Marc Andreessen: “Take the Ego Out of Ideas”
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...considering this statement was delivered while the US Workforce Participation is at 30+ year lows while productivity and technological change has made significant inroads during that time (ex: Macintosh 512k vs. iPhone 7), I think he's missing a large chunk of the, uh, big picture.
Then, contrast one of his well reasoned and very telling thoughts about the future:
>All of a sudden you can have the idea that an hour-long commute is actually a big perk because instead of driving and having to sit and focus and lurch through traffic, what if your car is a rolling living room? What if you get to spend that hour playing with your kid or reading the news or watching TV or actually working because you don’t have to worry about driving?
Because in the United States, we should be working even while we are getting to work, because we don't work enough? SMDH. To me, the Working Class has plenty of reason to be cynical about this vision of the future..."playing with your kids in the car" time or not.
However, these commutes should get shorter just because the cars will drive better and maybe at higher speeds.
Most people commuting are those with families who live further out for less cost and/or more house because they have families.
His quotes are more like anecdotal illustrations to a bigger point.
Why is the solution always to commute into cities?
I don't think there will be a problem for white collar workers or technical workers at all. Not sure about blue collar workers - I mean you always hear about how there is a shortage of people who are skilled in construction or whatnot. Will that be automated soon? I would be surprised. If not, perhaps some muscle-requiring jobs might even be more in demand.
Even if newer generations will be prepared for different types of labor, that still leaves lots of people with skills that are obsolete and the inability to adjust. And I think this problem is much bigger for lower-schooled work, which is exactly the kind of stuff that'll be automated first.
I'm a well-educated programmer and many of my skills are general and abstract enough to adjust to a changing world with relatively little effort. But I suspect a truck driver without a degree will have significantly more trouble adjusting to a world where his job is automated away.
While white-collar jobs fall somewhere in between, even there I've seen the negative effects of automation and changing requirements, and I think this is only now starting to become a real problem. I've met quite a number of people (even in the < 30 crowd) who are shockingly bad with computers, for example, and the only reasons I can think of that they get away with it is that 1) their 40+ manager/boss is is equally 'illiterate' so the whole company is 'old-fashioned' or 2) they cannot be easily fired (which I approve of, personally).
The way I see it, many of these people are one crafty, ambitious, young tech-savvy employee, consultant, or competitor away from being obsoleted. There's just a lag between what is possible and what companies actually do.
1. A lot of us think we will be needed, or we will be able desirable to someone, or company.
2. I don't know your backround, but unless your education is in a field where there's a big barrier to entry (medicine always comes to mind); I think even the Ivy Leaguers will feel the rath of automation.
3. Willie Brown is actively wondering what San Franciso is going to do when this current tech boom ends. He doesn't want to add to the huge homeless problem that visible everywhere in that city.
4. I read somewhere that workforce participation is at historic lows, or a 30 year low. I don't know? It's the number of people who can work, but just gave up number. I've looked at the unemployment numbers, and they just don't feel right. I almost feel like they are lying? I know so many able bodied people who are barely getting by. They have multiple jobs because they are young, and have energy. Companies like Uber has no problem finding people who will go into debt in order to "get their side hussle on". It's all so easier when your on your 20-30's. You have a network of friends on for support/networking. I know too many forty year olds that are living off their savings. It's so much harder when you get older.
5. I really fear what will happen to the "well educated" white collar worker finds out their skills are just not needed, or they hit 45 on the tech sector? I honestly don't know what "well educated" is anymore. It makes a much sence as a "Professional Manager"? I can't imagine companies in the future will really care what university you went to. After all, they went to college too. They know what it's all about.
6. My point is we should all be a little concerned. I know well educated guys whom hit 45-50, and just arn't needed anymore. Some try to go into blue collar jobs, but they don't seem to last. (Try to stay somewhat fit. Blue collar work is usually physically demanding. Even working at Cost-co, or Wholefoods is standing on your feet all day long, and construction blue collar jobs--are a bitch on the body.) I have noticed White Collar workers usually come from supportive families, so they don't become homeless. But--many do.
7. I really don't want to debate anyone. I just don't see the availability of jobs like I did in the 90's, and that was during a ression. I do see a lot of cushy tech jobs that I doubt will be there in ten years. Why do I feel like we will soon be talking about the free food Google used to offer its employees? "Remember the good ole days?"
Because I do strongly believe that society favors the higher-educated, or at least those who are good at abstract thought, and I think it's very unlikely that this will change in the near future. And if it does, we're probably all pretty fucked.
That said, I'm not disagreeing with you (both). Just wanted to clarify my position.
I'm skeptical because
1. a large part of the housing pressure in many urban places is artificially created by the past several decades of bad building/zoning policy.
2. the usual type of struggling rural community we think about is often more than an hour from a big city. I doubt even a self-driving car makes a 3-5 hour roundtrip commute appealing. And this doesn't address traffic at all, which is already often the bottleneck of how far out from a city it is feasible to commute from.
I'm generally excited about the prospect of self-driving cars but apprehensive of this idea that it will let us continue/increase our suburban sprawling for free.
Many cities have gone through drastic swings in population due to structural changes in the economy. Some, like Oakland, did not handle it well and paid dearly for it.
Long ~3 Hr RT "Self-driving" commutes already exist to some extant: FB, Google, etc, Oakland->MTV buses. People use them and they are required for talent retention.
It's nearly impossible to have both, ie, progress and no negative consequences. So which would you rather have?
For example, did nobody stop to ask what would happen to all that non-biodegradable plastic meant to service a disposable economy?
Do you feel the impact of the browser has been a net negative?
Personally, I just want a better voice in what that progress looks like. Rather than listening to venture capitalists whose sole claim to fame is making a lot of money off a social media platform. "Oh, well he got lucky in the financial lotto, so I guess I better listen to him."
SV capitalists are like yesterdays capitalists. "More capitalism" is the only solution that makes sense to them. Not necessarily because it makes sense in the big picture, but because their power and wealth rely on it.
