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This slide stood out: https://i.imgur.com/t7DAgJo.jpg https://i.imgur.com/t7DAgJo.jpg Failure was accepted as a part of the culture. Today it seems the opposit

This slide stood out: https://i.imgur.com/t7DAgJo.jpg https://i.imgur.com/t7DAgJo.jpg Failure was accepted as a part of the culture. Today it seems the opposite. Any hint of failure and people seem to distance themselves from your future ambitions. More and more, we seem to be moving toward a world ruled by massive corporations, where small developers have almost no autonomy or freedom, and we're subservient to the concept of intellectual property and non-disclosure. The age of tinkerers building something huge seems to have been a short-lived historical accident. That's related, because the only way to build something huge is to repeatedly fail at it. And that doesn't seem acceptable today.

s-shellfish 8y ago
Culture has changed dramatically and I hate to blame things on politics but i feel like that's exactly what it is. It's divided us all, made the identification of truth seem like a nonsensical fairytale, and those sentiments have sank into the background of cognition. We can dissociate all we like from culture and relegate ourselves to our comfort zones of computing, technology, things that bring us stability and a way of making sense of the world - but if we can't own up to our own mistakes then all of that goes away. You can say you aren't affected by it, but it's divided people through argument, it's made progress in education and research seem pointless because no one knows what's real anymore, who to listen to, what to believe. Failure is something to be scared of in a culture that's been indoctrinated into seeing chaos everywhere to the point that the only thing that matters is survival. Survival instinct is something people can hack. The point is to not allow it to blind you from coming to solutions as a group with people you are supposed to trust - whether through contractual obligation or through your own self defined choice. Don't let this culture break our culture. Don't let the culture of shifting of blame become part of you. Failure is critically important to success. Anyone who ignores this fact is blind to the process of learning. You have to be able to identify your own errors. Being right all the time is it's own version of insanity, because one literally can not identify the difference between correctness and error. We need to be able to fail and we need to be able to fail in front of others. Otherwise everything will keep going in circles with no sense of progress. I've lived my whole life this way, change, change, change. Blame, blame, blame. Accept, accept, accept. Correct, correct, correct. This is not a good mindset to have when you have to build things with other people unless you can point out your own errors to others, allow others to point out errors to you. You have to know what failure is in order to identify success. In education, this is obvious. A or F. In groups of building things, people define these metrics. Everyone either must agree 'this is the metric' or everyone must agree 'this is the new standard'. That's how to measure yourself in systems where rules are continuously changing and you can't identify why.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  > no one knows what's real anymore, who to listen to, what to believe. It's a myth that "trusted news sources" were more truthful before the internet. It's just that the internet has exposed all the propaganda going on. Professional historians well know that historical accounts tend to be more propaganda than factual, which is why they always look for independent corroboration. Archaeology has rewritten many accounts of things like battlefields, even modern ones.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - zby 8y ago
    This is probably true. In the past we have stable worldviews - but they were not very accurate, now we have much more information. It is now possible to build more accurate models of the reality - but overall do people build more accurate models or maybe they just use the additional information to dig themselves deeper into their biases?
    - s-shellfish 8y ago
      I think people go between two modalities for understanding information, shallow and deep or selective and generalized. We, globally, have more information, but information alone is relatively flat. Knowledge can seem to form feedback loops. I'm not sure if the models are more accurate as a consequence. The models themselves are mathematical objects. One domain of knowledge can easily map to another domain of knowledge through a mathematical model (up to isomorphism, meaning, they share the same model, use a different vocabulary, but that's besides the point, the literal mathematical model connects the knowledge domains). The obvious thing is knowledge uses math. Knowledge uses mathematical objects to model the world. You can keep seeing patterns from one knowledge domain to another, but it doesn't mean they are connected by the model intrinsically, that is, that the model is the thing generating the knowledge. The model is just a model. Math is filled to the brim in ways of making models of things. The model can be representative of a full data set and closed under the data set, or the model can be representative of a prediction. In an open system, there is no mathematical closure. So in an open system that is producing knowledge, something has to be the ground. The mathematical models. I don't know how this relates to bias, or digging oneself into a bias, but I do know that after enough cycles of going in a feedback loop, it can converge. Worldviews are always difficult. You never have all the information. There's always more information. If there's not more information, people will invent new ways of making more information. This is always the dilemma with data versus theory.
aaavl2821 8y ago
