14 ms·

Superlinear Returns

237 points by jger15 3y ago

zrkrlc 3y ago
With multimodal GPT-4 I really feel like there's suddenly way more things I'm confident about attempting (e.g. anything bottlenecked by graphic design), which should in turn should lead to more things I'll be confident about in the future. Can a hyperproductive person verify if the returns here don't actually look linear, but geometric?
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  What makes that different from everyone else who can also use GPT-4? If there are tens of millions who can do this, there's no way to obtain 'geometric returns'. There isn't enough money in existence.
  - sowbug 3y ago
    Big difference between "can do this" and "will do this." More than 99% of people are consumers, not creators. And the field only narrows the farther you go in a specialty. I do agree that the comment you're replying to is asking for too much -- "verify" and "geometric" are very strong words. But I also agree with the implication that LLMs are making it a lot easier for a person with grit to get farther, which might cross that person's personal threshold (using "threshold" as used in TFA).
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Hence why I said tens of millions and not billions. But in any case as long as the number is more then a few thousand, it's practically impossible.
  - yawnxyz 3y ago
    I'm still surprised by most of my tech/design/startup friends who don't want or like using GPT-4 to get work done or even for small stuff like cooking and planning. We'll be ok.
    - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
      Not really. In the 90s a lot of people were dismissive of the web but 10 years later everyone was a convert. It's just the beginning of this next revolution.
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
    Wealth isn't determined by the amount of money in existence, it's determined by the amount of goods and services in existence. If goods and service increase while the money supply stays constant, that means every dollar can buy more. In practice, that's called "deflation" and it's something that people who control the money supply try to avoid, by printing more money.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Yes I know, which is why I used that phrasing. As the production of real things made of atoms can't be ramped up arbitrarily quickly. For example, every doubling of oil production after WW1 took more than a decade to accomplish. And oil men were pretty well known for risk taking boldness. The physical impossibility of real resource inputs to human civilization doubling on an even faster timeline is so obvious that I skipped pointing it out, and got straight to the point. That it's incredibly unlikely for even money to double quickly enough.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  You’ll still be bound by being one person with limited time and energy in a day
  - gshklovski 3y ago
    It’s a lot easier to make decisions when you have all the knowledge than when it’s split across multiple people.
- nawgz 3y ago
  I find it hard to understand how using a tool to do the heavy lifting actually imparts the skills onto you directly. Why should there be multiplicative returns when you haven't actually learned anything?
  - imjonse 3y ago
    It's probably not about skill but productivity. Many founders have no skills apart from getting others to do the actual work (I am not being sarcastic, that is a skill too) so for them automated agents are just another road to productivity. Not everyone is driven by curiosity or wants to learn, some people only want to 'ship'. So in that sense there can be multiplicative returns without the person becoming more technically skilled.
  - com2kid 3y ago
    > I find it hard to understand how using a tool to do the heavy lifting actually imparts the skills onto you directly. My primary skill is as a software engineer who builds complex systems that solve difficult real world problems. That overarching skill encompasses a wide body of sub skills, from UX to doing user case studies to writing blog posts about my work. The actual writing of the code is a non-trivial portion of that, but ideally the code falls out naturally from a correctly planned approach to the problem domain. Futzing around with some broken API that has a bunch of "gotchas" that can only be gleaned from reading a dozen blog posts on the topic (because the official documentation sucks) is a huge time sink that is not related to any of my core competencies. I've previously spent days going through annoying stupid code doing work that an AI can do in hours. > Why should there be multiplicative returns when you haven't actually learned anything? I do fear this for the generation of coders coming up now. The best way to learn is to build it from scratch once, which already fewer and fewer people have a chance to do, and AI is only going to make it worse.
  - whoisthemachine 3y ago
    At least for me, I've used ChatGPT for areas where I don't really have much experience doing it nor get much out of learning how to do it better, especially if 100% correctness isn't necessary - writing job reqs/descriptions has been the best use so far. I use ChatGPT as the idea mill and take the best sounding ideas out of it and manipulate it a tiny bit for my purposes. In that sense, it makes me more "productive" because I don't need to spend so much time on a task like that and I can spend more time on a task that I have more expertise in, ie, programming.
- iterateoften 3y ago
  Geometric returns for the AI company of the tool you are using. As a user of the tool unless you have some other advantage or moat it’s a bit like a factory worker seeing new machines put in and wondering if that means their wages will increase with their increased productivity. Unless you own the means, as a user of AI you will always be a renter.
quantified 3y ago
Exponential growth tends to work at the beginning of "something". Since the world is finite, at some point new somethings need to be created or discovered for an exponential growth, quite possibly eating the last thing that was exponentially growing at one point. So part of the trick is to be in on the exponential growth phase and sell off / reduce exposure to the thing when that tapers off.
- jonny_eh 3y ago
  Just like how bacteria grow exponentially (as mentioned in the article), but are constrained by their petri dish or host.
- mtrimpe 3y ago
  As they say... every exponential is a sigmoid in reality.
- esafak 3y ago
  That's when you collect your check, step off the train, and start anew. Companies can do it too if they invest in new initiatives. There are no practical physical limits to wealth creation since ideas can be monetized with only energy expenditure.
  - baq 3y ago
    > There are no practical physical limits to wealth creation since ideas can be monetized with only energy expenditure. This statement is internally inconsistent.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - philipswood 3y ago
    Until someone finds drastically new physics the fastest possible expansion is cubic: Imagine a bubble expanding at the speed of light bringing everything inside it under complete optimal control.
choppaface 3y ago
When you have new tech that will “capture the light cone of all future value” [1] you’ll attract a herd of followers, and that’s where the outsized ROI comes from. The gain is from collecting and arbitraging disciples. The product doesn’t necessarily need to lead those disciples to a better place. [1] sama on chatgpt https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/18/sam-altmans-leap-of-faith/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/18/sam-altmans-leap-of-faith/...
- haltist 3y ago
  What exactly is a "light cone of value"? Is it money or something else?
  - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
    > Is it money or something else? Some people might argue that it is a hollow phrase to make OpenAI sound more important than it is. ;-) On the other hand: since we are, of course, nearing the AI singularity, we are in the situation where we cannot even predict what will have value in the coming future - will it be money, or will it be some completely alien concept that no one today can even imagine? Luckily, OpenAI is already prepared for this kind of future by its capability to capture the light cone of value. *sarc*
    - haltist 3y ago
      That's actually a good explanation. Every company should make that their mission.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    It's any value that's created at some point, and any value that will ever be created from that point onwards. A light cone starts at a point in space and time, and covers everything in space-time that point could causally interact with; speed of light is the speed of causality, hence "light cone". Definition of "value" is the usual fuzzy one - both money/wealth and all kinds of things humans value that are not expressed in dollars.
mistermann 3y ago
