Crazy New Ideas | Hacker News Reader

Crazy New Ideas

paulgraham.com

901 pointsrazin774 comments

Lots of comments already, but I'll chime on in.

I realized this very late in life, but I have a test for when it's time to pay attention to a new technology. It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome.

The web: couldn't you just transfer a file to an open port and use a rendering tool to view it?

Blogs: couldn't you just update a web page?

Wikis: couldn't you just update a web page?

social media: couldn't you just set up group view preferences and use RSS?

youtube: couldn't you just upload a video and use tags for search?

twitter: couldn't you just not? Isn't that just a worse version of what we can already do??

Honestly, I've overlooked almost every one of these things, because I failed to understand how removing small bits of friction can cause a technology to explode.

Sure, some ideas are crazy new, but some sound too underwhelming to be revolutionary. but they are, there's no question about it, all those things I listed above changed the world, in ways both good and pretty damn awful.

I think of this as my "Kardashian problem".

I don't understand why the Kardashians are famous or wealthy. I mean I get the mechanics of it - famous legal case -> sex tape -> reality TV show. But I don't understand how this works, or why it works.

This isn't their problem. They are very wealthy, famous, and they obviously totally grok how their market works.

This is my problem. I should not attempt to produce a mass-market product until I understand it as well as the Kardashians understand their market. They are experts in their domain. I am not, and I doubt I ever will be. I don't even understand how their market works. Why does anyone spend any time watching these people? Until I understand that, I should stay away from mass-market ideas.

I really don't remember tech people poo-pooing some of the examples you gave as "couldn't you..." I think you're looking at these examples with too fine a lens of implementation, especially in retrospect.

the web: I was a teen when people started using local "freenets" to connect to a text-only web and I think most people who tried it were amazed that you could instantly view content somebody on the other side of the world put up

blogs: I suppose "blogging platforms" were things you could say "couldn't you update a web page" but I think it was clear that what they provided was network effects you couldn't get from just your own web page and easy styling

wikis: I remember the idea being amazing because you could edit the page without having to sign in or create an account. That's not something you could just do with "updating a web page"

youtube: it was amazing that you could easily stream videos for free and search them. There was also a ton of copyright stuff in the early days.

Really, a better way to look at whether a technology is worth paying attention to is to ask "what can this allow us to do more easily that we couldn't before?"

I’m not convinced that’s a good rule of thumb at all, because there’s so many examples where it applies and is wrong, and many where it doesn’t apply but the tech was revolutionary.

Not to mention the greater point: Im not even that convinced tech is ever really revolutionary (at least at the same time it gets mainstream adoption). Usually the big improvement it made existed years earlier or in competitors but the timing was right for it to appear.

Youtube was doing the same thing as daily motion and another (I think Vimeo?). Facebook was just “cool MySpace”, blogs were personal webpages that got suddenly popular: a lot of these just popped up and executed at the right time and in the right way.

My point is: without looking at the technology at all or knowing anything about it, you could perfectly tell what “revolutionary product” would suddenly become the next big thing simply with perfect information about the market and how it will shift at each step.

You could invent the fastest most efficient and cheapest way in the universe to launch spaghetti, but the “revolutionary” nature of your invention doesn’t matter at all because there’s no market for it, even if the very technical spaghetti enthusiasts suggest “why don’t you just build your own spaghetti railgun?”.

Markets matter, products derive their value entirely from those markets and are worth nothing alone.

Consequently, knowing which products WILL BE revolutionary (here I deliberately define revolutionary after the fact, because amazing product with no market isn’t revolutionary) is very hard because even if you know the initial market, you won’t know how things change.

I suspect the best you can do to make or identify revolutionary products is to really know the initial customer and early market, rely on some long term perceived trend that aligns broad markets closer to your early market, then iterate quickly keeping the pulse on the market onwards towards the mass market - which means we’ve just re-derived the lean startup process.

> It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____", were the blank is filled with something a nontechnical person doesn't understand or considers very cumbersome.

This is basically putting the cart before the horse and pretty much the definition of hindsight bias. We all know the BrandonM/Dropbox quip, but that's just a fun anecdote, not some universal axiom.

I don't really have any dog in this race (I won't use Mighty because my PC/Laptop is more than capable of hundreds of tabs and Electron apps), but if it succeeds, good on Suhail!

This seems related to Clarke's First Law: 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.

Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws

That is a great list. I also felt the same about many of those technologies, but I never thought to put it so succinctly -- as you have!

For years, I never understood the point of Twitter. It felt like nano-blogging -- Why not just use a regular blog platform?. Later, I realised it is a single global open forum of "random" chats that are interlinked via @person and #idea links. So if a bunch of random people who don't know each other are nano-blogging about #idea, it's like they are part of a chat room called #idea. And, of course, you can cross-post to multiple @people and #ideas in same Tweet. And there is no gate-keeping: You don't need to ask to join an #idea and I don't think it is possible to block other people referencing your @name. Other social media platforms seem to integrate with the @people and #idea thing -- no sure if that actually came from Twitter.

Technology and concept aside, I still think most of Twitter is garbage content. /Once in a while/, I see a Twitter thread from an economist or hedge fund manager that is referenced by FT Alphaville (https://ftalphaville.ft.com/). And to be fair: A lot of interesting discussion about racial injustice in last five years originated as complaints or short stories on Twitter... then blew-up in more traditional media. Else... it seems like noise.

Related to your list: One thing I have never understood: Brand names create social media precense, like Coca Cola on Facebook. And people subscribe. Why? That is so weird. Coca Cola... really? I dunno... maybe they have fun photos on their Instagram. I assumed social media was for human-to-human contact, not business-to-human contact. I was wrong! Some of those brand names have massive social media following. Campbell's Soup! Tide Detergent!

“For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.” - Dropbox

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Thank you! I wanted to write a positive comment but couldn’t put my finger on it. This is exactly what has me interested in Mighty: making things ever so slightly easier. I already have a fast computer, but I’d still like to try, as there is room for surprise. And the service suggests it is aimed at reducing all manner of friction in using a browser: tab management, etc

This may or may not work but there seems to be obvious potential and In don’t know why people are so dismissive. If it improves worker productivity or saves on hardware upgrade costs, every business will want this.

The problem is that success in Silicon Valley means how much money you can make from a product and not about how the product improves the lives of the users in a balanced and morally acceptable way. Is it really successful to disregard user privacy and capitalize on their lack of knowledge, or to build unsustainable tech on top of already unsustainable tech rather then fixing the real issues.

The problem I see with this heuristic is that it is going to give false positives for, well, the vast majority of cases where there's a supposedly new idea that actually is just an unnecessary rehash or combination of things that already exist but with a new coat of paint. I don't see how the heuristic can possibly have any predictive power. Look at pretty much every tech startup, every get-rich-quick scheme, every cryptocurrency project, etc. and they'll be making grand claims that their idea is groundbreaking, and technical people are going to say "couldn't you just x?" or "isn't this worse than the existing x?" and those dismissals are actually going to be reasonable and proven valid in the overwhelming majority of cases. Of course, your heuristic will also catch the tiny number of cases that do turn out to be groundbreaking (or at least extremely successful or popular).

This is something I have thought about before when it comes to Docker. "It's just a fancy chroot" is what people often say.

While there is some truth to that statement, the real "innovation" is getting millions of people to share and collaborate using the framework. How do make it easy to share and collaborate? Making the technology as frictionless as possible.

I don't see Dockers rise to prominence as a result of some spectacular technical innovation. It's a group of technologies which already existed but now with a great UX around it.

That's just the realization that opinions of technical people don't really matter that much. They don't add up to a critical mass that puts enough buck in the game to make it bang.

> twitter: couldn't you just not?

This is, actually, still true :)

Great observation! It feels to me kind of like the 'blub' problem [0], in that these are both cases where technical folks misjudge the utility of something new (to them) because it merely makes it easy to do something, instead of making it possible to do something. And maybe that 'something' they either don't know they want, or don't realize how often they would use it if it were available, or don't appreciate that others want.

Edit: It might also be an example of the curse of knowledge: what seems trivial to an expert may be a showstopper for a layperson. An expert suffering the curse would implicitly assume that everyone else has the same knowledge sufficient to make convoluted method seem trivial.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/avg.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Another perspective; blogs and wikis are two use-cases of essentially the same interaction. The different designs guide and inspire people how to use them. Then, they discover that the use-cases are beneficial.

In some ways, all of social media consist of apps tailored to specific use-cases that haven't been new for decades, but they "invite" normal people to use them.

There are two types ideas:

1. ideas which improve the current broken system (blogs, wiki, youtube, dropbox, etc.)

2. ideas which admits that the current system is broken and just to try to ride on that wave (mighty app, random "fix you wet iPhone", and numerous other failed ones)

The second type of ideas are just are "bad" regardless of how crazy they are. But they will make some money.

Except for twitter, all the alternatives you wrote doesn't even fit the criteria of "couldn't you.." because it is not replacing the given product MVPs. What do you mean by update a page. Blog and wiki just "update the page" more than most other form of sites.

In other words, “we were promised flying cars but ...” You might as well celebrate stock buybacks.

I think there is an analog here to the great man theory vs zeitgeist. Maybe this tech was underwhelming and its massive impact was due to fortuitous timing. So you weren’t wrong about the tech just how it would mix with the spirit of the moment.

This is just cargo culting the Dropbox "you could just use FTP" comment.

I’m curious if you got this idea from the famous HN comment about Dropbox.

This argument have been attempted already, you can also take Juicero, "can you just squeeze the bad yourself?" , and was indeed a dumb idea. This "crazy idea" is not removing any friction to regular people, regular people browse youtube, or instagram, tik tok, etc... this is targeted to techies, look at the homepage, people who are pointing out the "crazy new idea" , is neither crazy, new, or good at all, are the target of this product. Just because some successful companies had bad feedback in the beginning, doesn't imply "you missed it" or their product will become the next thing. The HN crowd of today is also not the same as the crowd back then(dropbox founder comment fiesta...).

> It's when technical people look at what seems like a groundbreaking idea, seem unimpressed, and say "couldn't you just _____"

Sounds like HN's reaction to cryptocurrencies

Pretty much everything you listed is a free consumer product.

Yes exactly. Technical people suffer from curse of knowledge and miss great opportunities. Or the idea has to boil the ocean or it's a bust.

u r talking about the small changes that can be disruptive. This is different than the crazy ideas mentioned in the article. Ideas like the earth is round or that a large mass can bend light.

I guess Clayton Christensen explains the difference best in his youtube videos. Also Peter Thiel talks a lot about the difference of ideas in his talks on youtube!!

Canva - couldn't you just use photoshop? This isn't a dig at Canva, but praise.

Good heuristic.

Dropbox became a thing among technical users before it bridged to mainstream users. We all knew other, kludgy ways of doing the same thing, but it made it a little easier so we adopted it. Soon enough we were telling mainstream users that it's a good solution. Wikis and blogs began among technical people and grew out from there. Reddit was basically /r/programming in its early days.

I didn't pay attention to early Twitter, but I'd wager it probably leaned pretty heavily to the software dev demographic.

There is a bit of a disconnect that a lot of people are casting technical users as if it's the group that you shouldn't listen to. As if you can find single cases and say "See!" and that proves the point [1]. Yet an overwhelming percentage of products in the technology space first saw success among the most technical of all. If you don't get that group, it often is doomed to failure.

[1] - just as an aside, there is a tendency of many to point out some "top" comment on some site like HN as if it therefore is the majority opinion. It doesn't work that way. We all don't have mandatory votes on every comment, and even a tiny amount of clustering can send a minority opinion to the top.

There are incremental/larger/easier improvements and then there are populism "improvements." The one tends to amplify the other. Facebook was incrementally better than Myspace at first, and then became more popular and much better. Myspace was much better than Friendster. It's an evolutionary model where some improvements are made, some features are lost, and specialization meanders.

I think the transition point is when incremental improvements amplify themselves to the point where they are both way more popular and way more efficient than what came before.

All of those examples boil down to making technology more accessible for the millions or billions of less technologically savvy people.

Indeed, anyone with the knowledge would overlook a lot of these. They're not revolutionary on a technical or individual level, but they are on a social level.

"twitter: couldn't you just not? Isn't that just a worse version of what we can already do??"

This is correct though. Twitter is not a good idea, or a good product (if your metric for good is being useful and improving lives, rather than simply profit). Twitter succeeded because it became a "meme": everyone was caught up in what it could be. By the time it became clear that all the things it could be were bad, it was too late: too many people were on the platform, and their gravitational pull could keep things going indefinitely. Twitter, like a lot of recent "ideas" in tech, is a cake that's all frosting. It runs almost entirely on FOMO.

Wow, I came here to say that this was possibly Paul's best essay ever. There is so much to learn here. Completely surprised by the negative comments and so many of them :). Specially on an essay that is essentially asking to not being critical right away.

In my short startup life, I have had the opportunity of meet many founders, VCs and also get solicited and unsolicited opinions from friends and family. Most of the VCs, friends and family members were critical of my ideas or simply didn't spend the effort to really listen. I see the same thing happening to other founders and startups. Specially fun is meeting VCs who have never built a startup themselves or coming from a non technical background be overly critical and share their strongly held opinions on how my startup could fail. I ran out of fingers counting how many ways.

Ofcourse a startup can fail. Thats why it's not a company yet. There is a saying that it takes many miracles to make a startup a success. Most founders know that already. We are already scared.

Paul is suggesting a different approach. A more positive one. And given the statistics around Paul's and YC's success versus other VCs, you would think that the HN crowd of all people would at-least pay attention.

P.S: My startup was rejected multiple times by YC. So not a fan exactly.

I don't know if I'd say it's Graham's best essay ("Beating the Averages" still ranks as one of my favorites), but reading this most recent essay, I was thinking of Elon Musk.

