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How to Be an Expert in a Changing World

452 points by jayzalowitz 12y ago

theoh 12y ago
The idea that a static world implies monotonically increasing confidence in your beliefs is really shaky, logically. Hill-climbing in a landscape of belief-fitness could easily arrive at a local maximum. To further improve your beliefs you might need to become less certain. Apart from that, how can something (confidence) increase in a static world? PG has clearly tossed this essay off without serious thought or discussion. A waste of time.
- nl 12y ago
  The idea that a static world implies monotonically increasing confidence in your beliefs is really shaky, logically. Hill-climbing in a landscape of belief-fitness could easily arrive at a local maximum. Exactly, and it's common to see that in many fields. People are persuaded by things that were bad ideas when they were new, and aren't swayed by new evidence to the contrary. To further improve your beliefs you might need to become less certain. Isn't that sort of the point of the essay? Apart from that, how can something (confidence) increase in a static world? I don't understand. Didn't your previous point argue exactly how hill-climbing could happen, and isn't that a (bad) example of confidence changing? Or are you really arguing over the semantics changing beliefs in a static world? I hope you aren't; otherwise, like you said: A waste of time.
  - theoh 12y ago
    This is definitely a waste of time but my point is that you don't need to have a changing (dynamic) fitness landscape for monotonicity to be insufficient in the long term - you could get stuck at a local maximum _even_ in a static world. The second point is that drawing a line between the "world" and your beliefs about it is a pretty dopey dualistic way of thinking. But hey, Graham doesn't care that there might be real knowledge and valid experience of these matters in the accumulated history of philosophy or psychology, he just shoots from the hip with some flaky positivistic analogy with computation... Ridiculous.
    - ncallaway 12y ago
      This assumes you can only hold beliefs that are adjacent to your current beliefs (i.e. the graph of your beliefs over time must be continuous). I disagree with that assumption. You can explore ideas that you don't hold, and these can be quite varied from your current beliefs. Once you find an idea that you put more confidence into that your current beliefs, then that idea becomes your belief. The local optimum from high-climbing doesn't constrain you in a world where your beliefs can teleport from one hill to another.
vinceguidry 12y ago
> If you're sufficiently expert in a field, any weird idea or apparently irrelevant question that occurs to you is ipso facto worth exploring. My proudest creations all came from these weird ideas. Now I listen to them very carefully and nurture them. They're starting to cohere and turn from random ideas into an ideology. It will be fun to make that real.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
I work with making technology teams deliver faster. It's nothing as complex and tricky as what Paul's doing, but I also get to see lots of teams and make correlations between people and performance. One of the things I've noticed is that over a long period of time, the more arrogant and certain team members are, the less likely they are to deliver. Folks that are always learning have a tendency to kick ass. Not so much with folks who think they've already arrived. I read in an article on HN a few weeks back that Google calls this "intellectual humility" and looks for it as a hiring trait.
- nicklaf 12y ago
  The phenomenon you've observed in the arrogant individuals exhibit what Carol Dweck calls a "fixed mindset". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#.22Mindset.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#.22Mindset.22
- AndyNemmity 12y ago
  "... the more arrogant and certain team members are, the less likely they are to deliver. Folks that are always learning have a tendency to kick ass." I disagree with the first statement, and agree with the second one. Arrogance has a lot of variations. I find I know arrogant, certain people that deliver, and some that don't. But anyone who always learns, does well.
hayksaakian 12y ago
I hear many startup people talk about "domain expertise" I wish someone would write about that. What is an expert? What is a domain? How do I become a domain expert? Am I an expert at something I take for granted? I love Paul Graham's essays but there's a lot of implied logic and jargon. Maybe he should have a few non-startup, non-business people proof read them too?
- vinceguidry 12y ago
  One of the essential tensions of being a software developer is the fact that software isn't really useful on its own. It has to do something. That thing it's doing is the domain. Whatever very-specific information that the software system is organizing and passing, more specifically. For example, I maintain an e-commerce system. More specifically, I maintain an e-commerce system built for a cosmetics company. E-commerce is a field, cosmetics is a field, cosmetics e-commerce is specifically the domain I need to become an expert in. The more I can differentiate cosmetics e-commerce from other kinds of e-commerce, the more well-tailored I can make my app. And the more well-tailored I can make this app, the better I'll be able to understand the more general case of making custom e-commerce systems for other industries. The more I go through this process of understanding the specific needs of the industry, the more domain expertise I'm building. Domains can subdivide as much as industries subdivide. Say the cosmetic industry started to split along product lines, then I might start gaining insight into how lipstick companies operate, and be able to tailor a product offering straight to them. The domain doesn't have to mean commercial industry. You might have domain expertise, say, in XML parsing. Then you could wax poetic on the differences between Nokogiri and say, Chrome's internal parser. So, essentially, it just means "expertise". More specifically, the type of expertise that allows you to customize a software system around it. Which can be in practice quite different from normal expertise. The guy who devises our makeup formulas is definitely an expert. But he can't design the system to actually manufacture it. The guy who writes those systems might not understand the actual formulas, so the two types of experts have to work together. When startups talk about the need to be a domain expert, it means getting out of just pure programming and into the actual meat. Rather than hire an expert, to become one yourself. This not only allows you to reduce staff, it also makes it easier to make better, more custom solutions. The Soylent guys have to make the system to manufacture their product, but they also must understand nutrition, food, the regulatory environment of the food market.
nl 12y ago
One interesting thing about beliefs in a changing world is how you deal with contradictory beliefs. I see "beliefs" as an optimisation that avoids having to return to first principles for every single decision. That speeds things up, but is obviously dangerous. Sometimes it's possible to have two beliefs that contradict each other. Usually this means they need reevaluating, but sometimes it means there is context in which each is true. Reasoning in the face of contradictory beliefs is one of the most interesting things about "knowledge", and something that humans can do surprisingly well - at least until we realise we are doing it.
- Dorian-Marie 12y ago
  Strangely reminds me of machine learning: 1. We have some initial beliefs 2. We use it to make decisions 3. We receive some new data 4. Given the new data, we confirm/change the beliefs 5. We can make different decisions 6. Go to 3. The initial beliefs may or not be true, the key to get as much accurate data as fast as possible. A better algorithm would be to ask other systems beliefs and compare it to ours too (eg: neuronal network).
  - mkramlich 12y ago
    ML is derived from humans thinking about how we learn. so the arrow of similarity runs in the opposite direction ;-)
  - nl 12y ago
    There is a whole field of AI research called belief propagation that deals with this.
  - kszx 12y ago
    Strangely reminds me of Bayesian statistics and updating of prior probability distributions.
  - phektus 12y ago
    Strangely reminds me of learning :P
- 12y ago
andyidsinga 12y ago
re this : "if you write about a topic in some fairly durable and public form, you'll find you worry much more about getting things right than most people would in a casual conversation." i wonder what the bar here is - certainly more than blog posts / self published websites as those are fairly close to casual conversation imho. glad to see pg picking up the pace on the writing!
- marvy 12y ago
  He said what the bar is in one of the footnotes: something with a title. I guess for him at least, the blog posts count.
  - andyidsinga 12y ago
    yeah - I saw that, but seems to me it only barely meets the "fairly durable" test if you assume cache's and other history keeping mechanisms. I wonder if what is additionally required is : "someone you respect asks you to write on a topic". In PG's case, his audience might substitute, for others an employer or publisher might be what it takes.
davemel37 12y ago
I am noticing a trend in Paul's essays. The last two were about changing paradigms. The first was about how a second read of a book leads to a different understanding, and this essay is about not letting your previous beliefs close your mind about things that can change. I like though how he circles back to two fundamentals. One, human nature doesn't really change, and Two, betting on people is a better indicator of the future than betting on ideas. Probably the biggest mistake people make is looking for confirming evidence instead of using evidence to determine the relative likelihood of competing hypotheses. Even a large body of confirming evidence doesn't prove anything because that same evidence could be consistent with other hypotheses you never considered. You need to evaluate the diagnosticity of that evidence. (i.e. a patients high fever has almost no diagnostic value in determining what is wrong, because so many illnesses are consistent with that evidence. Whereas, one shred of evidence can disprove a hypothesis completely. Which is why good doctors rule out things to identify the most likely problem. These ideas PG is talking about are, IMO, some of the most important things for founders to understand. Don't look to confirm your theories, look to disprove them. Don't accept lore, challenge everything. Most importantly though, always evaluate competing hypothesis to prevent you from just trying to confirm what you are looking for.
- vishnugupta 12y ago
  > Don't look to confirm your theories, look to disprove them. I use this framework, though learnt it by reading Fenmayn's writings, when there's a debate as to use tool A or tool B to get X. And it's been very effective so far. I have a vague sense that B is better and a colleague is particular about A. Earlier I used to look deeper and deeper into how B is good at doing X. But realized that I wasn't convincing enough. Then I remembered Feynman's saying to the effect "the best way to prove something is to try very hard to disprove it". This has helped quite a lot in coming up with objective comparisons and use right tool for the task at hand; or in general to come up with the right solution the problem at hand.
