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Crazy New Ideas

• swayvil 5y ago
  From the footnotes >3] This is one reason people with a touch of Asperger's may have an advantage in discovering new ideas. They're always flying on instruments On the contrary, it is everybody else who is flying on instruments. The sperg sees straight.
  • anotha1 5y ago
    Maybe he meant to say we're observing the rules via mental systems(instruments) we developed to "fit in" instead of whatever neuro-typs use.
    • swayvil 5y ago
      I interpreted"flying on instruments" as employing an abstraction-layer (insulative, enculturated, solipsistic even) vs direct-observation.
      • zug_zug 5y ago
        So for some context, "flying on instruments" is considered much better in flight. A fair number of novice pilots kill themselves because they get lost in clouds and get emotional and think they aren't level anymore. The instrument tells them they are level, but they get paranoid and either stall or crash because they don't trust that the machine is more reliable than their emotions, even when it's drilled into them.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
• anotha1 5y ago
  Looks like pg discovered consensus vs non-consensus ideas[1], good for him. [1] https://medium.com/entrepreneurship-at-work/non-consensus-based-entrepreneurship-b5d4b370b645 https://medium.com/entrepreneurship-at-work/non-consensus-ba...
• bestinterest 5y ago
  Very interesting. This sounds like a response to the Mighty [0] launch which Paul Graham has been defending on twitter recently after an outcry from some of the 'hardcore' developers such as Jonathan Blow [1] and Casey [2]. [0] https://www.mightyapp.com/ https://www.mightyapp.com/ [1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 [2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224
  • anotha1 5y ago
    Mighty is a good idea, marketed to the wrong people. I mean, who wouldn't just upgrade their computer? New software is a cost, even if it's "free." I'm sure there's a niche, though. Like low-paid workers needing to do a lot on their crappy personal machines.
    • blocked_again 5y ago
      Do you think low paid workers are going buy a cheap laptop for 500$ and pay 30$ or 50$ per month for Mighty instead of just getting a more powerful Window laptop for like 1000$ or 1500$?
      • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
        M1 macs can be had for $999, and they can even be bought with cheap financing options to convert it to a monthly payment. Maybe there’s a market for people stuck on old computers but whose companies still spring for super fast internet and $50/month SaaS bills per user instead of just spending that same money (or less) financing the laptops they actually need, but it would be a small market.
      • criddell 5y ago
        Is it just the price that's the problem? What if Might were $30 to $50 per year?
    • bhouston 5y ago
• CJefferson 5y ago
  This is an interesting idea, but I feel it's not calibrated right -- I'm an academic, so I'd imagine I work with many "domain experts" (if you don't think so, that's of course another valid discussion). I don't think "if you bet on the entire set of implausible-sounding ideas proposed by reasonable domain experts, you'd end up net ahead.". I hear a implausible sounding ideas all the time. I think one of the main points of academia is to give people the chance to explore those ideas. But they don't turn out good "on average", not even close.
  • anotha1 5y ago
    Yes, because even when those implausible ideas fail, your more likely to learn something than when experimenting on an existing hypothesis with just a minor change.
    • skeeter2020 5y ago
      Your framing of the question totally ignores opportunity cost. All that time spent working on ultimately failing crazy ideas is time you did not spend working on anything else, either marginal and likely or less risky/crazy.
  • magusdei 5y ago
    Ending up "net ahead" does not necessarily mean maximizing the fraction of successful projects. I don't think pg is saying that implausible-sounding projects usually turn out good. He is saying that when they turn out good, they have outsized impact, precisely because they initially sounded implausible and therefore produce lots of new information if true.
  • tlb 5y ago
    The median implausible-sounding idea is bad, for sure. But if you never bet on any implausible-sounding ideas, you exclude the chance of being an early participant in any big paradigm shift. A good exercise is to back-test your rule against big ideas through their history. Would you have invested time in solving Schrodinger’s weird equation in 1925? 1927? 1940? Would you have invested time in public key cryptography in 1975? 1976? 1980? 1990? People who got in early, got to make the big discoveries in those fields.
• Y_Y 5y ago
  I was hoping he was going to provide a list of examples.
• jimhi 5y ago
  In the realm of entrepreneurship, I think domain experts who also risk tons of their cash on crazy ideas should be looked at even closer. Y Combinator and Tesla were seen as stupid and crazy for a long time. Meanwhile I’ve seen a lot of domain expert entrepreneurs do really crazy things that lead nowhere when it’s VC money instead of theirs.
  • fendy3002 5y ago
    There are too many factors that'll decide whether it'll be success or not. I believe timings and luck are often overlooked. iPhone certainly not the first touch screen display, Microsoft did have one, I believe. However Apple's timing was perfect, there was increasing adaptation of wifi connectivity and 3g, making it able to browse anywhere. Of course smoother interface and beautiful design also contribute big. AmongUs was lucky they got advertisement from streamer, at perfect timing that was (is) pandemic and lockdowns. Tesla can be considered crazy because they try to emerge with unknown product, with unknown market and unknown possibility of success. If we look at the past, Apple's iPhone was crazy too, because it was new product, with unknown market.
    • entee 5y ago
      The first iPhone famously only had 2G cellular internet. At the time 3G phones were not ubiquitous but were readily available (had one as a mid priced Nokia flip phone), so I’ve always thought this was a fascinating aspect of the iPhone story. I bet the decision was made to go forward despite the product being slightly hobbled precisely because of timing.
      • bombcar 5y ago
        The iPhone was an iPod that could make phone calls in an era when phones didn't do much beyond making phone calls. So it was a no-brainer for those already carrying an iPod and a phone, even if it didn't do anything beyond being an iPod that could receive calls and texts!
• activatedgeek 5y ago
  I think the key statement to realize here is this, > Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts. Off the top of my head, I vaguely remember that the latter half of the careers of many "greats" like Einstein, Fermi, Erdos were riddled with pursuing directions which bore no fruit (to this day). I don't quite think that crazy bets work on "average". On average they fail. It mostly so happens that crazy bets are on "average" taken by people with a network that can attract able and passionate people, who can see through an idea to its conclusion. This is where experts come in. Experts often rely on validation by their "community", and by the nature of community dynamics need to upsell. They naturally attract the kind of people needed to execute crazy ideas. But then attracting such talent also has a corrective effect on the originally crazy idea, such that it has a higher chance of succeeding by minimizing the blind spots, the unknown unknowns.
  • marcosdumay 5y ago
    > Off the top of my head, I vaguely remember that the latter half of the careers of many "greats" like Einstein, Fermi, Erdos were riddled with pursuing directions which bore no fruit (to this day). I don't know about Erdos, but the other had ambitious ideas, not crazy ones. Evidence that they weren't crazy is that the problems they were working on are still seen as the ones to solve by most of the physics community. In fact, on the case of Einstein, he worked on much crazier ideas on the beginning of his career. I don't think any respected physicist ever thought about solving Brownian motion, and the photoelectric effect was an interesting curiosity but mostly of interest of "those inventors out there", not of researchers.
  • agalunar 5y ago
    This is the whole "black swan" idea that Nassim Taleb writes about – events that are very rare and unpredictable but completely life-changing. This might be a poor paraphrase, but roughly: We're not very good at reasoning about these sorts of events, and domain experts are not immune. It's easy to believe you have more predictive or explanative power than you actually do, and to expose yourself to unacceptable risk as a result.
• tosh 5y ago
  > Having new ideas is a lonely business
• dvh1990 5y ago
  "Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don't have to be. They just have to be sufficiently good bets — to have sufficiently high expected value. And I think on average they do. I think if you bet on the entire set of implausible-sounding ideas proposed by reasonable domain experts, you'd end up net ahead." That's the VC business model in a nutshell
• reddog 5y ago
  Isn’t this pretty much what Thomas Kuhn said in his Structures of Scientific Revolutions back in the 60s? At one time that was hailed as one of the most important books of the 20th century.
• Gravityloss 5y ago
  "If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person proposed an idea that sounded preposterous" - my reaction would be to ask: that's unexpected to me, what is different?
• SigmundA 5y ago
  “But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” -Sagan
• rsp1984 5y ago
  I agree with the general gist of this, however the crux is that most ideas that turn out to be revolutionary just don't originate within the accepted circle of domain experts, exactly because being a domain expert makes you more unlikely to think out of the box. Google didn't come out of Yahoo. Napster wasn't founded by music industry execs. Friendster didn't evolve into Facebook. Match.com didn't invent Tinder. It's often the curious outsiders that disrupt the status quo, not the well connected insiders.
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    Those are all excellent examples of the main reason why innovation can not be done in established businesses: the fear of cannibalizing the cash cow will stifle any real innovation.
    • gustavo-fring 5y ago
      Was the Playstation not revolutionary?
      • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        I don't think so, at least not in any technical aspect. Pretty much everything about the tech was a logical extension of industry trends. It began life as a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES similar to Sega's SegaCD for the Genesis/MegaDrive. Outside the technology, the low license cost and relative ease of developing for it built a sizeable and varied library of games, which I think was a major contributor to its success, but neither of those things strike me as particularly revolutionary.
    • kolinko 5y ago
      Bell Labs is a counterexample to what you said. It developed the first transistor, photovoltaic cell, fiberiptic, lasers, cctv and some other things. Oh, and cellphones of course. Ditto Xerox Parc and modern user interfaces, ethernet and and laser printers.
      • 5y ago
• kstenerud 5y ago
  The thing is, most crazy new ideas are just that: crazy. For every great new invention there is the other 99.999% of bunk or snake oil. It's very difficult to differentiate between an innovative idea and claptrap. Genius is difficult to recognise because it takes a genius to develop the idea in the first place.
  • chrisco255 5y ago
    > the other 99.999% of bunk or snake oil. I think you are being overly pessimistic by several orders of magnitude.
• paraschopra 5y ago
  The issue is that domain experts often have crazy ideas outside their domain. Typical example is a technical expert or a scientist having a crazy business idea.
• keiferski 5y ago
  Something I’ve noticed a lot lately is that the people who have crazy new ideas are often the absolute last people that should be communicating them to the world. I’m not sure if it comes from the insularity of academia or just a basic inability to write clearly. My theory is that many domain experts haven’t needed to communicate with a lay audience in decades (if ever) and thus aren’t aware of their own baseline assumptions. Seems like a startup idea, maybe? Convert academic papers into comprehensible English. Two Minute Papers does this but it’s only for technology. https://youtube.com/c/K%C3%A1rolyZsolnai https://youtube.com/c/K%C3%A1rolyZsolnai This probably applies to early Apple. Wozniak, while clearly a technical genius, needed Jobs’ communication and design skills to sell “personal computing” and make Apple a mass-market company.
  • aadvani 5y ago
    We’re building this for clinical papers! inpharmd.com We have 10k summarized so far
  • mikewarot 5y ago
    I think many (but not all) domain experts end up that way because they are so interested in a topic, they've internalized all the jargon and assumptions required to get there. It takes quite a bit of effort (and practice!) to keep the viewpoint of the common person in mind as well. Feynman loved explaining things, so he had to keep trying to explain them in a manner that the ordinary folk could understand, but he also loved physics, which kept him diving deeper, and playing with it. Having charisma and knowing what people want, and how to sell was Steve Jobs portion of the game, once the initial technical hurdles were solved. Woz likes to minimize circuits and do clever things, that was his part of the game. Here on HN, the balance seems to be keeping it focused enough on hacking technology, while still appealing to those who want to make money off of it in yacht loads. It's all about balance between at least 2 domains.
