26 ms·
I'm sorry if this is an unsatisfying answer, but if you mean convincingly pitched, I couldn't answer a question like that without disclosing the long-term plans
by pg 14y ago
I'm sorry if this is an unsatisfying answer, but if you mean convincingly pitched, I couldn't answer a question like that without disclosing the long-term plans of startups that would prefer to keep them secret.
If you mean unconvincingly pitched, it would probably be the applications we get from people who've discovered new power sources that violate the laws of physics.
- npguy 14y agoThanks PG! More or less knew this would be the response :-) Can you at least share the domain e.g. Mobile apps or personal finance etc?
- Eliezer 14y agoCan you say where the scariest and most ambitious convincing pitch was on the following scale? 1) We're going to build the next Facebook! 2) We're going to found the next Apple! 3) Our product will create sweeping political change! This will produce a major economic revolution in at least one country! (Seasteading would be change on this level if it worked; creating a new country successfully is around the same level of change as this.) 4) Our product is the next nuclear weapon. You wouldn't want that in the wrong hands, would you? 5) This is going to be the equivalent of the invention of electricity if it works out. 6) We're going to make an IQ-enhancing drug and produce basic change in the human condition. 7) We're going to build serious Drexler-class molecular nanotechnology. 8) We're going to upload a human brain into a computer. 9) We're going to build a recursively self-improving Artificial Intelligence. 10) We think we've figured out how to hack into the computer our universe is running on.
- mej10 14y agoSo anything > 3 requires a bunch of "hard science". That does a great job of highlighting the fact that almost all of the readers of HN will be incapable of producing any of these. Time for a career change.
- Eliezer 14y ago3 is pretty decent. I can respect somebody trying for 3.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoNo, just vote for better funding of science research. It only takes one genius to change the world, but it turns out that one genius tends to produce many changes (cf Einstein // Lord kelvin // Faraday)
- mej10 14y agoThat doesn't really seem like a great attitude to have. It is far too hands-off and unreliable. I just can't imagine thinking "Well, I voted. That's the best I can do."
- faul_sname 14y agoThen become rich and fund the researchers yourself.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoPerhaps it would be more accurate to say - you could try to change career, become a renowned research scientist and invent number 3-8 on the Yudkowsky Ambition scale, but ... You are just one person, probably without the right inclinations to be a world class researcher (or frankly you would have become one, it would have been an irristable calling) So a more worthwhile use of your time and effort would be as part of a co-ordinated effort to select, support and reward a world wide network of inter-dependant researchers, and then layers of secondary innovators and implementors who in totality will bring the benefits of scientific progress to all humanity. They also serve who stand and insist politicians use empirical based testing to validate their spending on our behalf As it were
- xiaoma 14y agoWhat a way to reframe the entire conversation like a boss. Prior to reading your comment, I thought my scale went from 1 to 10, but it only went from 1 to 2.
- ph0rque 14y agoEliezer, I believe you just created the Yudkowsky Ambition scale. My startup, http://automicrofarm.com/ http://automicrofarm.com/, rates between a 3 and a 5, depending on how successful it becomes, in my opinion.
- Eliezer 14y agoHoly schmaloly, that actually is a 3 if it works. Anyone else got 3 or higher?
- stcredzero 14y agoGo after "Railroad Baron Money." That is to say, to invest in a fundamentally new kind of very useful infrastructure, like a subset network of computers where DRM actually works. If not absolutely, then well enough in practice. That would mean it would take something like 2 to 3 years for people to jailbreak new hardware, and almost a year to break revisions to old devices that fix an earlier jailbreak. (We're getting close to this level of security for some organizations.) The trick is to be one of the Barons when networks are becoming widespread, and not an early innovator who gets in the history books but dies penniless. (Again fits with the railroad analogy.) (And yes, trusted computation [DRM] as it is practiced now is bad, in the way that many things only possessed by only the powerful are also bad.)
- rdl 14y agoYeah, some kind of trustworthy computing would be around a 4-5 on the scale. Maybe 6.
- michaelt 14y agoWe already have a subset network of computers where DRM lasted from 2006 to 2010 - the PlayStation 3. Now, it's a console with some good games, but I wouldn't rate it as equivalent in social impact to electricity or nuclear weapons.
- 14y ago
- lionheart 14y agoAnd now I have to rescale all my ambitions
- billswift 14y ago"Aim high, you may still miss the target, but at least you won't shoot your foot off." Mercedes Lackey, I forget which book, but I think it was Tarma that said it.
- tel 14y agoI don't think this scale applies so well in the healthcare vertical. Any major healthcare breakthrough is going to hit the latter half of 6 at least a bit, but I'm not sure that those all induce changes that scale above 5.