evanwarfel 12y ago
Updating one's beliefs to get more accurate priors is something we should all strive to do. There is no such thing as having two beliefs of equal weight that contradict each other - that's an illusion created by either applying a different definitions to each belief, or a refusal to admit that you believe one more than the other. ... > "The winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain experts." I would also add that domain expertise is when one's internal model / map matches the territory. When this happens, one's intuition is accurate and one can notice patterns that other people can't, or one can make predictions that turn out to be right.
- unclebucknasty 12y ago
  I wonder if a lack of domain "expertise", but a general understanding of the domain instead, can sometimes be an advantage in generating domain-changing ideas.
  - kevan 12y ago
    There's definitely a risk as a domain expert that you'll take things for granted. Henry Ford is a good example of this, he was never an expert in horse-drawn carriages but he changed that domain drastically.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  >There is no such thing as having two beliefs of equal weight that contradict each other - that's an illusion created by either applying a different definitions to each belief, or a refusal to admit that you believe one more than the other. Of course there is: P(A) = 0.5 and P(~A) = 0.5. Don't be silly.
- lyricalpolymath 12y ago
  > "There is no such thing as having two beliefs of equal weight that contradict each other" Of course there is and the situation in which you find it is called Cognitive Dissonance [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
gbog 12y ago
Great read. I would go a bit further and say that the goal is not to be an expert and is not related to start-ups. The goal of being open minded and sceptical as described in this essay, is to make sure one do not embrace sheepishly some ideas that will be considered obviously stupid twenty years in the future. For example in the 50s in Europe most intellectuals were communist or pro communist. Only a very few were neither reactionary nor communist. The goal, for me, is to be of these few. In the US history, it would mean to have been e.g.among the earliest abolitionists.
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sitkack 12y ago
This reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke's "Hazards of Prophecy" > When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. and Asimov > Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. beliefs, like stereotypes are shortcuts in cognition. We should always be applying the most powerful tool we have developed in the history of humanity, the scientific method.
- baddox 12y ago
  I've always wondered if Clarke's statement has anything to do with elderly scientists in particular, or if he's just commenting that most things are possible.
  - alexbecker 12y ago
    Almost certainly elderly scientists in particular; if he meant a general statement then the juxtaposition with the previous sentence is very odd. Also there's this (paraphrased from memory) quote in Rendezvous with Rama: "even after hundreds of years, science never solved the problem of having elderly, conservative scientists at the helm of its governing bodies".
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    An elderly scientist is often one who did all his work in an old theoretical paradigm, a paradigm whose death is eagerly awaited by all the young PhDs looking for jobs with a new paradigm in their thesis.
    - waterlesscloud 12y ago
      A new paradigm that they'll stick to with an ironclad faith. Which is only marginally better.
  - omegant 12y ago
    Inmy limited experience, I found (to my surprise) that most young scientist are also reluctant to think out of the beaten track (even if it's just to play devil's advocate in a discussion). I guess it takes somekind of rebel todo it, no matter what kind of human group you are talking about.
jcr 12y ago
I spotted the following in my usual reading this morning: >"Until this point, I have been describing the stereotyping process as a negative force for individual and team functioning. However, this process actually stems from an adaptive, often functional psychological process. Mental heuristics and cognitive shortcuts enable us to process information without conscious deliberation: they fill in the informational gaps we often experience when making decisions. In other words, habits of mind help us to save brain power for more difficult tasks. Joseph Pieper's classic "Leisure, the Basis of Culture" sets out this theory well. In the 1980s, people thought we could create expert systems by interviewing experts like brain surgeons or oil exploration specialists, and creating a rule chaining prolog environment that would recreate their decision-making ability. The problem was the experts did not know how they knew what they knew. That is, experts are creating associations between disparate experiences and pieces of knowledge, using the subconscious brain." [1] The quote above reminded me a bit of the previous "How You Know" essay by Paul Graham [2,3]. At times it's disheartening to realize the discrepancy between how much I read, and how much of it I can actually remember, but it's nice to know at least some of it manages to stay with me somehow. In this new essay, pg says: >"When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world." Stereotyping and similar classification are essentially heuristic modeling based on past experience. Some substantial part of our mental models are based on "Unknown Knows," or better said, our mental models are based on experiences we cannot consciously recall but still somehow know unconsciously. Even if we keep the models updated to have a "current version of the world" through seeking new experiences, we are still often incapable of either anticipating or handling new surprises. Maybe people who regularly succeed as startup investors (i.e. anticipating and handling surprising exceptions) have learned to retain some degree or form of suspended disbelief when applying their models to the world? It's trivially easy to suspend disbelief for the sake of entertainment like enjoying a fictional story. Intentionally escaping reality for a while is an established habit for most people. On the other hand, intentionally suspending a bias, belief or model in the real world seems to take more effort, but that's possibly due to my own lack of practice. [1] http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/11/179827-the-data-on-diversity/fulltext/ http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/11/179827-the-data-on-div... [2] http://paulgraham.com/know.html http://paulgraham.com/know.html [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753526
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bane 12y ago
Expertise is a weird thing. In today's world, one that changes so rapidly, it's very hard to become an expert in something and have the value of that expertise remain valuable. It used to be that expertise in some field or area would last generations, and guild-like systems of master/apprentice developed in response. Now you can't even make it through a degree program before the things you started to learn about at the beginning become virtually obsolete by the end. Watching the front page of HN and you'll see entire frameworks and languages come and go virtually as quickly as the seasons. When I was starting out, it was fully possible and reasonable to consider becoming an expert in COBOL and one or two kinds of mainframes and make a career of it. Expertise today requires that you start to think and operate at a higher level of abstraction in order to cover what you know, and where your knowledge might go. Or it might require you to make connections between old ideas that are still valid and new ideas as they appear. You might even be able to change career paths entirely, but things you learned as an expert in your old one might make you special and unique in your new one -- somebody with rare and unique talents. Like automating business processes in a non-technical career. I've been thinking a lot about beliefs and belief systems recently. I'm not quite sure I have any meaningful or concrete conclusions yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm going down the path of thinking that beliefs should generally be treated and handled with extreme caution, that they're some kind of holdover from an earlier evolutionary stage -- a vestigial kind of proto-thought process wedged somewhere between pure animalistic instinct and enlightened reason. They aren't inherently bad just like instincts aren't inherently bad, the instinct to pull your hand off a hot stove is good for example. Perhaps they some kind of optimized way of thinking that evolved when we had less hardware to compute with. An estimation system that got us through hundreds of thousands of long cold nights, alone in the world of beasts...when we couldn't quite think through everything. But now we can, and this old wetware technical debt kind of gets in the way now and again. It tends to make us rigid and lazy in our thinking...why think when believing is less work? Maybe it's possible to hack our beliefs be believing in the right things, by believing in reason, or believing that things should be changing, believing that we should evaluate and challenge ourselves from time to time, believing that we should feel like we're just on the edge of discomfort and force us to use this new better and harder to use equipment we've been gifted with.
- eropple 12y ago
te_platt 12y ago
In the context of this article I think it's important to make a distinction between an expert and a specialist. I think of an expert as someone who almost always gets things right. For example, an expert pianist plays great music but it seems a bit off to think of an expert meteorologist. Weather is so variable it's just not realistic to expect anyone to get forecasts as accurate as pianist at a keyboard. But it makes good sense that a specialist will be able to better than most. I would change "When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world." to "When specialists get things wrong, it's usually because the world is so complex." So I agree that it's important to protect against obsolete beliefs it's also important to consider when the belief is really wrong and when it was just overloaded with confounding events.
sidcool 12y ago
The first paragraph is a gem. It took me few readings understand it in entirety. Great essay, Paul! > protecting yourself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you have to do to succeed as a startup investor This statement is not only true for startups, but for life in general.
mbesto 12y ago