• gustavo-fring 5y ago
  Graham's obviously inspired by some Kuhnian paradigms here, but in Grahamiam fashion, he doesn't cite anything to back it up. What I find interesting where he calls most people conservative is how when I'm discussing VCs, YC, etc with non SV people is we talk about how conservative they are. YC's business model for years was predicated on finding talent (kids) that was undervalued, underpaying them (10k was the initial payouts?), getting them to pack up and move to super-expensive monocultural SV like everyone else, and then when they made bukku money, lose interest in improving the service (Reddit, Dropbox). There's nothing original there, it's the business model of carpetbaggers and robber barons. How boring. I often feel like Jonah Hill in Moneyball, a pariah for pointing out how ancient VC thinking is. Or maybe I just imagine it. Well, it is my experience that true deep domain knowledge can only come from years of insights. People without years of experience will be lacking maturity and/or won't have time to even consider those insights. Usually people who mainly care about money, influence "becoming powerful" (Graham's words about his protege, not mine) will jump at whatever shortcut they can take instead of spending the card work necessary for learning these deep insights PG is interested in. With all due respect, Coinbase didn't require deep insight. It was the equivalent of "You like money, too?" . PG, you should stop the contrarian persecuted intellectual look. You're not the little guy anymore, haven't been for 2 decades.
  • antipauline 5y ago
    > There's nothing original there, it's the business model of carpetbaggers and robber barons. How boring. Indeed. Venture capitalism is still capitalism, with all its abuse and exploitation.
    • lbacaj 5y ago
      Capitalism for all its flaws at least taps into what motivates people to work really hard and encourages it. It mimics nature itself. Some ideas might be mundane but others can be extraordinary, it’s par for the course. As an example, Capitalism gave us a vaccine to a novel corona-virus within a year. These companies didn’t do it out of good will, they did it because they knew they could make money. Many socialist countries are struggling because it turns out it’s hard to force people to produce innovation without the right incentive structures in place. If you want to blame anyone blame God for making human nature this way. Capitalism is just the system that is most effective at tapping human psychology to push people to produce the best possible work.
• danybittel 5y ago
  That is kind of reaching for the stars. Or shall I say last straw argument. I think a much easier winner is if you have a domain expert in one area and bring his or her knowledge to another field. A Designer who creates a web app to design logos. A fitness guru who develops a Drink. A car maker who builds space ships.
• II2II 5y ago
  The reference to the Copernican Model of the solar system is an interesting one since it produced less accurate predictions than the Ptolemaic Model. Improving the predictions of the Copernican model initially involved the introduction of epicycles, diminishing the value of the crazy new idea. It took the work of Kepler (elliptical orbits) and Newton (a physical basis for elliptical orbits) to elevate the heliocentric model to the status that it enjoys today. There are two reasons why I bring this up: one is the validity of many of Paul Graham's assertions and conclusions. The other is to point out that things aren't so simple. Copernicus did not reap the rewards of his ideas since it took the work of others to prove those ideas. In fields outside of science, there is little reason to expect people to arrive upon similar conclusions. (Even within the sciences, there is no reason to believe we would converge on similar conclusions in the same time frame via different paths.)
  • gustavo-fring 5y ago
    Graham has a tendency to use hindsight to show that, yes, indeed he is contrarian and genius. The Ethereum people do it, too. They use the example of old massively successful tech to prove that Eth too can catch on, but they don't cite all the failures.
    • antipauline 5y ago
      Paul Graham is high on his own ego. Unfortunately, too many people take what he says at face value, like he's some sort of magical preacher of the Valley.
      • dang 5y ago
        Please don't cross into personal attack on HN, for any meaning of $person. And please stop creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with. You're damaging the community you're part of by doing these things, and that is self-defeating behavior—especially if you consider how fragile this place is. I'm sure you're not the kind of person who would drop lit matches in a dry forest or even litter in a city park. Please stop doing the equivalents here. The odds are high that the internet converges to suckage. We're spending a lot of energy trying to stave that off. Since you're such an active community participant, wouldn't it be in your interests to help that effort, rather than hurt it? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  should be prefaced with "within the context of american capitalism", because i don't think such views on personal ego and taking credit apply universally. There were a lot more crazy ideas when experimental science wasn't there to debunk them. And many science fields even today are lacking ideas, not methods, but not necessarily for fear of being ridiculed.
• halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
  I feel like the same thing can be said about Boring Old Ideas. If the person who is speaking to you knows what they're talking about, there's good chance that they've identified a gap/opportunity and you should listen to them. This seems more like an exercise in listening and trust than whether the idea is crazy or novel.
• antipauline 5y ago
  Why are you all upvoting this shit? Just because Paul Graham wrote it, doesn't mean it's worth reading. Usually the opposite, in fact. You people need to lay off the PG cultism. Stop worshipping every word he writes just because you idolize his riches, or want to be him, or whatever.
  • halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
    You created an account just to say this? Damn, commitment.
    • antipauline 5y ago
      Well, I don't want to get my usual account banned for expressing such apostate views. They're very protective of their cult leaders round here.
      • imhoguy 5y ago
        What are your views then?
      • inglor_cz 5y ago
        I do not think that the problem is with the content, moreso with the unnecessarily aggressive tone. Shit, cult ... - HN generally rewards civility and does not like sliding towards Twitter mode of operation.
      • hooande 5y ago
        Imagine if people could completely change their idenitites every time they said something. It would make conversation and discourse as we know it impossible. It would make the idea you created an account to express invalid. You can't criticize Paul Graham if he can say "That wasn't me, it was Gaul Praham". If your ideas aren't good enough for you to stay by them with some form of consistent identity, do not express those ideas. Think about them, develop them and then communicate them when they no longer embarrass you.
• bob33212 5y ago
  This is a great essay. I follow similar logic when assessing bitcoin. 1. Listen to as many viewpoints as possible 2. Remove the people who are not domain experts 3. Remove the people who are blinded by their own financial interests or ego. 4. Remove the people who are influenced by social pressures ( good and bad ) 5. Assign probabilities to the remaining viewpoints evenly. 6. Repeat steps 1-5 and chart the progression of the probability space. Currently, It seems 40%+ likely that Bitcoin will end up as an accidental Ponzi scheme with a crash based on late adopters rushing out. But there is also still a 10%+ chance that it replaces gold as a currency hedge for the next 20+ years and 5+ percent chance that it becomes a first class currency.
  • vaylian 5y ago
    For those 10%: Do you see BitCoin as an actual currency that you can buy stuff with, or purely an investment?
    • max_ 5y ago
      People buy BTC so they can sell it for USD. Most BTC sits idle in exchanges like coinbase.
    • zonethundery 5y ago
      I'm new at this, having just purchased some miners, but have followed the space using a similar logic. For the 10% view I'd consider the insane amount of institutional money chasing the entire value chain, which will not be shy about protecting itself. The policy environment is still evolving; the FinCEN travel rule will put the hurt on crypto ATMs and the exchanges (to some degree). But it's good collateral, it doesn't (generally) have storage costs like gold, the growth of supply is well understood. Potential positive catalysts remain, including a US btc ETF, the impact of cme's micro contract, and geopolitical developments further constraining the supply of ASICs. Its clear from the above that I view it more as a store of value than something you should spend as a currency. Ethereum-world (incl stablecoins) seems to have a lock on the latter. It will be interesting to see what happens when ETH shifts to POS.
    • jhgb 5y ago
• codingdave 5y ago
  > Someone proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then it gradually takes over the world. This is survivorship bias. He is not wrong in that yes, we should consider ideas from domain experts carefully and not be overly dismissive. But it is absolutely survivorship bias to believe that every crazy idea from a domain expert worked out.
  • gustavo-fring 5y ago
    Graham should know better, he talked about arc as the messiah for five years before getting beat to market by Clojure. Now they barely do proper language releases.
    • nickelcitymario 5y ago
      He doesn't say that crazy ideas by domain experts always work out. He makes two claims: 1) That if the crazy idea is from a domain expert, it deserves to be taken seriously. It doesn't deserve to be taken as gospel, but it shouldn't be dismissed outright. 2) He's betting (but not stating as fact) that if you did blindly support the crazy ideas of domain experts, you'd be right more often than you're wrong. This is not the same thing as saying domain experts are always right. Simply that all things being equal, you're better off betting on their expertise over your own ignorance. But even better than that is to look into the matter until you have sufficient expertise to properly evaluate their idea.
  • sneak 5y ago
    From TFA: > Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don't have to be. They just have to be sufficiently good bets — to have sufficiently high expected value. And I think on average they do. It's likely that you're both right. If something is biased 45% off of a coin toss, but gives 25x returns, it's still positive EV. This is a part of VC and speculative investment that a lot of people gloss over. Success is the difference between being wrong 95% of the time and being wrong 97% of the time. (And, with Softbank around, sometimes it's the difference between being wrong 97% of the time and 99.5% of the time.)
  • david-cako 5y ago
• woopwoop 5y ago
  > Everyone is too conservative. Interesting. Do VCs outperform the S&P 500 in general?
• grodes 5y ago
  can the font size be smaller? please
  • drux 5y ago
    And the text a little more to the left
• gman83 5y ago
  I guess because I think that Hyperloop is a really dumb idea I must be extremely envious. This smells like a way to justify ignoring difficult criticism. The critics are envious, they're trying to look sophisticated, they're not real domain experts, etc.
  • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    This kind of attitude seem to be very common among 'ambitious' founders, especially the YC crowd.
    • TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      Historically parodied as "One day the world will understand my true genius. And then you'll all be sorry!" It's trivially easy to disprove. Just read some vintage issues of Byte to see an impressive number of not entirely crazy novel ideas from established domain experts which crashed and burned. Of course some of these ideas - a minority - turned out to be successful. But a little digging shows success was not about the quality of the tech, and more the quality of the marketing, with some occasional monopolist strong-arming. In fact this is very much the US model. Take an okay to good idea, hype it into the stratosphere with a massive marketing and brand recognition campaign, and sell it at an inflated price. If you're lucky you can pitch it as a B2C Veblen lifestyle good or a B2B strategic corporate necessity. Win. That's very different to debating the tech itself purely on intrinsic technical merits. In a very literal sense it's a different argument happening in a different space. It's neither helpful nor clarifying to imply it isn't.
      • biztos 5y ago
        > Just read some vintage issues of Byte I still have the AI issue of Byte[0] and there still aren’t any robots that can draw for shit. /s [0]: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-04 https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-04
      • TimPC 5y ago
        I don't think most crazy ideas crashing and burning is good enough to disprove the thesis. Even if 1 in 100 ideas that can bring about 10x change in important areas are all that succeed, we need those ideas to improve things. I think if you look for marketing you'll find it, so even ideas that win on technology can look like monopolist strong-arming if that's what you're looking for. Also not all ideas that win on technology are the very best the technology could be, they are often the right compromise that's a good deal better than what they competed against. Windows for instance did a lot of strong arming monopolist tactics but was also the clear technical winner on PC for ease of use for much of its existence. I don't think the monopolist tactics would be enough if the average joe found it too hard to use.
• michaelbuckbee 5y ago
  I think most "crazy" ideas seem that way given the current constraints in that point in time and it's the domain experts that see the changing landscape which will make them viable. It's hard to remember, but there was a time that YouTube seemed "crazy" as it was assumed that bandwidth costs would swamp the viability of any video startup. See also: almost all the "dumb" early web startups that weren't dumb, but mistimed the market (Webvan, ePets)
• guerrilla 5y ago
  Weird pop psy in the middle of this article. Forgive me if I don't just take your word on millions of people's motivations with no data or argument.