That's an interesting slide and I think that a lot of universities unknowingly put up a lot of barriers to entrepreneurship because they don't get the value of it, or they don't get how that value is created. Berkeley vs Stanford is a decent example of this contrast
jiveturkey 8y ago
eh? can you give a concrete example or two? there is a seeming innumerable number of new startups, solving very small niche problems. it is a given that very very many will fail. the funding continues. my very small company uses maybe 15 saas vendors. maybe 10 of them are small guys that will be out of business in 3-5 years. there’s tons of failure to go around!
- sillysaurus3 8y ago
  https://kottke.org/18/06/a-sad-update-about-a-scissors-maker-that-went-viral https://kottke.org/18/06/a-sad-update-about-a-scissors-maker... The cultural pressure not to fail is so immense that it drives people insane. I watched it firsthand with my friend's father. He mismanaged the business into the ground and never really got over that. Trying again doesn't even come into his mind. And that same mentality is very often the way we bring up children. Play it safe. Get a good job. Prioritize work over your own desires. Sacrifice yourself for others. And whatever you do, make sure it goes well.
  - WalterBright 8y ago
    > And that same mentality is very often the way we bring up children. Play it safe. Get a good job. Prioritize work over your own desires. Sacrifice yourself for others. And whatever you do, make sure it goes well. It's always been that way. Self-sacrifice is a common theme in religions and cultures. The idea that life should be a pursuit of pleasure is very modern.
    - dadawoowoo 8y ago
      > The idea that life should be a pursuit of pleasure is very modern. No it is not at all new, greeks already discussed hedonism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonism
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
      If you can't afford to fail, learning to not fail is useful and rational.
maxxxxx 8y ago
When I started in computing in the 80s a lot of people did programming out of intellectual curiosity and fun. People did things like easter eggs and other stupid stuff. Now it's just a career and everything is about money, money and more money. I guess that's a natural progression once something goes mainstream.
- felix_nagaand 8y ago
  People can't afford to have hobbies like they used to.
- hyperpallium 8y ago
  When something is valuable economically, this shift seems inevitable... the same happened to electronics, electricity (telegrams etc), steam etc. (Probably, it was different before the industrial revolution and modern corporations.) The actionable question is: what's next? What promising technical field is not yet economically valuable?
- greggman 8y ago
  From my POV (maybe I'm just looking in a different direction?) I see way more people programming out of intellectual curiosity and fun than ever before. As just one example the 2018 Global Game Jam had 8,608 game created in a weekend. The Unity community is HUGE. The Processing community, the Open Frameworks community, the Three.js community. Not seeing a lack of people doing programming for curiosity and fun.
  - wilsonnb2 8y ago
    There are more people programming for intellectual reasons now than ever before in absolute numbers. However, that larger absolute number is a much smaller proportion of the total number of programmers than it was in the past. I think it's also safe to say that the mainstream of programming has moved more towards monetary motivation and away from intellectual curiosity.
    - bluedino 8y ago
zby 8y ago
Accepting failure is the prerequisite of learning. This works great when people can do things mostly by themselves - they try something, they fail and learn. When the basic unit to do something becomes a company coordination becomes more important than personal achievements. For coordination you need more stability, less agility. This is quite intuitive - when the leader changes the direction too often - then people tend to stop following him. But I have a feeling that this can also be formalized in terms of the system theory - it is a basic fact that in a system with feedback loops it is often that you need to react slower and less intensively or you can destabilize the system completely (think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game or even just one basic Business Inventory https://books.google.pl/books?id=JSgOSP1qklUC&lpg=PA51&vq=business%20inventory&pg=PA51#v=snippet&q=business%20inventory&f=false https://books.google.pl/books?id=JSgOSP1qklUC&lpg=PA51&vq=bu...). Personally I feel unfit for the position of a leader because I tend to be frank about my failures, react to changes quickly. I have been thinking much about making a starup - I have lots of ideas etc. - but I am afraid I would not be a good CEO. Fortunately I discovered that it works quite well when speculating (I now trade crypto - but that is just coincidental). At the dawn of the era experimenting on a small scale was essential - now we need bigger experiments and this means more coordination, and that means politics unfortunately.
skummetmaelk 8y ago
You should read The Master Switch.
karmakaze 8y ago
Hmmm. A certain amount is accepted/supported today. Just consider the number of startups that get funded with the expectaion that the majority will not survive. On the flip side how would a supporter distinguish repeated failures toward success vs futility? It's very difficult so cap it in some manner. The best we can do is to document the attempts for others to study, learn, and continue.
angarg12 8y ago
I'm tired of hearing 'X is the Silicon Y'. The truth is that few places in the world have the tolerance to failure that SV has. In many so called 'Silicon Y' a failed startup would mean the end of your career. And that is why it has been so hard to reproduce that success in some places in Europe.
Pica_soO 8y ago
In that regard, america just got more European.

