for it (PhD, ended up dropping out). Then I joined a big company to work on a product with massive (legacy) codebase, where I ended up learning relatively little w.r.t end-to-end project development.
I feel as if I'd have been miles ahead if I had just done what most of my uni colleagues did instead of trying to somehow skip a step or two.
You regret not partying at college? My biggest regret from college is binge drinking and staying up too late to basically faff around chasing frivolous pleasure. If I had drank half as much and partied half as much, I'd have gotten much more accomplished.
Not really. You say that now as if your non partying time would have been perfectly spent toward a goal of bettering yourself. In actuality you probably would have just putzed around in your dorm not doing anything that would have impacted your professional life trajectory.
But it depends on the balance you're striking. If all you're doing is playing the game, then that calculation pretty much checks out. Or even just if you're playing the game when you could well be working. You "just" gotta know when you're kidding yourself, and when you're not.
IMO trade-offs in a lot of cases. There is rarely a decision that's better, except when you've lived through it once, but that doesn't count, as none of us have do-overs.
What made you think those decisions were best at the time? Maybe the issue isn’t that you went against the grain, but rather that what you thought was best wasn’t thought through enough?
Absolutely nothing but some people feel that they missed out and it remains as one of those things forever lingering in their minds. Had they done it they'd probably wished otherwise
Fair enough but I did all the things you regret and I am very very happy I did them. Bought a house in 2009 when everyone said it was stupid because of the great recession, avoided partying, drinking or doing any kind of drugs, or "having fun" all throughout high school and university, and instead of using all the newest and greatest popular technologies I made my own libraries.
That house is now worth 3 times more today than when I bought it, almost all popular technologies from 10 years ago are dead and unmaintained today whereas the technology I made for myself forms the basis of my software company, and frankly I don't know many people in their 30s who still continue to maintain the same kind of friendship with their party buddies.
All this to say that it's irrelevant whether you do things everyone else does or do things no one else does. It's just a very poor way of reasoning about anything in life.
Maybe that's conventional wisdom, but I simply disagree then.
Just because everyone tells you not to buy a house doesn't mean you should buy one. I didn't buy my house because everyone told me not to, that would be incredibly stupid. In fact I would even go further and say that doing the opposite of what everyone tells you to do for the sake of being contrarian is worse than just going with the flow.
You can listen to people's reasons and try to appreciate where they are coming from and you can definitely learn from that, but making a decision on the basis of what everyone else is saying to do, one way or another, is bad advice.
I am 99% sure ska is saying that "lots of people would have suggested to buy a house in 2009."
I was not in a position to buy then, but IIRC the market had plummeted the previous year and was at an all-time low; if you were in a position to buy, it was a great time to do it.
I have to disagree a bit here. I remember at that time, 2009, nobody knew whether the market had bottomed out or not. There was still extreme nervousness with regards to asset prices. Prices actually bottomed out in around 2012, which is when my wife and I bought our first house. We didn't do it because we knew it was going to be the bottom; it just so happened to be when we had saved up some money and found a place we liked. Point being, I think the OP is correct; most people in 2009 were saying not to buy, from an investment perspective, because it was thought that prices were likely to keep dropping.
Exactly. So Kranar's scenario I think boils down to "although conventional financial planning says it's a great time to buy a house, I thought through my own situation before doing it".
I can't argue with the logic but not sure what it contributes to the OP point.
Fair enough, my interpretation is that he wishes he did party in college and chose not to because he thought it was best in spite of what everyone else was doing and that he regrets not buying the house simply on the basis that everyone was telling him that he should when he felt that he shouldn't.
My response is simply that it's irrelevant what everyone else is doing and to not make decisions on that basis. Sometimes most people do things for good reasons and it's worth knowing those reasons and participating in the same actions. Sometimes most people do things for bad reasons and you should avoid doing them even though it will make you unpopular.
Don't decide to buy a house because everyone else is doing it or not doing it, buy a house because it's a sound financial decision based on your own personal life situation.
In general, focus on the reasons, not on the popularity.
> An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring. You have to tell them something new.
I think there's something off about this statement: A lot of people enjoy watching a new marvel movie once or twice a year while the movies themselves are more or less reiterations of the previous ones. People seem to enjoy the repetition.
The same seems to be true for essays: People enjoy finding their own thoughts repeated by anothers voice.
For example, there are a lot of essays analyzing/explaining/stating/claiming the importance of book X, videogame Y or composer Z; Art movement A, theory B or profession C. But do they provide anything new besides the comfort of nostalgia for shared experiences? However stale the enjoyment of these essays seems when viewed through the lens of the cited statement, the enjoyment itself can not be denied.
> A lot of people enjoy watching a new marvel movie once or twice a year while the movies themselves are more or less reiterations of the previous ones. People seem to enjoy the repetition.
The success of the Marvel movies is obvious in retrospect, but nothing like them had ever been done before.
Thor, Iron Man and Captain America were not considered among the popular Marvel Characters. Spider Man, X-Men and Fantastic Four had already been licensed by other companies, but no one cared to do the same with what became the foundation characters of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Having a cinematic universe where major characters had their own movies, plus movies where they banded together, was common in comics, but never on the big screen.
Keeping the characterizations largely true to the comics, when many directors had wanted to make them more "sophisticated" or "adult", also displays independent minded thinking.
Would anyone have predicted a sci-fi romp with a talking squirrel and walking tree the general public had no familiarity with would be a massive success?
Making Thanos the protagonist of the "Hero's Journey" in the climax of the whole series I think was a bold decision.
There are many other ways these movies were bold and creative and, yes, independent minded, leading to success that would have been impossible with conventional thinking.
> A lot of people enjoy watching a new marvel movie once or twice a year while the movies themselves are more or less reiterations of the previous ones. People seem to enjoy the repetition.
Honestly, I would argue against this. While they tend to do simplistic plotlines that are similar to the previous, they're very visibly different and so do not trigger any of the usual "I already watched this." that I get from watching sitcoms.
Though, I do agree that people at times read essays because they reiterate your thoughts back to you, but as you say I'd agree that its more comfort/shared-experiences than the content that they've already seen (ex: reaction videos). At times, I've done this because I know an article will be able to provide an alternative view on the topic to further fuel my own reasoning, or simply helping to ground my reasoning more into words.
But, I do think an essay that is obviously what I already know would be boring. If I had to read an article about basic programming techniques, I'd be likely bored, due to having seen it all before.
Can someone explain the constant reference to nerds in PG's essays? I feel like it's a concept straight out of a 1970s-90s low-budget movie and hasn't been accurate or relevant since...
I'm guessing a lot of his readers somewhat identify themselves as nerds?
And sad to say, quite a few of the nerds I know / knew have some raging superiority complexity going on. Same type of people that put down anyone that spent their HS or College years partying / social life / etc., rather than "perfecting" some worthwhile craft, like software development, writing, or whatever.
Not saying that PG is like that, at all - but those are some of the people that flock to his writing, because PG is a successful person that's constantly validating their own beliefs about themselves.
They are nerds - they made all the right decisions, and are all unique geniuses, while the normies are just stupid sheeple that waste their lives on social media or watching TV.
The fact it's 2020 seems to escape a good portion of people in their 40's who still think its 2004 and that they're hip and young. I can only think this is a similar cultural ossification for older people.
I know that's an issue for me because I recently got introduced to a bunch of YouTuber's with millions of followers that I'd never heard of. I actually find that level of cultural disconnect a bit worrying.
The concept was prevalent in 1970s-90s movies because it's a core part of how people who grew up in those decades (like PG) perceive the world. I suspect that he struggles to see the world without that lens applied, the same way political partisans struggle to look at things without a red vs. blue filter; it's too foundational to who he is and what he believes.
(I don't mean that as an insult, to be clear. I have filters like that too, and I'm sure we all do.)
It's also quite a common factor in Scott Aaronson's writings, and equally, his blog posts would be much better if he could discard that filter at least once in a while
It's my understanding that the causality went the other direction; that "nerds" were a clear youth subculture in the 60s and 70s, and this subculture inspired all of the 70s-90s movies about them even as the term "nerd" broadened far beyond any concrete set of characteristics. If you had to pick one movie that contributed the most to fossilizing the image, Revenge of the Nerds has to be it.
In particular, PG's analysis of "conformists" seems heavily colored by the stereotype of jocks and other popular kids bullying the nerds. It's true that there's a set of people who try their hardest to believe what's popular in their social circles, but they aren't doing this to avoid thinking about things. In fact, I'd argue that moral trend followers almost all value intellectual thought and debate; people who don't value that don't engage in abstract discussions about society in the first place.
There is a pretty clear strain of personality that shows up early in life and is suspiciously correlated with becoming a programmer. It’s rare enough that most people don’t meet others who share it until they get past K12 and start to aggregate in self-selected universities and workplaces. It’s pronounced enough to be obvious to one’s peers and often causes some degree of social alienation. In the 1970s-90s the stereotype is that such people were relentlessly bullied as losers. Since the rise of Big Tech the dynamic has shifted a bit from “you’re not one of us and we hate you, loser” to “you’re not one of us but you’re obviously going to be rich some day, so please remember us fondly.”
Are there only a few paths for independent thinkers?
> Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture. Which means if you pick the wrong type of work, you're going to be unhappy. If you're naturally independent-minded, you're going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager. And if you're naturally conventional-minded, you're going to be sailing into a headwind if you try to do original research.
I'm asking this seriously. I'm a fairly unconventional thinker. (I'm not sure that's always or even mostly a good thing.) So I do find it frustrating to be in middle management, as I have been numerous times. It's also usually frustrating to report to middle management. I much prefer to figure out solutions and pursue them independently.
HOWEVER, I've also thus far found nothing but greater frustrations as an organizational leader or solo entrepreneur. (Good thing I'm currently neither.)
What are the options for the independent thinker who doesn't want to follow orders, doesn't care to lead others, but also wants to be a part of a team? Someone who knows they need others with complementary skills? Surely I'm not the only nerd who fits this bill.
Is there a work model for a team of independent thinkers who wish to neither lead nor follow, but simply cooperate? My gut says there is, that it's probably pretty obvious, and I'm just blind to it. Or maybe that they exist, but tend to fail. The only thing that comes to mind is to be a co-founder in the early stages of a startup, but if that succeeds you'll end up in a leadership role pretty quickly. Not everyone gets to be Woz.
You can have a small independent business. Buy a backhoe and become and excavator. Learn how to build custom cabinets.
You will need to hire people from time to time, but you won’t have to work in concert with anyone 40 hours a week.
In software, the best examples I see of that are in video games. Lots of solo developers. Hard to succeed but if you want it enough, the path is clear.
There are solo web developers too. But you need to be able to do sales and support.
You’re right startups are out because they grow and you’ll find yourself surrounded soon enough.
I guess my advice is treat your jobs like daily networking events, try to find people, especially with complementary skill sets, who you like and who like you. Have a side project, a game or a web dev company or whatever, and wait for a large enough revenue opportunity that you can incorporate and hire one of those people you got along with.
Problem is, the networking at work thing is nearly impossible if you’re as independent as you are. I’d recommend counseling. A therapist and/or career coach. Ideally both.
I'm going to ignore "being an artist" and "being a writer" and assume you want to work on technical things. I'm also going to ignore academia because that opens a whole new can of worms about what it means to be independent within academia, how to achieve that independence, whether it is worth it, etc. But you should note that I think most people who want to work in the "independent, technical, research-first" mode would traditionally pursue academia.
Anyway, examples:
Colin Percival runs Tarsnap by himself, and it turns a profit.
As another commenter mentioned, there are independent game developers who get to do technically interesting work (e.g. Marc Ten Bosch, who got a SIGGRAPH paper out along the way while making Miegakure, or Jonathan Blow, who is building a programming language [although his team grows and shrinks, so he must be acting in a management capacity, or at least like a film director]).
Sylph Bioscience is a lean team of three that seems to me to be doing very interesting work (and I don't think any of them have "traditional" educational backgrounds, though I might be wrong).
Matt Keeter works a day job and pumped out a SIGGRAPH paper largely for fun.
You can do consulting, freelance, contract work, etc. etc. until you land on what you want.
You can start some technical product with the aim to sell it in its entirety ASAP to some other entity (though of course the less work you put in on the "business-bits," the less you'll be selling that product for).
It's going to be harder to find these things or make them happen, and often they may not be very financially attractive compared to more standard paths (nor are they necessarily stable), but it seems that autonomy and creative control don't come for free in this life: you have to trade off money, time, stability, and status to do things in this manner.
Well be can begin with defining leader. Can't you say that a leader is one element of the group who is more intuned to regulate the stress levels of the group, and by having one the group can operate more efficiently? Isn't it infact burden but limitied to a designated element? Not everyone needs to be a leader, isn't that the point of having one? It might just be a completely seperate characteristics from independence
I find reading this article a very uncomfortable experience. It's just assertion after assertion without evidence to back them up. Do people believe this guy because he's rich?
I can tell you why I love his essays: because of the way he argues. It is very transparent. I seldomly agree with his conclusion(s), but since he is so honest (he is not trying to deceive) in listing his arguments it is just a matter for me to find where he is wrong... or where I am wrong. I find this style so uncommon and stimulating that I hardly can stand the regular "opinion" held by most people. At least it is hard to be intrigued by arguments that doesn't even try to be precise.
When PG writes something I pay attention to the words, because I know they were chosen with some care. If I can force open a crack in his arguments I get wiser, and if I don't... the same thing happens.
I wish more people wrote like him, but preferably less about startups. They don't interest me as much as attempts at honest discourse.
What are his arguments? That's what I'm puzzled about.
Usually an argument is a series of premises followed by discussion of how those premises combine to lead to a conclusion. The conclusion can be deductive or inductive. I am not demanding a scientific or sociological proof - but there is not even an attempt at explaining why these premises hold. There are two types of people in this world - independent and non-independent thinkers. Why? What if there are 10 types of people in this world, all landing on a spectrum of independent and conventional thought mixed in different aspects of their lives? Why should I accept the premises? What good is reading a conclusion (how to cultivate "independent thought" in the second half of the essay) when I don't know if the premises are even valid?
What if I'll tell that I didn't even know who is the guy before reading it? The sensation is like someone is speaking directly to you the thoughts you share already about the issues you struggled with for some time now to reach very similar conclusions.
It is also a sensation of relieve, because you feel you are not alone thinking similar way.
I literally had to google, who is this guy afterwards...
I really appreciate the message in this article. I think another way to partition the world is into zero-sum and non-zero sum situations. In non-zero sum situations it's more important to be correct than novel, but in zero-sum situations it's important to be both correct and novel.
One example I like to think about is the following: imagine having two boxes (A and B), one on each side of a football field. Exactly one of the two boxes contains a million dollars: box A contains the prize with 99% probability and box B contains the prize with 1% probability.
Suppose you're standing at the center of the field together with n other people and are told to race to get the million dollars (first person who finds it wins). You have to decide whether to run for box A or box B since they're in opposite directions. If n = 0, it's clearly in your best interest to go for box A, but as n grows, the probability of you getting to box A first drops since you're competing with other people, meaning that at some point you ought to actually go for box B.
This is a toy example of where it's not sufficient to be right, but it's also important to be novel. If each person was awarded its contents (rather than just the first person to get there), there'd be no rush and you ought to go for box A. In other words: in zero-sum situations you need to be both right and novel, but in non-zero sum situations it's sufficient to just be right.
I think the example of academia in the article is not quite right for two reasons. As pointed out elsewhere, the incentives in academia are actually quite twisted which means that there's actually more incentive to just be verbose than to be novel, but additionally I don't think it's really zero-sum. It's true that if you're working in a crowded space, it starts approaching zero-sum and then becomes a game of novelty. However, if you're not in a crowded space (e.g. interdisciplinary stuff) you can actually be quite successful by discovering rather mundane things (you might say that this is just being novel on a different axis, which I think is reasonably accurate, but the point made in the article was that the discoveries have to be surprising).
Yes and no. If I wanted to start a social network today, it would not be sufficient to just clone Facebook because the space is already so saturated (it's zero-sum). I would have to have something very novel. If, however, I wanted to start a social network back in the early 2000s, I think it would have been sufficient to clone Facebook because the space was not yet saturated. This is not to say that it would have worked out, of course. Most likely I would have been crushed by Zuckerberg.
When a new technology emerges, there will be a lot of "obvious" ideas that are ready to be "plucked", but as that technology matures, these obvious ideas become saturated, effectively turning the space into a zero-sum game. For example, in the early days of the app store / mobile revolution, I think there were a lot of reasonably straight-forward ideas out there ready to be executed on, e.g. Uber. I'm not saying that Uber was necessarily obvious to everyone, but I don't think that the idea of summoning a taxi from your phone would have been met with comments like "that's crazy, nobody would ever want that." However, if you wanted to come up with a startup around mobile today, you'd be better be very novel because pretty much everything obvious is already taken.
Looking at trends today like autonomous cars, I think there are plenty of reasonably obvious ideas that we all sort of expect will be part of the first generation of applications (shipping, robo-taxies, last-mile delivery). That's not to say that they're easy to implement or by any means are guaranteed to succeed, but I don't think that they'll necessarily be super controversial.
Fun observation that everybody in this community consider it positive to be "independent minded".
But the author seem to fall into the same trap at the end:
When I wrote "The Four Quadrants of Conformism" I expected a firestorm of rage from the aggressively conventional-minded, but in fact it was quite muted. They sensed that there was something about the essay that they disliked intensely, but they had a hard time finding a specific passage to pin it on.
Isn't it much more likely that the conventional-minded people actually liked the essay because it confirmed their values and world-view? Presumable the essayist can't read minds, so this is just how he hopes they reacted.
I don't think this community is unique in the number of people who believe themselves to be independently minded. I can't recall the last time someone has told me they are a conformist compared to the number of times I've heard someone describe themselves as an independent out of the box thinker.
It's funny because no matter how people react, he can spin it to confirm his world view. If people reacted with a "firestorm of rage" like he expected, then it's because he really angered those conventional-minded losers, and he's doing something right! And if they didn't, then it was because they're too stupid to refute his trenchant critique.