• stephc_int13 5y ago
  In case someone missed the story, Paul Graham is indirectly talking about the feedback received by Mighty App. And in this particular case, I don't think this is a valid defense. First, he clearly has too much skin in the game to be credibly neutral about it. Second, he avoids addressing the main critique about this "new tech". People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is infeasible or not valuable, but because it is dangerous and also because it sounds technically ridiculous. (thin client inside thin client) https://www.mightyapp.com/ https://www.mightyapp.com/ https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224
  • stephc_int13 5y ago
    This idea of a dumb client is not new, it has been around basically forever, but we're seeing it again in multiple different incarnations because it could be huge. And I mean that in a bad way. Privacy and users rights are already pretty bad, but we still own our computers. I can see how it would start in the corporate world.
    • bsedlm 5y ago
      It's like they don't understand that (seemingly) forgotten archiectural principle of the internet which says that the "intelligence" goes in the ends: i.e. the leaves are smart, the nodes are as dumb as pipes. Thus they insist on making the nodes (the servers) smart and the clients (leaves) dumb.
      • stephc_int13 5y ago
        This is true from a technical perspective, and this is probably why the web is still not perfectly sound from an engineering point of view. But from a business perspective, there is huge value in dumb clients (not for the end-user)
      • razorfen 5y ago
        It’s the first I’d heard of this axiom. Can you give an example of that in a real architecture? I think about a central server with multiple terminals on a network. There the node is the beefy boi and the terminals are just I/O devices. Kind of similar to what MightyApp is doing - except with fewer privacy concerns :)
• kumarvvr 5y ago
  Off Topic : The site is sending a GET request to http://np.lexity.com/embed/YA/fa27bb6ce937aea400cc8e5f11aa42d5/v/206WqmSFLR7C/k/Qe4wkfhCjfWQ/u/http%3A%2F%2Fpaulgraham.com%2Fnewideas.html/n/1620306880340/t/Crazy%20New%20Ideas/r/https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F/vn/1/ysid/paulgraham/bt/prod-view/ii/newideas/io/2/c/shrxjhpk.f.kk[0]?id=06de067e4a3b&ts=1620306881136 http://np.lexity.com/embed/YA/fa27bb6ce937aea400cc8e5f11aa42... every 5 seconds. Anyone have any idea what it is? Note : The address keeps changing for every request. Edit2 : Is it only on my PC, or are others also able to see it?
  • lioeters 5y ago
    I see it too, but my ad blocker prevented the request(s). A quick search for "lexity.com" shows that it's an analytics company. > Lexity - Apps to help grow your ecommerce business > Commerce Central is the easiest way to grow your small and medium ecommerce businesses. We provide the best real time analytics and insights for ecommerce for free, and apps to advertize your store through Google, Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter.
  • SingAlong 5y ago
    I see those requests too but my adblocker takes care of it. Lexity.com looks like a Yahoo service and maybe this is the analytics being collected. AFAIK pg's site is still hosted on Yahoo.
    • unstatusthequo 5y ago
      Sometimes crazy ideas like SSL aren’t so crazy. I wonder if the HTTPS failure is due to the Yahoo part of this?
• visarga 5y ago
  This video is relevant. They talk about "openendedness", serendipity, the tyranny of objectives, the evolution of ideas (and biology), inventing new problems not just solving problems. There are important implications in AI. Kenneth Stanley - Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned on Machine Learning Street Talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E&t=3016s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E&t=3016s
  • ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    I watched this entire video and it's awesome. Their whole channel is a gold mine of information.
    • visarga 5y ago
      Yes, it's the best channel together with Yannic's channel. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZHmQk67mSJgfCCTn7xBfew https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZHmQk67mSJgfCCTn7xBfew I come every couple of days back for more.
• UncleMeat 5y ago
  I really wish PG would actually talk to some historians. History of Science is an extremely deep field with tons of professionals who have spent their lives studying this material. His overview is shallow. The only history book he cites is from fifty years ago! It is so frustrating. There is this huge wealth of content available and a large group of people who'd want nothing more to be able to share what they know about the history of science and instead we get think pieces based in hunches, feelings, and generalities. The historians are right there! They want to talk to you!
  • anatoly 5y ago
    You should use this opportunity to recommend an especially high-quality introduction/overview of modern history of science, approachable by a curious outsider.
    • UncleMeat 5y ago
      Diving straight into books can be hard, since academics write for other academics. But I recommend works by Paula Findlen and Tom Mullaney highly! Mullaney's work pushes back against a whole bunch of myths about the chinese language and its effect on technological innovation. Findlen's work covers both the history of technologies but also the technology of communication and the nature of information in the Renaissance period. Mullaney is weirdly involved on social media so that can be more approachable and Findlen's work is on the readable side for academic history. The world is so much more complex than "a new idea is created from the ether, people criticize it, and then a paradigm shift happens and it takes over the world".
    • walleeee 5y ago
      Philosophy of Science: the Central Issues (Curd, Cover, & Pincock) is a decent although limited aggregation
      • anatoly 5y ago
        Thank you.
  • 5y ago
• srckinase123 5y ago
  The idea of using reasonable domain experts as a filter to implausible-sounding ideas seems obvious for hard-technology and scientific problems. But what about entrepreneurial ideas that provide a social service, such as Uber or Airbnb? Were the founders "domain experts"?
  • bombcar 5y ago
    What's interesting is both of those examples are relatively removed from the "original proposition" - Uber was "ridesharing" and now is "taxi on demand" and AirBnB was "couch surfing" and now is "unlicensed hotel".
  • jimhi 5y ago
    He has a different essay explaining the Stripe founders were not experts at all when they started. I think there's multiple paths to success and change
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• darkerside 5y ago
  > Another reason people dismiss new ideas is that it's an easy way to seem sophisticated. When a new idea first emerges, it usually seems pretty feeble. It's a mere hatchling. Received wisdom is full-grown eagle by comparison. So it's easy to launch a devastating attack on a new idea, and anyone who does will seem clever to those who don't understand this asymmetry. I wonder if most people realize this? In my experience, it seems like a characteristic that defies intellect and education. Incredibly smart people are, if anything, someone's more dismissive of new ideas because of their confidence that it just won't work.
  • randomsearch 5y ago
    Related: when ideas are young, they must be nurtured like saplings. Too much criticism will kill them, they must be watered and fed to give them a chance.
• motohagiography 5y ago
  A fast heuristic on the value of crazy ideas would be: a) is the premise of this idea based on the rejection or falsification of an established consensus or convention, and b) does this person (the proponent) survive? A crazy idea is just betting a majority is wrong. What makes it smart is not about being right, it's that you have figured out how to make money if the consensus is vulnerable or wrong. Some of the the biggest startups and plays of the last decade were bets against conventions and rich country taboos like letting strangers crash on your couch, driving strangers around in your car, straight women wanting anonymous hookups and the normalization of sex work, non-technical people using cryptography, working class people investing in alterantive assets - let alone understanding what a short squeeze is enough to execute one, watching movies on little laptop screens. What makes an idea 'crazy' is that it is against one that people align with because the alignment itself means being aligned to power. Most of what people believe, they do so because it works for them, and by works I mean aligns them to what they percieve to be powerful. Most money seems to be made getting short weaker middle class conventions. A crazy idea is making the call that an emperor has no clothes. I suspect the secret to getting short naked emperors is not so much a track record for upholding convention, but rather, a track record of suviving.
• de_keyboard 5y ago
  I think "attacking" Crazy New Ideas is how we develop them, iron out the kinks and test our understanding. Criticism is an essential part of the journey from crazy new idea to accepted wisdom. However, the main problem I have with with this article is that it divides people into domain experts and the rest. This kind of black and white thinking is pervasive in PG essays, and always lead to a cute conclusion. You can have two domain experts that disagree. You can have an idea that spans multiple domains, and there are no (or few) experts in all of them. Maybe the Crazy New Idea seems brilliant to experts in one domain, but only because they don't grasp the others.
  • marvin 5y ago
    That two domain experts disagree on a radical idea is irrelevant, if the one presenting the radical idea turns out to be right. There are no points given out for merely participating. This happens all the time. And the most interesting ideas are rejected by almost everyone, except the tiny minority that happens to be positioned to understand the change. So you can’t make predictions by tallying up expert votes either.
  • mcguire 5y ago
    Likewise, one of the best, most valuable, things that Albert Einstein did was to attack quantum mechanics in every way he could.
  • npsimons 5y ago
    > I think "attacking" Crazy New Ideas is how we develop them, iron out the kinks and test our understanding. Criticism is the crucible in which crazy new ideas are forged into crazy viable ideas. > However, the main problem I have with with this article is that it divides people into domain experts and the rest. Let's be honest: in this day and age "the rest" are far too vocal and need to STFU on things which they have no knowledge. Sure, domain experts can disagree - let them be heard, but the know-nothings should be given zero attention.
    • dbtc 5y ago
      Except for children, who often ask the best questions.
• talkingtab 5y ago
  I believe there is another factor, a bit more subtle, but I wonder if it is more pervasive. Humans need to act. In order to act we need to believe that our actions are actionable. Anything, anything at all, that leaves us unable to act is a threat to our survival. A bear jumps out at you. Being unable to act because you don't know whether to play dead or run is deadly. Being unable to decide whether to wear a mask or not is deadly, even if both choices are both right or wrong. Maybe not said well, but when you consider all the actions you take in a day and what would happen if we could not decide. As a side effect, I wonder if simply voicing ideas or bringing into view concepts that challenge the certainty we each require in order to get through a day, is in fact threatening.
• jgalt212 5y ago
  as PG has gotten richer, astoundingly so, I feel his writing has become of lower quality and less general utility. But, that's fine. I don't have to read it, but I do still adore and re-read his older works. That being said, it's amazing that mental gymnastics all VCs these days will go through to make something that's completely nonsensical seem like it "could" make sense. e.g. NFTs and Andreesen Horowitz
• Tycho 5y ago
  My favourite type of dismissal is: "X is a stupid idea that nobody asked for and it will never even work. Besides we already have Y[1], so this is nothing new." [1] Where Y is some product that foreshadows the functionality of X and is already successful among some set of users, although has some incidental limitations that prevent its growth
• ojbyrne 5y ago
  Should probably credit Thomas Kuhn: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_...
  • FiatLuxDave 5y ago
    Check footnote number 2?
    • ojbyrne 5y ago
      I will admit that I missed that but its barely enough. The whole piece is basically a paraphrase of Kuhn.
• arua442 5y ago
  I don't like how Paul's writing always gets hundreds of likes just because it's by him. Not everything he writes is amazing. I wish there wasn't such a cult around him.
  • ck425 5y ago
    I don't think he gets hundreds of likes because he's amazing (though some of what he's written has been). It's because his writing is an insight into silicon valley and VC culture. Even when I completely disagree with his opinions they're interesting to read because they give an insight into how him and many of his peers think. And as someone interested in this industry that's fundamentally interesting even when it's not great. Arguably more so.
  • drclau 5y ago
    I think this may be an American thing. People as successful as PG, Musk, Bezos, Gates etc become demigods, for a majority of people. Cults are created around them. They can never be wrong and so on. As a result, the opposition arises too: the people who dislike these demigods for the same reasons their followers like them. I say this is probably an American thing because I don’t see this happening in Europe. I worked for years for one of the most successful startups in Europe and I have no idea what the names of the founders are. Probably no one does by now.
    • HDMI_Cable 5y ago
      All of the attention around these guys seems like an extension of celebrity culture. I know Europe (in particular the UK and France) have a somewhat large culture around celebrities and their opinions / comings-and-doings, but the US is on a different level. These founder-cults seem like the cults around the Kardashians (or whoever), but for guys who couldn't care less about movies but really want to be rich.