Say what you will about the guy, and there's an argument to be made that Tesla at least is incremental and not a crazy new idea, but Musk co-founded Paypal and is now pushing limits in spaceflight.

Do you not think there is a balance between unalloyed boosterism and lying (the YC way) and not giving you any good feedback?

There are just way more people that I know and trust personally that I think could give positive, but constructive advice. I would believe absolutely nothing coming out of Paul's mouth because he hasn't shown that he's an honest person. He's not disinterested about any of this, but feigns like he is above it.

I think some of us are very sick of the absolutely fake and fraudulent way he and others like him and Musk operate. They do not care about the truth or other people, they care about their own egos and people for whatever reason buy that.

I think "attacking" Crazy New Ideas is how we develop them, iron out the kinks and test our understanding. Criticism is an essential part of the journey from crazy new idea to accepted wisdom.

However, the main problem I have with with this article is that it divides people into domain experts and the rest. This kind of black and white thinking is pervasive in PG essays, and always lead to a cute conclusion. You can have two domain experts that disagree. You can have an idea that spans multiple domains, and there are no (or few) experts in all of them. Maybe the Crazy New Idea seems brilliant to experts in one domain, but only because they don't grasp the others.

Likewise, one of the best, most valuable, things that Albert Einstein did was to attack quantum mechanics in every way he could.

>I think "attacking" Crazy New Ideas is how we develop them, iron out the kinks and test our understanding. Criticism is an essential part of the journey from crazy new idea to accepted wisdom.

It depends upon the level of attack. Outright dismissal without consideration compared to critique. Is the intent to destroy the idea so it goes away or to test it for flaws? That's done by the suggestion given to ask questions. Instead of saying "this is stupid", figure out why your think it is stupid and turn it into a question. Such a question is a soft attack, one that may be met with an explanation without needing for direct conflict, or which may be met with a 'I haven't considered that, let me think on it' or a 'That's one of the flaws I'm still working on'.

>However, the main problem I have with with this article is that it divides people into domain experts and the rest.

While the presentation did present this as an overly binary classification, I don't think the intention (that I perceived) is wrong. Some people have more experience in certain things, and given we are all mortals with limited time, we need to have some way to decide how much attention we give ideas and using relative expertise in domains seems a decent filter. This does not have to be perfect, because the result is not accepting the idea but instead not outright rejecting the idea. In cases where the idea still is mistaken it will still be revealed under critique. It is a test to determine what should be given the chance to be critiqued given limited time and resources.

It would lead to experts overlooking ideas from sources who don't have expertise, but I think that is acceptable for two reasons. First, there are already a flood of ideas so applying a filter that lets more through will still lead to ideas not being considered, but this time due to a lack of time and resources. Second, this is all relative so a good idea from a non-expert would still pass the filter for someone who is slightly more of an expert. If they find it passes their critique it now is able to pass filters of people who are more of experts in their fields. Good ideas can still bubble up (we just need to take care that they are correctly attributed).

That two domain experts disagree on a radical idea is irrelevant, if the one presenting the radical idea turns out to be right. There are no points given out for merely participating.

This happens all the time. And the most interesting ideas are rejected by almost everyone, except the tiny minority that happens to be positioned to understand the change. So you can’t make predictions by tallying up expert votes either.

> I think "attacking" Crazy New Ideas is how we develop them, iron out the kinks and test our understanding.

Criticism is the crucible in which crazy new ideas are forged into crazy viable ideas.

> However, the main problem I have with with this article is that it divides people into domain experts and the rest.

Let's be honest: in this day and age "the rest" are far too vocal and need to STFU on things which they have no knowledge. Sure, domain experts can disagree - let them be heard, but the know-nothings should be given zero attention.

HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating your odds of success. "It's too expensive" or "Nobody needs it because we have X" on a project lead by a domain expert is not constructive criticism or conservatism, it's pure envy.

PG isn't defending Mighty, Dropbox or Coinbase because he has skin in the game, but because he knows what the teams have achieved and what they could potentially achieve.

I don't understand, it seems so obvious to me. Dropbox started as a better FTP, Coinbase is a better Bitcoin wallet, Gmail is a better SMTP, Mighty is a better Chrome. All of these products are meant for the masses because the core technologies/protocols are too complicated or restrictive to directly interact with.

People always bring Dropbox to these discussions as an example of a startup that was dismissed by HN but turned out to be huge, but turns out there are examples of the opposite thing happening too!

Does anyone remember Color Labs? Go read this thread and marvel at the similarities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2364463. A stellar team backed by top VCs who invested (extraordinary at the time) $41M sets out to build a location enabled photo-sharing app. VCs tout it as "the next Google". Most of HN is pretty critical with some voices advocating caution and saying "let's not be so dismissive, maybe there is something more to it". Well, it turned out there was nothing more to it.

So no, being dismissed by HN does not automatically mean that your idea is good and you will be successful.

> HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating your odds of success.

It's not. This is survivorship bias from the infamous stories about Dropbox, Coinbase, etc. There's plenty of "Show HNs" of HNr's criticizing companies that go nowhere. Including one of my own!

What you're referring to is effectively called "non consensus and right"[0]. The problem with this concept is that it can only be verified after the idea is deemed right or wrong.

https://disruptionobserver.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/image...

Mighty's problem is different than the others though, in that it is a thin client for a thin client. If web apps are too big to the point people need to stream Chrome in a container to get them to run well, why wouldn't you just stream them a full operating system where developers didn't have to target the web with all of its oddities and instead could just target Windows (or Linux)? The entire point of web applications was that they didn't require an install and were lighter than their desktop counterparts, and now that isn't true, so can't we ditch them?

This is so common in SV, you are just being arrogant and salty in general, because people are showing how dumb, privacy unfriendly, and dangerous this product is, it has nothing to do with envy. Using Dropbox as an example is even worst, thats like saying "X celebrity is famous and smoke weed, then if I smoke weed, I will be famous". PG is clearly biased and he is just trying to get a return on his investment, thats all, and if he needs to hype this product to make money he will. People are not dummies, if the product is meant for the general public and not the HN crowd, then start a Google Ads campaign, or get in the Tonight Show or something.

If they pivot, does that mean the negative feedback was right or is it always wrong? What if the feedback precipitates the pivot?

I have no idea if Mighty will succeed or not. But I suspect it will not succeed as a a $30/mo consumer product. Indeed, I'd bet money on it. The companies everyone keeps referencing were free products. I got excited about Dropbox. So did my friends. No friend has excitedly sent me a link to Mighty.

I'm sure some professionals will pay though. How many and how many they need to hit their numbers is another question. They can still probably ride the hype machine to an exit.

Mighty isn't "better chrome"! It's a whole thin client proxy-service privacy-nightmare. It's more and more centralising of everything under corporate control with the payoff to users of marginal gains in speed. Kill it with fire.

Don’t forget my favorite: “Slack is just IRC with clever marketing.”

Interesting metric. The underlying principle is:

"No one went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."

HN just hasn't internalized it quite yet, so we have the counter-indicator.

> Mighty is a better Chrome

yes, it's better in the sense that the privacy issues are even better; well, worse in the viewpoint of the user, but since when VCs cared about it?

> HN comment section pessimism is a new metric for evaluating your odds of success.

The success of a startup depends on many factors and pessimism on HN is definitely not one of them. HN is a forum where people intellectualize things from their limited point of view. It is usually not the primary forum where the founders seek feedback. I think HN is a remix of the old slashdot forums with a healthy mix of digg + reddit.

> PG isn't defending Mighty, Dropbox or Coinbase

Those are not needing defense. Those are quite mundane business.

Dropbox for one, everyone thinks it's useful. The controversial part is whether or not it's a good business. Turns out Dropbox is not so great a business. I mean, if Dropbox is in China, it will be crushed by copycats and die very quickly.

Similarly for coinbase. It's useful. The question was whether or not btc and crypto currency will be big enough for coinbase to be a great business. Of course, given the success in crypto currency, coinbase is a great business.

But neither of these are “crazy new ideas”. They are not even new ideas...

there are lots of links to casey's twitter account but the real gem is[0]. it reads like the famous jurassic park quote: 'Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should'

[0]https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387126330961981441

The reference to the Copernican Model of the solar system is an interesting one since it produced less accurate predictions than the Ptolemaic Model. Improving the predictions of the Copernican model initially involved the introduction of epicycles, diminishing the value of the crazy new idea.

It took the work of Kepler (elliptical orbits) and Newton (a physical basis for elliptical orbits) to elevate the heliocentric model to the status that it enjoys today.

There are two reasons why I bring this up: one is the validity of many of Paul Graham's assertions and conclusions. The other is to point out that things aren't so simple. Copernicus did not reap the rewards of his ideas since it took the work of others to prove those ideas. In fields outside of science, there is little reason to expect people to arrive upon similar conclusions. (Even within the sciences, there is no reason to believe we would converge on similar conclusions in the same time frame via different paths.)

I think there's a very strong analogy between the Copernican model vs Ptolemaic and computer languages (for example) - you can have something like C which has obvious defects (grant this for the argument, substitute something else if you like), but a replacement like Rust isn't taking on just C, but the entire ecosystem around C and all the tooling and knowledge therein.

Similarly the Copernican model was "more correct" depending on how you look at it (currently we model everything relative to everything else, the earth and sun "orbit" around a midpoint that is inside the surface of the sun but not the exact center, for example) but it provided WORSE predictions than the Ptolemaic model of the time.

And this had real practical implications in the technology of the day - navigation charts, etc, analogous to trying to use new tooling and finding it doesn't support aspects the old tooling did.

To add to this:

He lists two reasons why people want to dismiss "crazy new ideas": envy, and the desire to seem sophisticated. Using Copernicus as an example simply does not fit these claims.

Reasons to dismiss Copernicus's ideas:

1. They were worse predictions, so for all 'practical' purposes of the day (essentially, only knowing where the wandering stars would be), adopting his ideas would be poor.

2. Most crazy new ideas like this proposed by people on the fringe of a field are flat out wrong. The Copernican Model is a good example of a common mistake, really: Someone saw a complex but accurate system and tried replacing it with a simple system that is easier to understand but rejects the actual data. Turns out the world is complex and doesn't care about being intuitive. See all of quantum mechanics for an example.

3. Classical relativity was only established later by Newton. The moon, sun, and other planets were poorly understood at the time. It wasn't until Galileo's observations that evidence was gained for a rocky moon. The idea that the whole Earth could be moving and spinning without violating everyday observation, and therefor the other bodies in the sky follow the same rules as those on Earth, is simply a large and unnecessary leap in intuition. Sure, it's a correct leap, but the path of reasoning there is backwards. It is only with Newton's laws of motion that heliocentrism begins to make any sense.

4. Further, much better evidence (as discussed above) came to light far before Copernicus's ideas had any effect on non-academic matters. Other than finding things interesting, and generally liking to know how the universe works, heliocentrism has no practical affect on life even today. Sure if you work at NASA it's super important, but most people don't. Trying to force an idea before it's time, when it won't effect things anyways has little practical value.

The crux of this is that this article is not a response to people dismissing a new idea. It's people dismissing a new business. He seems to be arguing that new ideas by domain experts shouldn't be criticized because they might be right, while ignoring that people can have strong financial motivation to promote incorrect ideas. Fighting such ideas is good because:

- If the ideas prove correct, internet criticism of it really won't matter. Only a few key investors need to be convinced, and yeah they'll make a lot of money.

- If the ideas are wrong, healthy skepticism is the strongest force against snake oil salesmen.

90% of starts fail, so the criticism will usually be on the correct side, even if the exact criticisms don't point to the true cause of failure.

Graham has a tendency to use hindsight to show that, yes, indeed he is contrarian and genius.

The Ethereum people do it, too. They use the example of old massively successful tech to prove that Eth too can catch on, but they don't cite all the failures.

This is an interesting idea, but I feel it's not calibrated right -- I'm an academic, so I'd imagine I work with many "domain experts" (if you don't think so, that's of course another valid discussion). I don't think "if you bet on the entire set of implausible-sounding ideas proposed by reasonable domain experts, you'd end up net ahead.".

I hear a implausible sounding ideas all the time. I think one of the main points of academia is to give people the chance to explore those ideas. But they don't turn out good "on average", not even close.

The median implausible-sounding idea is bad, for sure.

But if you never bet on any implausible-sounding ideas, you exclude the chance of being an early participant in any big paradigm shift.

A good exercise is to back-test your rule against big ideas through their history. Would you have invested time in solving Schrodinger’s weird equation in 1925? 1927? 1940? Would you have invested time in public key cryptography in 1975? 1976? 1980? 1990?

People who got in early, got to make the big discoveries in those fields.

Ending up "net ahead" does not necessarily mean maximizing the fraction of successful projects. I don't think pg is saying that implausible-sounding projects usually turn out good. He is saying that when they turn out good, they have outsized impact, precisely because they initially sounded implausible and therefore produce lots of new information if true.

Yes, because even when those implausible ideas fail, your more likely to learn something than when experimenting on an existing hypothesis with just a minor change.

As you point out, it depends on how we define "domain expert". I may be a "blockchain domain expert" but I also need to understand what consumers need from a blockchain in order for it to be a profitable venture. My idea may be very innovative, but if it doesn't solve people's problems it's not going to make much of a difference.

In other words, a successful business requires not only producing an innovative product, it also requires knowing if people actually demand this innovative product. One half is the core idea, the other half is how this idea interfaces with the world.

The central thesis

> Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts.

Is later contradicted by a discussion on the quality of criticism

> The lowest form [of criticism] of all is to dismiss an idea because of who proposed it.

So which is it? Judge an idea by who proposes it or not? I think the essay stands without the tangent on ranking criticism, and it could perhaps be discarded entirely.