"When I wrote "The Four Quadrants of Conformism" I expected a firestorm of rage from the aggressively conventional-minded, but in fact it was quite muted. They sensed that there was something about the essay that they disliked intensely, but they had a hard time finding a specific passage to pin it on."
Or perhaps they just rolled their eyes so hard that they strained their eye muscles and then couldn't see to type.
"[7] You see this especially among political extremists. They think themselves nonconformists, but actually they're niche conformists. Their opinions may be different from the average person's, but they are often more influenced by their peers' opinions than the average person's are."
> There may even be a phenomenon like Dunning-Kruger at work, where the most conventional-minded people are confident that they're independent-minded, while the genuinely independent-minded worry they might not be independent-minded enough.
I think for intelligent disciplined thinkers it's a positive to be independent minded. Stupid people risk becoming "cranks" and/or believing in conspiracy theories, and being defrauded of their money for woo-pills and woo-accessories.
Well I for one liked this essay. Be sure to read the footnotes at the end for some great lines:
> When I ask myself what in my life is like high school, the answer is Twitter. It's not just full of conventional-minded people, as anything its size will inevitably be, but subject to violent storms of conventional-mindedness that remind me of descriptions of Jupiter.
> The threshold for having opinions about politics is much lower than the one for having opinions about set theory. So while there are some ideas in politics, in practice they tend to be swamped by waves of intellectual fashion.
> The conventional-minded are often fooled by the strength of their opinions into believing that they're independent-minded. But strong convictions are not a sign of independent-mindedness. Rather the opposite.
While I agree holding your own views and opinions help with doing something novel and different. I do feel like articles like this are mostly used to cover up and excuse hostility, bad work environments and Jobs esque management styles.
You can have groundbreaking ideas without "disrupting" every single part of your work life. Assuming large groups of people can't think for themselves is both short sighted and insulting. Not everyone is in the position to push their views on their environment without repercussions.
I'm pretty sure a janitor or administrator can think for themselves really well. It's their bosses that limit their subordinates, not the employees limiting themselves.
> Assuming large groups of people can't think for themselves is both short sighted and insulting.
But it is mostly true, at least in management positions. Independent-minded people by definition question authority so they are mostly relegated to low status positions. If you don't question authority then you aren't independent-minded. And no, questioning some authority figure just because some other authority figure told you to doesn't count.
It's possible to be independent minded and not question management. You know internally that it's all BS (because of your independent mindedness) but don't vocalize it because you're employing a political strategy to which that would be harmful.
Lets say that your drive to be liked by your manager makes you express X more support for his ideas, or express X less arguments against them. Then the person with a more supportive base line will still appear more supportive even after this motivation adjustment.
You can work around this by just being better than your peers at manipulating feelings, but it is still a handicap.
Why would independed minded person necessary came to conclusion that loudly openly questioning authority is good idea, in situation in which it is predictable that it is going to lead to bad result?
Keeping quiet about things only helps so much. People can feel if you question them or not. I mean, there are two workers, A is always excited about everything his manager suggest and do while B mostly keeps his thoughts to himself. Who is more likely to get promoted?
Everyone starts out as low status, so that scenario is the most important to analyze.
> But yes, having good relationship with manager definitely helps your career. It typically does not require being excited about absolutely everything.
Do you think that questioning your manager doesn't make it harder to have a good relationship with him? As I said keeping quiet about it doesn't work, most people know when you aren't agreeing with them even without telling them.
My point about excitement is that a person will lose a lot of energy and excitement when they do things they feel are wrong. Others can feel that.
> I do feel like articles like this are mostly used to cover up and excuse hostility, bad work environments and Jobs esque management styles.
I don't think so but I definitely dislike the mentioned points as well and probably this should be more unambiguous. At the same time, hostile and toxic work environments tend to encourage aggression towards regular employees with different opinions. Therefore I find the article quite encouraging.
It's amazing to see how little is focused on training young kids to think independently in early education. In my own experience, even science is taught in a doctrinal way, i.e. we were told to believe what scientists thought and discovered. It seems to me that it's no different from religion--just replace God with Newton. Most students worship scientists but don't study them in details.
It's bad that when those students grow up, they believe science is the absolute truth and they're hostile to people who doubt about it. They become the new priests. And probably today's biggest "scientific doctrine" is big data-people unquestionably believe whatever data tells them without caring about nuance or bothering to think what it implies. Interestingly, it seems most of those people don't have a strong background in science while most trained scientists rarely hold the same view that science is superior and we know everything.
Folks, do not shoot the messenger (aka PG) here: he actually created something novel fifteen years ago, while coalescing brilliant minds around something people needed. He even went on making an institution of that! With the miracle turned institution and now organization, it is human to look back and preach to the good savages of today.
More in depth, this is maybe the difference between the do-it-first American approach and the study-it-first English attitude? Special relationship at play, you know, but the world is multipolar today, so you also have the socially regulated Euro approach and the paternally autocratic Chinese approach to reconcile. All these, even without taking rogue approaches into consideration.
Maybe the ultimate dream of PG these days is being acknowledged as the headmaster of outsiders, connecting curiosity with prototyping for the markets, in that by-passing the canonical school curricula by virtue of intuition by necessity and fast implementation?
Late in life I wondered if/when I had a truly original idea. Not one that I was the first to think of, but one which I came up with all on my own not based upon anything similar I'd already learned. It was hard but I satisfyingly recalled an early instance. I was in grade 7 back in the late 70s being taught that cutting a circle in half and unrolling each half to make the semi-circumference straight thus making a series of triangles (in the limit). Meshing the triangles together makes a parallelogram/rectangle in the limit. This was a demonstration of the formula for the area of a circle.
After seeing this, I thought to myself, Pi is dumb. A diameter is double the radius, so the radius is the fundamental. I tried telling this to a bunch of people, kids or adults who just looked at me funny.
I was so happy to much later learn that there's Tau. And very sad that alien races might hear the beeps of Tau/2 being sent to them by the clueless terrans.
“if a lot of other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already reflect it, and there's no room to make money“
This is wrong. You make money when you invest in public stocks as compensation for the risk you take. You don’t need to be better than others at predicting to make money. You do if you want to make excess money, money above the level that compensates for risk.
I think this is implied because he's talking about people that trade stocks for a living. Leaving money in a an index that tracks the overall market doesn't really count as a full-time trader job.
I don’t think it’s implied because it’s not even true for professional public market investors. They can make money by giving customers ways to take risk, not necessarily through superior predictions.
I basically completely disagree with everything in this article. And the article provides scant evidence to support its (to me) extremely controversial framing of the world.
To start with, I think it's complete bullshit that most work doesn't require independent mindedness, or creativity. Or that most work is uncreative.
Second, I strongly question the assertion that independent mindedness is innate in any sense. I don't believe there's any strong evidence to support this statement, and believing it leads to some pretty dangerous attitudes to the world and other people.
Thirdly, and somewhat illustrative of my previous point, I am quite repulsed by the suggestion that most people think they're free thinkers but aren't. How the hell do you know and who are you to day?
Why would you want to talk about how each individual is multi-faceted, complex, and full of contradictory beliefs when you can conveniently categorize them into conventional and independent? Ah, I know the answer: because hackers come in only one flavor: independent; and everyone else who doesn't fit the description is a conventional thinker.
The level of (apparent) profundity(?) in these essays and the amount of people in SV that revere his words just boggles my mind. Maybe I am a conventional thinker :/.
Not to be rude, but if you googled his name you would have found all the information you could possibly need about why he’s considered important. For convenience here’s a link to his Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)
That was a snarky response to your and other comments about the author’s self-aggrandizement etc., that maybe his importance is inflated and limited to this community.
I think if he weren't famous, PG's essays wouldn't get much reverence. But as an icon for he's a great figure. He uses his social status points to offer messages of optimism, self-improvement, hope for rebels that is socially important and feels good.
The fact that we tear him down so much is testament to the regard we hold him in. I'm sure all of us who poke at his logic could just as easily shred the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the president...
He specifically said it is a spectrum, not a category and of course you can be more of an independent thinker in certain categories and more conventional in others.
To be a successful scientist... you can't publish papers saying things other people already know
PG may have some good insights sometimes, but it's rare I see him get something so completely wrong as this.
Reproducing research to demonstrate a result was correct or not is a cornerstone in the foundation of science. A fundamental problem in the research community is that incentives as misaligned to support that initiative, and so there are an endless stream of papers published that are either flawed in themselves or obtained spurious results that wouldn't hold up under additional systematic scrutiny.
Worse, these flawed pieces of research feed into the sound-byte media cycle and over time have eroded public trust & confidence in the scientific process. To some extent that's unavoidable when preliminary research, even well performed, us taken out of context. But every study performed with a handful of subjects that producing a weak result with controversial implications will be shouted from the roof tops nonetheless.
So, to PG saying a successful scientist must pursue novel research: stop navel gazing on the superiority of SV values and looking to shove them into every area of human endeavor. You're wrong, and sometimes dangerously so.
Being notorious :), or lets just call it being well known is not a measure of success.
Problem with defining successful scientist is I suppose more complex than scientist becoming a celebrity.
I believe one can be very successful by reproducing papers and for example pointing out bad ones that claim something that was supposed to be "groundbreaking".
But reproducing research results does produce new knowledge: enhanced validity of the original research. Or on the contrary, decreased validity. Both outcomes result in the creation of new (deeper) knowledge.
Yes, they do produce knowledge. And had PG said "a successful scientist has to produce knowledge" I'd be fine with that statement. Instead, he used the word "novel".
You could not say "I am doing novel research to reproduce the results of study X" and have "novel" be a correct usage of the term. That is simply not what novel means.
Sure, PG is right that "novel" research is important. But not that it's a necessary condition for success. That just reveals the SV bias against actually doing the daily work it takes to simply keep things going
It's fine to want to disrupt things, to (in the appropriate context) move fast & break things, fail quickly and move on, whatever. But when the dust settles on a successful "disruption", you need large numbers of people to put in the day-to-day work to make it work and keep things going. There is a tendency in SV culture to regard that first part as the highest virtue. Heck it's right there in PG's title: Think for Yourself The implication being that you're not thinking for yourself if you're one of the millions of people that make things work every day in a million different ways. Or take this quote:
"If you're naturally independent-minded, you're going to find it frustrating to be a middle manager."
This is so incredibly insulting to imply a person could not be a manager and also think for themselves. It's indicative of the out-of-touch siloed SV cult mentality that has raised novelty for its own sake along with hustle porn & more to cargo-cult virtues, all while deriding, denigrating, and just outright insulting any endeavor that isn't in service to that.
Did anyone find the article too long? Don't get me wrong - the first few paragraphs were engaging and thought-provoking. The rest of the article looked as if it could be condensed to two paragraphs.
This is not a criticism - I'm just curious to know if I was bored because I have a short attention span, or if the amount of novel/useful content in the article plummeted sharply beyond the first few paragraphs.
Like many of PG’s essays about psychology or society, the problem is that this essay is basically an aphorism or a self-help book: there’s no logic here, no citations, no connection to facts. It’s just a bunch of feel-good BS for libertarian-minded tech workers. I get the impression that the length is (at least unconsciously) making up for the absence of rigor.
A few paragraphs of “stuff that has no real argument but basically sounds right to PG” is a fine short essay as a “maninfesto of independent thought”.
But when the essay is full of detailed “analysis” of “facts” such as “it seems that independent thought is a matter of nature rather than nurture,” then PG is just wasting his readers’ time. This essay is a genuine clunker.
He does seem to be pandering to his target audience - specifically those who will be just independent enough to consider failing at a startup, but not so independent that they'll question the more questionable elements of startup culture.
Startup culture really isn't the most natural home for independent and original minds. It's a good match for those who are just different enough to play the game on its own terms, but not so different they'll ask themselves why the game exists. Or whether better games are possible.
And IMO independence correlates far more closely with creativity. I find it more useful to wonder "What is this belief/tradition/culture going to look like five hundred years from now, and/or from the perspective of a disinterested alien visitor?" than to wonder if I'm being independent enough to get investor funding.
I’ve been pretty critical of PG’s essays recently but I thought this one hit the spot. Go into twitter right more and search for “great reset” for a perfect mirror of this paragraph for example:
> Without this fastidiousness about truth, you can't be truly independent-minded. It's not enough just to have resistance to being told what to think. Those kind of people reject conventional ideas only to replace them with the most random conspiracy theories. And since these conspiracy theories have often been manufactured to capture them, they end up being less independent-minded than ordinary people, because they're subject to a much more exacting master than mere convention.
To truly appreciate the beauty of such mirrors, one should take care to examine both sides...observe thousands of the conversations of not just the "excessively" open-minded who obsess over topics like The Great Reset and similar, but also of those who are the ideological opponents of these types. Observe how they talk about their opponents. See if any patterns (in talking, and thinking) emerge, and whether some of the patterns are the same in both communities.
From TFA:
> You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is to cultivate an attitude of skepticism. When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" Don't say it out loud.
Or, sometimes, do say it out loud, and watch hilarity (to the unconventional, at least) ensue.
> Treat it as a puzzle. You know that some accepted ideas will later turn out to be wrong. See if you can guess which. The end goal is not to find flaws in the things you're told, but to find the new ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones. So this game should be an exciting quest for novelty, not a boring protocol for intellectual hygiene. And you'll be surprised, when you start asking "Is this true?", how often the answer is not an immediate yes. If you have any imagination, you're more likely to have too many leads to follow than too few.
> More generally your goal should be not to let anything into your head unexamined, and things don't always enter your head in the form of statements. Some of the most powerful influences are implicit. How do you even notice these? By standing back and watching how other people get their ideas.
> When you stand back at a sufficient distance, you can see ideas spreading through groups of people like waves. The most obvious are in fashion: you notice a few people wearing a certain kind of shirt, and then more and more, until half the people around you are wearing the same shirt. You may not care much what you wear, but there are intellectual fashions too, and you definitely don't want to participate in those. Not just because you want sovereignty over your own thoughts, but because unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking.
No - Plato, Descartes, and Locke all referenced actual history when formulating their ideas about politics - PG doesn't even mention an example of an "independent-minded" person! - and at least Descartes and Locke heavily cited the past generations of political philosophers that came before them.
It is also worth noting that at least Plato/Descartes/Locke were investigating deep questions of political philosophy with little precedent and which is almost impossible to observe empirically. By contrast, PG has an entire century's worth of psychology theory and experiments that he is ignoring out of pure arrogance.
Dollars to donuts PG could sit down and write down an in-depth philosophical article with all kinds of references and probably get it into periodicals.
I think you're mistaking the type of writing this is.
This is for a blog not a book or an academic journal.
These are his semi fleshed out informal ideas and you can take them or leave them.
I don't even think he's claiming theyre objective reality.
They're interesting neat ideas based on a smart man's experience that help you look at the world in a certain way and I can appreciate that and I'm glad he writes them.
Mark Twain said, whenever you find yourself siding with the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.
I have found this saying to serve me well enough to memorize it.
I think the reason is that by the time an opinion has propagated to the majority, it is already outdated, and several years (sometimes decades) behind the newest available knowledge.
The opinion of the majority is inevitably whatever their chosen source of media assigns them[1]. This is easily seen in the disparity between subjects where a persuasion campaign is in effect vs the ones where one isn’t. In the latter case persons will have a naturally broad distribution of opinions while in the former you will see near unanimity within their persuasion bubble.
Naturally this makes discussing the assigned opinions extremely boring, because it’s entirely predictable and worse yet at a 6th grade level at best.
[1] In the USA this means the distribution of opinions among the general population is bimodal.
This is complicated by situations where the majority opinion is clearly imprudent so few people actually follow it, but they will loudly insist they agree with it to avoid the social cost of nonconformity. Sadly, in US society it’s an important life skill to be able to recognize this sort of dishonesty and act accordingly.
If you hold a view that very few share, you're more likely to have thought from first principles about why that view should be held. If you hold a view that everyone shares, there's a much higher probability that the view is programmed into you by your social stimuli.
> Yet it is not always right, and you can give yourself a huge advantage by questioning it for yourself.
Assuming you have a reason to. If the majority assumed the shape of the earth was a cube based on the information they had at the time, and you came along and noticed something to refute that, of course that is valuable.
But if you are refuting that simply because the majority assumed it, that doesn’t seem useful.
People have a limited amount of time on earth, and using the majority’s assumptions is a valuable heuristic for not wasting resources (time) coming to the same conclusion.
Can everyone study sufficient biology and astrophysics to “prove” to themselves how vaccines and planetary systems work? Most likely not.
They aren't arguing that you should simply not trust the majority at all, but that you should be willing to evaluate the majority's beliefs. There are obviously limits on this, and I think you are trying for a far too absolute interpretation of what they were saying.
"In 1884, meridian time personnel met
in Washington to change Earth time.
First words said was that only 1 day
could be used on Earth to not change the 1 day marshmallow."
Here's another aphorism for you: "If a respected, grey-haired scientist tells you something is possible, he's probably right. If he tells you something is impossible, he may well be wrong. But if a thousand respected, grey-haired scientists tell you something, that's probably where you want to put your money."
I dunno. Like everything, we need balance. Brilliance needs to be balanced with patience, persistence and practicality.
Working for a Japanese corporation taught me to really respect the "three P's." They didn't have the kind of creativity to invent the next iPhone, but they had what it takes to make it better than everyone else, and in a fairly short time.
Great things are accomplished by great teams, and teams need a lot of variety to work properly. A team composed only of independent thinkers would be a never-ending gladiatorial contest, with the product being the main victim.
What does gall me, is the fairly naked disrespect that many brilliant folks have for the types of implementors that they need in order to realize their dreams. These engineers (and managers) are often treated as "dime a dozen," which is far from the truth.
I agree that pg's model for thinking serves disruptive-based enterprises like small startups much better than consensus-based endeavors like a large corporation, a military, or a football team. Groupthink is an essential skill when cooperation is more important to success than innovation. Propaganda and the delusions that ensue from it are how you build teams.