How do you have progress without private industry actually making things?
There was the whole Netscape thing, too. I mean, way his arguments on their merits, but he's not just a random VC.
If the good ideas are obvious, why bother listening to him?
He seems to ignore that an obvious good idea still requires exorbitant amounts of capital to enable it. No one can hack together a Netscape and win big anymore, been there done that.
Honestly, this "advice" comes off as a) obvious b) tone deaf.
Right now we can't show you ads in your car, of course, because you're in command of two tons of steel moving at high speed, so your attention needs to be fully concentrated on that task. But if the car could drive itself, think of all the ways we could monetize that newly tappable reservoir of attention! It'd be a gold rush!
He doesn't say that, of course, because the vision of a world where you can spend your commute playing with your kid is a much easier sell than the vision of a world where your car becomes a kind of rolling Skinner box, with you a literally captive audience (what are you going to do, step out of a moving vehicle?) to be bombarded with messages by the highest bidder. But... yeah.
Also, I believe the theory is (assuming we even still have 8 hour work days), you work an hour in the car, work 6 at work, work an hour driving home.
They aren't. Which is a problem.
No, because if you work-day was originally 8hrs of work + 2hrs of commute, it's now just 6hrs of work + 2hrs of work.
I agree:
I put 200,000+ miles on each of three cars, mostly commuting to work. Soooo, that was a lot of money, all after tax -- buy the car, usually on time so that there was interest, pay for insurance, fuel, maintenance, tolls, parking. All those expenses should have been pre-tax money, "unreimbursed business expenses" like, say, professional text books at least long were.
Should I be compensated for my high rent that comes with living downtown?
The parking is insufficient and costs money, so the drivers would like cheaper more plentiful parking.
The non-drivers catch the bus or pay extra to live in the surrounding suburbs so they can walk in.
Neither side will see the others point of view.
When I was brand new in my career I got about $200 a month for not using a parking spot in Santa Monica. It was a nice little bonus.
I mean, I hope this becomes the case but I think employees will need to ask for it more.
I'm not saying it's impossible. I've done it here and there. But it's definitely a challenge and far from a norm.
> ...considering this statement was delivered while the US Workforce Participation is at 30+ year lows w...
You cropped out "around the world" which was a prominent prepositional phrase in his sentence.
Having ego in the idea means to equate the idea with yourself. So if someone criticizes the idea, ask questions, points out flaws, or issues with it a) don't take it personal and b) you need to be open to those and not dig your heels in refusing to adapt because "then it isn't my idea!"
Many years ago on HN, I think before he even became part of YC, Paul Buchheit said "You have to be arrogant enough to believe that everybody else is wrong, but humble enough to believe that you may be wrong too." That about sums it up.
Statically, you're just as likely to be right with the first idea as the one you're sat on for months
In practice, that usually means do the minimum you can to verify the key assumptions of each idea, back out and try something different if any key assumption doesn't hold, and if you find something that has a good chance of working, stick with it.
If you sit on an idea for months, then that means it has survived a a good deal of reasonability testing and careful analysis, as you have been mentally prodding and poking the idea for a while, and haven't found a good reason to abandon it yet.
While the idea you just came up with has been through absolutely no deep analysis, by definition.
The subconscious mind is incredibly powerful, but it needs time to do its work.
Of course, slowly acquired self-delusion and emotional entanglement regarding the idea is a risk. But this varies significantly among people, can be somewhat defended against, and doesn't negate my main point.
This means that public response to the bare idea is never a good barometer, and you have to look to other things for data about whether it's going to be successful enough. This requires rigorous study and brutally honest introspection.
Don't get bent out of shape if people don't understand or respect what you're doing, but don't assume you're invincible or automatically right. Some wanna-be entrepreneurs waste their entire adult lives starting failing business after failing business, assuming that starting a business is the key to success, and that any idea they have is intrinsically valuable. Don't do this.
I will say that doubters are everywhere and you do have to be able to persevere. My own wife was one of them with one of my companies. She'd say why are you spending so much time on that business when it doesn't make any money? I also met with an industry expert at the beginning and they told me not to bother; that there's already an 800 lb gorilla in the space and the market doesn't really need another entrant. Needless to say I bootstrapped it to 40k MRR and that gorilla offered to buy my company and I told them no.
Many times the doubt is not about your idea; people are just scared of any existing competition. They think - oh there are other companies doing that. Non-entrepreneurs seem to get more jazzed about new ideas that aren't being done and they get completely disappointed and paralyzed when they find out their idea isn't new and someone is already doing it. To the point they won't even see how they are doing it and see if they can do it better. I get jazzed when I see companies making a lot of money in a niche but not doing it well.
For many people, maintaining the ego on your idea/vision results in second mortgages on their house, high credit card debt, a lot of time away from family, and not knowing when to hang it up or change course.
Separately - taking the ego out of ideas is definitely a good thing when building a company with one or more partners.
You should stick with your vision, but not tie your ego into how you originally planned to execute towards that vision.
In tech, we meet so many people who are emotionally attached to their work, who would treat their production as 'their baby'. This is a terribly common counterproductive bias. It prevents from:
- taking criticism productively: people "put their soul" in their work, and then someone tells them it's perhaps not the best way. Do hear them.
- assessing one's position objectively: people who are attached to their work often misconstrue their vision with the reality of the work. They tend to minimize weak points and emphasize strong points.
- delegating your job away: people infatuated with their work have a hard time giving it away. Necessarily, the delegate will screw it up.
That should be rule number 0 of all jobs: Be invested in the mission, not in the solution
This is ridiculous. That's what our supposedly most innovative thinkers can come up with? Turning your car into a living room so we can have even more commuting (with all the wonderful side effects that come with it ...)?
What about eliminating the need to commute in the first place?
1hr commute outside of Minneapolis, Duluth, St. Cloud, or any of the other metro areas in MN and you're living in a beautiful cabin in the woods.