But that's too easy, and I think the discussion of criticism is a strong (unintentional) counterpoint to the essay. You have gated the hard work of weighing an idea behind the reputation of the person who proposed it. History all too often labels a genius only in retrospect and in their own time were more likely to be considered fringe or even crackpots.

In short, I think the essay is boiled down to "find the right people to trust/engage/pursue, and especially don't discard their implausible ideas". The tack on of trying to localize to a "smart domain expert" in whatever you're interested in seems.... uninspired. The tack on of being more open to implausible ideas is more interesting. But the fundamental work is unchanged from basically all of human history- "find (or become) the people who are going to be successful/transformative"

Those two statements are not inconsistent.

The first statement isn't a suggestion that implausible sounding ideas can be dismissed on the basis of a lack of credibility of the person communicating the idea.

But I share in the dislike of an appeal to authority. The idea should stand on its own merits.

Something I’ve noticed a lot lately is that the people who have crazy new ideas are often the absolute last people that should be communicating them to the world. I’m not sure if it comes from the insularity of academia or just a basic inability to write clearly.

My theory is that many domain experts haven’t needed to communicate with a lay audience in decades (if ever) and thus aren’t aware of their own baseline assumptions. Seems like a startup idea, maybe? Convert academic papers into comprehensible English. Two Minute Papers does this but it’s only for technology.

https://youtube.com/c/K%C3%A1rolyZsolnai

This probably applies to early Apple. Wozniak, while clearly a technical genius, needed Jobs’ communication and design skills to sell “personal computing” and make Apple a mass-market company.

I think many (but not all) domain experts end up that way because they are so interested in a topic, they've internalized all the jargon and assumptions required to get there. It takes quite a bit of effort (and practice!) to keep the viewpoint of the common person in mind as well.

Feynman loved explaining things, so he had to keep trying to explain them in a manner that the ordinary folk could understand, but he also loved physics, which kept him diving deeper, and playing with it.

Having charisma and knowing what people want, and how to sell was Steve Jobs portion of the game, once the initial technical hurdles were solved. Woz likes to minimize circuits and do clever things, that was his part of the game.

Here on HN, the balance seems to be keeping it focused enough on hacking technology, while still appealing to those who want to make money off of it in yacht loads.

It's all about balance between at least 2 domains.

We’re building this for clinical papers! inpharmd.com We have 10k summarized so far

Off Topic : The site is sending a GET request to

http://np.lexity.com/embed/YA/fa27bb6ce937aea400cc8e5f11aa42...

every 5 seconds.

Anyone have any idea what it is?

Note : The address keeps changing for every request.

Edit2 : Is it only on my PC, or are others also able to see it?

I see it too, but my ad blocker prevented the request(s).

A quick search for "lexity.com" shows that it's an analytics company.

> Lexity - Apps to help grow your ecommerce business

> Commerce Central is the easiest way to grow your small and medium ecommerce businesses. We provide the best real time analytics and insights for ecommerce for free, and apps to advertize your store through Google, Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter.

I see those requests too but my adblocker takes care of it.

Lexity.com looks like a Yahoo service and maybe this is the analytics being collected. AFAIK pg's site is still hosted on Yahoo.

Very interesting. This sounds like a response to the Mighty [0] launch which Paul Graham has been defending on twitter recently after an outcry from some of the 'hardcore' developers such as Jonathan Blow [1] and Casey [2].

[0] https://www.mightyapp.com/

[1] https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389

[2] https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224

There was this product[1] to browse internet offline by downloading something called “Web Packs”. This was back in 2005 just when I was graduating when I spoke to the founding team. They were naturally quite confident about the product taking off. Something seemed off to me I couldn’t point out what so I didn’t take the job offer. After all these years I realized the source my discomfort. They were actually betting against the speed of internet getting better. While most of the businesses like Amazon, Google were betting for the internet tech to improve this product did exactly the opposite.

To me Mighty sounds like a similar category of product. They are betting that PC/Laptop/Mobile hardware will stagnate from this point on. Exactly when Apple has launched M1, which blows the previous version out of the water, at a non crazy price. From this point it’s a matter of time other hardware also catches up in terms of performance and price.

Besides, yet another company to handover my entire browsing history and data for purported improvement in latency? I don’t know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webaroo

My hang up with Mighty isn’t about their idea or their technology or their execution. It’s impressive to see what they’ve done.

My issue is that it’s not a product I could feel good recommending to anyone, at least at the high pricing that was proposed in the last discussion. In an era of $999 M1 Macs (and even cheaper AMD laptops) and readily available financing options, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to throw their money away at a SaaS service that simply cannot perform as well as local Chrome on a modern machine.

I could see the narrow use case for limited situations where someone has

1. Weird IT department restrictions that require them to use old, slow computers but also

2. Budget rules that allow them to spend monthly money on a SaaS but not on financing the hardware they need to get their job done and

3. Guaranteed high speed internet all of the time and

4. An IT/corporate security department that is okay with them sending all of their keystrokes, login info, and browser data to a 3rd party service

Surely this situation exists, but it still feels like Mighty is targeting a broader audience by providing untrue claims about remote thin client technology somehow being faster than a halfway decent local machine. I’d feel equally uncomfortable if Stadia was charging $50/month while claiming to be lower latency than local gaming.

The counter arguments about disrespecting hard working startup founders or doubting visionaries feel like a strawman response to legitimate questions about the value of their service. The technology and execution look to be good, AFAICT. It’s the product, pricing, messaging, and value that I can’t recommend.

From what I understand of both the recent tweets and both of their fairly radical/extreme (and mostly correct) views about abstraction being a net negative, the criticism is less "Mighty doesn't work" and more "We shouldn't need to use an app like Mighty to get good performance on a basic website".

I am actually in Mighty's market if it cost ~$10usd per month, not $50.

At our startup we have a small org of customer service reps. They basically live in four tools: Notion, Slack, Chrome, and Front.

These four tools have one thing in common: they are all Electron apps. They SUCK. On any windows computer slower than a $1.5K lenovo, our reps can't have more than ~10 tabs open before their computer starts to stutter.

One answer would be to buy everyone an M1 mac. However, most of these reps are not familiar with apple (they use PCs at home) + they are still a bit too expensive (we're in Mexico where they cost 1.5 - 2x).

I would love to be able to buy our customer service reps a setup (monitor + mouse + computer) for ~$500 USD and have them use Mighty to run our customer service suite for $10-$15 bucks a month. That would scale to a customer service org of hundreds.

At $50 bucks a month I should just buy them a mac.

IMHO Suhail's pitch about "running figma" is wrong. I'm happy to buy a designer any computer they want. But outfitting a CSR team of 50+ people? Mighty + a thin client would be amazing.

It is fascinating to me how quickly people reject the premise of Mighty, even after PG lists all the good reasons for replacing judgment with curiosity.

I’ll admit, my initial reaction to Mighty was “I can’t imagine it ever being faster than my behemoth PC.” But then I stopped for a second and got curious. What is Mighty, really? It is a thin-client. That’s it. And are thin-clients a bad thing? Well, if latency is an issue, sure. But “high-ping” is a somewhat solved issue, whether in multiplayer gaming, in terminal utilities like Mosh, or even in optimistic GraphQL mutation updates. Where’s the use-case where near-zero latency is vital? The only cases I can think of are games like Rocket League: fast-twitch games where even the latency between my controller and my PC is something I happily spend hours optimizing — where latency prevents the necessary feedback loop for learning (akin to trying to learn how to hit a baseball while drunk).

But beyond near-zero latency use-cases, why would a thick client ever be better than a thin client? At the edge of performance, this question is easily answered: I would never attempt to train a PyTorch model on my admittedly powerful GPU. That’s what the cloud is for. So when it comes to my browser, why am I content to eat up memory and cpu-time with hundreds of tabs open that almost always include one or two that are broken, soaking up my resources, and have to be hunted down and killed off so that IntelliJ can return to its normal lightning-fast speed?

Might goes even further and asks why I would want to run IntelliJ on my machine at all. Wouldn’t I rather run IntelliJ like I used to run Vim over Mosh, where I never have to worry about storage space, about download/upload bandwidth, or about my computer becoming sluggish?

And that’s the killer idea here: that thin-clients almost always beat thick-clients. One could even argue that the entire internet is premised upon this reality.

I’d happily pay Mighty to try it out for a bit. Even if it doesn’t work, I’ve dropped more money of less fascinating ideas. At the very least, I’m rooting for their success, because it would change a lot more than how you consume content over the internet.

I have no dog in the fight either way, but I think it's weird that their demo product shots are on a Mac when part of their pitch is

> "50+ tabs without your computer coming to a crawl"

On Macs, people can just switch to Safari for free and solve that problem. Yes, Chrome is a memory hog. Stop using Chrome, don't send all your browsing data to a third party.

Perhaps Windows would be a better choice for Mighty demo shots, since there may not have a better option than Chrome for Windows.

If a “Crazy New Idea” (CNI) is getting VC funding from establishment tech capital to deliver a twist in an existing product, it doesn’t seem like it could be so crazy.

Reading this I thought of CNIs like the Internet of the 1980s, women’s suffrage in the 19th century, Project Mercury, The Eiffel Tower.

The CNIs gaining ground today in tech seem to be crypto, brain-computer-interfaces, quantum computing, and CRISPR gene editing.

I follow Blow's work and opinions quite closely. I am quite confident he was NOT criticizing Mighty specifically. Instead he was deploring the state of software engineering in general and web programming in particular. He is saying something like "I can't believe web engineering sucks so bad that a tool like Mighty actually makes sense". See his talk about preventing the end of civilization (!!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

I did not take Jonathan Blow's tweet to be saying it's a bad idea, or won't work, but rather that it's an indictment of the whole web stack that it's necessary.

I'm not upset about Mighty itself - I'm sure it's a fine product made by some decent people.

No, I'm upset that Mighty is necessary. That we, as an industry, have failed so hard that multi-gigahertz mult-core machines with gigabytes of ram can no longer consistently and quickly render documents without offloading it to a central server.

Yeah. Also, Suhail Doshi, the founder of Mighty, is mentioned as one of the people who draft read this essay.

We have game streaming services from NVIDIA and amazon has had Amazon workspaces. With the global chip shortage which will affect a large amount of people I think that this would be the best time to prove your product to have a good effect.

Not only that but a great amount of people here live in a literal tech bubble and we believe that everyone has a reasonably fast laptop or can setup a large workstation.

If there was a similar offering as mighty for certain development tools including Xcode and android studio together, that would be awesome and something I would look into. Basically something which would reduce the build times.

I don't understand how Jonathan Blow of all people, figurehead behind several great video games that would have been impossible to run on a supercomputer 25 years ago, could possible have this take.

This is the first time I’m hearing of Mighty App and, at least at first glance, I wouldn’t categorize it as a “crazy idea,” in fact it seems pretty non-crazy to me - chrome but more efficient. It’s literally a faster horse. I guess the implementation is the crazy part...?

Has mighty app announced what pricing will look like? I’m assuming that you couldn’t offer something like this for free.

Mighty is a good idea, marketed to the wrong people. I mean, who wouldn't just upgrade their computer? New software is a cost, even if it's "free."

I'm sure there's a niche, though. Like low-paid workers needing to do a lot on their crappy personal machines.

But the main thing that leads reasonable people to dismiss new ideas is the same thing that holds people back from proposing them: the sheer pervasiveness of the current paradigm.

This sounds like the sort of nonsense used by scientific crackpots to attack their critics for "not understanding" them.

Sure, your idea may be revolutionary and actually upend everything, but the overwhelming likelihood is it won't and you need to go through the same evaluation process as everybody else and not be so salty about that.

Incidentally, I find the MightyApp concept interesting and wish it well in forging a new market, but this sort of rationalisation as the "main" driver behind reasonable scepticsm is a very poor defence.

As an intern I once attended an internal Innovation Symposium hosted by the company I was working for.

Most of the speakers talked in glowing terms about innovation, how good it was, and how welcomed it was.

But one speaker didn't. He said: "You'll know you're being innovative because you'll feel uncomfortable about your idea."

I had never before heard that point of view before, but it clicked.

If all of your peers think what you're doing is a good idea, maybe it's time to re-evaluate how innovative your ideas really are.

The problem with all of this is that immature good ideas look and act exactly like crazy ideas. It's hard to find comfort pushing on an idea with that fact always in the back of your mind. You could find yourself years down the road with nothing to show for all that effort.

> Whatever the church thought of the heliocentric model, astronomers must have been convinced as soon as Copernicus proposed it. Far, in fact, from it.

I don't think this tells the whole story. The church didn't immediately view the heliocentric model as a crazy new idea.

> In 1533, Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter delivered a series of lectures in Rome outlining Copernicus's theory. Pope Clement VII and several Catholic cardinals heard the lectures and were interested in the theory. On 1 November 1536, Cardinal Nikolaus von Schönberg, Archbishop of Capua, wrote to Copernicus from Rome:

> "... Therefore with the utmost earnestness I entreat you, most learned sir, unless I inconvenience you, to communicate this discovery of yours to scholars, and at the earliest possible moment to send me your writings on the sphere of the universe together with the tables and whatever else you have that is relevant to this subject ..."

(From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus#Heliocentr...)

The church's stance against the heliocentric model developed later, and probably for religious and political reasons.

Secondly, rational astronomers shouldn't have been convinced of the model as soon as Copernicus proposed it. It wasn't yet proven. It's like string theory today. It may have been an elegant theory, but a good scientist shouldn't consider a theory proven until it's actually proven.

Relating this back more generally to the essay, I think there's a bias in how we retell stories from history that makes it seem like great new ideas were initially mostly considered crazy. It makes a better story when one person overcomes the odds and invents something great despite everyone telling them they're crazy. But reality, most new ideas had a mix of detractors and supporters. We just remember the detractors better and amuse ourselves thinking about how wrong they were.

