14 ms·

Fashionable Problems

365 points by hackerews 7y ago

blueboo 7y ago
Paul is confusing ignorance for insight here. It's the same phenomenon whereby a weekend visit to Paris has your uncle explaining the European soul but your year in Kyoto leaves you barely able to generalize at all from your (actual) knowledge of nuance, complexity and diversity of another culture. Everyone is trying to break the mold at various scopes. Meanwhile, you're welcome to reproduce your late-90s success at any moment, Paul. We'll wait.
- jdsully 7y ago
  Does YC not count?
lquist 7y ago
If you want to try working on unfashionable problems, one of the best places to look is fields that people think have already been fully explored: essays, Lisp, venture funding – you may notice a pattern here. Do people really think the fields of essays, LISP or venture funding are fully explored?
- gkoberger 7y ago
  I think so? They’re all expanding, of course... but none have really changed that much over the past few decades. There’s a ton more VCs than there were a decade ago, but has it really changed as a field? People tweak the formula a bit, but we haven’t seen a shift in the same way YC shifted things. To a lesser extent, pg was one of the first “tech essayists” (now it’s a genre, http://waitwho.is http://waitwho.is). I don’t think pg is saying they’re being ignored, but rather that there’s a sense of “yup we figured it out, let’s just iterate slowly on it”. (I will say I can think of much better examples, but I don’t blame pg for picking the three examples that sum up his entire career. He picked those three things when nobody else cared.)
  - leppr 7y ago
    Cryptocurrency ICOs showed venture funding could be innovated on way more fundamentally than "tweaking a formula". The simple ICO model may arguably have been largely misused, but it kickstarted a lot of promising research and experimentation[1]. [1]: e.g. https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/10/24/gitcoin.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/10/24/gitcoin.html, https://www.zfnd.org/blog/dev-fund-guidance-and-timeline https://www.zfnd.org/blog/dev-fund-guidance-and-timeline
- travisjungroth 7y ago
  Mmm, no. Which is why I really don’t get this post. The advice seems to boil down to something like : “don’t work on something fashionable! Do something like VC funding with a twist, or your own take on essays!” (which seems to be very fashionable).
  - Lammy 7y ago
    He's praising himself. Those are three areas _he_ explored.
- jdminhbg 7y ago
  I think the meaning is that they were at one time, namely, the time he got started on them.
- diehunde 7y ago
  I was wondering the same. I get the message from the post but I don't think the examples are good.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
Agree. It is also a good reason for having multidisciplinary interests so we might have different ideas for looking for very different solutions to problems.
blast 7y ago
Is this the first PG essay that was composed on Twitter? https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1183686114844069888 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1183686114844069888
- mmahemoff 7y ago
  Many articles now are cleanly formatted tweetstorms.
  - blast 7y ago
    Many PG articles? Which ones?
    - mmahemoff 7y ago
      Just a general observation. Wasn't specifically answering your question about PG's writing.
      - xwowsersx 7y ago
        Lol what do you mean a "general observation"? You stated plainly that "Many articles now are cleanly formatted tweetstorms". Which ones?
        dang 7y ago
        Curious questions are great, but please don't cross examine. That's in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
nostromo 7y ago
I love this mini-essay. The counter to this is that it'll be harder to raise capital for un-fashionable problems. If you pitched "ML for sandwich makers" right now you could raise a million bucks because so many VCs are making fashionable bets on ML.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  So what? Raising is not success.
  - wwweston 7y ago
    It’s pretty successful as failures go.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      I guess, if you define "success" as "managing to borrow money"...
  - Traster 7y ago
    It's often a pre-requisite for success. It doesn't matter how good your idea is, if you can't get it implemented and supported by a sales team, support team etc. it isn't going to work. There are brilliant ideas out there, but very few of them are brilliant and require 0 resources to achieve.
  - gitgud 7y ago
    > Raising is not success. People think raising is a signal for success, when it's more like kissing the dice at a casino
fnord77 7y ago
> If you can find a new approach into a big but apparently played out field, the value of whatever you discover will be multiplied by its enormous surface area. If you found something in a big, fashionable field with a huge surface area (cough ai/ml cough), wouldn't this multiplier apply to that fashionable field, too?
- simlan 7y ago
  Well I guess you can't see AI as a played out field yet. More likely it is just starting to take off. Say you find a new exciting spin on ERPs to replace e.g. SAP solutions that will have a large surface area. At least that is how i read the linked post.
  - Wistar 7y ago
    ... or payment processing. Look what Stripe is carving out.
    - m11a 7y ago
      There are still many problems in payment processing. One I can think of is acceptance. Merchant fees are way too high especially for physical payments. I can't pay using card at my barber or local convenience stores here. I suppose the reasoning is that card fees make it not worthwhile accepting for amounts below, say, £5-10 (inflated for microtransactions). Doesn't make sense for them to accept a big % loss in profits just to accept cards over cash. If we're to become a cashless society extortionate merchant processing fees need to lower.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Fashionable problem. Played out field. So, essentially, yes - fashionable fields will be well explored; the essay is about not getting sucked into fashionable problems in whatever field you're working in.
  - backpropaganda 7y ago
    So in the case of AI/ML, the fashionable new thing is unsupervised learning, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, GANS, etc. The played out problems are image classification, speech recognition, etc.
sillysaurusx 7y ago
As a long-time pg supporter, it pains me to say this: I think at this point pg could write anything and it would show up immediately with critical acclaim. It was more charming when he had to work hard to make his points known. But hey, fame, right? Just famous people things. There's so much more to say in this case, though! How do you avoid the traps? Waving a wand like "Just love something" leaves far too much to the imagination. Pointing at a prior essay at loving your work is helpful, but different. Often, you have to actively offend people in order to find good problems to work on. The idea that people have devoted their lives to the wrong thing is inherently offensive to them. That's a point not covered here. For example, I imagine that a lot of people who've studied 3D rendering for their entire lives are about to feel very outdated the moment neural network renderers displace them. And that's also a good counterexample to the point that "Often, the best place to search for new ideas is a place thought fully explored." It might often be true, but it's not always true. And then there are the in-betweens. Bitcoin was in a field both thought fully explored (crypto + finance) and also unexplored, in a certain sense.
- tyre 7y ago
  Had the same thought. Some of his essays, no one else could have written them and brought a fresh, nuanced perspective. These couple paragraphs wouldn’t get any attention if not for the name of the writer. Maybe that’s fine—great writers have their share of banality—but does reveal how susceptible we are generally to brand name over substance.
  - gist 7y ago
    I am actually surprised that PG doesn't feel uncomfortable about the 'acclaim' that he is getting for writing many of the things he has said that are not related to anything he has expertise in. Reminds me of celebrities who opine about politics with their thoughts (sometimes not always with PG). Paul is authoritative on many topics. General thoughts about life and people are great to hear what he thinks. Why not? But he is no more special than 100000 other people who have no audience. Does he know this? I've often thought he should do some A/B posting with his thoughts. Write something and then randomly decide whether to put it on his blog or some other place and see what the interest level is.
diego 7y ago
Well, I have a hard time thinking of a field that I believe is fully explored. History has shown time and again that it's really easy to be fooled in that respect.
MAXPOOL 7y ago