Keep in mind, sharing files and chat essentially were solved problems long before Dropbox and Slack came along, too. However, it was only with these two companies and their products that a wider audience adopted those solutions because finally someone got the UX right.
"Keeping an unmanned Predator drone in the air for twenty-four hours requires about 168 workers laboring in the background. A larger drone, such as the Global Hawk surveillance drone, needs about 300 people...an F-16 fighter aircraft requires fewer than 100 people for a single mission."
It's well known that the industrial revolution created countless new jobs that were unimaginable at the time, a sentiment echoed in The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson. But how do you pick the winners that will bring the most jobs? Some say disruptive innovation, but it still seems like an open question.
On a work day, NYC subway provides 6 million trips. Think of all of the car drivers it is displacing. And then there are the buses! And that is in NYC alone. Just think of all of the drivers mass transit has already displaced throughout the nation!
Then there is intercity transit: think of all of the drivers displaced by planes, trains, and buses!
Self-driving trucks? Trucks have been displaced by trains, barges, container ships, ....
Cars, even electric ones, create air pollution which impacts health as well as greenhouse gas. Electric cars are charged from electric power plants -- most of the US electricity is generated by carbon-based fuels -- coal and gas.
Using Via which transports multiple passengers [part of Manhattan, part of Brooklyn, Chicago, Washington DC] (or Uber pool for example) at least helps to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas compared with single passenger vehicles that at least helps to reduce air pollution / greenhouse gas.
I think if you read history, you'll find that, overall, the automobile disrupted and reduced the size of the passenger rail industry, and public transportation in general. Not the other way around.
Now we have our 'great' thought leader try to convince us about the virtues of hard work and 1 hour commute again.
How about "Put the type of Ego in your ideas that will remove the need for you to have a job in a few years"? Because jobs will be going away, and we don't need an even more hard core rat race in the US.
Biased by me? Surely. But I haven't seen a benevolent VC in my life, and I've met 10-12 of them. Anecdotal? Of course. None of us knows them all so there you have it, anecdotal evidence.
I can't take this guy for real. Plus, he looks like he's in the rich bubble and "playing with your kids in the car" is a horribly misguided idea. So people should work even in their leisure / warmup time. Sure!
FFS.. No. They are not destroyed and created. These jobs are just shifted from one company to another, and most of them are seasonal, or part-time jobs.
I wonder why isn't telecommuting / virtual presence a big part of his predictions.
His ideas seem to be (A) some large changes in the economy and society from (B) some exploitations of largely existing computer technology to meet some want/need previously unnoticed or infeasible to meet.
But, even for just (A) and (B), there is potentially MUCH more potential in ideas that Andreessen seems to ignore.
An example was Xerox: Copying paper documents was important. The main means was carbon paper. Xerox did quite a lot of engineering research based on some early research, IIRC, at Battelle. The result was one of the biggest business success stories of all time.
Andreessen doesn't discuss research ideas -- how to have them, pursue them, apply them, evaluate them, etc.
So much for the short-lived renaissance of the city. Will millennials still want short commutes when they can pass the time in their cars?
If I become a remote/work-from-home/smb-owner I'd love to just being a self-driving car doing stuff on the go and also changing where I am all the time.
Then you start to imagine what businesses could do with this. Self-driving food trucks is an obvious example: why pay a delivery driver when your restaurant drives itself?
Even with the difficulties, it was 100% worth it. I still dream of it, sometimes.
That seems like a gross simplification of the way things usually work. Saying good ideas are obvious sounds a little egoistic, which seems ironic, considering the title
just look at andreesen horowitz investments. many are largely media companies(buzzfeed, stack exchange). they've tried doing finance which is a much bigger market but like clinkle clearly imploded and coinbase probably is next(literally transfers went down the other day eek). so fb is still all he's got.
he hasn't invested in any big winners yet beyond fb/media. so why should i listen to this guys advice(unless of course if i'm building a media company).
Netscape sold for more than that.
If you read interviews on the topic of say, cancer research, it would make sense for journalists to talk to an oncologist or a person who works for the American Cancer Society, versus just any doctor or a philosopher.
But his largest investments have been outside media. Anki, Qik, Sigma Networks, Equinix, Asana. He's certainly not out of his element when he isn't talking media.
He had a career before Netscape, he wrote the Mosaic browser for the Mac and Windows while he was still a student at the University of Illinois. After having to install tcp/ip on my Windows machine (Trumpet Winsock) that is the first browser that I used, perhaps a week(?) after it launched.
Interestingly after getting into a spat when he wanted to use the Mosaic name with his new company his alma mater licensed the code to Bill Gates so he could quickly launch Internet Explorer 1.0 and use it to destroy Netscape. So he really is the father of the modern browser.
Andreesen is a bit of a blowhard at times, but he's incredibly sharp and has a great track record. Trust, but verify.
I suppose one can find these answers from people who commute by company shuttles, trains or subways.
"Guys look! An hour long commute is actually a good thing because you can spend it with your kids!" Why is it so hard to spend time with our kids now?!
I know that sounds harsh, but we seriously need to stop the hero worship in SV culture and begin building a society that benefits everyone, not a society that works itself to the bone just to eat the cake of a larger corporation and enrich the early investors. They will just as quickly dilute your quality of life as they will dilute the shares in your company.
Currently, about 10% of the world's population lives in extreme poverty. It was 12% in 2012. It was 40% in 1990.
The history of the world, post-war 20th century, is one of extreme progress for the lives of real people -- especially really poor people.
So, what do you think drove that change? Was it shaping a society that "works for everyone?" Or was it technology and the efficient allocation of capital?
I'd argue that it was the latter, because I can look at the world and find the places where people have remained extremely poor, where people have starved to death in large numbers, and it's not hard to see that it happens in the places where technology and capital are stopped.
