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Novelty and Heresy
- bshimmin 7y agoFrancis Cornford in 1908: "Every public action, which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time."
- pjc50 7y ago+1 for referencing Microcosmographia Academica! https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/iau/cornford/cornford7.html https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/iau/cornford/cornford...
- baxtr 7y agoSide note: Almost everything by Paul Graham gets upvoted fairly quickly. Has anyone insights into what the key ingredients for this are?
- maehwasu 7y agoDisclaimer: I think his essays are strong. There’s a lot of selection bias in his upvoting: a large number of people know/knew about HN because they liked PG’s writing.
- chrisweekly 7y agoI agree there's likely some selection bias as you mentioned. I think the strength of his writing is the biggest factor though.
- s_kilk 7y agoHis writing style is strong for sure but the concepts and observations are fairly trivial. I suspect it says something about the kind of ideas and discourse which are thought of as novel in tech culture.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoI think his essays are models of clarity and conciseness. But I agree about the content.
- dennis_jeeves 7y agoI upvoted you to counter some idiot(s) who down voted you...
- brainwad 7y agoBe a famous computer scientist who co-founded Y Combinator and created this very site?
- BenoitEssiambre 7y agoHacker news is basically his website.
- cm2012 7y agoHe founded YC
- dennis_jeeves 7y agoIn a manner speaking it is annoying to see (his not so profound) essay upvoted. Like people said he is the founder of he founded YC, so he has a fan following of the commoner naive programmer crowd. He certainly is an intelligent chap ( and very ordinary by some some measures) but by no means profound. In fact this subject of heresy is quite banal to me or anyone who has spent sufficient time observing society ( including the scientific community). I have always wondered what his objective was when writing these essays. (I always have an objective, when I write, which is not narcissism, or seeking approval/support/vindication).
- blfr 7y agoI'm pretty sure PG entertains quite a few interesting heresies that he's simply not willing to share publicly because of the backlash. Instead, he nudges people to find them on their own.
- dennis_jeeves 7y ago>Instead, he nudges people to find them on their own. A.k.a driving sense into the (intellectual) peasants :). I hope he succeeds. My observation though is that crows are never whiter by washing.
- pnathan 7y agoThat's been my take for a while. Idly curious what they are, but I'd rather not be extra-horrified at whatever they are.
- febeling 7y agoThere is a whole essay by him about this class of ideas, "Things you can't say." http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
- overgard 7y agoWhether something is "profound" is extremely subjective, and rooted in someone's personal experiences. Banal to you is not the same as banal to everyone. But to (playfully) turn it around on you, what was your objective in writing your comment? To display that you already know this and are thusly above the "naieve" upvoters of "banality"? Is that not "seeking approval/support/vindication?" :-)
- classified 7y agoThe cult of over-analyzing it all and coming out as being right in the end. Also, dreams of membership in the club of not-just-knowing-everything-but-knowing-everything-better.
- mcguire 7y agoIt's his site?
- buboard 7y agohe writes well. this may not be the best, but his essays are usually clearly written, to the point, nonjudgemental, right amount of brevity etc.
- kareemm 7y agoThis squares with my experience. In 2007 I had a social conversation with a well known and successful operator / VC in the valley about new ideas. Having just gone through negotiations for a raise at my corporate job, the information asymmetry between corporations and employees about salaries was huge. So my thinking was that it was only a matter of time until salary information became more open. He was adamant that it would never happen. Sharing salary information between employees was heresy. Mind you, I was also 30 and he was in his 50s. 12 years later Glassdoor, levels.fyi, etc are all things. For whatever reason - he hadn’t gone through a salary negotiation in a long time, generational culture, etc - this was a major blind spot for him.
- 7777fps 7y agoBut sharing salary information is still heresy, it's attempted in secret across opaque unverifiable websites that companies themselves like to game.
- jefftk 7y agoPeople can break this dynamic by just going ahead and sharing their salaries: https://jefftk.com/money https://jefftk.com/money At least in the US, employers aren't allowed to keep you from disclosing your compensation.
- kareemm 7y agoThe world has come a long way in the last 12 years and it seems (to me at least) that salary date is trending towards openness.
- prvc 7y agoI wonder what conditions would be necessary for a culture that is more tolerant of heretical ideas, compared to the present environment, in order to be more conductive to new discoveries?