Humanity as a whole as problem solving algorithm might be similar to particle swarm in very complex neighbourhoods and topologies. Particles (individual humans or small groups) move around in problem space as particles with position and velocity. Each individual's movement is influenced by its best known position locally but also the the best known global positions in the search-space. When better positions are found by others, individual change their course (take hints) and move towards them. The problems would be the same. Too much randomness and it's just a random search. Too much convergence leads to local optimums.
bdotdub 7y ago
Area man write blog post saying things are great and just so happens to overlap exactly with what he does
gist 7y ago
> Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems. How can a statement like that be made? Is there some kind of authoritative directory of 'the smartest, most imaginative people' being 'surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on'. Implied I guess Paul means 'who I've met or who I know of'. So then say that. It's a big world out there. Who knows what anyone is working on or what they are thinking or have tried and why they haven't pursued it. This is a bit like saying 'people love their dogs and will do anything for them if they are sick'. Just a general statement of opinion by one person (and generally accepted as being correct) but based on not anything even close to being scientific and/or backed up by any actual data. That part is fine. But if that is the case state it as such and not some absolute. Why does this matter? Because when someone like Paul writes something it will be taken by others to be some kind of important thought or fact.
- mvp 7y ago
  Most of his essays have that wise old man who has seen the world kind of vibe to them. If anybody else writes the same things without the success he has had it will be ridiculous to read. I don't think anybody who reads his essays is looking for any scientific report based on facts. They are looking for some sort of confirmation that they are not crazy when they have similar thoughts.
  - gist 7y ago
    It's in some ways the writing equivalent of the NPR calm and measured voice the intended impact to make it more believable and important and entirely rational sounding and correct.
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rgbrenner 7y ago
I think pg understates the problem. It isn't just fashionable. Think about how the solutions we use today evolved. Someone had an idea originally and certain decisions were made about that approach.. those that best adapted to the conditions of the time were successful... rinse and repeat over several decades. Those ideas that preserved the past were more likely to succeed because they preserved the ecosystem that already existed. Ideas that diverged too much from the existing successful tech had a huge obstacle in their way: they had to recreate all of the existing solutions in their new model. So even if they would lead to a better solution over time, they may never get past that initial roadblock. And the longer we stay on the path, the bigger that roadblock becomes. If we are all thinking of ideas around the existing model and assuming all of the existing assumptions, then we end up with similar solutions (fashionable solutions). We've reduced the solution space, leading to a limited number of solutions. Perhaps groundbreaking/valuable tech can be found by questioning those existing assumptions; identifying where tech is still built on assumptions that are no longer true; or reexamining past solutions to see if they can be solved in better ways today with what we've learned since then...
- cjblomqvist 7y ago
  Many insights to be made by this comment. One that is easily missed is how hard it is to fight against the existing ecosystem/assumptions. I've found that a lot of people either don't, or make a point of challenging everything. A strategy they've worked fairly well for me so far is to challenge one(!) assumption after a lot of careful analysis, and then try to adapt to the ecosystem as best as possible. Most revolutionary things are not made in one big bang, but in many incremental steps. They only look like big bangs in hindsight. Even the nuclear bomb was fairly incremental, with truly a big bang in the end.... (pun intended ;)
  - jbverschoor 7y ago
    The problem is that multi-layered problem solving is superhard to execute. It's not that it's hard to find a solution that would be orders better, but it's just that it's risky, as it's an all-or-nothing path. It at least requires a lot of confidence for the existing market. With waterfall-kind of planning, that would work. Unfortunately it got a bad name in the '90s and early '00s. The wild-west of inexperienced developers, who needed to solve business problems they didn't understand, combined with clients who didn't understand technology. I believe this is a great period to do bigger things, and you see this happening with for example SpaceX, Tesla and Apple: space is happening again, companies are creating super specialized and complex ICs, there's actual business value and consumer value being produced, and projects are reasonably on time with these companies. This in constract with companies who, what it seems, do more of an iterative approach: Facebook, Google, Amazon. No huge innovation going there.
shrubble 7y ago
In this thread a guy talks about using the Q language and then someone else jumps in and says 'it's not scalable etc.' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854793 What if all this cloud/k8s / serverless stuff is really all piffle? What if running stuff on dedicated hardware ends up a better solution in some fashion?
- kick 7y ago
  The claim that k/q isn't scalable is false for anyone curious: k/q is incredibly scalable. That's a selling point of it.
- icebraining 7y ago
  It may be fashionable and overused, but I don't think we can talk about the cloud as if it was still something new and unknown. By now I think one can already do an informed decision on which to use for a particular problem.
  - jakobegger 7y ago
    > an informed decision on which to use for a particular problem I doubt that really is the case. I think most decisions are made based either on anecdotes, or whatever someone happens to have experience with. It's rare that you can accurately predict the kind of workloads you'll have to deal with ahead of time, and it's even rarer that the people making the decision have experience with multiple completely different stacks. And I don't really think it matters that much. Some people solve the problem with distributed document stores and key value stores, other people use a big transactional database and just keep putting extra RAM sticks in their server... I don't think there's always an obviously "better" choice.
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galaxyLogic 7y ago
Well that's the whole paradox of Fashion isn't it? You want to follow fashion but be almost at the top of it. If you are too much next year's style nobody thinks you fashionable but just crazy. But if you follow last year's trend you are also unfashionable. The paradox is that nobody really knows what will be the next fashion and similarly nobody knows what's the next worthwhile problem-area to work with. There's a good reason why fashionable problem-areas are well-researched it is because the results so far have been useful and promising.
smitty1e 7y ago
Let's write "The Online Packaging System To Ruminate About Them All" (TOPSTRATA). Are we not eternally one packaging system short of Nirvana?
mmahemoff 7y ago
"Fashionable solutions" are a related phenomenon to fashionable problems. Solving a problem the same way as everyone else (and often expecting a better result). Both are widespread.
- franze 7y ago
  "Fashionable Solutions" are major problems. An actor with lack of experience solves a challenge (a challenge coming from of a million+ times solved problem) not with a proven solution, but with a fashionable one (one that currently has some mindshare and good PR). the research most of the time is looking at alternatives that try to solve the similar thing in the same fashionable way. therefore no real research was done. an example: a fashionable solution for a static webpage is a fashionable static site builder, a unfashionable solution is an HTML page.
majos 7y ago
This post sorely lacks evidence for its big first claim: > I've seen a similar pattern in many different fields: even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they've all worked on similar things. Anyone want to step in with some examples? Without them, the thrust of the essay seems to be: "If only other people understood what problems are worth working on! Especially in the well-studied areas of essays, Lisp, and venture funding! Too bad they do not. Well, goodbye."
- rbavocadotree 7y ago