We can't have teams that are composed of both independent thinkers and implementation experts?
I think of companies like Apple, that had a couple of rather...mercurial types at the head, and a large team of highly skilled implementors to realize their view.
I guess what I was talking about, is that we get all caught up in brilliant "visionaries," and forget that someone needs to actually do the work in the trenches to get the "vision" up and going.
I encounter outright disdain for skilled implementors, even though they are just as rare as "visionaries."
Sure, there are lots of people with the correct job titles, a firm grasp of jargon, and a willingness to take money, but it is just as difficult to find good implementation experts, as it is to find good visionaries.
It isn't as "sexy" to be an implementation expert, but it is very, very important.
I think PG is trying too hard to generalize with a lot of his latest essays.
Many of those essays seem like he's trying to take his experiences and take them up a level of abstraction, and apply them across a whole swath of human experience. That's hard, and it falls a little flat on the receiving end when it doesn't land.
He's still got it on some topics. I loved his essay on having kids.
Another place where the independent- and conventional-minded are thrown together is in successful startups. The founders and early employees are almost always independent-minded; otherwise the startup wouldn't be successful. But conventional-minded people greatly outnumber independent-minded ones, so as the company grows, the original spirit of independent-mindedness is inevitably diluted. This causes all kinds of problems besides the obvious one that the company starts to suck
I can think of no better example of this than Hacker News.
Years ago, independent-minded people came together for the liveliest "out of the box" discussions on the internet.
Eventually those people started to get shouted down until sadly, many of them left.
I wish I knew what to do about that. I imagine people way smarter than me have been struggling with this for some time.
4chan handles this perfectly, but it comes with a general unpoliteness and freedom that most people don't like. However, those aspects of it are exactly what keeps the community fresh and constantly re-inventing itself, because you need cultural artifacts (memes, ways of interacting, etc) to be generated that oppose whatever the prevailing narrative is, and those are harder to be generated if everyone has to be polite all the time.
So the solution is fairly simple: remove upvotes so the conventionally-minded can't decide on what's being discussed, and don't moderate based on politeness, but on subject. 4chan has lots of moderation, but it's mostly focused around which board the discussion should go in, i.e. if you want to talk politics go to the politics board, don't do it in the video games one or your thread will be deleted. This is obviously a solution that doesn't work for most people, but that's the price you have to pay if you want actual independent-mindedness in a community.
An underappreciated part of 4chan's genius is the bump mechanism, which means that if something gets a lot of replies it gets bumped to frontpage again and again - and of course the posts that get a lot of replies are exactly the ones that go against the grain of the forum, that people try to refute.
Subreddits seem to somewhat solve this by spinning off once they hit that level of dilution (low effort content, memes, repeated questions). The 'serious' members will create a new subreddit (i.e. /r/movies > /r/TrueFilm) in order to shake off the casual members and return the discussion to its roots.
It's not perfect, but the subreddit design has definitely given Reddit more longevity since you can rotate your memberships and only join subreddits with higher effort content. Yes, the default subreddits are filled with the same memes every post, but just unsubscribe from those and curate your feed.
It also allows, almost encourages, to people to find echo chambers of very like-minded people. Each subreddit has it's own version of conventional-mindedness, and is resistant to anyone saying anything outside those boundaries.
Okay, but how do you have a lively discussion but also have nobody’s ideas getting shouted down? Would a lively discussion involve everyone agreeing with one another?
Edit: people are apparently not getting my central point here: it might be that, if you’re a conformist, you see a whole bunch of people nodding and saying roughly the same things and think, “this is a lively discussion!” But then see people disagreeing with you and think, “what happened to this once lively community?”
But, it could also be that we’re talking about something else. But the parent post is too vague for me to tell. I sense a more concrete suggestion coming on? Maybe related to the power of downvotes to silence dissent?
The reddit trap. Upvotes are supposed to be given for a good reply, even if it's against your opinion, not a reply that you happen to agree with. Same with downvotes.
If you’re the one with the unpopular opinion, even if it is correct, then you will always find yourself being the one “shouted down”. But if you never find yourself shouted down, perhaps you are less nonconformist than you think?
You can’t be both nonconformist and also never shouted down. It’s a contradiction.
Edit: I tried to just post that I think I understand where you’re coming from: people disagreeing but without giving actual reasons. Which is toxic. And guess what: I got “you’re posting too fast”. Thanks for enabling real discussions by nonconformists, hacker news!
Funny. The article cannot live up to the title if some of the premises are true: if independent thinking is nature bound, then you can't learn to do it.
At least the advice to find out which one you are and commit to that is useful.
Lots of value in being conventional: all my friends who went and worked at AMZN and GOOG are far wealthier than the rest of us today.
Every time a new pg essay comes out, comments appear saying how much he and his essays have changed (for the worse, of course). I think this perception has the nicely ironic property that it exists because it's false.
pg hasn't changed. He can't; he's too weird (nonconformist, if you prefer). Traits at that level just are.
What's changed is his status. Becoming rich and famous changes how people perceive you. What sounds scrappy and original coming from an underdog sounds inflated and self-congratulatory coming from a fatcat. It's because he hasn't changed—in particular, to accommodate the expectations people have once they classify you as a fatcat—that people complain that he changed.
Even more ironically, this 'change' is the invariant: pg never accommodated the expectations people had. His essays pissed people off 10 years ago, 15 years ago, coming up on 20 years ago. While the surface reasons have changed, the feelings are so similar that the deep structure of the off-pissage is surely the same.
What’s a strong disagree you have with him? For if he is so non-conformist certainly you disagree with him on a few things.
What makes him weird in his thinking compared to your typical Bay Area tech person? They all seem to value non-conformity, thinking from first principles, growth, etc.
What view would you’d say is truly contrarian? One that most here would disagree with?
Most of the critique here isn’t about him saying something people just disagree with. He’s not being radical in any way whatsoever. The critiques here all have to do with the fact that he’s saying aggressively conventional things that are framed as the opposite. Banal, backwards and self-congratulatory. It’s not that he’s said anything disagreeable in content.
You’re fighting against different people with each point you make. It’s like you made a field of straw men and then shot each down. You do the same thing with critiques of HN itself: “people always have said this”, where the “this” is vague and has often been different at different times. If what they say is different then maybe some are right, maybe the “this” was right at the time, and now it’s a different this, and it’s right now. Just because a choir sounds bad doesn’t mean a few voices aren’t correct.
Paul is an aggressively conventional guy. He’s your super stereotypical “slightly nerd techie”. He excels at second order thinking (“everyone says X, but have you thought of Y”) but then he just stops there. He never contends with his own second order contrarian idea, he just builds reinforcements around it. This essay is kindergarten chalkboard aphorism “Think Outside the Box!” framed as real contrarianism, which is why he gets flak.
Yes, partly because he wasn't famous (so reading his essays felt like being part of a club) and partly because he was advocating for an underdog perspective (that of the smart technical founder). The idea that you could succeed through programming skill, talking to customers, and cutting out bullshit was enormously exciting, and the fact that Viaweb had succeeded doing it was more of an inspiring existing proof than something to identify against. People like me used to sit around talking about it as sort of a "home team makes good" story. Then they started YC to prove the point at scale, and did prove the point at scale—so much so that it's no longer so easy to remember how radical the thing was. If you're radical enough and proven right enough, people will eventually call you "aggressively conventional".
I imagine the qualities of his essays which "piss others off" are exactly those qualities that I most value.
For instance, I enjoy how each essay seems to take an abstract and detached look at something widely taken for granted. It then extracts some valuable insights that are often too hard to see without this lofty view. I personally love this.
One of the things I've started actively disliking more and more are the "independent thinkers" in the tech oligarchy who seem to do it simply because they enjoy being contrarians.
They post pseudo-intellectual babble about going against the grain justified by single sentence "observations" about some anecdotal evidence they then stretch and generalize into a larger point and continue beating up until the horse is dead.
there are loads of these folks in VC. Anyone who went to an ivy/stanford/MIT, worked in banking for 2 years, and now is at a VC by definition isn't a contrarian. Contrarianism bears out in life decisions - not a faux intellectual attitude
When I read PG’s essays I find they are subconsciously trying to pitch YC. How everyone PG knows including him are very special and deserving. This clouds my experience of reading his essays. I am unable to derive any value from them because of this.
The main reason for this is that I see a big divide between what he says about success people and what I have observed. Success has no set pattern. It can come from a huge variety of reasons.
I really hope this is not koolaid because a lot of young people are drinking it. It would suck if it was all just to suck them into applying for YC.
It's really hard to read this kind of discussion of paul graham's work, because I feel there is a lot of reaction to who he is rather than just the ideas being presented. I'd love to see him do a [Richard Bachman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman) i.e. start writing essays with no obvious connection to his actual identity and see what response it gets.
I agree, it's very irritating that so many people respond to who the messenger is, rather than to what the message is. You don't really have to anonymize the author's identity in order to focus on the message rather than the messenger. You just have to let go of identity politics and any similar goofiness.
There is no identity politics - which in itself isn't bad or "goofiness" by the way - when the author is read as part of the writing. Most critical comments mentioned Graham's biography for specific reasons that correspond to the writing.
Is it helpful to differentiate Discovery vs. Invention?
When a scientist discovers a physical behavior, or a oceanographer a new species, it's a discovery that others could make. The phenomena exists, they happened to find it first.
When a composer invents, they are likely creating music that no other human would have created. If they hadn't composed it, it would never have existed.
Both of these activities seem to require an independent mind to be successful. Are they related? Or fundamentally different in some way?
You could frame it as discovery being finding something out about the thing. So you find out the color of the trees in fall, the sun that an asteroid is about to fall into, or a person's name.
For invention, you are usually deliberately creating it. Your composer works on the music to become better, and chooses better chords to play. The programmer modifies his code to fix an issue he noticed, thus making the invention better.
I think they are separate. Even if they are 100% related, all from the same factors of psychology, it would still be useful to differentiate them.
If you reference it to the world and its inherent chaos it is an invention. If you reference it to a structure with labels and a finite number of alterations it is a discovery of a part of that structure
Evolution is inherently chaotic, yet new species are "discovered," not "invented." Coming back to songs, most chart hits are cobbled together from samples and prior works. It's unclear whether we can all these new creations that occurred in isolation.
You are right, species are discovered when in reference to our defined concept of what it means to be a spiece, that is a structure with all other spiecies. However it's name is an invention, as all definitions are invented.
Yes the song example can be put on a scale, but even the most plagerised of works can call it an invention to an extent when referencing a newly created title.
On a side note, since we all share the most primitive source of information, all behaviours are indirectly stolen on one level or another. But that idea doesn't contribute alot of practicality
So, to be independent-minded is to be actively evidence-seeking, as opposed to being conventionally reflexively consensus-accepting. Positive traits are skepticism, honesty, and curiousity. As a complement, it always helps to be smart. Start ups attract and benefit from independent-minded doers. It's nice to think about "independent-mindedness" as a superpower.
There's one thing missing. Being useful. If you frame a start up experience as an opportunistic search for a sustainable market, plus rigorous service to customer experience in that market, it helps a lot to have strong drive to be relevant, to serve. A ideal organization will help independently minded people to be mission-effective. That suggests an organization that is flattish, decoupled, and with explicit goals and values. But won't an organization, pragmatically, also need incorporate conventionally-minded people - who can also be smart and useful? A ideal organization for the "conventionally minded" suggests hierarchy and normative culture and policies. What's the right structure for a mix of "independent" and "conventional" contributors?
IMHO PG's best essay since thinking for yourself is a complex topic that underlies many of his previous essays yet is explained so well here. A few things stuck out to me that could have deeper explanations:
I suspect conformity has just as strong of a relationship with childhood environment as genetics. Ironically heavy-handed parents trying to create conformity can create rebels. Loving and understanding parents can create conformists unless they emphasize independent thinking. Personally I try to avoid telling children what exactly to do and try to listen to them, essentially treating them like adults: this is explained in the book "How to Talk so Kids Will Listen".
"Resistance to being told what to think" is given in this essay as working with curiosity, but I think it can also have a negative feedback. The independent thinker can be less curious about ideas they are told by someone else. However, the same phenomenon may help explain the mentioned individualization of curiosity: the ideas the critical thinker thinks of as coming from themselves naturally generate curiosity in those areas.
Another idea for instilling independent thinking in kids is to troll them: https://imgur.com/a/GLDrD In the comics Calvin doesn't catch on, but in my experience if you keep making the tale taller and taller, kids will start to figure out what's going on and be more alert in the future.
I agree, it is one of the great joys of parenting :)
I think it helps a lot with imagination, curiosity, and "fastidiousness about truth" since they need to keep evaluating whether what you tell them is true.
A deeper variant of this that I do is focus more on giving them incorrect justifications for things. This helps with evaluating the reasons given for why something is true rather than the idea itself.
> To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know.
To be a brilliant scientist - maybe.
To be a successful scientist - I think (unfortunately) the opposite.
If you rock the boat too hard - by challenging or contradicting other scientists' work, then you'll be gently rebuffed on technical grounds by the peer-review process, which will make it harder and slower to get funding, which means you spend more time stuck in bureaucracy than you do in science.
Publishing things that confirm the status quo is a much easier way to be successful as a scientist. Correctness is less important - many published papers are not 'correct'.
I doubt that the other examples (investors, startup founders, writers) are different in this respect.
It's easier to be successful by taking the obvious and safe path competently, rather than taking the very high risk of a completely novel path.
Yeah, I mean a LOT of people - scientists, software developers, etc - already struggle to do things correctly, let alone in a novel way. There's huge value in work that is not groundbreaking.
For the sciences for example: Repeat or (re) confirm someone else's theories. Repeatability is one of the most important parts of science, and if all the scientists only pushed to do something new, instead of double-checking others' work, science would become something ego-driven and vague.
For software development (my and most people on here's jobs), 99% of it is not building something new. Build something good first. Quality standards, testing, accessibility - how much software do you know that actually does that right?
I've worked with so many people during my consultancy stint (myself included I guess?) that would always pursue the latest and greatest - they wanted to innovate, they wanted something fresh and new. So rarely did they spend more than two years at any one customer. The worst offenders would swoop into a company, advise technology X, then fly off again without ever having to live with the consequences.
And that does not make you a better developer. It scratches your personal itch maybe, but you've caused potentially millions in lost productivity and the inevitable rewrite by more sane developers further down the line.
I'm trying at the moment to do things Right. Build software for the next ten years, instead of the next six months. I'm struggling a bit because the project is big and I'm just a solo developer, but I like to think the mindset is right. I mean I'm not doing anything new, it's just a CRUD application in the end, but it's important that it's done right due to the sheer amount of data (width, not so much amount).
I would add that shallow understanding of this essay is also toxic.
Two weeks ago on some forum for developers I have seen a guy that was basically refusing to learn what other people did because he was convinced that he should be "inventing new unseen algorithms".
That was an IT undergrad that was bored with learning about things other people already invented. He just could not understand that in order to invent something new and groundbreaking you have to learn quite a lot of what already was there. Otherwise you will invent something that someone in 1820 came up with and think that you are genius.
So I agree with PG that there is a lot of value in independent thinking, but one has to be smart enough to realize where to stop. Essay is also not saying "non novel thinking is useless", because it is really useful.
One of the consequences of thinking for yourself is that you’re often going to find that the majority of other people disagree with you. So you’re always going to be having disagreements where it’s an unfair fight; you’re outnumbered and easy to ignore. It’s exhausting, and people generally cope in two ways: keep their thoughts private, which looks like conformity from the outside, or find like minded people, which puts them back in the majority, arguably making them a conformist again. Either way something feels off about claiming oneself to be a consistent nonconformist.
Edit: the other aspect of this to consider is the power relationships involved. If you’re the boss you probably feel free to express your opinions to anyone of equal or lower status: employees and other founders. But if you’re the employee, doing so to the boss might involve personal risk. So for pg to paint his employees as conformists leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
The most radical solution would be to grow revenues without growing the company
Some investment firms already seem to be able to grow revenues without growing the number of employees.
Growing revenue without growing employees is probably a good thing for many reasons if it's possible. However w/r/t the investment firms, imo many investment firms can grow revenue without hiring only when the bottleneck constraint on their revenue is just their reputation.
As their reputation grows, investment firms are often able to do the same thing but with a larger quantity of investor money. Perhaps their reputation also helps on the other end; maybe some can make the same quantity of deals per unit time but as their reputation grows perhaps they become better connected so maybe the deals get bigger and/or more profitable.
In other industries you have to produce a higher quantity of goods or services in order to get more revenue, so this may not generalize.
> You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it
Which would show you that there is a market with customers. Now the question is, can you find a niche in that market and do you have enough to separate yourself from the competitors, also is it possible to attract attention to your product or is the market already saturated. No need to invent something totally new, it's fine to improve enough to make the pain to switch to your product worthwhile.
I think this is an appealing sounding false dichotomy. Bryan Caplan consistently wins bets by betting trends. Robin Hanson has noted that merely taking all the basic facts of a domain as actually true will often get you to contrarian status.
I would say independent thought is a limited resource, and you should allocate it wisely.
There are many things you can "think for yourself" about that wouldn't return much for the investment. For example, if I rejected english and made my own language that would probably be a long-shot. For a while, I wasn't interested in using math formulas until I could prove them, in hindsight maybe I'd say spend that energy getting better at people skills.
I think you'll find 90% of things are done the right way, and if you deviate you're probably doing worse for it. So it's worst being deliberate about. I don't think independent thought is an ends in itself.
> When I wrote "The Four Quadrants of Conformism" I expected a firestorm of rage from the aggressively conventional-minded, but in fact it was quite muted. They sensed that there was something about the essay that they disliked intensely, but they had a hard time finding a specific passage to pin it on.
I think this goes both ways: those that found something they liked intensely, but had a hard time finding a specific passage / point to pin it on could also be aggressively conventionally minded.
Both reactions stem from letting your subconscious decide your logical conclusion rather than arrive at that conclusion through skeptical, rigorous observation and analysis.
