- For some cruel reason, I keep finding myself in the position of being introduced to things in their infancy (often before they are even launched), dismissing them as stupid, and then watching them become unbelievably popular. This has happened to me at least four times. Each time I vow never to call anything stupid again, and then, invariably, it happens again.
Even more interesting - to me - than this post is the predictable reaction to it on Hacker News. It's a short reflection on how the author has been immediately dismissive, and not even given the benefit of the doubt, to ideas which turned out to be greatly successful. The first reaction is to immediately dismiss any point that can be implied from the post by: comparing social startups to smoking, attacking the success of Pinterest and Vine, attacking the idea of success being an indication of anything, and attacking the markets of successful startups.
I'm not sure if it's just part of the culture or something more innate to being human, but I'm increasingly surprised at the immediate and abject dismissal and contrarianism of hacker culture. This is supposed to be a community consisting of and cultivating people who go against all odds to bring ideas to reality. But it seems they trip over themselves to be the first to shoot down any idea. I'm reminded of the comments to a post about a 9 year old girl becoming a Microsoft Certified Professional.
The author is clearly questioning his tendency to judge and reject rather than observe and question further. forwardslash adds 1. a consequence of the education of technologists and engineers. Note: my comment is just based on my own limited observations and is not intended to imply anything beyond that: I often find myself surrounded by graduates of MIT. They like to solve problems. They like also to predict problems. When it seems to me that more questions are needed to get a fuller picture, they are already engaged in imagining problems. Do you think that could be a cause?
and 2. There is a tendency in our culture to assume negative outcomes over positive ones. Imagining positive outcomes requires cognitive complexity. By cognitive complexity, I mean the definition in the second paragraph here. Consider the statement:
"The principal wants to see you in his office." --
If you are in high school and you hear that statement, who is going to think that the principal wants to see you to give you an award? Even the most praise-worthy, high-functioning, obedient student will shuffle to the principal's office grumbling, "What did I do? It's lies all lies. I didn't do anything wrong." In fact, the principal is congratulating you on an award. or You are waiting in an airport departure gate. You hear your name called to come up to the desk. You immediately assume that you've been bumped, that they over-subscribed and you have to take the next flight, etc. etc. You can barely contain your frustration. You grumble something unkind to the attendant. She says, "Calm down. We've just upgraded you to first class."But for some reason, my first reaction to their earliest attempts wasn't to give them the benefit of the doubt–it was to immediately find problems and then dismiss their ideas.
I'm not sure if it's just part of the culture or something more innate to being human
I wonder too if the tendency to make negative predictions or assume negative outcomes - to judge/reject - might be
The funny part is that "this startup is going to fail" is actually a great heuristic for winning a whole lot of bets. If one could figure out a way to place a bet against the success of each internet venture lots of money could be made. Youarenotgoingtomakeit.com each new business puts down say 100 dollars saying they will be successful in 5 years (criteria must be met) after that time we cut them a check for $1000. Most fail we pocket the money $$$ heh anyone in?
Cut the 5 years down to 1 year, lets come up with some clearly defined metrics for success and I'm in.
We need to get some real data on failure rate to make sure the house wins in aggregate. success has to be based on turning a profit.
Based merely on the business plan of YCombinator I'd say you're on the right track. Basically, Paul's idea is that if you fund 50 startups and only one of them succeeds, the money made off that one success far outweighs the loss from the 49 who failed.
I am in Wilmington well in New Hanover county (what is with the german county names in NC) I just got over a horrible plague so anytime sounds good to me. you can meet Marshy and the Baby.
I'd like that. I may be up there the early part if next week. Ill be in touch.
We also need to ensure that it's not just the motivated and talented using the site no matter what the rate of success shows.
I'm not sure if it has become more prevalent on HN, or if I have become more sensitive to it; however, I am finding myself increasingly less interested in the top comments there. I think lil is right that it has something to do with the analytical nature of engineers, but I'd say it has as much to do with predisposition as education. I had a technological education, but need to keep a foot in the arts at all times. I also believe that some solutions cannot be explained, but only understood.