Before modern markets were (slowly) permitted to function in China and India, lots and lots of people died of hunger. Way more than today. The lives of nearly everyone in the former USSR became much better when the wall fell. It's still pretty terrible to live in North Korea. Right now in Venezuala people are starving, and there are hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating on the streets.
I'm fine with "the oligarchs" getting rich, by comparison.
The factors that generate the last three are largely unrelated to median income. In fact they reliably go down when neoliberal "efficient allocation of capital" becomes the dominant ideology.
People are starving in the US and UK too. Did you know that around 15% of US households cannot consistently afford food, while more than 5% have "very low food security" which includes persistent periods of hunger or malnourishment?
>> 15% of US households cannot consistently afford food, .. 5% hunger
What food are we talking about ? because basic grains, etc - the kind of meals indians eat, for ex.(and are very healthy and pretty tasty) - are extremely cheap. So is 15% possible ?
Why would it be hard to believe that wealthy Western countries feature extreme or even abject poverty?
America had some huge tent cities filled with previously not-homeless families living in them following the 2009 meltdown.
Yes, median household income has stagnated in the U.S. since 2000, while both the low-end and the high-end have improved. Can you support your claim that it this correlates with "neoliberal" policies? Where in the world has life gotten better that you think is a better model? Can you please name a place on earth where something other than free-market capitalism has proven successful?
I never claimed that no one in the U.S. or U.K. was in poverty. I claimed fewer were than before, and fewer are than in countries will less access to technology and capital.
Your other point -- that people in extreme poverty can actually be happier -- well, I don't know what to say. Feeding starving people more often seems like an intrinsically worthy goal to me. I can't imagine the pain of not having enough food for my children.
Lol! I think this incentive-based version works better though. If the libertarian culture of Californian idealists is imposed across the board, we would probably witness the end of innovation (unless war and existential threats provide the incentive)
Even if it's broken, don't fix it.
While I'm not opposed to the idea that if you're born -- and if so much of the world values human life including and especially in the womb -- then you should have the opportunity to at least "get by" and not be per force exploited, much less sickened and killed.
While I'm not opposed to it, there is a pre-cursor of ostensibly more limited scope, and perhaps of greater benefit than just "throwing undifferentiated dollars" at a problem.
Access to healthcare. Not necessarily absolutely unlimited, spend 100K for an extra last week of life healthcare. But quality basic, effective healthcare.
If we value human life, then we should also value the quality of that life. Providing effective health care greatly enhances that quality. It greatly enhances the ability of people to take care of themselves, and their families. And their friends.
You may not live in a palace, nor anything close. But we'll do our best to help you have the physical wherewithal to enjoy the day. And to keep you that way. If you become injured or ill, you will not be alone -- and we will not let others prey upon you in your weakness.
If we -- here in the U.S., in my case -- can't do this. With all our resources and largess. Well, then, you can just go and stuff the rest of your moralizing and idealizing.
I also want my insurance to spend a million dollars if it means I can live for an extra week. Even if I'm absolutely miserable. Even if I'm unconscious. I don't care about your "not necessarily absolutely unlimited" healthcare plans that dictate how long I get to live. That's not your call, if I paid for insurance that says they'll spend a million dollars on end of life care they'd better spend a million dollars.
Just to preempt Poe's law here, I'm absolutely serious in both of my above statements. I'm not creating a straw man or using hyperbole. I think basic income and "free" healthcare would have strings attached that I quite frankly find disgusting.
> I would have a thousand children if I could.
I know this is just an example, but here are obligations that come with children beyond the economic cost. As someone with 3 small children, a basic income for them would not incentivize me in any way to have more.
You can also pay for your $1M never-let-me-die insurance policy over what free healthcare provides.
What makes you worry that people would try to intrude into your decision of how many children you want to have, or how much to spend on healthcare?
I hope you're not one of them. Because, per your attitude, I'm free to kill you and take all you have.
Make people pay for their kids. That's fine with me. Make it expensive to have kids -- an expense you can't easily get out of, like credit card debt and student loans and, hey!, medical bills, during bankruptcy.
Why are you going to make the kids suffer? If someone is that uncaring to start with, the sight of their suffering kids is going to turn them around?
Why do I take care of other people, already on the earth? So I can walk down the street in peace and comfort.
Why do I pay for others' health care, meaning those not of my family? (And I have, including personally, maybe a lot more than you.) Because the world isn't perfect, and it screws people over. And physical discomfort engenders psychological discomfort and suffering. I can't fix the past, as history, but I believe we should do our best to ameliorate and alleviate its physical after-effects.
I've observed the benefit of helping others. And I've suffered the consequences of others' inconsideration.
For those reasons, I think we should guarantee each other's access to quality health care.
It's called "insurance". That is, insurance against many things. Because you don't know who life is going to screw over. And because you'd rather spend your day with healthy people, than miserable ones.
P.S. A major point of advice in life, including from many experts, is to "move on."
Do you want to spend years in court, and struggling to find ways to pay for the legal effort, to seek recompense for a past injury? Or maybe do you want to heal it as best you can and focus on the present and future?
And, HN tends to be populated with people who are not overly fond of lawsuits and unlimited liability. Well, what is a practical way of lessening those? Provide an avenue for mistakes to be addressed and for people to get on with their lives.
As the old saying goes, "Health is wealth." Restore their "wealth", in this aspect. Under those circumstances, I think and find that most people then choose not to dwell on the past. Including in court.
But you are fine with letting people with less money die?
Universal health care doesn't mean you can't pay extra for supplemental stuff.
Then of course you just have the reality that plenty of the love coming their way is just... well... ass-kissing for favors, status, money, or in some vague hope of some of those.
Until or unless enough talented people figure out that they'd have better odds playing the lottery than aiming to become an SV oligarch/plutocrat, there will continue to be a culture of this intensely covetous "worship", that almost inevitably morphs into loathing and resentment.
That's just the "in" people... the public at large is either subjected to intense marketing and PR, or unaware of such people.
