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> There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough j

• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  > Being skeptical of the conventional wisdom can be useful, but keeping yourself intentionally ignorant of it is generally a bad plan. I can vouch for that. I write software, but my original training was as an EE. My software development methodology was almost entirely self-taught. This has been both good and bad. I will sometimes come up with some really interesting orthogonal approaches, but I will also sometimes "reinvent the wheel," with a naive approach. Experience has taught me to seek out prior art, and established patterns. My creative way may still be the best way, but I've learned that is not always the case.
  • enos_feedler 6y ago
    I think ordering of exposure makes a difference. Being submersed in prior art and then trying to come up with something novel is much harder or less likely than having conviction around a novel idea/experience and then digging into prior art to strengthen your offering.
    • snth 6y ago
      But doesn't that seem like a strategy for indulging in confirmation bias?
    • Ar-Curunir 6y ago
      Uh that's entirely wrong. If you don't even know the tools available to the state-of-the-art, then how can you begin to build new things? For example, in cryptography, if you don't know know about basic things like elliptic curves and hash functions, how are you going to solve any big problem?
      • username90 6y ago
        Bitcoin is probably an example of this. I really doubt its creator knew about the state of the art in the field, yet he still created the state of the art in the field. But yes, you are unlikely to do state of the art math without extensive education. However most other fields aren't like that, software engineering included.
  • sound1 6y ago
    As an EEE graduate myself I hear you. But now that I work in pure IT where I write programs for customer's requirements where nobody cares about a rock solid product vs a shiny new one that can ship next week (and I believe that was the context the article was written), and I hate to admit this - can't fault the author here.
• walleeee 6y ago
  I think this may attest to the value of (apparent) novelty/innovation in PG's sphere. Seeming unconventional and disruptive has better ROI than spending years mining the history of human thought. He doesn't do science, he funds and markets products. He's competing to capture pieces of a finite pie, not creating knowledge. More broadly, he promotes a zeitgeist which has made him wealthy. I wonder if this has something to do with his efforts to maintain some semblance of "thought leadership", even if it means recycling tired content.
  • leetcrew 6y ago
    > He's competing to capture pieces of a finite pie this is an odd way to describe investing. this would more accurately describe the founders themselves, competing for a finite pool of VC dollars without necessarily having a viable product.
    • walleeee 6y ago
      Good point. I meant it in the sense that anyone marketing a product is competing for a finite pool of consumer dollars.
      • leetcrew 6y ago
        FWIW, I agree with the rest of your post. while I enjoy some of PG's posts, he often makes the classic mistake of presuming that expertise in one specific area makes his opinion on other topics relevant.
  • Hongwei 6y ago
    Sorry but I strongly disagree with your assertion that building a business is a zero-sum game. At the basic level, a farmer who sows a field and harvests a crop is making the world one harvest richer, and no one poorer. Ditto for the carpenter making a table or mechanic fixing a car. PG addressed this long ago: http://paulgraham.com/gap.html http://paulgraham.com/gap.html Scientists turn money into knowledge. Entrepreneurs turn knowledge into money. It's a virtuous cycle. Scientists lament that they don't get their "fair share" but it's wrong to blame innovators, better to reevaluate their own economic strategy. What if we had private research institutes turning out cutting edge research? Or vertically integrated ones that commercialized their own discoveries, like Spacex?
• ptero 6y ago
  In many domains of science I will agree with you: success in physics is unlikely if you don't have a strong physics background. But many modern technologies are much less mature. For example, a good general background in software engineering helps, but following state of the art is not critical (and may be counterproductive) for building new products. My 2c.
• getpost 6y ago
  And, like most kinds of work these days, science progress is mainly collaborative, rather than the result of one independent thinker. pg seems predisposed to dichotomous thinking. This could be about his rhetorical style. It's easier to write an essay, or a screenplay, with good guys and bad guys. The world is more like a novel now, with multiple independent processes in shades of gray.
• whatshisface 6y ago
  The huge difference between tech startups and science is that in science, the conventional wisdom has recorded justifications and collected evidence that you can look up and understand, while in tech startups the conventional wisdom is advice made up by businessesmen who succeeded once, or sometimes succeeded zero times, and shared over drinks at the local pub. The usefulness gap between scientific knowledge and cultural knowledge is wide, and nowhere wider than business.
  • Darkstryder 6y ago
    Unfortunately the bias against negative results in scientific publications cause a lot of scientific dead-ends to be non-public as well. A lot starting researchers (such as PhD students) that are left without adequate supervision are likely to reach a dead-end someone previously encountered but did not publish anything about.
    • hutzlibu 6y ago
      I have not been directly involved in academic research, but from what I understood, results gets published, whether they met the goals or not. It is still novel and valuable to publish why this certain approach or idea did not work as expected as long as you followed scientific standards.
