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I feel this pressure whenever I come up with a new startup idea. I hate doing lots of research, only to find that my idea has already been done. Most recently,

I feel this pressure whenever I come up with a new startup idea. I hate doing lots of research, only to find that my idea has already been done. Most recently, I wasn't very happy with a portable router that I had bought, so I started brainstorming ideas for a new travel router that would be extremely easy to use and to set up. My idea was that your new wifi password would seamlessly sync to the router, and you could set it up from streamlined OSX toolbar or mobile application. But then I found the ASUS WL-330NUL, which already does everything I was imagining. And I also realized that I could never compete with hardware like that. I was just going to build a prototype with a Raspberry Pi and a few wifi adapters. On a related topic: I hold very liberal views, and I've recently tried to expose myself to more conservative opinions. So far I've just subscribed to /r/Conservative on Reddit, and I've read a few articles on Breitbart and other conservative sites. I also read through some of the comments, which was very frightening. That is not a place for intellectual discussion. I have relatives who often send me articles from http://creation.com http://creation.com, so there's another source of information that I try to avoid.. Also, a few days ago I was on a flight, and the person next to me was telling me about his flat earth beliefs, and a wide variety of other conspiracy theories. He mentioned how Breivik was just a scapegoat, because the government had ordered the killing of those children. And also 9/11 was an inside job, Stalin was a hero, and how The Hunchback of Notre Dame takes place in Saigon, Vietnam. (I believe he came to that conclusion after visiting the Notre-Dame cathedral in Saigon.) It was an interesting 3 hours. At one point he was telling me how the sun is only 50 kilometers wide, and it moves around on giant cables. Also, there are no satellites in space. They are all underground, and that's how GPS works. Also that's why GPS sometimes has problems, because Google's Maps are all wrong. I tried to really understand all of his views, but I can't say they were very compelling. It's strange, because he was a very well-read person, and seemed quite smart, apart from these insane views.