Being able to divide people into independent-minded and conventionally-minded is itself conventional thinking. It's also sadly narrow. There is no one I know who is independently minded in all disciplines of life or, likewise, conventionally minded. In sports, there's no one as independently-minded as the top stars (read reviews by their coaches and teammates for a sense of this). But in other disciplines, especially religion, they're are amost the most conventionally minded: adopting all sorts of rituals to solicit the help of God during the game.
This extends beyond sports. Descartes, arguably the father of modern philosophy, was a devout Catholic, even refusing to publish a paper after Galileo's declaration got him in trouble with the Catholic Church. If the soubriquet "father of modern philosophy" doesn't imply independent thinking, I don't know what else would. And then there's his Meditations on First Philosophy where he's severely blinded by conventional-mindedness to "discover" God as the first principle.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, someone writing about independent- and conventional-mindedness should at least take some pain to explain that in any individual you'll see both. That there are no independent-minded people nor conventional-minded people, but only in ways that we carry out our activities.
"When you write something telling people to be good, you seem to be claiming to be good yourself. So I want to say explicitly that I am not a particularly good person. When I was a kid I was firmly in the camp of bad."
Having read and forgotten most of his essays over years, I could recall this in a minute. So probably there's more.
Don't know where i got it from. I usually use it as a reminder that even evil people like Hitler consider themselves as the good hero. Maybe in difficult circumstances. I don't want to compare PG to Hitler though.
Not to be sociopathic, but try to be the hero of your own story as well. Focusing on the things you do right and not remunerating on your mistakes it's a key part of mental wellness.
In many ways this is just an extension of his 4 quadrants of conformism essay, so I'll argue with it using ideas from that essay. I would argue that people vastly over estimate their degree of independent mindedness because although it's easy to be independent minded in one field, especially if it's one you have been studying for a while, it's incredibly easy to fall victim to common sheep-like mentalities about any other topic you're not an expert in. Just ask non-economists what they think of the economy, all of their answers, if not outright incorrect, will be canned answers stolen directly from whatever media outlet they use.
This is important to note because literally everyone does it. I don't actually know of a single person that has not done this, and I personally have done it so many times I question my degree of independence and free will all the time. So what can we say about this? Is no one independent minded then?
Not very popular nowadays, but saying "I don't know" or "I am not informed enough" is always an option. You make it out as if you have to have a perfectly individual and informed opinion on everything there is which is pretty much impossible.
PG has a high degree of believability to me when it comes to the topic of innovation, which makes it all the harder to square his assertion that a successful way to innovate is to be unaware of convention with my experience that you simply can’t even begin to innovate until you know the state of the art in a field.
I’ll have to think a lot about this, because it’s something important to me, and what he’s written here is very different from my experience and understanding, but I trust his history of accuracy, so I can’t just dismiss it.
The comments I've read have been really strongly worded either for or against the motif of this article. All in all I thought this essay was a nice albeit not too deep train of thought through kinds of thinking - not anything worth getting into fisticuffs over.
Yet some comments make me feel like they expect, with the threat of harsh criticism, uber-deep and profoundly insightful content from PG on a highly consistent basis. Maybe it's the phenomenon where wider audiences give rise to (or amplify) polarizing views.
To add on top of PG's arguments: A podcast with Barry Diller made me realize that small active memory in a person may have a lot to do with them becoming perceptive, intuitive, and thus innovative. Diller underlined many times how he struggles to remember, but has as a result learned to perceive ground truth through experience instead.
I've confirmed this in a number of conversations with founders and other professionals, so it is possible the formal research surfaces more. Here are a few of stories from people I know:
1. A left handed, night owl, bathroom builder with horrible memory, who loves his work and can easily find a way to improvise to achieve the right results on projects, even if volunteering in a different country with different materials and house structures (wood vs brick) where he doesn't speak the language.
2. A doctor with amazing memory (can recite most movie lines ever heard and medical books ever read) who becomes timid and conservative about any new approach unless the best possible route is taken.
3. A founder who has benchmarked their brain on different tasks with different amounts of sleep deprivation. They have noticed in some states (nap, and high protein no-carb meal after sleep deprived state) the brain kicks into gear and comes up with amazing solutions to previously un-crackable problems while in other states repeat tasks flow much faster without over-think.
Delusion, ignorance, egotism, purism, curiosity? Is this really such a dark, dystopian world for everybody attempting startups out there?? “Hey, teachers, leave those kids alone!” (cit.)
Over the past decade, our economic system has been rewarding zero-sum capital concentration at the expense of productive innovation and this has rewarded conventional thinkers at the expense of independent thinkers.
Conventional thinkers are better at concentrating capital because they want what everyone else wants - This allows certain things to become and remain highly overvalued or undervalued. Conventional thinkers have a sense of value which is grounded mostly in social approval/reinforcement; their sense of value is mostly detached from any underlying utility.
Independent thinkers are better at innovating since they don't value social approval/reinforcement and so they are more capable at identifying real utility value.
The problem today is that there are many conventional thinkers and they have been reinforcing each other's arbitrary decisions (not rooted in utility). This arbitrariness which is only rooted in social convention has been terrible for independent thinkers. Independent thinkers have been competing with large groups of conventional thinkers; on a ratio of maybe 1 to 100 or worse.
A lone genius is no match for hundreds of fools. History has demonstrated this time and time again. Socrates, Galileo... Successfully persecuted for being independent thinkers. It doesn't matter that they were right.
Our society just seems to be breeding conventional thinkers by the millions.
1. Taking a position that is so novel that your peers neither agree nor disagree with it. Example from 15 years ago: believing that people should live on floating cities. Most people probably would disagree with this if they thought about it some (or understood the ideology behind the desire to seasted), but the position was so strange that it wouldn't stimulate immediate disagreement.
2. Taking a courageous position that is already strongly and overwhelmingly unpopular. This would be something like "I believe democracy is vastly overrated". Unlike with (1), almost everyone in the population has already formed an opinion that is pro-democratic, so when you utter the opposite view, you've got 95%+ of the population ready to disagree with you.
These two categories are exhaustive. In fact a false category of contrarian belief is uttering something that is already popularly controversial, and only slightly unpopular statistically. An example would be uttering "I believe DJT should be President" in a state like Colorado, where a sizable minority of the population already agrees with you. I think this is why most people think they are independent minded, when in fact they aren't. They have a few slightly unpopular views, which don't sufficiently qualify as genuinely contrarian.
TLDR: Genuinely contrarian opinions are either so novel that almost everyone is ready to disagree with you, or they are so novel that no one has an opinion yet on the subject.
I was going to suggest a third but I realize it's a hybrid: having a view that in summary fits the latter category but for which the detailed argument is in the former category.
An issue with #2 might be that 5% is still millions of people , many of who are available to find with a google search. So it becomes harder to figure out who is a courageous contrarian and who is a crank.
Pre-web, individual conspirasists used to be mute. They were either smart enough to keep quiet or afraid to speak up because they thought their views were unique. Now, everyone can let their freak flag fly without much consequence.
There just isn’t enough danger or personal risk anymore to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Somehow I got to feel a lot of unease when I read sentences like
> Fortunately you don't have to spend all your time with independent-minded people ...
Maybe it's the absurdity to divide people (and here obviously ALL people) simply into two groups and just by structuring them gain some meaning or knowledge. It's really easy and unprofessional: really you could divide society up by uncountable distinctions. But distinctions do not make dialectics or aren't anything but misleading if you're just asserting them.
Also the distinctions between conventional and independent are just blurry ones here, only derived by example; not by definition. There is no intellectual sharpness to the argument, right from the start of the "essay" – in that, that it appeals only to the intuition, not to the mind. There are no studies about "independent-minded" or "conventional-minded" people; not in hte sense he is using the term here. Quite the opposite: he is using the terms to appeal to a feeling. In no earnest science, or literature, someone talks so dull and undifferentiated about human beings.
Also I wouldn't ever think about a friend of mine, or someone close to me with such cold efficiency that derives from that really simplistic way of handling people and amateur psychology.
The 'Elephant in the Room' he failed to mention is that the vast, vast majority of 'independent thought' has nothing to do with 'Truth', it's just more or less egosim.
Also missing from the articulation is that independence from the group can be at odds with your loyalty and respect for the cause of the group, and our sense of civil duty towards it.
90% of 'independent thinking' is akin to conspiracy theory, or people arbitrarily rejecting authority, even if that authority is legitimate.
9% of 'independent thinking' is raw creativity, art, or people just expressing themselves one way or another in a variety of ways.
Only 1% of independant thinking is of the type he is describing, which is conscientious.
The problem is that it's very hard to have the self awareness to know which type you are.
There is logic in conformity, even imperfect systems, it's much better that we have a standard than otherwise.
The most enlightened people I find are those that seem actually fairly conformist not so much because they have been 'told' to do a certain thing, but because they understand why - and - have a sense of duty or obligation towards the outcome - and then conscientiously chose to take that path. It's not conformist to do what everyone else is doing if there's reason in it.
>And if it's like other forms of fastidiousness, it should also be possible to encourage in children. I certainly got a strong dose of it from my father.
>Perhaps the reason is that even the conventional-minded have to be curious in the beginning, in order to learn what the conventions are. Whereas the independent-minded are the gluttons of curiosity, who keep eating even after they're full.
The author doesn't try to answer where the greed for innovation comes from.
If those traits come from parents, how can this be reproduced? Isn't 'How to Think for Yourself' more like 'You are all individuals'?
It can make people behave in certain ways, but it cannot create individualism.
Coincidently, the author offers a service for founders to help them to be founders, to tell them, how to be founders. He most likely is looking for conforming non-conformists, because those are the people who need his services the most.
Then on the other hand, maybe he has realized that he cannot give them what they need the most? It's a bit like reddit. He gave the founders lisp and a non-conformist, but they ended up with a platform for submissions.
People think for themselves when the answers they get are not enough. Who wants to give people the gift of endless dissatisfaction?
he is not the best. i am very impressed by how little his thinking and writing have improved over the years.
there is always a flavor of lecturing in his words. sometimes, it makes me wonder if i am just too stupid to understand his answers to all matters.
these days i could not finish reading his writings. his twitter feels like a talkative kid who hasn't learned self control. i have unfollowed him long ago.
he may want to be different. but how is he different? really.
The decrease of independent minded as an organisation grows seems an almost universal phenomenon. It happens to startups yes, but also to forums, bands, fashions, the internet, games, religions, politics, etc.
Basically anything new will target independent minded people, and anything successful will target conventional people. It's sad for the independent minded, but is there anything that can be done about this ?
"anything successful will target conventional people"
Plenty of successful products are useful for both. E-mail, smartphone, Covid vaccine.
PG's idea that outsourcing more conventional activities such as advertisements and PR may preserve the creative core of the company is interesting at least.
> You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it.
I must say I quite disagree with that statement. You definitely can run a successful startup without being novel. Other companies doing the same thing as you do is not necessarily something that will prevent you to be successful.
At the end of the day, thinking for ourselves is hard. It takes time and often the stakes aren’t that high. I think that being a bit sceptic and cynic can help. You don’t need to be born with those traits; you can acquire them with some practice.
It’s an investment that is valuable especially when dealing with politics, or one’s career.
There are always multiple sides to a story. Just try to get a grip of what each side is saying, and what their interests are. Then, gather data if you need to. Analyse it, reason about it, discuss it openly. I do it sometimes. Other times I just trust the source enough to let it go.
Don’t put yourself in a silo. If you do, you’re surely thinking for yourself, but you could also be missing on something you didn’t consider.
Edit: I guess that there’s also a biological side to it. It’s safer to go along with the mass. If not from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense from a social one.
Thinking for yourself in Silicon Valley is nigh impossible these days without becoming a disliked outcast. If you even question the legitimacy or viability of a potentially flawed mission or irony in company values, experienced startups will manage you out silently and tactfully. In some of the worst places, you'll also get treated poorly and excluded so that you leave.
Company values really are just words on a wall in pretty much every company. I don't think you will find a single company where the values aren't silently broken by leadership and management. The best companies have ways of hiding this through shallow apologetic acts (e.g. self-washing on social media).
I've seen this happen to plenty of people who found out something they shouldn't have, at companies who would otherwise appear like great places to work.
> Thinking for yourself in Silicon Valley is nigh impossible these days without becoming a disliked outcast.
Yes. The irony of Paul Graham’s fluff (apparently he was one of the founders of HN or something?) about thinking for yourself etc. versus the tendency of HN to downvote any comment that goes against the grain, like the one above. Hah
The late Christopher Hitchens was a drink sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay, of course. But one we needed.
His 'Letters to a Young Contrarian'(2001), though filled with himself[0], remains a heartfelt read for anyone going about the world in their own way. If you can get a used copy, preferably filled with marginalia, treasure it, add your own thoughts, and pass it along. The always unique comments railing against Hitch will be worth the effort. More so when all agree.
Paul may wish to pick up a copy, though I suspect he just needs to re-read the one on his shelf.
A fantastic debate between Christopher and his brother Peter in which Christopher defended the Iraq war showed me just how much of an "independent thinker" Christopher really was (i.e. Not as much as you'd think). Being a militant atheist is hardly enough to be considered independent or contrarian in today's world.
He was a two fisted drunken chain smoker, for sure.
But what rare good ideas he had were worth it all.
I'll cheer again his Letters to Young Contrarian as terrible sauced drivel.
But damned if I ever wrote more in the margins of that thin little tome arguing against his bastard ideas. To be clear, I disagree with nearly everything Hitch said. But his poppycock made me think deeper than any second-rate Augustine. To have everyone hate you is a rare thing. To have that for decades is unique.
If he ever wrote only that one pamphlet, he'd be forgotten. But that he wrote so much more and that cigarette of a book, well, makes the matchbox so much more reprehensible. It wasn't satire, rather, a hose of drool.
But it is truly honest.
Again, read it, argue with him, treasure it, and pass it along.
I can't recommend anything better on how to live that kind of life.
PG had lots of terms, e.g., independent minded, and lots of proposed connections among them.
Okay, for some approaches to science, the next step is to define numerical measures of the terms and then to state the proposed connections mathematically. Then gather a lot of data and test the connections.
E.g., not from PG, but as people rise in organizations, do they become more conservative, e.g., in PG's terminology, more conventional minded? Pursuing just that one question scientifically was my wife's Ph.D. dissertation.
Point: Addressing scientifically all of PG's proposed connections would be a lot of work! And my guess is that many of the connections, including ones seemingly nearly obviously true -- would be very tough to settle scientifically.
for me, one of the interesting failures is in assuming that there is only one dimension for being unconventional.
Even though one might like to think of themselves on an axis from "conventional" to "unconventional", my experience has shown that your normality can vary wildly depending upon whether we are talking about matters of love, finance, career, etc. As well as nuances therein.
What I think would be quite probing would be an exploration of the ways in which you might be unconventional in some aspects of your career, whereas conventional in others. It's these fine-differences that the articles suggests we could adjust to achieve parity overall in a particular domain, but does not actually explore...
This is basically a verbose version of the countless sayings that state something along the lines of...if you think the same as others, you’ll get the same results.
Albeit he’s speaking about the initial temperament / mindset of the individual, which is something I guess.
What is quite ironic is that this is written by Pg, who’s institution has become one of the most conformist. To generalize and draw out the point clearly - Yc invests in tech companies (most conformist type of business nowadays) that are incredibly de-risked since those that make the yc. Arches usually have ‘traction’/ revenue etc.
(Ie, odds are that today, yc wouldn’t invest in 2 designers looking to disrupt hospitals)
Fan of PG's work. Question from me would be, were these the values he attributes to his business success, or discoveries after enlightenment and actualization?
Follow up essays, "how to prevail on others when you've thought for yourself," and "how to leverage other thinkers who just don't fit," would be extra interesting.
There is a significant element of "Foxes and Hedgehogs," in this, and what I talk about to business clients as "indoors cats and outdoors cats," as well.
I like that this essay brings to mind what it means to "en-courage," or to give courage-to someone. It's not flattery or justification, it is meant to genuinely imbue people with courage.
Originality is an interesting thing. The word itself is highly favorable and when confronted with the word alone most people have a favorable impression of it.
In practice most people absolutely despise originality. It isn't that something original is merely disinterested or disagreeable. It is a thing of emotional revulsion that frequently brings forth hostility.
Ray Dalio, as I discovered when I interviewed at BridgeWater in 2014, had figured out how to test for originality as a psychological personality characteristic and comparatively measure people using a standard metric. Strangely enough if you score high enough on such a metric people will be interested in you for interesting reasons such that they might be able to identify or measure the concept and yet not have any idea how to explorer it or exploit it.
What I have learned most from originality is rejecting feedback and scoring ideas not in what people say but what they do next or whether they come back. I have also learned that originality appeals highly to a very specific class of people eager to explore new things. These rare people are precious to early stage ideas of any kind. Identify them and go out of your way to appreciate their time even when they disagree with you.
For this article to be "useful" it should be treated like some kind of scripture in 420AD.
What's great about this article is not its content but that it exists and is written by someone with a considerable amount of influences in this world. I would argue that if you have been so-called independent minded for long enough most PG's articles would feel cliché.
Nonetheless, if you deeply values independent mindfulness and happen to enjoy PG's writings, you will find the article to be extremely powerful because these words can computationally touch something deep inside you. And that is nice.
Permaculture has a concept that it is the boundaries where interesting things happen - Where desirable life can be found. Between the forest and the meadow is where lies the life that may be desirable, whether fauna or flora.
I had labeled the two distinctions as destroyer/creators versus maintainers. I tear things down to create better replacements, whereas my partner is an excellent maintainer - As long as my new system is not too onerous, she is usually willing to keep it going, as I move on to the next process. And it seems that the transition from a small company to a larger one is also the transition from the independent to the more conventional minded, even though it contains its own traps (like having independents forced out - even from their own companies, or being strangled into oblivion by bean-counters, as it were).
Those who don't/did not do well in school may be in the independent group, more often than not. But then that misses other underlying reasons, like a few of my friends who had undiagnosed dyslexia.