  Two areas where I have a little experience: Economics: There are surprisingly little people studying very large, grand, topics such an inequality. You've probably heard of the handful of economists that do. It's unfashionable due to the influence of the Chicago school and it's focus on free market principles, as well as many other factors. Physics: Good luck getting any interest or funding if you are not studying the currently dominant theory in your field (even if there has been no progress in decades).
  - alexandercrohde 7y ago
    Okay, but to play devil's advocate -- if you study something controversial and/or unfashionable in academia (such as economics of inequality) aren't you just going to be ignored by the community? I think being unfashionable is more viable in fields that are meritocratic and don't require popular approval to succeed.
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    I have this suspicion that, in economics, trends and fashions have sometimes formed around principles whose primary attraction is that they make the math tractable.
  - chasedehan 7y ago
    There are a large number of people working on inequality. The two most common fields studying it are: 1) Development 2) Labor Although there are a number of Macro-Economists who have studied the impact of inequality on growth. The reason you may not read about it is that the relationship between inequality and growth is a largely "solved" problem. It is "unfashionable" because of that.
est31 7y ago
> Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems. This makes no sense. The concepts of "conservative" and "fashionable" are almost polar opposites. Becoming a musician or an actor is fashionable and the dream of many. But it won't bring any money to most people who choose that career. It's no conservative choice. Instead, it's conservative to go into STEM, law or finance. But those fields are "boring". The pattern repeats inside a field as well. It's conservative to be a cobol coder or a DOS expert, and you'll certainly make money. But it's not fashionable. How come you aren't building a cryptocurrency using self driving car that has a drone port on the roof! It results in the woke fields being overrun with very smart and capable people and capital, while tons of fields that use slightly outdated stuff are ripe for harvest but nobody is around to do it.
- simonh 7y ago
  I think here by conservative he means doing what everybody else is doing. Risk averse. Following the mainstream. Going into COBOL May have been a conservative choice 40 years ago, but not anymore. The conservative choice is to go with the herd.
  - est31 7y ago
    > The conservative choice is to go with the herd. That's not conservative. Being conservative means that you only follow a change if it makes sense. If you adopt some new technology, you should do it because it convinces you that it's better, not because it's new, wasn't available before, everyone else is doing it, or any other such reason. If you are conservative, you don't neccessarily end up doing what the majority is doing, as most times, the majority is following some empty hype. That's because his use of that word is wrong: everything said in that article contradicts that statement.
    - ksdale 7y ago
      I think your definition of conservative is correct, but it assumes the thing you’re trying to conserve is something like energy spent on new/different approaches. I think pg’s definition of conservative in this case assumes the thing being conserved is something like prestige or credibility. As an aside, in my experience it’s a fairly common usage to describe any behavior that avoids risk along some dimension, which could very well mean going with the herd, if you’re trying to conserve social status.
bawolff 7y ago
Seems like a lot of weirdly defensive people in this thread. But the essay doesnt really seem that revolutionary more common sense. If you want to make an impact, dont work in an oversaturated field. The low hanging fruit is probably already picked and other people will probably get there before you do. But you also dont want to work in a field nobody cares about as noone will care. Working on a problem with proven demand, but seems "boring" and hasn't changed much recently is a good bet, as there is probably new insights you can apply and new contexts that have appeared since last time there was a frenzy for that field.
- mannykannot 7y ago
  The advice to not work in an oversaturated field, if you want to make an impact, looks to me a bit like the reverse of looking for one's keys under the lamp post, because that is where the light is. We should give some credence to the proposition that saturation is the wisdom of the crowd at work, figuring out where a breakthrough is likely, and it is usually only with hindsight that over-saturation is apparent.
  - bawolff 7y ago
    I somewhat suspect by the time something is "popular" it is, almost by definition, oversaturated. Its sort of like weird investment strategies (e.g. always buy stocks on mondays, or whatever I dont actually know anything about stocks). Sure some of them may work originally, but unless i am extremely well connected, by the time i hear about it, everyone else knows too and the market has corrected for it. Perhaps another metaphor is a gold rush. Even if there really is gold in those hills, if everyone knows there is, its probably already too late to go out and buy a shovel. That said, i agree that there is plenty of survivorship and hindsight bias when it comes to any advice on how to be succesful.
  - stereolambda 7y ago
    There is a difference here without the society preference and what you should do as an individual. As you are saying, in crowded fields breakthroughs may be likely (or not, due to overexploitation, rampant fashion instead of principles thinking and people digging themselves too deep into one paradigm), but in any case, you are not likely to be participating in them if you're not already a strong player. Thus, if you are doing something like research or development of new things, your marginal impact will be probably tiny. I would put two caveats on this. First, if you are globally in a good position (world's top university, good connections to get into places) you may be positioned to meaningfully get even into a mature field. Second, if you don't want to do much research and exploration, it's reasonable to reap benefits from specialist knowledge of already proven fields. Just keep an eye on other options to transition to if everything eventually crashes. Even in crowded areas you should benefit from wide knowledge of horizons and fundamentals beyond what is now fashionable. It may mean just more ideas and perspective. I work in NLP with an interest in AI, and I've dived fairly deep into currently out-of-scope things like rules-based NLP, symbolic AI and biological neurons, their physics and simulations etc. I hope this gives me more viability that your average deep learning guy from a moderate background.
lazyjones 7y ago
People are different, but I cannot imagine how someone could seriously work on (as in: devote their whole working time to, by their own choice, as an entrepreneur, researcher or hobbyist rather than an employee or student) problems they don't genuinely love. Sure, some do it for the money, but then they probably just love money and found a promising opportunity to earn it.
galfarragem 7y ago
What I understand from PG words is that people, even the creative ones, by lack of courage or macro vision are not a 'Elon Musk' and go with the herd building yet another crypto or yet another SAAS.
jonplackett 7y ago
It's not just people's desires and people following what is 'fashionable'. I read a while back that in Physics it was impossible to get funding for anything outside of what was fashionable, String Theory was their example.
bobbyi_settv 7y ago
Fashionable problems are the ones for which you'll have the easiest time recruiting employees, raising funding and generating press coverage, even taking into account that their fashionability leads others to pursue them.
kick 7y ago
Is this a repost? I feel like Paul has already written this essay. Edit: Oh, it was originally a tweet: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1183687634763309056?s=20 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1183687634763309056?s=20
starpilot 7y ago
This advice is just so... airy. Like most of his advice. "Build something people love" Got it, now what? What do I build, exactly? Like the incredible Onion talk on startup: "Step 1: come with up an idea. Step 2: Build it. We're at step 2 - we're half way there"
ismail 7y ago