I think the key statement to realize here is this,

> Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts.

Off the top of my head, I vaguely remember that the latter half of the careers of many "greats" like Einstein, Fermi, Erdos were riddled with pursuing directions which bore no fruit (to this day).

I don't quite think that crazy bets work on "average". On average they fail. It mostly so happens that crazy bets are on "average" taken by people with a network that can attract able and passionate people, who can see through an idea to its conclusion. This is where experts come in.

Experts often rely on validation by their "community", and by the nature of community dynamics need to upsell. They naturally attract the kind of people needed to execute crazy ideas. But then attracting such talent also has a corrective effect on the originally crazy idea, such that it has a higher chance of succeeding by minimizing the blind spots, the unknown unknowns.

> Off the top of my head, I vaguely remember that the latter half of the careers of many "greats" like Einstein, Fermi, Erdos were riddled with pursuing directions which bore no fruit (to this day).

I don't know about Erdos, but the other had ambitious ideas, not crazy ones. Evidence that they weren't crazy is that the problems they were working on are still seen as the ones to solve by most of the physics community.

In fact, on the case of Einstein, he worked on much crazier ideas on the beginning of his career. I don't think any respected physicist ever thought about solving Brownian motion, and the photoelectric effect was an interesting curiosity but mostly of interest of "those inventors out there", not of researchers.

This is the whole "black swan" idea that Nassim Taleb writes about – events that are very rare and unpredictable but completely life-changing. This might be a poor paraphrase, but roughly: We're not very good at reasoning about these sorts of events, and domain experts are not immune. It's easy to believe you have more predictive or explanative power than you actually do, and to expose yourself to unacceptable risk as a result.

> I vaguely remember that the latter half of the careers of many "greats" like Einstein, Fermi, Erdos were riddled with pursuing directions which bore no fruit

And don't forget Newton!

In case someone missed the story, Paul Graham is indirectly talking about the feedback received by Mighty App.

And in this particular case, I don't think this is a valid defense.

First, he clearly has too much skin in the game to be credibly neutral about it.

Second, he avoids addressing the main critique about this "new tech".

People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is infeasible or not valuable, but because it is dangerous and also because it sounds technically ridiculous. (thin client inside thin client)

https://www.mightyapp.com/ https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1387101172230672389 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1387645578067124224

> First, he clearly has too much skin in the game to be credibly neutral about it.

I think this is a general and important point (and sadly not at all discussed in his post). When an expert publicly says something that seems wrong, my default explanation is that they have a vested interest that consciously or unconsciously forces them to consider the implications of what they say and alter the message accordingly. Recent case in point: public health authorities telling the public that masks are useless and even harmful during the pandemic (presumably to avoid shortages) and then reversing their stance when masks became abundant.

This is especially true for public statements. If I were a friend of pg and we would go to a pub and he would not stop talking about how awesome one of the startups he invested in are, that would be a strong signal for me. But if he shills for one of his investments on twitter and on his blog just like some influencer-investor would do, I don't find this especially strong evidence that said startup is revolutionary even though he is an undisputed expert on startups.

This domain is frustrating to talk about as a technical person because success isn't based on technical soundness, but rather popularity.

So any argument I could realistically make against $sillyAppThatHasVCBacking will not matter if enough Paul Grahams back it and $sillyApp makes itself a moat.

WeWork would be the most prominent example of this; even after their 2019/2020 crash, they'll probably come out of the pandemic okay compared to its competitors simply because it just got big enough.

I lost a decent amount of respect for pg due to how he keeps portraying Mighty like it's gonna change how we use the Internet and computers in general. Like, really?

I don't mind Mighty as a product, I don't mind their team, their pricing or their slick marketing website. But please, call it what it is: A nice and slick Remote Browsing product, one of multiple ones. Cloudflare recently launched an RBI product with much more humble and honest marketing about where it will be useful.

This idea of a dumb client is not new, it has been around basically forever, but we're seeing it again in multiple different incarnations because it could be huge.

And I mean that in a bad way.

Privacy and users rights are already pretty bad, but we still own our computers.

I can see how it would start in the corporate world.

Maybe this is a terrible stance but if the idea pisses off Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori, I wouldn't take that as a bad sign. jblow and Casey are brilliant programmers and I mean them no disrespect, but their philosophies are certainly in the vein of prescriptive, "correct" ways of writing code. Namely you should write code that is fast and efficient. Unfortunately (or not, depends on your view), programmers do not like prescriptive, "correct" ways of writing code. Worse is better and all. If you give them a cheat code to let them use a little more performance, give them a little more headroom, they'll take it. For all the jblows and muratori's in the world, there's a lot more people who don't care about perf and just want to make cool stuff. For better or worse.

> Paul Graham is indirectly talking about

I find it strange that for someone that is a relatively immune from any real scrutiny, and constantly claiming to be a bold thinker, PG is always so coy in his writing.

I would find PG's recent stream of ego driven rants much more enjoyable and potentially insightful if he would just say what he's really trying to say.

He might be trying to add strength to his arguments by making them somehow more general, but since these pieces always seem very clearly about a specific bone PG has to pick, the result is they read as some of the most cowardly essays I've ever encountered.

Wasn't this a feature of Amazon's Silk browser?

"The browser uses a split architecture where some of the processing is performed on Amazon's servers to improve webpage loading performance."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Silk

So during their onboarding process they have a survey about your usage patterns. One of the questions is about speed of switching between tabs and one of the answers is "Tabs are switched very fast (<1 sec)"

I'm sorry, but 1 sec is not fast...

He might also be talking about many more ideas too: Dropbox, Boom, Lambda School, and another dozen ideas within YC that all seem surprisingly possible. You can criticize him for having skin in the game but you could equally commend him too: he puts his money where his mouth is.

hahaha, fuck, I remember ages ago, maybe 2013, when people were trying to get me to buy into the "web 2.0" craze -- "Web is the future!", "web can scale!", "nobody will install apps!", "your stuff will be accessible everywhere!"

funny how they all turned out to be mixed bags. the best part? people telling me web apps are "lighter". even back then I knew that was a hot load of bullshit.

good to know the other shoe has dropped and we're really going full-circle to thin clients/mainframes, but shittier.

Not to mention the privacy concerns of allowing someone else’s machine to proxy all of your web requests.

> “ People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is infeasible or not valuable, but because it is dangerous and also because it sounds technically ridiculous. (thin client inside thin client)”

This is the kind of asymmetric dismissal he’s talking about, and it’s not very good.

Dangerous? We run everything via cloud services and encrypted communication. “Sounds technically ridiculous” - so did probably every modern technological idea when it was new “you put your database in some other company’s servers?!”.

You’re mostly proving PG’s point.

It’s quite illuminating to see the very forum that PG created is calling him out on his shortcomings. Almost all the recent posts by PG were panned down by HN hivemind and PG seems to take no hints from the wisdom of the HN crowd. The case with MightyApp is the latest in the saga.

> In case someone missed the story, Paul Graham is indirectly talking about the feedback received by Mighty App.

This is the subtext I came here for, thanks.

I'm undecided on Mighty, I don't have a strong opinion. I wouldn't consider it "revolutionary", unless perhaps they have a vision way beyond the product they've talked about publicly, but it would seem a bit unfair to use that as a defence against criticism.

One thing I did notice is that a few people involved or indirectly involved with Mighty seem to have a problem with the criticism on HN, which seems really strange to me if you consider yourself an open individual who supports freedom of discussion. You don't need to engage with that criticism directly, but presumably it's useful to be criticised - you'll need answers to those arguments. And if the criticism isn't constructive, well, who cares? There's always some noise.

It feels to me like "oh yes I want people to freely debate ideas and criticise them but just not the ideas I like".

It's funny how this context changes the entire the article. I didn't realize that this was related to Mighty and thought it was a good "call to arms" for domain experts in non-tech industries to disrupt their markets.

> People are not claiming that it is a bad idea because it is infeasible or not valuable, but because it is dangerous and also because it sounds technically ridiculous.

An idea isn't bad if it's valuable and built on ridiculous / dumb / silly / simple / old technology. A product should be measured on output, not input... in fact I'd go as far as to say that we (hackers) should celebrate ideas that deliver incredible value with such a simple implementation.

Could perhaps the idea of a thin client inside a thin client not be an idea that could be further developed to be of use one day?

I wish he would say this in the post!

These "Mighty is bad" arguments are actually arguments in support of Mighty.

They are arguing that technology shouldn't need Mighty. The mere fact they are complaining about the state of the world means that there is a problem that needs solving.

Perhaps he is indirectly talking about Mighty. We could still consider what he says here on its own merits.

Imagine not having to think about cross browser comparability. Customer wants to use internet explorer? Just head to ie.example.com, for a mighty version of a given website.

Mighty is such an obviously good idea, and if you've spent decades on the cutting edge of the web you'd understand why. People's demands for more powerful web apps are for all intents and purposes infinite, and it is much more pleasant as a developer to develop once, run anywhere, than to develop an app for low powered clients and a different one for high powered ones.

> First, he clearly has too much skin in the game

That sounds like an odd use of "skin in the game". "Skin in the game" would be if that thing failed and then he gets skinned, basically. Being invested in something with potentially lots of upside and worst case a bit of lost investment isn't like that.

- Personally I don’t think PG is defending mighty app because he has skin in the game. I would think he is at a point where he doesn’t need to.

- Also IMO we should let mighty app (or for that matter other crazy ones) play out. We all know little about the capabilities of individuals and what the future holds. So why to ridicule and prematurely declare certain death.

The main idea of the article is that when someone who is a domain expert proposes an idea that seems wrong, there is a chance that this idea is a great idea because why would a smart person proposes a stupid idea? They must've known something.

He says that in history, great ideas started like that. But he didn't provide examples. I didn't find the article practical because of that. It would have been a lot more useful if it provided contemporary examples that support the claims made.

I think there are enough examples for and against.

He does give the example of Copernicus, I believe Louis Pasteur would be another good example. PG does say he is speaking mostly of maths, sciences, etc.

But there are also many examples where the domain experts missed the opportunities, and somebody else stepped in.

The AirBnB gang weren't domain experts in hospitality. Coinbase founder wasn't an expert in finance (though he was an expert in security I believe), Collison brothers weren't experts in credit cards, doesn't look like the founders of DoorDash were experts in hospitality or delivery.

Not to say PG is wrong, there is good logic to not dismissing ideas, and finding nuggets, but I think the model is being overfit. Or perhaps one wild ideas by domain experts doesn't negate the potential for wild ideas from non-domain experts.

It's also a common theme for Kent Beck, who "invented" extreme programming.

> i have good ideas, i just don't know which of them are good up front. hence, looking foolish is a prerequisite for looking smart.

Source: https://mobile.twitter.com/kentbeck/status/11329885166594867...

This is a great essay. I follow similar logic when assessing bitcoin.

1. Listen to as many viewpoints as possible 2. Remove the people who are not domain experts 3. Remove the people who are blinded by their own financial interests or ego. 4. Remove the people who are influenced by social pressures ( good and bad ) 5. Assign probabilities to the remaining viewpoints evenly. 6. Repeat steps 1-5 and chart the progression of the probability space.

Currently, It seems 40%+ likely that Bitcoin will end up as an accidental Ponzi scheme with a crash based on late adopters rushing out. But there is also still a 10%+ chance that it replaces gold as a currency hedge for the next 20+ years and 5+ percent chance that it becomes a first class currency.

Who exactly is a "domain expert" in bitcoin? The whole thing was created by an anonymous developer 10 years ago, and all of the so called "domain experts" are johnny come latelys who smelled a quick buck.

For those 10%: Do you see BitCoin as an actual currency that you can buy stuff with, or purely an investment?

Let's not kid ourselves, this thin-client re-package is a marketing effort to push forward a paradigm shift that allows companies to grab more power and control of our 1's and 0's

... whatever value proposition it is packaged up in is just marketing and propaganda ... even if they charge money for it.

My favorite crazy ideas from Science are

- "Imagine, they're like really small animals, but the're too small to see! The're everywhere! They live on us, in us, around us! They are what makes us sick!" (Pasteur, germ theory of diseases)

- "You know how there can be mountains as huge as the Himalaya? Easy! In reality, all continents are really like small leaves floating on a see of magma, and they're bouncing into each other, and when they crash we get these huge mountain ranges and continents." (Alfred Wegener, tectonic plates)

- "You know time? Yeah, it's really different for everyone, and there isn't even a thing such as 'simultaneous'. I'm serious! Just imagine riding on a train and playing with a flashlight and a watch!" (some patent clerk in Switzerland)

More recently:

Seeing small things is difficult. Instead of making microscopes better, what if we made the samples bigger?

(Expansion microscopy)

There are two ways of looking at this:

1. PG is selling us something. 2. PG just open-sourced a part that seems like a component of the YC admissions logic.

I personally don't care if it's just 2) or if it's 1) and 2) - in each case I get to learn something new and for that I am grateful. Basically, they must have established that whenever they can't tell if you're right or wrong, they ask themselves how likely are you to know something that they don't. This seems obvious enough, but only after you've heard it explained. Also, it might be obvious to each individual to a different degree, so when you consider that YC applications are reviewed by a large group of people, it's almost certain that this is all codified in such a way that the reviewers are not just judging the startup alone, but likely also the founder independently of their startup. As you can tell, I clearly don't have any inside knowledge here and this is all just speculation. But if I were to submit a YC application, I would certainly ask myself now more than ever before how to make people believe that I am an expert in the field of my startup.

I think a lot of people - dare I say it, even PaulG - are missing the point of Mighty (or not putting it into words properly).