Although I have usually been attracted to conspiracy theory just to be at odds with the rest of mainstream thought, I recognize I do not practice enough critical thinking if said theory already conforms to an existing bias I may have - Another place for me to practice my mental strength!
Another item in HN's feed this morning is Connections - That series has been an invaluable cross-discipline introduction to so much thought and design of other creative independent types. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25218056
Last, I agree with the concept of reading good autobiographies of interesting thinkers allows me to think some of the same thoughts they did...
A holistic approach to the question of collective thought and formation of conventional ideas raises the question of "what is the positive functional purpose of conventional thinkers in society and civilization?" That "conventional thought serves as societal and civilizational balast" seems a satisfactory (and possibly obvious) answer.
Independent thought exerts a displacing force on the collective mind. If this force exceeds the capacity of the collective to adjust ("far out"), the thought (and the thinker) is rejected.
Successful independent thought moves but does not destablize the collective mind.
> More generally your goal should be not to let anything into your head unexamined.
I can accept this way of reasoning if 'unexamined' is not directly linked to attention. The brain consistently tries to automate thoughts/behaviours and with confidence comes relaxation in the attention muscle, as to say well defined areas will need less 'examination'.
On another note, there's a reason why conventions exist and it is not always the right path to opt for independence. Being able to relate to people is a huge blessing and should not be completely overruled if the object is piece of mind.
I believe that the independent-mindedness actually has some sort of biological underpinning. Original thought requires more energy expenditure (to push against entropy) than simply copying someone else's thinking.
So my hypothesis is that if your body is better at providing energy to the brain and not "wasting" it on other energy sinks around your body, you'll be better at independent thinking (and also intelligence, since it also boosts your ability to create models).
But that's just my totally unproven and anecdotal hypothesis, although I guess it might be worth checking out scientifically.
"You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't — like writing software for a tiny computer used by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let people rent airbeds on strangers' floors."
Probably true more often than not, but Google and Facebook both started off doing something that everyone already thought was a good idea, they just did it much better.
The article mentions politically extreme politicians being niche conformists, point #7. I find the difference between an extreme politician and moderate one is that the moderates advocate for their constituents, which requires two things: listening to their constituents and compromising on political ideals to attain an interest desirable to their constituents.
Extreme politicians instead tell you want your opinion is. That opinion is often a form of populism because otherwise nobody would give it the time of day. Extremes are only relevant when they have a following.
I think you have these two backwards. By definition a populist is promoting the rights and power of the people against privileged elite. It's no surprise the privileged elite consider populist an insult. And it's the moderates, the privileged elite, that have to instruct the proles about what's best for them.
By definition a populist claims to be promoting the rights and power of the people against a privileged elite. In many cases this involves instructing proles not to listen to any other views and especially not any criticism of their movement since these are falsehoods promoted to serve the interests of the elite, and sometimes flat out telling them what the popular will is supposed to be...
A moderate wishes to maintain the status quo position of the elite. I don't think it's helpful to try to debate which type of politician is likely to lie more.
Well stated, as expected. That said, it's heavy on features and light on benefits (which include often undesirable side effects).
For example, in PG's world unbound-thinking has value. It is generally seen as a good thing. Do the same within a religion and you're a heretic. Worse, you could end up dead.
Perhaps he'll do a follow up? To explore the benefits (and friction) for individuals, as well as teams and organizations. Maybe even go so far as to address diversity beyond the conventional paradigm (i.e., race, gender, etc.) That would be great.
He says "...good universities are still an excellent way to meet independent-minded people." Is that even true anymore? So many of the ones I considered "good" have gone over to the whole SJW/microaggressions/safe spaces mentality. Any independent thinkers will have a hard time finding each other at those places. Are there any universities left where you would have your ideas really challenged? That's what I would expect at university.
Perhaps “safe spaces” are a lofty goal to allow students to focus on intellectual exploration rather than devoting a lot of mental energy to the slow drip of “microaggressions”.
It sounds like you might be in one of the “niche conformists” pg describes.
Haha. I'm asking for suggestions of unis where I can still be challenged and even offended, and someone comes along with some psycho babble about me being a conformist of some sort. If I put on my psycho babble hat I might think they spent too much time in one of those safe spaces.
If you think the concept of a safe space is at odds with being challenged then you are severely mistaken. When is the last time you were at a university? Your vaguely inflammatory comments suggest it’s been a while...
A lot of attempts being independent-minded end up just being contrarian. It is after all much less of an investment. It gets really tiring to talk to such people after a while.
But still a thoroughly contrarian personality may be defined as disagreement on maybe 10 separate issues, which is maybe one in a million possibilities. And if those are popular contentious issues, then it may be for good reason, given so much effort taken to convince everybody that one opinion is dominant.
And of course there are different types: the theorist, and the skeptic. Skeptics generally have an extremely good hit rate on the truth. There are many beliefs held by the vast majority of educated people, that require fantastic improbabilities and incongruences with normal experience, whereas the extremely uncommon disbelief requires only storytellers. I can see how this would be quite boring company. Theorists are the opposite. They tell great stories with attempt to explain, or influence, or gain social acceptance by conforming their story to the emotional needs of the group. You wouldn’t think them tiresome at all if the story was catering to your emotional needs. Or perhaps not, because you may be a tiresome skeptic yourself.
>The same is true for investors. It's not enough for a public market investor to predict correctly how a company will do. If a lot of other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already reflect it, and there's no room to make money. The only valuable insights are the ones most other investors don't share.
That really depends. Tesla and Amazon stock are widely followed and have optimistic projections yet continue to deliver massive shareholder returns.
It's always going to be a tiny number of people that'll be the principal cause of progress, along with the rest of us being reasonable enough and simply go along with it.
Independent thinking is hard, that's why the majority of people will opt instead to adopt the common thinking of the group of their choice - a choice that comes principally from feelings.
One can be perfectly happy however, regardless on which category they belong, as long as they are comfortable with their choice.
I find nonconformist thinking rather isolating and open-mindedness rather helpful, but it does sometimes invite naiveté. Therefore I like his advice to secretly think through if a statement is correct. But I suspect there is more than one kind of "thinking for yourself", because it's not always useful. Perhaps one has to think for himself BUT at the same time be very tuned in to what the others believe in order to have ideas that have potential?
If you have an idea and nobody else is doing it, odds are not that you had a good idea; instead it is probably a bad idea that many others have had and failed at.
When you have a seemingly original idea figure out who else had it and ask why they failed. That will give you insight into what you need to do better. Sometimes you will realize that it was a bad idea, other times you will know what to change to make it work.
Uber is just a taxi company. Maybe better done (as you say, the jury is out) , but just a taxi company in the end. People get this idea that taxi company on the internet is some how unique, but it isn't really.
I'd like the opposite essay, how to be more conventional-minded. It's exhausting feeling continually unable to accept conventional wisdom and go with the flow.
Questioning everything is absolutely not all upside; there isn't time or energy available to do it, so you've gotta either tune a huge chunk of the world out, or cynically reject it, both of which are alienating and unpleasant.
Solutions are dictated by problem itself to a large extent, so when someone is right when others are wrong he may be just understanding the nature of the problem better. So he is conventionaly minded, but sees deeper into the chain (web) of implications, because has more powerful brain or spent more attention on the topic out of interest, etc.
"Ditto for essayists. An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring. You have to tell them something new."
How come I know exactly where this essay is going? It is yet another "start-up founders are genetically, intellectually, and emotionally superior; the rest of the muggles are so envious."
Does Paul think everyone except startup founders works on an assembly line?
"You see this especially among political extremists. They think themselves nonconformists, but actually they're niche conformists. Their opinions may be different from the average person's, but they are often more influenced by their peers' opinions than the average person's are."
Oooh. So close.
Anyway, don't pop your shoulder out while you're patting yourself on the back.
> How come I know exactly where this essay is going?
This is the question I've been thinking as I've checked back in on comments here a few times this morning. Why do so many people "know" that this essay is all about aggrandizing pg's own intellect or that of startup founders, when it's almost entirely composed of two parts: (1) discussion on when independent thinking is and isn't valuable, and (2) advice on cultivating independent thinking? Where does this impression come from?
There's always some negativity toward any widely-read essay, but there seems to be a higher quantity with this one, making me think there's something actually wrong with it. My hypothesis is that its presentation is too neatly wrapped. This essay espouses curiosity, but does not model it. It comes across as having all the answers. This is especially true of the brief part that confidently explains the lack of negative reaction to another essay, with no details of how such confidence was arrived at.
This is too bad. I'd like for this essay to have engendered more discussion on cultivating independent thinking, and less discussion about pg's mindset.
Part of why I'm sure is that I was prone to thinking like this as a teen. I was a smart kid from a family that valued smartness trying to get by in a world that generally didn't, and certainly didn't value the kid of weirdness that in retrospect made me well suited for what turned out to be hot career.
I made it to an environment better suited to me (SF, tech industry) and eventually got the fuck over myself. I used my newfound material and emotional safety to do the necessary work of self-examination that let me get a better handle on my self-justifying bullshit. To spot and manage my desire to be right, to be smart, to be without intellectual flaw. To write bombastic essay like this.
So yes, I think you have part of it. It is hypocritical. It doesn't model what it's talking about. But for me it's worse than that. One, it presenting an at-best-incomplete approach as the final word from on high, it's going to create a sad sort of blinded conformism of its own. Doing a tech startup has long become a cargo cult of its own, and this won't help.
Second, in his amateur psychologizing, I think he makes some elementary mistakes. E.g., valorizing the performative anti-caring about what people think. To me that's a sign of insecurity and/or a trauma reaction to some past person who was overbearing. For me, true independent thinking comes from listening to others without judgment and choosing for myself. Positive attachment and negative attachment are both attachment.
Third, this reads to me like it's a part of the political kick he's been on in recent years, where he's shitting on the US left. E.g., the footnote about how politics is boring because it's subject to intellectual fashion. He complains here about people who "think themselves nonconformists, but actually they're niche conformists". When honestly his opinions, which I once found fresh and interesting, seem to be the tiresome conventional wisdom in his niche, and easily predicted by his financial interests and social position.
I get that he's gone through a hard change. He used to be an underdog and would still like to see himself that way. But in reality, he's rich and powerful, a kingmaker in what has been the hottest segment of American industry for a generation. One that in my opinion has been vastly overfunded for the last decade or so. That is a challenge to anybody's self image. You can't be a genius underdog and at the top of the status quo. But given his money and his smarts, he's not doing a good job at all of meeting that challenge.
> E.g., valorizing the performative anti-caring about what people think. To me that's a sign of insecurity and/or a trauma reaction to some past person who was overbearing.
I can't recall ever meeting even one person who didn't get somewhat scarred over the fact that he/she disagreed with the majority of the people around them [at least once in their lives]. That insecurity, as you call it, is IMO present in most people these days. Whether it's a trauma or not though, I can't argue in an informed manner.
But I do believe it's a very normal trait of all social animals. There always comes one point where the collective shows you, usually through the medium of violence (physical or emotional), that they don't appreciate you thinking or acting differently.
> For me, true independent thinking comes from listening to others without judgment and choosing for myself. Positive attachment and negative attachment are both attachment.
I only knew two such people who were able to be genuinely completely detached and they indeed didn't care who thought what. But they were almost dead inside, to me watching on the side at least. They also had almost no desires of their own. I didn't envy them at all, I actually thought they were sick.
Your statement reminds me of a Buddhist teaching but if memory serves, one of their proverbial wise men said that this is an ideal to strive towards knowing that you will never truly reach it. And that's a good thing. Complete lack of attachment would make me think something is seriously wrong with you. So I interpreted that advice -- "don't get attached" -- more along the lines of "don't burden yourself with things you can't change or which would take too much energy or time to change; just let go and give yourself in to the things you genuinely care about" -- something along those lines.
All of this is obviously my opinion based on life experience and observations, of course. I wouldn't dream of presenting myself as a psychologist or a psychiatrist.
---
Outside of this small paragraph of yours I found myself nodding my head at the entirety of your comment and I agree completely with it.
Sure, everybody has a history. Nobody agrees with everybody all the time. Same for me. My issue with this essay is that it doesn't examine that history and how it affects people.
Another way to look at it is in terms of having a choice in response to some stimulus. If somebody expressing a desire compels me to do a, "Yes sir yes sir three bags full" routine, I'm not free. But I'm equally unfree if my response is to shout, "Fuck you, you're not my dad." To me, really thinking for myself comes after my reactions pass and I'm at peace again.
Oh, I don't disagree. But didn't you have situations in which the amount of adequate responses you can give is a small set?
So even if somebody were to predict all your possible responses that still doesn't mean that you don't have free will. You do. But your choice set might be limited at the time.
I might be nitpicking here though. If what you are getting at is "I let my spontaneous reaction pass silently in my head and THEN analyze how should I really respond" then I am in full agreement -- I trained myself to do that too and I found it to be the option that maintains my inner peace much better.
I think the root cause is some “conflicting” mechanism where people associate pg’a writings with a following, which has been carefully cultivated. This article being about “how to not be a follower” in itself is at odds with that, and as such it entices heavy scrutinizing from the audience.
In a way, it’s incredibly difficult to establish whether or not this article is conforming to existing ideas or not, when there’s such a large group of people that typically agree with pg’s thinking. This in itself may trigger a southpark-esque response, “I’m such a non-conformist I’m not conforming to you non-conformists!”
The more of them I read, the more it seems like they are chiefly a form of marketing for his accelerator, and all marketing should be approached with suspicion.
You missed (3) where independent thinking isn't valuable you find the unhappy and the conventional; the latter group having a fairly large stack of poor qualities.[1]
Oh, and (4) how do you know you're really independent minded? It's "more a matter of nature than nurture" after all. Someone could be lying to themselves. "Conventional-minded people don't like to think of themselves as conventional-minded. And in any case, it genuinely feels to them as if they make up their own minds about everything."
Dunning-Kruger and all. In fact, you can't even trust the ne plus ultra: the conventional minded have to be curious in order to find out what the conventions are, no? But then, I'm being critical here, and feeding "a firestorm of rage from the aggressively conventional-minded"; I clearly show all of those poor qualities.
(I'm trying hard to figure out how "One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are. It's hard to be a conformist if you don't know what you're supposed to conform to" doesn't imply that ignorance is a virtue.)
I am a bit disappointed Paul doesn't mention some of the downsides to independent thinking; he seems to regard it as an unalloyed good. "Founders can delay the problem by making a conscious effort only to hire independent-minded people. Which of course also has the ancillary benefit that they have better ideas." The problem here is that those independent-minded people are going to want to see their ideas in action---even if those ideas disagree with those of the founder. (Hence unhappiness and the promotion of conventional thinking.)
(I notice that Paul picks out "administrators" and "middle management" as specifically conventional. I wonder if extending that to "management" would strain the cognitive dissonance of those readers he personally knows?)
I do like the fine distinction of "Fastidiousness about truth doesn't imply that an independent-minded person won't be dishonest, but that he won't be deluded. It's sort of like the definition of a gentleman as someone who is never unintentionally rude." I certainly have always found it advantageous to prefer the presence of those who know they are lying.
[1] Unskeptical, indifferent to truth, herd-minded, humorless, and incurious, with poor thinking and poor ideas.
Nowhere in the essay does he argue that the three qualities of independent thinkers are exclusive to startup founders. You clearly feel some type of way about Paul Graham.
While I may not necessarily be as harsh as the commenter you are responding do, I will say that I am starting to feel a certain way about pg, and it's much less positive than it was 5-10 years ago.
I feel like a common thread in his most recent essays has been separating people into, for lack of a better term, "desirables" vs. "undesirables". True, he doesn't use those terms, and he often couches the language he uses about the undesirables in sort of a "they can't really help it, they're just born that way" phrasing, but the distain is barely hidden.
And I find all of this somewhat ironic, given that as high as pg values curiosity, I don't really see a lot of self-introspection (at least as communicated in his essays) about why he seems to be much more interested in recent years in writing about how one group of people is intrinsically special and the other basically just exists to be led.
I will specifically contrast this with Sam Harris. While they talk about different subjects, I find Sam Harris to be much more interested in thinking about "why do I think the way I do." More importantly, after listening to a Harris podcast I often find myself thinking about things in a very different way, where lately with pg's essays I find myself thinking "not this shit again."
100%. I've gotten that impression about everything him and his protege Sam say since the first time I read anything they wrote. It's like their mantra. It's so tiring.
"Surround yourself with smart people, cut out anyone who doesn't inspire you to move fast and break things."
What about my fucking parents? What about the friends I grew up with who have ordinary jobs that aren't pushing the boundaries of human innovation? Should I ditch them all because they didn't found Airbnb?
The pretentiousness of it is really tiring, and it's the one aspect of the hacker news community that I dislike: this constant Kool-Aid drinking that unless you've somehow impacted the system we all live in, you aren't really worthwhile.
I think this is a misreading of PG’s essay and although I agree with some criticism of sorts that PG’s recent essays are lacking in what his early essays did for us, I really didn’t get that he was insinuating what you think. It was more of choose the career and surround yourself with the type of people that are good for your type..
But again, some criticism here is spot on for different resons while other is quite unfounded. But it seems to me that mr PG hasn’t changed much, his essays stayed pretty much the same while the whole landscape has transformed quite a bit since his early essays. If one of his vhehement critics is to read an old PG essay thinking it is recent they’d probably have the same reaction.
From what I see online, it appears that the social zeitgeist has swung toward factionalism - I perceive this, and this pressure - and I think what pg is doing in the essay, is largely pointing out that there's value in and a need for independent thinking.
> You see this especially among political extremists. They think themselves nonconformists, but actually they're niche conformists. Their opinions may be different from the average person's, but they are often more influenced by their peers' opinions than the average person's are.
This reminds me of my arguments (many many years ago) about the alleged "non-conformist" credentials of the "Goth" kids. I'm sure, of course, that PG has captured some insight or subtlety that my socially maladjusted insular teenaged self missed...