    • distances 5y ago
      > I say this is probably an American thing because I don’t see this happening in Europe. I worked for years for one of the most successful startups in Europe and I have no idea what the names of the founders are. Probably no one does by now. I agree there's much less business related worship in Europe. I also worked a couple of years for a successful "startup" (it's a public company so hardly a startup any more), and wouldn't be able to name the founders. I've also been visiting HN for a good while and have no idea who PG is, beyond that he apparently is some boss at YC and likes to write controversial blog posts. We do get our share of Gates/Bezos/Musk news but lots of it is quite critical, I don't think anyone sees them as role models.
• aazaa 5y ago
  As an intern I once attended an internal Innovation Symposium hosted by the company I was working for. Most of the speakers talked in glowing terms about innovation, how good it was, and how welcomed it was. But one speaker didn't. He said: "You'll know you're being innovative because you'll feel uncomfortable about your idea." I had never before heard that point of view before, but it clicked. If all of your peers think what you're doing is a good idea, maybe it's time to re-evaluate how innovative your ideas really are. The problem with all of this is that immature good ideas look and act exactly like crazy ideas. It's hard to find comfort pushing on an idea with that fact always in the back of your mind. You could find yourself years down the road with nothing to show for all that effort.
• snarkypixel 5y ago
  Biggest mind shift: Instead of asking why it wouldn't work, ask what would it take for it to work
• bombcar 5y ago
  The problem I immediately see is that you have to qualify your domain experts. If it's someone you personally know, perhaps it would apply - otherwise you're opening yourself pretty wide to domain experts out to scam you.
  • topaz0 5y ago
    Right. Examples of ideas that seemed crazy, were initially treated as implausible, and nevertheless worked out are plentiful, but so are examples of ideas that seemed crazy, were initially venerated as the miracle way of the future, and turned out to be complete BS founded on deception.
    • bombcar 5y ago
      And because the second group fails (or were outright scams) the record of all of them is lost. We know about the HUGE venture capital failures like pets dot com, but there were thousands more in the $1-10m range nobody cares to even document. Similarly throughout history. The "crazy ideas that actually worked" are talked about because of how rare they are.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• dukeofdoom 5y ago
  Seems like the privacy implications of this are not worth it for any serious company. I was watching Rudy Giuliani yesterday on youtube, talk about how the FBI accessed and monitored his iCloud account for over a year. Which included his privileged lawyer/client information. If they can do that to a president's lawyer, while he's defending the president. They can do it to anyone.
  • tome 5y ago
    Do you have a source for that? It seems extremely implausible for a number of reasons.
    • dukeofdoom 5y ago
      Sure, Rudy made a video detailing the FBI breach of his iCloud account. [Starts at the 18:30 minute mark] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcjaaBcmUVg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcjaaBcmUVg
      • tome 5y ago
        Hmm, I think I meant "evidence" more than "source".
        • dukeofdoom 5y ago
          Did you watch the video? The FBI itself disclosed to Rudy's lawyer that they accessed his iCloud. Thats a post facto admission from the government itself. There's no good reason to think Rudy, a practicing lawyer for 40+ years, is making up statements of legal fact. Article with statements from Rudy's Lawyer https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/lawyer-feds-got-rudy-icloud-023335029.html https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/lawyer-feds-got-rudy-iclou...
          • tome 5y ago
            Interesting, thanks.
• tw04 5y ago
  >The reason is that everyone is too conservative. Everyone isn't too conservative: veterans in a field are conservative because they have earned the war wounds they carry. Which is why you tend to see "disruptive apps" targeting younger people. They don't have the life experience to understand, at first glance, why an idea may be extremely dangerous. I'm young enough to remember being that way myself: Who cares if someone gets my bank account info, what are they going to do, pay off my student loans? Spend the $25 I have in my checking account? Oh no! I abhor people who throw around the idea that someone in tech being "conservative" is somehow wrong or bad. They're conservative because they know just how much is at risk for the folks who don't know any better.
  • dralley 5y ago
    It's technological manifest destiny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k&t=36m48s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k&t=36m48s
  • borski 5y ago
    That founder naïveté, however, is also what often leads to founders winning. Building Stripe really seems like a schlep if you’ve built a payments company before - so much so that you might not want to do it. It’s hard, and annoying, and has all sorts of regulatory hurdles. But if you don’t know any of that, you build it anyway, because schleps are really just long collections of much smaller problems, and naive founders can solve much smaller problems at a rapid succession, whereas “conservative industry experts” simply wouldn’t even start because it’s too hard.
    • thisisbrians 5y ago
      This. I started my company in my early 20s and had no clue how much work it would be due to my own naïveté. Indeed, we broke the problems down and worked through them one-by-one until we had a functioning business model. On the one hand, it would be a lot harder to start over knowing what I know now about how much work it takes. On the other, it would be a lot easier because I got a lot better at problem solving and decision making.
• ANarrativeApe 5y ago
  There's more than one crazy new idea floating around, checkout cituzenshareholders.com reimagining of capitalism and their (ok, our) crazy, yet feasible, plan to democratize corporate governance. With $40 trillion in shares owned thru collective investments Larry Fink's wish for a new form of shareholder engagement will come true!
• nottorp 5y ago
  If this is about Mighty, the bad parts of it aren't technical. - Even with today's concentration of information, there are several independent information sources left... and they want us to access them from a single point of failure? - Who pays for this and how? How do I install my own ad blockers and anti tracking extensions on Mighty? Am I supposed to just trust them that they won't sell my advertising profile? - What happens to the sites Mighty management disagrees with? Do they become inaccessible? Or they render badly? Especially since they're an American company and society is getting ultra polarized over there...
  • intergalplan 5y ago
    Exactly. The tech is farcical (surely even a proponent of them can see that?) but that's not really Mighty's fault. It's bad because their strongest viable business plays seem to all involve leveraging their access to people's browsers in not-so-nice ways.
  • not1ofU 5y ago
    Founders: "Write that down"
• demygale 5y ago
  Does Thiel count as reasonable?
• throwaway823882 5y ago
  New Ideas aren't crazy. Crazy Ideas are crazy. That's why people say it won't work, because it sounds crazy. It sounds crazy because the person proposing it hasn't made a good enough case for it. Getting people to agree with a new idea is about salesmanship. If people think your idea is crazy, you suck at sales. Coffee's for closers.
• aparsons 5y ago
  I think a lot of people - dare I say it, even PaulG - are missing the point of Mighty (or not putting it into words properly). Mighty isn’t betting on the internet continually getting more bloated, or being better than a thick client. Even for a poor person working mostly in Figma, buying a decent laptop will be much more cost-effective. What they are really selling is the equivalent of upgrading your laptop to a new model while it’s still running. Hardware shopping is time-consuming, stressful, and never done proactively - so you suffer in silence till the new one arrives. Then you have to replicate your old workflow and warm the caches. The two biggest threats to Mighty are Apple/MSFT building “snapshot” recoveries in new hardware (almost AMI-like), and real adoption of saving bookmarks, history and passwords to the cloud by signing in to Chrome (most I know are hesitant). As has always been the case in this industry, the hardware is irrelevant. This isn’t game-streaming, where you unlock hardware economies of scale because most users play a tiny amount a day on average. Your browser is always on.
  • wraptile 5y ago
    > Hardware shopping is time-consuming, stressful, and never done proactively - so you suffer in silence till the new one arrives. Then you have to replicate your old workflow and warm the caches. What a luxurious problem to have: would rather swipe my card and pay 50$/month than buy a new laptop - ugh!
• tutfbhuf 5y ago
  Is it possible to add a HN filter (hide) all paulgraham.com posts? I'm not interested in his posts and they pop up very often on HN.
  • hutrdvnj 5y ago
    I'm not sure what you are down voted. It's a very legitimate question.
  • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    People ask for the same thing for politics, and for various subjects. So how many different "hide" filters should we create? Then there's the classification problem. Is post X really about politics? It's not binary. The only solution that would even approximately work would be to add a block list of domains to peoples' profiles. That way, if you don't want to see anything from paulgraham.com, and I don't want to see anything from HuffPost, we can each do that. But even that only approximately works. I've seen articles posted here that are Twitter comments on Paul Graham articles. Or, the absolute simplest solution: Skip over the articles that don't interest you. It's really easy to just move your eyes to the next line.
    • tutfbhuf 5y ago
      It could be very easy. Just hide all posts from that specific website, a very easy filter, not classification problem. > It's really easy to just move your eyes to the next line. Well if it's that easy, then why is there an hide button on HN in the first place?
      • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        It really is that easy. And, I don't know why there's a hide button. I have never used it that I recall; I had forgotten that it existed.
• sirsinsalot 5y ago
  Let's not kid ourselves, this thin-client re-package is a marketing effort to push forward a paradigm shift that allows companies to grab more power and control of our 1's and 0's ... whatever value proposition it is packaged up in is just marketing and propaganda ... even if they charge money for it.
• peter_retief 5y ago
  I wish somebody would take my wild ideas seriously.
  • kirubakaran 5y ago
    I'd love to hear them. My email is in my profile.
    • peter_retief 5y ago
      I missed your reply will respond soon, been away just got back.
• dd36 5y ago
  I wonder if the backlash to Mighty and the resulting defensiveness will cause it to persist longer than it would have had it announced earlier or gotten less friendly feedback. Presuming it doesn’t get the widespread traction it was hoping for.
• mindfulplay 5y ago
  This post seems to be in response to the recent Mighty app. To me, the main problem lies in what VCs think pass as 'tech'. The mighty app website made it sound it like it was some novel revolutionary app. I was hoping it was really something clever like what the Cloudflare people or even game streaming companies do. But nope. It's significantly worse: it's literally slapping together existing tech and calling it novel. And worse, simple security/privacy seem to have taken a backseat as if there is some innovative performance-oriented solution being prioritized here. There doesn't seem to be any tech. But reading through the website, one might be mistakenly led to believe it is something of a hard problem to solve. In fact the person running the show admits to how they pivoted from a Windows VM company to running just Chrome. This is reality distortion at best. Running an Electron app to stream a live Chrome VM session seems like a CS401 style project. This is similar to Uber or AirBNB: the value add is in slapping together some quick existing tech with the main 'innovation' being the funding system or creatively working around regulatory/legal hurdles. I find it amusing and sad that there isn't any new tech nor even a sound financial plan for a lot of these companies (nor even a so-called moat beyond just siloing their first mover advantage behind legal paperwork). It seems as though the 90s VCs funded actual technically sound, innovative, "pushing the envelope yet making money" companies. These days it's a popularity and ego matching competition among VCs and founders. This isn't tech. This is throwing money at a problem inefficiently and seeing what sticks. The people that work in this space are rather uninspiring, technically demotivated but financially motivated group. I hate to think that this is the new 'tech' world that was promised. I don't even want to start on Jonathan/Casey comments as they are obviously right but that's besides the point here. Makes me wonder if Mighty or Clubhouse (or even Lambda school/Coinbase) are the stellar examples a budding CS student is going to look up to: which is sad and makes me really wish for the 90s VCs to come back and fund more technically/financially sound and inspiring companies.
  • HDMI_Cable 5y ago
    Wait, Mighty App is just a remote server running Chrome and then sending it to an on-device app? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds so dumb. I thought it was at least some recompiled version of chrome optimized for performance.
• merwanedr 5y ago
  HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating your odds of success. "It's too expensive" or "Nobody needs it because we have X" on a project lead by a domain expert is not constructive criticism or conservatism, it's pure envy. PG isn't defending Mighty, Dropbox or Coinbase because he has skin in the game, but because he knows what the teams have achieved and what they could potentially achieve. I don't understand, it seems so obvious to me. Dropbox started as a better FTP, Coinbase is a better Bitcoin wallet, Gmail is a better SMTP, Mighty is a better Chrome. All of these products are meant for the masses because the core technologies/protocols are too complicated or restrictive to directly interact with.