Mighty isn’t betting on the internet continually getting more bloated, or being better than a thick client. Even for a poor person working mostly in Figma, buying a decent laptop will be much more cost-effective.

What they are really selling is the equivalent of upgrading your laptop to a new model while it’s still running. Hardware shopping is time-consuming, stressful, and never done proactively - so you suffer in silence till the new one arrives. Then you have to replicate your old workflow and warm the caches.

The two biggest threats to Mighty are Apple/MSFT building “snapshot” recoveries in new hardware (almost AMI-like), and real adoption of saving bookmarks, history and passwords to the cloud by signing in to Chrome (most I know are hesitant). As has always been the case in this industry, the hardware is irrelevant.

This isn’t game-streaming, where you unlock hardware economies of scale because most users play a tiny amount a day on average. Your browser is always on.

> Hardware shopping is time-consuming, stressful, and never done proactively - so you suffer in silence till the new one arrives. Then you have to replicate your old workflow and warm the caches.

What a luxurious problem to have: would rather swipe my card and pay 50$/month than buy a new laptop - ugh!

I agree with the general gist of this, however the crux is that most ideas that turn out to be revolutionary just don't originate within the accepted circle of domain experts, exactly because being a domain expert makes you more unlikely to think out of the box.

Google didn't come out of Yahoo. Napster wasn't founded by music industry execs. Friendster didn't evolve into Facebook. Match.com didn't invent Tinder. It's often the curious outsiders that disrupt the status quo, not the well connected insiders.

It’s also just as often someone who’s worked in an industry for a while and has a bunch of good ideas from understanding the problems. We put the college kids making big companies on a pedestal but most startups are from people who know the domain.

You won’t find a revolutionary import/export company that doesn’t have some knowledge about the logistics industry. But you are more likely to be paying attention to new technologies as they emerge that might allow you to come up with the revolutionary ideas. I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older I’ve stopped spending my time fiddling with all my devices. As a result I’m less likely to realize when something new and exciting might be within reach, until it hits a higher point on the bell curve of maturity.

However, for everyone of those examples there are many counter-examples: Intel came out of Shockley, ex-IBMers went onto found several other companies (SAP, Peoplesoft,...)...

So Im skeptical of this outsider/insider characterization, IMHO it's almost always the individuals.

Those are all excellent examples of the main reason why innovation can not be done in established businesses: the fear of cannibalizing the cash cow will stifle any real innovation.

>Google didn't come out of Yahoo.

from my reading of the history of Yahoo they had plenty of good ideas that they destroyed because the problem was not domain experts but thinking they were in the wrong business (media!)

I'm curious to see a list of world-changing ideas that came out of domain expertise and those that the essay claims could be dismissed because the person was not an expert.

AirBnB, which is perhaps pg's favorite company, would never have gotten into Y Combinator without Michael Seibel and the endorsement of the JTV crew. AirBnB simply would not exist today.

So I hope people don't read this essay and think, "I'm not a domain expert, so I'll give up on this idea." Somewhat of a dangerous essay for that reason.

I don't think pg intended that crazy new ideas require someone to be a domain expert, just some expertise. Slight wording difference.

In the case of music, one could have domain expertise on audio files, compression and domain expertise about file sharing and domain expertise about younger people's listening habits. That's just having some insights into the domain, several as is the case with Napster. Music industry execs in those days probably had domain expertise on contract law, revenue sharing models, marketing and didn't have a clue about file sharing or audio compression.

Also want to mention the examples you mention seem to have not much "newness" to them to be "crazy new" in my opinion.

When I think of "crazy new" ideas, I think of things like stuff that came out of PARC in the 60's. If you go watch the Stanford 2 part series "How To Invent The Future" with Alan Kay on youtube [0] it goes into a lot of detail about them.

The challenge there with Xerox was they couldn't capitalize on every single idea that came out, just not logistically possible for a company to really do that.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ

He didn't say "the accepted circle". Just domain experts.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were domain experts - they were doing a PhD dissertation on mapping and indexing the web.

The other businesses you mention aren't all that crazy; they just needed good implementation.

Why are all your examples software companies? Certainly not because most of the world's revolutionary ideas are from programmers. Perhaps there are benefits to domain knowledge for coming up with revolutionary ideas in, say, biology or chemistry or electrical engineering or literature or political science or manufacturing or medicine...

> the crux is that most ideas that turn out to be revolutionary just don't originate within the accepted circle of domain experts, exactly because being a domain expert makes you more unlikely to think out of the box.

I don't know about that... look at physics for example. You have plenty of experts who are total mavericks and then a bunch of outsiders spewing crankery and messing up on the basics.

I agree 100%. The list could be continued indefinitely.

Less positively formulated, you could also say people outside an industry are naïve enough to start something people inside would deem impossible.

You could also look at the list of Google's failures.

SpaceX and Tesla came 'out of' PayPal.

Isn't this the issue Joseph Campbell addressed? The journey a person with a crazy new idea endures? And, how in all different cultures the redeemer, a person solving an issue that their society needs to address, have the same symbolic characteristics. You and your children experience this not in a philosophy or mythology class but at every moment someone mentions a Star Wars or Marvel reference[0]. Disney keeps telling this one story over and over again, a story of a person with a crazy new idea being ostracized and rejected by their society and the journey they have to make to return to their society with a new solution to a problem.

The system, lol, I mean our culture and society, is very resilient to change. If it wasn't, it would be a different system. A part of the resilience, the reason it doesn't crash down into chaos and anarchy is because it rejects and ostracizes people with new ideas. It's by design, how it evolved. However, it also needs to evolve and grow and the people who do that have to endure.

Not all people who are on this 'Hero's Journey' are correct. Disney isn't addressing whether the crazy new idea is good or not, although in their media it is always a good idea, which is what Paul Graham is writing about. Their stories are addressing the journey a person endures if they have any crazy new idea that challenges their culture and society, good or bad. Whereas, Paul Graham is looking to quantify signals that a crazy new idea is good, something he should invest in. To which, I'd add asking if the person with a crazy new idea is honest, not only to other people, but more importantly honest to themselves, integrity. If a person can separate delusion from fact except for that one idea, that's a signal.

[0]https://livingspirit.typepad.com/files/chris-vogler-memo-1.p...

I think Campbell's "journey" is about storytelling and the narrative journey, with a heavy dose of Jungian psychology, not about tech/science ideas. So I'd say it doesn't fit here.

I feel like Godwin saying this, but the other side of that coin is that's the same process that Joachim Feist's biography describes Hitler as going through.

You might be a Skywalker, but you don't know which one.

“But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” -Sagan

The Mighty App will either die or become a privacy nightmare. Because a browser can run arbitrary compute it will be abused, and if they don't want to die they will have to spy on what their users are doing to find abuse.

In the realm of entrepreneurship, I think domain experts who also risk tons of their cash on crazy ideas should be looked at even closer.

Y Combinator and Tesla were seen as stupid and crazy for a long time. Meanwhile I’ve seen a lot of domain expert entrepreneurs do really crazy things that lead nowhere when it’s VC money instead of theirs.

There are too many factors that'll decide whether it'll be success or not. I believe timings and luck are often overlooked.

iPhone certainly not the first touch screen display, Microsoft did have one, I believe. However Apple's timing was perfect, there was increasing adaptation of wifi connectivity and 3g, making it able to browse anywhere. Of course smoother interface and beautiful design also contribute big.

AmongUs was lucky they got advertisement from streamer, at perfect timing that was (is) pandemic and lockdowns.

Tesla can be considered crazy because they try to emerge with unknown product, with unknown market and unknown possibility of success. If we look at the past, Apple's iPhone was crazy too, because it was new product, with unknown market.

He is an investor on this “crazy new idea” , I don’t believe him, he is just hustling his audience and trying to create hype about a product that is neither new nor competitive. People like Guido van Rossum , James Gosling , Bjarne Stroustrup , just to mention a few, have contributed way more to the field and have earned the respect of millions , you don’t see them hyping crappy startups for a few bucks (billions* ) . I do respect the founders , and understand the have worked hard on this project , I just don’t think that just working hard on something makes it good , or whatever Paul Graham says is something I should accept as truth.

> he is just hustling his audience

And doing an extremely effective job of it. Getting readers to feel something is the whole game. Paul and Suhail know the default reaction to this idea is “well that’s dumb”. Encouraging and exploiting heated conversation around that is a smart move.

This is such an uncharitable read that I think it’s doing you a disservice.

I recommend imagining “what frame of mind or perspective would PG need to have to honestly believe what he’s saying?”

All of the people you mention are examples of the sort of folks the article mentions - domain experts with a "crazy new idea".

Unrelated to PG's post... I had no clue what MightyApp is so I went to their website [0]. When I scrolled to "Work without the fan noise" section on the homepage my fan started to work pretty hard. Haven't checked if they intentionally got the fan to work, but it was a nice coincidence.

[0] mightyapp.com

They could do the equivalent of those images comparing Full HD and 4K side-by-side, by having a button "with MightyApp" which reduces CPU load and makes your fan stop.

If this is about Mighty, the bad parts of it aren't technical.

- Even with today's concentration of information, there are several independent information sources left... and they want us to access them from a single point of failure?

- Who pays for this and how? How do I install my own ad blockers and anti tracking extensions on Mighty? Am I supposed to just trust them that they won't sell my advertising profile?

- What happens to the sites Mighty management disagrees with? Do they become inaccessible? Or they render badly? Especially since they're an American company and society is getting ultra polarized over there...

Exactly. The tech is farcical (surely even a proponent of them can see that?) but that's not really Mighty's fault.

It's bad because their strongest viable business plays seem to all involve leveraging their access to people's browsers in not-so-nice ways.

Founders: "Write that down"

I think there is some evolutionary psychology at play in people's bias against "Crazy New Ideas". A human hunting and gathering on a savanna with a crazy new idea is likely to be killed by a lion or starve. Sure the new ideas sometimes were breakthroughs but the idea-haver's peers likely experienced strong selective pressure to wait until there was good evidence that an idea was unlikely to get one killed before endorsing it and practicing it themselves.

In modern times we should feel more safe to have "Crazy New Ideas", we probably need them to solve many of the problems our world faces today. But we are biased against new ideas since our brains have evolved to see them associated with negative outcomes like death by lion or exile from the tribe. There is a lower risk of death by big cat today so people should feel more willing to have an celebrate new ideas.

There is no question that many important ideas sounded crazy at first.

The problem is that these ideas are a tiny minority of all new ideas.

The vast majority of new ideas are eventually proven invalid.

So just because an idea is rejected, does not mean that it is guaranteed to triumph.

> Someone proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then it gradually takes over the world.

This is survivorship bias. He is not wrong in that yes, we should consider ideas from domain experts carefully and not be overly dismissive. But it is absolutely survivorship bias to believe that every crazy idea from a domain expert worked out.

Graham should know better, he talked about arc as the messiah for five years before getting beat to market by Clojure. Now they barely do proper language releases.

From TFA:

> Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don't have to be. They just have to be sufficiently good bets — to have sufficiently high expected value. And I think on average they do.

It's likely that you're both right. If something is biased 45% off of a coin toss, but gives 25x returns, it's still positive EV.

This is a part of VC and speculative investment that a lot of people gloss over. Success is the difference between being wrong 95% of the time and being wrong 97% of the time. (And, with Softbank around, sometimes it's the difference between being wrong 97% of the time and 99.5% of the time.)

Having crazy ideas seems to be a prerequisite for taking over the world with an idea. The alternative is having familiar ideas which are already pervasive, or having no ideas.

It would be survivorship bias if the author suggested a rule here - but this quote is only a statement that 'this can happen'.

Where the author suggest a rule: "Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don't have to be. They just have to be sufficiently good bets — to have sufficiently high expected value." - it is hedged against survivorship bias.

> it is absolutely survivorship bias to believe that every crazy idea from a domain expert worked out

Who believes that?

It seems people often have a weird "anti-bias" to believe that everything that goes on to be wildly successful was originally dismissed as ridiculous or impossible. First of all, it's not true. There are plenty of examples of ideas that seemed good to begin with and turned out to be good in practice. So something seeming ridiculous doesn't really count as an important quality in predicting success. Secondly, even if it were somehow true that all successful ideas seemed ridiculous, that still says nothing about how likely something is to succeed. What percentage of failed ideas originally seemed ridiculous? It's also an important question, but I guess one you don't need to answer if you're a billionaire and have a large audience of worshipers.

Sometimes a stupid idea is just that.

The problem is compounded by the fact that most of this is just a storytelling retcon anyway.

Mighty is trying to make your browser experience smoother, faster, whatever (saying nothing of the larger vision). That's obviously a good idea, and it's easy to tell a story about how the founders overcame huge technical hurdles to make it work, and so on.

But then Mighty is also obviously one of the ugliest, most inelegant ideas ever invented, which, in case it fails, can be used to point it how obvious it was.

So, yeah. Not sure there's much to be learnt here?

“Please work on new things and sell me your equity a pittance, so that I may become richer on a few home runs, while most of you fail miserably.”

Seems like the privacy implications of this are not worth it for any serious company.

I was watching Rudy Giuliani yesterday on youtube, talk about how the FBI accessed and monitored his iCloud account for over a year. Which included his privileged lawyer/client information. If they can do that to a president's lawyer, while he's defending the president. They can do it to anyone.

Do you have a source for that? It seems extremely implausible for a number of reasons.

> Another reason people dismiss new ideas is that it's an easy way to seem sophisticated. When a new idea first emerges, it usually seems pretty feeble. It's a mere hatchling. Received wisdom is full-grown eagle by comparison. So it's easy to launch a devastating attack on a new idea, and anyone who does will seem clever to those who don't understand this asymmetry.

I wonder if most people realize this? In my experience, it seems like a characteristic that defies intellect and education. Incredibly smart people are, if anything, someone's more dismissive of new ideas because of their confidence that it just won't work.

