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Comment by tlb | Hacker News Reader

Not all ex-post theories are BS. For example, I slam my hand in the drawer and theorize, "Slamming hands in drawers hurts; one should not do it." That theory is pretty solid. It doesn't cover all the edge cases, but following it is better than not following it.

There are lots of startup theories that are equally solid, despite being ex-post. I know a startup that didn't pay payroll tax for a couple years, and it ended badly. The resulting advice is pretty obvious.

There are theories about how to hire, how to find customers, how to negotiate deals. These theories might not apply in every single case, but you should definitely start by knowing what worked in the past.

This post picks a couple of unsupported startup theories, but it's sort of like criticizing physics for the 1% of reality it can't explain and ignoring the 99% it can.

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The difference is the prior.

There's strong prior reason to believe not paying payroll tax is not going to end well. The theoretical basis is simple, clear, well-reasoned, and supported by strong evidence in adjacent realms (i.e. the IRS takes taxes taxes pretty seriously).

Whereas the prior on the validity of something like "early-stage founders should live with their customers" is much weaker.

Even though the advice for each presented example is based on sample size n=1, the resulting belief can and should be quite different depending on your prior.

The real meta-advice is to be able to understand and evaluate your prior for any given piece of advice you receive. This mostly comes down to thinking rationally, being knowledgeable, and critically considering each piece of advice for whether it's worth heeding or not.

Which is not so far from the author's message I think ("figure everything out yourself", "I don't mean to say don't take any advice").

(Obligatory shout-out to Bayes Theorem)

> Whereas the prior on the validity of something like "early-stage founders should live with their customers" is much weaker.

There's a pretty strong theoretical reason for that as well: startups succeed because they make something customers want; the more time the person making product decisions spends with times with customers, the more information they can gather about what the customers want; and the more the customer trusts and has a rapport with the founder, the more willing they'll be to share candid feedback.

There are some practical problems that make living with your customers a little problematic if you're not Brian Chesky, namely that they may not want another roommate, you may not want a roommate, they or you may already have a family, or you might just get on each others' nerves.

But if you extend the general principle to "spend a lot of time with your users" (and being able to extend to a general principle is a big advantage of having theoretical reasoning), there are a lot of other companies that have found similar success. Facebook was another one where the founder literally lived with his first users. Google, for all intents and purposes, lived with their first users (it's grad school, after all). DropBox, Reddit, and Instacart were their first users. Apple, Stripe, Clerky, Twitch, etc. were in regular contact with their first users.

That’s an overly wide definition of living with your customers to be useful. Apple for example was selling people kit computers at the start, they did not really have much interaction with or feedback from their customers. Nor could they do much to adapt their product with customer feedback.

I mean if all you mean is have even a tiny amount feedback from a few of your customers. That’s going to include almost every company.

"Spend the relevant type of time with the appropriately targeted type of users"

Their first customers were microcomputer enthusiasts and both Steves were members of the Homebrew Computer club, and Woz built Apple I with continuous feedback from the club meetings.

I would argue that it's moving to the Apple II (were they suddenly lost this direct feedback because of the vast expansion of their customer base well beyond their reach.

There's good reason to believe tons of sociological theories. The problem is figuring out whether the pro or con factors win out, and figuring out if you've nailed down every single factor.

Being simple, clear, and well-reasoned in the realm of people's behavior is not enough to give you very good accuracy.

The kind of priors you get by reasoning in a vacuum just aren't good enough in some realms. Bayesianly combining those priors with anecdotes doesn't really help.

Some ex-post theories are fine but I don't think you've hit upon the way to distinguish them.

>There's good reason to believe tons of sociological theories. The problem is figuring out whether the pro or con factors win out, and figuring out if you've nailed down every single factor. Being simple, clear, and well-reasoned in the realm of people's behavior is not enough to give you very good accuracy.

This is all argument in favor of a weak prior, not to ignore the existence and utility of a prior completely. Ideally, you have solid (relevant) empirical data that informs your prior but if you're seriously evaluating "advice" then I'd venture to say that you're probably lacking such data.