There's a subtle theme in this essay which describes the thought process of how YC (well pg specifically) selects teams for YC. Perhaps in a way, bringing clarity to what is generally seen as a non-scientific and highly complex line of reasoning for hiring and selecting talent with very little limited context. However, I still don't feel like I've still fully grokked it. > Within Y Combinator, when an idea is described as crazy, it's a compliment—in fact, on average probably a higher compliment than when an idea is described as good. Yet, outside the walls of YC, sounding crazy means you don't get in. > But we could tell the founders were earnest, energetic, and independent-minded. (Indeed, almost pathologically so.) How is it possible to discern this in a YC application? This is all reminiscent of the talk Gabe Newell, CEO and founder of Valve, gave on the hiring practices at Valve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU#t=1291 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU#t=1291 Here he mentions the following: (paraphrased) "One of the first programmers of the company was the manager of a waffle house. He was one of the most and still one of the most creative people in the industry" So what made them take the risk? What makes Valve turn away every waffle house manager that applies today? What made YC take the risk on Chesky, Gebbia, and Blecharczyk?
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  Determination seems to be one decisive trait. If you're determined, people often want to help you succeed or to work with you. Determination also seems to matter more than raw intelligence, and betting on determined people tends to be a good bet.
  - kimdouglasmason 12y ago
    Being willing to work for low payoff seems to be one decisive trait. If you're willing to work for low payoff, people often want to take advantage of you. Being a sucker also seems to matter more than raw intelligence, and betting on suckers tends to be a good bet.
- SamReidHughes 12y ago
  > How is it possible to discern this in a YC application? They interview applicants in person, too.
jsonmez 12y ago
Have strong convictions, but hold on to them loosely.
pitchups 12y ago
There is an additional attribute that goes a long way in staying an expert in a changing world - humility or acknowledging that you do not or cannot know the future. PG hints at this when he says.. "...admit you have no idea what the right direction is, and try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of change...". It is also paraphrased quite well in the maxim of "Stay hungry, stay foolish" popularized by Jobs. But humility that stems from ignorance is at odds with popular expectations of an expert. The problem is what worked in the past may not work in the future. Being sensitive to changes in the world around you, requires you to momentarily stop being an expert and look at the world from the eyes of a novice or beginner. This is not only hard but sometimes impossible to do because of how we change as we acquire new knowledge. [2] So the trick is to be somewhat schizophrenic - being able to simultaneously view the world as an expert with the fresh thinking of a beginner or a novice. [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8754334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8754334
- waps 12y ago
  > There is an additional attribute that goes a long way in staying an expert in a changing world - humility or acknowledging that you do not or cannot know the future. Sadly there's one rather important setting where this does not work at all : Interviewing with a non-technical interviewer. Like one has to do for pretty much any non-individual contributor job at all but the very largest companies. I keep having this impulse and I find it actually convinces people you don't know what you're talking about. The more algorithms you've seen fail spectacularly at prediction, the more capable you are (especially if you figured out why), but the less capable you appear. Furthermore people always believe they can do better by just looking at the data and going with their gut feeling. This is not true, I've only seen people do that in a few cases. And I've seen people screw it up royally in more than a few cases. I think the successes were lucky guesses, because while they looked like they knew what they were doing, I could never get a decent response to the simple question : your arguments work just as well for 5 other predictions one might make, so why this one ? So I'm forced to doubt there. Either they knew more than they were willing to admit (one was also a political figure, so ...), or they were lucky guesses.
- AndyNemmity 12y ago
oldpond 12y ago
Beliefs like JEE is a good thing? Like object oriented development is a good thing? Like Portal Server is still relevant? Yeah, I hit the wall with those all the time. Lots of ego in the way of changing those beliefs because the big guys have been selling this for the last two decades. How would you like to be the guy trying to convince enterprises that loosely coupled is the way to go when they've been sold on "silos are bad we need integrated systems"? I feel a little bit like Chicken Little at times. :)
holri 12y ago
The human nature is not static as well. Humans are able to think and act very differently. If I look back what I was thinking and doing 20 years ago, I have to shake my head in astonishment.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  Yes, a person evolves that fast. But a population is much slower. To the point where "human nature doesn't change" is an extremely useful heuristic. If you look for counter examples, you'll find a few changes that took only a century or two, but in practice you'll probably never see one of those changes.
zan2434 12y ago
I wonder if being open minded is enough. The "winds of change" aren't always very strong, and accordingly new opportunities aren't (at least initially) better alternatives to the status quo, they just happen to have incredible future potential. To fully take advantage of this, the expert would have to move backwards, quite possibly endangering himself, while a new entrant to the field has no risk to assume by doing so. To use the hill-climbing metaphor described by other commenters, a new climber can begin climbing the new potentially tall mountain immediately, while the "expert" will first have to descend his peak.
asimjalis 12y ago
@pmarca has an interesting thread on this on Twitter [1]. In Peter Thiel’s terminology [2], PG’s view is optimistic nondeterminate, which might be fine for a VC but might not be the best choice for a founder. [1] https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/546533509922160640 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/546533509922160640 [2] http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-13-notes http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-cs183-...
- ThomPete 12y ago
  And def not fine for the 99% of the working population.
- napoleond 12y ago
  Unfortunately Thiel's views don't really map to a "hard" 2x2 matrix--the axes should be considered to represent spectra or gradients instead. (I'm not presuming to be smarter than Thiel here, just extrapolating rationally... nobody believes the future to be entirely determinate or entirely indeterminate.) In light of that, I suspect PG and Thiel actually live in the same quadrant of determinate optimism. I haven't read PG suggest that we should just "wait" for the future to happen--he's merely suggesting that the most common path toward building the future is on a wave. (And Thiel built PayPal that way--he recognized a version of the future that was on the cusp of being realized and took it upon himself to make it happen.)
soup10 12y ago
What a dumb assertion that someone can be an expert on changing the world. Paul graham has lived in the startup world bubble for too long and is a bit off his rocker when it comes to having perspective on the larger picture of changing industries and global trends and dynamics. The next big thing is not some social media garbage app for sharing cat pictures. That much is clear. Take a look at the kind of low impact garbage YC specializes and funding to get a clear look at how paul graham views successful startup ideas and teams. It needs no reminder that the vast majority of YC companies, fail, have no impact, dissolve and get aquired by other teams or if they are lucky get a talent aquisition by a bigger fish with a bloated mergers and aquisitions budget. My advice to Paul, write essays about what you KNOW, not what you feel like rambling on about. You have lots of experience in the world of seed staging and getting small teams to make the leap into legitimate hard working business entities with growth potential. You don't have a ton of wisdom to share outside of that domain so stop acting like you do.
- scrollaway 12y ago
  PG does not in fact talk about being an "expert on changing the world" but of being an "expert IN a changing world". And indeed the essay talks about... well, seed funding, investment etc. Not random "out-of-bubble" assertions. You seem to have read the title and just spouted your vomit onto your keyboard then hit send. That's not really a good path to constructive criticism there, is it?
  - ofir_geller 12y ago
    nor will it keep your keyboard in mint working condition.
- sytelus 12y ago
  Your comment is completely offtopic, pointless and undeserving. You are bickering about YC while not knowing basic facts about success and impact of YC. And you are advising pg on what he should do after making a a judgement that he knows nothing outside startups so I hope you have a good set of diverse accomplishment and experience in your resume to back it up. It's his website and his essay - he can ramble all he wants in anything he wants.
ExpiredLink 12y ago
"Anyway, the thing about progress is that it always seems greater than it really is." Wittgenstein
sytelus 12y ago
I'm not exactly sure what is the grand insight(s) from this essay that warrants it's rather link-baity lavish title. Does below captures all the tips and techniques pg mentioned? 1. Don't marry to your beliefs. This is always a delicate balancing act because we do have to have some belief to make a decision, we just don't know if it's a right. 2. Don't predict the future. Can be derived from #1 so I suppose redundant. 3. Bet on people instead of ideas. I think this is great advice for VCs but have been covered many times by pg. 4. Make friends/Surround yourself with smart people.: Not extremely practical unless you are a famous VC but even then not trivial. It would have been great essay if pg shared some stories and shared non-trivial insights that makes us better at doing above. BTW, I did got tripped at this line: Another trick I've found to protect myself against obsolete beliefs is to focus initially on people rather than ideas. Ummm... what was the first trick?
- Implicated 12y ago
  > Ummm... what was the first trick? "...to focus initially on people rather than ideas"
- SiVal 12y ago
  Yeah, at the risk of being "middle-brow", I didn't really learn much about "How to be an expert" from this. Maybe, it's just a title issue, and "How to be among the first investors to spot an exploitable change" or something similar would have set my expectations properly, but I was hoping to get some useful tips that would apply to a significantly broader definition of "expert".
- lyricalpolymath 12y ago
  the first trick was a meta-belief > believe in change
- varchar 12y ago
  With these kinds of advice (entrepreneurial / life), you just take the best lessons and move on. I like your point by point analysis. But I guess you cannot look at such articles solely through the lens of analysis. On an unrelated note - I know a lot of successful professionals and entrepreneurs (mostly non tech and some tech). Surprisingly they are not that analytical as one would expect. They have great drive, self belief, instincts, people skills, adaptability, negotiation skills, ability to bounce back and perhaps several other skills. I realized at some point in my career that great intellectual / analytical ability is just one aspect required for a successful career and there were several other important skills / traits. Warren Buffet famously said (I think in reference to stock analysts who pore through and analyze stocks endlessly) "Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway."
