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Pseudo work is the lottery of productivity. And yet, because people spend so much time doing it, the odds eventually come up that they'll reap some sort of rewa

Pseudo work is the lottery of productivity. And yet, because people spend so much time doing it, the odds eventually come up that they'll reap some sort of reward. That said, I have found a rule of thumb for myself: the more that pseudo work is done in isolation, the less likely it is to yield results. So, my alarm revolves around how long it's been since I've interacted with somebody.

tansey 16y ago
I think that's a very good point. I got more done when living in a dorm room than any other time in my life. Even if it's just screwing around with a project idea at a dev house meetup, I get tons more work done (and have a lot more fun) than if I was at home. Maybe there's some way to harvest the chaotic energy of HN so that people aren't just wasting time, but rather contributing to something. Maybe if there were some way to do massive collaborative projects that could be embedded into HN, where users could each contribute to building part of a larger system or structure. I don't think this is a new idea, but it's really only ever worked when started organically via sites like reddit or 4chan; maybe it can be done in a structured form.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  I dunno...I think it may be more that doing it alone increases the risk that a project may fail, but also increases its innovativeness if it succeeds. I'm reminded of Steve Wozniak's "Work alone" quote: http://www.dailycommonsense.com/apples-steve-wozniak-work-alone-inspiration/ http://www.dailycommonsense.com/apples-steve-wozniak-work-al... It seems that basically all truly innovative projects either came out of a single mind or of a small team that worked so closely together that they might as well have been one mind. There seems to be a regression-to-the-mean effect as you add more people to a project: you eliminate truly bad ideas, but you also eliminate some truly good ones too. Many ideas that look bad are really just different. In some ways, I think this unfortunate, because working on a team is a lot more fun, IMHO, than working solo. But that seems to be the tradeoff.
  - tansey 16y ago
    What if we could vote up/down changes to the evolving project?
    - nostrademons 16y ago
      I think you would get the same effect. It's not because of direct interference: I've seen it happen even when the extra "cooks" do everything they can to encourage innovation. It's because there's a natural tendency to self-censor your more "out there" ideas when you know there are people watching. In order to let them bloom, you usually need a safe, private environment where you can try out lots of things that don't work before you condense on one that does.

tansey 16y ago

I think that's a very good point. I got more done when living in a dorm room than any other time in my life. Even if it's just screwing around with a project idea at a dev house meetup, I get tons more work done (and have a lot more fun) than if I was at home. Maybe there's some way to harvest the chaotic energy of HN so that people aren't just wasting time, but rather contributing to something. Maybe if there were some way to do massive collaborative projects that could be embedded into HN, where users could each contribute to building part of a larger system or structure. I don't think this is a new idea, but it's really only ever worked when started organically via sites like reddit or 4chan; maybe it can be done in a structured form.

nostrademons 16y ago
I dunno...I think it may be more that doing it alone increases the risk that a project may fail, but also increases its innovativeness if it succeeds. I'm reminded of Steve Wozniak's "Work alone" quote: http://www.dailycommonsense.com/apples-steve-wozniak-work-alone-inspiration/ http://www.dailycommonsense.com/apples-steve-wozniak-work-al... It seems that basically all truly innovative projects either came out of a single mind or of a small team that worked so closely together that they might as well have been one mind. There seems to be a regression-to-the-mean effect as you add more people to a project: you eliminate truly bad ideas, but you also eliminate some truly good ones too. Many ideas that look bad are really just different. In some ways, I think this unfortunate, because working on a team is a lot more fun, IMHO, than working solo. But that seems to be the tradeoff.
- tansey 16y ago
  What if we could vote up/down changes to the evolving project?
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    I think you would get the same effect. It's not because of direct interference: I've seen it happen even when the extra "cooks" do everything they can to encourage innovation. It's because there's a natural tendency to self-censor your more "out there" ideas when you know there are people watching. In order to let them bloom, you usually need a safe, private environment where you can try out lots of things that don't work before you condense on one that does.