Paul is "not wrong"[1], but he overlooks that all of this is only the way it is due to a variety of (well guarded) social conventions (as opposed to some immutable nature of reality, as he implies)...but most every defense has holes. [1]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=you%27re%20not%20wrong https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=you%27re%20n...
- dasyatidprime 3y ago
  “overlooks” doesn't seem right to me. He states within the first few paragraphs: > It's obviously true that the returns for performance are superlinear in business. Some think this is a flaw of capitalism, and that if we changed the rules it would stop being true. But superlinear returns for performance are a feature of the world, not an artifact of rules we've invented. You say “conventions” rather than “capitalism” here, but without more details it seems like you're targeting substantially the same distinction re social determination. So it sounds more like you disagree with him about that statement than that he just didn't take it into account.
  - RandomLensman 3y ago
    Any claim that superlinear returns for performance are a feature of the world and not of some rule set really needs to come with some strong supporting evidence.
    - eaurouge 3y ago
      “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” ― Archimedes Because everything in our history shows humans will exploit (i.e. fully utilize) leverage wherever they find it: labour, capital, technology, AI.
      - RandomLensman 3y ago
        I don't think history shows that at all: In ancient Greece people did not go and exploit steam power beyond toy applications, for example.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
Knowing that the author owns a famous "startup incubator" intended to discover and grow companies that will either 1) turn into a giant like Amazon or Google or 2) be sold to a giant like Amazon or Google puts a certain spin on this. In particular, this passage seems to be a pretty thinly veiled way of saying that giant corporations are a natural consequence of a healthy economy: > It's obviously true that the returns for performance are superlinear in business. Some think this is a flaw of capitalism, and that if we changed the rules it would stop being true. But superlinear returns for performance are a feature of the world, not an artifact of rules we've invented. We see the same pattern in fame, power, military victories, knowledge, and even benefit to humanity. It relies on a flimsy claim: this consequence is not caused by social conventions. Are not all of the examples given some manifestation of "rules we've invented"? Which of these things have any significance sans any sort of social context?
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > It relies on a flimsy claim: this consequence is not caused by social conventions You're not saying why it's flimsy. Talking about "social conventions" is the wrong approach. It's more like "this is an outcome of dominant strategies". Be that strategy in the time of kings and queens to become a ruler, or a powerful subject, or in the age of capitalism gaining money by offering things people want to pay for, or in socialist countries gaining power and wealth through navigating the politics of the state, or whatever it is, some people outperform others significantly. You just have to pick whether you want a mechanism that rewards creating value for others, that they will pay for, or one that rewards having the right connections, or being willing to do violence.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
    I see. My phrasing could have been better; I wasn't sure how to express this so here's another attempt. I do understand the observation and I don't disagree, per se. It's just so very noticeable that the observation is made by a person who has greatly benefited from its effects. It's then more than a little distasteful from my perspective that this person is asserting that this is "a feature of the world, not an artifact of rules we've invented". Again, strictly speaking the observed effect is not a construct of human society; a wild cat who steals food from another wild cat is the one who gets to survive that day. But it's hard to look past who is writing this and for what audience. To clarify, the "It" in my sentence is referring to "a pretty thinly veiled way of saying that giant corporations are a natural consequence of a healthy economy". I won't object to "natural", as the essay makes a compelling point, but "healthy" was hardly mentioned and certainly not by name. Indeed, "healthy" was dismissed as irrelevant by the passage I quoted.
pramsey 3y ago
PG radically underestimates the continuing importance of institutions in the modern world, which is understandable given how and with whom he spends his days. The public sector is huge and largely old fashioned heirarchical/institutional. What is the Fortune 500, if not a big list of institutions. Read the CV of any new-minted corporate CEO almost without fail you'll find that before leaping into the C-suite they first laboured for 15 years in one big institution, building credibility and experience. Big law firms, big financial firms, the military, academia, on and on it goes, large institutions within which career advancement depends on finding ones way through the institutional culture and comporting oneself to it, in greater and lesser ways.
- kevinventullo 3y ago
  Not to mention the institution of SV VC’s.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  Which part of the essay suggests that he underestimates this?
- atq2119 3y ago
  The key irony is that the empowerment of ambitious individuals that he praises is only possible in an institutional framework that makes it possible. That just allows you to sell your homebrew computer, for example. And there are plenty of people who, once they have become powerful by climbing those ladders, would have no qualms about pulling them up. So pg's analysis works at an individual level, but it's not great guidance for what society should do.
  - BoiledCabbage 3y ago
    > The key irony is that the empowerment of ambitious individuals that he praises is only possible in an institutional framework that makes it possible. That's the pretty consistent blindspot I've found in people who strongly promote that view - they are almost always blind to the institutions that are required to support someone "being independent".
pazimzadeh 3y ago
> The most obvious case of superlinear returns is when you're working on something that grows exponentially. For example, growing bacterial cultures. When they grow at all, they grow exponentially. There is a very linear relationship between the maximum concentration that your bacterial culture will get to and the amount of sugar/carbon that they have to eat. Log growth is not really sustainable. (Unless you continuously find ways to unlock new energy sources, either by luck or because you set aside resources for research/generation of diversity.) For markets, it would be also good to mention that the price of an asset is not necessarily tied to the value of the asset, and this made worse by markets of low or unknown liquidity. And I would guess that it's also made worse when the valuation of group of assets is calculated by extrapolating from the price of a small number of units of the same kind of asset (i.e. stocks).
- stvltvs 3y ago
  In natural systems (i.e. all real systems), it's better to think of exponential growth as just the first half of a sigmoid curve.
  - rtpg 3y ago
    In that case, there's an interesting idea: trying to push things over the tipping point. It doesn't last forever, but nothing does! Instead there's an exciting idea in place: instead of committing your entire life to trying and getting "one thing" to be as big as possible, you can kickstart many things! As someone who likes a bit of variety in my life, that sounds way more exciting to me.
    - chii 3y ago
      by splitting your resources across many projects, you run the risk of all of them not reaching a critical threshold for which they experience exponential growth.
      - cinquemb 3y ago
        I think some people at any given point in time (and some institutions and some governments) do a better job than others at splitting their resources because in part because they have a better framework at recognizing what may reach that critical threshold faster than others based on a given set of conditions (or have lower switching costs when it comes to deciding to not allocate resources to something after a certain point).
gshklovski 3y ago
What if the returns are just big-theta of n*log(n)?
haltist 3y ago
Very optimistic.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
yawnxyz 3y ago
There are tons of counter-examples to his argument — that successful organizations (and organisms) don't require exponentially unchecked growth. Do those mean either his argument is wrong, or those examples are outliers? (Examples: Mailchimp, anything Pieter levels makes, etc.)
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Do those mean either his argument is wrong, or those examples are outliers? Read generously, they’re compounding something not financial. Expertise, for instance.
- Alupis 3y ago