- huffmsa 7y agoYou don't think we're at the most open and accepting time in history? No one gets beheaded for heresy, real or imaginary, anymore, except in Saudi Barbaria. And on Twitter. But you can pretty easily avoid both places. (Curiously, the people who will behead you on Twitter are the same ones who are most opposed to the dogma of Saudi Barbaria, but they're onboard with how to punish dissidents)
- pjc50 7y agoI am intrigued by this technology which allows people to remotely remove the actual heads of their enemies over the internet, but maybe I skipped that in the Twitter release notes.
- huffmsa 7y agoIt's called swatting
- undecisive 7y ago> It's called swatting Dark but true :( Again, mostly geographically limited to the United States of Barberica?
- philwelch 7y agoI think at least in the US, maybe 10-15 years ago was much more open and accepting of dissenting ideas.
- chroma 7y agoI think we peaked 15 years ago. Today I have to worry about what I say lest I be branded a bigot and fired from my job. It's very stifling.
- rtx 7y agoI wonder if this could be applied to anti vaccination crowd.
- mcv 7y ago> "Galileo and Darwin are famous examples of this phenomenon," Famous, yes, but there can also be incorrect assumptions in that. Galileo, for example. A lot of people assume his heliocentric model was correct and was only rejected because heliocentrism was considered heretical because it contradicted the ruling assumption of geocentrism. But the Vatican at the time was seriously considering a number of models including some heliocentric models. One of the reasons Galileo's model was rejected, was because it contradicted observations. Planets didn't quite move in the way he predicted, and that's because Galileo clung to the incorrect assumptions that orbits had to be circular. Of course his core idea of heliocentrism was less wrong than geocentric models, but at the same time it's an example of how addressing one incorrect assumption can lead you into another incorrect assumption. And that also lead to a lot of resistance to your idea, even if the core of your idea is correct. As for Darwin, a lot of people at the time already assumed that something like evolution had to be going on, and that many animals had common ancestors. They just didn't know how it worked. Even while Darwin was working on his theory, Alfred Russel Wallace was working on the exact same idea. So in that case, the idea was actually obvious to anyone paying attention, and Darwin happened to be the one to get there first. But if he hadn't published about it, Wallace would most likely have done so.
- titzer 7y agoDarwin also deserves the lion's share of the credit because his documentary evidence was absolutely overwhelming. It took him decades to amass it.
- 7y ago
- mrleiter 7y agoTo put it in other fancy words: when challenging paradigms, expect resistance. If you want to non-obvious („contrarian“ in SV speak), look for paradigms and question them.
- mojuba 7y agoThe opposite is also true: the interestingness and explosiveness of a novel idea is a function of its hereticity. We all create interesting business opportinities indirectly, by resisting to change.
- rhaksw 7y agoOk here's one, a website that shows things you posted that have been removed from Reddit [1]. Ask HN: heretical or not? This is the only tool AFAIK that shows removed content for a given account. [1] https://revddit.com https://revddit.com
- aaron695 7y agoI do not think people will call something novel that (actually) works heresy. Example? What's something with resistance that was discovered in the past 20 years? If it works, people will see that, even without a working model. Other than silly examples like calling the Wii a Wii I can't name anything. And arguably the Wii wasn't a 'discover something new'. (I also don't count one comment about DB) Is Wikipedia an example?
- hexxiiiz 7y agoNot sure what Grahams views are on economics, but I have certainly read/heard business people trumpet heretical ideas with praise before, having specifically in mind those heresies that conform to their particular world view. Graham uses two scientists as examples that have long been situated uncontroversially in the scientific world as canonical. Scientists are often used as examples of this kind of "revolutionary thinking" lauded by people in this world. I am curious how Graham would respond to the heresy of Marx's critique of capital to challenge the idea that capitalism is the best and historically final form of economics. Marx is just one example here of a thinker that is heretical without being "innovative" in the archetypical sense of Einstein or an inventor. I am generally curious if when someone promotes heresy, they already have in mind the kind of heresies that already fit into their dogmas. Graham may be more broad minded than this, but this kind of view does get thrown around enough to look like a trope.
- huffmsa 7y agoMarx didn't challenge capitalism though,he said it wasn't the endgame, just the late-midgame. WALL-E is our future, and WALL-E is perfect Marxist communism.