  • baud147258 5y ago
    > Mighty is a better Chrome yes, it's better in the sense that the privacy issues are even better; well, worse in the viewpoint of the user, but since when VCs cared about it?
    • baud147258 5y ago
      And other than that I don't even think Mighty is better that Chrome, because it wouldn't work if you have a bad internet connection speed or if the connection drops
  • te_chris 5y ago
    Mighty isn't "better chrome"! It's a whole thin client proxy-service privacy-nightmare. It's more and more centralising of everything under corporate control with the payoff to users of marginal gains in speed. Kill it with fire.
    • the-dude 5y ago
      The money will be made by charging corporations, edu's & gov's who want just that : centralized control.
      • dd36 5y ago
• new_realist 5y ago
  “Please work on new things and sell me your equity a pittance, so that I may become richer on a few home runs, while most of you fail miserably.”
• qshaman 5y ago
  He is an investor on this “crazy new idea” , I don’t believe him, he is just hustling his audience and trying to create hype about a product that is neither new nor competitive. People like Guido van Rossum , James Gosling , Bjarne Stroustrup , just to mention a few, have contributed way more to the field and have earned the respect of millions , you don’t see them hyping crappy startups for a few bucks (billions* ) . I do respect the founders , and understand the have worked hard on this project , I just don’t think that just working hard on something makes it good , or whatever Paul Graham says is something I should accept as truth.
  • SheinhardtWigCo 5y ago
    > he is just hustling his audience And doing an extremely effective job of it. Getting readers to feel something is the whole game. Paul and Suhail know the default reaction to this idea is “well that’s dumb”. Encouraging and exploiting heated conversation around that is a smart move.
    • qshaman 5y ago
      yeah, good point. The saddest part is, I'm confident that people will buy into that "crazy idea" and before you know it, they have a 4B valuation. VCs always win, even when they loose.
      • drclau 5y ago
        In today's startup and VC ecosystem, they've already won. They don't have to ever become profitable, they just need to get money from their friends and connections, forever. I don't recall who said this (if anyone does, please do share!), but it goes something like this: if you reach Series F, it means exactly what you think it means. Well, not anymore. It won't be long until we'll exhaust the alphabet for funding series names, and we'll go two letters. And this is not even a critique of PG. It's just what the VC and startup ecosystem seems to have become. If anything, YC does seem to be a sort of counterbalance to this trend.
      • aerosmile 5y ago
• 21eleven 5y ago
  I think there is some evolutionary psychology at play in people's bias against "Crazy New Ideas". A human hunting and gathering on a savanna with a crazy new idea is likely to be killed by a lion or starve. Sure the new ideas sometimes were breakthroughs but the idea-haver's peers likely experienced strong selective pressure to wait until there was good evidence that an idea was unlikely to get one killed before endorsing it and practicing it themselves. In modern times we should feel more safe to have "Crazy New Ideas", we probably need them to solve many of the problems our world faces today. But we are biased against new ideas since our brains have evolved to see them associated with negative outcomes like death by lion or exile from the tribe. There is a lower risk of death by big cat today so people should feel more willing to have an celebrate new ideas.
• 9erdelta 5y ago
  > Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially the history of science, knows that's how big things start. Someone proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then it gradually takes over the world. Funny how he says this but then later goes on to mention Darwin. Perhaps we could say part of the natural selection of new "big things" is if they (both the ideas and the people) survive the early dismissiveness and criticism. I would welcome criticism from highly experienced and conservative people, because if you can respond meaningfully and survive - you're probably on to something.
• rogers18445 5y ago
  The Mighty App will either die or become a privacy nightmare. Because a browser can run arbitrary compute it will be abused, and if they don't want to die they will have to spy on what their users are doing to find abuse.
• mellosouls 5y ago
  But the main thing that leads reasonable people to dismiss new ideas is the same thing that holds people back from proposing them: the sheer pervasiveness of the current paradigm. This sounds like the sort of nonsense used by scientific crackpots to attack their critics for "not understanding" them. Sure, your idea may be revolutionary and actually upend everything, but the overwhelming likelihood is it won't and you need to go through the same evaluation process as everybody else and not be so salty about that. Incidentally, I find the MightyApp concept interesting and wish it well in forging a new market, but this sort of rationalisation as the "main" driver behind reasonable scepticsm is a very poor defence.
• tworats 5y ago
  > The rewards for working on new ideas are weighted by the value of the outcome. So it's worth working on something that only has a 10% chance of succeeding if it would make things more than 10x better This is the primary point here - the "crazy idea" may (and likely does) have a low probability of being correct and succeeding, but with an outsized reward it may still be worth pursuing. This is, almost by definition, the correct way of looking at it. Also note that he's talking about crazy ideas from "reasonable domain experts", not your run of the mill crazy. This is not just a response to Mighty - he's been talking about this for years.
• umutisik 5y ago
  The essay seems to be about startups. It could use more examples to illustrate the point.
• robofanatic 5y ago
  The title is misleading. I went into it thinking I will find some new crazy ideas, but there were none.
• waxman 5y ago
  A practical application of this perspective, and one that has a lot of virtues is: When evaluating a crazy new idea (particularly something like a product or business), don't bother asking "will this work?" because no one truly knows, but rather ask: "if this does work, then what are the implications?" Pg has quite a track record here by being an early investor in textbook crazy new ideas like Airbnb, Coinbase, etc. "Will this replace a chunk of the hotel market? Unclear, but if it does, it will be a huge and valuable business." For folks talking about Mighty, its through this lens that pg is thinking about it. "Will it work? Is it better than alternatives? Who knows... But if the vision does pan out, I think it's more obvious to see how this could be a big and important business."
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• bttrfl 5y ago
  Unrelated to PG's post... I had no clue what MightyApp is so I went to their website [0]. When I scrolled to "Work without the fan noise" section on the homepage my fan started to work pretty hard. Haven't checked if they intentionally got the fan to work, but it was a nice coincidence. [0] mightyapp.com
  • OhNoMyqueen 5y ago
    They could do the equivalent of those images comparing Full HD and 4K side-by-side, by having a button "with MightyApp" which reduces CPU load and makes your fan stop.
  • amznthrwaway 5y ago
    I didn’t think there was anything crazy about Mighty. It looks like a straightforward play to implement app streaming to deliver an application that holds immense amounts of personal data, and Mighty will (eventually) monetize that data. It feels weird to bet on devices not being fast enough though, in a world where my phone is faster than my laptop.
• atldev 5y ago
  > They also vacuum up the trail of crumbs that led to them, making our standards for new ideas impossibly high. I enjoy this style of writing. Seemingly simple but packs a lot of meaning (like JoelOnSoftware back in the day).
• robomartin 5y ago
  > it's easy to launch a devastating attack on a new idea, and anyone who does will seem clever This happened to me when I was younger. I had an idea that could best be described as Uber, years before Uber existed. I worked hard on analyzing this idea, preparing all sorts of financials, enrolling in an incubator program to understand how to pitch, getting help everywhere I could. The incubator held a pitch event that would be attended by a range of people from different professions and judged by a panel of their choosing. I made my presentation. It went very well. Until one of the five judges essentially took over. Up until then I had received reasonable questions and offered reasonable answers. He chose to be brutally dismissive. I don't know his background but the guy attacked at such a level that no other judge asked any questions. It was truly distressing, to say the least. Once the firing squad treatment ended I said "thank you" and left the auditorium. I must have been obviously fuming and the attack must have been obviously unfair to some in the audience because an executive from UPS (the shipping company) decided to follow me out and talk to me. After calming me down he said he though my idea was excellent, that it needed refinement and that I should not give up on account of that jerk. Still, I was rattled. Definitely. I was too young and stupid to process that event for what it was: A jerk being elevated to judging startup ideas who was there to feel superior by hurting people. Again, I was too young to process that and I did not have anyone around to help me get past it. I quit. I abandoned that particular dream. All because of that one jerk. Now, many years later, I wish I hadn't. I wish I had been equipped with the wisdom to dismiss him for what he was and move on. Again, too young, didn't have enough experience and this guy was at the right place and the right time to destroy me. And that he did. Thankfully my career moved on. I have nothing to complain about. I sometimes wonder how much of that goes on in the startup scene. I wonder how many great ideas (or potential entrepreneurs) evaporate because of assholes who want to "seem clever".
• f430 5y ago
  Paul's writing inspired me to start a porn studio. Thank you Paul!
• GnarfGnarf 5y ago
  There is no question that many important ideas sounded crazy at first. The problem is that these ideas are a tiny minority of all new ideas. The vast majority of new ideas are eventually proven invalid. So just because an idea is rejected, does not mean that it is guaranteed to triumph.
• ThomPete 5y ago
  Getting ideas is easy. Getting ideas other people want to spend money or time on is something quite different. Even if you get an amazing idea, the chances of it being a good business are small. In fact, some of the best businesses didn’t start out with good ideas. Instead, they started out being considered stupid, wrong, childish, irrational, useless, too easy, too hard, impossible, unethical, unsustainable and we could go on. If you get an idea that turns out to be a great business, chances are that others would have told you it’s a bad idea you might even yourself at times think it’s a bad idea and almost give up. The difference between an idea that looks to be a complete failure and one that is wildly successful is often a matter of months. On top of that, most businesses fail even if you have a stellar team and for many not-so-obvious reasons (more about that in the next essay) It’s just hard to know if your idea is great or not or if it just sounds great. So how do you make sure your idea even has a chance of making it? Having worked with hundreds of startups, investors, and founders over the years, we decided to put together a list of principles that can be used to come up with ideas that others want to pay for. 1. There are 3 categories of ideas that potentially could be turned into a business. Ideas for a solution to a problem Ideas for fulfilling a need Ideas that create new demand. The safest business ideas are solutions to problems. The world is filled with problems. Finding the right problem to solve is often harder than the actual solution. The questions become more important than the answer. The next safest business idea category fulfills an existing need but in a better/cheaper way. Whether a dating service, an email client or a new type of insurance. Finding an underserved market is normally the way in. The riskiest, but potentially most fruitful of them all are ideas that create new demand. These are products or services no one knew they needed before they tried them. Computer games, songs, movies, fart apps, and most social networks belong to this group. Make sure you know which category you are in. 2. Questions you can ask yourself or others: “What problem in your industry would you pay for someone to solve?” “What annoys me that I would be ready to pay for?” “What in my life feels like it could be better?” “What are my friends complaining about?” “What are my friends excited about?” “What has changed over the last 3–5 years?” Ask questions that are open-ended and don’t come with an obvious solution. 3. Once you’ve found an idea to pursue ask yourself: “Are there any existing solutions out there?” “How big is the problem/need?” “Why hasn’t this been solved so far?” “What kind of problem/need is it? (i.e. Legislative, technical, financial, etc)” “Do I have the skills or knowledge or intuition or perseverance to pursue this?” Keep asking questions and don’t be afraid of the answer. The right questions asked today can save you months or years of work down a path that leads nowhere. 4. Define your competitors much more broadly. You will often be asked, “Are there other companies out there doing what you are doing?” The answer most of the time will be yes. If you don’t find anyone, you most likely aren’t defining competitors wide enough. Oftentimes competitors aren’t doing exactly what you are doing but are perceived by customers as if they were. If you define competition too narrow you risk missing what might be inhibiting your growth. If you define too wide then you might find potential market places you weren’t even thinking about. 5. Don’t be afraid of sharing your ideas with others. In the beginning, most great ideas don’t look different than bad ones. Chances are that even if your idea turns out to be a unicorn, no one will notice. In fact, if you are on to something, chances are you will often have to pay people to work on it for you. Reversely if you get an idea that sounds great and everyone loves it, chances are it most likely already exists or it just that, a great idea, not a great business. So unless you’ve found the cure for cancer and then probably instead should patent it, don’t be afraid to share ideas. 6. Fight for your ideas. Ideas are like newborn babies. Extremely fragile in the beginning but with great care and nurturing they can turn into amazing mature businesses. Make sure you give your idea enough time to grow but not enough to turn into a bad teenager. 7. Choose ideas that keep you motivated. Many early-stage startup founders make the mistake of just looking for a good idea rather than something they care about. Most ideas aren’t going to work out, so for most of us, a higher goal is needed. Something that makes you want this idea to exist and be successful. Something to keep us going when thing’s are looking the least likely to succeed. A lot can be done with perseverance and grit, make sure your idea is worth it. There is a lot more to this than what we’ve covered here but as you can see there is a lot more going into ideas than just getting them. So make sure you’ve spent enough time on your idea.