  Mailchimp grew rapidly, then floundered while trying to find new growth areas, including a brief venture into "feel good" short films (coinciding with a fee increase to support this brainless idea). Then... eventually sold to Intuit, which appears hell-bent on ruining the remaining reputation of Mailchimp. They're rolling out a new UI, which is obviously not being tested internally. Buttons don't work or provide confusing terminology, preview runs off the screen, occasionally the CSS for their home page just breaks, etc. Employees are clueless and development appears outsourced. Zombie walking...
quadcore 3y ago
Unfortunatly, the http era is behind, we've just entered the https one. It's risky to leave a job.
RIMR 3y ago
[flagged]
- downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  Nobody is snooping your network traffic to read the public plain text that you're reading on that site. And if they are, so what?
  - d-z-m 3y ago
    That's not the main issue I see with serving unencrypted HTTP. The bigger issue is that it's a vector attackers can use to deliver malware, as the entire response can be hijacked.
- tantony 3y ago
  > tech-illiterate The guy wrote two books on Lisp. Lol. What are you talking about? And why do you need HTTPS to access a static HTML blog which doesn't even have a single form? What are you hoping to hide here?
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  > I block all HTTP sites, and his HTTPs site has some sort of misconfigured *.store.turbify.com cert on it I've got the same issue. What's the root cause?
- AlchemistCamp 3y ago
  … he angrily types into the forum that pg wrote.
  - diogenes4 3y ago
    Really, this has no bearing on the comment, it's just asinine.
    - AlchemistCamp 3y ago
      He’s typing comments into the forum pg wrote from scratch, claiming pg is tech-illiterate. You don’t see any dissonance there?
martingalex2 3y ago
power laws
pedalpete 3y ago
I'm not religous, but I do find it amazing that this was known back in the days of the bible 'For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away' - Matthew 25:29 I wonder if other religions have similar elements. It is understandable that both the size of an army, and the wealth of a ruler would lead to this conclusion, as PG states, but it's still surprising that it has been recognized with such clarity.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  you just made me think of hysteresis, and then realize that's an ancient Greek word somehow descriptive
- edmundsauto 3y ago
  I think most religions, at their core, have the element of philosophy. It’s a shame it gets bundled with institutional self preservation, growth, and belief in the supernatural. Those that can separate the less good attributes end up more like Stoicism or westernized Buddhism. But there is something deeply wise in most religions that can have profound effects on how we live our lives.
- csomar 3y ago
  Religions were created by natural selection through thousands of year; and they made it through multiple empires, times and even today. This might be very important to understand and recognize why they are very powerful if you are not religious.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  By New Testament the common people grokked investment to a degree, hence the Parable of the Talents you quoted. From Mathew 25:24-27, relevant bits: "He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, ‘(...) I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.’ But his master answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant! (...) you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest." For that parable to be useful when it was written, common people must have understood the idea of lending your money with interest. From that, it's not a big step for them to have figured out what happens if do it again, and again, having the interest compound. EDIT: Also, how old is that story about a smartass asking a king to give him a chessboard of grain, where on first field they have one single grain, and for every other field, 2x the amount on the previous one?
dave1999x 3y ago
Yet another rich dude blog post survivor bias protrayed as skill.... zzz
hypertexthero 3y ago
From a link to A Few Notes On The Culture[1] in the discussion on Iain M. Banks’ Why the Culture Wins, from a couple of days ago: > The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings. > It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] — through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others — a kind of synthetic evil. … > The Culture, of course, has gone beyond even that, to an economy so much a part of society it is hardly worthy of a separate definition, and which is limited only by imagination, philosophy (and manners), and the idea of minimally wasteful elegance; a kind of galactic ecological awareness allied to a desire to create beauty and goodness. > Whatever; in the end practice (as ever) will outshine theory. [1]: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
- kubanczyk 3y ago
  > the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values There's no such elevation. The political process ultimately decides the law (including constitutional), and the law regulates (or frees) the market.
  - arcwhite 3y ago
    To some extent? But then we have lobby groups, PACs, regulatory capture and astroturf campaigns that have proven to be quite successful techniques to subvert the political process. I'd argue that those techniques put us back at the mechanistic system being elevated above other values.
sukruh 3y ago
> But don't overoptimize what you're learning. Don't limit yourself to learning things that are already known to be valuable. You're learning; you don't know for sure yet what's going to be valuable, and if you're too strict you'll lop off the outliers. I am genuinely curious how my learning about the constitution of the Roman Republic while procrastinating will help me.
tempestn 3y ago
One way to frame this that I find fascinating is that increased equality of opportunity directly leads to decreased equality of outcomes. I think we're seeing both. While opportunity is still very unequal, it is arguably more equal than it ever has been -- both for cultural reasons, but also for technological ones, especially the internet. The combined knowledge of humanity is basically freely available to anyone with the skill to use it. Likewise it is much easier, as PG mentioned, for individuals to reach an audience, whether their field is business, art, politics, etc. As a direct result, it is easier than ever for exceptional (and/or lucky) individuals to become exponentially more successful than others, leading to an increase in inequality of outcomes. I've never thought of it in those terms before, and find it really interesting, as both forms of inequality are often lumped together as issues to be solved, whereas it now seems to me they may be in direct conflict.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  >The combined knowledge of humanity is basically freely available to anyone with the skill to use it. It's fascinating how differently people react to the knowledge of this phenomenon. When I was a kid, basically as soon as I realized this was the case I started arguing with my parents that we had to have an Internet-connected computer in the house now. As soon as we got one I basically started reading Wikipedia every non-school hour of every day for 2 years straight. I doubt I remember more than 0.1% of everything I actually read from that period of my life, but it felt formative and healing in a way I just never expected to be the case. I have also never met anyone else who did something like this and it makes me sad!
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I read both the complete set of the Book of Knowledge and whatever version of Britannica my parents had, cover to cover. Then again I also printed the DooM FAQ out.
  - foobarian 3y ago
    Can you please think back very hard and try to remember if it's something that you ate or drank that made you like this that I can feed to my kids :-D
TacticalCoder 3y ago
Firefox (firefox-esr on Debian stable / Bookworm, latest package version) gives me for the first time: Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to paulgraham.com. Certificate validity dates looks good (so does my computer's date). Anybody else got some similar error?
- mikhailfranco 3y ago
  Yes, same with HTTPS Everywhere in Chrome.
- d-z-m 3y ago
  The fact that this site doesn't serve HTTPS(correctly) remains a head-scratcher for me. The certificate isn't valid for paulgraham.com, hence the error. It is valid for *.store.turbify.com, among other SANs, which seems to indicate that the site is hosted by Yahoo[0] and has HTTPS misconfigured. [0]: https://login.yahoosmallbusiness.com https://login.yahoosmallbusiness.com
  - willvarfar 3y ago
    In the 90s Paul Graham was one of the creators of Viaweb, which Yahoo brought and became Yahoo Store. Perhaps there's a link?
- bawolff 3y ago
  The link is http. I assume there is no hsts, so i think the more interesting question is why firefox would load it over https?
  - TacticalCoder 3y ago
    Yeah it's weird: I've got my Firefox configured to never load HTTP sites but I'm too sure why it then tries to load the HTTPS one when a HTTP URL is given.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