Here's a thought experiment: what was Marc Andreesen's last idea? How much ego was in it: none, some, or a lot?
But when it comes to building a society that benefits everyone - how? That's always the question. Pretty much everyone agrees that it's a good goal, but when it comes down to figuring out "What would peoples' lives look like in a society that benefits everyone", nobody agrees.
Let's acknowledge that and stop treating these people like Heroes because they got rich.
For example, that socialized medicine is the better method to reach that goal ?
(I'm not actually arguing that such science is shoddy, only that the perception that they are shoddy and invalid is a strong disincentive to listen to any research on this matter. It's actually really disheartening to me that this is the case.)
I don't see a lot of people doubting that someone like Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates figured out a viable pathway to success, for which luck plays(played) a role, but is not the only factor. The problem is that for every Buffet you have dozens of clowns with platforms, massive egos, and cults of personality.
I would argue that a person that has a happy home life and feels comfortable and sufficiently compensated in their work is a success. There are hundreds of millions such people. This doesn't seem overly complex at all.
Yeah, but when someone says "Marc Andreessen is successful" most people are able to deduce the criteria that was used to make that judgment. So while "success" as a whole may not have a firm definition, "be successful like Marc Andreessen" may.
It is critical to understand that the super rich are not superhuman, though some may believe they are. They are just lucky. That doesn't mean they aren't entitled to their belongings, but it's bad for everyone to believe that such wealth translates to superiority or to some type of hidden knowledge.
Worship is a problem, but methodical research of the sort that went into "Good to Great" is not.
sports are the easiest way to illustrate this point, but it also applies to other areas.
with coin flipping, replacing alice with bob does not influence the outcome. everyone has the same odds because luck is the only determinant. no amount of practice matters. the odds alice can flip 10 consecutive heads on her next turn will always be the same as bob's.
with basketball, replacing alice with steph curry vastly increases the odds of hitting 10 consecutive free throws. most importantly, alice can improve her odds with practice.
business is like poker: the longer the timeline, the more true skill emerges and dictates success. but if you only play one hand, then yes, luck may dictate the winner.
> Self-driving cars, for example, could potentially put 5 million people involved in transportation jobs out of work. And creating 5 million new jobs for them seems impossible with net monthly job gains typically in the hundreds of thousands. “Five million jobs seem like a lot of jobs. It is a lot,” Andreessen says. But looking at the big picture shows that “every year in the U.S. on average about 21 million jobs are destroyed and about 24.5 million are created,” Andreessen says. “So the real answer to how do you replace 5 million jobs is, we already replace that in less than a quarter [of a year] today.”
This is disingenuous, bordering on stupid.
If a McDonald's closes and another one opens, 20 jobs are destroyed and 20 new ones are created, but they're the same!
What we are talking about with self-driving cars is an entire category of jobs being destroyed, and 5 million people doing the same thing, becoming unemployed at the exact same time (a time when their job doesn't exist anymore).
Very different from the normal life of the economy.
200 years ago 95+% of all people worked in agriculture. In developed countries, now barely 1-2% do so. 100 years ago the vast majority worked in manual labour jobs. Now people are moving on to service jobs. Macro-economically speaking, those were much larger and more rapid changes than what we're seeing right now.
This is not new. It's normal economic development. Nothing unusual at all. People have to stop portraying this negatively, and Marc is correct in seeing this as a positive to humanity.
His argument is that we need to manage this shift as a society. Some countries pro-actively do so (European social security comes to mind), others do not (USA). I tend to agree with him that it does need to be managed.
What we're doing, now, is destroying whole sectors of the job market.
It has happened before, yes! -- but it was horrible then, and it will be horrible now (and now we have youtube, which they didn't have in the UK or India in the 19th century).
This has happened many, many times over the 250 years since the Industrial Revolution. Each time, the old jobs have been replaced by newer and better jobs, and each time people have worried about mass unemployment and misery that did not happen.
One trend to consider: each "mega successful company" for the past 100 years or so (maybe longer?) has been extraordinary because of how few people were required to start the company, and how much profit per employee they generate. The unspoken side effect is "we need fewer people" (and they're hard to find AKA "90% of the people we talk to can't do the job"). As companies focus on these types of efficiencies, they're creating more value while providing fewer jobs. I think this is OK, but that's what's happening. So take this to its logical limit and you have mass unemployment. Now add A.I. as an accelerator to that and you have what will actually happen.
This is a very accessible video with a similar argument and much better examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
We're just going to have to start thinking about a society where 50% of the "eligible workers" are out of work at any given time. The way we're setup now, it'd be chaos. But there's a lot that can be done ahead of time to prepare, like expanding welfare until it looked more like a basic income and was socially acceptable.
In such a world, most people will have to be on the dole at some point in their life, and that will be OK. As opposed to now where our society thinks that's very much not ok and will punish you in various ways for it. Most people are simply not going to be economically useful and no amount of forcing them to be re-educated is going to change that.
I don't think so.
If "most people are simply not going to be economically useful" for what reason, besides an appeal to utopianism, is it a good idea to strain the country's resources in chase of an ideal?
Basic income will pave the way to cementing this feudalistic class-inequality we possess today. Extremely simplified: Those who believe in virtue through "self-fulfillment" (leisure) will intermingle and breed with the same, and so will those who believe in virtue through industry.
The first will mimic the lower classes (maybe even the proletariat) and be "left behind," degenerating over the years into nothing more but grazing animals.
The second will mimic the higher classes and continue to consolidate power and seize freedoms for themselves.
Basic income is an idealistic idea, both impractical and separated from human nature.
Two very practical reasons.
A) People need to buy groceries. What will you do when they're at your door with pitchforks, pissed because you told them to "go eat cake"?
B) For the larger economy to function, there has to be bottom up purchasing pressure at the consumer level. Walmart has to be making lots of money so they can buy cool stuff from startups (some of which eventually turn into large companies buying from startups themselves). If you just give people money to spend, that will drive the economy at the bottom. It's basically like the opposite of trickle-down economics and I think it's much more sustainable.
