Comment by superfrank | Hacker News Reader

Comment by superfrank | Hacker News Reader

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I'm kind of a perpetual skeptic and I probably would have been one of those that dismissed the internet as a toy in its early days had I been old enough to have an opinion.

That being said, by being a skeptic, I think I'm right more than I'm wrong. For every "internet" that I've called wrong, there's a "3D TV" or "Segway" that's I've correctly predicted would fail to live up to the hype.

These revolutionary technologies that shift our daily life come along far less often than people like to predict. Even if the technology is superior to what most people are using there are still a ton of factors standing in the way of mass adoption (see VHS vs Betamax). You know that Tolstoy quote "All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way", I kind of feel that way about new technologies. There are a million reasons technologies can fail to catch on, but they have to walk a very narrow path to succeed.

So, as one of those type of people you're asking about, I guess my reaction would be "oh well". I'm right more than I'm wrong and the downsides of a false negative and less than the downsides of a false positive. If thought the internet was a load of crap and I hop on the band wagon a few years late, oh well, it's not like I've missed out on it for ever. On the other hand, if I bought a 3D TV when they first came out, I'd now be stuck with an overpriced TV with a feature that has almost no support.

Totally valid to not be an early adopter, but I feel like you're just "predicting" it won't rain in the desert every single day. Most things fail, so you're going to be right most of the time even if you don't have any special insight.

> I feel like you're just "predicting" it won't rain in the desert every single day

I mean... yeah, that's my point. When we talk about most of these things we're trying to predict how the world will look years or even decades into the future. Even if you know the technology inside and out, there's too many unknowns to really make an accurate prediction.

If I asked you whether it was going to rain in the desert tomorrow, you could find a bunch of information and come back to me with a fairly informed guess that would probably be right. If I asked you whether it was going to rain in the desert on Jan 1 2030 what would be your answer. You don't know and I'd argue that you can't know, so the best thing you can do is play the probabilities and say "no, it will not rain".

> the downsides of a false negative and less than the downsides of a false positive

As a consumer, yes. As a founder, there is an opportunity cost to not founding the next Googlebook.

There's also an opportunity cost to building a business around a technology that doesn't catch on. Looking only at companies that created "the next big thing" is survivorship bias. For every Elon Musk/Tesla story, you've got multiple people who bet big and lost on something like hydrogen cars.

Also, I'd argue that most business aren't founded on some bleeding edge technology. It's a false dichotomy to think that all successful founders embrace new technology and all skeptical founders are doomed to fail. There are plenty of businesses built around doing the same thing everyone else is doing, just faster, easier, or cheaper. Sure a skeptical founder may not create the next Googlebook, but I don't think that really matters.

Yeah but a broken clock could do the same thing

Even if just a consumer, buying unnecessary expensive 3D TV just costs like max additional $1000 once, meanwhile missing Internet is huge.

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