- zzzcpan 7y agoNovelty he talks about is one thing, but economics is a policy driven political system, not rooted in science and hence forced on people and supported with propaganda. The difference is between fighting opinions of powerless people and fighting powerful governments that have full force of propaganda behind them and all kinds of censorship, silencing techniques that affect spread of information everywhere.
- buboard 7y agohow was Marx not innovative? Also, today it feels that Marx is the orthodoxy and the heretics are those who reject him
- blotter_paper 7y agoIf Marx feels like orthodoxy you either haven't read a significant amount of Marx or you haven't been paying attention to who controls the capital in society. I say this as somebody who does not identify as a Marxist, but used to.
- classified 7y agoJust look at HN comment threads: Any truth that's inconvenient for the majority in the respective thread will be brainlessly downvoted. Killing the messenger is just as popular here (where all the smartest know-it-alls convene) as it is there (where all the ignoramuses reside).
- undecisive 7y agoThat's a natural consequence of the human condition, coupled with a libertarian outlook when creating moderation tools. A downvote can never be presumed to mean "this is objectively wrong", always "this is subjectively objectionable" A good exercise in knowing thyself, examining your own prejudices and improving the world around you because of that critical introspection. Unfortunately, this process must be repeated near-constantly to bring about perfection, and few people have the time for that (or are willing to make the time for that)
- Ma8ee 7y agoCould you give me some examples?
- bluntfang 7y agoGender issues and workplace diversity.
- sincerely 7y ago"Gender issues" and "workplace diversity" are vague topics, not "truths" or even specific ideas we can discuss.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ctdonath 7y agoWe all know what truths and specific ideas those terms encompass. Stating them brings a flurry of downvotes. Even pointing in their general direction gets downvoted.
- WMCRUN 7y agoWhen did PG redesign the site?
- farrelmahaztra 7y agoWhat are some examples of ideas today that are considered heretical but may have value to them?
- chmike 7y agoHomeopathy: see "Water Memory Due to Chains of Nano-Pearls" (https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=89620 https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=...)
- redsymbol 7y agoSomeone asks for heretical ideas. Someone else replies honestly. Honest reply is downvoted, hard. Regardless of the merit, or not, of that idea... this whole process perfectly demonstrates the article's point.
- CamperBob2 7y agoThe question was "What are some examples of ideas today that are considered heretical but may have value to them?" There's no conceivable value in homeopathy, so it's non-responsive to the question that was asked.
- chmike 7y agoYou are just a member of the people who consider homeopathy and water memory as an heresy. You claim that there is no value to it, but this might be wrong and the article given in reference support this possibility. An aspect that Paul Graham did not address in his essay is the difficulty one can face to communicate about something in a domain considered an heresy. The probability to find something new in such domain is greater than the average, but the recognition is much more difficult to gain than average.
- farrelmahaztra 7y agoThanks! It was an interesting read regardless of the understandable controversy of the topic. Sorry to see you were downvoted. Anyone else?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hycaria 7y agoReading this I can't help but think about my mother, justifying all her shady pseudoscience beliefs by mentioning that brilliant and innovant scientists were treated with disdain during their own times, just as pseudoscience is. Heresies then turn into antivaxxers, electrosensitivity, homeopathy and so on. This might work for business opportunities, but please leave science out of that.
- chmike 7y agoI beg to differ. This is exactly spot on for science too. You gave homeopathy as an example. Here is an article that explain water memory, the underlying principle of homeopathy: ["Water Memory Due to Chains of Nano-Pearls"](https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=89620 https://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=...)
- hycaria 7y agoYes yes, sadly I'm well aware of water memory already.
- hackface 7y agoDefinitely an area not explored much. Any research into homeopathy is seen either with scoff or pity. http://www.i-sis.org.uk/DNA_sequence_reconstituted_from_Water_Memory.php http://www.i-sis.org.uk/DNA_sequence_reconstituted_from_Wate...
- the_af 7y agoWater memory is pseudoscience.
- tonetheman 7y agoI am with you on this comment. I feel like mentioning famous scientist does not help the case at all. I mean PG is talking about coming up with ideas to sell to VC or private equity firms... There is nothing as grand as scientific progress here... just randos trying to get rich.