Of the two sources of superlinear returns here I find step functions the easier one to steer my life happily by. Graduating college is a step function: You go from 0 sheepskin effect to 1 sheepskin effect, and all future employment barriers are made significantly easier to scale. SOC2 compliance is a step that lets you sell 1/10 the feature set to 10 times the enterprises at 100 times the subscription price. An exponential return is the fundamental driver, for sure, but the way you get there is often by hurtling over a sequence of steps. One huge example for me: Marriage. I went from a long time with 0 wives, and now I have 1 and everything is much much better. What a step! If this is what PG means by a superlinear return sign me up!
- pc86 3y ago
  Just imagine how great things would be with two wives.
  - swagasaurus-rex 3y ago
    These returns may not be superlinear
    - nindalf 3y ago
      If we never try then we’ll never know.
      - csomar 3y ago
        Some societies allow this, maybe we should ask them?
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Like with everything seemingly exponential, the returns in the real world follow a sigmoid. It turns out for this, the inflection point of that sigmoid is at or slightly above n=1 wives.
- 3y ago
vegabook 3y ago
A highly regarded quant analyst once interviewed me and could not understand why I took a powered motorcycle in for my (early morning) 11-mile commute to work. "You spend 30% less time on your commute, but you increase your injury risk by 30x" he said. "It doesn't make sense - your risk/reward is illogical". He hadn't considered the superlinear returns attributable to being "first", a point made in the article ('thresholds'). By being 20 minutes earlier into work than others on average, I was also inevitably better prepared for the high-pressure morning meeting than anyone else. Didn't get (that) job.
galaxyLogic 3y ago
I think he's seeing patterns where there is just variation. Some things grow faster than others. I couldn't really get the main insight of the article, is there one? Is he saying we should try to grow our businesses exponentially? Who wouldn't want that, in business? But then how can we do it? What's his advise?
oneman 3y ago
BRAVO! THIS IS A MASTERPEICE! Superintelligence is hyperintergration of the metasystem, but right now we are in a state of total hybrid network warfare, so some things must be done ina rather beast mode, given the superlog capabilitie.. :P
SunghoYahng 3y ago
I can tell by the title what it's all about. Paul's essays are always like this.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Yes. All are about how smart PG is, and how you'll make a lot of money if you work as he did. Also everything should be a startup working towards a VC exit.
  - nickpp 3y ago
    His advice in the last 20 years worked for plenty of us. How about your advice?
    - mihaic 3y ago
      Why attack someone for an opinion? I agree that pure cynicism is toxic online, and merely pointing out flaws without solutions can be worse than useless, but that message was not this. I read it as a warning that PG skews his arguments to prove some narrow points and you should be careful when applying them to your life, so you don't waste years chasing improbable goals. Plenty failed start-ups exemplify this.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        GP has a fair counterpoint. Yes, PG, like every pundit, is biased. Yes, many of us here read his essays in our younger, more naive years, and it took time to learn how they're not as seminal as we thought. But yes, pointing that out is also a meme at this point; it starts to feel like a hash-table dismissal[0], which is not very interesting or useful. -- [0] - 'dang described it long ago as behaving as if there was a great hash table in the sky, mapping a person's name to the simplest and most well-known fault of them, and as if commenters were somehow obliged to dereference that hash table every time some person's name is mentioned.
        3y ago
opportune 3y ago
Three things: Many, if not most when taken to pedantic conclusions, seemingly-superlinear phenomena are logistic “s-curves”[0]. Even if you’re taking over the entire physical universe, eventually you run out of some limiting growth factor like “total addressable market” or “particles in the the reachable universe.” This isn’t a purely nitpicky point - epidemics and “viral ideas” initially have little interference like this, but when they grow enough they run into interference from immune or previously infected individuals being much harder to infect. Tiktok for example surely had an exponential growth phase among the 14-24 demographic in the US, but by now everyone in that demographic has at least heard of it, and if it did near total penetration into that demographic it’d eventually be limited by the actual number of people able to use their app. There are also log returns, which look superlinear (not really exponential technically) but eventually taper. For example, a skilled aerospace engineer could probably make a crappy paper plane for $0.1, a really good one for $100. But for $10000 it probably wouldn’t be that much better than the $100 if at all. Plenty of things are like that, it’s called diminishing returns… Finally, there are definitely quadratic curves in real life. If you’re looking at communications it’s everywhere, usually as an upper bound or worst case. Additional leaf connections may have their diminishing marginal utility countered by the fact that existing and new connections become incrementally more valuable as the network grows. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function
- ad93611 3y ago
  Could you please elaborate on the quadratic curves in real life?
  - chrchang523 3y ago
    Suppose the value of a network to an individual user is proportional to the number of users. Then the total value of the network, summed across all its users, is proportional to the square of the number of users. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect .
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
Razengan 3y ago
This must be the first post from paulgraham.com that I've seen that didn't get 1000 upvotes in 10 minutes
- saberience 3y ago
  I think the penny has dropped and people have realized his essays aren't actually very original and mostly contain obvious advice or stuff copied from someone else and re-worded.
  - jdthedisciple 3y ago
    ... or made up ...
lwhi 3y ago
Why do we actually want to encourage superlinear returns. Is this something that's actually beneficial?
- lwhi 3y ago
  So I get two downvotes for asking this. Bizarre.
j7ake 3y ago
It’s also why it doesn’t make sense for employees to work 80 percent effort and expect 80 percent compensation. The relationship is nonlinear, most of a high compensation actually happens at the margins; how much better you are compared to the state of the art.
- fkyoureadthedoc 3y ago
  I'll gladly work 20% effort and take the 80% compensation then
gdubs 3y ago
Great points. One thing that is worth underlying, as unpopular a subject as it may be with this crowd, is the impact structural disadvantages in our society have. It comes down in many ways to, "how many turns at bat do you get?" As a parent, I think providing my kids with as many turns at bat is a better heuristic than what college they get into, etc. To Paul's point, there are actually ways to "earn" more times at bat — learning to read, or to draw, or to code. In America, that's something that most parents can provide — but worth emphasizing that even there, structural disadvantages come into play. This is why I support a universal basic income and disagree with the idea that everyone would become lazy and depressed. I actually think giving people more turns at bat wouldn't just set them up for potential success — it also would benefit society. As Paul points out — there are likely to be discoveries from unexpected people and places. There are a lot of brilliant people in the world, and they don't all look the way you'd expect, or come from places you'd expect. But in a world where institutions and organizations are less predictive of success, this diversity is worth keeping in mind. Great essay, but I'd add one thing that I think Paul has actually touched on before and is somewhat implicit here — it's often surprising just how little one needs to rise above average to hit that step function. Consistency, consistency, consistency.
j7ake 3y ago
> What are fields where a few big winners outperform everyone else? Here are some obvious ones: sports, politics, art, music, acting, directing, writing, math, science, starting companies, and investing. What’s really interesting is that out of that entire list, only math and science are publicly funded at a level such that a person can get 5 to 7 years of guaranteed job security and funding(ie a PhD), giving you plenty of shots on goal. From this point of view the science/math path seems obvious. Even if you don’t find gold during your PhD, you still get a PhD and have access to a host of industry, startup, or postdoc positions. The failure path for writers, painters, or jazz musicians is more risky in my opinion.