Its hard to think of a more homogenous industry / group of individuals than the HN / SV startup founder clique.
The length that people will go to to pretend that it isnt another rich boys club that leans somewhat conservative (sorry "libertarian") is interesting in itself.
Thinking for yourself means accepting the consequences of such. For some people it is easier to follow someone else's advice and then blame them if something goes wrong than making decision themselves and then trying to learn from it.
It is a tough one, but if you engage critical thinking you may end up somewhere in the middle, which isn't bad.
I find Ray Dalio's thoughts on this and other related subjects much more compelling than Paul's.
Mr. Dalio has recently, within the past year or two, started sharing his thoughts publicly in an organized way at https://www.principles.com/ and on social media.
That's to answer your "just another capitalist" comment.
To answer your first question. Because he thinks about and explains things more rigorously than Paul Graham does. That does sometimes make it a little longwinded and he has a tendency to go on a lot of tangents on his live speeches.
Also has absolutely no ego in the game whatsoever. It's almost clinical the way he describes how he's thinking about things.
hilarious and true-- hype trains are drains. I'm with ya on mongodb. nodejs is awesome though :) that sweet sweet async event loop. sure, the language has some imperfections-- it's not perfect for all use cases (nor is any other)-- but overall I enjoy working with it. the community is fantastic as well.
I think the biggest problem we have today is that people have become so out of touch with themselves and their own intrinsic needs that they ended up resorting to simply wanting what other people want.
We can blame advertising. Successful advertising is all about inducing as many people as possible to conform to the same imagery.
> You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't — like writing software for a tiny computer used by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let people rent airbeds on strangers' floors.
He's talking about airbnb here, but what's the other company?
Yet again an excellent essay. It is very sad that these days pg is literally the only one in the programming space who writes essays for free spirits.
Ten years ago these opinions would not have been extraordinary, but programmers as a group seem to have been subject to successful $BIGCORP reeducation in the last decade.
We all have the capacity to think for ourselves, once we start trusting our 'instinct/little voice/intuition' and not doubting ourselves into oblivion. We need to unlearn our bad habits, not necessarily search for some sacred pearl of wisdom in Nirvana somewhere...
PG has one target market. I respect him for that. He’s trying to help the unique people experience their full potential instead of giving into conformity.
My heart aches for all the ways I’ve allowed conformity to ruin me, but thankful that some of my original efforts have paid off.
Meditate. When I started I was surprised to discover "slower" thoughts that took time to arise, but were of higher quality. The noisy, fast, surface thoughts are often more conventional - echos of what I've been told. Silence is part of creativity.
I don't relish the idea of doing work where I can only succeed when I disagree with others (it feels both risky and lonely) but that's different than if, in practice, I tend to conform to what others think (I don't think I do, on average).
> I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say.
Trying to decide whether you fit in the “conventional” or “non-conventional” category; then trying to decide whether you committed a Type I or a Type II error on the previous task.
But schools generally ignore independent-mindedness, except to the extent they try to suppress it.
Why do so many folks buy this bullshit about American schooling? Sure, we've got SATs and standardized tests but schools also have jazz bands, rock ensembles, student written plays and musicals.
Hell my failing public high school had plenty of room for self-expression, it wasn't the sort of conformist prison PG thinks to seem schools are, it just wasn't a very good school. No one was going to punish you for writing an essay or starting a club or anything else.
My university, one likely to be accused of 'credentialism' also had the gamut of clubs: campus crusade for christ down to groups for divesting from Israel to Zionist groups, to LGBT groups, etc, etc, etc.
PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity.
It's clear in all of his writing that he's perpetually beating around the bush about some current itch he has, I wish he would just come out and say it with out pretending to be a deep thinker:
> Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else?
I mean, taken outside of this being a PG essay I would assume this means stay away from SV, but I suspect that's not really the point.
> One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are.
This essay is an object lesson in how this leads to profoundly conventional thinking. This entire thing reads like it was torn from the journal of a clever middle-schooler who thinks he's so much more clever then the world.
Right now Silicon Valley VC thinking is the dominant ideology, putting blinders on to what is considered convention isn't cultivating an independent mind, it's an assertion of the status quo.
> An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring.
I agree, but given how beloved rehashed versions of "aren't we the clever independent thinkers!" essays are here I think there is some empirical evidence to the contrary.
> This essay is an object lesson in how this leads to profoundly conventional thinking. This entire thing reads like it was torn from the journal of a clever middle-schooler who thinks he's so much more clever then the world.
You've hit upon something that's always bothered me with this characterization of nerds. It's like if someone framed adult life by superimposing stereotypical high school nerd vs jock social dynamics onto it, and then went on to portray nerds as heroes.
In real life "nerds" are part of the same system. They are utterly conventional. You don't get to call yourself unconventional just because you deride sportsball and like computers.
This essay reminds me of an xkcd comic: https://xkcd.com/610/. I think it would be too harsh to call him self-aggrandizing, but he does seem to dress up otherwise good insights about how to think critically with celebration of how unconventional this is.
It's like when Peter Thiel expanded one good insight about critically finding ideas from uncommon beliefs into an entire book.
This reminds me of one of the more embarrassing episodes of my life. My friends and I (pretty nerdy types) were at a bar with an amateur MMA fighter. Guy was like 6'10", covered in huge muscles and tattoos. One of the nicest guys I've ever met, but you definitely wouldn't want to get on his bad side.
Anyway we didn't know the guy too well, lots of getting-to-know you type stuff. The MMA fighter after a few hours mentions that he was really into Starcraft, Age of Empires, and other RPS.
You could have knocked me and my other friends over with a feather. This ripped "jock" likes Starcraft! Oh my god! We were so surprised and just went on and on about how impressed we were like idiots.
A year or two later one of my friends who was there (a little more balanced guy who played more sports and hung out with more varied groups of people) told me that he and the MMA fighter had been talking as we walked back from the bar. The MMA guy was apparently like "so I guess these guys have just never hung out with any athletes?" Turns out it isn't that abnormal for them to like cool and nerdy stuff.
Even though I felt pretty dumb, that was a good experience for me as a person. My whole life I've been a pretty accepting and nice person, and my intelligence has never really made me feel superior to other people. I guess to that point those qualities made me feel like I couldn't possibly be prejudiced or biased because hey, I don't actively hold any hostile or condescending beliefs. But that showed me that my own ignorance was sufficient for me to classify some guy I knew almost nothing about and put him in a box, a guy I liked perfectly well and never had a bad thought about. It's a tough thing to be aware of but I think has made me a little more skeptical and humble, which I'm glad for.
Yeah, stereotypes are a bitch. BUT - if one gets stereotyped enough, after a while s/he’s probably developed some coping mechanism to actually leverage it into an advantage (I know I do). So don’t feel too bad - it might well be that the guy uses that sort of conversation precisely to gauge his audience.
(It makes a lot of sense that pro athletes are in gaming, btw: it’s competitive and it’s something that can be done during long downtimes between training sessions, or lonely hotel nights away from home. If you follow any twitter feed of pros, from football to f1, sooner or later you’ll see plenty of posts about games.)
With games its been ubiquitous culture for a couple of decades now. It frankly staggers me that stereotype is something people actually still think is a thing.
Just for context this was about a decade ago. Games were definitely more popular than in that past, but I remember it was well before the time I first remember seeing League of Legends on ESPN and being like "ok nerds are unequivocally mainstream now." But yeah it was pretty silly even by the standards of then.
I'm on the cusp of 40 and even in my youth (in the UK) videogames were ubiquitous. LoL appearing on ESPN is basically that ubiquity catching up with people no longer watching ESPN.
You can leverage the negative ones too. They can be used to let people underestimate you, gaining the element of surprise at later stage; or to look more threatening than you actually are.
It's not a moral thing. It's called inductive learning. We classify people and things based on our past experiences. The more experiences you have the better the inductive method works.
It's good to learn about black swans, else you might make the incorrect logical conclusion that swans are ALWAYS white. And more importantly learn that "black swans" is not only about swans. There can be sports-types who also like intellectual activity
>> The MMA guy was apparently like "so I guess these guys have just never hung out with any athletes?" Turns out it isn't that abnormal for them to like cool and nerdy stuff.
> "black swans" is not only about swans. There can be sports-types who also like intellectual activity
The gp's experience taught that such sports-types are not black swans. It's not just that the stereotype had exceptions; it's that the stereotype wasn't even accurate at low granularity.
Maybe the quote I used was too long. I'll shorten it to just the part that shows it's more than a single case, and add caps to emphasize it was more than ONE exception.
>>"so I guess these guys have just NEVER hung out with ANY athletes?" Turns out it ISN'T THAT ABNORMAL FOR THEM to like cool and nerdy stuff.
Yeah I wasn't really trying to cast it as a "moral" issue, so sorry if it came across that way. I guess my point is that in general, to the extent possible, I'd like to get to know people for who they are and not the pictures I have in my head. I feel like my thinking will be more accurate and my life experience more rich that way. I oversold a little bit how "embarrassing" it was. I wasn't deeply ashamed or anything, like I had done something unforgivable, it's just a little embarrassing to lose your mind with excitement about something that actually isn't all that rare. Rather than sharing an enthusiasm I kind of just exposed my own ignorance. I also think it created a tiny wall between me and the MMA guy because I'm sure on his side it's like "ok these guys don't get it / think I'm some kind of weird anomaly, maybe we should move on to something else." I still hung out with the guy a bunch of times after that so it's not like there were bad feelings, but I still feel like it would have helped the conversation and friendship if I had been a little less credulous towards my own assumptions.
As someone who did sport and hung out with sport types a lot, they always played computer games. I mean, you have to be deep in a bubble to think that people who do sport are either a.) invariably dumb b.) do not play computer games.
> There can be sports-types who also like intellectual activity
Quite a lot of them, to the point of such people not being exceptional black swans at all. That is what the MMA fighter commented on - the only way to be surprised over him playing computer games is that you dont talk to athletes at all.
I agree, what is nerdy has changed since last millennium. It is not nerdy any more to use a computer just for fun, because everybody is doing it. Social media, online SPORTS-gaming etc.
People are complex. For example, Carmack is a high level Judoka. Half the people in my BJJ classes work as programmers, and would be considered ‘nerds’.
I think it’s a direct result of failing to understand other people. A lot of nerd culture is about instant gratification at the expense of everything else. That’s objectively poor decision making, but also makes other people’s actions seem dumb by comparison.
This thread kind of illustrates the point it was making.
The readers of Hacker News are a part of "nerd culture." The author of XKCD is part of "nerd culture" and makes comics out of themes that are common in "nerd culture." Popular themes are often a part of a post that becomes popular on Hacker News. Unsurprisingly, this theme was captured at some point by the nerd of XKCD, and now it is shared here.
It's like... we're all thinking alike (while reveling in how unique we are!)
I thought you were being too harsh, and then I read the essay. Sheesh.
One of the conventions he really adopts here is binary thinking. He's created an enormous false dichotomy, and then decided he and his in-group are 100% on the correct side of it. Another convention is the commanding, voice-of-God essay that has now finally answered an important question. As if things like this ever have one answer. And as you suggest, at this point he's promoting a "nerds >> normies" ideology that may have been novel in the mid-80s, but now seems hopelessly stale to this nerd.
And I think that leads him to write what is just a poor essay on the topic. These days good a chunk of the independence in my thinking comes from things like humility, self-awareness, and empathy. Maybe at 18 the best strategy for independent thinking is to ignore others. But somebody not much younger than Graham, the biggest threat to my clarity of thought is getting high on my own bullshit. It's getting locked into ideas and beliefs that are comfortable or convenient. It's that thinking myself independent of others is the only kind of independence needed.
Of course, I'm lucky in that since I'm not nearly as successful as Graham, I don't have the same kind of incentive to justify my success in terms of me being a unique, superior genius.
Agreed. He obfuscates his point behind emotionally pompous British semantics.
His orthodox of privilege was obviously a public lovers quarrel with Thiel (who was, around the same time, also ranting like a god-headed buffoon in essays to the tune of “the rubes need masters! villainous cackle” on blogs around the web).
They have little information advantage, except in the form of ephemeral financial capital. Human tradition states “rich person = extra special” so we rubberneck at them.
Beneath the pretentious veneer it’s contemporary businessmen. Let’s see them resolve longstanding issues in society and science.
Wagging business success in the face of people who weren’t born yet isn’t terribly novel and their real output isn’t that useful to the future.
It seems to me that claiming you’re independent-minded is sort of like claiming you’re a genius. You’re not supposed to make this claim yourself. Graham doesn’t make this claim explicitly, but by writing about this subject he makes it implicitly.
How do you avoid making this claim? I think it’s to remember the the trap of fundamental attribution error. People are not always independent-minded or always conformist. They may think independently about some subjects and conform to conventional wisdom for others.
This provides more room for modesty - maybe I was able to think independently about some subject, that one time, or a few times, but certainly not consistently on all subjects. Having some experience might make it reasonable to write about it, with suitable caveats.
So, essays often start out with some kind of explanation of the author’s qualifications, sometimes written as a sort of half-apology to the reader for presuming to write as an expert when you are still learning.
We might also remember the lesson of counter-cultures, which is that rejecting mainstream beliefs more easily happens with the help of other people who believe differently. This makes it more difficult to tell where you stand, since everyone feels like they are being non-conformist in some way. When people are divided then it’s inevitable that you will disagree with some. (Nerd culture is a counter-culture that has become mainstream in some ways, though there are less popular aspects of it.)
Conventional wisdom is also relative to which culture you are talking about. That’s what culture is, an agglomeration of ideas about the best way to do thousands of different things. When you move to a different place, it’s quite possible to get caught between cultures inadvertently and not have any community that thinks quite like you do.
> It seems to me that claiming you’re independent-minded is sort of like claiming you’re a genius. You’re not supposed to make this claim yourself. Graham doesn’t make this claim explicitly, but by writing about this subject he makes it implicitly.
I think that is one reason to react against the essay, but not really.
My problem is fundamentally that it seems like, with the rise of VC worship (I really don't know what else to call it), people now take the pseudo-sociological observations of their VC heroes as fact or at least very close to fact.
Given that we're pretty incredibly shitty at social sciences, even when trying to do it rigorously, I don't understand why I would start giving strong weight to someone who is just pondering in a wall of text about sociological phenomenons/models that I have no reason to believe are how the world actually works.
I’m too isolated to say how many people engage in “VC-worship” but in any case, I don’t believe this is limited to VC’s? Confident explanations of social issues are everywhere and there are other popular authors of them.
> PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity.
If your first reaction reading this essay is "PG is trying to big himself up as an independent thinker", that tells me more about your attitude and mental state than about PG.
Forgive the cliche, but "great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people" is a decent heuristic, with good reason. Once you start seeing attempts to communicate as status contests automatically, you're not in a useful frame of mind for rational discourse any more.
The problem with a comment like this is that there's no detailed rebuttal. What you've given here is more of an aloof dismissal which is implicitly judgmental. If you're willing to bucket peoples' minds into greatness or smallness based on a single observation of their message board activity, how is your response substantively different from the thing it's criticizing?
This is to say that I reject the premise; your comment would put a chilling effect on frankly discussing other people, as though the only way to do so is through irrationality and gossip. People can critically discuss other people in an intelligent way without having "small minds", and you shouldn't attempt to infer a person's overall "mental state" from this kind of commentary, in my opinion.
> how is your response substantively different from the thing it's criticizing?
That is a fair criticism. I still think there is a difference in degree between (A) reading a long, thoughtful article and responding with unkind speculations about the author, and (B) reading such speculation that has little content in it and responding in turn with unkind speculations about the comment's author; but only a difference of degree, not of kind, I admit.
> your comment would put a chilling effect on frankly discussing other people, as though the only way to do so is through irrationality and gossip.
The proverb I quoted would do that, sure, which is why it's explicitly marked as only a decent (not excellent) heuristic. There are honest, thoughtful ways to go about discussing and criticizing people. Speculations and borderline conspiracy theories are not among them.
Citing the ad hominem fallacy is pretty reductive; in dialectics there are plenty of occasions where the identity of an arguer is relevant to their argument. The internet's obsession with calling out this fallacy has sucked all the formal nuance out of its rhetorical usage.
It also doesn't apply here, because the grandparent comment is not trying to refute PG's argument, it's mounting an entirely orthogonal one. So yes, I do agree it's not directly discussing the content. But that's also pretty characteristic of most HN threads.
People on HN usually talk about the ideas they have which are evoked by the article. They do not as a rule engage in formal refutation or advocation of the article's core thesis, unless it's very technical in nature.
I don't really agree with the OP, but that's not true. It's a quote which discusses people as a category in the abstract, which is to say it discusses the idea of people and their behavior. As much as I'd like to dunk on the quote like this, it is consistent :)
My interpretation of the quote has always been that discussing people means something along the lines of gossip, i.e. specific people. That being said I think there's a clear difference between simple gossip and critical discussion of others, which can be very intellectually elevated.
If you initiate a public dialogue with someone specifically for the purpose of making a show of rejecting the possibility of engaging in any dialogue with them, forgiveness of clichés is IMO a big ask.
That heuristic is a very antiquated mindset that largely just measures one’s relationship with formal education. One can be a great mind and never discuss “grand ideas”, simply because he’s too busy helping himself to the content of your metaphorical pockets.
I don't see the point of the essay as how brilliant of an independent thinker he is, or even that being an independent thinker makes you a better person.
The essay is useful because has specific tactical points on how to think better: questioning whether a statement you hear is true, or watching how other people find their beliefs.
What do you think people should be doing more in the world? Or mental habits people should have?
IMO Voltairine de Cleyre[0] phrased this notion much better in this essay about Anarchism[1] in the first few paragraphs.
She starts with describing two essential spirits, one being conservative and steady, the other one being progressive and unpredictable. It becomes clear these spirits both inhabit everyone in some way or another and society reflects that as a whole as well.