Related: when ideas are young, they must be nurtured like saplings. Too much criticism will kill them, they must be watered and fed to give them a chance.

> it's easy to launch a devastating attack on a new idea, and anyone who does will seem clever

This happened to me when I was younger. I had an idea that could best be described as Uber, years before Uber existed. I worked hard on analyzing this idea, preparing all sorts of financials, enrolling in an incubator program to understand how to pitch, getting help everywhere I could.

The incubator held a pitch event that would be attended by a range of people from different professions and judged by a panel of their choosing.

I made my presentation. It went very well. Until one of the five judges essentially took over. Up until then I had received reasonable questions and offered reasonable answers. He chose to be brutally dismissive. I don't know his background but the guy attacked at such a level that no other judge asked any questions. It was truly distressing, to say the least. Once the firing squad treatment ended I said "thank you" and left the auditorium.

I must have been obviously fuming and the attack must have been obviously unfair to some in the audience because an executive from UPS (the shipping company) decided to follow me out and talk to me. After calming me down he said he though my idea was excellent, that it needed refinement and that I should not give up on account of that jerk. Still, I was rattled. Definitely.

I was too young and stupid to process that event for what it was: A jerk being elevated to judging startup ideas who was there to feel superior by hurting people. Again, I was too young to process that and I did not have anyone around to help me get past it. I quit. I abandoned that particular dream. All because of that one jerk.

Now, many years later, I wish I hadn't. I wish I had been equipped with the wisdom to dismiss him for what he was and move on. Again, too young, didn't have enough experience and this guy was at the right place and the right time to destroy me. And that he did.

Thankfully my career moved on. I have nothing to complain about. I sometimes wonder how much of that goes on in the startup scene. I wonder how many great ideas (or potential entrepreneurs) evaporate because of assholes who want to "seem clever".

A fast heuristic on the value of crazy ideas would be: a) is the premise of this idea based on the rejection or falsification of an established consensus or convention, and b) does this person (the proponent) survive?

A crazy idea is just betting a majority is wrong. What makes it smart is not about being right, it's that you have figured out how to make money if the consensus is vulnerable or wrong.

Some of the the biggest startups and plays of the last decade were bets against conventions and rich country taboos like letting strangers crash on your couch, driving strangers around in your car, straight women wanting anonymous hookups and the normalization of sex work, non-technical people using cryptography, working class people investing in alterantive assets - let alone understanding what a short squeeze is enough to execute one, watching movies on little laptop screens.

What makes an idea 'crazy' is that it is against one that people align with because the alignment itself means being aligned to power. Most of what people believe, they do so because it works for them, and by works I mean aligns them to what they percieve to be powerful. Most money seems to be made getting short weaker middle class conventions.

A crazy idea is making the call that an emperor has no clothes. I suspect the secret to getting short naked emperors is not so much a track record for upholding convention, but rather, a track record of suviving.

The problem with this is selection bias. When you say you've studied the "history of ideas", what you've actually studied is the history of notorious ideas that worked.

You have nothing remotely resembling a proper sampling of ideas. The ones that failed simply get forgotten

This video is relevant. They talk about "openendedness", serendipity, the tyranny of objectives, the evolution of ideas (and biology), inventing new problems not just solving problems.

There are important implications in AI. Kenneth Stanley - Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned on Machine Learning Street Talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhYGXYeMq_E&t=3016s

I watched this entire video and it's awesome. Their whole channel is a gold mine of information.

This is article comes at a good time. I feel like the tech sector over the past 10 years has been focusing mostly on very safe bets.

It's been shocking for me to see how terrified multi-millionaires are to invest even $100K into a risky but potentially transformative project; instead preferring to pile onto the latest hot startups which other big investors are dumping their money into... Like a herd of sheep. This behavior underlies a lack of self-confidence.

When you have a lot of money, your odds of success are much better, so why waste it and act like a sheep? Is it because a lot of wealthy people nowadays come from lower classes and they've struggled to shake off the herd mentality which is so pervasive among the lower classes of society? They think they're playing the same game as before; with all odds stacked against them, but this mindset is counterproductive to a wealthy person. Once you have a lot of money, the game is rigged in your favor, not against you; there is no excuse to act like a sheep anymore.

If the majority of rich people keep acting like sheep, the system will collapse under its own weight from the sheer inefficiency. Capitalism doesn't tolerate deadweight; it shakes it all off sooner or later.

Now investors are realizing that if they want to only make safe bets, then they should just invest in Bitcoin or some other scheme with high network effects... Maybe now is a good time for investors to actually judge investments based on their disruptive potential instead of just looking to other investors to outsource decisions. If you just want to participate in a social scheme; just invest in crypto. If you want to invest in a business, then you can't avoid taking risks!

When I look back at video clips from the 1970s, there was a diversity there that has been sort of lost. Things got developed in smaller regions and if they were good enough, they got introduced to a larger world. So we got some variety without everything having to overcome a perception of "crazy."

Now we kind of think everyone is so connected that you have to be "crazy" to think X rather than realizing sometimes X makes perfect sense locally and it only seems bizarre to outsiders. "Crazy" often means it's a radical departure from existing ideas rather than an incremental improvement and there used to be more latitude for saying "Hey, let's import this idea from elsewhere that seems crazy here but it's proven and solid somewhere else."

And I think that's a challenge we need to work on. The world seemed really cool and exciting about forty or fifty years ago and I think that's because things were only starting to get connected. Now we are sort of over-connected and expected to all know what "normal" is, as if normal is the same the world over when it isn't.

I think there is a cost to that.

>The reason is that everyone is too conservative.

Everyone isn't too conservative: veterans in a field are conservative because they have earned the war wounds they carry. Which is why you tend to see "disruptive apps" targeting younger people. They don't have the life experience to understand, at first glance, why an idea may be extremely dangerous.

I'm young enough to remember being that way myself: Who cares if someone gets my bank account info, what are they going to do, pay off my student loans? Spend the $25 I have in my checking account? Oh no!

I abhor people who throw around the idea that someone in tech being "conservative" is somehow wrong or bad. They're conservative because they know just how much is at risk for the folks who don't know any better.

That founder naïveté, however, is also what often leads to founders winning. Building Stripe really seems like a schlep if you’ve built a payments company before - so much so that you might not want to do it. It’s hard, and annoying, and has all sorts of regulatory hurdles.

But if you don’t know any of that, you build it anyway, because schleps are really just long collections of much smaller problems, and naive founders can solve much smaller problems at a rapid succession, whereas “conservative industry experts” simply wouldn’t even start because it’s too hard.

It's technological manifest destiny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGX7odA87k&t=36m48s

From the article, PG argues that the crazy idea should be taken seriously predicated on the person having deep domain expertise.

I don't think anyone with deep domain experience in banking would say "Who cares if someone gets my bank account info"

It's not necessarily true. Some people are conservative and have forgotten the reason why.

I feel like the same thing can be said about Boring Old Ideas. If the person who is speaking to you knows what they're talking about, there's good chance that they've identified a gap/opportunity and you should listen to them.

This seems more like an exercise in listening and trust than whether the idea is crazy or novel.

Might as well introduce this project here: https://planetarysunshade.org

We are domain experts, and are developing the support of domain eminences. It's an umbrella organization for anyone working on space-based climate intervention. Happy to chat with interested parties.

That is kind of reaching for the stars. Or shall I say last straw argument. I think a much easier winner is if you have a domain expert in one area and bring his or her knowledge to another field. A Designer who creates a web app to design logos. A fitness guru who develops a Drink. A car maker who builds space ships.

as PG has gotten richer, astoundingly so, I feel his writing has become of lower quality and less general utility. But, that's fine. I don't have to read it, but I do still adore and re-read his older works.

That being said, it's amazing that mental gymnastics all VCs these days will go through to make something that's completely nonsensical seem like it "could" make sense. e.g. NFTs and Andreesen Horowitz

I believe there is another factor, a bit more subtle, but I wonder if it is more pervasive.

Humans need to act. In order to act we need to believe that our actions are actionable. Anything, anything at all, that leaves us unable to act is a threat to our survival. A bear jumps out at you. Being unable to act because you don't know whether to play dead or run is deadly. Being unable to decide whether to wear a mask or not is deadly, even if both choices are both right or wrong. Maybe not said well, but when you consider all the actions you take in a day and what would happen if we could not decide.

As a side effect, I wonder if simply voicing ideas or bringing into view concepts that challenge the certainty we each require in order to get through a day, is in fact threatening.

Ironically, I'd dismiss this if it wasn't PG saying it, but this has survivor bias written all over it. No one remembers the ideas that were dismissed by domain experts that did not make it. This is the exact same argument that says college dropouts make the best CEOs.

This post seems to be in response to the recent Mighty app.

To me, the main problem lies in what VCs think pass as 'tech'. The mighty app website made it sound it like it was some novel revolutionary app.

I was hoping it was really something clever like what the Cloudflare people or even game streaming companies do. But nope.

It's significantly worse: it's literally slapping together existing tech and calling it novel. And worse, simple security/privacy seem to have taken a backseat as if there is some innovative performance-oriented solution being prioritized here.

There doesn't seem to be any tech. But reading through the website, one might be mistakenly led to believe it is something of a hard problem to solve. In fact the person running the show admits to how they pivoted from a Windows VM company to running just Chrome. This is reality distortion at best. Running an Electron app to stream a live Chrome VM session seems like a CS401 style project.

This is similar to Uber or AirBNB: the value add is in slapping together some quick existing tech with the main 'innovation' being the funding system or creatively working around regulatory/legal hurdles.

I find it amusing and sad that there isn't any new tech nor even a sound financial plan for a lot of these companies (nor even a so-called moat beyond just siloing their first mover advantage behind legal paperwork).

It seems as though the 90s VCs funded actual technically sound, innovative, "pushing the envelope yet making money" companies.

These days it's a popularity and ego matching competition among VCs and founders. This isn't tech. This is throwing money at a problem inefficiently and seeing what sticks. The people that work in this space are rather uninspiring, technically demotivated but financially motivated group.

I hate to think that this is the new 'tech' world that was promised. I don't even want to start on Jonathan/Casey comments as they are obviously right but that's besides the point here.

Makes me wonder if Mighty or Clubhouse (or even Lambda school/Coinbase) are the stellar examples a budding CS student is going to look up to: which is sad and makes me really wish for the 90s VCs to come back and fund more technically/financially sound and inspiring companies.

Unpopular opinion: the use of "tech" or "high tech" to describe many of today's tech companies is a misnomer.

For me, a tech company is a company that leverages advances in applied sciences and mathematics (computer science included) to create new, innovative solutions.

While there are certainly companies that are innovating in fundamental technologies and making that a cornerstone of their businesses, the vast majority of tech companies are little more than conventional businesses with some digital business automation plumbing. Innovative business models are still innovation - don't get me wrong - but they're not technology innovation.

It made sense to call e-business "tech" companies when the web was fresh and new and everyone was innovating, but these days, very few are pushing the envelope on the technology side. It's pretty well accepted that any business needs electronic technologies to work now: at what point do we stop calling every company that builds an app tied to a database a "tech" company and just call them an "[insert vertical here] business"?

The VCs are just following the money. We're at the tail end of the economic boom brought on by computers. Until we have another paradigm-shifting scientific discovery, computers will be used to more efficiently match up existing assets (AirBnB) while serving ads and content that decays our social bonds/infrastructure (Facebook).

If there was less money in the system a lot of these quasi-innovative companies would die, or not even get off the ground. But there is tons and it is leading to the misallocation of a great amount of time, energy, and intelligence - at the cost of future generation's standard of living.

Paul Graham addressed this in his previous essay "How People Get Rich Now":

    The best way to envision what happened is to imagine a pond with a crust of ice on top. Initially the only way from the bottom to the surface is around the edges. But as the ice crust weakens, you start to be able to punch right through the middle.

    The edges of the pond were pure tech: companies that actually described themselves as being in the electronics or software business. When you used the word "startup" in 1990, that was what you meant. But now startups are punching right through the middle of the ice crust and displacing incumbents like retailers and TV networks and car companies.

Wait, Mighty App is just a remote server running Chrome and then sending it to an on-device app? Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds so dumb. I thought it was at least some recompiled version of chrome optimized for performance.

I was hoping he was going to provide a list of examples.

> Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially the history of science, knows that's how big things start. Someone proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then it gradually takes over the world.

Funny how he says this but then later goes on to mention Darwin. Perhaps we could say part of the natural selection of new "big things" is if they (both the ideas and the people) survive the early dismissiveness and criticism. I would welcome criticism from highly experienced and conservative people, because if you can respond meaningfully and survive - you're probably on to something.

"I'm not claiming this principle extends much beyond math, engineering, and the hard sciences. In politics, for example, crazy-sounding ideas generally are as bad as they sound. Though arguably this is not an exception, because the people who propose them are not in fact domain experts; politicians are domain experts in political tactics, like how to get elected and how to get legislation passed, but not in the world that policy acts upon. Perhaps no one could be."

Weird. Math, engineering, and the hard sciences are the few places where it is possible to positively say an idea won't work.

I really wish PG would actually talk to some historians. History of Science is an extremely deep field with tons of professionals who have spent their lives studying this material. His overview is shallow. The only history book he cites is from fifty years ago!

It is so frustrating. There is this huge wealth of content available and a large group of people who'd want nothing more to be able to share what they know about the history of science and instead we get think pieces based in hunches, feelings, and generalities. The historians are right there! They want to talk to you!

A very smart man, PG himself, once said [0]:

> I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before.

PG started writing essays about what he knows well (programming, start ups), then about things he knows a bit (painting) and then stuff like this, or his essays on economic policy. In any case, he predicted his own future quite well.