s-shellfish 8y ago

Culture has changed dramatically and I hate to blame things on politics but i feel like that's exactly what it is. It's divided us all, made the identification of truth seem like a nonsensical fairytale, and those sentiments have sank into the background of cognition. We can dissociate all we like from culture and relegate ourselves to our comfort zones of computing, technology, things that bring us stability and a way of making sense of the world - but if we can't own up to our own mistakes then all of that goes away. You can say you aren't affected by it, but it's divided people through argument, it's made progress in education and research seem pointless because no one knows what's real anymore, who to listen to, what to believe. Failure is something to be scared of in a culture that's been indoctrinated into seeing chaos everywhere to the point that the only thing that matters is survival. Survival instinct is something people can hack. The point is to not allow it to blind you from coming to solutions as a group with people you are supposed to trust - whether through contractual obligation or through your own self defined choice. Don't let this culture break our culture. Don't let the culture of shifting of blame become part of you. Failure is critically important to success. Anyone who ignores this fact is blind to the process of learning. You have to be able to identify your own errors. Being right all the time is it's own version of insanity, because one literally can not identify the difference between correctness and error. We need to be able to fail and we need to be able to fail in front of others. Otherwise everything will keep going in circles with no sense of progress. I've lived my whole life this way, change, change, change. Blame, blame, blame. Accept, accept, accept. Correct, correct, correct. This is not a good mindset to have when you have to build things with other people unless you can point out your own errors to others, allow others to point out errors to you. You have to know what failure is in order to identify success. In education, this is obvious. A or F. In groups of building things, people define these metrics. Everyone either must agree 'this is the metric' or everyone must agree 'this is the new standard'. That's how to measure yourself in systems where rules are continuously changing and you can't identify why.

WalterBright 8y ago
> no one knows what's real anymore, who to listen to, what to believe. It's a myth that "trusted news sources" were more truthful before the internet. It's just that the internet has exposed all the propaganda going on. Professional historians well know that historical accounts tend to be more propaganda than factual, which is why they always look for independent corroboration. Archaeology has rewritten many accounts of things like battlefields, even modern ones.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- zby 8y ago
  This is probably true. In the past we have stable worldviews - but they were not very accurate, now we have much more information. It is now possible to build more accurate models of the reality - but overall do people build more accurate models or maybe they just use the additional information to dig themselves deeper into their biases?
  - s-shellfish 8y ago
    I think people go between two modalities for understanding information, shallow and deep or selective and generalized. We, globally, have more information, but information alone is relatively flat. Knowledge can seem to form feedback loops. I'm not sure if the models are more accurate as a consequence. The models themselves are mathematical objects. One domain of knowledge can easily map to another domain of knowledge through a mathematical model (up to isomorphism, meaning, they share the same model, use a different vocabulary, but that's besides the point, the literal mathematical model connects the knowledge domains). The obvious thing is knowledge uses math. Knowledge uses mathematical objects to model the world. You can keep seeing patterns from one knowledge domain to another, but it doesn't mean they are connected by the model intrinsically, that is, that the model is the thing generating the knowledge. The model is just a model. Math is filled to the brim in ways of making models of things. The model can be representative of a full data set and closed under the data set, or the model can be representative of a prediction. In an open system, there is no mathematical closure. So in an open system that is producing knowledge, something has to be the ground. The mathematical models. I don't know how this relates to bias, or digging oneself into a bias, but I do know that after enough cycles of going in a feedback loop, it can converge. Worldviews are always difficult. You never have all the information. There's always more information. If there's not more information, people will invent new ways of making more information. This is always the dilemma with data versus theory.

aaavl2821 8y ago

That's an interesting slide and I think that a lot of universities unknowingly put up a lot of barriers to entrepreneurship because they don't get the value of it, or they don't get how that value is created. Berkeley vs Stanford is a decent example of this contrast

jiveturkey 8y ago

eh? can you give a concrete example or two? there is a seeming innumerable number of new startups, solving very small niche problems. it is a given that very very many will fail. the funding continues. my very small company uses maybe 15 saas vendors. maybe 10 of them are small guys that will be out of business in 3-5 years. there’s tons of failure to go around!