I think it's a reaction to the shift in focus to startups and VC/buisness in general. Slashdot got mean[er] when that happened there, as did proggit. HN was always there. Anecdotally, I and most of my coworkers get grouchier when we have to spend a lot of time talking to the suits. It's easy to be enthusiastic about technology, once the conversation shifts to commerce and competition it's hard not to see everything through shit-colored glasses. That stuff is a necessary evil, of course, because we all need to eat, but letting it into all of our conversations ruins the party.
I have to agree with the top comment. I don't follow HN closely or have anything to say about "hacker culture", whatever that is, but I can't help but completely agree with its conviction of most social startups as unproductive and stupid. As Paul Miller admitted yesterday here and kleinbl00 asserted way back on this post of mine, people are to blame for wasting their time; the medium by which they waste it is inconsequential. I believe this. But I also believe, as kleinbl00 also asserted in that discussion, that the internet and social applications are handicapping people's social lives. These social media startups pretty much all contribute directly to this problem, encouraging people to have shorter, less sincere, and more mediated social interactions. They're a net loss for the people who use them and for everyone else in the world, making it more difficult for people like me to find friends interaction with whom doesn't mandate investment in this artificial social world. Snapchat and Vine may have been made by people going against all odds to bring ideas to reality, but they are lucrative, successful, unproductive, and stupid ideas, adding fragmentation and indirection to people's relationships, and my life would be better if those people hadn't bothered.
There's the key. I think this is easier to understand when you work in Hollywood. KTLA did a stand-up at the corner of Hollywood and Vine in 2003. They set up a camera and a reporter and stopped and asked random passers-by "How's your screenplay coming?" 80% of the people asked had an answer. That doesn't mean 80% of the people they talked to were screenwriters. That doesn't mean 80% of the people they talked to had finished a screenplay. That meant that 80% of the people they had talked to had considered the idea of writing a screenplay seriously enough that they "had a screenplay" in their own minds. Of those who answered yes, there's a small percentage that would ever write FADE IN. There's a smaller percentage that would ever write FADE OUT. There's a still smaller percentage that would ever get anyone to seriously consider it. And the number of people who would actually sell their scripts, see them turned into movies and make money from them is vanishingly small - the apocryphal datapoint we all know so well is that there are fewer working screenwriters in the WGAw than there are players in the NBA. So when you're surrounded by "screenwriters" and the effort necessary to turn that "screenplay" into a movie is insurmountable - when the money being spent is "oil rig money" and when the number of people necessary to get them off the ground is "startup-grade" you naturally get in a position of learning to say no, not to say yes. I know three people who brought The Walking Dead to production companies to turn it into a TV series. Slam Dunk, right? Well, not until Frank Darabont wanted to do it it wasn't. I know a guy who turned down Being John Malkovich for HBO - and if asked, he'd do it again. Finding Forrester was a spec screenplay that Sony turned down, that won the Nicholl Fellowship, that Sony bought. The screenwriter has the poster and the rejection letter framed side-by-side on his wall, behind his desk. Finding Forrester still lost money. So at the end of the day, the evaluation isn't "will this idea make money?" The evaluation is "do you have the connections, the drive, the skills, the passion, the bankroll, the persistence, the intelligence, the charisma and all the other intangibles necessary to make this malformed and larval idea into a killer app?" And the answer, statistically speaking, is far more likely to be "no" than it is to be "yes." HERE'S THE THING Ben Silberman didn't need Dustin Curtis' permission to make Pinterest. And Dom Hoffmann didn't need Dustin Curtis' permission to make Vine. They made them. And they caught on. And sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. Stupid ideas catch on - Facebook is a fucking terrible idea and always has been, yet it's on our culture like a rash. Recognize that, as William Goldman said, "Nobody knows anything" and that your instincts are to assume it's a bad idea because bad ideas take less energy. You don't have to believe in them.I have to agree with the top comment. I don't follow HN closely or have anything to say about "hacker culture", whatever that is, but I can't help but completely agree with its conviction of most social startups as unproductive and stupid.