      • dzolob 6y ago
        I’m sorry you’re being downvoted just because you have a wrong impression of how scientific publishing works. Nobody is looking for wrong answers, there are simply many uninteresting ways to screw things up. If you are able to publish a wrong result in a worthwhile journal, a lot of right results have to be in it, which I guess makes your work “right”.
        • hutzlibu 6y ago
          I am not sure if there was a missunderstandig: I know of people who researched topic X with the assumption to find Y. But they did not find Y and rather found out that their setup was insufficient to provide meaningful answers. So they wrote and explained about why this setup did not work for the original question and published it and moved on. And this makes sense, because they achieved novel information the next student could improve on. So published about a dead end, or not?
• mariodiana 6y ago
  The difference between true genius and your regular old smart person is that it takes about all the brainpower the smart person has to understand something that's pretty complicated, and their thinking then becomes locked in. The effort not only cements their conceptual understanding; it cements their emotional attachment to their understanding. By contrast, the genius has the brainpower to understand a thing, understand alternative explanations just as well, and then innovate beyond all that.
  • sfink 6y ago
    I think this is true in less extreme cases too. People have a tendency to do more of what works for them. People with more raw intelligence have lower cost (effort) in considering multiple possibilities and keeping them all alive in their heads at once. (I'll assume just for this paragraph that "raw intelligence" is a thing, and means what I want it to mean.) If other, less capable people attempted to do the same thing, they would get hopelessly confused and be unable to decide or act. So for them, it is smarter to stick to conventional wisdom; they'll be more likely to get a positive outcome. Combine that with the fact that different people have different interests, inclinations, and abilities in different areas, and the result is that the whole dichotomy of "conventional vs unconventional" quickly falls apart. Do what's right for you, not what's right for pg.
• kseifried 6y ago
  Another option to: "One of the most effective techniques is one practiced unintentionally by most nerds: simply to be less aware what conventional beliefs are. " Is to be aware of them, and to be aware that they may not be correct, or they may be correct and there are better and more effective beliefs now (new theories, but they may not be as well proven, yet), and better ways in the future (new theories/frameworks that aren't proven, or can't yet exist due to other lacking ecosystem components like technology or math or thought processes (Like open source back in the day, and then it won). My response to all this is to consciously be aware of what I know and how old it is, and that there are probably better ways to solve these problems, or simply engineer the problem away (e.g. better password policy vs simply replacing it with SSO with good MFA).
• dfranke 6y ago
  There are certain classes of creative work that especially turn this essay on its head: writing a textbook, typesetting a page, creating a film as an homage to a particular time period or genre. To do these things exceptionally well means noticing and meticulously following conventions that nobody realized existed before you did.
• krona 6y ago
  And yet many of the greatest mathematicians produced their best work before their 30th birthday.
  • captain_price7 6y ago
    This used to be true for scientists too, 100 or more years ago. Body of human knowledge is much bigger now-a-days. It takes 4 yrs honors and first 1/2 yrs in PhD to even begin thinking about fundamental research. That number is likely higher for some other fields (like doctors I guess).
    • bra-ket 6y ago
      >Body of human knowledge is much bigger now-a-days that's what Einstein' contemporaries could have said as well. The growing body of human knowledge is increasingly noise, bad or redundant theories, with entire gigantic fields based on wrong assumptions and fueled by groupthink and premature optimization, just like 100 or 500 years ago. Deep specialization is not always helpful and often detrimental for fundamental research as it assumes deep indoctrination into consensus theory of the day. Thinking about fundamental research can start once one learns the fundamentals which doesn't take more than a few years in a breadth-first search manner. You don't have to cover all the branches of that giant tree, some of the branches don't have a right to exist in the first place and some are incredibly redundant or marginal improvements of the core parent idea. I think redundancy and noise have definitely increased because more people are involved in research. So the only think that might be harder now vs. 100 years ago is filtering signal from noise. But the internet, and the rise of search engines is actually pretty helpful with that.
• LetThereBeLight 6y ago
  >Being skeptical of the conventional wisdom can be useful, but keeping yourself intentionally ignorant of it is generally a bad plan. Yes, I agree with this. It follows along the lines of the saying: You must learn the rules before you can break them. With that said, I have seen many 1st year graduate students spend weeks/months going through the literature only to come up with project ideas that are close derivatives of published works. This usually happens because a student put too much focus on absorbing the "conventional wisdom" of the field rather than starting with a question and seeing what research has already been done to address it. However, there are plenty of scientists who disagree with this sentiment. I had a colleague who would quote Feynman, "I never pay any attention to anything by experts. I calculate everything myself." Maybe that works if you are Feynman, but I seem to recall John Preskill saying that he didn't think this mentality served Feynman well, at least in his later years.