I think it goes much deeper than people choosing to work on fashionable problems. Here are my thoughts 1. The more defined and mature the problem space is, the more the assumptions that underpin that field are taken as a given. 2. These assumptions may become so deeply ingrained that people become effectively blind to the entire range of possibilities. 3. These assumptions frame how the problem/solution space is looked at. Therefore the solution space is constrained by the set of assumptions (about what the problem is , how to solve it, what to do) 4. These assumptions are recursive, in that they are contained within other assumptions. It is turtles all the way down. At some level, someone working in the space may not even understand what the core assumptions are. We have to have these assumptions though. See the next point. 5. The interesting thing about this is: The constraining of the problem/solution space is actually a positive. It enables co-ordination and incremental improvements and refinement. It allows people new to the domain to quickly get productive. I like to think about it this way: Picture yourself in a massive area that is pitch black. You are grasping around and can not see much. Someone figures out how to get a tiny fire started. With this tiny fire you get to see a little bit. Using this you can build a bigger fire illuminating more of the area (but still leaving the entire space unexplored). This eventual results in the ability to build a permanent light illuminating a specific corner of this space. This specific space with light illuminating it becomes highly productive, people can do all sort of things. Like read etc. Yet, there are still areas left unexplored. The light cannot simply be taken across. It takes work, and it takes turning your back towards the current "lit" up space, and taking a step back into the dark. A scary thought for some. 5. Importantly: These assumptions have been inherited from the past. So they existed and were relevant at a specific point in time. They may or may not be relevant as of today. We would have to peel several layers to get to the core. 6. While 4 is a positive, it is also a negative. The idea/areas greatest strength (maturity, constant improvements, efficiencies) is also its greatest weakness (constraining the search space) To take a step into the dark, is to turn your back to the lit up parts. You have to question the underlying assumptions and see if they are still relevant. If you discover an assumption about the world that is no longer accurate, then you found a new space to illuminate. To put it in another way, to explore the dark is to shift your perspective on the problem/solution. It is to see with "new eyes". Initially it may be dark, but slowly with diligent work, and passion you could light up a completely new and novel area.
notkid 7y ago
The heuristic of trying to work on what you genuinely love is not helpful or practical for most people. It sounds good, but it is just a platitude. Genuine love and fake love feel and look pretty similar. Most people naturally start loving the life they live in, if it is generally positive. Then, they make up a self-affirming, coherent narrative that justifies their emotions, decisions, and interests. If you do an AI startup, life goes well for you, and you embrace that decision and life, how can you differentiate whether it was really a genuine interest or not?
- mark_l_watson 7y ago
  Cal Newport makes the good point that people learn to like/love things after they get very good at it, whatever “it” is. I love Joseph Campbell but his advice to his students to “follow their bliss” may not always be optimal. I read the AI book “Mind Inside Matter” in the late 1970s, and even though I have done a ton of non-AI architecture and software development, I have also been able to work on AI problems like knowledge representation, expert system, NLP, neural networks, and deep learning starting in 1982. I definitely followed my bliss, but I have never been world class in my profession, but I have enjoyed myself.
- jonahx 7y ago
  > Most people naturally start loving the life they live in, if it is generally positive. The platitude is directed toward those living a life they feel is negative, but who slog through for whatever reason: fear of change, obligation to other people, etc. Taken as feel-good, head-in-the-sand optimism, of course it's facile advice. But imo there is genuine wisdom in it, and it's this: You are much more likely to do something well, and to continue to do it until you reach a high-level of expertise, if you don't have to force yourself to do it. People who naturally love working out are more likely to be fit. That's what the heuristic is.
mc3 7y ago
Sounds grand. There are a lot of us who just want to pay the rent. If that means a React job, so be it.
savrajsingh 7y ago
I think there are still a few major breakthroughs left in our understanding and use of electricity.
ronilan 7y ago
Silicon Valley’s biggest problem is that is tends to see problems as opportunities and opportunities as problems. There is no opportunity in that problem.
mmaunder 7y ago
I'd suggest focusing on people and the problems they have rather than industry, your space, the news and your colleagues. That way you'll serve real needs rather than getting a ton of street cred as you dissapear down an academic rabbit hole.
rdiddly 7y ago
Nice to see the recent burst of writing activity from PG. Also nice to see people here putting it through the paces. Would expect nothing less.
MaysonL 7y ago
Just listened to a podcast with a VC who applied this pattern to nuclear power. The big problem, which almost nobody was investing to solve, was nuclear waste. He went out, attended a number of nuclear power events, and found some people who thought they had a productive attack. They did, and after he threw some money at them, ended up with a 40 or so X return. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2019-08-16/josh-wolfe-discusses-innovative-investments-podcast https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2019-08-16/josh-wolfe-d...
blondin 7y ago
yeah but i am afraid pg is not relatable anymore (to most of us anyway). devoting more than 20 percent of your time to problems that are unfashionable but dear to you is ill-advised because: a. they don't pay the bill b. they take time and in the grand scheme of things spending time with others on things you all understand is better than being happy alone. but of course there are exceptions...
- m11a 7y ago
  b) not true for everyone. the way different people want to live their lives is, well, different. his essays don't necessarily have to be relatable, they just have to be useful. he isn't a life coach (though I suppose that is arguable). his expertise is in tech and startups, that's where he's proven himself, and that's the area where his advice carries weight.
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ydb 7y ago
I think pg makes an excellent point here. The Modern American Think Piece is ripe for disruption. I, like I imagine many HNers, am troubled by the shameless grift, anti-intellectualism, and dull senility of the current fashionable op-ed essay hegemony (The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, and People. I hope to be one small part conquering this decrepit aged cement hedonism, if I can be cursorily self-promotional. Nevertheless, I think pg's fine wisdom shines again in this elegant (and yet fashionable) think piece.
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echelon 7y ago
My worry in solving an existing problem in a novel way is that the incumbents can catch up faster than you can scale. If I were to take on Netflix/Disney/Twitch with some new kind of video entertainment product, they'd have deep pockets to fund a competing offering. The lever of equity might work to attract better talent, but only if you succeed. There's a lot of risk. Scaling rapidly also means giving up control as you seek capital. It'd be hard to organically grow and go unnoticed.
- Timberwolf 7y ago
  My experience working for the 800lb gorilla incumbent was that we didn't take competition seriously at all. Even stuff competitors did that would be trivial for us to replicate got put in the "not a priority" bucket. The few cases where we were forced to match a feature you were looking at a lead time measured in years, tending to infinity if it threatened the influence of a powerful department. And this is the reactive stuff. Forget actual innovation, other than a few toy projects that never escaped the lab! However, this was justified: even the most promising-looking competitors tripped over their own bad assumptions long before becoming a threat. We saw plenty of novel ideas but they'd always be sunk by a failure to understand the basics of how our market worked - things like trying to put a complicated app with a thousand options at a point in the journey everyone is trying to simplify and time-optimise, etc. If someone who knew the market well had gone at it seriously and solved hard problems rather than apply the usual hand-waving "tech! blockchain! magic!", by the time we'd noticed it would have been too late to respond. You'd hope more recent incumbents like Netflix or Twitch might be a bit more responsive, but corporate inertia can build up surprisingly quickly.
akr1 7y ago
Funny, we've just launched EssayMash.com yesterday trying to accomplish what PG writes about: further exploration into essays. We host monthly essay competitions on an important topic with $300+ in cash prizes.