- 7y ago
- NateEag 7y agoThe idea of heresy as a path to being right shows up many times in Graham's work, but he adheres so closely to software heterodoxy throughout his essays. - Programming language of choice being a huge deal - Taking it as obvious that the supernatural is fiction - Assuming smartness is a crucial ingredient for success I could probably come up with more, but that'll do for now.
- mcguire 7y agoYou have to be heretical correctly.
- olooney 7y agoDid you mean, "adheres so closely to software orthodoxy?" I only ask because it's hard to see how one could "adhere" to heterodoxy and your use of the word "but" suggests you're setting up a contrast with heresy.
- NateEag 7y agoApparently I did. I had a functioning vocabulary once, but it seems to have failed hard with the advent of small children.
- LudwigNagasena 7y agoIt’s easy to say things like that when you live in a bubble of hypereducated successful people and you are being myopic concentrating on your own field. There is no shortage of heresy in modern culture: astrology, homeopathy, creationism, dianetics, quantum mysticism, anti-aging creams and essential oils, torsion fields, moon landing conspiracy, the Bermuda Triangle, feng shui and yoga woo (at least in the form they are practiced in the West), conversion therapy, graphology, anti-vax, neuro-linguistic programming, phrenology, aryanism, etc. I think Gavin Belsen is an apt caricature of this mindset turned up to 11, a successful Silicone Valley entrepreneur with megalomaniac tendencies and his own exotic, mystic and Eastern spiritual guru. Yes, some people may cry wolf every time a new idea is presented, but oftentimes they are right and the new idea is indeed heresy and maybe even dangerous.
- philwelch 7y agoNone of that stuff is heresy. Most of it is crackpottery and kookish, but crackpots and kooks tend to get debunked rather than shouted down. With heretics there’s usually no attempt at good faith counterargument at all.
- LudwigNagasena 7y agoOh, sure, when you agree with something controversial, it is just society being irrational. But when you disagree with something, it is obviously because it is crackpottery. Don’t you think people who are against these “heresies” have exactly the same view?
- philwelch 7y agoDid you even read my comment before replying to it?
- LudwigNagasena 7y agoYes.
- wsy 7y agoI like a lot how G. B. Shaw phrased this insight: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." However, from the perspective of the reasonable man, things look differently: Only a small minority of 'unreasonable men' actually manage to change the world. So it is rational to be doubtful if someone's novel idea contradicts widely shared assumptions.
- janvdberg 7y agoFunny both Galileo and Darwin are mentioned, since they are also mentioned on the same page in The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb page 167: "Likewise we think that Galileo was a victim in the name of science; in fact, the church didn't take him too seriously. It seems, rather, that Galileo caused the uproar himself by ruffling a few feathers. At the end of the year in which Darwin and Wallace presented their papers on evolution by natural selection that changed the way we view the world, the president of the Linnean society, where the papers were presented, announced that the society saw "no striking discovery," nothing in particular that could revolutionize science. " So Taleb makes the opposite claim that their ideas in their time weren't regarded as heresy as we now tend to believe.
- Bartweiss 7y agoI think we overestimate the dichotomy between those two things. It's pretty common to see people react to ideas with "that's either obviously true or heretically stupid, but it's definitely not accurate and groundbreaking." Galileo got in trouble over insulting his patron, but heliocentric theory more broadly was peacefully ignored, except when it became too visible and was persecuted. And the Catholic Church has maintained the same position ever since: into the 1800s, it was alternately publishing and banning works which accepted heliocentric theory. Even in the 1990s, we saw Cardinal Ratzinger rationalizing the Church's position as more rational than Galileo's at the time, while John Paul II was talking about "the error of the theologians of the time", as though the matter had consisted of a standard disagreement between scholars, rather than a heresy trial and a formal ban on Galilean ideas. One view says he was a foolish heretic who got lucky, the other an accepted part of the academy; neither concedes that his work was both controversial and correct. We see the same thing all over. Darwin was hesitant to publish because he knew the conflict he'd attract, but the Linnean society declared his work unremarkable even as sparked outrage in other quarters. Soviet science suppression is recent enough to be well-documented; we see for instance that cybernetics was a "bourgeois pseudo-science" until it was rehabilitated, at which point Kolman wrote a history in which suppressed thinkers like Glushkov were credited with inventing the science ahead of Westerners. Taleb's historical point is interesting, but I think he's wrong to portray those as conflicting reactions. Jumping straight from mockery to acceptance is a common approach for an establishment that doesn't want to lose face.