blrgeek 12y ago
Coincidentally went to an effectual entrepreneurship workshop by Prof. Sarasvathy y'day. Her learnings from talking to 'expert entrepreneurs' are that 1. they do not believe the future can be predicted, esp in the early stages of a new venture 2. they prefer to create the future in areas with high uncertainty by forging partnerships with people they know already, and who are also investing in the same areas 3. they go to the customer at a very low 'acceptable loss' as they can, building as little of the product as they can, investing as little as they can, and getting the first initial set of customers as partners. 4. they jump in to a fast iteration of execution/sales that helps them discover/create the market, relying on sales as market research. 5. they find pleasant surprises along the way that shape their execution/market/venture and they change to fit the new reality - and they shape that reality along the way Finding great parallels with PGs essays here.. See http://effectuation.org/learn http://effectuation.org/learn Read also http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/how-great-entrepreneurs-think.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/how-great-entrepreneurs... and the original paper at http://www.effectuation.org/sites/default/files/documents/what-makes-entrepreneurs-entrepreneurial-sarasvathy.pdf http://www.effectuation.org/sites/default/files/documents/wh...
- wslh 12y ago
  It seems like Prof. Sarasvathy has a clear idea about what entrepreneurship really is. I understand that it is about a lot of uncertainty, coping with trial and error, and getting information from the business black box as fast as you can. One thing not addressed here is the importance of your location and your status / credentials. Not everything is about your personal skills.
lyricalpolymath 12y ago
ASK PG: when you are saying "energetic" people, do you also mean "passionately convinced"? It's interesting that on one side you try to avoid the pitfalls of your own beliefs (by smartly adopting meta-beliefs and techniques that sidestep the problem, like believing in change and focusing on people) but at the same time you are suggesting that you somehow accept, or decide to trust, the worldview of "energetic" founders. You might not mean it, but this connection is somehow untold in the classical narrative of the driven founder: there is a fine line between "energetic" and "passionately convinced", which also suggests that they might have and communicate strong beliefs in their success or their idea. Of course I understand that "strong beliefs" aren't forcefully connected with being an expert, which is your main argument. PG, Where do you stand on this? do you believe in founder's beliefs? Do founders who passionately believe in something convince you? I feel very sympathetic to the argument of your essay, for many reasons, and have grown to use the same meta-belief of believing in change; however, instead of sidestepping the problem, I tackle it heads on, by incorporating Doubt and Relativism in my decision making. I feel, and strongly believe ;), that Relativism is the cure to many cognitive biases; if you doubt yourself you can't be affected by the Dunning-Kruger effect; I think everybody should train themselves in managing the unavoidable cognitive dissonances of day to day life, it would make the world a better place. Relativism is also an important tool for creativity: the moment you doubt your frame of reference, you start seeing the picture outside of the box, new possibilities open up. Of course Relativism has it's shortcomings, and beliefs, which are rooted in emotions, command our behaviours more powerfully that the logical reasonings of Relativism. However, I believe, there are ways for us to be both "passionately convinced" and relativistic at the same time; I try to be like Cezanne, who would ask himself: "is this what I see?"
KedarMhaswade 12y ago
Kahneman attributes a lot to 'luck' of what experts achieve especially when it comes to predicting something. I am a bit surprised that PG does not give 'shear luck' its fair share. I am assuming that many (most?) of the startup founders, when they are being interviewed by the potential investors, are 'complete strangers'. By focusing objectively on ideas than subjectively or intuitively on people doing them, they believe that they mitigate the so-called risk. I am not convinced that by judging people rather than by judging ideas (in supposedly short amount of time) the chances of succeeding go up, because if we are often wrong judging ideas, what makes us good at judging people who are ever changing too? Of course, there is an undeniable 'credit history' part wherein if a 'successful' founder comes back with another idea, many investors are ready to 'shower money' on her/him -- I don't find anything majorly wrong with that attitude, but that alone does not guarantee success, I believe.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  That may be one of the very few context where judging people is easier than ideas. Ideas that grow huge look completely random, except when you happen to know the one or two details that make them promising. And you can never know if you know all of those details. Almost all people that make something big share some few treats that most people lack, what makes this a useful filter. Of course people can change, what reduces the effectiveness of the filter, but it's still better than random.
C2E2 12y ago
More I read these VC spreading their wisdom, more I find the Silicon Valley barely a caricature.
McUsr 12y ago
What I got out of this essay, which I found to be good, is that you should investigate your hunches, more deliberately before dismissing them. That is hindsightly (From my hindsights :) )a great wisdom from Paul Graham.
whiddershins 12y ago
I don't agree that this essay is arguing for indeterminate optimism. I think you can consciously and deliberately shape the future while simultaneously being open to the reality that things are constantly changing.
fubarred 12y ago
Life is suffering, change, taxes and death. The meta of Buddhist philosophy (sans religion, spirituality, etc.) appears to be one of the most honest of the major, religion-derived belief systems.
akrymski 12y ago
And yet the truly successful people have gotten to where they are by sticking to their beliefs: - Warren Buffet has always believed that companies should be valued based on their profits, not their share price performance. Thus he didn't invest in the tech bubble of the 90s, and was forced to under-perform the market significantly for many years whilst everyone thought he was getting too old for the new way of things. Yet he stuck to his beliefs, and it turned out that he was right - the Nasdaq bubble evaporated and he again out-performed other funds in the long term. - Steve Jobs always stuck to his belief that computing devices for consumers should be fully integrated and beautifully designed. After getting kicked out of Apple and loosing the OS war to MS, he could have easily told himself his approach was wrong. But whether he is right or wrong became irrelevant - his belief was so powerful that it was contagious. - Zuck, Brin, and others have succeeded because they stuck to their beliefs instead of selling out early on. - Darwin stuck to his unorthodox beliefs until his theories became accepted. All of these people have/had a belief - a model of the universe which they passionately believed in. Having such a model means that predicting the future becomes possible, even though one can't predict exactly when that future will come, the same way Warren Buffet will never tell you what the market will do tomorrow, yet he certainly has a belief in where things are going long term. Jobs was too early with the Newton, yet his continued belief caused him to strike gold later on with the iPhone. There is an interesting difference between fundamental beliefs and "expert knowledge". The later constantly needs to adapt to take new information into account, but it is our fundamental beliefs that determine how we interpret that expert knowledge. For what it's worth, my startup investment belief has always been to: invest in companies that are run by great people that have created the best product in a growing market that has profitable competitors. I'll leave it up to the "experts" to speculate on which markets will grow most, or which competitors will win out. If Warren Buffet can't do it, I won't bother either. All that we can really judge to the best of our ability is the quality of the product and the team.
- davemel37 12y ago
  the difference is that all of these beliefs are rooted in change and/or going against the grain...which is exactly PGs point.
UhUhUhUh 12y ago
Talking about non-conform ideas, I would like to add that what should be of interest is not what changed but what doesn't. And I would like to offer that this idea of a world of accelerated change might in fact be a self-serving, Ptolemaic fantasy of omnipotence. What counts hasn't changed much in centuries. We're still using steam engines to produce electricity. And society is very similar to what it was in the Bronze Age.
kordless 12y ago
> The winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain experts. If you're sufficiently expert in a field, any weird idea or apparently irrelevant question that occurs to you is ipso facto worth exploring. I frequently wrangle with challenges related to finding other people who are open to listening and helping me explore these less-than-complete ideas in an unbiased way. It's always an enjoyable moment when someone listens and then adds to the conversation, instead of immediately trying to negate the kernel of the idea based on the fact it's in a chaotic state at the time.
dschiptsov 12y ago
"an expert in a previous version of the world" is a good metaphor. Old people in general are such experts, or some "fundamentalists" or "conservatives" - those, who are trying to "preserve" the world they grow up in, everyone who follow and worship a "ritual", a "process", stuck up "creationists" or "froidians", "public static void" guys - the list is surprisingly long. Some "teachers" said millennias ago "be the change", others said that "we are never the same". Perhaps, they have tried to capture this notion of "an ever changing process" - us (we are processes, not entities, they said) in a "beginningless and endless change" which they call "That" or "Tao", and we call Universe.
armansu 12y ago
The quote I'm adding to my Evernote: "It seems to me that beliefs about the future are so rarely correct that they usually aren't worth the extra rigidity they impose, and that the best strategy is simply to be aggressively open-minded. Instead of trying to point yourself in the right direction, admit you have no idea what the right direction is, and try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of change".
silverlake 12y ago
"Expert Political Judgment", by Tetlock, has a lot to say about this. It adds data to the story about the Fox and the Hedgehog. Basically, the hedgehog knows one big thing and tries to force the world into their mental model. The fox knows many things, allowing him to be more flexible thinking about a messy world.