On a personal level, it gets complicated really fast. People as I know them usually cannot be categorized as easily into one or the other. Some people appear as unconventional and free thinkers, but are set in their ways in many areas, and vice versa. And then it also depends very much on the situation, the atmosphere and so on. Someone who appears timid at first, sometimes just needs a nudge to open up and go bonkers.
So I feel like the notion that you can divide people into these categories is very reductionist.
What I find useful however is balancing the creative/progressive aspect (or spirit) with the conservative/steady one, and not just balancing but letting them guide oneself them deliberately, dependent on context.
John Cleese did a inspirational and funny talk[2] about this subject, that I found quite useful, because he suggests a practical framework to nurture the creative side deliberately.
Similarly, there is this talk[3] from Rich Hickey that describes the notion of giving oneself enough time to think deeply about problems. It relates to the above in the sense that he also acknowledges passive/subconscious mechanisms of our mind.
>She starts with describing two essential spirits, one being conservative and steady, the other one being progressive and unpredictable. It becomes clear these spirits both inhabit everyone in some way or another and society reflects that as a whole as well.
Reminds me a bit of the Catalonian characteristics of Seny (wisdom or sensibleness) and Rauxa (sudden determination or action):
I think PG writes well, thinks clearly, and occasionally has some very good essays.
But I do get the sense that he's trying really hard to show how deep a thinker he is. (I'm not sure if this has always been the case, or it's a new thing.) His tweets are particularly cringey, but I still follow him because of the occasional nugget.
It's a clever cultural move. Instead of actually being "the independent thinkers", you simply brand yourselves as such. You get to feel unique and wise without all that fuss of actually being unique or having wisdom.
I don't want to veer too far into politics, but suffice to say, if the institutions of power in your society hold the same values as you, you aren't the "counterculture", no matter how much you claim to be.
You put your finger on why I felt compelled to unfollow PG on Twitter. I kept waiting for him to hit me with valuable insights that rarely showed up. I took the time to learn Lisp because of PG and was underwhelmed. I bet Lisp was amazing 40 years ago; now it just seemed like a fetish for parenthesis to me. Lispy and functional ideas have moved into the brace block languages I've been using the last 20 years.
I don't have an MBA but I think you're vastly overestimating the information density of these essays. Or maybe MBAs are really just that vacuous, I don't know.
PG has wrote some really great essays (the Submarine Article, anyone?). I've read all of them, some of them many times. But if I'm being completely honest, lately it feels like he's writing to write instead of writing because he has something genuinely new and insightful to say.
PG does have a good, prescriptive insight here: you should constantly question what the truth is in a manner of detached concern. You could more concisely call it dispassionate skepticism.
But take away all the dressing about conventionality and thinking in ways others don't, and drill down into that one idea. That would be a great essay.
You got it. There's some technical information for, you know, administering business, like doing CFO and COO, stuff but the main purpose for "famous" MBAs is to make friends you can do deals with.
Somewhat more charitably, I think he’s writing about very basic things, which a different skill than writing about new and exciting things. Such essays are more useful to some people than others.
It's not that harsh. He wrote some good things in the past, but his recent essays are very simple minded and anti-scientific. You can't categorize people like you are in a middle school and be taken seriously, human behavior is very complex, no one can be "conventional- or independent-minded", it's always both simultaneously or rather neither, as those ideas don't describe human behavior even to a slightest degree. I get that in the US people are used to the idea of classifying everyone into simple buckets, given how political propaganda there divides people into classes, like democrats and republicans, etc., so pg is comfortable with such idea, but it doesn't make it less of a nonsense.
I disagree, I don't think PG has to struggle to stay relevant. He remains a towering figure in venture capital across the country, and in essentially all of private equity on the West coast in particular.
Yeah, you're right he is still relevant to that specific but small crowd. A crowd that might be described as having similar flaws to PG.
Maybe it would have been more accurate for me to say "culturally relevant". He is increasingly seen by younger people, even engineering types, as out of touch and tone deaf. And too many of his recent essays feel like they are a reaction to that. So much patting himself on the back about how the crowds are wrong and he as such an independent thinker has got it right - and so little vulnerability. My gut tells me that he is trying a little too hard to convince himself and others.
He'd be a far better essayist if he were more like Johnny Cash at the end of his life and less like Liam Gallagher.
> much patting himself on the back about how the crowds are wrong and he as such an independent thinker has got it right - and so little vulnerability
I think that "great man" theories of success are sort of dying out among newer generations. Perhaps I've met enough "great men" to realize how large of a factor luck is after a certain threshold point.
The same old stuff just plays differently now that he's semi retired and not building his VC brand by recruiting nerds to sell him stakes in their companies.
>PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity.
In recent years conformists have gotten louder and louder, and more and more insistent that everyone should conform.
His recent essays are his reaction to that.
It would be a strategically bad response for someone of lesser stature, but in his place he can afford to weather the storm and it's valuable for the tiny, narrow target audience of this essay to hear.
Well, as a toy model to compare to reality to see if it improves your insight into how societal changes happen, I guess. And if it doesn't, you can discard it.
But if you entertain it, it suggests that sudden shifts in culture (acceptance of gay marriage, for example) proceed along the boundaries of social groups, where people are influenced by both their closest friends and family and the prevailing external "field", until they "flip their poles" and align with the neighbouring domain, at which point it becomes more likely that their other friends and family will do the same, and so on.
> PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity.
For somebody praising non-conformity the idea of the superiority of the "independent thinker" is a pretty conventional idea. It dates in written form at least back to Plato's philosopher king [1]. You can guess the idea is a lot older than that. There does not seem to be a lot of evidence it leads to better overall outcomes than other, more inclusive approaches. Big successes in human affairs tend to involve getting a lot of people aligned around specific goals.
> Right now Silicon Valley VC thinking is the dominant ideology
Are you sure? Are you talking about the US? And even then it's probably true for only ~half of the states? Are you talking about the business world? The whole of EU seems to strongly disagree with SV VC thinking.
Edit: Why doesn't the EU replicate the success of US startups? You think EU policy makers don't understand what is needed for that? Or that there's not enough "talent"? I doubt it. I think it's a more or less conscious decision to avoid the US startup culture. It's a cultural thing.
> Are you talking about the business world? The whole of EU seems to strongly disagree with SV VC thinking.
The US is dominant in the Western business world, things that become popular business practices here get ported over to the EU.
I think it's pretty clear that if it is not dominant, it is sharply ascendant in the past 5 years. HN commentators and certain segments of Twitter basically worship at the feet of successful VCs.
>>Edit: Why doesn't the EU replicate the success of US startups? You think EU policy makers don't understand what is needed for that? Or that there's not enough "talent"? I doubt it. I think it's a more or less conscious decision to avoid the US startup culture. It's a cultural thing.
If it is indeed a cultural thing, I would argue that they have also thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
Example: here is a very curious thing about the GDPR - non-European countries cannot really put a "counter-tariff" (metaphorically speaking) because nothing that useful has actually come out of Europe to tariff in retort. We did see some comical efforts of some websites to block the entire continent of Europe, but what would have been actually interesting is if non-European countries could block, say, the Google of Europe. Europeans had no skin in this game so to speak, because they haven't actually produced anything at that level of utility for a long time.
Note: I am neither American nor European, and my country has done almost nothing of note either. But I am not going to say that "oh, we don't need all that SV shit because as a culture, we think it is beneath us".
Well, PG very probably is an independent thinker. I enjoy his examinations what makes people like him different from other people, and while this essay may sound like a rehash of his other essays, it isn't. It was genuinely surprising to me (and also obvious in hindsight) that people separate into independently-minded and conventionally-minded and that this determines what work they should be looking for. I mean, this is advice that is about as actionable as advice will ever get. Beware that there are strong forces that will tempt you to act against this advice, and make you doubt yourself.
How to complain about PC thought police without getting lynched — verbose timidity from the mildly conservative libertarian with too much to lose. By Paul Thiel.
There is a large socialist/anti-capitalist/woke movement on Twitter and a somewhat in the real world as well. I assume PG would like to call all those people out directly. But he cannot because in the current media and social climate the news summary will read:
"Older White SV Billionaire living in England tells poor American minorities to stop complaining because their politics would lead to an economy with less innovation."
I don't think he is wrong. Some of these very progressive goals can have unintended consequence, but he isn't in a position where he can say those things due to his professional and personal expectations which he has to conform to.
What are those unintended consequences of progressive goals that he can't say out loud? I assume you're an independent thinker who can spell them out for us.
AB 5 in California is the best example I can think of. It would have been a disaster for workers in most if not all affected businesses; it had to start with dozens of exemptions, and AB 2257 a few months ago added a dozen more. But because AB 5 was written towards the well-meaning progressive goal of good pay and benefits for workers, it's most likely going to stay there, and "lobby the legislature for an AB 5 exemption" will just become part of the cost for building a new industry sector in California.
I don't claim to be an independent thinker. That sounds like a false dichotomy to me. The consequence would be that the Twitter mobs would go after YC and YC companies asking them to cut ties with PG
If that's true then this essay is hilarious. Independent thinkers are the ones adhering to the capitalist status quo rather than the people trying to challenge it?
I knew how I felt when I read this essay, but I couldn’t quite put it into words, even in my mind.
Then I arrived here in the comment section and discovered your refreshingly accurate comment; I knew, immediately, that I did not need to have my own “independent” thought, because you summarized my feelings perfectly.
I was put off by the essay so much; seeing your comment at the top gives me hope.
> This entire thing reads like it was torn from the journal of a clever middle-schooler who thinks he's so much more clever then the world.
This point really undermines your argument. I see this kind of response a lot, particularly on the left to people like PG (who I have mixed opinions of) when they have the audacity to write about something they don't have qualifications in (such as economics), or when you just don't like what he's saying on an emotional level. "Oh he thinks he's so clever" is just a childish insult, you're not refuting his central point. You're also second guessing him.
> pretending to be a deep thinker:
This is just an insult. PG clearly reads more than most and is a thoughtful writer.
The distinction between independent-mindedness and conventional-mindedness is captured more correctly I think by a trait called politeness as defined here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5863998_Between_Fac... Independent-mindness would be similar to low politeness (coupled with high openness, but I'll ignore that for now), and those people would be more likely to be like this than not:
* Make enemies.
* Oppose authority.
* Believe that I am better than others.
* Seek danger.
* Put people under pressure.
* Try to outdo others.
* Believe only in myself.
* Impose my will on others.
* Love a good fight.
* Seek conflict.
* Think too highly of myself.
* Tell tall stories about myself.
* Play tricks on others.
* Enjoy crude jokes.
* [Comment loudly about others.]
* [Enjoy being reckless.]
* [Do dangerous things.]
You get the point. In my opinion, you don't really get to be independent-minded without the negatives that come with it. For instance, most conspiracy theorists are highly independent-minded people. They definitely reject authority, and they're highly curious and contrarian about established narratives.
This recent small debate I found on Twitter is a good illustrative example of it. https://twitter.com/ModeledBehavior/status/13280235538249932... The account in question (https://twitter.com/toad_spotted) was someone who got the pandemic right earlier than most people, so conventional-minded people followed it because it was a good source of information about the virus overall. But now that another situation has come up where independent-mindedness can also show itself to be useful (and potentially right), conventional-minded people will dislike it, just like they disliked it when the outcome of the virus wasn't yet known.
I felt like mentioning this because I feel like there's a lack of appreciation for how exactly the negative aspects of independent-mindedness manifest themselves in real life, and without that appreciation for the negatives of it I think it's easy to misjudge how independent-minded someone actually is and to also misjudge people who are more independent-minded than you because they seem more difficult to get along with.
> For instance, most conspiracy theorists are highly independent-minded people.
I agree with Graham's take that conspiracy minded people are not independent minded at all. They just have a different group whose authority they accept without question.
Very few conspiracy minded people come up with the conspiracies they believe in entirely on their own, or deeply investigate to find out if the conspiracy is true. They just latch on to a conspiracy someone else articulated and accept it unquestioningly.
We just disagree then. In my view, most conspiracy theorists actually deeply investigate if the conspiracy is true, they just don't have the tools, knowledge or intelligence necessary to rebuke the arguments themselves so they believe the conspiracy is true. This is more work than most people do when faced with any kind of claim from an authoritative source.
The main reason some conspiracies get more "believers" than others, in my opinion, is because they're contrarian signals, so they'll attract contrarian people, and like with anything, most people will only explore the surface level stuff because that's enough for their contrarian itches.
The twitter example seems more like those Nobel prize winners that later reconvert to crackpots.
I definitely agree that conspiracy theorists reject authority and are contrarian, but most don't strike me as curious except for a superficial level.
That said, I would agree with the general idea that independent minded people can be less approachable, mainly due to the fact that they do not "need" anyone and people like to feel useful.
As for the list of things those people may or may not enjoy, the sheer amount of things polled and the small sample size give me doubts.
>The twitter example seems more like those Nobel prize winners that later reconvert to crackpots.
That's the point. They were always "crackpots". You need to be a crackpot to generate ideas that people aren't generating, otherwise everyone would generate them. This means you'll generate wrong ideas, but it also means you'll generate right ideas that people think are wrong.
>I definitely agree that conspiracy theorists reject authority and are contrarian, but most don't strike me as curious except for a superficial level.
They are definitely more curious than most people, as evidenced by the fact that they were attracted to the conspiracy theory in the first place. It's also not uncommon for an intelligent conspiracy theorist to be able to outargue a conventional person on a subject they care about, i.e. the Earth being flat or not.
>As for the list of things those people may or may not enjoy, the sheer amount of things polled and the small sample size give me doubts.
I think this field is pretty well established and this paper in particular is well cited, so among peers it doesn't seem to be contentious.
I think it's quite tragic that you got downvoted in a thread about independent thinking. Seriously people, you might disagree with his point, but it's very independent, has a lot of substance compared to all other comments, provides links.
The physical separation of Lockheed's Skunk Works may have had this as a side benefit.
That mindset produced the big corporate labs of the 1950s to 1970s - Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM Research, Sarnoff Labs, the Department of Energy labs, the NASA centers, etc. They got impressive results. But in time, they stagnated, working hard on the wrong problems. You have to have a well defined goal to make that work.
Of course, at the other extreme, we have the brogrammers making webcrap. "Agile" is not likely to lead to independent thinking. It's a system for keeping nose to grindstone.
We're seeing a very strong push towards political conformity, but it's bipolar. On one side, we have groups where saying there are only two genders can get you fired. On the other side, we have groups which think whatever Trump said today is gospel. This is not getting us anywhere useful.
Only one of those sides has children in substantial numbers, so this polarity will sort itself out over longer time scales. As somebody living next to a primary school in a very progressive city I already see this in a big way!
Is this article about defining a term independent-minded which is strongly related to curious and a lot more talk about some aspects of the life and ideas of an independent-minded nerd?
As an inventor holding over 70 patents, I often get asked "can you teach me to be innovative?" My answer is that you already are but you have been taught not to be. It is not that you need to learn to be innovative you have to unlearn to be compliant. School, military, most big companies all have many rules and expectations which essentially train the innovativeness out of people. I agree it is in human nature to be innovative and creative, you just have to find ways to unleash your inner inventor.
Empirical testing is the only way to think about anything.
Epidemiology is the way to pluck randomised trials from peoples lived lifestyles
As such all the decisions we make in life have been made by billions of others before us - more than enough to tease out the "best" outcomes.
This is Inthink truly the golden egg of the age of surveillance - you can think for yourself, but back test against a million exactly the same decisions made by a million others - and decide if their outcomes are what we want
Had dinner with some randoms tonight in a lesser known corner of China. Although we were in a small place and the bill for 6 people was perhaps $150, it turned out one of them was a (foreign) billionaire. He took an interest in our venture and we made dinner plans tomorrow. One of the topics of conversation: resistance of crowd mentality and thinking for yourself. YMMV.
that's what conventional-thinking people do. independent-thinking people don't want to fit in, they instead gather followers (other conventional-thining) to follow them
> You see this pattern with startup founders too. You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't
I immediately thought of Drew DeVault's initiatives...
It seems to me that throughout the essay Paul Graham keeps undermining his own claims. Early on he states:
> Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture.
Subsequently he starts giving advice about how to make yourself more independently-minded:
> Can you make yourself more independent-minded? I think so. This quality may be largely inborn, but there seem to be ways to magnify it, or at least not to suppress it.
> But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to, and to think of more.
> You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is to cultivate an attitude of skepticism.
etc.
Only to come back to claims about the strength of certain natural tendencies:
> I don't think we can significantly increase our resistance to being told what to think. It seems the most innate of the three components of independent-mindedness; people who have this quality as adults usually showed all too visible signs of it as children.
> Everyone I know who's independent-minded is deeply curious, and everyone I know who's conventional-minded isn't. Except, curiously, children. All small children are curious. Perhaps the reason is that even the conventional-minded have to be curious in the beginning, in order to learn what the conventions are.
I guess the overall takeaway would be that intellectual independence is primarily innate, but can be cultivated with targeted effort.
Personally I find this view unconvincing, or at least not well specified. I suspect early care and environment play a much larger role than biology in developing one's intellectual attitudes, as well as personality.
To the extent to which there are genuinely biological factors involved, I would have been really curious to see more concrete evidence of what those factors might be.
Nevertheless, the article is sprinkled with nuggets of useful advice or insight, such as the following:
> If you later find yourself in a situation that makes you think "this is like high school," you know you should get out.
> try to meet as many different types of people as you can. It will decrease the influence of your immediate peers if you have several other groups of peers. Plus if you're part of several different worlds, you can often import ideas from one to another.
> You can expand the source of influences in time as well as space, by reading history.
> When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?"
> unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking.
Yes, he just paraphrased the agreeableness trait of the OCEAN/Big Five personality model here. His nature/nurture musing are off the mark, though: Of the five traits agreeableness has the lowest heritability with about 42%.
The curiosity part he mixed in would be opennes to experience, with about 57% heritability.
Sad state of affairs that people need to be thought how to think for themselves. It's unnatural and only a product of the current educational systems. Greek philosophers were able to do a lot of great work over 2 thousand years ago.