- slowenough 7y agoSome heresies: - React is bad and bloated. - Startup industry is exploiting idealistic young people, as slaves of VC/venture partner "bet placers" with the promises of often unrealizable rewards, by promoting startup mythology, as lab rats most of whom will end up failed experiments. - China is not bad and should be supported, and the West can learn much from it, if the West could set aside its insecurity and pomp and see clearly.
- _Microft 7y agoThere is a difference between being heretical and being impolite, insulting or deliberately provocative. It is not only what you say but also how you say it. This being said, how do you expect to receive anything but backlash with a conditional clause like in your last sentence ("if the West could set aside its insecurity and pomp and see clearly."). That's not heresy, it's deliberate edgy-ness. Beside that I believe that 'the West' could learn some things from China because I believe that it is not all bad. Claiming that China is not bad in light of the China Cables is pretty bold, though.
- jessaustin 7y ago...deliberate edgy-ness... Strong disagree, from this Westerner. There is ample evidence of both insecurity and pomp anywhere one looks, in USA and in popular Western media.
- slowenough 7y agoMaybe you're just jealous then. So go to China, don't blame me.
- buboard 7y agoBurn him
- slowenough 7y agoHe he. Well, at least the heresies were actual heresies. They were so effective that a whole subthread starting with a guy who asked me to say what I think is good about China, had to be detached because it descended into trolling and China bashing. Surprise, surprised. I think we've identified a pretty good heresy. The problem is heresies stop people seeing beyond them. So they don't see the useful new ideas, because they are blinded by the "2 minutes hate" the heresy triggers.
- jakemal 7y agoCan you expand on what types of things you think we should be learning from China?
- slowenough 7y agoSure I could but then you'd just point out exactly why that looks wrong to you, since that seems to be what you'd like to do, so what would be the point? It only works when you're actually ready to listen. That's not my problem. You get ready to learn on your own time. If you're resisting there's no point trying to put it in front of you so you see, since you'll just pretend you don't see. Cherished mistaken assumptions protection and all. Okay?
- jakemal 7y agoI was not asking from a standpoint of trying to tell you that you're wrong. I was asking because it seems like a good example to take away from the article but I'm not sure what specifically you were thinking.
- slowenough 7y agoAlright, I'll take you at your word and I'll risk it, let's see what happens. China: - is good at doing things. Projects in the West are smaller and take longer. - can take the long view. Western governments think of the next election. - promotes harmony and unity among its citizens. Western electorates must be divided by emotional issues. - has a domestic security apparatus that's more transparent and obvious than corresponding forces in the West. - has 1.4 billion people. EU has 512 million. US has 330 million. - learn what works from others and make it their own. Less Western students go to China, than vice versa. - people emigrate everywhere, mix with everyone but still maintain their own culture. Less Westerners migrate to China than vice versa. - is very safe from violent crime and terrorism. The West could emulate China's effective law enforcement strategies. - has an admirable, inspiring and clear goal of striving for national rejuvenation, a harmonious and moderately prosperous country. What admirable, inspiring and clear goal for the future to work toward does any Western country have? That's some of what I think. But I don't think it's important to you what I think. I think what's important for you is you being open to see what's already there in front of you. When you are open to learn, you will find your own things about China that you admire and wish the West would emulate.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoIt's linked at the end, but http://paulgraham.com/say.html http://paulgraham.com/say.html (2004) is, IMHO, much stronger version of the same argument.
- jessaustin 7y agoThat's PG's most important piece. By occasionally publishing short references to it (like TFA), he re-surfaces it for people who haven't seen it before or haven't thought about it for a long time. When I was a child it seemed that society could distinguish moral judgments from epistemological ones. Now it seems that epistemology is the only remaining hiding place for judgmental moralists. Fake news!
- kfk 7y agoJust keep in mind that if your thinking is heresy you either have a way to show results quickly or a huge marketing budget. Being right today doesn't mean people will listen. With so much noise on the web credibility is a huge driver for customer acquisition. If your solution doesn't clearly show results and requires a pitch be ready to spend a lot of time building up your case and selling it. For instance, insects are a good idea for animal feed, right? Well you still need a lot of marketing to convince animal farmers to adopt them, the easier thing for them to do is just keep doing what they are doing today.