452 points by jayzalowitz 12y ago

theoh 12y ago

The idea that a static world implies monotonically increasing confidence in your beliefs is really shaky, logically. Hill-climbing in a landscape of belief-fitness could easily arrive at a local maximum. To further improve your beliefs you might need to become less certain. Apart from that, how can something (confidence) increase in a static world? PG has clearly tossed this essay off without serious thought or discussion. A waste of time.

nl 12y ago
The idea that a static world implies monotonically increasing confidence in your beliefs is really shaky, logically. Hill-climbing in a landscape of belief-fitness could easily arrive at a local maximum. Exactly, and it's common to see that in many fields. People are persuaded by things that were bad ideas when they were new, and aren't swayed by new evidence to the contrary. To further improve your beliefs you might need to become less certain. Isn't that sort of the point of the essay? Apart from that, how can something (confidence) increase in a static world? I don't understand. Didn't your previous point argue exactly how hill-climbing could happen, and isn't that a (bad) example of confidence changing? Or are you really arguing over the semantics changing beliefs in a static world? I hope you aren't; otherwise, like you said: A waste of time.
- theoh 12y ago
  This is definitely a waste of time but my point is that you don't need to have a changing (dynamic) fitness landscape for monotonicity to be insufficient in the long term - you could get stuck at a local maximum _even_ in a static world. The second point is that drawing a line between the "world" and your beliefs about it is a pretty dopey dualistic way of thinking. But hey, Graham doesn't care that there might be real knowledge and valid experience of these matters in the accumulated history of philosophy or psychology, he just shoots from the hip with some flaky positivistic analogy with computation... Ridiculous.
  - ncallaway 12y ago
    This assumes you can only hold beliefs that are adjacent to your current beliefs (i.e. the graph of your beliefs over time must be continuous). I disagree with that assumption. You can explore ideas that you don't hold, and these can be quite varied from your current beliefs. Once you find an idea that you put more confidence into that your current beliefs, then that idea becomes your belief. The local optimum from high-climbing doesn't constrain you in a world where your beliefs can teleport from one hill to another.

vinceguidry 12y ago

> If you're sufficiently expert in a field, any weird idea or apparently irrelevant question that occurs to you is ipso facto worth exploring. My proudest creations all came from these weird ideas. Now I listen to them very carefully and nurture them. They're starting to cohere and turn from random ideas into an ideology. It will be fun to make that real.

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

I work with making technology teams deliver faster. It's nothing as complex and tricky as what Paul's doing, but I also get to see lots of teams and make correlations between people and performance. One of the things I've noticed is that over a long period of time, the more arrogant and certain team members are, the less likely they are to deliver. Folks that are always learning have a tendency to kick ass. Not so much with folks who think they've already arrived. I read in an article on HN a few weeks back that Google calls this "intellectual humility" and looks for it as a hiring trait.

nicklaf 12y ago
The phenomenon you've observed in the arrogant individuals exhibit what Carol Dweck calls a "fixed mindset". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#.22Mindset.22 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#.22Mindset.22
AndyNemmity 12y ago
"... the more arrogant and certain team members are, the less likely they are to deliver. Folks that are always learning have a tendency to kick ass." I disagree with the first statement, and agree with the second one. Arrogance has a lot of variations. I find I know arrogant, certain people that deliver, and some that don't. But anyone who always learns, does well.

hayksaakian 12y ago

I hear many startup people talk about "domain expertise" I wish someone would write about that. What is an expert? What is a domain? How do I become a domain expert? Am I an expert at something I take for granted? I love Paul Graham's essays but there's a lot of implied logic and jargon. Maybe he should have a few non-startup, non-business people proof read them too?

vinceguidry 12y ago
One of the essential tensions of being a software developer is the fact that software isn't really useful on its own. It has to do something. That thing it's doing is the domain. Whatever very-specific information that the software system is organizing and passing, more specifically. For example, I maintain an e-commerce system. More specifically, I maintain an e-commerce system built for a cosmetics company. E-commerce is a field, cosmetics is a field, cosmetics e-commerce is specifically the domain I need to become an expert in. The more I can differentiate cosmetics e-commerce from other kinds of e-commerce, the more well-tailored I can make my app. And the more well-tailored I can make this app, the better I'll be able to understand the more general case of making custom e-commerce systems for other industries. The more I go through this process of understanding the specific needs of the industry, the more domain expertise I'm building. Domains can subdivide as much as industries subdivide. Say the cosmetic industry started to split along product lines, then I might start gaining insight into how lipstick companies operate, and be able to tailor a product offering straight to them. The domain doesn't have to mean commercial industry. You might have domain expertise, say, in XML parsing. Then you could wax poetic on the differences between Nokogiri and say, Chrome's internal parser. So, essentially, it just means "expertise". More specifically, the type of expertise that allows you to customize a software system around it. Which can be in practice quite different from normal expertise. The guy who devises our makeup formulas is definitely an expert. But he can't design the system to actually manufacture it. The guy who writes those systems might not understand the actual formulas, so the two types of experts have to work together. When startups talk about the need to be a domain expert, it means getting out of just pure programming and into the actual meat. Rather than hire an expert, to become one yourself. This not only allows you to reduce staff, it also makes it easier to make better, more custom solutions. The Soylent guys have to make the system to manufacture their product, but they also must understand nutrition, food, the regulatory environment of the food market.

nl 12y ago

One interesting thing about beliefs in a changing world is how you deal with contradictory beliefs. I see "beliefs" as an optimisation that avoids having to return to first principles for every single decision. That speeds things up, but is obviously dangerous. Sometimes it's possible to have two beliefs that contradict each other. Usually this means they need reevaluating, but sometimes it means there is context in which each is true. Reasoning in the face of contradictory beliefs is one of the most interesting things about "knowledge", and something that humans can do surprisingly well - at least until we realise we are doing it.

Dorian-Marie 12y ago
Strangely reminds me of machine learning: 1. We have some initial beliefs 2. We use it to make decisions 3. We receive some new data 4. Given the new data, we confirm/change the beliefs 5. We can make different decisions 6. Go to 3. The initial beliefs may or not be true, the key to get as much accurate data as fast as possible. A better algorithm would be to ask other systems beliefs and compare it to ours too (eg: neuronal network).
- mkramlich 12y ago
  ML is derived from humans thinking about how we learn. so the arrow of similarity runs in the opposite direction ;-)
- nl 12y ago
  There is a whole field of AI research called belief propagation that deals with this.
- kszx 12y ago
  Strangely reminds me of Bayesian statistics and updating of prior probability distributions.
- phektus 12y ago
  Strangely reminds me of learning :P
12y ago

andyidsinga 12y ago

re this : "if you write about a topic in some fairly durable and public form, you'll find you worry much more about getting things right than most people would in a casual conversation." i wonder what the bar here is - certainly more than blog posts / self published websites as those are fairly close to casual conversation imho. glad to see pg picking up the pace on the writing!

marvy 12y ago
He said what the bar is in one of the footnotes: something with a title. I guess for him at least, the blog posts count.
- andyidsinga 12y ago
  yeah - I saw that, but seems to me it only barely meets the "fairly durable" test if you assume cache's and other history keeping mechanisms. I wonder if what is additionally required is : "someone you respect asks you to write on a topic". In PG's case, his audience might substitute, for others an employer or publisher might be what it takes.

davemel37 12y ago

I am noticing a trend in Paul's essays. The last two were about changing paradigms. The first was about how a second read of a book leads to a different understanding, and this essay is about not letting your previous beliefs close your mind about things that can change. I like though how he circles back to two fundamentals. One, human nature doesn't really change, and Two, betting on people is a better indicator of the future than betting on ideas. Probably the biggest mistake people make is looking for confirming evidence instead of using evidence to determine the relative likelihood of competing hypotheses. Even a large body of confirming evidence doesn't prove anything because that same evidence could be consistent with other hypotheses you never considered. You need to evaluate the diagnosticity of that evidence. (i.e. a patients high fever has almost no diagnostic value in determining what is wrong, because so many illnesses are consistent with that evidence. Whereas, one shred of evidence can disprove a hypothesis completely. Which is why good doctors rule out things to identify the most likely problem. These ideas PG is talking about are, IMO, some of the most important things for founders to understand. Don't look to confirm your theories, look to disprove them. Don't accept lore, challenge everything. Most importantly though, always evaluate competing hypothesis to prevent you from just trying to confirm what you are looking for.

vishnugupta 12y ago
> Don't look to confirm your theories, look to disprove them. I use this framework, though learnt it by reading Fenmayn's writings, when there's a debate as to use tool A or tool B to get X. And it's been very effective so far. I have a vague sense that B is better and a colleague is particular about A. Earlier I used to look deeper and deeper into how B is good at doing X. But realized that I wasn't convincing enough. Then I remembered Feynman's saying to the effect "the best way to prove something is to try very hard to disprove it". This has helped quite a lot in coming up with objective comparisons and use right tool for the task at hand; or in general to come up with the right solution the problem at hand.