365 points by hackerews 7y ago

Paul is confusing ignorance for insight here. It's the same phenomenon whereby a weekend visit to Paris has your uncle explaining the European soul but your year in Kyoto leaves you barely able to generalize at all from your (actual) knowledge of nuance, complexity and diversity of another culture. Everyone is trying to break the mold at various scopes. Meanwhile, you're welcome to reproduce your late-90s success at any moment, Paul. We'll wait.

jdsully 7y ago
Does YC not count?

lquist 7y ago

If you want to try working on unfashionable problems, one of the best places to look is fields that people think have already been fully explored: essays, Lisp, venture funding – you may notice a pattern here. Do people really think the fields of essays, LISP or venture funding are fully explored?

gkoberger 7y ago
I think so? They’re all expanding, of course... but none have really changed that much over the past few decades. There’s a ton more VCs than there were a decade ago, but has it really changed as a field? People tweak the formula a bit, but we haven’t seen a shift in the same way YC shifted things. To a lesser extent, pg was one of the first “tech essayists” (now it’s a genre, http://waitwho.is http://waitwho.is). I don’t think pg is saying they’re being ignored, but rather that there’s a sense of “yup we figured it out, let’s just iterate slowly on it”. (I will say I can think of much better examples, but I don’t blame pg for picking the three examples that sum up his entire career. He picked those three things when nobody else cared.)
- leppr 7y ago
  Cryptocurrency ICOs showed venture funding could be innovated on way more fundamentally than "tweaking a formula". The simple ICO model may arguably have been largely misused, but it kickstarted a lot of promising research and experimentation[1]. [1]: e.g. https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/10/24/gitcoin.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/10/24/gitcoin.html, https://www.zfnd.org/blog/dev-fund-guidance-and-timeline https://www.zfnd.org/blog/dev-fund-guidance-and-timeline
travisjungroth 7y ago
Mmm, no. Which is why I really don’t get this post. The advice seems to boil down to something like : “don’t work on something fashionable! Do something like VC funding with a twist, or your own take on essays!” (which seems to be very fashionable).
- Lammy 7y ago
  He's praising himself. Those are three areas _he_ explored.
jdminhbg 7y ago
I think the meaning is that they were at one time, namely, the time he got started on them.
diehunde 7y ago
I was wondering the same. I get the message from the post but I don't think the examples are good.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

Agree. It is also a good reason for having multidisciplinary interests so we might have different ideas for looking for very different solutions to problems.

blast 7y ago

Is this the first PG essay that was composed on Twitter? https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1183686114844069888 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1183686114844069888

mmahemoff 7y ago
Many articles now are cleanly formatted tweetstorms.
- blast 7y ago
  Many PG articles? Which ones?
  - mmahemoff 7y ago
    Just a general observation. Wasn't specifically answering your question about PG's writing.
    - xwowsersx 7y ago
      Lol what do you mean a "general observation"? You stated plainly that "Many articles now are cleanly formatted tweetstorms". Which ones?
      - dang 7y ago
        Curious questions are great, but please don't cross examine. That's in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

nostromo 7y ago

I love this mini-essay. The counter to this is that it'll be harder to raise capital for un-fashionable problems. If you pitched "ML for sandwich makers" right now you could raise a million bucks because so many VCs are making fashionable bets on ML.

StavrosK 7y ago
So what? Raising is not success.
- wwweston 7y ago
  It’s pretty successful as failures go.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    I guess, if you define "success" as "managing to borrow money"...
- Traster 7y ago
  It's often a pre-requisite for success. It doesn't matter how good your idea is, if you can't get it implemented and supported by a sales team, support team etc. it isn't going to work. There are brilliant ideas out there, but very few of them are brilliant and require 0 resources to achieve.
- gitgud 7y ago
  > Raising is not success. People think raising is a signal for success, when it's more like kissing the dice at a casino

fnord77 7y ago

> If you can find a new approach into a big but apparently played out field, the value of whatever you discover will be multiplied by its enormous surface area. If you found something in a big, fashionable field with a huge surface area (cough ai/ml cough), wouldn't this multiplier apply to that fashionable field, too?

simlan 7y ago
Well I guess you can't see AI as a played out field yet. More likely it is just starting to take off. Say you find a new exciting spin on ERPs to replace e.g. SAP solutions that will have a large surface area. At least that is how i read the linked post.
- Wistar 7y ago
  ... or payment processing. Look what Stripe is carving out.
  - m11a 7y ago
    There are still many problems in payment processing. One I can think of is acceptance. Merchant fees are way too high especially for physical payments. I can't pay using card at my barber or local convenience stores here. I suppose the reasoning is that card fees make it not worthwhile accepting for amounts below, say, £5-10 (inflated for microtransactions). Doesn't make sense for them to accept a big % loss in profits just to accept cards over cash. If we're to become a cashless society extortionate merchant processing fees need to lower.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Fashionable problem. Played out field. So, essentially, yes - fashionable fields will be well explored; the essay is about not getting sucked into fashionable problems in whatever field you're working in.
- backpropaganda 7y ago
  So in the case of AI/ML, the fashionable new thing is unsupervised learning, self-supervised learning, reinforcement learning, GANS, etc. The played out problems are image classification, speech recognition, etc.

sillysaurusx 7y ago

As a long-time pg supporter, it pains me to say this: I think at this point pg could write anything and it would show up immediately with critical acclaim. It was more charming when he had to work hard to make his points known. But hey, fame, right? Just famous people things. There's so much more to say in this case, though! How do you avoid the traps? Waving a wand like "Just love something" leaves far too much to the imagination. Pointing at a prior essay at loving your work is helpful, but different. Often, you have to actively offend people in order to find good problems to work on. The idea that people have devoted their lives to the wrong thing is inherently offensive to them. That's a point not covered here. For example, I imagine that a lot of people who've studied 3D rendering for their entire lives are about to feel very outdated the moment neural network renderers displace them. And that's also a good counterexample to the point that "Often, the best place to search for new ideas is a place thought fully explored." It might often be true, but it's not always true. And then there are the in-betweens. Bitcoin was in a field both thought fully explored (crypto + finance) and also unexplored, in a certain sense.

tyre 7y ago
Had the same thought. Some of his essays, no one else could have written them and brought a fresh, nuanced perspective. These couple paragraphs wouldn’t get any attention if not for the name of the writer. Maybe that’s fine—great writers have their share of banality—but does reveal how susceptible we are generally to brand name over substance.
- gist 7y ago
  I am actually surprised that PG doesn't feel uncomfortable about the 'acclaim' that he is getting for writing many of the things he has said that are not related to anything he has expertise in. Reminds me of celebrities who opine about politics with their thoughts (sometimes not always with PG). Paul is authoritative on many topics. General thoughts about life and people are great to hear what he thinks. Why not? But he is no more special than 100000 other people who have no audience. Does he know this? I've often thought he should do some A/B posting with his thoughts. Write something and then randomly decide whether to put it on his blog or some other place and see what the interest level is.

diego 7y ago

Well, I have a hard time thinking of a field that I believe is fully explored. History has shown time and again that it's really easy to be fooled in that respect.