237 points by jger15 3y ago

With multimodal GPT-4 I really feel like there's suddenly way more things I'm confident about attempting (e.g. anything bottlenecked by graphic design), which should in turn should lead to more things I'll be confident about in the future. Can a hyperproductive person verify if the returns here don't actually look linear, but geometric?

MichaelZuo 3y ago
What makes that different from everyone else who can also use GPT-4? If there are tens of millions who can do this, there's no way to obtain 'geometric returns'. There isn't enough money in existence.
- sowbug 3y ago
  Big difference between "can do this" and "will do this." More than 99% of people are consumers, not creators. And the field only narrows the farther you go in a specialty. I do agree that the comment you're replying to is asking for too much -- "verify" and "geometric" are very strong words. But I also agree with the implication that LLMs are making it a lot easier for a person with grit to get farther, which might cross that person's personal threshold (using "threshold" as used in TFA).
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Hence why I said tens of millions and not billions. But in any case as long as the number is more then a few thousand, it's practically impossible.
- yawnxyz 3y ago
  I'm still surprised by most of my tech/design/startup friends who don't want or like using GPT-4 to get work done or even for small stuff like cooking and planning. We'll be ok.
  - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
    Not really. In the 90s a lot of people were dismissive of the web but 10 years later everyone was a convert. It's just the beginning of this next revolution.
- 0xDEAFBEAD 3y ago
  Wealth isn't determined by the amount of money in existence, it's determined by the amount of goods and services in existence. If goods and service increase while the money supply stays constant, that means every dollar can buy more. In practice, that's called "deflation" and it's something that people who control the money supply try to avoid, by printing more money.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Yes I know, which is why I used that phrasing. As the production of real things made of atoms can't be ramped up arbitrarily quickly. For example, every doubling of oil production after WW1 took more than a decade to accomplish. And oil men were pretty well known for risk taking boldness. The physical impossibility of real resource inputs to human civilization doubling on an even faster timeline is so obvious that I skipped pointing it out, and got straight to the point. That it's incredibly unlikely for even money to double quickly enough.
coffeebeqn 3y ago
You’ll still be bound by being one person with limited time and energy in a day
- gshklovski 3y ago
  It’s a lot easier to make decisions when you have all the knowledge than when it’s split across multiple people.
nawgz 3y ago
I find it hard to understand how using a tool to do the heavy lifting actually imparts the skills onto you directly. Why should there be multiplicative returns when you haven't actually learned anything?
- imjonse 3y ago
  It's probably not about skill but productivity. Many founders have no skills apart from getting others to do the actual work (I am not being sarcastic, that is a skill too) so for them automated agents are just another road to productivity. Not everyone is driven by curiosity or wants to learn, some people only want to 'ship'. So in that sense there can be multiplicative returns without the person becoming more technically skilled.
- com2kid 3y ago
  > I find it hard to understand how using a tool to do the heavy lifting actually imparts the skills onto you directly. My primary skill is as a software engineer who builds complex systems that solve difficult real world problems. That overarching skill encompasses a wide body of sub skills, from UX to doing user case studies to writing blog posts about my work. The actual writing of the code is a non-trivial portion of that, but ideally the code falls out naturally from a correctly planned approach to the problem domain. Futzing around with some broken API that has a bunch of "gotchas" that can only be gleaned from reading a dozen blog posts on the topic (because the official documentation sucks) is a huge time sink that is not related to any of my core competencies. I've previously spent days going through annoying stupid code doing work that an AI can do in hours. > Why should there be multiplicative returns when you haven't actually learned anything? I do fear this for the generation of coders coming up now. The best way to learn is to build it from scratch once, which already fewer and fewer people have a chance to do, and AI is only going to make it worse.
- whoisthemachine 3y ago
  At least for me, I've used ChatGPT for areas where I don't really have much experience doing it nor get much out of learning how to do it better, especially if 100% correctness isn't necessary - writing job reqs/descriptions has been the best use so far. I use ChatGPT as the idea mill and take the best sounding ideas out of it and manipulate it a tiny bit for my purposes. In that sense, it makes me more "productive" because I don't need to spend so much time on a task like that and I can spend more time on a task that I have more expertise in, ie, programming.
iterateoften 3y ago
Geometric returns for the AI company of the tool you are using. As a user of the tool unless you have some other advantage or moat it’s a bit like a factory worker seeing new machines put in and wondering if that means their wages will increase with their increased productivity. Unless you own the means, as a user of AI you will always be a renter.

quantified 3y ago

Exponential growth tends to work at the beginning of "something". Since the world is finite, at some point new somethings need to be created or discovered for an exponential growth, quite possibly eating the last thing that was exponentially growing at one point. So part of the trick is to be in on the exponential growth phase and sell off / reduce exposure to the thing when that tapers off.

jonny_eh 3y ago
Just like how bacteria grow exponentially (as mentioned in the article), but are constrained by their petri dish or host.
mtrimpe 3y ago
As they say... every exponential is a sigmoid in reality.
esafak 3y ago
That's when you collect your check, step off the train, and start anew. Companies can do it too if they invest in new initiatives. There are no practical physical limits to wealth creation since ideas can be monetized with only energy expenditure.
- baq 3y ago
  > There are no practical physical limits to wealth creation since ideas can be monetized with only energy expenditure. This statement is internally inconsistent.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- philipswood 3y ago
  Until someone finds drastically new physics the fastest possible expansion is cubic: Imagine a bubble expanding at the speed of light bringing everything inside it under complete optimal control.

choppaface 3y ago

When you have new tech that will “capture the light cone of all future value” [1] you’ll attract a herd of followers, and that’s where the outsized ROI comes from. The gain is from collecting and arbitraging disciples. The product doesn’t necessarily need to lead those disciples to a better place. [1] sama on chatgpt https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/18/sam-altmans-leap-of-faith/amp/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/18/sam-altmans-leap-of-faith/...

haltist 3y ago
What exactly is a "light cone of value"? Is it money or something else?
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > Is it money or something else? Some people might argue that it is a hollow phrase to make OpenAI sound more important than it is. ;-) On the other hand: since we are, of course, nearing the AI singularity, we are in the situation where we cannot even predict what will have value in the coming future - will it be money, or will it be some completely alien concept that no one today can even imagine? Luckily, OpenAI is already prepared for this kind of future by its capability to capture the light cone of value. *sarc*
  - haltist 3y ago
    That's actually a good explanation. Every company should make that their mission.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  It's any value that's created at some point, and any value that will ever be created from that point onwards. A light cone starts at a point in space and time, and covers everything in space-time that point could causally interact with; speed of light is the speed of causality, hence "light cone". Definition of "value" is the usual fuzzy one - both money/wealth and all kinds of things humans value that are not expressed in dollars.

mistermann 3y ago

Paul is "not wrong"[1], but he overlooks that all of this is only the way it is due to a variety of (well guarded) social conventions (as opposed to some immutable nature of reality, as he implies)...but most every defense has holes. [1]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=you%27re%20not%20wrong https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=you%27re%20n...