evanwarfel 12y ago

Updating one's beliefs to get more accurate priors is something we should all strive to do. There is no such thing as having two beliefs of equal weight that contradict each other - that's an illusion created by either applying a different definitions to each belief, or a refusal to admit that you believe one more than the other. ... > "The winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain experts." I would also add that domain expertise is when one's internal model / map matches the territory. When this happens, one's intuition is accurate and one can notice patterns that other people can't, or one can make predictions that turn out to be right.

unclebucknasty 12y ago
I wonder if a lack of domain "expertise", but a general understanding of the domain instead, can sometimes be an advantage in generating domain-changing ideas.
- kevan 12y ago
  There's definitely a risk as a domain expert that you'll take things for granted. Henry Ford is a good example of this, he was never an expert in horse-drawn carriages but he changed that domain drastically.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
>There is no such thing as having two beliefs of equal weight that contradict each other - that's an illusion created by either applying a different definitions to each belief, or a refusal to admit that you believe one more than the other. Of course there is: P(A) = 0.5 and P(~A) = 0.5. Don't be silly.
lyricalpolymath 12y ago
> "There is no such thing as having two beliefs of equal weight that contradict each other" Of course there is and the situation in which you find it is called Cognitive Dissonance [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

gbog 12y ago

Great read. I would go a bit further and say that the goal is not to be an expert and is not related to start-ups. The goal of being open minded and sceptical as described in this essay, is to make sure one do not embrace sheepishly some ideas that will be considered obviously stupid twenty years in the future. For example in the 50s in Europe most intellectuals were communist or pro communist. Only a very few were neither reactionary nor communist. The goal, for me, is to be of these few. In the US history, it would mean to have been e.g.among the earliest abolitionists.

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sitkack 12y ago

This reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke's "Hazards of Prophecy" > When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. and Asimov > Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. beliefs, like stereotypes are shortcuts in cognition. We should always be applying the most powerful tool we have developed in the history of humanity, the scientific method.

baddox 12y ago
I've always wondered if Clarke's statement has anything to do with elderly scientists in particular, or if he's just commenting that most things are possible.
- alexbecker 12y ago
  Almost certainly elderly scientists in particular; if he meant a general statement then the juxtaposition with the previous sentence is very odd. Also there's this (paraphrased from memory) quote in Rendezvous with Rama: "even after hundreds of years, science never solved the problem of having elderly, conservative scientists at the helm of its governing bodies".
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  An elderly scientist is often one who did all his work in an old theoretical paradigm, a paradigm whose death is eagerly awaited by all the young PhDs looking for jobs with a new paradigm in their thesis.
  - waterlesscloud 12y ago
    A new paradigm that they'll stick to with an ironclad faith. Which is only marginally better.
- omegant 12y ago
  Inmy limited experience, I found (to my surprise) that most young scientist are also reluctant to think out of the beaten track (even if it's just to play devil's advocate in a discussion). I guess it takes somekind of rebel todo it, no matter what kind of human group you are talking about.

jcr 12y ago

I spotted the following in my usual reading this morning: >"Until this point, I have been describing the stereotyping process as a negative force for individual and team functioning. However, this process actually stems from an adaptive, often functional psychological process. Mental heuristics and cognitive shortcuts enable us to process information without conscious deliberation: they fill in the informational gaps we often experience when making decisions. In other words, habits of mind help us to save brain power for more difficult tasks. Joseph Pieper's classic "Leisure, the Basis of Culture" sets out this theory well. In the 1980s, people thought we could create expert systems by interviewing experts like brain surgeons or oil exploration specialists, and creating a rule chaining prolog environment that would recreate their decision-making ability. The problem was the experts did not know how they knew what they knew. That is, experts are creating associations between disparate experiences and pieces of knowledge, using the subconscious brain." [1] The quote above reminded me a bit of the previous "How You Know" essay by Paul Graham [2,3]. At times it's disheartening to realize the discrepancy between how much I read, and how much of it I can actually remember, but it's nice to know at least some of it manages to stay with me somehow. In this new essay, pg says: >"When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world." Stereotyping and similar classification are essentially heuristic modeling based on past experience. Some substantial part of our mental models are based on "Unknown Knows," or better said, our mental models are based on experiences we cannot consciously recall but still somehow know unconsciously. Even if we keep the models updated to have a "current version of the world" through seeking new experiences, we are still often incapable of either anticipating or handling new surprises. Maybe people who regularly succeed as startup investors (i.e. anticipating and handling surprising exceptions) have learned to retain some degree or form of suspended disbelief when applying their models to the world? It's trivially easy to suspend disbelief for the sake of entertainment like enjoying a fictional story. Intentionally escaping reality for a while is an established habit for most people. On the other hand, intentionally suspending a bias, belief or model in the real world seems to take more effort, but that's possibly due to my own lack of practice. [1] http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/11/179827-the-data-on-diversity/fulltext/ http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/11/179827-the-data-on-div... [2] http://paulgraham.com/know.html http://paulgraham.com/know.html [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753526

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bane 12y ago

Expertise is a weird thing. In today's world, one that changes so rapidly, it's very hard to become an expert in something and have the value of that expertise remain valuable. It used to be that expertise in some field or area would last generations, and guild-like systems of master/apprentice developed in response. Now you can't even make it through a degree program before the things you started to learn about at the beginning become virtually obsolete by the end. Watching the front page of HN and you'll see entire frameworks and languages come and go virtually as quickly as the seasons. When I was starting out, it was fully possible and reasonable to consider becoming an expert in COBOL and one or two kinds of mainframes and make a career of it. Expertise today requires that you start to think and operate at a higher level of abstraction in order to cover what you know, and where your knowledge might go. Or it might require you to make connections between old ideas that are still valid and new ideas as they appear. You might even be able to change career paths entirely, but things you learned as an expert in your old one might make you special and unique in your new one -- somebody with rare and unique talents. Like automating business processes in a non-technical career. I've been thinking a lot about beliefs and belief systems recently. I'm not quite sure I have any meaningful or concrete conclusions yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm going down the path of thinking that beliefs should generally be treated and handled with extreme caution, that they're some kind of holdover from an earlier evolutionary stage -- a vestigial kind of proto-thought process wedged somewhere between pure animalistic instinct and enlightened reason. They aren't inherently bad just like instincts aren't inherently bad, the instinct to pull your hand off a hot stove is good for example. Perhaps they some kind of optimized way of thinking that evolved when we had less hardware to compute with. An estimation system that got us through hundreds of thousands of long cold nights, alone in the world of beasts...when we couldn't quite think through everything. But now we can, and this old wetware technical debt kind of gets in the way now and again. It tends to make us rigid and lazy in our thinking...why think when believing is less work? Maybe it's possible to hack our beliefs be believing in the right things, by believing in reason, or believing that things should be changing, believing that we should evaluate and challenge ourselves from time to time, believing that we should feel like we're just on the edge of discomfort and force us to use this new better and harder to use equipment we've been gifted with.

eropple 12y ago

te_platt 12y ago

In the context of this article I think it's important to make a distinction between an expert and a specialist. I think of an expert as someone who almost always gets things right. For example, an expert pianist plays great music but it seems a bit off to think of an expert meteorologist. Weather is so variable it's just not realistic to expect anyone to get forecasts as accurate as pianist at a keyboard. But it makes good sense that a specialist will be able to better than most. I would change "When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world." to "When specialists get things wrong, it's usually because the world is so complex." So I agree that it's important to protect against obsolete beliefs it's also important to consider when the belief is really wrong and when it was just overloaded with confounding events.

sidcool 12y ago

The first paragraph is a gem. It took me few readings understand it in entirety. Great essay, Paul! > protecting yourself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you have to do to succeed as a startup investor This statement is not only true for startups, but for life in general.

mbesto 12y ago

There's a subtle theme in this essay which describes the thought process of how YC (well pg specifically) selects teams for YC. Perhaps in a way, bringing clarity to what is generally seen as a non-scientific and highly complex line of reasoning for hiring and selecting talent with very little limited context. However, I still don't feel like I've still fully grokked it. > Within Y Combinator, when an idea is described as crazy, it's a compliment—in fact, on average probably a higher compliment than when an idea is described as good. Yet, outside the walls of YC, sounding crazy means you don't get in. > But we could tell the founders were earnest, energetic, and independent-minded. (Indeed, almost pathologically so.) How is it possible to discern this in a YC application? This is all reminiscent of the talk Gabe Newell, CEO and founder of Valve, gave on the hiring practices at Valve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU#t=1291 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU#t=1291 Here he mentions the following: (paraphrased) "One of the first programmers of the company was the manager of a waffle house. He was one of the most and still one of the most creative people in the industry" So what made them take the risk? What makes Valve turn away every waffle house manager that applies today? What made YC take the risk on Chesky, Gebbia, and Blecharczyk?