Greek philosophers whose works are still being read today are probably not a representative sample. It's tempting to look back at a few exceptional people from past societies, compare them with typical people from ours, and find our society lacking -- but this isn't a fair comparison.
"It matters a lot who you surround yourself with. If you're surrounded by conventional-minded people, it will constrain which ideas you can express, and that in turn will constrain which ideas you have. But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to, and to think of more."
This is the exact opposite of my experience. My independent-mindedness happens the most as a reaction to being surrounded by too much groupthink. On the other hand, when I'm surrounded by people who are already having plenty of crazy ideas, they begin to feel a bit tiresome to me, and I don't feel the need to have any of my own.
This reminded me of a different article by Scott Alexander which also addresses the topic of certain ventures like the stock market and job interviewing being “anti-inductive” aka resistant to formulas that worked in the past. You could say that successful independent thinking is also a highly anti-inductive activity.
"To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet."
Oof, first paragraph and he's entirely wrong. That's rough.
One of the most worrisome aspects of the world's take on science lately is that reproduction of published results is considered the work of dullards and thus unworthy of funding.
By definition, reproduction of results is not novel, and yet it is (or at least really should be) one of the single most crucial aspects of a shared scientific method.
In fairness, PG's statement there is correct if you consider it descriptively rather than prescriptively, for exactly the reason you outlined in your comment. As a positive statement of fact about the current ethos of science it's correct. Less so if you interpret it as a normative imperative.
What? What he says is completely right. You can keep verifying other people's work, you can verify that bad ideas not work, but these approaches will not get you published. What you're saying would be true in an ideal world, but it's not true in today's academic world.
There is some really, really good advice in here for those folks who might be struggling with identity and self-valuation in today's excessively connected culture. There are a couple of indelicate points, however, that I think bear addressing.
"Independent-mindedness" is a very, very leaky abstraction. It is certainly not a scalar quantity (as Paul seems to suggest), nor is it something one is born with. At best, it is a measurement of distance from the cultural mean, and culture is n-dimensional.
Culture is also contextual. Paul trades a little paint with this concept but fails to impact it fully. If you're trying to expand your understanding of the world (and consequently your ability to reason about it, which will help you think for yourself), one of the best things you can do is to travel / move / change jobs / insert contextual mix-up here.
He touches on some qualities adjacent to these concepts with stunningly good advice. Think for yourself. Be curious. Ask what's missing. Step back and see how people think. However, he notably avoids giving a name to one of the most important components of curiosity; that of humility. He talks around it quite a bit - but somehow misses calling it out explicitly. This feels like the kind of thing that someone of his considerable success might take a little for granted. Not that he doesn't have it himself, I cannot make an assessment as to that one way or the other.
This leads me to one of the things I found most dissonant about this piece; Paul absolutely nails it when he talks about having sovereignty over your thoughts. In the context of an article that's about "how to make it". Pressure to succeed financially or to gain social recognition is one of the most deleterious forces to a diverse culture of thought. Forgive me for getting a little political here, but IMHO it's the core reason that capitalism has an upper bound. Fiscal incentives are by their nature (and design) reductive.
From there, I have a couple of other, relatively minor, gripes. I'm as uncomfortable as many of the rest of you with how specific the prescriptions for "thinking for yourself" get. Furthermore, the idea that you have to insulate yourself against those who are different from you (even if you perceive that difference to be I'm weird and they're not) is fundamentally antithetical to expanding your worldview.
That being said, if you're struggling with feeling like the world is trying to put you in a box, the things Paul suggests here are helpful: Indulge your curiosity. Don't hang out with people who get down on you for being you. Humor and ingenuity are sibling concepts. Don't participate in intellectual fashion.
Most importantly, don't let people tell you how to think.
This essay would have been stronger had pg explored where people choose to be conventional vs independent, rather than make it an identity-based dichotomy between independent / conventional.
As it stands, this essay will cause people to insert themselves in the piece along the way rather than consider from a distance what is being discussed. This is especially true since one of the options is framed as the 'good' one, which triggers our innate confirmation bias - of the aspects we recognize in ourselves, we see the 'good' ones loud and clear, while we downplay or ignore the 'bad'. The takeaway of the piece for most is 'I'm an independent thinker' with perhaps some brief acknowledgement of 'but I've had to do conventional things'. Just evoking Dunning-Kruger doesn't innoculate against this conclusion.
One of my favorite quotes is "Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work" by Gustave Flaubert. This is, in effect, and similar but distinct thesis from pg's - that people choose to spend time & energy being 'independent thinkers' in certain domains of life, while hewing to convention elsewhere. Of course, different people do this to different degrees, but that's really where this exploration is most interesting - where, when, and how should I be an independent thinker?.
One of my favorite activities when getting to know someone is to find the part of their being that is the independent thinker - what hidden rebellions they posses, where those came from, etc. Almost every reasonably smart person I've met has had some independent or unconventional aspect to them if you look close enough, even if they're outwardly very conventional. It's finding these gems and learning from them that makes getting to know someone so much fun. To his credit pg does mention something similar when discussing learning from people.
The other reason I like Gustave's quote is that it suggests much more of a choice and strategy in the matter of independence, while leaving open what set of circumstances that led to the 'violent and original' aspect of independent thought. This rings more true to me, because independent thinking has a personal cost when dealing with others, and we must engage with others in life. Reasoning from first principles or holding unpopular beliefs cost us energy (for different people this energy is more or less felt), and Gustave's point is to focus those limited energies on our creative work where they are more productively employed.
Having studied psych, bio, and education I'm sensitive to arguments that pontificate about whether something is 'more nature than nurture', especially from those with very technical and deterministic mindsets. To me, this is lazy thinking and convenient shorthand for 'I don't really know how people come to know things'. It's even contradicted by his own admission that his father gave him a strong dose of one of the three parts of being an independent thinker. Because we have such an overwhelming amount of evidence about how different environments shape people's beliefs and actions, when presented with nature/nurture arguments about loose concepts like 'independent thinking' my take is the burden of proof is on those claiming nature. [1]
Nonetheless, I did enjoy the essay and its analysis. Many parts rung true or rhymed with my own experiences as a founder and early employee. For instance, the increasing conventionality of later employees you hire. But again pg gets close but misses an important nuance - the environment of a startup at founding or early on inspires more independent thinking because it's a blank sheet where people have a great deal of agency, while the environment of a startup after product market fit is a more conventional environment with constraints that drive conventional action. Thus, most people thrust into an early stage environment are going to become more 'independent thinking' by virtue of the environment and visa-versa in late stage environments.
Anyway, it was an enjoyable read regardless, and clearly inspired some quality discussion.
[1] A great example of this is the rise of violent crime in the 70s and 80s. A person then may come to the conclusion that man's nature is much more violent, when in fact the root cause is an excess of lead in the environment disrupting neurological development. This is an extreme 'near nature' argument but worth considering how little we understand our environments effect on us. https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le...
The unconventional independent minded people on HN are the people who are banned and voted down.
While this group of people includes individual with new ideas, it also includes flat earthers. The same emotional confidence that allows you to have revolutionary ideas is the same one that allows you to be a flat earther.
If you posted your idea on HN and you find that the idea is voted up by a lot? It means a lot of people agree with you, the thought is therefore not independent or unconventional. Does your post get voted down? Well it's pretty much by definition a very independent idea.
In general, unconventional independent minded people fight an uphill battle.
Someone who is already an independent thinker doesn't need this advice though. However someone who is a dependent thinker who see Paul as an authority figure could maybe listen a bit and become a tiny bit more independent than he were before.
It's not. We also teach teachers how to teach, for instance. No one is born with all their skills and knowledge. Critical (or independent) thinking is a skill just like any other.
> The second component of independent-mindedness, resistance to being told what to think, is the most visible of the three. But even this is often misunderstood. The big mistake people make about it is to think of it as a merely negative quality. The language we use reinforces that idea. You're unconventional. You don't care what other people think. But it's not just a kind of immunity. In the most independent-minded people, the desire not to be told what to think is a positive force. It's not mere skepticism, but an active delight in ideas that subvert the conventional wisdom, the more counterintuitive the better.
I've found quite a lot in my career that often people mistake understanding someone elses line of thought as acceptance of such a thought. This invariantly upsets someone that to be quite frankly isn't mentally equipped (and no I not using that a euphemism for stupid, I mean they literally cannot have conversations about ideas and that maybe due to a number of reasons that have nothing to do with their intelligence) will become upset and then you end up in an argument and the conversation is derailed.
Also simply examining pre-conceptions of why a problem exists also seems to upset some. Normally because you are undermining their authority in one manner or another or they have accepted the initial pre-conception cannot be incorrect because it is normally considered to be inevitable.
I don't think there is a need for "thinking for yourself" for those to whom it doesn't come naturally.
I believe that the human population produces certain number of people with contrarian attitudes as a defense against too much conformity, which can trap the population in local maximas or even wipe it out of existence if it fails to adapt to the changes. When the natural environment is changing, there is a bigger need for contrarians because there is a possibility that the changed environment is detrimental to the population or there could be better opportunities because of the changes to the environment. However, in stable times, contrarians are a nuisance or even a threat to the stability of the society. It's much more valuable most of the time for most of the people to do what you know and keep it at that.
As a contrarian, I am fortunate enough to be in the current time and place where I'm less likely to be executed for my "wrong" views because some of it is applied in places where it is very useful and I'm a net benefit to the society. If and when things become stable again, our kind will be silenced and curbed.
I would want to have a future where it is understood that the human population is bigger than the individual... and these variations exist because it is beneficial to the the population in the long term... and these differences should be celebrated... but maybe the effort required to maintain this understanding in the population is not worth it overall over getting rid of us by silencing or executing us. So, my kind will make do by understanding that this is happening and learn to shut up and stay low until when things change and we're needed again.
Whilst I'm not convinced that this incoherent rambling is directly human-generated, I am a little intrigued. What is the point that you're trying to get across? Do you think you could sum it up in a sentence?
* Post something that is factual, but the crowd doesn't like
* Post something that is logical, but the crowd doesn't like
* Post a link to something reasonable, but that the crowd doesn't like
Just to say that Hacker News is a highly biased community. There's very little space here to discuss anything that is not "conventional" beyond some bits of technology.
When a topic touches life in general it becomes a place for political narratives associated with the establishment (meaning: left leaning), which is probably explainable due to the fact most people here work in big tech companies that have strong government ties.
I think it's still possible to go against conventional narrative on HN and get upvoted, but one needs to word one's comments with an extraordinary amount of extra care, completely stripped of sarcasm or confrontational tone, remaining objective even when under personal attack - in short, one is held to a much higher standard (in terms of quality and substance of comments) than those posting conventional opinion.
HN is worse than other sites because if a comment is downvoted early on by a handful of users, the upvote button disappears and it can’t be upvoted later by others who agree with it. So there is no way of knowing the true score of a comment if the people who dislike it found it first.
HN also literally disappears downvoted comments by making them unreadably light colored and eventually hiding them to all users who haven’t enabled the “Show Dead” setting.
No, the flagging works well for unsupported opinions (usually with quite bad discourse included) being pushed, if you feel you were flagged wrongly you can always go check with the mod team and explain why you believe your behaviour shouldn't have been flagged.
I believe that HN is one of the most open forums for dissenting opinions when those opinions are well-presented and substantiated.
He hit the nail on the head but I think the framing of the investor's objective is not complete. The search for alpha is usually not about finding ideas that everyone thinks is bad but are actually good, although that does sometimes happen. Instead it's about finding totally undiscovered perspectives that lead to new insights into the market structure, market data or underlying market mechanisms that nobody considered before. There's large numbers of Easter Eggs that need to be unlocked. It's secret knoweledge, an unknown unknown.
The world of start-ups is a little different. It's more rare to have a totally novel idea that nobody has thought of. In that space I think his framing is spot on.
Regardless, there's enough similarities that I think it's fair to group them together.
Same with his comments about science. It isn't necessary for everyone else to be wrong - you're often just adding more detail to the picture. PG paints it as some kind of zero-sum when it really isn't.
In this article, I am struck by how closely PG is echoing the developmental theory of Harvard psychologist Robert Keegan, which I first learned of from this sequence of blog posts on how to be an adult[0]. The good news: with some work we can move from the great majority of adults and have a separate identity, making our own rules (35% of the population). The bad news: only 1% of us reach the final stage of adult development, where we hold many identities and embrace paradox.
"We grow by moving more and more of what is unseen and unexamined in the way we understand the world (those things that are SUBJECT) to a place where they can be examined, questioned and changed (where they become OBJECT)."
According to Keegan, these are the most important ways to move toward stage 5 development:
* Understanding our self: Constant awareness and humility
* Sharing our self: Honest, real conversations with people we trust
* Transcending our self: Experiment with self-transcendent experiences
Seems almost every PG essay is controversial now. I got downvoted for pointing out someone was insulting him rather than criticising the essay.
Which leads me to say - I don't think HN is particularly fanboish towards PG. His recent essays have been mixed in quality, and certainly not up to Hackers and Painters (which I just reread for the third time) and I do feel that HN has thoroughly called that out. There are nuggets of wisdom but also signs of how difficult it can be to write generally when your life paths constricts you somewhat.
I really don't see a groupthink towards hero worship. Ironically, it seems the entrepreneur and nerdish need to be contrarian is at work here - looking to push back against PG, and somewhat justifiably so. And I'm sure he'd be the first to appreciate the need for that.
I knew from as far back as I can remember that I was totally different from most people. I always thought that most people were the same. I grew up stricken with independent mindedness. If you are smart enough to blend in despite having a completely different way of thinking then it would be ok but I am the kind of person who cannot hide what’s inside. It ruined my life. Most people live a life of luxury simply by the virtue of their brain. Even poor people have the ability to enjoy human connection with other people. That is luxury to me. Most people don’t even understand that something so fundamental can be absent, they don’t even know it exists as it’s own thing. Most people completely miss all the details. This essay really speaks to me.
In 2010 when I would try to explain what was going on with Tesla and who Elon musk was, literally nobody believed me, took me seriously or demonstrated any ability at all to think for themselves and come to the correct conclusion through the special combination of single minded intuition and logical deduction that is described in the essay. I noticed that people always reacted the same way, no matter where they came from, mentioning something about golf carts. There was an emotional component where when I would get close to making a breakthrough, an emotional wall would go up. This emotional wall was the same in everyone and it was a very strong pattern. Having an emotional disconnection with yourself is important to being able to believe things that are upsetting or having your world view tossed. It’s not a choice to be disconnected and for me it’s a medical thing.
Because of my insights about Tesla and other things related to my special way of thinking, I am retired. And I still say it isn’t worth it and I would give it all up to enjoy the amazing luxury of being a normal person.
I identify with both your sentiment and what PG wrote.
Going through life with this feeling of disconnection is very consuming, and can have severe consequences personally and professionally.
Time is especially unkind for independent thinkers who do not achieve what others consider success, fast enough. Being unconventional and 'creative' while young is something passable and understandable... maybe even fashionable depending on where you live. But being of the same mindset and past your thirties is not generally acceptable, unless you have show a measure of financial/professional success.
I would love to see PG write about this, if he has experience observing or living through these sentiments.
I had two of those thoughts today, that would probably get me ostracized from society if I expressed them freely.
Earlier today I overheard a teen girl with a giant behind, talking with her friend how she wants to go home and do nothing, to her obese friend, on a Friday.
Sorry but this is not how teenagers acted in the past. And its not normal that so many young people are morbidly obese, stay at home do nothings.
People are stumbling along and nobody notices how fat everyone is around here, as if its all fine, but maybe they notice but too afraid to speak up. But really its not fine, its actually pretty horrible. And is probably an indication of some sort of toxicity. Maybe like lead poisoning from lead pipes.
I also draw a line, I don't think we should be wearing space suits to live on this planet. Sorry if that means people will die from exposure to disease. But thats not the path I want humanity to take.
Independent thinkers can often come off as lacking empathy. Expressing empathy is very important in communication, especially If you want to be liked by other people. But as society, I think its crutch too. Its not that I don't think we have too much empathy. I think we use empathy to cover up problems, which can be solved. A little temporary pain, can reduce suffering in the long run.
These are pretty conventional counter sentiments online, I don't claim I independently thought of them. But you can't freely express them. Try talking about fat people at work, and report how well that goes over. After you lose your job, you might feel a little "ostracized" from society.
My point which I did not state adequately in my comment, is that obesity is huge problem, that people use empathy to cover up for.
I'll use cigarettes as an example, it wasn't until packages started showing graphic pictures of cancer, damaged lungs, and huge graphic labels and warnings. That the public/social pressure to quit, had substantial effect.
I think its misguided to put all our effort in protecting at risk individuals, when the responsibility lies with most of these people to lose weight, and strengthen their immune system.
You have to be a blind person to ignore the real authentic evidence of obesity in this country. I won't even bother to look for links to studies. Here's an article stating its 40% and higher.
I don't oppose wearing masks, as a short term strategy to reduce infection. The evidence that they work is marginal.
I have no problem wearing them, other than it may give a false sense security to at risk individuals.
But how long should we wear masks? A year, two years, a decade... ? Its very conceivable that technological innovation will take over, and cloth masks will become full-on ventilators. Which at that point really will resemble "space suits". So will wearing mandated "space suits" be a path that we want humanity to go down on?
Or will nature select out the weak, like it has done for millions of years in our evolution.
Also, "my body my choice" has to be respected at some point. If we want to save the most lives, we would really want to isolate the most at risk elderly and mandate some nation wide weight loss program.
Mandating that everyone do an hour walk, lose weight if you are obese, and put a treadmill in every classroom, would save more a lot more lives than just masks.
This essay and other's like it, without evidence or data, implies that some of us know the formula for success. I get it, the things that change convention are unconventional at first. This is the definition of unconventional. I agree with the general vector of his essay but this is just boring to me.
Here is my formula for success (in case anyone cares): Enjoy life, try to make the world better, be a good person, go towards your passions (whether for hobby or career) and cultivate relationships because that seems to be the thing people regret most when they die.
Now, let's move on to to the actual unconventional ideas and observations.