rebootthesystem 10y ago
> Also, a few days ago I was on a flight, and the person next to me was telling me about his flat earth beliefs Just when I was about to say "don't go to all those conservative websites, they are full of mental cases" you pull out this real-life encounter of the nth kind. Yikes! This person was the very definition of nut-case. You have to wonder where and how such belief systems develop and take root. It doesn't say much for the human condition other than, perhaps, we are one good power outage away from being cave men (and women). Seriously though, I'd say the online landscape is populated by extremes. This applies to all viewpoints and subject, be it religion, politics or what to feed your dogs. Don't form opinions based on that at all. That's not the real world. The images of both liberals and conservatives being painted online are absolute caricatures of reality. In real life (outside of running into demented cases on a plane) I have found most people agree on, dare I say, most topics at a fundamental level. The key, in my opinion, is to actively engage in real-life conversations with a wide range of people and avoid echo chambers as much as possible. I can't tell you how to do that because it depends on where you live, where you work and your level of comfort. I'm the kind of person who has no problem whatsoever approaching a total stranger at a coffee shop to have a conversation. If you watch TV, do watch news networks with different biases. They all have them. Realize they do what they do for ratings and do your best to filter through the nonsense. Nearly every TV news network has a bunch of clowns and a few serious people. Look for the latter and you'll get useful information. If we are talking Fox News, I'd say Tucker Carlson's show is pretty good. Bret Baier and Chris Wallace are also decent. Most everyone else is a clown putting on a show for ratings. I won't talk about the liberal-leaning stations because I would imagine you know who's serious and who's a ratings clown, for example, I would imagine you might categorize Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) as a member of the latter. I think the key is to be open to information from all sides while being careful to filter out attempts at manipulation and what I call "clowning for ratings". The BBC, Al Jazeera and Deutsche Welle ought to be part of everyone's news source rotations. And don't forget news from the rest of the American continent. Yes, being well informed is a job. Still can't get over your flight experience. I would have politely moved. No, I would have vomited into a bag and then moved.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Just when I was about to say "don't go to all those conservative websites, they are full of mental cases" you pull out this real-life encounter of the nth kind. Yikes! This person was the very definition of nut-case. You have to wonder where and how such belief systems develop and take root. They "develop and take root" in a distrust of the established truths, which finds an outlet in some niche pet-theory (flat earth, etc) -- and an existential distress and unhapiness in living with them. Which is not totally unhealthy, as a lot of established truths are either dictums or states of being held by force taken as inevitable/the way things are/gospel, and others are BS spread for profit (and also held as truth). Of course rejecting those instead of the shape-of-the-earth type beliefs would be better. But it would also be more difficult (try rejecting an established "truth" and see how well it goes. In a repressive government it can even end in execution). Whereas believing in flat-earth at best makes other perceive you as cooky.
  - rebootthesystem 10y ago
    Given what you said, is it even worth having a conversation with someone who has gone out there to such an extent? If we are talking about science, where one can present evidence from which hypothesis can be re-verified by anyone, how do you deal with someone who just refuses to disconnect from their delusion for even a moment? As an atheist I have had some interesting conversations with what I would characterize as "intense believers". I have friends who are Born Again Christians. I have endured intense verbal poundings of all kinds at their hands. I even had a case where one of them was yelling and screaming at me in the middle of a parking lot at midnight because I was going on a business trip to Amsterdam the next day and he felt I needed to kneel down and accept Jesus that very minute or I would surely go to hell and condemn my whole family just for setting foot on that city. Nice guy and all, but holy crap! BTW, I have never done the opposite and tried to convince a believer to become an atheist. When do you think someone is so far gone that an attempt to engage based on reason is futile?
- shawnee_ 10y ago
  If we are talking Fox News, I'd say Tucker Carlson's show is pretty good. Bret Baier and Chris Wallace are also decent. Most everyone else is a clown putting on a show for ratings. I won't talk about the liberal-leaning stations because I would imagine you know who's serious and who's a ratings clown, for example, I would imagine you might categorize Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) as a member of the latter. The problem with your assessment here is that "clowning" is not actually a part of journalism. Fact-finding however, is part of journalism. The OP is making the case that people will actively ignore facts they are receiving when they can't parse the information to match up with their world view. They will dismiss facts as things like conspiracy or what you're calling "clowning for ratings" when they don't like what they are hearing. Information dissemination that is based on verifiable facts garnered from multiple independent sources... this is the job of journalists. From what I've seen of Fox News, it does not subscribe to the verifiable facts method of journalism and relies instead upon the echo chamber method of repeating something enough times in attempts to make it seem truthful.
pjc50 10y ago
Yeah, a lot of this stuff isn't "intellectual" discussion in the sense of a dispassionate search for truth but instead a form of loyalty signalling. On reading it you ask yourself, "why would anyone think that?" and then go digging; several iterations later you find their entire set of experiences, beliefs, values and loyalties is different. And you wonder where it came from - but it takes a village to raise someone like this, and there's an entire community out there who think in the same way. Epistemology matters, and can't be separated from power relations. The person with the extremely bonkers views is engaging in radical epistemology: those are his facts, because he doesn't trust anyone else's. If you were to dig long enough perhaps you'd find the point in his childhood where he rejected either educational authority or his own experimentation in favour of this fantasy world in which he's the sole arbiter of knowledge.
hashkb 10y ago
How do you know he is wrong? Have you stared at the sun through a telescope looking for the cables? He has. And he saw them with his own eyes.
tvanantwerp 10y ago
I'm glad you tried to expand your bubble and understand the viewpoint of conservatism, though choosing sources like r/Conservative or Breitbart is perhaps equivalent to understanding the liberal/progressive view through Daily Kos or a Occupier. It might be representative of a certain strain of popular conservatism, but it doesn't get to much of the deep ideas or intellectual history. I'm not sure if that even matters, since I don't know what percentage of self-described conservatives really give those ideas any thought versus sticking to a "my team versus their team" mentality. But there are some serious conservative thinkers out there worth engaging. An easy intro discussion of conservative ideas might be William F. Buckley's older interview show Firing Line, which is all on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/firinglinevideos https://www.youtube.com/user/firinglinevideos Disclosure: I don't consider myself conservative nor liberal.
sjg007 10y ago
With respect to the start up you should do it anyway. Or do something. Many times you see multiple successful solutions to the same problems.
MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
Oh the irony of riding an airplane as a flat earth believer. Kyrie Irving (a famous American basketball player) was in the news recently for being a flat earth believer, and it blew my mind because here's a guy who must take at least 100 if not 200 flights in a year. And it occurred to me that holding those beliefs is tantamount to accusing all pilots and other aviation professionals of being gatekeepers of a massive conspiracy - if the earth isn't round, something about the "public" model of flight is the most wide spread fabrication in human history, and the pilots must be in on it or else planes would be crashing left and right.
- nathan_f77 10y ago
  > And it occurred to me that holding those beliefs is tantamount to accusing all pilots and other aviation professionals of being gatekeepers of a massive conspiracy Haha yeah, I brought that up. His position was that all pilots are involved with the conspiracy. I asked why no-one has said anything yet, and his answer was that they were paid a lot of money. Not only that, but they would be killed, along with their spouses and children. He also mentioned that there was a force field above the earth, so it was impossible to go into space. And above this forcefield is a layer of water. Something about the "waters above the firmament", which got weirdly Biblical, because he didn't seem to be religious at all.
- treebeard901 10y ago
  For some reason earlier this morning, I started thinking about this out of the blue. My hope is that he is just trolling but who knows these days. If I ever meet a flat earther, I just want to ask "Have you ever seen a full moon? and if so, how do you explain it?"
zmoreira 10y ago
I am also a very liberal person, but I greatly enjoy reading The American Conservative. Have you tried that? Also some of the contributors to UNZ.com are really interesting, but it's a very mixed bag.