sillysaurus3 12y ago
Determination seems to be one decisive trait. If you're determined, people often want to help you succeed or to work with you. Determination also seems to matter more than raw intelligence, and betting on determined people tends to be a good bet.
- kimdouglasmason 12y ago
  Being willing to work for low payoff seems to be one decisive trait. If you're willing to work for low payoff, people often want to take advantage of you. Being a sucker also seems to matter more than raw intelligence, and betting on suckers tends to be a good bet.
SamReidHughes 12y ago
> How is it possible to discern this in a YC application? They interview applicants in person, too.

jsonmez 12y ago

Have strong convictions, but hold on to them loosely.

pitchups 12y ago

There is an additional attribute that goes a long way in staying an expert in a changing world - humility or acknowledging that you do not or cannot know the future. PG hints at this when he says.. "...admit you have no idea what the right direction is, and try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of change...". It is also paraphrased quite well in the maxim of "Stay hungry, stay foolish" popularized by Jobs. But humility that stems from ignorance is at odds with popular expectations of an expert. The problem is what worked in the past may not work in the future. Being sensitive to changes in the world around you, requires you to momentarily stop being an expert and look at the world from the eyes of a novice or beginner. This is not only hard but sometimes impossible to do because of how we change as we acquire new knowledge. [2] So the trick is to be somewhat schizophrenic - being able to simultaneously view the world as an expert with the fresh thinking of a beginner or a novice. [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8754334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8754334

waps 12y ago
> There is an additional attribute that goes a long way in staying an expert in a changing world - humility or acknowledging that you do not or cannot know the future. Sadly there's one rather important setting where this does not work at all : Interviewing with a non-technical interviewer. Like one has to do for pretty much any non-individual contributor job at all but the very largest companies. I keep having this impulse and I find it actually convinces people you don't know what you're talking about. The more algorithms you've seen fail spectacularly at prediction, the more capable you are (especially if you figured out why), but the less capable you appear. Furthermore people always believe they can do better by just looking at the data and going with their gut feeling. This is not true, I've only seen people do that in a few cases. And I've seen people screw it up royally in more than a few cases. I think the successes were lucky guesses, because while they looked like they knew what they were doing, I could never get a decent response to the simple question : your arguments work just as well for 5 other predictions one might make, so why this one ? So I'm forced to doubt there. Either they knew more than they were willing to admit (one was also a political figure, so ...), or they were lucky guesses.
AndyNemmity 12y ago

oldpond 12y ago

Beliefs like JEE is a good thing? Like object oriented development is a good thing? Like Portal Server is still relevant? Yeah, I hit the wall with those all the time. Lots of ego in the way of changing those beliefs because the big guys have been selling this for the last two decades. How would you like to be the guy trying to convince enterprises that loosely coupled is the way to go when they've been sold on "silos are bad we need integrated systems"? I feel a little bit like Chicken Little at times. :)

holri 12y ago

The human nature is not static as well. Humans are able to think and act very differently. If I look back what I was thinking and doing 20 years ago, I have to shake my head in astonishment.

marcosdumay 12y ago
Yes, a person evolves that fast. But a population is much slower. To the point where "human nature doesn't change" is an extremely useful heuristic. If you look for counter examples, you'll find a few changes that took only a century or two, but in practice you'll probably never see one of those changes.

zan2434 12y ago

I wonder if being open minded is enough. The "winds of change" aren't always very strong, and accordingly new opportunities aren't (at least initially) better alternatives to the status quo, they just happen to have incredible future potential. To fully take advantage of this, the expert would have to move backwards, quite possibly endangering himself, while a new entrant to the field has no risk to assume by doing so. To use the hill-climbing metaphor described by other commenters, a new climber can begin climbing the new potentially tall mountain immediately, while the "expert" will first have to descend his peak.

asimjalis 12y ago

@pmarca has an interesting thread on this on Twitter [1]. In Peter Thiel’s terminology [2], PG’s view is optimistic nondeterminate, which might be fine for a VC but might not be the best choice for a founder. [1] https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/546533509922160640 https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/546533509922160640 [2] http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-13-notes http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-cs183-...

ThomPete 12y ago
And def not fine for the 99% of the working population.
napoleond 12y ago
Unfortunately Thiel's views don't really map to a "hard" 2x2 matrix--the axes should be considered to represent spectra or gradients instead. (I'm not presuming to be smarter than Thiel here, just extrapolating rationally... nobody believes the future to be entirely determinate or entirely indeterminate.) In light of that, I suspect PG and Thiel actually live in the same quadrant of determinate optimism. I haven't read PG suggest that we should just "wait" for the future to happen--he's merely suggesting that the most common path toward building the future is on a wave. (And Thiel built PayPal that way--he recognized a version of the future that was on the cusp of being realized and took it upon himself to make it happen.)

soup10 12y ago

What a dumb assertion that someone can be an expert on changing the world. Paul graham has lived in the startup world bubble for too long and is a bit off his rocker when it comes to having perspective on the larger picture of changing industries and global trends and dynamics. The next big thing is not some social media garbage app for sharing cat pictures. That much is clear. Take a look at the kind of low impact garbage YC specializes and funding to get a clear look at how paul graham views successful startup ideas and teams. It needs no reminder that the vast majority of YC companies, fail, have no impact, dissolve and get aquired by other teams or if they are lucky get a talent aquisition by a bigger fish with a bloated mergers and aquisitions budget. My advice to Paul, write essays about what you KNOW, not what you feel like rambling on about. You have lots of experience in the world of seed staging and getting small teams to make the leap into legitimate hard working business entities with growth potential. You don't have a ton of wisdom to share outside of that domain so stop acting like you do.

scrollaway 12y ago
PG does not in fact talk about being an "expert on changing the world" but of being an "expert IN a changing world". And indeed the essay talks about... well, seed funding, investment etc. Not random "out-of-bubble" assertions. You seem to have read the title and just spouted your vomit onto your keyboard then hit send. That's not really a good path to constructive criticism there, is it?
- ofir_geller 12y ago
  nor will it keep your keyboard in mint working condition.
sytelus 12y ago
Your comment is completely offtopic, pointless and undeserving. You are bickering about YC while not knowing basic facts about success and impact of YC. And you are advising pg on what he should do after making a a judgement that he knows nothing outside startups so I hope you have a good set of diverse accomplishment and experience in your resume to back it up. It's his website and his essay - he can ramble all he wants in anything he wants.

ExpiredLink 12y ago

"Anyway, the thing about progress is that it always seems greater than it really is." Wittgenstein

sytelus 12y ago

I'm not exactly sure what is the grand insight(s) from this essay that warrants it's rather link-baity lavish title. Does below captures all the tips and techniques pg mentioned? 1. Don't marry to your beliefs. This is always a delicate balancing act because we do have to have some belief to make a decision, we just don't know if it's a right. 2. Don't predict the future. Can be derived from #1 so I suppose redundant. 3. Bet on people instead of ideas. I think this is great advice for VCs but have been covered many times by pg. 4. Make friends/Surround yourself with smart people.: Not extremely practical unless you are a famous VC but even then not trivial. It would have been great essay if pg shared some stories and shared non-trivial insights that makes us better at doing above. BTW, I did got tripped at this line: Another trick I've found to protect myself against obsolete beliefs is to focus initially on people rather than ideas. Ummm... what was the first trick?