• kehrlann 5y ago
  It's also a common theme for Kent Beck, who "invented" extreme programming. > i have good ideas, i just don't know which of them are good up front. hence, looking foolish is a prerequisite for looking smart. Source: https://mobile.twitter.com/kentbeck/status/113298851665948672 https://mobile.twitter.com/kentbeck/status/11329885166594867...
• notananthem 5y ago
  As someone who writes notebooks full of completely new, bad ideas, this comes naturally to many of us
• unchocked 5y ago
  Might as well introduce this project here: https://planetarysunshade.org https://planetarysunshade.org We are domain experts, and are developing the support of domain eminences. It's an umbrella organization for anyone working on space-based climate intervention. Happy to chat with interested parties.
• cryptica 5y ago
  This is article comes at a good time. I feel like the tech sector over the past 10 years has been focusing mostly on very safe bets. It's been shocking for me to see how terrified multi-millionaires are to invest even $100K into a risky but potentially transformative project; instead preferring to pile onto the latest hot startups which other big investors are dumping their money into... Like a herd of sheep. This behavior underlies a lack of self-confidence. When you have a lot of money, your odds of success are much better, so why waste it and act like a sheep? Is it because a lot of wealthy people nowadays come from lower classes and they've struggled to shake off the herd mentality which is so pervasive among the lower classes of society? They think they're playing the same game as before; with all odds stacked against them, but this mindset is counterproductive to a wealthy person. Once you have a lot of money, the game is rigged in your favor, not against you; there is no excuse to act like a sheep anymore. If the majority of rich people keep acting like sheep, the system will collapse under its own weight from the sheer inefficiency. Capitalism doesn't tolerate deadweight; it shakes it all off sooner or later. Now investors are realizing that if they want to only make safe bets, then they should just invest in Bitcoin or some other scheme with high network effects... Maybe now is a good time for investors to actually judge investments based on their disruptive potential instead of just looking to other investors to outsource decisions. If you just want to participate in a social scheme; just invest in crypto. If you want to invest in a business, then you can't avoid taking risks!
• davesque 5y ago
  It seems people often have a weird "anti-bias" to believe that everything that goes on to be wildly successful was originally dismissed as ridiculous or impossible. First of all, it's not true. There are plenty of examples of ideas that seemed good to begin with and turned out to be good in practice. So something seeming ridiculous doesn't really count as an important quality in predicting success. Secondly, even if it were somehow true that all successful ideas seemed ridiculous, that still says nothing about how likely something is to succeed. What percentage of failed ideas originally seemed ridiculous? It's also an important question, but I guess one you don't need to answer if you're a billionaire and have a large audience of worshipers. Sometimes a stupid idea is just that.
  • davidivadavid 5y ago
    The problem is compounded by the fact that most of this is just a storytelling retcon anyway. Mighty is trying to make your browser experience smoother, faster, whatever (saying nothing of the larger vision). That's obviously a good idea, and it's easy to tell a story about how the founders overcame huge technical hurdles to make it work, and so on. But then Mighty is also obviously one of the ugliest, most inelegant ideas ever invented, which, in case it fails, can be used to point it how obvious it was. So, yeah. Not sure there's much to be learnt here?
• geebee 5y ago
  Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in. I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome. The web: couldn't you just transfer a file to an open port and use a rendering tool to view it? Blogs: couldn't you just update a web page? Wikis: couldn't you just update a web page? social media: couldn't you just set up group view preferences and use RSS? youtube: couldn't you just upload a video and use tags for search? twitter: couldn't you just not? Isn't that just a worse version of what we can already do?? Honestly, I've overlooked almost every one of these things, because I failed to understand how removing small bits of friction can cause a technology to explode. Sure, some ideas are crazy new, but some sound too underwhelming to be revolutionary. but they are, there's no question about it, all those things I listed above changed the world, in ways both good and pretty damn awful.
  • gustavo-fring 5y ago
    I absolutely agree with you that you can get insane mileage from improving the basic UIs of almost everything. It's sad how little attention we give to this stuff. I think that's what Jobs got and his imitators only imitate...a genuine concern for the user. edited by me for content
    • gustavo-fring 5y ago
      I'll be real, it's interesting to post this stuff and see how many downvotes saying factually correct stuff will get you compared to comments. It's like people downvote when they have nothing to say. What's wrong with this comment, HN? Is it too on the nose? We are supposed to wrap all of our disagreements in snide pedantry, no? We supposed to act like most of YCs founders and to use tacky business speak when we hit any rough patches? Is this too mean to change the world? I see it's flagged now. Good, gooood. dang and company and YCs alums and all you groupies close ranks and edit, shuffle, and remove posts and people when they talk a little too different from you. That's why this place is a dead echo chamber composed of 90% males of the same demographics.
• deleted 5y ago
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• mcguire 5y ago
  "I'm not claiming this principle extends much beyond math, engineering, and the hard sciences. In politics, for example, crazy-sounding ideas generally are as bad as they sound. Though arguably this is not an exception, because the people who propose them are not in fact domain experts; politicians are domain experts in political tactics, like how to get elected and how to get legislation passed, but not in the world that policy acts upon. Perhaps no one could be." Weird. Math, engineering, and the hard sciences are the few places where it is possible to positively say an idea won't work.
• aranchelk 5y ago
  Taking this article at face value, the idea Graham is talking about, already has a name: jootsing (jumping out of the system) coined by Douglas Hofstadter. I’m familiar with it from Daniel Dennett’s excellent book Intuition Pumps. A feature of ground breaking ideas is they contradict established wisdom, but that’s also a feature of most awful ones. The latter greatly outnumber the former. For every brilliant mind contradicting and redefining a discipline there are a multitude of clueless ones who lack basic knowledge of that discipline producing total crap. Think Einstein vs thousands of crackpots who don’t understand kinetic energy and momentum are not the same thing. For this reason Dennett points out that the presence of jootsing is not a valuable metric to assess an idea. He goes on to say as it’s unhelpful advice to give to someone attempting to produce a valuable concept. He compares it to teaching someone how to invest by saying “buy low, sell high”. Yes this is a feature of a successful investor, but in and of itself, quite unhelpful. Unfortunately, saying “my ideas jootses” isn’t saying much.
• boraoztunc 5y ago
  I wonder why Chrome's "Reading Mode" is not activated in Paul Graham's website. I really get used to read articles in Reader Mode, with the same style, background color, font size and without any other distracting elements of the page. His website font size is 13px, which is pretty small. So I copy+paste to Obsidian and read there.
• kbutler 5y ago
  Sounds like an essay to state Arthur C. Clarke's "First Law": When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. ...which really just boils down to "it's probably possible". Here are the three: 1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
• cptaj 5y ago
  The problem with this is selection bias. When you say you've studied the "history of ideas", what you've actually studied is the history of notorious ideas that worked. You have nothing remotely resembling a proper sampling of ideas. The ones that failed simply get forgotten
• benp84 5y ago
  These two parts seem contradictory: > "Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts." > "The lowest form of all is to dismiss an idea because of who proposed it." I feel like he's prematurely dismissing the idea of dismissing an idea based on who proposes it because of who he's imagining doing (proposing) it, if that makes sense.
• bruhhh 5y ago
  Here's a crazy idea for you: use SSL on your website!!
• lucideer 5y ago
  This entire article seems like some pretty obvious stuff that most people understand very well, wrapped in a veil of apparent profundity. First of all: it makes one very large assumption from the beginning that is never mentioned: "I, pg, can confidently identify a reasonable domain expert". That's basically a fallacy: this is the hardest thing to be sure of and Dunning Kruger applies heavily here (both for the apparent domain expert, and also for the person listening to their idea, who considers themselves such an excellent judge of the speaker's expertise). Beyond that, there's nothing profound here: any "average" person, when listening to a person they trust (and "trust" here means they believe that this person is competent, i.e. is a "reasonable domain expert"), will heed their ideas, and be more likely to consider the "crazy" ones. Paul is not unique nor advanced in this regard. The unstated problem is knowing whether you're good at identifying experts.
• aerosmile 5y ago
  There are two ways of looking at this: 1. PG is selling us something. 2. PG just open-sourced a part that seems like a component of the YC admissions logic. I personally don't care if it's just 2) or if it's 1) and 2) - in each case I get to learn something new and for that I am grateful. Basically, they must have established that whenever they can't tell if you're right or wrong, they ask themselves how likely are you to know something that they don't. This seems obvious enough, but only after you've heard it explained. Also, it might be obvious to each individual to a different degree, so when you consider that YC applications are reviewed by a large group of people, it's almost certain that this is all codified in such a way that the reviewers are not just judging the startup alone, but likely also the founder independently of their startup. As you can tell, I clearly don't have any inside knowledge here and this is all just speculation. But if I were to submit a YC application, I would certainly ask myself now more than ever before how to make people believe that I am an expert in the field of my startup.
• aa_memon 5y ago
  I believe the technology behind Mighty is amazing, the people involved are amazing, the experience for it's users will be amazing. I believe the underlying reason for HN's reaction to Mighty has almost nothing to do with any of the above. To the contrary, most of us probably feel that Mighty will be a raging success. But we don't actually like that at all. When I reflect on my own thoughts, the reasons my initial reaction is pessimistic are: 1. If Mighty makes badly designed/architected apps "fast", nobody will fix the underlying issues. 2. The internet will be amazing for the folks that can afford to pay $30-$50/month and all others will have to live with a sub-par experience because of #1 3. Some other company will come along and try to subsidize Mighty for all those that couldn't afford it but they'll monetize by advertising and further personal data collection. 4. Further lack of control over core software on our personal computers. I fear that one day I'll visit a website with a message saying "This website runs best using Mighty". There were similar sentiments when RSS blogs started moving to medium. Medium is amazing! but at some point medium needed to introduce a 3 item limit. More and more of the internet which a lot of us remember as this open thing that no one owns is being siloed into privately owned.
  • losteric 5y ago
    Unfortunately, that timeline probably why Mighty will go big - the business model is a trojan horse for a very lucrative global surveillance business, which challenges and likely surpasses current businesses ("social media" and "search engines"). HN and the tech crowd at large is cynical but also naively ethical... missing how ideas can be profitable because we're really thinking in terms of bettering society. Exploitation is where the real money is at.
  • nicebyte 5y ago
    medium isn't amazing - it's probably one of the _worst_ ways of putting writing on the web. pastebin is better than medium.