Also, there's growing awareness that sociopaths aren't good for society, so arguments along the lines of "oh quit whining and suck it up you pussies" are starting to get a lot more pushback.
It's a good thing I have the police and military under my thumb to quell all uprisings. If I were smart, I would elevate them to the upper class and remove their current class loyalties.
But a more practical answer: What's stopping those with (economic resources) from continuing their views that those without aren't human. That they're causing upheaval in society and their plight is baseless. That they should be locked away, or worse.
> If you just give people money to spend, that will drive the economy at the bottom. It's basically like the opposite of trickle-down economics and I think it's much more sustainable.
This goes against your first point. Basic income is assumed to mean "just enough income to buy vital products, services, and utilities." Commodities don't drive the economy and innovation. Unless, you propose a "workless wage" where the average person gets something like 70k just for being alive.
Which then, why work? The average joe doesn't care about the same things most HN users do. They'll simply stop producing the labor that serves as the foundation for so many "innovative" and "cool" companies.
So on and so forth, the economy crashes.
> Also, there's growing awareness that sociopaths aren't good for society, so arguments along the lines of "oh quit whining and suck it up you pussies" are starting to get a lot more pushback.
I fear it's a similar situation to drug addicts. Crack-down hard on the, relatively, low-level crime, instead of starting from the top. Similarly here, crack down on the most obvious, and less intelligent, of the pack and you're just strengthening the sociopath's genome.
> Which then, why work?
The same reason people already making 70K working a certain number of hours with a certain degree of effort expend additional effort to make more if they can do so: because wants are unlimited.
Of course the level of universal income an economy support varies by the degree of automation and other factors (including cultural factors), so it's best to start small, and set it up so it scales smoothly and naturally with the capacity of the system to support it rather than simply targeting a particular (basic or otherwise) level.
Wants are theoretically unlimited, however in practice people have a few set of wants they need to have fulfilled to be "content." See: new video games, new computer specs, new car, etc.
You don't have a majority of spendthrifts among the labor-producing class.
Famous last words!
> If I were smart, I would elevate them to the upper class and remove their current class loyalties.
Until they realize they don't need you, kill you, and take control. See history of the Praetorian Guard. Or KGB.
> Basic income is assumed to mean "just enough income to buy vital products, services, and utilities."
It means a lot of things. Notice I said "expand welfare" because that's a lot easier and clearer than "introduce basic income". Basically financial security is high and will continue to increase, so the question is about solutions to that.
> Commodities don't drive the economy and innovation.
Actually, they kind of do because you have to look at b2b startups and how they really represent most of the interesting companies (and value) being generated by startups these days; if you're innovative and an entrepreneur and all that, odds are high that you might find yourself starting something in the b2b space. You'll be trying to sell to large enterprises that sell stuff like electricity, cell phones, food, etc. Commodities. The commodities that drive the economy.
You know who the biggest ad buyers in the US are? Procter and Gamble. AT&T. Comcast. Verizon. Commodities. And every ad agency is a b2b startup. Not to mention "ad tech".
Enterprise margins/profits are up now because of gains from automation, and they're driving the startup boom (plus an unhealthy amount of free money pumped into the top--instead of bottom which is what I'm proposing). Eventually, that will run out because bottom up consumer demand will drop (and free money will stop). That will cause a crash. Unless measures are introduced to give people money to spend so they can jumpstart the economy from the bottom up.
> Which then, why work? The average joe doesn't care about the same things most HN users do. They'll simply stop producing the labor that serves as the foundation for so many "innovative" and "cool" companies.
You can still get rich with a cool innovative company. But yeah, if you're not doing something interesting, why work? My answer to that is, "You shouldn't, and the cheapest solution to your resulting financial insecurity is for the government to give you money to go buy things."
> Similarly here, crack down on the most obvious, and less intelligent, of the pack and you're just strengthening the sociopath's genome.
Yeah, people have been doing that for generations and are starting to see the problem, therefore looking to the top.
Keep them at arm's reach and content, and their greed will keep them loyal. I've known of the Praetorian to assassinate emperors, but only those unwieldy that didn't indulge them.
> Actually, they kind of do because you have to look at b2b startups and how they really represent most of the interesting companies (and value) being generated by startups these days; if you're innovative and an entrepreneur and all that, odds are high that you might find yourself starting something in the b2b space.
You're conflating B2B startups with B2B businesses. One is a Remora fish and the other is a Shark. The first, aides the second and gets a little in return. The second, takes the lions-share (or should I say sharks-share?) of profits.
> You'll be trying to sell to large enterprises that sell stuff like electricity, cell phones, food, etc. Commodities. The commodities that drive the economy.
They do not drive the economy. They keep it running. The basic electricity, cell phone, food, etc. are just that: basic.
> You know who the biggest ad buyers in the US are? Procter and Gamble. AT&T. Comcast. Verizon. Commodities. And every ad agency is a b2b startup. Not to mention "ad tech".
You're stretching the term commodity too much here. AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon are not commodities companies.
> Enterprise margins/profits are up now because of gains from automation, and they're driving the startup boom
To be blunt, this is another leap of logic that isn't true. Enterprise profits may be up, but they're not funneled directly back into VC cash (or equivalent) for startups.
> Eventually, that will run out because bottom up consumer demand will drop
Why do you suppose this?
> That will cause a crash. Unless measures are introduced to give people money to spend so they can jumpstart the economy from the bottom up.
I'm not quick to insult, but this flies in the face of all economic theory (all the above as well) and is exhausting to refute. The economy does not need a jumpstart via cash infusion. The economy will not crash because of perpetual deflation (which you are arguing will happen via "cash running out").
> "You shouldn't, and the cheapest solution to your resulting financial insecurity is for the government to give you money to go buy things."