MAXPOOL 7y ago

Humanity as a whole as problem solving algorithm might be similar to particle swarm in very complex neighbourhoods and topologies. Particles (individual humans or small groups) move around in problem space as particles with position and velocity. Each individual's movement is influenced by its best known position locally but also the the best known global positions in the search-space. When better positions are found by others, individual change their course (take hints) and move towards them. The problems would be the same. Too much randomness and it's just a random search. Too much convergence leads to local optimums.

bdotdub 7y ago

Area man write blog post saying things are great and just so happens to overlap exactly with what he does

gist 7y ago

> Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems. How can a statement like that be made? Is there some kind of authoritative directory of 'the smartest, most imaginative people' being 'surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on'. Implied I guess Paul means 'who I've met or who I know of'. So then say that. It's a big world out there. Who knows what anyone is working on or what they are thinking or have tried and why they haven't pursued it. This is a bit like saying 'people love their dogs and will do anything for them if they are sick'. Just a general statement of opinion by one person (and generally accepted as being correct) but based on not anything even close to being scientific and/or backed up by any actual data. That part is fine. But if that is the case state it as such and not some absolute. Why does this matter? Because when someone like Paul writes something it will be taken by others to be some kind of important thought or fact.

mvp 7y ago
Most of his essays have that wise old man who has seen the world kind of vibe to them. If anybody else writes the same things without the success he has had it will be ridiculous to read. I don't think anybody who reads his essays is looking for any scientific report based on facts. They are looking for some sort of confirmation that they are not crazy when they have similar thoughts.
- gist 7y ago
  It's in some ways the writing equivalent of the NPR calm and measured voice the intended impact to make it more believable and important and entirely rational sounding and correct.

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rgbrenner 7y ago

I think pg understates the problem. It isn't just fashionable. Think about how the solutions we use today evolved. Someone had an idea originally and certain decisions were made about that approach.. those that best adapted to the conditions of the time were successful... rinse and repeat over several decades. Those ideas that preserved the past were more likely to succeed because they preserved the ecosystem that already existed. Ideas that diverged too much from the existing successful tech had a huge obstacle in their way: they had to recreate all of the existing solutions in their new model. So even if they would lead to a better solution over time, they may never get past that initial roadblock. And the longer we stay on the path, the bigger that roadblock becomes. If we are all thinking of ideas around the existing model and assuming all of the existing assumptions, then we end up with similar solutions (fashionable solutions). We've reduced the solution space, leading to a limited number of solutions. Perhaps groundbreaking/valuable tech can be found by questioning those existing assumptions; identifying where tech is still built on assumptions that are no longer true; or reexamining past solutions to see if they can be solved in better ways today with what we've learned since then...

cjblomqvist 7y ago
Many insights to be made by this comment. One that is easily missed is how hard it is to fight against the existing ecosystem/assumptions. I've found that a lot of people either don't, or make a point of challenging everything. A strategy they've worked fairly well for me so far is to challenge one(!) assumption after a lot of careful analysis, and then try to adapt to the ecosystem as best as possible. Most revolutionary things are not made in one big bang, but in many incremental steps. They only look like big bangs in hindsight. Even the nuclear bomb was fairly incremental, with truly a big bang in the end.... (pun intended ;)
- jbverschoor 7y ago
  The problem is that multi-layered problem solving is superhard to execute. It's not that it's hard to find a solution that would be orders better, but it's just that it's risky, as it's an all-or-nothing path. It at least requires a lot of confidence for the existing market. With waterfall-kind of planning, that would work. Unfortunately it got a bad name in the '90s and early '00s. The wild-west of inexperienced developers, who needed to solve business problems they didn't understand, combined with clients who didn't understand technology. I believe this is a great period to do bigger things, and you see this happening with for example SpaceX, Tesla and Apple: space is happening again, companies are creating super specialized and complex ICs, there's actual business value and consumer value being produced, and projects are reasonably on time with these companies. This in constract with companies who, what it seems, do more of an iterative approach: Facebook, Google, Amazon. No huge innovation going there.

shrubble 7y ago

In this thread a guy talks about using the Q language and then someone else jumps in and says 'it's not scalable etc.' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854793 What if all this cloud/k8s / serverless stuff is really all piffle? What if running stuff on dedicated hardware ends up a better solution in some fashion?

kick 7y ago
The claim that k/q isn't scalable is false for anyone curious: k/q is incredibly scalable. That's a selling point of it.
icebraining 7y ago
It may be fashionable and overused, but I don't think we can talk about the cloud as if it was still something new and unknown. By now I think one can already do an informed decision on which to use for a particular problem.
- jakobegger 7y ago
  > an informed decision on which to use for a particular problem I doubt that really is the case. I think most decisions are made based either on anecdotes, or whatever someone happens to have experience with. It's rare that you can accurately predict the kind of workloads you'll have to deal with ahead of time, and it's even rarer that the people making the decision have experience with multiple completely different stacks. And I don't really think it matters that much. Some people solve the problem with distributed document stores and key value stores, other people use a big transactional database and just keep putting extra RAM sticks in their server... I don't think there's always an obviously "better" choice.

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galaxyLogic 7y ago

Well that's the whole paradox of Fashion isn't it? You want to follow fashion but be almost at the top of it. If you are too much next year's style nobody thinks you fashionable but just crazy. But if you follow last year's trend you are also unfashionable. The paradox is that nobody really knows what will be the next fashion and similarly nobody knows what's the next worthwhile problem-area to work with. There's a good reason why fashionable problem-areas are well-researched it is because the results so far have been useful and promising.

smitty1e 7y ago

Let's write "The Online Packaging System To Ruminate About Them All" (TOPSTRATA). Are we not eternally one packaging system short of Nirvana?

mmahemoff 7y ago

"Fashionable solutions" are a related phenomenon to fashionable problems. Solving a problem the same way as everyone else (and often expecting a better result). Both are widespread.

franze 7y ago
"Fashionable Solutions" are major problems. An actor with lack of experience solves a challenge (a challenge coming from of a million+ times solved problem) not with a proven solution, but with a fashionable one (one that currently has some mindshare and good PR). the research most of the time is looking at alternatives that try to solve the similar thing in the same fashionable way. therefore no real research was done. an example: a fashionable solution for a static webpage is a fashionable static site builder, a unfashionable solution is an HTML page.

majos 7y ago

This post sorely lacks evidence for its big first claim: > I've seen a similar pattern in many different fields: even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they've all worked on similar things. Anyone want to step in with some examples? Without them, the thrust of the essay seems to be: "If only other people understood what problems are worth working on! Especially in the well-studied areas of essays, Lisp, and venture funding! Too bad they do not. Well, goodbye."

