Ask HN: What is the thinking style of HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the thinking style of HN?

4 pointsivyirwin4 comments

I'm working for a startup (mindtime.com) that has developed a new model of human cognition positing that each of the temporal frames that our species has conceptualized—future, past, and present—correlates with a specific set of cognitive aptitudes.

Broadly speaking, future thinking gives us an awareness of possibilities, past thinking gives us an awareness of certainties and present thinking an awareness of probabilities. In the startup world, this might translate to idea generation (future activity), validation (past activity), and execution (present activity). Each individual member of a startup team blends these three perspectives in their own way, but are all of the thinking styles necessary to make the start-up work?

So what is the thinking style of HN? Are we a community of future, past or present thinkers? Or a healthy mix of all three?

We've developed a simple app to measure the thinking style of communities. Please participate at apps.facebook.com/mindtime/ and report back here with your unique blend.

Ok, so I was predominantly future thinking style (as probably most of HN).

But the biggest error I see that it suggest I am inclined toward spontaneity and impulsiveness.

I can see where this comes from - I marked that I do not methodically examine choices before I make them. Which is accurate, but not so much when viewed in a vacuum.

When faced with a decision that is not time sensitive, I like to think about the idea for a few minutes, then come back to it a week later, not explicitly thinking about the problem as the week progresses. During that week of not thinking, it is typical to have a sudden breakthrough. If that doesn't happen, when I revisit the problem and commit to thinking about it, I discover that my decisions have already been made without me trying to figure everything out. In a sense it is letting my subconscious do all the heavy lifting.

I very much enjoyed reading through the results.

Thanks for checking it out -- glad you enjoyed reading the results. I also suspect HN will be composed of mostly future thinkers, but our research points to successful companies needing all three constructs to operate efficiently.

By the way, we will be adding a link to retake the questions in the next revision.

Ok, I took the plunge and I'm definitely in the idea generation area. My strengths are much more in line with CEO/CTO than COO. Here's the test result:

You are primarily driven by Future thinking qualities, and your thinking style generates:

Enthusiasm for fresh ideas; Ingenuity led by intuition; A sense for possibilities; An embrace of opportunities and change; A constant drive towards the new and unexplored.

Hi, I'm one of the team developing MindTime and thought that perhaps I might help in the discussion. While you definitely seem to use Future thinking as your lead (the brief description points to our lead perspective more than anything) it does not mean that you aren't also using a good amount of Present or Past thinking in the mix. My experience with COO's is that they are often Future/Present or Present/Future thinkers. Especially in software development. The nature of the beast requires a strong ability to stay with what can often be a moving target and changing sets of variables or assumptions while driving things toward concrete goals. The more in-depth description provided in the FB app should give you a fuller picture of your thinking style.

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