Where do you suppose this money will come from? What plane of the astral aether will this money come from? Value is perpetually created and destroyed everyday, if you implement a "workless wage" you will crash the economy by devaluing your currency.
lol
This statement is likely to be disputed by residents of huge swaths of the country from Flint Michigan to upstate New York.
This above comment is a perfect example. I don't know much about Marc, but where I'm concerned, he's just a guy who has experience in the VC scene, was invited to talk at an event, and agreed to share his personal thoughts and strategies. I read through the article, and nothing that he said really stood out in any way, good or bad. The thing about self-driving cars was just him saying "look at the potential upside for people who're currently wasting time in daily commutes" and "don't nitpick so much on the things that can go wrong, that you lose sight of the potential for things to go tremendously right".
A little platitude-like, sure. But not really objectionable in any way. I certainly don't think anything he said in the article warranted a ranting about "hot air coming out of money-grubbing share-diluting quality-of-life-ruining tech oligarchs whose feet we're worshipping". If you really want to have a discussion about this tangent, write your own blog post, submit it, and let's have a discussion there. But it's sad to see the comments thread get hijacked by such superfluous soapboxing.
I realize that me posting this isn't going to do anything. This is a lost cause, and my venting is more cathartic than anything. The culture of this place has changed, and I don't think we can ever go back to how it used to be. I guess it's time to start looking for another place to frequent.
The comments sections are almost impossible to read because the signal to noise ratio is getting so large.
FWIW, comments like yours are helpful to people like me in that they provide the assurance that I'm not alone in largely disagreeing with the sentiment expressed in the top HN comments in threads like these.
I agree that the forum has been on a ten year trends towards slipstreaming in politics, ideology, and dogma on more and more articles. They follow very similar templates: a standard liberal rant about how we need more benefits for the people or a standard libertarian rant about how the markets will take care of it all. As a result, it becomes less interesting because the points made are similar.
The reality is that stasis leads to the stagnation and death of any community, and it's the only way to avert change. If you're into frontiers though, the good news is that there are always new frontiers.
Don't forget, Andreesen has had his share of spectacular failures too. He just had more resources to bet with going forward from them.
Anyone other than me find it funny that Mark not only talks to a very small circle of people for "validity" of his ideas, he's proud to have figured out how to avoid even that in this article?
The secret is to keep searching for a new place to have high quality discussions. You never know where it will pop up. (If it's a place where people expect to find it, then all the popular kids will go there and make noise.) I wouldn't give up on HN yet though, it still has quality discussions most of the time.
I've seen him moderate people because they're posting too much "anti-this or anti-that". Not because of their behavior, but because he didn't like what they were posting.
And this community is aware that dang will do that, so you watch them flag ideas that absolutely have no reason for being moderated.
To be quite frank, I don't really like HN's community, I mostly lurk for the interesting things that get posted, rather than the discussion that comes afterwards.
HN is about backrubbing discussion, I don't know that I'd call it good or quality discussion. That's not to say you don't see good discussion here or there, but in general? no, absolutely not.
I am a woman. My experience of the forum has vastly improved during that time.
I am not saying that HN does not have problems. When I arrived, it had a real sense of community that it seems to mostly lack today, but that sense of community and mutually respectful conversation was reserved for the privileged few, some core group of members. It was not extended to me. I experienced all kinds of drama.
I do what I can to promote genuine mutual respect for all parties. I think there is certainly room for improvement in that regard. But I sometimes wonder if the changes HN has seen in terms of that initial core community apparently deteriorating were a necessary prerequisite for positive changes, such as being more welcoming of women. And while I sometimes wish that atmosphere of respectfulness had not been lost, I do wonder if its preservation would have continued to exclude some people, such as me.
I never quite know how to feel about such thoughts.
But the general feel seems a lot meaner these days. There are less specific attacks against race/gender/sexuality/etc but more general attacks against anyone and everyone and I think it has a compounding effect. I know I am certainly less kind on here than I use to be. It's that drive towards the negative that made me all but stop posting on Reddit since I didn't like the person I was when commenting there. It's having the same effect here. Every Show HN/talk/release seems to be more than 50% negative these days.
I'd love to see someone run a sentiment analysis on the comments here though to see if it's just that I'm seeing more negativity or if it really exists.
I mean we all remember drews first dropbox post and the whole "Why not just use rsync! this is stupid" type comments so maybe I just have rose coloured glasses.
I think the world is still learning to interact effectively in online forums. There is still plenty to learn about how to make that work effectively.
Reddit: No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded.
I think we could much worse than to start moving away from the SV VC startup mentality which is so dominant.It's become ridiculous. Think about how many stories you see about some guy who is living in a van in SF because that's what you have to do now.
The comment you replied to was relevant to the article and it articulates a valuable perspective that I actually wish we saw more of on HN, more skepticism toward the established VC/startup investment process. It's especially important because YC's involvement with HN has made it a nexus for many who are infatuated with startup culture and unwilling to countenance criticism of it.
FWIW, my account claims to be 3173 days old (or "8.715 average Gregorian years" according to WolframAlpha) and I don't think what you're describing is anything new, or that it's bad. The comments have always been the star of the show at HN. The articles are treated as catalysts because they are. HN is about the discussion that occurs on HN.
There is also great disconnect between the tech billionaires and the real problems in the world.
The numbers they base their worldview on are carefully curated and the story is of course that 'things are greater than ever', but the rest of the people (especially outside the US) are felling it very differently.
Proof of that is Brexit, Trump and populists + nationalists winning in many countries - voted in by people who are finding it hard to adapt to the fast-changing pace of the tech-driven world, in which they have no shares or say.
Compared to 'real' problems that the world faces, self-driving cars are, in my humble opinion, irrelevant. From a passenger's perspective, self-driving vehicles have existed since forever - called buses, trains or taxis, so I don't see how the passenger experience will dramatically change when it's driven by a computer rather than a human.
From the perspective of the owner of a self-driving fleet, though, this is a potentially fantastic business.