rbavocadotree 7y ago
Two areas where I have a little experience: Economics: There are surprisingly little people studying very large, grand, topics such an inequality. You've probably heard of the handful of economists that do. It's unfashionable due to the influence of the Chicago school and it's focus on free market principles, as well as many other factors. Physics: Good luck getting any interest or funding if you are not studying the currently dominant theory in your field (even if there has been no progress in decades).
- alexandercrohde 7y ago
  Okay, but to play devil's advocate -- if you study something controversial and/or unfashionable in academia (such as economics of inequality) aren't you just going to be ignored by the community? I think being unfashionable is more viable in fields that are meritocratic and don't require popular approval to succeed.
- mannykannot 7y ago
  I have this suspicion that, in economics, trends and fashions have sometimes formed around principles whose primary attraction is that they make the math tractable.
- chasedehan 7y ago
  There are a large number of people working on inequality. The two most common fields studying it are: 1) Development 2) Labor Although there are a number of Macro-Economists who have studied the impact of inequality on growth. The reason you may not read about it is that the relationship between inequality and growth is a largely "solved" problem. It is "unfashionable" because of that.

est31 7y ago

> Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems. This makes no sense. The concepts of "conservative" and "fashionable" are almost polar opposites. Becoming a musician or an actor is fashionable and the dream of many. But it won't bring any money to most people who choose that career. It's no conservative choice. Instead, it's conservative to go into STEM, law or finance. But those fields are "boring". The pattern repeats inside a field as well. It's conservative to be a cobol coder or a DOS expert, and you'll certainly make money. But it's not fashionable. How come you aren't building a cryptocurrency using self driving car that has a drone port on the roof! It results in the woke fields being overrun with very smart and capable people and capital, while tons of fields that use slightly outdated stuff are ripe for harvest but nobody is around to do it.

simonh 7y ago
I think here by conservative he means doing what everybody else is doing. Risk averse. Following the mainstream. Going into COBOL May have been a conservative choice 40 years ago, but not anymore. The conservative choice is to go with the herd.
- est31 7y ago
  > The conservative choice is to go with the herd. That's not conservative. Being conservative means that you only follow a change if it makes sense. If you adopt some new technology, you should do it because it convinces you that it's better, not because it's new, wasn't available before, everyone else is doing it, or any other such reason. If you are conservative, you don't neccessarily end up doing what the majority is doing, as most times, the majority is following some empty hype. That's because his use of that word is wrong: everything said in that article contradicts that statement.
  - ksdale 7y ago
    I think your definition of conservative is correct, but it assumes the thing you’re trying to conserve is something like energy spent on new/different approaches. I think pg’s definition of conservative in this case assumes the thing being conserved is something like prestige or credibility. As an aside, in my experience it’s a fairly common usage to describe any behavior that avoids risk along some dimension, which could very well mean going with the herd, if you’re trying to conserve social status.

bawolff 7y ago

Seems like a lot of weirdly defensive people in this thread. But the essay doesnt really seem that revolutionary more common sense. If you want to make an impact, dont work in an oversaturated field. The low hanging fruit is probably already picked and other people will probably get there before you do. But you also dont want to work in a field nobody cares about as noone will care. Working on a problem with proven demand, but seems "boring" and hasn't changed much recently is a good bet, as there is probably new insights you can apply and new contexts that have appeared since last time there was a frenzy for that field.

mannykannot 7y ago
The advice to not work in an oversaturated field, if you want to make an impact, looks to me a bit like the reverse of looking for one's keys under the lamp post, because that is where the light is. We should give some credence to the proposition that saturation is the wisdom of the crowd at work, figuring out where a breakthrough is likely, and it is usually only with hindsight that over-saturation is apparent.
- bawolff 7y ago
  I somewhat suspect by the time something is "popular" it is, almost by definition, oversaturated. Its sort of like weird investment strategies (e.g. always buy stocks on mondays, or whatever I dont actually know anything about stocks). Sure some of them may work originally, but unless i am extremely well connected, by the time i hear about it, everyone else knows too and the market has corrected for it. Perhaps another metaphor is a gold rush. Even if there really is gold in those hills, if everyone knows there is, its probably already too late to go out and buy a shovel. That said, i agree that there is plenty of survivorship and hindsight bias when it comes to any advice on how to be succesful.
- stereolambda 7y ago
  There is a difference here without the society preference and what you should do as an individual. As you are saying, in crowded fields breakthroughs may be likely (or not, due to overexploitation, rampant fashion instead of principles thinking and people digging themselves too deep into one paradigm), but in any case, you are not likely to be participating in them if you're not already a strong player. Thus, if you are doing something like research or development of new things, your marginal impact will be probably tiny. I would put two caveats on this. First, if you are globally in a good position (world's top university, good connections to get into places) you may be positioned to meaningfully get even into a mature field. Second, if you don't want to do much research and exploration, it's reasonable to reap benefits from specialist knowledge of already proven fields. Just keep an eye on other options to transition to if everything eventually crashes. Even in crowded areas you should benefit from wide knowledge of horizons and fundamentals beyond what is now fashionable. It may mean just more ideas and perspective. I work in NLP with an interest in AI, and I've dived fairly deep into currently out-of-scope things like rules-based NLP, symbolic AI and biological neurons, their physics and simulations etc. I hope this gives me more viability that your average deep learning guy from a moderate background.

lazyjones 7y ago

People are different, but I cannot imagine how someone could seriously work on (as in: devote their whole working time to, by their own choice, as an entrepreneur, researcher or hobbyist rather than an employee or student) problems they don't genuinely love. Sure, some do it for the money, but then they probably just love money and found a promising opportunity to earn it.

galfarragem 7y ago

What I understand from PG words is that people, even the creative ones, by lack of courage or macro vision are not a 'Elon Musk' and go with the herd building yet another crypto or yet another SAAS.

jonplackett 7y ago

It's not just people's desires and people following what is 'fashionable'. I read a while back that in Physics it was impossible to get funding for anything outside of what was fashionable, String Theory was their example.

bobbyi_settv 7y ago

Fashionable problems are the ones for which you'll have the easiest time recruiting employees, raising funding and generating press coverage, even taking into account that their fashionability leads others to pursue them.