Implicated 12y ago
> Ummm... what was the first trick? "...to focus initially on people rather than ideas"
SiVal 12y ago
Yeah, at the risk of being "middle-brow", I didn't really learn much about "How to be an expert" from this. Maybe, it's just a title issue, and "How to be among the first investors to spot an exploitable change" or something similar would have set my expectations properly, but I was hoping to get some useful tips that would apply to a significantly broader definition of "expert".
lyricalpolymath 12y ago
the first trick was a meta-belief > believe in change
varchar 12y ago
With these kinds of advice (entrepreneurial / life), you just take the best lessons and move on. I like your point by point analysis. But I guess you cannot look at such articles solely through the lens of analysis. On an unrelated note - I know a lot of successful professionals and entrepreneurs (mostly non tech and some tech). Surprisingly they are not that analytical as one would expect. They have great drive, self belief, instincts, people skills, adaptability, negotiation skills, ability to bounce back and perhaps several other skills. I realized at some point in my career that great intellectual / analytical ability is just one aspect required for a successful career and there were several other important skills / traits. Warren Buffet famously said (I think in reference to stock analysts who pore through and analyze stocks endlessly) "Wall Street is the only place that people ride to in a Rolls Royce to get advice from those who take the subway."

blrgeek 12y ago

Coincidentally went to an effectual entrepreneurship workshop by Prof. Sarasvathy y'day. Her learnings from talking to 'expert entrepreneurs' are that 1. they do not believe the future can be predicted, esp in the early stages of a new venture 2. they prefer to create the future in areas with high uncertainty by forging partnerships with people they know already, and who are also investing in the same areas 3. they go to the customer at a very low 'acceptable loss' as they can, building as little of the product as they can, investing as little as they can, and getting the first initial set of customers as partners. 4. they jump in to a fast iteration of execution/sales that helps them discover/create the market, relying on sales as market research. 5. they find pleasant surprises along the way that shape their execution/market/venture and they change to fit the new reality - and they shape that reality along the way Finding great parallels with PGs essays here.. See http://effectuation.org/learn http://effectuation.org/learn Read also http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/how-great-entrepreneurs-think.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/how-great-entrepreneurs... and the original paper at http://www.effectuation.org/sites/default/files/documents/what-makes-entrepreneurs-entrepreneurial-sarasvathy.pdf http://www.effectuation.org/sites/default/files/documents/wh...

wslh 12y ago
It seems like Prof. Sarasvathy has a clear idea about what entrepreneurship really is. I understand that it is about a lot of uncertainty, coping with trial and error, and getting information from the business black box as fast as you can. One thing not addressed here is the importance of your location and your status / credentials. Not everything is about your personal skills.

lyricalpolymath 12y ago

ASK PG: when you are saying "energetic" people, do you also mean "passionately convinced"? It's interesting that on one side you try to avoid the pitfalls of your own beliefs (by smartly adopting meta-beliefs and techniques that sidestep the problem, like believing in change and focusing on people) but at the same time you are suggesting that you somehow accept, or decide to trust, the worldview of "energetic" founders. You might not mean it, but this connection is somehow untold in the classical narrative of the driven founder: there is a fine line between "energetic" and "passionately convinced", which also suggests that they might have and communicate strong beliefs in their success or their idea. Of course I understand that "strong beliefs" aren't forcefully connected with being an expert, which is your main argument. PG, Where do you stand on this? do you believe in founder's beliefs? Do founders who passionately believe in something convince you? I feel very sympathetic to the argument of your essay, for many reasons, and have grown to use the same meta-belief of believing in change; however, instead of sidestepping the problem, I tackle it heads on, by incorporating Doubt and Relativism in my decision making. I feel, and strongly believe ;), that Relativism is the cure to many cognitive biases; if you doubt yourself you can't be affected by the Dunning-Kruger effect; I think everybody should train themselves in managing the unavoidable cognitive dissonances of day to day life, it would make the world a better place. Relativism is also an important tool for creativity: the moment you doubt your frame of reference, you start seeing the picture outside of the box, new possibilities open up. Of course Relativism has it's shortcomings, and beliefs, which are rooted in emotions, command our behaviours more powerfully that the logical reasonings of Relativism. However, I believe, there are ways for us to be both "passionately convinced" and relativistic at the same time; I try to be like Cezanne, who would ask himself: "is this what I see?"

KedarMhaswade 12y ago

Kahneman attributes a lot to 'luck' of what experts achieve especially when it comes to predicting something. I am a bit surprised that PG does not give 'shear luck' its fair share. I am assuming that many (most?) of the startup founders, when they are being interviewed by the potential investors, are 'complete strangers'. By focusing objectively on ideas than subjectively or intuitively on people doing them, they believe that they mitigate the so-called risk. I am not convinced that by judging people rather than by judging ideas (in supposedly short amount of time) the chances of succeeding go up, because if we are often wrong judging ideas, what makes us good at judging people who are ever changing too? Of course, there is an undeniable 'credit history' part wherein if a 'successful' founder comes back with another idea, many investors are ready to 'shower money' on her/him -- I don't find anything majorly wrong with that attitude, but that alone does not guarantee success, I believe.

marcosdumay 12y ago
That may be one of the very few context where judging people is easier than ideas. Ideas that grow huge look completely random, except when you happen to know the one or two details that make them promising. And you can never know if you know all of those details. Almost all people that make something big share some few treats that most people lack, what makes this a useful filter. Of course people can change, what reduces the effectiveness of the filter, but it's still better than random.

C2E2 12y ago

More I read these VC spreading their wisdom, more I find the Silicon Valley barely a caricature.

McUsr 12y ago

What I got out of this essay, which I found to be good, is that you should investigate your hunches, more deliberately before dismissing them. That is hindsightly (From my hindsights :) )a great wisdom from Paul Graham.

whiddershins 12y ago

I don't agree that this essay is arguing for indeterminate optimism. I think you can consciously and deliberately shape the future while simultaneously being open to the reality that things are constantly changing.

fubarred 12y ago

Life is suffering, change, taxes and death. The meta of Buddhist philosophy (sans religion, spirituality, etc.) appears to be one of the most honest of the major, religion-derived belief systems.

akrymski 12y ago

And yet the truly successful people have gotten to where they are by sticking to their beliefs: - Warren Buffet has always believed that companies should be valued based on their profits, not their share price performance. Thus he didn't invest in the tech bubble of the 90s, and was forced to under-perform the market significantly for many years whilst everyone thought he was getting too old for the new way of things. Yet he stuck to his beliefs, and it turned out that he was right - the Nasdaq bubble evaporated and he again out-performed other funds in the long term. - Steve Jobs always stuck to his belief that computing devices for consumers should be fully integrated and beautifully designed. After getting kicked out of Apple and loosing the OS war to MS, he could have easily told himself his approach was wrong. But whether he is right or wrong became irrelevant - his belief was so powerful that it was contagious. - Zuck, Brin, and others have succeeded because they stuck to their beliefs instead of selling out early on. - Darwin stuck to his unorthodox beliefs until his theories became accepted. All of these people have/had a belief - a model of the universe which they passionately believed in. Having such a model means that predicting the future becomes possible, even though one can't predict exactly when that future will come, the same way Warren Buffet will never tell you what the market will do tomorrow, yet he certainly has a belief in where things are going long term. Jobs was too early with the Newton, yet his continued belief caused him to strike gold later on with the iPhone. There is an interesting difference between fundamental beliefs and "expert knowledge". The later constantly needs to adapt to take new information into account, but it is our fundamental beliefs that determine how we interpret that expert knowledge. For what it's worth, my startup investment belief has always been to: invest in companies that are run by great people that have created the best product in a growing market that has profitable competitors. I'll leave it up to the "experts" to speculate on which markets will grow most, or which competitors will win out. If Warren Buffet can't do it, I won't bother either. All that we can really judge to the best of our ability is the quality of the product and the team.

davemel37 12y ago
the difference is that all of these beliefs are rooted in change and/or going against the grain...which is exactly PGs point.

UhUhUhUh 12y ago

Talking about non-conform ideas, I would like to add that what should be of interest is not what changed but what doesn't. And I would like to offer that this idea of a world of accelerated change might in fact be a self-serving, Ptolemaic fantasy of omnipotence. What counts hasn't changed much in centuries. We're still using steam engines to produce electricity. And society is very similar to what it was in the Bronze Age.

kordless 12y ago

> The winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain experts. If you're sufficiently expert in a field, any weird idea or apparently irrelevant question that occurs to you is ipso facto worth exploring. I frequently wrangle with challenges related to finding other people who are open to listening and helping me explore these less-than-complete ideas in an unbiased way. It's always an enjoyable moment when someone listens and then adds to the conversation, instead of immediately trying to negate the kernel of the idea based on the fact it's in a chaotic state at the time.

dschiptsov 12y ago

"an expert in a previous version of the world" is a good metaphor. Old people in general are such experts, or some "fundamentalists" or "conservatives" - those, who are trying to "preserve" the world they grow up in, everyone who follow and worship a "ritual", a "process", stuck up "creationists" or "froidians", "public static void" guys - the list is surprisingly long. Some "teachers" said millennias ago "be the change", others said that "we are never the same". Perhaps, they have tried to capture this notion of "an ever changing process" - us (we are processes, not entities, they said) in a "beginningless and endless change" which they call "That" or "Tao", and we call Universe.

armansu 12y ago

The quote I'm adding to my Evernote: "It seems to me that beliefs about the future are so rarely correct that they usually aren't worth the extra rigidity they impose, and that the best strategy is simply to be aggressively open-minded. Instead of trying to point yourself in the right direction, admit you have no idea what the right direction is, and try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of change".

silverlake 12y ago

"Expert Political Judgment", by Tetlock, has a lot to say about this. It adds data to the story about the Fox and the Hedgehog. Basically, the hedgehog knows one big thing and tries to force the world into their mental model. The fox knows many things, allowing him to be more flexible thinking about a messy world.