rebootthesystem 10y ago

> Also, a few days ago I was on a flight, and the person next to me was telling me about his flat earth beliefs Just when I was about to say "don't go to all those conservative websites, they are full of mental cases" you pull out this real-life encounter of the nth kind. Yikes! This person was the very definition of nut-case. You have to wonder where and how such belief systems develop and take root. It doesn't say much for the human condition other than, perhaps, we are one good power outage away from being cave men (and women). Seriously though, I'd say the online landscape is populated by extremes. This applies to all viewpoints and subject, be it religion, politics or what to feed your dogs. Don't form opinions based on that at all. That's not the real world. The images of both liberals and conservatives being painted online are absolute caricatures of reality. In real life (outside of running into demented cases on a plane) I have found most people agree on, dare I say, most topics at a fundamental level. The key, in my opinion, is to actively engage in real-life conversations with a wide range of people and avoid echo chambers as much as possible. I can't tell you how to do that because it depends on where you live, where you work and your level of comfort. I'm the kind of person who has no problem whatsoever approaching a total stranger at a coffee shop to have a conversation. If you watch TV, do watch news networks with different biases. They all have them. Realize they do what they do for ratings and do your best to filter through the nonsense. Nearly every TV news network has a bunch of clowns and a few serious people. Look for the latter and you'll get useful information. If we are talking Fox News, I'd say Tucker Carlson's show is pretty good. Bret Baier and Chris Wallace are also decent. Most everyone else is a clown putting on a show for ratings. I won't talk about the liberal-leaning stations because I would imagine you know who's serious and who's a ratings clown, for example, I would imagine you might categorize Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) as a member of the latter. I think the key is to be open to information from all sides while being careful to filter out attempts at manipulation and what I call "clowning for ratings". The BBC, Al Jazeera and Deutsche Welle ought to be part of everyone's news source rotations. And don't forget news from the rest of the American continent. Yes, being well informed is a job. Still can't get over your flight experience. I would have politely moved. No, I would have vomited into a bag and then moved.

coldtea 10y ago
>Just when I was about to say "don't go to all those conservative websites, they are full of mental cases" you pull out this real-life encounter of the nth kind. Yikes! This person was the very definition of nut-case. You have to wonder where and how such belief systems develop and take root. They "develop and take root" in a distrust of the established truths, which finds an outlet in some niche pet-theory (flat earth, etc) -- and an existential distress and unhapiness in living with them. Which is not totally unhealthy, as a lot of established truths are either dictums or states of being held by force taken as inevitable/the way things are/gospel, and others are BS spread for profit (and also held as truth). Of course rejecting those instead of the shape-of-the-earth type beliefs would be better. But it would also be more difficult (try rejecting an established "truth" and see how well it goes. In a repressive government it can even end in execution). Whereas believing in flat-earth at best makes other perceive you as cooky.
- rebootthesystem 10y ago
  Given what you said, is it even worth having a conversation with someone who has gone out there to such an extent? If we are talking about science, where one can present evidence from which hypothesis can be re-verified by anyone, how do you deal with someone who just refuses to disconnect from their delusion for even a moment? As an atheist I have had some interesting conversations with what I would characterize as "intense believers". I have friends who are Born Again Christians. I have endured intense verbal poundings of all kinds at their hands. I even had a case where one of them was yelling and screaming at me in the middle of a parking lot at midnight because I was going on a business trip to Amsterdam the next day and he felt I needed to kneel down and accept Jesus that very minute or I would surely go to hell and condemn my whole family just for setting foot on that city. Nice guy and all, but holy crap! BTW, I have never done the opposite and tried to convince a believer to become an atheist. When do you think someone is so far gone that an attempt to engage based on reason is futile?
shawnee_ 10y ago
If we are talking Fox News, I'd say Tucker Carlson's show is pretty good. Bret Baier and Chris Wallace are also decent. Most everyone else is a clown putting on a show for ratings. I won't talk about the liberal-leaning stations because I would imagine you know who's serious and who's a ratings clown, for example, I would imagine you might categorize Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) as a member of the latter. The problem with your assessment here is that "clowning" is not actually a part of journalism. Fact-finding however, is part of journalism. The OP is making the case that people will actively ignore facts they are receiving when they can't parse the information to match up with their world view. They will dismiss facts as things like conspiracy or what you're calling "clowning for ratings" when they don't like what they are hearing. Information dissemination that is based on verifiable facts garnered from multiple independent sources... this is the job of journalists. From what I've seen of Fox News, it does not subscribe to the verifiable facts method of journalism and relies instead upon the echo chamber method of repeating something enough times in attempts to make it seem truthful.