kick 7y ago

Is this a repost? I feel like Paul has already written this essay. Edit: Oh, it was originally a tweet: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1183687634763309056?s=20 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1183687634763309056?s=20

starpilot 7y ago

This advice is just so... airy. Like most of his advice. "Build something people love" Got it, now what? What do I build, exactly? Like the incredible Onion talk on startup: "Step 1: come with up an idea. Step 2: Build it. We're at step 2 - we're half way there"

ismail 7y ago

I think it goes much deeper than people choosing to work on fashionable problems. Here are my thoughts 1. The more defined and mature the problem space is, the more the assumptions that underpin that field are taken as a given. 2. These assumptions may become so deeply ingrained that people become effectively blind to the entire range of possibilities. 3. These assumptions frame how the problem/solution space is looked at. Therefore the solution space is constrained by the set of assumptions (about what the problem is , how to solve it, what to do) 4. These assumptions are recursive, in that they are contained within other assumptions. It is turtles all the way down. At some level, someone working in the space may not even understand what the core assumptions are. We have to have these assumptions though. See the next point. 5. The interesting thing about this is: The constraining of the problem/solution space is actually a positive. It enables co-ordination and incremental improvements and refinement. It allows people new to the domain to quickly get productive. I like to think about it this way: Picture yourself in a massive area that is pitch black. You are grasping around and can not see much. Someone figures out how to get a tiny fire started. With this tiny fire you get to see a little bit. Using this you can build a bigger fire illuminating more of the area (but still leaving the entire space unexplored). This eventual results in the ability to build a permanent light illuminating a specific corner of this space. This specific space with light illuminating it becomes highly productive, people can do all sort of things. Like read etc. Yet, there are still areas left unexplored. The light cannot simply be taken across. It takes work, and it takes turning your back towards the current "lit" up space, and taking a step back into the dark. A scary thought for some. 5. Importantly: These assumptions have been inherited from the past. So they existed and were relevant at a specific point in time. They may or may not be relevant as of today. We would have to peel several layers to get to the core. 6. While 4 is a positive, it is also a negative. The idea/areas greatest strength (maturity, constant improvements, efficiencies) is also its greatest weakness (constraining the search space) To take a step into the dark, is to turn your back to the lit up parts. You have to question the underlying assumptions and see if they are still relevant. If you discover an assumption about the world that is no longer accurate, then you found a new space to illuminate. To put it in another way, to explore the dark is to shift your perspective on the problem/solution. It is to see with "new eyes". Initially it may be dark, but slowly with diligent work, and passion you could light up a completely new and novel area.

notkid 7y ago

The heuristic of trying to work on what you genuinely love is not helpful or practical for most people. It sounds good, but it is just a platitude. Genuine love and fake love feel and look pretty similar. Most people naturally start loving the life they live in, if it is generally positive. Then, they make up a self-affirming, coherent narrative that justifies their emotions, decisions, and interests. If you do an AI startup, life goes well for you, and you embrace that decision and life, how can you differentiate whether it was really a genuine interest or not?

mark_l_watson 7y ago
Cal Newport makes the good point that people learn to like/love things after they get very good at it, whatever “it” is. I love Joseph Campbell but his advice to his students to “follow their bliss” may not always be optimal. I read the AI book “Mind Inside Matter” in the late 1970s, and even though I have done a ton of non-AI architecture and software development, I have also been able to work on AI problems like knowledge representation, expert system, NLP, neural networks, and deep learning starting in 1982. I definitely followed my bliss, but I have never been world class in my profession, but I have enjoyed myself.
jonahx 7y ago
> Most people naturally start loving the life they live in, if it is generally positive. The platitude is directed toward those living a life they feel is negative, but who slog through for whatever reason: fear of change, obligation to other people, etc. Taken as feel-good, head-in-the-sand optimism, of course it's facile advice. But imo there is genuine wisdom in it, and it's this: You are much more likely to do something well, and to continue to do it until you reach a high-level of expertise, if you don't have to force yourself to do it. People who naturally love working out are more likely to be fit. That's what the heuristic is.

mc3 7y ago

Sounds grand. There are a lot of us who just want to pay the rent. If that means a React job, so be it.

savrajsingh 7y ago

I think there are still a few major breakthroughs left in our understanding and use of electricity.

ronilan 7y ago

Silicon Valley’s biggest problem is that is tends to see problems as opportunities and opportunities as problems. There is no opportunity in that problem.

mmaunder 7y ago

I'd suggest focusing on people and the problems they have rather than industry, your space, the news and your colleagues. That way you'll serve real needs rather than getting a ton of street cred as you dissapear down an academic rabbit hole.

rdiddly 7y ago

Nice to see the recent burst of writing activity from PG. Also nice to see people here putting it through the paces. Would expect nothing less.

MaysonL 7y ago

Just listened to a podcast with a VC who applied this pattern to nuclear power. The big problem, which almost nobody was investing to solve, was nuclear waste. He went out, attended a number of nuclear power events, and found some people who thought they had a productive attack. They did, and after he threw some money at them, ended up with a 40 or so X return. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2019-08-16/josh-wolfe-discusses-innovative-investments-podcast https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2019-08-16/josh-wolfe-d...

blondin 7y ago

yeah but i am afraid pg is not relatable anymore (to most of us anyway). devoting more than 20 percent of your time to problems that are unfashionable but dear to you is ill-advised because: a. they don't pay the bill b. they take time and in the grand scheme of things spending time with others on things you all understand is better than being happy alone. but of course there are exceptions...

m11a 7y ago
b) not true for everyone. the way different people want to live their lives is, well, different. his essays don't necessarily have to be relatable, they just have to be useful. he isn't a life coach (though I suppose that is arguable). his expertise is in tech and startups, that's where he's proven himself, and that's the area where his advice carries weight.

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ydb 7y ago

I think pg makes an excellent point here. The Modern American Think Piece is ripe for disruption. I, like I imagine many HNers, am troubled by the shameless grift, anti-intellectualism, and dull senility of the current fashionable op-ed essay hegemony (The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, and People. I hope to be one small part conquering this decrepit aged cement hedonism, if I can be cursorily self-promotional. Nevertheless, I think pg's fine wisdom shines again in this elegant (and yet fashionable) think piece.

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echelon 7y ago

My worry in solving an existing problem in a novel way is that the incumbents can catch up faster than you can scale. If I were to take on Netflix/Disney/Twitch with some new kind of video entertainment product, they'd have deep pockets to fund a competing offering. The lever of equity might work to attract better talent, but only if you succeed. There's a lot of risk. Scaling rapidly also means giving up control as you seek capital. It'd be hard to organically grow and go unnoticed.

Timberwolf 7y ago
My experience working for the 800lb gorilla incumbent was that we didn't take competition seriously at all. Even stuff competitors did that would be trivial for us to replicate got put in the "not a priority" bucket. The few cases where we were forced to match a feature you were looking at a lead time measured in years, tending to infinity if it threatened the influence of a powerful department. And this is the reactive stuff. Forget actual innovation, other than a few toy projects that never escaped the lab! However, this was justified: even the most promising-looking competitors tripped over their own bad assumptions long before becoming a threat. We saw plenty of novel ideas but they'd always be sunk by a failure to understand the basics of how our market worked - things like trying to put a complicated app with a thousand options at a point in the journey everyone is trying to simplify and time-optimise, etc. If someone who knew the market well had gone at it seriously and solved hard problems rather than apply the usual hand-waving "tech! blockchain! magic!", by the time we'd noticed it would have been too late to respond. You'd hope more recent incumbents like Netflix or Twitch might be a bit more responsive, but corporate inertia can build up surprisingly quickly.

akr1 7y ago

Funny, we've just launched EssayMash.com yesterday trying to accomplish what PG writes about: further exploration into essays. We host monthly essay competitions on an important topic with $300+ in cash prizes.