sillysaurus3 8y ago
https://kottke.org/18/06/a-sad-update-about-a-scissors-maker-that-went-viral https://kottke.org/18/06/a-sad-update-about-a-scissors-maker... The cultural pressure not to fail is so immense that it drives people insane. I watched it firsthand with my friend's father. He mismanaged the business into the ground and never really got over that. Trying again doesn't even come into his mind. And that same mentality is very often the way we bring up children. Play it safe. Get a good job. Prioritize work over your own desires. Sacrifice yourself for others. And whatever you do, make sure it goes well.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  > And that same mentality is very often the way we bring up children. Play it safe. Get a good job. Prioritize work over your own desires. Sacrifice yourself for others. And whatever you do, make sure it goes well. It's always been that way. Self-sacrifice is a common theme in religions and cultures. The idea that life should be a pursuit of pleasure is very modern.
  - dadawoowoo 8y ago
    > The idea that life should be a pursuit of pleasure is very modern. No it is not at all new, greeks already discussed hedonism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonism
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    If you can't afford to fail, learning to not fail is useful and rational.

maxxxxx 8y ago

When I started in computing in the 80s a lot of people did programming out of intellectual curiosity and fun. People did things like easter eggs and other stupid stuff. Now it's just a career and everything is about money, money and more money. I guess that's a natural progression once something goes mainstream.

felix_nagaand 8y ago
People can't afford to have hobbies like they used to.
hyperpallium 8y ago
When something is valuable economically, this shift seems inevitable... the same happened to electronics, electricity (telegrams etc), steam etc. (Probably, it was different before the industrial revolution and modern corporations.) The actionable question is: what's next? What promising technical field is not yet economically valuable?
greggman 8y ago
From my POV (maybe I'm just looking in a different direction?) I see way more people programming out of intellectual curiosity and fun than ever before. As just one example the 2018 Global Game Jam had 8,608 game created in a weekend. The Unity community is HUGE. The Processing community, the Open Frameworks community, the Three.js community. Not seeing a lack of people doing programming for curiosity and fun.
- wilsonnb2 8y ago
  There are more people programming for intellectual reasons now than ever before in absolute numbers. However, that larger absolute number is a much smaller proportion of the total number of programmers than it was in the past. I think it's also safe to say that the mainstream of programming has moved more towards monetary motivation and away from intellectual curiosity.
  - bluedino 8y ago

zby 8y ago

Accepting failure is the prerequisite of learning. This works great when people can do things mostly by themselves - they try something, they fail and learn. When the basic unit to do something becomes a company coordination becomes more important than personal achievements. For coordination you need more stability, less agility. This is quite intuitive - when the leader changes the direction too often - then people tend to stop following him. But I have a feeling that this can also be formalized in terms of the system theory - it is a basic fact that in a system with feedback loops it is often that you need to react slower and less intensively or you can destabilize the system completely (think of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game or even just one basic Business Inventory https://books.google.pl/books?id=JSgOSP1qklUC&lpg=PA51&vq=business%20inventory&pg=PA51#v=snippet&q=business%20inventory&f=false https://books.google.pl/books?id=JSgOSP1qklUC&lpg=PA51&vq=bu...). Personally I feel unfit for the position of a leader because I tend to be frank about my failures, react to changes quickly. I have been thinking much about making a starup - I have lots of ideas etc. - but I am afraid I would not be a good CEO. Fortunately I discovered that it works quite well when speculating (I now trade crypto - but that is just coincidental). At the dawn of the era experimenting on a small scale was essential - now we need bigger experiments and this means more coordination, and that means politics unfortunately.

skummetmaelk 8y ago

You should read The Master Switch.

karmakaze 8y ago

Hmmm. A certain amount is accepted/supported today. Just consider the number of startups that get funded with the expectaion that the majority will not survive. On the flip side how would a supporter distinguish repeated failures toward success vs futility? It's very difficult so cap it in some manner. The best we can do is to document the attempts for others to study, learn, and continue.

angarg12 8y ago

I'm tired of hearing 'X is the Silicon Y'. The truth is that few places in the world have the tolerance to failure that SV has. In many so called 'Silicon Y' a failed startup would mean the end of your career. And that is why it has been so hard to reproduce that success in some places in Europe.

Pica_soO 8y ago

In that regard, america just got more European.