dasyatidprime 3y ago
“overlooks” doesn't seem right to me. He states within the first few paragraphs: > It's obviously true that the returns for performance are superlinear in business. Some think this is a flaw of capitalism, and that if we changed the rules it would stop being true. But superlinear returns for performance are a feature of the world, not an artifact of rules we've invented. You say “conventions” rather than “capitalism” here, but without more details it seems like you're targeting substantially the same distinction re social determination. So it sounds more like you disagree with him about that statement than that he just didn't take it into account.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  Any claim that superlinear returns for performance are a feature of the world and not of some rule set really needs to come with some strong supporting evidence.
  - eaurouge 3y ago
    “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” ― Archimedes Because everything in our history shows humans will exploit (i.e. fully utilize) leverage wherever they find it: labour, capital, technology, AI.
    - RandomLensman 3y ago
      I don't think history shows that at all: In ancient Greece people did not go and exploit steam power beyond toy applications, for example.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago

Knowing that the author owns a famous "startup incubator" intended to discover and grow companies that will either 1) turn into a giant like Amazon or Google or 2) be sold to a giant like Amazon or Google puts a certain spin on this. In particular, this passage seems to be a pretty thinly veiled way of saying that giant corporations are a natural consequence of a healthy economy: > It's obviously true that the returns for performance are superlinear in business. Some think this is a flaw of capitalism, and that if we changed the rules it would stop being true. But superlinear returns for performance are a feature of the world, not an artifact of rules we've invented. We see the same pattern in fame, power, military victories, knowledge, and even benefit to humanity. It relies on a flimsy claim: this consequence is not caused by social conventions. Are not all of the examples given some manifestation of "rules we've invented"? Which of these things have any significance sans any sort of social context?

robertlagrant 3y ago
> It relies on a flimsy claim: this consequence is not caused by social conventions You're not saying why it's flimsy. Talking about "social conventions" is the wrong approach. It's more like "this is an outcome of dominant strategies". Be that strategy in the time of kings and queens to become a ruler, or a powerful subject, or in the age of capitalism gaining money by offering things people want to pay for, or in socialist countries gaining power and wealth through navigating the politics of the state, or whatever it is, some people outperform others significantly. You just have to pick whether you want a mechanism that rewards creating value for others, that they will pay for, or one that rewards having the right connections, or being willing to do violence.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  I see. My phrasing could have been better; I wasn't sure how to express this so here's another attempt. I do understand the observation and I don't disagree, per se. It's just so very noticeable that the observation is made by a person who has greatly benefited from its effects. It's then more than a little distasteful from my perspective that this person is asserting that this is "a feature of the world, not an artifact of rules we've invented". Again, strictly speaking the observed effect is not a construct of human society; a wild cat who steals food from another wild cat is the one who gets to survive that day. But it's hard to look past who is writing this and for what audience. To clarify, the "It" in my sentence is referring to "a pretty thinly veiled way of saying that giant corporations are a natural consequence of a healthy economy". I won't object to "natural", as the essay makes a compelling point, but "healthy" was hardly mentioned and certainly not by name. Indeed, "healthy" was dismissed as irrelevant by the passage I quoted.

pramsey 3y ago

PG radically underestimates the continuing importance of institutions in the modern world, which is understandable given how and with whom he spends his days. The public sector is huge and largely old fashioned heirarchical/institutional. What is the Fortune 500, if not a big list of institutions. Read the CV of any new-minted corporate CEO almost without fail you'll find that before leaping into the C-suite they first laboured for 15 years in one big institution, building credibility and experience. Big law firms, big financial firms, the military, academia, on and on it goes, large institutions within which career advancement depends on finding ones way through the institutional culture and comporting oneself to it, in greater and lesser ways.

kevinventullo 3y ago
Not to mention the institution of SV VC’s.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
MichaelZuo 3y ago
Which part of the essay suggests that he underestimates this?
atq2119 3y ago
The key irony is that the empowerment of ambitious individuals that he praises is only possible in an institutional framework that makes it possible. That just allows you to sell your homebrew computer, for example. And there are plenty of people who, once they have become powerful by climbing those ladders, would have no qualms about pulling them up. So pg's analysis works at an individual level, but it's not great guidance for what society should do.
- BoiledCabbage 3y ago
  > The key irony is that the empowerment of ambitious individuals that he praises is only possible in an institutional framework that makes it possible. That's the pretty consistent blindspot I've found in people who strongly promote that view - they are almost always blind to the institutions that are required to support someone "being independent".

pazimzadeh 3y ago

> The most obvious case of superlinear returns is when you're working on something that grows exponentially. For example, growing bacterial cultures. When they grow at all, they grow exponentially. There is a very linear relationship between the maximum concentration that your bacterial culture will get to and the amount of sugar/carbon that they have to eat. Log growth is not really sustainable. (Unless you continuously find ways to unlock new energy sources, either by luck or because you set aside resources for research/generation of diversity.) For markets, it would be also good to mention that the price of an asset is not necessarily tied to the value of the asset, and this made worse by markets of low or unknown liquidity. And I would guess that it's also made worse when the valuation of group of assets is calculated by extrapolating from the price of a small number of units of the same kind of asset (i.e. stocks).

stvltvs 3y ago
In natural systems (i.e. all real systems), it's better to think of exponential growth as just the first half of a sigmoid curve.
- rtpg 3y ago
  In that case, there's an interesting idea: trying to push things over the tipping point. It doesn't last forever, but nothing does! Instead there's an exciting idea in place: instead of committing your entire life to trying and getting "one thing" to be as big as possible, you can kickstart many things! As someone who likes a bit of variety in my life, that sounds way more exciting to me.
  - chii 3y ago
    by splitting your resources across many projects, you run the risk of all of them not reaching a critical threshold for which they experience exponential growth.
    - cinquemb 3y ago
      I think some people at any given point in time (and some institutions and some governments) do a better job than others at splitting their resources because in part because they have a better framework at recognizing what may reach that critical threshold faster than others based on a given set of conditions (or have lower switching costs when it comes to deciding to not allocate resources to something after a certain point).

gshklovski 3y ago

What if the returns are just big-theta of n*log(n)?

haltist 3y ago

Very optimistic.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

yawnxyz 3y ago

There are tons of counter-examples to his argument — that successful organizations (and organisms) don't require exponentially unchecked growth. Do those mean either his argument is wrong, or those examples are outliers? (Examples: Mailchimp, anything Pieter levels makes, etc.)

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> Do those mean either his argument is wrong, or those examples are outliers? Read generously, they’re compounding something not financial. Expertise, for instance.
Alupis 3y ago
Mailchimp grew rapidly, then floundered while trying to find new growth areas, including a brief venture into "feel good" short films (coinciding with a fee increase to support this brainless idea). Then... eventually sold to Intuit, which appears hell-bent on ruining the remaining reputation of Mailchimp. They're rolling out a new UI, which is obviously not being tested internally. Buttons don't work or provide confusing terminology, preview runs off the screen, occasionally the CSS for their home page just breaks, etc. Employees are clueless and development appears outsourced. Zombie walking...

quadcore 3y ago

Unfortunatly, the http era is behind, we've just entered the https one. It's risky to leave a job.