- tesseractive 14y agoA major healthcare breakthrough that improved the quality of life for a large number of people would qualify as a solid 3 -- a major political-level change. I'd save 6 for things like defeating the aging process -- something that, like raising the IQ of the population at large, would also fundamentally change the human condition. I'm not really sure how many medical breakthroughs of this magnitude there are.
- tel 14y agoImproving world health status might not improve IQ as some inherent human intelligence capacity, but would certainly have an immeasurable population-level effect on "effective IQ" i.e. ability to practice whatever intelligence capacity exists already. Consider just the challenge of defeating the obesity epidemic. Better diet improves energy and massively increases, again at the population level, the amount of raw thoughtful hours are available to a country. This is even more widely applicable in global health where health initiatives can also be important components of social change. Women's/sexual health is tied deeply to women's rights which is a leading indicator for social revolution. While medical breakthrough that change the space of healthcare at large might be rare, there's a lot of room instead for the kind of breakthrough which changes how people receive and are impacted by the healthcare knowledge we already have today.
- tesseractive 14y agoI think the idea of level 6 is not merely an incremental increase in effective IQ -- the internet and smartphones putting most of human knowledge at anyone's fingertips could qualify as that -- but something that fundamentally changes what it means to be human. Defeating obesity, the African AIDS epidemic, or even cancer would be amazing, heroic, and worldchanging, but still wouldn't qualify as changing what it means to be human.
- T_S_ 14y agoI think I am at 0.25 on this scale.
- sskates 14y agoI know within my own batch (W12) the highest a startup pitched itself at demo day was about a 2.5- creating a company substantially bigger than Apple. I wouldn't be surprised if you could find a 4 or 5 somewhere in in all of YC with something along the lines of creating the next version of the internet (especially from the startups doing hardware). The tradeoff there is the variance is even higher; doing a software startup is safe, relatively speaking!
- croddin 14y agoWhere does Planetary Resources rank on this scale?
- dasmoth 14y agoSomewhat depends on what they find, and if they're able to usefully exploit it. But for ambition, I'd say at least a 3. Of course, you could argue that anyone who can return non-negligible amounts of mass to earth makes it to 4...
- Futurebot 14y agoAfter reading the original essay from PG, I was hoping that this comment would finally appear. I think number 3 would start at "frightening." Anything below that would simply be "quite" or "very." 4) Amazingly 5) Terrifyingly 6) Shockingly! 7) Mind-bendingly 8) Unbelievably 9) Universe-changing 10) Alpha-Omegaly!
- davidgerard 14y agoWhere would the World Wide Web be on this scale? It would look below 4, but one instance of it, Wikileaks, arguably sparked several revolutions and is a 3 by itself.
- SilasX 14y agoIt's a solid 5 -- made the kind of change that electrification did, in terms of there being massively many more ways to get informed, fact-check, collaborate, organize, the importance of location, and so on.
- sbierwagen 14y agoI don't know... what kind of impact has the internet actually made on human lifespans, or manufacturing output? The internet has affected global GDP a lot, but almost entirely in the "moving numbers around in a database" fields, with all the profit ending up in the pockets of a few hundred hyperrich. (high finance, entertainment)
- SilasX 14y agoI think this is one of the cases where GDP misses what we're trying to measure. If, before the Web, I would have bought a product just barely useful enough to pay for, then post-Web, buy something different instead that is much, much better for me (has a higher consumer surplus), GDP will be the same, even though human welfare has significantly increased. Normally, you can glaze over such a case, but the internet is basically filled with this kind of thing. Moreover, a lot of the stuff that you would normally have to pay for, you get effectively for free, and I'm not talking about pirated movies. I mean the collaboration, fact-checking, knowing of more options, info you'd normally need to buy a book for, etc. Again, cash payments for that stuff might have dropped, but it made people that much better off. So if people that were doing things obviated by the Web, then go start doing something different, then, well "GDP is GDP" -- but that is a massive efficiency improvement. I don't know about human lifespans or manufacturing output (though the widening collaboration opportunity increases the number of people that can solve foundational manufacturing problems), but that's only one of many human values, and I think it's an artificial requirement to compare to electricity on that basis -- almost like penalizing it because it didn't enable better hunting of large animals. So stepping back to the level of human welfare and modes of life it enables, I think the Web is comparable to electricity. Here's an informal measure: what does the technology do to the "quaintness" of (non-sci-fi) stories composed before it? After electricity, you might look at a book with a plot element "character can't work at night", and scoff at how backward it is. Does the Web do something similar? I'd say it does a lot more. Per Steven Landsburg, there was a novel written in '91 (right at the Web's infancy) with plot elements like "someone is endlessly searching bookstores to find an obscure book" and "someone sells expensive encyclopedias to people with a tremendous demand for easy access to knowledge" -- very, very quaint from today's perspective. (Novel was called, IIRC, "Hunters and Gatherers")
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sanj 14y agoWhere does the internet fit into this hierarchy? How about the web? 3-6 ?