• deleted 5y ago
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• peter_d_sherman 5y ago
  >"Copernicus published the heliocentric model in 1532 -- but it wasn't till the mid seventeenth century that the balance of scientific opinion shifted in its favor.[4]"
• fillskills 5y ago
  Wow, I came here to say that this was possibly Paul's best essay ever. There is so much to learn here. Completely surprised by the negative comments and so many of them :). Specially on an essay that is essentially asking to not being critical right away. In my short startup life, I have had the opportunity of meet many founders, VCs and also get solicited and unsolicited opinions from friends and family. Most of the VCs, friends and family members were critical of my ideas or simply didn't spend the effort to really listen. I see the same thing happening to other founders and startups. Specially fun is meeting VCs who have never built a startup themselves or coming from a non technical background be overly critical and share their strongly held opinions on how my startup could fail. I ran out of fingers counting how many ways. Ofcourse a startup can fail. Thats why it's not a company yet. There is a saying that it takes many miracles to make a startup a success. Most founders know that already. We are already scared. Paul is suggesting a different approach. A more positive one. And given the statistics around Paul's and YC's success versus other VCs, you would think that the HN crowd of all people would at-least pay attention. P.S: My startup was rejected multiple times by YC. So not a fan exactly.
  • gustavo-fring 5y ago
    Do you not think there is a balance between unalloyed boosterism and lying (the YC way) and not giving you any good feedback? There are just way more people that I know and trust personally that I think could give positive, but constructive advice. I would believe absolutely nothing coming out of Paul's mouth because he hasn't shown that he's an honest person. He's not disinterested about any of this, but feigns like he is above it. I think some of us are very sick of the absolutely fake and fraudulent way he and others like him and Musk operate. They do not care about the truth or other people, they care about their own egos and people for whatever reason buy that.
    • fillskills 5y ago
      After marriage and running a decent sized org, I learnt that all people are not exactly like me. They are different. In many ways. While some like PG like to support others and shy from confrontation, others like Steve Jobs etc found success by being more direct. Looks like both ways can work. And I am teaching my team at work the same - that there are many paths to a win. This was not easy in the beginning for me personally, I could not appreciate the differences. But I am learning.
• dataviz1000 5y ago
  Isn't this the issue Joseph Campbell addressed? The journey a person with a crazy new idea endures? And, how in all different cultures the redeemer, a person solving an issue that their society needs to address, have the same symbolic characteristics. You and your children experience this not in a philosophy or mythology class but at every moment someone mentions a Star Wars or Marvel reference[0]. Disney keeps telling this one story over and over again, a story of a person with a crazy new idea being ostracized and rejected by their society and the journey they have to make to return to their society with a new solution to a problem. The system, lol, I mean our culture and society, is very resilient to change. If it wasn't, it would be a different system. A part of the resilience, the reason it doesn't crash down into chaos and anarchy is because it rejects and ostracizes people with new ideas. It's by design, how it evolved. However, it also needs to evolve and grow and the people who do that have to endure. Not all people who are on this 'Hero's Journey' are correct. Disney isn't addressing whether the crazy new idea is good or not, although in their media it is always a good idea, which is what Paul Graham is writing about. Their stories are addressing the journey a person endures if they have any crazy new idea that challenges their culture and society, good or bad. Whereas, Paul Graham is looking to quantify signals that a crazy new idea is good, something he should invest in. To which, I'd add asking if the person with a crazy new idea is honest, not only to other people, but more importantly honest to themselves, integrity. If a person can separate delusion from fact except for that one idea, that's a signal. [0]https://livingspirit.typepad.com/files/chris-vogler-memo-1.pdf https://livingspirit.typepad.com/files/chris-vogler-memo-1.p...
  • gustavo-fring 5y ago
    I feel like Godwin saying this, but the other side of that coin is that's the same process that Joachim Feist's biography describes Hitler as going through. You might be a Skywalker, but you don't know which one.
    • dataviz1000 5y ago
      Also, Erich Fromm's, a German psychoanalyst, 'Escape from Freedom' which is a social psychology treatise on the rise of Nazism published in 1941 about how people innately shirk responsibility and the relationship between a person's freedom to make decisions and how much social and personal responsibility they assume. The book is about how Hitler came to power but what I saw was a manual on how to become a very evil person. I remember thinking halfway through the book, 'Oh, this is why negging is a very effective seduction technique.' (I looked up the word assume to make sure I'm using it correctly here and even in its definition power and responsibility are interchangeable which makes sense because there is a relationship in our reality between power and responsibility. Strangely, Fromm didn't use the word shirk in this context, I think I get that word from Dr. Seuss' 'Horton Hears a Who'. Probably a good thing that Dr. Seuss got to me first. That is the wisdom of the Disney folks.)
• kevinskii 5y ago
  I can't speak to Mighty's potential, but this essay is quite good. As one anecdote in support of its argument, I have an acquaintance who co-founded a startup about 10 years ago. Much like Dropbox's early skeptics, I didn't understand how this business solved any real problem that couldn't be trivially addressed in a multitude of other ways. I was puzzled as the business continued to grow and open offices around the world, and I was astounded when they were acquired for many multiples of the minimal VC investment that they eventually accepted.
  • gustavo-fring 5y ago
    WeWork?
    • kevinskii 5y ago
      Heh. Not far off, in my opinion.
• heipei 5y ago
  Let's try something fun and imagine Mighty (and similar RBI services) were the only browsers available when finally Google, Microsoft and Mozilla launch their own browsers. Imagine the headlines: "Run your own browser for free, forever, without having to sign up or put in your credit card!" "Run your own browser, even when your network connectivity is bad!" - "Run your own browser to access resources on your corporate intranet that are not available on the Internet". "Run your own browser, you stay in charge of your data, login credentials and browsing history!" "Run your own browser which efficiently caches resources locally so you only have to download them once instead of a constant 4K video stream".
• taytus 5y ago
  >People will also attack new ideas when they have a vested interest in the old ones. It's not surprising, for example, that some of Darwin's harshest critics were churchmen. Nah man, it's because every time they’re asked about security they say “yes we did an audit no we won’t release the results”? I don’t know about you but I’d like to keep my passwords to myself
• bilater 5y ago
  Great article. What most people are not taking into account with Mighty is that new ideas like this rarely stay the same...who knows what product/use case it morphs into? Maybe the browser implementation takes off, maybe it pivots to an OS rather than just Chrome...maybe becomes a backup / cross device solution. Maybe something that we haven't even thought of yet becomes possible with new technologies like 5G coming on board. We don't know.
  • fillskills 5y ago
    Let my people try - humbly, a startup founder
• xmeadow 5y ago
  I think the biggest problem of these statements is that you don't hear much of terrible ideas which failed initally.
• rikroots 5y ago
  The alternative, of course, is when a plausible person expresses an implausible-sounding idea which turns out to be, well, wrong. For instance when Noam Chomsky presented his theory of Universal Grammar[1] which managed to impede and derail the study of linguistics for decades[2]. [1] - This is my own personal opinion supported by no evidence whatsoever. [2] - Again, an outrageously subjective statement without an ounce of evidence to support it.
  • blululu 5y ago
    Chomsky’s followers are not as powerful as they used to be so you can say this sort of opinion without losing your job as a linguist. That said, this objection does not directly contradict Graham’s point. There are issues with Chomsky’s theories, but they are non-obvious and we learned a lot along the way. Would it have been reasonable to have dismissed these theories out of hand? Maybe but we false positives and false negatives exist as a trade off, and we would miss things if we try to lower our false positive rate too aggressively.
• nearbuy 5y ago
  > Whatever the church thought of the heliocentric model, astronomers must have been convinced as soon as Copernicus proposed it. Far, in fact, from it. I don't think this tells the whole story. The church didn't immediately view the heliocentric model as a crazy new idea. > In 1533, Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter delivered a series of lectures in Rome outlining Copernicus's theory. Pope Clement VII and several Catholic cardinals heard the lectures and were interested in the theory. On 1 November 1536, Cardinal Nikolaus von Schönberg, Archbishop of Capua, wrote to Copernicus from Rome: > "... Therefore with the utmost earnestness I entreat you, most learned sir, unless I inconvenience you, to communicate this discovery of yours to scholars, and at the earliest possible moment to send me your writings on the sphere of the universe together with the tables and whatever else you have that is relevant to this subject ..." (From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus#Heliocentrism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus#Heliocentr...) The church's stance against the heliocentric model developed later, and probably for religious and political reasons. Secondly, rational astronomers shouldn't have been convinced of the model as soon as Copernicus proposed it. It wasn't yet proven. It's like string theory today. It may have been an elegant theory, but a good scientist shouldn't consider a theory proven until it's actually proven. Relating this back more generally to the essay, I think there's a bias in how we retell stories from history that makes it seem like great new ideas were initially mostly considered crazy. It makes a better story when one person overcomes the odds and invents something great despite everyone telling them they're crazy. But reality, most new ideas had a mix of detractors and supporters. We just remember the detractors better and amuse ourselves thinking about how wrong they were.
• rmason 5y ago
  One area PG missed is someone, exceedingly bright, who gets interested in a totally new field where they have little or no expertise. Using first principles they announce a bold and crazy idea. Say like Elon Musk and rockets. Sure he read some books and recruited people with domain expertise. If you remember his story he tried to buy Russian rockets, they didn't take him seriously because he lacked the domain experience. So he was forced to take an even greater risk and build his own rocket. Doing something previously the province of only large nation states. Still he was able to pull it off.
• bernulli 5y ago
  My favorite crazy ideas from Science are - "Imagine, they're like really small animals, but the're too small to see! The're everywhere! They live on us, in us, around us! They are what makes us sick!" (Pasteur, germ theory of diseases) - "You know how there can be mountains as huge as the Himalaya? Easy! In reality, all continents are really like small leaves floating on a see of magma, and they're bouncing into each other, and when they crash we get these huge mountain ranges and continents." (Alfred Wegener, tectonic plates) - "You know time? Yeah, it's really different for everyone, and there isn't even a thing such as 'simultaneous'. I'm serious! Just imagine riding on a train and playing with a flashlight and a watch!" (some patent clerk in Switzerland)
  • Metacelsus 5y ago
    More recently: Seeing small things is difficult. Instead of making microscopes better, what if we made the samples bigger? (Expansion microscopy)
• andai 5y ago
  Don't scroll down.
• ammar_x 5y ago
  The main idea of the article is that when someone who is a domain expert proposes an idea that seems wrong, there is a chance that this idea is a great idea because why would a smart person proposes a stupid idea? They must've known something. He says that in history, great ideas started like that. But he didn't provide examples. I didn't find the article practical because of that. It would have been a lot more useful if it provided contemporary examples that support the claims made.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • pedalpete 5y ago
    I think there are enough examples for and against. He does give the example of Copernicus, I believe Louis Pasteur would be another good example. PG does say he is speaking mostly of maths, sciences, etc. But there are also many examples where the domain experts missed the opportunities, and somebody else stepped in. The AirBnB gang weren't domain experts in hospitality. Coinbase founder wasn't an expert in finance (though he was an expert in security I believe), Collison brothers weren't experts in credit cards, doesn't look like the founders of DoorDash were experts in hospitality or delivery. Not to say PG is wrong, there is good logic to not dismissing ideas, and finding nuggets, but I think the model is being overfit. Or perhaps one wild ideas by domain experts doesn't negate the potential for wild ideas from non-domain experts.
    • samatman 5y ago
      It turns out that security was the domain where Coinbase needed expertise. Selling something and taking a commission is not exactly the nosebleed seats of high finance. Lots of people with expertise in setting up a web site, and enough finance to run a business, could have become Bitcoin markets. Indeed, a lot of them did. Most of them got hacked, sooner or later, because protecting billions of dollars of value from adversarial forces is very, very difficult. Coinbase didn't. Security is the hard part.