- hef19898 7y agoThat rings true. Somewhat unrelated, but nonetheless important IMHO, is the new trend I see on networks like LinkedIn around culture fit, trust and performance. In a group where trust, a highly subjective concept to begin with, intervenes with heresy the focus on trust over performance can severely hinder innovation and be counterproductive. Which might explain why certain companies attract certain people.
- wolfram74 7y agoBeing right has /never/ been enough to convince people. Changing peoples minds has to have enough of an improvement to overcome switching costs /and/ any anchoring biases.
- kfk 7y agoYes but today you compete with everybody else. If you are in a crowded space, i.e. analytics, your ideas will have to compete with ideas of many other bigger players with bugger marketing budgets. You also more or less advertise in the same place where they advertise.
- kstenerud 7y agoHappens to me every time. Every major product I've built from the ground up was first greeted as heresy by those already in that particular industry, and then later copied by the same people. By now I'm used to it, and use it as a gauge of how sneaky I'll have to be in marketing it.
- bulletsvshumans 7y agoThe flip side of the coin is protecting truth or useful ideas from ultimately less true or useful ideas. Or just simply avoiding the overhead of exhaustively vetting every idea without regard for its apparent merit. It's just like genetics: mutation can be valuable and is ultimately the way that anything evolves, but any given mutation is much much more likely to be problematic than valuable. There's a fine balance in identifying the ideal level of mutation for the long-term health of an ecosystem. Similarly, there's a balance in finding the right degree of resistance to novel ideas. Maximum support for heresy is probably not the equilibrium point.
- philwelch 7y agoTrue and useful ideas can take care of themselves. It’s mostly false and useless ideas that need to be protected from heresy.
- larnmar 7y agoI don’t think we should feel the need to comprehensively entertain every idea that is different and sounds silly. For a healthy ideas ecosystem: If you hear a new and silly idea, and you don’t have the time or energy or interest to look into it properly, the best thing to do for everyone’s sake is to ignore it. Either address an idea properly, or ignore it. Don’t write a 140-character snarky dismissal of it, don’t attack the personal characteristics of the person holding it, and certainly don’t seek to censor or “cancel” them.
- rexgallorum2 7y agoMaybe we need a special place where we can discuss highly unpopular and 'heretical' ideas that strongly contradict perceived wisdom or popular opinion. Any ideas?
- mistermann 7y agoI'd like to see a once per month thread on HN that allows it, with rate limiting removed from accounts that have been flagged for participating in flame wars, and a policy of "try to speak only in truthful terms". I think some interesting conversations that aren't otherwise possible might result.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pron 7y agoThe problem is that this outlook is often used as an argument in favor of some heretical position, instead of just being a defense against outright rejection. What is often forgotten (aside from the excellent points brought up by mcv) is that Galileo and Darwin were each among the very top experts in their respective fields, and many of those who rejected them most forcefully were laymen. That was the biggest difference between them and their detractors -- they were experts facing off many laymen and amateurs -- not their heresy. These days laymen often challenge experts and see themselves as Galileo just because their opinion is heretical, rather than because they've studied a subject more rigorously than others. Rigor and scholarship must precede heresy. Another pitfall that's common nowadays is that many ideas that are presented as heroic heresy are just yesterday's rejected dogma. When dogma is rejected when a more rigorous heresy shows up, it doesn't lend more credibility to the rejected dogma, which is now heretical. In other words, these are people who claim Galileo's heretical status by arguing for geocentrism, which is today's heresy. Ironically, these days it is mostly reactionaries rehashing old dogmas that proudly describe themselves as heretics.
- namirez 7y ago> "Galileo and Darwin are famous examples of this phenomenon, but it's probably always an ingredient in the resistance to new ideas." The problem with this logic is that for every Galileo and Darwin, there are thousands of crackpots out there. Every month or so I see some news about engines that run on water as fuel. As Walter Kotschnig said: "Let us keep our minds open, by all means, as long as that means keeping our sense of perspective and seeking an understanding of the forces which mould the world. But don’t keep your minds so open that your brains fall out!"