Of course profits will be largely shared by a couple of shareholders and some leftovers offered to the engineers in the form of yearly salaries and maybe some equity, while the rest of us will get a new bill each month for the miles/seconds driven.
I know it because I experienced it myself as an engineer in a company in which Mark made billions, while those who built the whole thing received scraps from the deal.
So I think the OP post is understandable - maybe the tone was a bit harsh, but the main points I find hard to not agree with.
What problems are more 'real' than 1 million people dying each year from car related injuries?
You may feel that the level of discourse has declined, but our social context has shifted quite a bit too. In an era of extreme wealth inequality, the tech industry and venture capitalism have taken on new and perhaps darker connotations. It's fine to walk away from that discussion, but I don't think doing so is to the benefit of understanding the reality of our circumstances.
It's possible to recognize this pattern and choose to change it into one that has positive side effects instead of negative ones. Many HN users have done so. I had a long process to go through myself.
As for the culture of the forum having shifted recently, it's society at large that has become more vitriolic. This is not unique to HN, nor can we expect to be immune from macro trends. We need to assess this accurately to have good options for reacting. If a boat is lurching because of a stormy sea, the problem is not in the boat. Unless the sea smashes the boat altogether.
Technology has warped and dominated our world and culture to an extent it never has before.
I like to imagine a little scene: a primitive man bows at the feet of another who fashioned a knife out of a mammoth tooth.
That's more or less what we still do today.
The technological and scientific have replaced the religious as the ruling dogma and organizational frameworks of the world. Just as many folks in the middle ages probably couldn't conceive of the radical changes that would happen were religious hegemony toppled, it's hard for us to conceive of a world where the ruling technological caste loses their influence.
But what a wild world it might be.
What bothers me the most about our current age is our lack of questioning when it comes to technological progress. We have a sort of close your eyes and jump philosophy when it comes to technology--we seem to go ahead and create new technologies before a. considering the full scope of their possible effects, and b. developing the requisite social, political, and economic structures to support the shifts they'll bring about (e.g. in the case of self driving cars and automation of work in general we will have to switch to an economic model other than capitalism if we are against a very slim few having the majority of the world's wealth, more so than is already the case, which is hard to imagine.)
Of course, it's not possible to predict all of the side effects introducing new technology will have--for example, I doubt Tim had any notion of the extent to which the internet would change the world when he came up with an idea that let you view the documents your buddy had on his machine, but here we are.
Still, I think we have a bad tendency to accelerate change in the technological sphere while social, political, and economic structures remain woefully antiquated.
>That's more or less what we still do today.
100% yes. Psychology is a thin veneer on top of biology, and evolution is a slow process. Let none of us believe we are so beyond our forbears that their problems, difficulties, and sins are behind us, or that their thoughts and lessons are irrelevant to us.
This sort of oligarchy is probably emergent from the way we structure our economy on a base level. What factors incentivize corporations to form into pyramids, with most of the wealth accruing on top? Can we instead incentivize smaller, cooperative-style companies with more democratic managerial styles and more equitable distribution of wealth? It wouldn't work for every business, but it's barely been tried at all, and I'd love to see the kind of SV culture that would emerge from these parameters. (I guess Valve is a notable example, but I can't think of many others. I suppose the OSS community?)
Unfortunately, I don't think telling people to stop hero worship is going to do the trick. Things are going to have to change on a more fundamental level.
Most people are incapable of managing high-level responsibilities. Those on the lower rungs assign/relinquish (depending on how you look at it) their responsibilities, and the fruits they bear, to those they perceive more capable than them. So now instead of having a smooth slope of compensation, it's top-heavy.
In layman's terms: The bulk of people who work are not motivated by the company's direct prosperity. They're motivated by other factors such as "work fulfillment," "passion", "making the world a better place", all of which don't align intrinsically with profit.
> Can we instead incentivize smaller, cooperative-style companies with more democratic managerial styles and more equitable distribution of wealth?
This is paradoxical for a few reasons. First, lead-by-many is much more inefficient than lead-by-few(usually one). See: democracy vs. democratic republic.
Second, good leaders have "ego," in the way that they have a certain modus operandi and goal they won't deviate from. Thus, if you were to populate your ranks with good leaders, it would be a shit-show. See: in-fighting nobility.
Third, incentives have always been abused. Take a look at any industry with "incentives" and subsidies. The companies are built around that subsidy, not upon being a successful business.
I agree that centralized leadership tends to produce better products, but I don't think a more democratic company would necessarily have to put every decision to vote. Hierarchies could still emerge and responsibility could still be delegated. (Again, see Valve.) But I think distributing power, reward, and responsibility more equally throughout the company would be massively beneficial in terms of "social good".
I agree with you, but will the people?
History has shown that people just don't care about doing hard things themselves.
Valve is a very small, very selective company, which rarely produces new products. Despite all the overtures about freedom, there is still a central point of control that can and will put the kibosh on things if they're not going the way they want.
People have a psychological need for authorities. If you don't give them any, they will make their own out of the nearest willing "charismatic" person, who will emerge as a de-facto authority. An explicit structure is better than mob rule.
I don't think anyone believes wealth inequality is not a problem, but I don't think non-hierarchical structures are going to do anything to solve it.
Almost like an inflationary pressure on the ownership of the co-op that might allow us to turn away from the gains continually traveling upwards long after the contributions of members have been made and they've moved on to other things.
You could still pay differential salaries if you wanted some hierarchy.
Andreessen's base point is that whether you like it or not, millions of jobs are going to get taken away and millions more jobs are going to open up elsewhere. The question is, how do we get society to be better at adapting to this change?
If you truly are concerned about building a society that benefits everyone, this is the question that should be discussed/answered.
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/e40ca4a54cc35379d6052369f8...
Shouldn't it be:
> Anonymous: “Take the Ego Out of Ideas”
http://img.timeinc.net/time/magazine/archive/covers/1996/110...