[0] quoted here https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm from there http://lemonodor.com/archives/001091.html#c8508

You should use this opportunity to recommend an especially high-quality introduction/overview of modern history of science, approachable by a curious outsider.

I see little evidence he would want to talk to them, indeed his way of life is an insult to their discipline and their discipline is a threat to his way of life

Consciousness of history is inoculation against the sort of "thought leadership" PG sells

Being actually-correct about one's historical analogies and still making them work (or even finding that they don't! Gasp!) is harder than repeating "common knowledge" tales or fudging things to fit your narrative while writing with the same bold voice you would if you were actually-correct.

Not to pick just on PG—that's more common than not, really.

I don't like how Paul's writing always gets hundreds of likes just because it's by him.

Not everything he writes is amazing. I wish there wasn't such a cult around him.

This essay is a frustrating read, because you can feel his condescension towards critics (oh, they must be envious, or taking cheap shots), and you get a window into his headspace in which he believes that his way of examining the world and arriving at substantially the same beliefs is the only correct way.

But to be quite honest, many PG essays fit this same basic structure, whereby some venture or belief of his is introduced in a slow-burn way, with lots of short sentences light on content as if trying to sound off-the-cuff but way too authored to sound convincingly so, and then a dispassioned but complete teardown of the critics of the idea. A subversion of an appeal to historical authority thrown in for good measure. He always comes across as the understated luminary whose low opinion of the clueless hordes or meddling schemers below him is emotionlessly obvious, and anyone who disagrees is clearly a meddling schemer because of envy or fear or some other existential insecurity, because his seldom-mentioned achievements ought to speak for themselves about the supremacy of his approach.

But what's especially frustrating about this essay is that it's clearly precipitated by the dismissive public reaction towards the Mighty app -- an observation shared by many others in this thread -- but this is intentionally unacknowledged by him, presumably so that he can pontificate about the bravery of weird ideas the envy and fear of others on his personal blog without soiling the name of a business venture he backed. But it's also evidence that with a simple Twitter beef, you can get under his skin -- a sad fact you'd be forgiven for doubting if you hang on every word of his essays.

I don't think he gets hundreds of likes because he's amazing (though some of what he's written has been). It's because his writing is an insight into silicon valley and VC culture. Even when I completely disagree with his opinions they're interesting to read because they give an insight into how him and many of his peers think. And as someone interested in this industry that's fundamentally interesting even when it's not great. Arguably more so.

I think this may be an American thing. People as successful as PG, Musk, Bezos, Gates etc become demigods, for a majority of people. Cults are created around them. They can never be wrong and so on.

As a result, the opposition arises too: the people who dislike these demigods for the same reasons their followers like them.

I say this is probably an American thing because I don’t see this happening in Europe. I worked for years for one of the most successful startups in Europe and I have no idea what the names of the founders are. Probably no one does by now.

Weird pop psy in the middle of this article. Forgive me if I don't just take your word on millions of people's motivations with no data or argument.

The alternative, of course, is when a plausible person expresses an implausible-sounding idea which turns out to be, well, wrong. For instance when Noam Chomsky presented his theory of Universal Grammar[1] which managed to impede and derail the study of linguistics for decades[2].

[1] - This is my own personal opinion supported by no evidence whatsoever.

[2] - Again, an outrageously subjective statement without an ounce of evidence to support it.

  A new idea is a beautiful and fragile thing. Attack people, not ideas.

Explains those attacking pg instead of his ideas. I guess.

Reasonable domain experts sometimes keep proposing the same idea, because it would be so cool. e.g. onlive, gaikai, stadia. Investors overlook the latency problem (BTW starlink might solve this) because of its compelling business advantages. Aka wishful thinking.

Analogous to Chesterton's fence (reforms should not be made until reasons for the current system are understood), paradigm-breakers could say upfront what new insight makes their idea plausible. This also makes for compelling and exciting marketing.

I really like the section on paradigms, particularly how they "vacuum up the trail of crumbs that led to them".

On the one hand, becoming proficient in the current paradigm makes it harder to see other ways (in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few), not least of all because of its cognitive load. On the other hand, without that proficiency, you can't stand on the shoulders of giants.

My favourite type of dismissal is:

"X is a stupid idea that nobody asked for and it will never even work. Besides we already have Y[1], so this is nothing new."

[1] Where Y is some product that foreshadows the functionality of X and is already successful among some set of users, although has some incidental limitations that prevent its growth

The title is misleading. I went into it thinking I will find some new crazy ideas, but there were none.

Sounds like an essay to state Arthur C. Clarke's "First Law":

  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.

...which really just boils down to "it's probably possible".

Here are the three:

  1. 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.

  2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

  3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

This essay resonates a lot. I have currently a crazy new idea. I feel I am a domain expert. I am working really hard on it and have good feedback from non tech people in the domain.

Still, so many non experts dismiss my ideas and prototypes. Without asking Why, How, etc. And feeling good about themselves, tapping themselves in the back for "helping me make my ideas better".

I am not talking about other domain experts, those criticisms are super interesting. But being a computer dev and/or being smart in your domain does not make you a domain expert in my domain.

The ratio of supportive people vs incompetent critics is astounding. Even as I have one successful company behind me already. The lonely reference at the end feels right.

I wonder if the backlash to Mighty and the resulting defensiveness will cause it to persist longer than it would have had it announced earlier or gotten less friendly feedback. Presuming it doesn’t get the widespread traction it was hoping for.

> The rewards for working on new ideas are weighted by the value of the outcome. So it's worth working on something that only has a 10% chance of succeeding if it would make things more than 10x better

This is the primary point here - the "crazy idea" may (and likely does) have a low probability of being correct and succeeding, but with an outsized reward it may still be worth pursuing. This is, almost by definition, the correct way of looking at it.

Also note that he's talking about crazy ideas from "reasonable domain experts", not your run of the mill crazy.

This is not just a response to Mighty - he's been talking about this for years.

The problem I immediately see is that you have to qualify your domain experts. If it's someone you personally know, perhaps it would apply - otherwise you're opening yourself pretty wide to domain experts out to scam you.

One area PG missed is someone, exceedingly bright, who gets interested in a totally new field where they have little or no expertise.

Using first principles they announce a bold and crazy idea. Say like Elon Musk and rockets. Sure he read some books and recruited people with domain expertise.

If you remember his story he tried to buy Russian rockets, they didn't take him seriously because he lacked the domain experience. So he was forced to take an even greater risk and build his own rocket. Doing something previously the province of only large nation states. Still he was able to pull it off.

The comments here have taken a different turn from what I came here for.

Anyway, is there some relatively unknown startup that everyone thinks is crazy at the moment? Like Twitter of 2007? I remember blogging their demise back then.

I can't speak to Mighty's potential, but this essay is quite good.

As one anecdote in support of its argument, I have an acquaintance who co-founded a startup about 10 years ago. Much like Dropbox's early skeptics, I didn't understand how this business solved any real problem that couldn't be trivially addressed in a multitude of other ways.

I was puzzled as the business continued to grow and open offices around the world, and I was astounded when they were acquired for many multiples of the minimal VC investment that they eventually accepted.

The carnivore paradigm is a great example, Paul. It's infeasible to diehard carnivores that one could live (and thrive) without animal protein. We evolved as humans on animal protein. Our deep addiction to this results in massive environmental damage using modern technologies to raise and hunt (obliterate) animal populations at scale- 77 billion land animals and 2.4 trillion fish annually. I'm betting on Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and all the new startups in the plant/lab meat space!

Great article. What most people are not taking into account with Mighty is that new ideas like this rarely stay the same...who knows what product/use case it morphs into? Maybe the browser implementation takes off, maybe it pivots to an OS rather than just Chrome...maybe becomes a backup / cross device solution. Maybe something that we haven't even thought of yet becomes possible with new technologies like 5G coming on board. We don't know.

I think most "crazy" ideas seem that way given the current constraints in that point in time and it's the domain experts that see the changing landscape which will make them viable.

It's hard to remember, but there was a time that YouTube seemed "crazy" as it was assumed that bandwidth costs would swamp the viability of any video startup.

See also: almost all the "dumb" early web startups that weren't dumb, but mistimed the market (Webvan, ePets)

The issue is that domain experts often have crazy ideas outside their domain. Typical example is a technical expert or a scientist having a crazy business idea.

These two parts seem contradictory:

> "Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts."

> "The lowest form of all is to dismiss an idea because of who proposed it."

I feel like he's prematurely dismissing the idea of dismissing an idea based on who proposes it because of who he's imagining doing (proposing) it, if that makes sense.

I'm currently dealing with explaining why we should at least try and understand Stephen Wolfram's "a project to find the fundamental theory of physics".

It is a very unconventional view certainly and one which I suspect many "reasonable" experts from the field might term a crackpot idea. But Stephen Wolfram is an expert himself and so I suppose Paul Graham's test stands.

should be prefaced with "within the context of american capitalism", because i don't think such views on personal ego and taking credit apply universally. There were a lot more crazy ideas when experimental science wasn't there to debunk them. And many science fields even today are lacking ideas, not methods, but not necessarily for fear of being ridiculed.

"Such ideas are not guaranteed to work. But they don't have to be. They just have to be sufficiently good bets — to have sufficiently high expected value. And I think on average they do. I think if you bet on the entire set of implausible-sounding ideas proposed by reasonable domain experts, you'd end up net ahead."

That's the VC business model in a nutshell

>People will also attack new ideas when they have a vested interest in the old ones. It's not surprising, for example, that some of Darwin's harshest critics were churchmen.

Nah man, it's because every time they’re asked about security they say “yes we did an audit no we won’t release the results”? I don’t know about you but I’d like to keep my passwords to myself

New Ideas aren't crazy. Crazy Ideas are crazy. That's why people say it won't work, because it sounds crazy. It sounds crazy because the person proposing it hasn't made a good enough case for it.

Getting people to agree with a new idea is about salesmanship. If people think your idea is crazy, you suck at sales. Coffee's for closers.

I wonder why Chrome's "Reading Mode" is not activated in Paul Graham's website. I really get used to read articles in Reader Mode, with the same style, background color, font size and without any other distracting elements of the page. His website font size is 13px, which is pretty small. So I copy+paste to Obsidian and read there.

Domain experts may lie, they might be sure that idea will never work but still propose it in order to increase company valuation, get funding, etc.

Example: self-driving cars. Probably, experts that work in this field are confident that self-driving cars are impossible even 100 years in future, but working on self-driving cars gives them money.

The most important idea like this in the world right now is expounded in the book The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton which everyone should read. MMT fits this article exactly except for the fact that PG says it doesn’t extend beyond “hard sciences”. It also extends to the dismal science

I believe the technology behind Mighty is amazing, the people involved are amazing, the experience for it's users will be amazing.

I believe the underlying reason for HN's reaction to Mighty has almost nothing to do with any of the above. To the contrary, most of us probably feel that Mighty will be a raging success. But we don't actually like that at all. When I reflect on my own thoughts, the reasons my initial reaction is pessimistic are:

1. If Mighty makes badly designed/architected apps "fast", nobody will fix the underlying issues.

2. The internet will be amazing for the folks that can afford to pay $30-$50/month and all others will have to live with a sub-par experience because of #1

3. Some other company will come along and try to subsidize Mighty for all those that couldn't afford it but they'll monetize by advertising and further personal data collection.

4. Further lack of control over core software on our personal computers.

I fear that one day I'll visit a website with a message saying "This website runs best using Mighty".

There were similar sentiments when RSS blogs started moving to medium. Medium is amazing! but at some point medium needed to introduce a 3 item limit.

More and more of the internet which a lot of us remember as this open thing that no one owns is being siloed into privately owned.

The idea of using reasonable domain experts as a filter to implausible-sounding ideas seems obvious for hard-technology and scientific problems. But what about entrepreneurial ideas that provide a social service, such as Uber or Airbnb? Were the founders "domain experts"?

Thomas Kuhn. I feel sorry for the guy. His work is the basis of so much armchair worldview building about the modern world and is relevant to a cultural practice of science that died out 200 years ago.

I can't help but roll my eyes whenever I hear anyone use the word paradigm shift anymore.

I bet this is built using.

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...

Is this about his stupid browser again? It's not that the idea is "crazy", people are dismissive because the idea is "perverse". It has a perverse business aspect behind it, this world does not need ontop of the mess modern Internet has become.

On a technical note, is there really no https on Paul's site? The link is http, and changing it to https throws an certificate error https://imgur.com/a/1rnsGnM.

> They also vacuum up the trail of crumbs that led to them, making our standards for new ideas impossibly high.

I enjoy this style of writing. Seemingly simple but packs a lot of meaning (like JoelOnSoftware back in the day).

"If someone I knew to be both a domain expert and a reasonable person proposed an idea that sounded preposterous" - my reaction would be to ask: that's unexpected to me, what is different?

This entire article seems like some pretty obvious stuff that most people understand very well, wrapped in a veil of apparent profundity.

First of all: it makes one very large assumption from the beginning that is never mentioned: "I, pg, can confidently identify a reasonable domain expert".

That's basically a fallacy: this is the hardest thing to be sure of and Dunning Kruger applies heavily here (both for the apparent domain expert, and also for the person listening to their idea, who considers themselves such an excellent judge of the speaker's expertise).

Beyond that, there's nothing profound here: any "average" person, when listening to a person they trust (and "trust" here means they believe that this person is competent, i.e. is a "reasonable domain expert"), will heed their ideas, and be more likely to consider the "crazy" ones. Paul is not unique nor advanced in this regard.

The unstated problem is knowing whether you're good at identifying experts.

> Everyone is too conservative.

Interesting. Do VCs outperform the S&P 500 in general?