- lukifer 7y agoThe problem is, it's not obvious a priori which ideas are crackpot and which ideas are hidden gems. (The infamous comparison being Newton's passion for theology and alchemy in addition to calculus and physics; it's not obvious he would have made his accomplishments in the latter, without being the kind of person willing to invest time in the former.) I think the right strategy is to acknowledge that such pursuits are proverbial moon-shots, setting expectations and risk tolerance accordingly. Most innovations fail, and that's okay; "the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas".
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gdubs 7y agoGotta wonder if this was inspired by the Cybertruck announcement and the polarization that has followed.
- jdance 7y agoReading the comments its obvious that this hits a nerve with many people, exactly as the essay argues :) Our conceptual world is just that, conceptual, and is open to interpretation and change, and is fundamentally open ended. And at our current societal development we really really do not like that. We want to know how things are, and poking holes in how things are, is not popular (yet)
- raincom 7y agoHistory and philosophy of sciences have studied this phenomenon a lot. Read Thomas Kuhn's "The structure of Scientific revolutions".
- aridiculous 7y agoThe timing of the publishing of this seems coincidentally aligned with YC's very recent backout of a Chinese outpost. https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/21/y-combinator-abruptly-shutters-yc-china/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/21/y-combinator-abruptly-shut... I read this as a coded way for Paul Graham to express his distaste for those opposing the YC China expansion.
- buboard 7y agoWhy now? PG has written about this before. My thinking is that the tech stagnation has lately become evident even to the most disbelieving ones. And perhaps even SV is starting to think it's time to go ahead with the less safe ideas. That's just the idea i get from my reading of Twitters, i m not even in the US :)
- voidhorse 7y agoI dislike this essay’s use of the concept of heresey. Heresy had force back in the day when religious orders had hegemonic control over society. That’s no longer the case today. I know that’s not what PG means by his use of the term, but there’s no reflection in this peice about the metaphorical use of the concept. Furthermore, the argument is fundamentally flawed. What consitutes heresy is entirely contingent upon the prevailing societal order’s judgements. Let’s put aside the problematic use of heresey for a second and deal with PG’s actual argument—which is that it’s good to go after ideas that the majority of society either doesn’t recognize or sees as anathema. This quality alone doesn’t prove the marker of a good idea. For all the « heretical » ideas like Darwin’s and Galilleo’s that proved lifechanging, there are a horde that were useless of harmful. The value in these thinker’s ideas has almost nothing to do with their heretical nature, which is a politico-religious quality—that these ideas are felt as « life-altering » in history may have something to do with their heretical nature (since they necessarily flew in the face of the prevailihg order of the day) but their fame and historical import does not actually have anything to do with their theoretic rigor, scientific value, or general usefulness. I don’t really see the point of this essay other than to say « think outside the box » in a quite clunky way by arguing from history and making some dubious claims (e.g. the essay seems to suggest that chasing heresies is an operable method to make novel discoveries while neither of the examples it uses are evidence of this methodology—while the discoveries may have been heretical, its unlikely Darwin or Galileo chased the discoveries on account of their heretical status).
- tlb 7y agoWikipedia defines the word as "any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs, in particular the accepted beliefs of a church or religious organization". You're presumably using a different definition, or else neither of your arguments make sense. Maybe you should say what you think the word means?
- voidhorse 7y agoFair enough. But it’s also fair to quote the sentence you cited in its etirety instead of chopping it off at the comma: « Heresy is any belief or theory that is strongly at variance with established beliefs or customs, in particular the accepted beliefs of a church or religious organization.« A better word for a belief that disagrees with general sentiment without having religious conotations is iconoclasm which unlike heresy, has the religious meaning as its secondary definition.( heresy’s religious sense is still the primary definition according to oxford). Though I must say I’m not surprised the differentiation between such words is coming to ruin given our general laziness in regard to language, the decay of religious systems, and a broad ignorance of etymology and history. It won’t be surprising to me if the word totally loses its religious elment in a few years. Sorry for the salt. Have to presenr this one for the future so I can check my prediction.