Imo, the critique to be had of what I said above is that there's no clear general way to form good priors and thus the advice is somewhat empty. But that's just life -- there's no magic bullet algorithm to discover truth and one has to use his/her brain to do the best they can. Many who seem to well in this area tend to like the Bayesian framing of beliefs, and personally I've found it useful to guide my own thinking as well.

You can reframe almost any statistics as Bayesian if you try hard enough. That doesn't mean it's actually helping you. If you have a method for generating 'good' priors and it doesn't work, it does far more harm than good when you use that to analyze this kind of anecdote. Anecdotes are such weak evidence that the chance it pushes your priors into the correct result is super low. You'd be better off not trying. Just accept the need to gather proper amounts of evidence.

Or in other words: Some undescribed system of priors could help, but the system you actually described doesn't help. So "use priors" is a bad answer.

> "Slamming hands in drawers hurts; one should not do it."

This is a fact and don't think this is what the author is trying to say. I guess he's more focused on the kind of theories which people throw around as some sort of self-evident truth, when in fact it's a personal truth which they learned through trial and error.

But I guess there's a point in learning from some of these "self-evident" truths (this is more rare though)

slamming your hands in drawers is also a personal experiment. I might be wearing a good set of gloves, and it won't hurt

There always has to be a balance between learning from other people's mistakes and making your own. However learning from the right people is important.

You wouldn't use avocadoes when a recipe asks for flour but in the start-up world, everyone seems to think that what works for the well-known successes will automatically work for them.

What really frustrates me (rant, rant... :)) is the notion that if I build, they will come. So so many of the start-ups I work with think that. What happened to people understanding basic business theory? Basic marketing theory would be useful but I don't hold out much hope for that!

Maybe theories about what not to do are more solid.

Thank you for the validation!

My purpose in life is to serve as an example of what not to do.

Sounds like fun!

But you have a paradox.

Do you demonstrate one big thing to not do and go out with a bang, winning a Darwin Award, or demonstrate many smaller (less lethal) things to not do? Which generates more net benefit for the world?

Always these career choices, and what kind of advice is there on that?

Nah. In fact that's the whole reason "contrarianism" is a thing.

Not taking sides, but your example is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man fallacy.

Is it though?

The parent comment is criticizing the article for "cherry picking". That in itself is not a fallacy.

It's not. He's directly refuting the claim made in the title of the blog post. That is: Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs.

In the title, the author is seemingly making the claim that all ex-post startup advice is BS. The commenter is debunking that claim by providing sound ex-post advice.

> directly refuting the claim made in the title of the blog post. That is: Most [...] In the title, the author is seemingly making the claim that all [...]

Very clever, but missing the point. Those two qualifiers refer to different classes:

(1) Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs.

(2) All ex-post startup theory is bullshit.

Those claims may or may not be true, but there's no contradiction between the two. The title does indeed seem to implicitly claim (2), in the form of the following (implied) syllogism:

Most startup theory is ex-post.

All ex-post startup theory is bullshit.

Therefore, most startup theory is bullshit.

Or, more concisely: most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs.

Well, since I'm here no need for the guesswork. I'm not saying all ex-post theories all bullshit. I think that most ex-post startup thoeries are bullshit.

Thanks, I misread.

Ok come on guys. Obviously, tax law advice that is ex-post is not bs. Law advice is ex-post per definition, because the law needs to be written first. That's not what the post is about.

I think you did a fine post but a wrong generalization. The advice you mentioned is bad because it's not generalizable and possibly not reproducible, but IMO claiming that the advice being ex post is the cause of that was a stretch.

A more generous interpretation of the article’s claim interprets “BS” to not necessarily mean it is false. For instance, if I were to speak condescendingly on a topic I know nothing at all about, I might (unbeknownst to me) actually say some true things... but most people would consider this BS regardless (both the false and the incidentally true things).

This common-sense interpretation of BS agrees with epistemologists’ definitions of “knowledge”—they invariably define it in such a way that a belief must not only be true, but also true for the right kinds of reasons, to count as knowledge (though there is a lot of disagreement about what those right sorts of reasons are). See for instance the “justified true belief” definition and its critics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/

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