pjc50 10y ago

Yeah, a lot of this stuff isn't "intellectual" discussion in the sense of a dispassionate search for truth but instead a form of loyalty signalling. On reading it you ask yourself, "why would anyone think that?" and then go digging; several iterations later you find their entire set of experiences, beliefs, values and loyalties is different. And you wonder where it came from - but it takes a village to raise someone like this, and there's an entire community out there who think in the same way. Epistemology matters, and can't be separated from power relations. The person with the extremely bonkers views is engaging in radical epistemology: those are his facts, because he doesn't trust anyone else's. If you were to dig long enough perhaps you'd find the point in his childhood where he rejected either educational authority or his own experimentation in favour of this fantasy world in which he's the sole arbiter of knowledge.

hashkb 10y ago

How do you know he is wrong? Have you stared at the sun through a telescope looking for the cables? He has. And he saw them with his own eyes.

tvanantwerp 10y ago

I'm glad you tried to expand your bubble and understand the viewpoint of conservatism, though choosing sources like r/Conservative or Breitbart is perhaps equivalent to understanding the liberal/progressive view through Daily Kos or a Occupier. It might be representative of a certain strain of popular conservatism, but it doesn't get to much of the deep ideas or intellectual history. I'm not sure if that even matters, since I don't know what percentage of self-described conservatives really give those ideas any thought versus sticking to a "my team versus their team" mentality. But there are some serious conservative thinkers out there worth engaging. An easy intro discussion of conservative ideas might be William F. Buckley's older interview show Firing Line, which is all on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/firinglinevideos https://www.youtube.com/user/firinglinevideos Disclosure: I don't consider myself conservative nor liberal.

sjg007 10y ago

With respect to the start up you should do it anyway. Or do something. Many times you see multiple successful solutions to the same problems.

MaxfordAndSons 10y ago

Oh the irony of riding an airplane as a flat earth believer. Kyrie Irving (a famous American basketball player) was in the news recently for being a flat earth believer, and it blew my mind because here's a guy who must take at least 100 if not 200 flights in a year. And it occurred to me that holding those beliefs is tantamount to accusing all pilots and other aviation professionals of being gatekeepers of a massive conspiracy - if the earth isn't round, something about the "public" model of flight is the most wide spread fabrication in human history, and the pilots must be in on it or else planes would be crashing left and right.

nathan_f77 10y ago
> And it occurred to me that holding those beliefs is tantamount to accusing all pilots and other aviation professionals of being gatekeepers of a massive conspiracy Haha yeah, I brought that up. His position was that all pilots are involved with the conspiracy. I asked why no-one has said anything yet, and his answer was that they were paid a lot of money. Not only that, but they would be killed, along with their spouses and children. He also mentioned that there was a force field above the earth, so it was impossible to go into space. And above this forcefield is a layer of water. Something about the "waters above the firmament", which got weirdly Biblical, because he didn't seem to be religious at all.
treebeard901 10y ago
For some reason earlier this morning, I started thinking about this out of the blue. My hope is that he is just trolling but who knows these days. If I ever meet a flat earther, I just want to ask "Have you ever seen a full moon? and if so, how do you explain it?"

zmoreira 10y ago

I am also a very liberal person, but I greatly enjoy reading The American Conservative. Have you tried that? Also some of the contributors to UNZ.com are really interesting, but it's a very mixed bag.