RIMR 3y ago

[flagged]

downWidOutaFite 3y ago
Nobody is snooping your network traffic to read the public plain text that you're reading on that site. And if they are, so what?
- d-z-m 3y ago
  That's not the main issue I see with serving unencrypted HTTP. The bigger issue is that it's a vector attackers can use to deliver malware, as the entire response can be hijacked.
tantony 3y ago
> tech-illiterate The guy wrote two books on Lisp. Lol. What are you talking about? And why do you need HTTPS to access a static HTML blog which doesn't even have a single form? What are you hoping to hide here?
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> I block all HTTP sites, and his HTTPs site has some sort of misconfigured *.store.turbify.com cert on it I've got the same issue. What's the root cause?
AlchemistCamp 3y ago
… he angrily types into the forum that pg wrote.
- diogenes4 3y ago
  Really, this has no bearing on the comment, it's just asinine.
  - AlchemistCamp 3y ago
    He’s typing comments into the forum pg wrote from scratch, claiming pg is tech-illiterate. You don’t see any dissonance there?

martingalex2 3y ago

power laws

pedalpete 3y ago

I'm not religous, but I do find it amazing that this was known back in the days of the bible 'For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away' - Matthew 25:29 I wonder if other religions have similar elements. It is understandable that both the size of an army, and the wealth of a ruler would lead to this conclusion, as PG states, but it's still surprising that it has been recognized with such clarity.

jjtheblunt 3y ago
you just made me think of hysteresis, and then realize that's an ancient Greek word somehow descriptive
edmundsauto 3y ago
I think most religions, at their core, have the element of philosophy. It’s a shame it gets bundled with institutional self preservation, growth, and belief in the supernatural. Those that can separate the less good attributes end up more like Stoicism or westernized Buddhism. But there is something deeply wise in most religions that can have profound effects on how we live our lives.
csomar 3y ago
Religions were created by natural selection through thousands of year; and they made it through multiple empires, times and even today. This might be very important to understand and recognize why they are very powerful if you are not religious.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
By New Testament the common people grokked investment to a degree, hence the Parable of the Talents you quoted. From Mathew 25:24-27, relevant bits: "He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, ‘(...) I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours.’ But his master answered him, ‘You wicked and slothful servant! (...) you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest." For that parable to be useful when it was written, common people must have understood the idea of lending your money with interest. From that, it's not a big step for them to have figured out what happens if do it again, and again, having the interest compound. EDIT: Also, how old is that story about a smartass asking a king to give him a chessboard of grain, where on first field they have one single grain, and for every other field, 2x the amount on the previous one?

dave1999x 3y ago

Yet another rich dude blog post survivor bias protrayed as skill.... zzz

hypertexthero 3y ago

From a link to A Few Notes On The Culture[1] in the discussion on Iain M. Banks’ Why the Culture Wins, from a couple of days ago: > The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings. > It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] — through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others — a kind of synthetic evil. … > The Culture, of course, has gone beyond even that, to an economy so much a part of society it is hardly worthy of a separate definition, and which is limited only by imagination, philosophy (and manners), and the idea of minimally wasteful elegance; a kind of galactic ecological awareness allied to a desire to create beauty and goodness. > Whatever; in the end practice (as ever) will outshine theory. [1]: http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

kubanczyk 3y ago
> the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values There's no such elevation. The political process ultimately decides the law (including constitutional), and the law regulates (or frees) the market.
- arcwhite 3y ago
  To some extent? But then we have lobby groups, PACs, regulatory capture and astroturf campaigns that have proven to be quite successful techniques to subvert the political process. I'd argue that those techniques put us back at the mechanistic system being elevated above other values.

sukruh 3y ago

> But don't overoptimize what you're learning. Don't limit yourself to learning things that are already known to be valuable. You're learning; you don't know for sure yet what's going to be valuable, and if you're too strict you'll lop off the outliers. I am genuinely curious how my learning about the constitution of the Roman Republic while procrastinating will help me.

tempestn 3y ago

One way to frame this that I find fascinating is that increased equality of opportunity directly leads to decreased equality of outcomes. I think we're seeing both. While opportunity is still very unequal, it is arguably more equal than it ever has been -- both for cultural reasons, but also for technological ones, especially the internet. The combined knowledge of humanity is basically freely available to anyone with the skill to use it. Likewise it is much easier, as PG mentioned, for individuals to reach an audience, whether their field is business, art, politics, etc. As a direct result, it is easier than ever for exceptional (and/or lucky) individuals to become exponentially more successful than others, leading to an increase in inequality of outcomes. I've never thought of it in those terms before, and find it really interesting, as both forms of inequality are often lumped together as issues to be solved, whereas it now seems to me they may be in direct conflict.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
>The combined knowledge of humanity is basically freely available to anyone with the skill to use it. It's fascinating how differently people react to the knowledge of this phenomenon. When I was a kid, basically as soon as I realized this was the case I started arguing with my parents that we had to have an Internet-connected computer in the house now. As soon as we got one I basically started reading Wikipedia every non-school hour of every day for 2 years straight. I doubt I remember more than 0.1% of everything I actually read from that period of my life, but it felt formative and healing in a way I just never expected to be the case. I have also never met anyone else who did something like this and it makes me sad!
- bombcar 3y ago
  I read both the complete set of the Book of Knowledge and whatever version of Britannica my parents had, cover to cover. Then again I also printed the DooM FAQ out.
- foobarian 3y ago
  Can you please think back very hard and try to remember if it's something that you ate or drank that made you like this that I can feed to my kids :-D

TacticalCoder 3y ago

Firefox (firefox-esr on Debian stable / Bookworm, latest package version) gives me for the first time: Warning: Potential Security Risk Ahead Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to paulgraham.com. Certificate validity dates looks good (so does my computer's date). Anybody else got some similar error?

mikhailfranco 3y ago
Yes, same with HTTPS Everywhere in Chrome.
d-z-m 3y ago
The fact that this site doesn't serve HTTPS(correctly) remains a head-scratcher for me. The certificate isn't valid for paulgraham.com, hence the error. It is valid for *.store.turbify.com, among other SANs, which seems to indicate that the site is hosted by Yahoo[0] and has HTTPS misconfigured. [0]: https://login.yahoosmallbusiness.com https://login.yahoosmallbusiness.com
- willvarfar 3y ago
  In the 90s Paul Graham was one of the creators of Viaweb, which Yahoo brought and became Yahoo Store. Perhaps there's a link?
bawolff 3y ago
The link is http. I assume there is no hsts, so i think the more interesting question is why firefox would load it over https?
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  Yeah it's weird: I've got my Firefox configured to never load HTTP sites but I'm too sure why it then tries to load the HTTPS one when a HTTP URL is given.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