>"Copernicus published the heliocentric model in 1532 -- but it wasn't till the mid seventeenth century that the balance of scientific opinion shifted in its favor.[4]"

Isn’t this pretty much what Thomas Kuhn said in his Structures of Scientific Revolutions back in the 60s? At one time that was hailed as one of the most important books of the 20th century.

Everything Paul wrote about in this post resonated with me. He avoided any examples, and looking through these HN comments, it's clear why. A lot of people assume that his experiences are specific, but no, there really is a culture of shooting down crazy new ideas.

I can think of a few examples of crazy ideas being dismissed. I remember seeing this post where someone was trying to figure out if it was possible to verify that a photo was either undoctored or else that someone went through a lot of trouble to hack the camera hardware of a phone. The post started off in the vein of, "Here's this idea, and even though it sounds crazy, I can't convince myself that it's a bad idea." The peanut gallery had all sorts of reasons that it was a bad idea -- I think my favorite reason was that it would be immoral to try to provide this capability. Paul's essay suggests a few reasons that this crazy idea might have generated such a personal attack.

Crazy new ideas are uncomfortable. I'm reminded of "Pitch Anything" by Oren Klaff, which describes the "croc brain" that protects the higher functioning parts of our brain by trying to discard anything that is uncomfortable. A crazy new idea challenges our worldview, so it's going to be uncomfortable.

There's a class of ideas that engineers are comfortable with: incremental improvements. If there's a framework in place to evaluate an idea, it doesn't make people so uncomfortable. By extension, if an idea is non-incremental, meaning it's a crazy new idea, then since it makes us uncomfortable, it should be rejected immediately.

I remember a conversation about the value of an idea. There's the school of thought that ideas are worthless -- a monkey with a typewriter can hammer out ten ideas before their breakfast banana. Another viewpoint recognizes that good ideas are important starting points, but after that the only thing that matters is hard work.

My feeling is that crazy new ideas are more like a lottery ticket: probably worthless. I don't know, maybe the peanut gallery is right. Since the lottery ticket is probably worthless, the easiest thing to do is to toss them all in the trash before checking them against the winning numbers.

I think the biggest problem of these statements is that you don't hear much of terrible ideas which failed initally.

I think Mighty is a reasonable hotfix on the face of it. Having said that, if the question is "How do we make the web less slow", the actual solution must be reducing inefficiencies in the web apps themselves. Mighty seems like the equivalent of saying your room is tidy because you've shoved all of your clothes in the wardrobe. It'll work but what happens when we need a Mighty for Mighty or something like that.

I guess because I think that Hyperloop is a really dumb idea I must be extremely envious. This smells like a way to justify ignoring difficult criticism. The critics are envious, they're trying to look sophisticated, they're not real domain experts, etc.

The problem with education is that u r always taught to look for the right answer someone else discovered long time ago. Coming up with crazy ideas means u were either a bad student, or u have a post-doctoral education. It is hard for anyone in the middle to come with crazy ideas (unless u worked with someone crazy coming up with crazy ideas requires a certain training or exposure, it is very difficult to learn on ur own

> Having new ideas is a lonely business

Although true, there is a general anti-religious tone here that helps feed into HN culture. Thank you Paul.

Biggest mind shift: Instead of asking why it wouldn't work, ask what would it take for it to work

As someone who writes notebooks full of completely new, bad ideas, this comes naturally to many of us

The essay seems to be about startups. It could use more examples to illustrate the point.

Taking this article at face value, the idea Graham is talking about, already has a name: jootsing (jumping out of the system) coined by Douglas Hofstadter. I’m familiar with it from Daniel Dennett’s excellent book Intuition Pumps.

A feature of ground breaking ideas is they contradict established wisdom, but that’s also a feature of most awful ones. The latter greatly outnumber the former. For every brilliant mind contradicting and redefining a discipline there are a multitude of clueless ones who lack basic knowledge of that discipline producing total crap. Think Einstein vs thousands of crackpots who don’t understand kinetic energy and momentum are not the same thing.

For this reason Dennett points out that the presence of jootsing is not a valuable metric to assess an idea. He goes on to say as it’s unhelpful advice to give to someone attempting to produce a valuable concept. He compares it to teaching someone how to invest by saying “buy low, sell high”. Yes this is a feature of a successful investor, but in and of itself, quite unhelpful.

Unfortunately, saying “my ideas jootses” isn’t saying much.

> If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they're proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don't. And if they have deep domain expertise, that's probably the source of it.

I am not an expert, but this sounds related to Gell-Mann Amnesia. https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

If a domain expert suggests a radical idea, by mere statistics, I should treat that radical suggestion with higher confidence than if a non-expert suggested the same idea. For example, a theoretical physicist talking about a flat earth in the context of 2D quantum gravity compared to a fanatic talking about how the earth is flat on YouTube. Of course, I'm not going to immediately dismiss Lee Smolin, but I might dismiss a random YouTuber talking about it because they are not a domain expert. This, I believe is at least somewhat related to Gell-Mann Amnesia, no?

Whatever Might is or becomes, I am sure it will have an app store.

> When the average person proposes an implausible-sounding idea, its implausibility is evidence of their incompetence.

I mean, this is basically QAnon, antivaxxers, creationists and trickle-down economists in a nutshell. That said . . .

> Are they mistaken, or are you? One of you has to be.

By default I assume I'm in the wrong. There's just so many domains of knowledge, the probability of me having enough depth of even more than a handful is highly unlikely. The hard part is distinguishing those who are domain experts, and those who are not, when you are not a domain expert.

> If you're the one who's mistaken, that would be good to know, because it means there's a hole in your model of the world.

And I love viewing everything as a mental model, because, well, it is, plus models are plastic: they can be changed. Asimov's "Relativity of Wrong" comes to mind.

The thing is, most crazy new ideas are just that: crazy. For every great new invention there is the other 99.999% of bunk or snake oil.

It's very difficult to differentiate between an innovative idea and claptrap. Genius is difficult to recognise because it takes a genius to develop the idea in the first place.

Any recommendations for books about how new ideas happen?

I wish somebody would take my wild ideas seriously.

Does Thiel count as reasonable?

Don't scroll down.

Let's try something fun and imagine Mighty (and similar RBI services) were the only browsers available when finally Google, Microsoft and Mozilla launch their own browsers. Imagine the headlines:

"Run your own browser for free, forever, without having to sign up or put in your credit card!"

"Run your own browser, even when your network connectivity is bad!" -

"Run your own browser to access resources on your corporate intranet that are not available on the Internet".

"Run your own browser, you stay in charge of your data, login credentials and browsing history!"

"Run your own browser which efficiently caches resources locally so you only have to download them once instead of a constant 4K video stream".

Getting ideas is easy. Getting ideas other people want to spend money or time on is something quite different.

Even if you get an amazing idea, the chances of it being a good business are small. In fact, some of the best businesses didn’t start out with good ideas. Instead, they started out being considered stupid, wrong, childish, irrational, useless, too easy, too hard, impossible, unethical, unsustainable and we could go on.

If you get an idea that turns out to be a great business, chances are that others would have told you it’s a bad idea you might even yourself at times think it’s a bad idea and almost give up.

The difference between an idea that looks to be a complete failure and one that is wildly successful is often a matter of months. On top of that, most businesses fail even if you have a stellar team and for many not-so-obvious reasons (more about that in the next essay) It’s just hard to know if your idea is great or not or if it just sounds great. So how do you make sure your idea even has a chance of making it? Having worked with hundreds of startups, investors, and founders over the years, we decided to put together a list of principles that can be used to come up with ideas that others want to pay for.

1. There are 3 categories of ideas that potentially could be turned into a business.

Ideas for a solution to a problem

Ideas for fulfilling a need

Ideas that create new demand.

The safest business ideas are solutions to problems. The world is filled with problems. Finding the right problem to solve is often harder than the actual solution. The questions become more important than the answer. The next safest business idea category fulfills an existing need but in a better/cheaper way. Whether a dating service, an email client or a new type of insurance. Finding an underserved market is normally the way in. The riskiest, but potentially most fruitful of them all are ideas that create new demand. These are products or services no one knew they needed before they tried them. Computer games, songs, movies, fart apps, and most social networks belong to this group. Make sure you know which category you are in.

2. Questions you can ask yourself or others: “What problem in your industry would you pay for someone to solve?” “What annoys me that I would be ready to pay for?” “What in my life feels like it could be better?” “What are my friends complaining about?” “What are my friends excited about?” “What has changed over the last 3–5 years?” Ask questions that are open-ended and don’t come with an obvious solution.

3. Once you’ve found an idea to pursue ask yourself: “Are there any existing solutions out there?” “How big is the problem/need?” “Why hasn’t this been solved so far?” “What kind of problem/need is it? (i.e. Legislative, technical, financial, etc)” “Do I have the skills or knowledge or intuition or perseverance to pursue this?” Keep asking questions and don’t be afraid of the answer. The right questions asked today can save you months or years of work down a path that leads nowhere.

4. Define your competitors much more broadly. You will often be asked, “Are there other companies out there doing what you are doing?” The answer most of the time will be yes. If you don’t find anyone, you most likely aren’t defining competitors wide enough. Oftentimes competitors aren’t doing exactly what you are doing but are perceived by customers as if they were. If you define competition too narrow you risk missing what might be inhibiting your growth. If you define too wide then you might find potential market places you weren’t even thinking about.

5. Don’t be afraid of sharing your ideas with others. In the beginning, most great ideas don’t look different than bad ones. Chances are that even if your idea turns out to be a unicorn, no one will notice. In fact, if you are on to something, chances are you will often have to pay people to work on it for you. Reversely if you get an idea that sounds great and everyone loves it, chances are it most likely already exists or it just that, a great idea, not a great business. So unless you’ve found the cure for cancer and then probably instead should patent it, don’t be afraid to share ideas.

6. Fight for your ideas. Ideas are like newborn babies. Extremely fragile in the beginning but with great care and nurturing they can turn into amazing mature businesses. Make sure you give your idea enough time to grow but not enough to turn into a bad teenager.

7. Choose ideas that keep you motivated. Many early-stage startup founders make the mistake of just looking for a good idea rather than something they care about. Most ideas aren’t going to work out, so for most of us, a higher goal is needed. Something that makes you want this idea to exist and be successful. Something to keep us going when thing’s are looking the least likely to succeed. A lot can be done with perseverance and grit, make sure your idea is worth it. There is a lot more to this than what we’ve covered here but as you can see there is a lot more going into ideas than just getting them. So make sure you’ve spent enough time on your idea.

Graham's obviously inspired by some Kuhnian paradigms here, but in Grahamiam fashion, he doesn't cite anything to back it up.

What I find interesting where he calls most people conservative is how when I'm discussing VCs, YC, etc with non SV people is we talk about how conservative they are. YC's business model for years was predicated on finding talent (kids) that was undervalued, underpaying them (10k was the initial payouts?), getting them to pack up and move to super-expensive monocultural SV like everyone else, and then when they made bukku money, lose interest in improving the service (Reddit, Dropbox). There's nothing original there, it's the business model of carpetbaggers and robber barons. How boring.

I often feel like Jonah Hill in Moneyball, a pariah for pointing out how ancient VC thinking is. Or maybe I just imagine it. Well, it is my experience that true deep domain knowledge can only come from years of insights. People without years of experience will be lacking maturity and/or won't have time to even consider those insights. Usually people who mainly care about money, influence "becoming powerful" (Graham's words about his protege, not mine) will jump at whatever shortcut they can take instead of spending the card work necessary for learning these deep insights PG is interested in.

With all due respect, Coinbase didn't require deep insight. It was the equivalent of "You like money, too?" . PG, you should stop the contrarian persecuted intellectual look. You're not the little guy anymore, haven't been for 2 decades.

There's more than one crazy new idea floating around, checkout cituzenshareholders.com reimagining of capitalism and their (ok, our) crazy, yet feasible, plan to democratize corporate governance. With $40 trillion in shares owned thru collective investments Larry Fink's wish for a new form of shareholder engagement will come true!

In 2013, I mentioned to a recruiter that Go would be huge by 2015-2016, and the jagoff argued with me from their zero domain expertise. I told them to piss off and never contact me again because they signaled they were stupid, ignorant, and unable to listen.. which means I had no use for them and they were a liability.

Looks like pg discovered consensus vs non-consensus ideas[1], good for him.

[1] https://medium.com/entrepreneurship-at-work/non-consensus-ba...

Why are you all upvoting this shit?

Just because Paul Graham wrote it, doesn't mean it's worth reading. Usually the opposite, in fact.

You people need to lay off the PG cultism. Stop worshipping every word he writes just because you idolize his riches, or want to be him, or whatever.

can the font size be smaller? please

Paul's writing inspired me to start a porn studio. Thank you Paul!

PG posts hit HN like The Force

Here's a crazy idea for you: use SSL on your website!!

Should probably credit Thomas Kuhn: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_...

Is it possible to add a HN filter (hide) all paulgraham.com posts? I'm not interested in his posts and they pop up very often on HN.

From the footnotes

>3] This is one reason people with a touch of Asperger's may have an advantage in discovering new ideas. They're always flying on instruments

On the contrary, it is everybody else who is flying on instruments. The sperg sees straight.

A practical application of this perspective, and one that has a lot of virtues is:

When evaluating a crazy new idea (particularly something like a product or business), don't bother asking "will this work?" because no one truly knows, but rather ask: "if this does work, then what are the implications?"

Pg has quite a track record here by being an early investor in textbook crazy new ideas like Airbnb, Coinbase, etc. "Will this replace a chunk of the hotel market? Unclear, but if it does, it will be a huge and valuable business."

For folks talking about Mighty, its through this lens that pg is thinking about it. "Will it work? Is it better than alternatives? Who knows... But if the vision does pan out, I think it's more obvious to see how this could be a big and important business."

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