- lukeck 14y agoI'm not sure where it sits on the scale but the internet, web and associated technologies allow anyone to share without the limitations of physical media, an idea with any other person across any distance from across the room to as far as people spread in future and across time from instantly through to the end of civilization. I'd say that's a fairly fundamental change for humanity.
- wamatt 14y ago11) Become the universe Used to joke with my friends about this, as the most ambitious goal of any rational entity in maximizing the existence utility function. "Happiness" etc are human factors, while obviously relevant to us now, and may not exist down the line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain Co-operative existence models of super massive intelligent entities (like Matrioshka brains), could equally end up being dominant vs 'last man standing' scenarios. But at least in LMS (which of course we are not fans of), there is no doubt as to the eventual outcome.
- writetoalok 14y ago> We think we've figured out how to hack into the computer our universe is running on Not sure someone with that kind of access will need seed funding with YCombinator or anywhere else. Unless their hack is unproven and unreliable, and up for immediate rejection.
- chronophilic 14y agoDoes anyone know of a sort of hacker news for 3 and up? I think it would be good for my blood pressure to find a place where people don't equate "changing the world!" with "finding a new way to sell socks on the internet!"
- mietek 14y agoI wish. Maybe we should create one?
- leolalabs 14y ago...Its interesting....before Google all the investors were saying that you could not compete against yahoo....and before you could not compete against IBM....and you could not compete aganits microsoft....All this was BS then and it is all BS today...
- TikiTDO 14y agoOh finally, now I can just say I'm 10 on the Yudkowsky Ambition scale. You've saved me much explaining.
- mammalfriend 14y agoThis is neat. Just keep in mind that there's a difference between transformative innovation and a successful business.
- minm 14y agoFew years back, this guy (Ramar Pillai) fooled the whole country and if i remember correctly even got the audience from Indian PM and State Chief Minister. Probably the best pitch ever :). He claimed he can turn water into fuel using some herbs :). http://8ate.blogspot.com/2009/09/pramar-pillai-herbal-fuel-man-who-saved.html http://8ate.blogspot.com/2009/09/pramar-pillai-herbal-fuel-m...
- brudgers 14y ago"violate the laws of physics" I suspect the convincing ones violate conventional wisdom, best practices, and to a certain degree, common sense.
- bluestix 14y agoFlat earth economics.
- hammock 14y agoAppreciate the honesty in revealing that the biggest idea you've been pitched you can't actually talk about. But how about not taking the easy way out and instead answering what is the most frighteningly ambitious idea you have been convincingly pitched that you can talk about?
- seiji 14y agoJust wake up your inner pg: airbnb, dropbox, that new skateboard thinggy.
- run4yourlives 14y agoI swear to you - cold fusion is real. I have a reactor in my basement.
- hluska 14y agoSeveral years ago, a good friend came to me and excitedly pitched his latest invention - perpetual motion. He grew more and more animated as he explained how his device used magnets... Being young, I drew a diagram showing why it would fail. With each line, I could sense him deflating, but I kept drawing. Finally, by the time I brought up Newton, I realized that I'd gone too far. Our friendship didn't really work out too well after that and I still feel somewhat guilty...
- podperson 14y agoOnce upon a time a good friend tried to convert me to Scientology. That didn't work out so well for our friendship either. All I did was ask to see him levitate...
- hkmurakami 14y agoThis reminds me of Jeff Bezos' anecdote about telling his grandmother how much her smoking had shortened her life. http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S27/52/51O99/index.xml?section=&path=/main/news/archive/S27/52/51O99/index.xml&next=1 http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S27/52/51O99/inde...
- dreamdu5t 14y agoWow... that speech is amazing.
- writetoalok 14y agoReminds me of the Harry Potter books. Somewhere in those stories, Dumbledore comments: "We are what we choose".
- its_so_on 14y agoThank you very much for taking this step. (Not disclosing long-term plans just because they're frighteningly ambitious). Hopefully this goes double for ideas you chose not to take 7% of for a couple of grand :) (As that adds real injury to mere insult.) I genuinely appreciate it.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jameslevy 14y agoThe irony is that over the next few decades, maybe it will turn out that the single biggest YC black swan could be a new power source that appears to violate the laws of physics.
- systems 14y agoi dont like ideas that need to be kept a secret, i think its just psychological or emotional to feel or think you need to keep your idea a secret to increase its chance of success if its so easy to execute and replicate ... its not much of an idea ...
- bluestix 14y agoAnyone who argues for the first or second law of thermodynamics has poor reading comprehension. Both of those 'laws' are meaningless.
- Tycho 14y agoHuh?! But ideas are worthless anyway, everyone knows that.