Of the two sources of superlinear returns here I find step functions the easier one to steer my life happily by. Graduating college is a step function: You go from 0 sheepskin effect to 1 sheepskin effect, and all future employment barriers are made significantly easier to scale. SOC2 compliance is a step that lets you sell 1/10 the feature set to 10 times the enterprises at 100 times the subscription price. An exponential return is the fundamental driver, for sure, but the way you get there is often by hurtling over a sequence of steps. One huge example for me: Marriage. I went from a long time with 0 wives, and now I have 1 and everything is much much better. What a step! If this is what PG means by a superlinear return sign me up!

pc86 3y ago
Just imagine how great things would be with two wives.
- swagasaurus-rex 3y ago
  These returns may not be superlinear
  - nindalf 3y ago
    If we never try then we’ll never know.
    - csomar 3y ago
      Some societies allow this, maybe we should ask them?
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Like with everything seemingly exponential, the returns in the real world follow a sigmoid. It turns out for this, the inflection point of that sigmoid is at or slightly above n=1 wives.
3y ago

vegabook 3y ago

A highly regarded quant analyst once interviewed me and could not understand why I took a powered motorcycle in for my (early morning) 11-mile commute to work. "You spend 30% less time on your commute, but you increase your injury risk by 30x" he said. "It doesn't make sense - your risk/reward is illogical". He hadn't considered the superlinear returns attributable to being "first", a point made in the article ('thresholds'). By being 20 minutes earlier into work than others on average, I was also inevitably better prepared for the high-pressure morning meeting than anyone else. Didn't get (that) job.

galaxyLogic 3y ago

I think he's seeing patterns where there is just variation. Some things grow faster than others. I couldn't really get the main insight of the article, is there one? Is he saying we should try to grow our businesses exponentially? Who wouldn't want that, in business? But then how can we do it? What's his advise?

oneman 3y ago

BRAVO! THIS IS A MASTERPEICE! Superintelligence is hyperintergration of the metasystem, but right now we are in a state of total hybrid network warfare, so some things must be done ina rather beast mode, given the superlog capabilitie.. :P

SunghoYahng 3y ago

I can tell by the title what it's all about. Paul's essays are always like this.

coldtea 3y ago
Yes. All are about how smart PG is, and how you'll make a lot of money if you work as he did. Also everything should be a startup working towards a VC exit.
- nickpp 3y ago
  His advice in the last 20 years worked for plenty of us. How about your advice?
  - mihaic 3y ago
    Why attack someone for an opinion? I agree that pure cynicism is toxic online, and merely pointing out flaws without solutions can be worse than useless, but that message was not this. I read it as a warning that PG skews his arguments to prove some narrow points and you should be careful when applying them to your life, so you don't waste years chasing improbable goals. Plenty failed start-ups exemplify this.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      GP has a fair counterpoint. Yes, PG, like every pundit, is biased. Yes, many of us here read his essays in our younger, more naive years, and it took time to learn how they're not as seminal as we thought. But yes, pointing that out is also a meme at this point; it starts to feel like a hash-table dismissal[0], which is not very interesting or useful. -- [0] - 'dang described it long ago as behaving as if there was a great hash table in the sky, mapping a person's name to the simplest and most well-known fault of them, and as if commenters were somehow obliged to dereference that hash table every time some person's name is mentioned.
      - 3y ago

opportune 3y ago

Three things: Many, if not most when taken to pedantic conclusions, seemingly-superlinear phenomena are logistic “s-curves”[0]. Even if you’re taking over the entire physical universe, eventually you run out of some limiting growth factor like “total addressable market” or “particles in the the reachable universe.” This isn’t a purely nitpicky point - epidemics and “viral ideas” initially have little interference like this, but when they grow enough they run into interference from immune or previously infected individuals being much harder to infect. Tiktok for example surely had an exponential growth phase among the 14-24 demographic in the US, but by now everyone in that demographic has at least heard of it, and if it did near total penetration into that demographic it’d eventually be limited by the actual number of people able to use their app. There are also log returns, which look superlinear (not really exponential technically) but eventually taper. For example, a skilled aerospace engineer could probably make a crappy paper plane for $0.1, a really good one for $100. But for $10000 it probably wouldn’t be that much better than the $100 if at all. Plenty of things are like that, it’s called diminishing returns… Finally, there are definitely quadratic curves in real life. If you’re looking at communications it’s everywhere, usually as an upper bound or worst case. Additional leaf connections may have their diminishing marginal utility countered by the fact that existing and new connections become incrementally more valuable as the network grows. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

ad93611 3y ago
Could you please elaborate on the quadratic curves in real life?
- chrchang523 3y ago
  Suppose the value of a network to an individual user is proportional to the number of users. Then the total value of the network, summed across all its users, is proportional to the square of the number of users. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect .
- marginalia_nu 3y ago

Razengan 3y ago

This must be the first post from paulgraham.com that I've seen that didn't get 1000 upvotes in 10 minutes

saberience 3y ago
I think the penny has dropped and people have realized his essays aren't actually very original and mostly contain obvious advice or stuff copied from someone else and re-worded.
- jdthedisciple 3y ago
  ... or made up ...

lwhi 3y ago

Why do we actually want to encourage superlinear returns. Is this something that's actually beneficial?

lwhi 3y ago
So I get two downvotes for asking this. Bizarre.

j7ake 3y ago

It’s also why it doesn’t make sense for employees to work 80 percent effort and expect 80 percent compensation. The relationship is nonlinear, most of a high compensation actually happens at the margins; how much better you are compared to the state of the art.

fkyoureadthedoc 3y ago
I'll gladly work 20% effort and take the 80% compensation then

gdubs 3y ago

Great points. One thing that is worth underlying, as unpopular a subject as it may be with this crowd, is the impact structural disadvantages in our society have. It comes down in many ways to, "how many turns at bat do you get?" As a parent, I think providing my kids with as many turns at bat is a better heuristic than what college they get into, etc. To Paul's point, there are actually ways to "earn" more times at bat — learning to read, or to draw, or to code. In America, that's something that most parents can provide — but worth emphasizing that even there, structural disadvantages come into play. This is why I support a universal basic income and disagree with the idea that everyone would become lazy and depressed. I actually think giving people more turns at bat wouldn't just set them up for potential success — it also would benefit society. As Paul points out — there are likely to be discoveries from unexpected people and places. There are a lot of brilliant people in the world, and they don't all look the way you'd expect, or come from places you'd expect. But in a world where institutions and organizations are less predictive of success, this diversity is worth keeping in mind. Great essay, but I'd add one thing that I think Paul has actually touched on before and is somewhat implicit here — it's often surprising just how little one needs to rise above average to hit that step function. Consistency, consistency, consistency.

j7ake 3y ago

> What are fields where a few big winners outperform everyone else? Here are some obvious ones: sports, politics, art, music, acting, directing, writing, math, science, starting companies, and investing. What’s really interesting is that out of that entire list, only math and science are publicly funded at a level such that a person can get 5 to 7 years of guaranteed job security and funding(ie a PhD), giving you plenty of shots on goal. From this point of view the science/math path seems obvious. Even if you don’t find gold during your PhD, you still get a PhD and have access to a host of industry, startup, or postdoc positions. The failure path for writers, painters, or jazz musicians is more risky in my opinion.