      • 5y ago
• dools 5y ago
  The most important idea like this in the world right now is expounded in the book The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton which everyone should read. MMT fits this article exactly except for the fact that PG says it doesn’t extend beyond “hard sciences”. It also extends to the dismal science
• mikesabbagh 5y ago
  The problem with education is that u r always taught to look for the right answer someone else discovered long time ago. Coming up with crazy ideas means u were either a bad student, or u have a post-doctoral education. It is hard for anyone in the middle to come with crazy ideas (unless u worked with someone crazy coming up with crazy ideas requires a certain training or exposure, it is very difficult to learn on ur own
• Nihmie 5y ago
  Everything Paul wrote about in this post resonated with me. He avoided any examples, and looking through these HN comments, it's clear why. A lot of people assume that his experiences are specific, but no, there really is a culture of shooting down crazy new ideas. I can think of a few examples of crazy ideas being dismissed. I remember seeing this post where someone was trying to figure out if it was possible to verify that a photo was either undoctored or else that someone went through a lot of trouble to hack the camera hardware of a phone. The post started off in the vein of, "Here's this idea, and even though it sounds crazy, I can't convince myself that it's a bad idea." The peanut gallery had all sorts of reasons that it was a bad idea -- I think my favorite reason was that it would be immoral to try to provide this capability. Paul's essay suggests a few reasons that this crazy idea might have generated such a personal attack. Crazy new ideas are uncomfortable. I'm reminded of "Pitch Anything" by Oren Klaff, which describes the "croc brain" that protects the higher functioning parts of our brain by trying to discard anything that is uncomfortable. A crazy new idea challenges our worldview, so it's going to be uncomfortable. There's a class of ideas that engineers are comfortable with: incremental improvements. If there's a framework in place to evaluate an idea, it doesn't make people so uncomfortable. By extension, if an idea is non-incremental, meaning it's a crazy new idea, then since it makes us uncomfortable, it should be rejected immediately. I remember a conversation about the value of an idea. There's the school of thought that ideas are worthless -- a monkey with a typewriter can hammer out ten ideas before their breakfast banana. Another viewpoint recognizes that good ideas are important starting points, but after that the only thing that matters is hard work. My feeling is that crazy new ideas are more like a lottery ticket: probably worthless. I don't know, maybe the peanut gallery is right. Since the lottery ticket is probably worthless, the easiest thing to do is to toss them all in the trash before checking them against the winning numbers.
  • taytus 5y ago
    > He avoided any examples Because most people following HN knew about what SPECIFICALLY he was talking about. This was a reaction, not something that happened out of nowhere.
• npsimons 5y ago
  > When the average person proposes an implausible-sounding idea, its implausibility is evidence of their incompetence. I mean, this is basically QAnon, antivaxxers, creationists and trickle-down economists in a nutshell. That said . . . > Are they mistaken, or are you? One of you has to be. By default I assume I'm in the wrong. There's just so many domains of knowledge, the probability of me having enough depth of even more than a handful is highly unlikely. The hard part is distinguishing those who are domain experts, and those who are not, when you are not a domain expert. > If you're the one who's mistaken, that would be good to know, because it means there's a hole in your model of the world. And I love viewing everything as a mental model, because, well, it is, plus models are plastic: they can be changed. Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong" comes to mind.
• spondyl 5y ago
  I think Mighty is a reasonable hotfix on the face of it. Having said that, if the question is "How do we make the web less slow", the actual solution must be reducing inefficiencies in the web apps themselves. Mighty seems like the equivalent of saying your room is tidy because you've shoved all of your clothes in the wardrobe. It'll work but what happens when we need a Mighty for Mighty or something like that.
• madrox 5y ago
  Ironically, I'd dismiss this if it wasn't PG saying it, but this has survivor bias written all over it. No one remembers the ideas that were dismissed by domain experts that did not make it. This is the exact same argument that says college dropouts make the best CEOs.
• n00bdude 5y ago
  PG posts hit HN like The Force
• Misdicorl 5y ago
  The central thesis > Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts. Is later contradicted by a discussion on the quality of criticism > The lowest form [of criticism] of all is to dismiss an idea because of who proposed it. So which is it? Judge an idea by who proposes it or not? I think the essay stands without the tangent on ranking criticism, and it could perhaps be discarded entirely. But that's too easy, and I think the discussion of criticism is a strong (unintentional) counterpoint to the essay. You have gated the hard work of weighing an idea behind the reputation of the person who proposed it. History all too often labels a genius only in retrospect and in their own time were more likely to be considered fringe or even crackpots. In short, I think the essay is boiled down to "find the right people to trust/engage/pursue, and especially don't discard their implausible ideas". The tack on of trying to localize to a "smart domain expert" in whatever you're interested in seems.... uninspired. The tack on of being more open to implausible ideas is more interesting. But the fundamental work is unchanged from basically all of human history- "find (or become) the people who are going to be successful/transformative"
  • fighterpilot 5y ago
    Those two statements are not inconsistent. The first statement isn't a suggestion that implausible sounding ideas can be dismissed on the basis of a lack of credibility of the person communicating the idea. But I share in the dislike of an appeal to authority. The idea should stand on its own merits.
    • Misdicorl 5y ago
      Surely it is saying exactly that? Changing the "but" to "except" I think makes it clear without changing the intent
      • fighterpilot 5y ago
        He's saying implausible sounding ideas should be dismissed because they are implausible, not because of the credibility of the person behind it. Then he makes one exception which is when the person is credible. That's different to saying that the idea should be dismissed merely due to lack of credibility of the person, which is what the second statement is talking about. The primary reason for dismissal in his first statement is the idea's implausibility, not the credibility of the person. If his first statement said "all ideas should be dismissed, but for ones proposed by credible people", then that would be inconsistent with his second statement.
• sjg007 5y ago
  Whatever Might is or becomes, I am sure it will have an app store.
• anonytrary 5y ago
  > If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they're proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don't. And if they have deep domain expertise, that's probably the source of it. I am not an expert, but this sounds related to Gell-Mann Amnesia. https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ If a domain expert suggests a radical idea, by mere statistics, I should treat that radical suggestion with higher confidence than if a non-expert suggested the same idea. For example, a theoretical physicist talking about a flat earth in the context of 2D quantum gravity compared to a fanatic talking about how the earth is flat on YouTube. Of course, I'm not going to immediately dismiss Lee Smolin, but I might dismiss a random YouTuber talking about it because they are not a domain expert. This, I believe is at least somewhat related to Gell-Mann Amnesia, no?
• sjg007 5y ago
  I bet this is built using. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs/old_chromoting_build_instructions.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...
• gourneau 5y ago
  Any recommendations for books about how new ideas happen?
• Lindn182 5y ago
  Please upvote
• shawn-butler 5y ago
  Thomas Kuhn. I feel sorry for the guy. His work is the basis of so much armchair worldview building about the modern world and is relevant to a cultural practice of science that died out 200 years ago. I can't help but roll my eyes whenever I hear anyone use the word paradigm shift anymore.
• DoreenMichele 5y ago
  When I look back at video clips from the 1970s, there was a diversity there that has been sort of lost. Things got developed in smaller regions and if they were good enough, they got introduced to a larger world. So we got some variety without everything having to overcome a perception of "crazy." Now we kind of think everyone is so connected that you have to be "crazy" to think X rather than realizing sometimes X makes perfect sense locally and it only seems bizarre to outsiders. "Crazy" often means it's a radical departure from existing ideas rather than an incremental improvement and there used to be more latitude for saying "Hey, let's import this idea from elsewhere that seems crazy here but it's proven and solid somewhere else." And I think that's a challenge we need to work on. The world seemed really cool and exciting about forty or fifty years ago and I think that's because things were only starting to get connected. Now we are sort of over-connected and expected to all know what "normal" is, as if normal is the same the world over when it isn't. I think there is a cost to that.
• CraftingLinks 5y ago
  Is this about his stupid browser again? It's not that the idea is "crazy", people are dismissive because the idea is "perverse". It has a perverse business aspect behind it, this world does not need ontop of the mess modern Internet has become.
• Mulpze15 5y ago
  This essay resonates a lot. I have currently a crazy new idea. I feel I am a domain expert. I am working really hard on it and have good feedback from non tech people in the domain. Still, so many non experts dismiss my ideas and prototypes. Without asking Why, How, etc. And feeling good about themselves, tapping themselves in the back for "helping me make my ideas better". I am not talking about other domain experts, those criticisms are super interesting. But being a computer dev and/or being smart in your domain does not make you a domain expert in my domain. The ratio of supportive people vs incompetent critics is astounding. Even as I have one successful company behind me already. The lonely reference at the end feels right.
• hunter-2 5y ago
  The comments here have taken a different turn from what I came here for. Anyway, is there some relatively unknown startup that everyone thinks is crazy at the moment? Like Twitter of 2007? I remember blogging their demise back then.
• sriku 5y ago
  I'm currently dealing with explaining why we should at least try and understand Stephen Wolfram's "a project to find the fundamental theory of physics". It is a very unconventional view certainly and one which I suspect many "reasonable" experts from the field might term a crackpot idea. But Stephen Wolfram is an expert himself and so I suppose Paul Graham's test stands.
• mgh2 5y ago
  Although true, there is a general anti-religious tone here that helps feed into HN culture. Thank you Paul.
• ungzd 5y ago
  Domain experts may lie, they might be sure that idea will never work but still propose it in order to increase company valuation, get funding, etc. Example: self-driving cars. Probably, experts that work in this field are confident that self-driving cars are impossible even 100 years in future, but working on self-driving cars gives them money.
• hyperpallium2 5y ago
  A new idea is a beautiful and fragile thing. Attack people, not ideas. Explains those attacking pg instead of his ideas. I guess. Reasonable domain experts sometimes keep proposing the same idea, because it would be so cool. e.g. onlive, gaikai, stadia. Investors overlook the latency problem (BTW starlink might solve this) because of its compelling business advantages. Aka wishful thinking. Analogous to Chesterton's fence (reforms should not be made until reasons for the current system are understood), paradigm-breakers could say upfront what new insight makes their idea plausible. This also makes for compelling and exciting marketing. I really like the section on paradigms, particularly how they "vacuum up the trail of crumbs that led to them". On the one hand, becoming proficient in the current paradigm makes it harder to see other ways (in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few), not least of all because of its cognitive load. On the other hand, without that proficiency, you can't stand on the shoulders of giants.
• luckyd 5y ago
  The carnivore paradigm is a great example, Paul. It's infeasible to diehard carnivores that one could live (and thrive) without animal protein. We evolved as humans on animal protein. Our deep addiction to this results in massive environmental damage using modern technologies to raise and hunt (obliterate) animal populations at scale- 77 billion land animals and 2.4 trillion fish annually. I'm betting on Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and all the new startups in the plant/lab meat space!
• lincpa 5y ago
  Is he talking about this theory? The Grand Unified Programming Theory: The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow with Principle-based Warehouse/Workshop Model https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow
• failwhaleshark 5y ago
  In 2013, I mentioned to a recruiter that Go would be huge by 2015-2016, and the jagoff argued with me from their zero domain expertise. I told them to piss off and never contact me again because they signaled they were stupid, ignorant, and unable to listen.. which means I had no use for them and they were a liability.
• archon810 5y ago
  On a technical note, is there really no https on Paul's site? The link is http, and changing it to https throws an certificate error https://imgur.com/a/1rnsGnM https://imgur.com/a/1rnsGnM.
  • forgotmypw17 5y ago
    What would be the purpose?