- dnprock 7y agoI'm working on a heresy: a cryptocurrency with constant inflation. Most people in crypto dismiss the idea of inflation. It has been tried before. This time, I come up with a reward schedule to bootstrap inflation. And my crypto has inflation as its narrative. Inflation is its main feature. People think I start another scam to replace Bitcoin. I actually think my project is not competing with Bitcoin. Galileo didn't advocate heliocentrism to bring down the church. He just supported the idea. The funny thing about heresy is most of them are somewhat trivial to see. People will think it's too trivial. Someone must have tried/proposed it before. Galileo's and Darwin's cases were also like this. My project may fail. But the interesting thing about heresy is someone will try again at some point in the future. So I'm not too hung up about having to succeed. Check out my project. :) https://bitflate.org/post/2019/04/14/bitflate-cryptocurrency-with-constant-inflation.html https://bitflate.org/post/2019/04/14/bitflate-cryptocurrency...
- blotter_paper 7y agoBesides longer blocktimes (2.5 minutes v.s. 1 minute), a higher inflation rate (7% v.s. ~4.5%), and a different hashing algorithm (SHA-256 v.s. Scrypt), how does Bitflate compare with Dogecoin? What aspects of Dogecoin made you decide to start your own project instead of working with an existing community that revolves around an inflationary cryprocurrency? I don't hold any Dogecoins, nor have I ever been a part of that community, they just seem like the primary example of an inflationary cryptocurrency to me and I'm trying to understand what makes your project different than the incumbent in that space, or if there's enough distinction that you don't see yourself as even being in competition with Dogecoin.
- dnprock 7y agoThanks. Dogecoin has a constant tail emission. As supply grows, the rate of new coin inflation shrinks. Dogecoin community rejects the idea that they have a compound (percentage) inflation. https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1wuhyj/info_clearing_up_missinformation_about_our/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoin/comments/1wuhyj/info_clear... Dogecoin is a good example of how hard it is to depart from its own narrative, basically, commit a heresy. Bitflate has a percentage point of 7% inflation. We're going to stick with it for the sake of this experiment. Given what I read, I think it'd be hard to convince Dogecoin to really do percentage point inflation. I'm nobody. Dogecoin community won't bother listening to me. In addition, my project starts out with inflation in the plan. It has reward halving until inflation stops at 7%. The reward schedule looks like this: 0: 50 (supply: 10 million) 1: 25 (supply: 15 million) 2: 12.5 3: 6.25 (end of halving) 4: 6.56 (start of inflation 7%) 5: 7.02 6: 7.51 7: 8.04 8: 8.60 9: 9.20 10: 9.85 (supply: 31 million) Dogecoin narrative is fun/meme/tip coin. Bitflate narrative is inflation coin. I think narrative is important. Once set, it'll be hard to change. It's possible other communities will switch to inflation. I would consider it a success for our effort. :)
- war1025 7y agoWonder what inspired him to put out two essays in short order after having been silent since early 2017...
- michael2l 7y agoI think when it comes to evaluating true novelty we underestimate how much our language does our thinking for us. Which is another reason why novel ideas hide from us so well. To put them into articulated forms that can be carried through time effectively (even to communicate them to later versions of ourselves) we have to bend the meanings of the words we're using in novel ways. Not easy to do but essential to an idea's survival.
- blooperblogger 7y agoPaul Graham is the same blogger who "realized" Microsoft is dead and irrelevant . I wonder what kind of sheeple listen to him
- robsinatra 7y agoPaul Graham, Eric Ries, Steve Blank, Sam Altman, and many others have promoted their share of ideas that entrepreneurial and VC communities have latched onto as sacrosanct. Take, for instance, the notion of "minimum viable product". Do the absolute minimum of work to validate an idea because that way you didn't spend years of your life creating something that there was no market for. If you didn't go to market after 3 months of development, you're doing it wrong. If you didn't seek sage advice from a panel of... "experts"... trying to convince you why you should give up 10% of your life's work for $100,000, you're doing it wrong. If you take a principled approach to your work and do what is right rather than what is popular, you're doing it wrong. Ship as quickly as possible. Go fast. We need Velocity©! You don't need to do anything right, just focus on appearances. Generally speaking, whatever you're thinking and doing is wrong. They know what is best. Herein lies the great dead zone of missed opportunities, rejected by venture capitalists and entrepreneurship thinkers who worked too hard to advance ideas that aren't universally applicable and in many cases are simply wrong. PG et al: break from convention and challenge your theories about what makes projects successful
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