Ask HN: How strong a signal of idea value is “smart people want to work on it”? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How strong a signal of idea value is “smart people want to work on it”?

3 points609venezia7 comments

In a recent interview about his belief in blockchain technology, Kevin O'Leary (Shark Tank) said:

"Look at an MIT graduating class of engineers," O'Leary said. "The smartest people want to work on the [block]chain. So you've got the majority of the best intellectual capital in the world solving poor outcomes on the chain — why wouldn't you expect that to work?"

Is his heuristic good? Are there examples of many highly intelligent people being drawn to work on technologies or ideas that ultimately prove useless?

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How about the "don't listen to sleazy TV personalities who have incentive to make unsupported claims because they hitched their wagon to crypto and crypto is crashing right now" signal? That seems like a good signal to by too.

Actually if it wasn't crashing, it would still be a bad idea to listen to Kevin O'Leary. Or you could think about whether the majority of smart people are working on crypto (clearly false, there isn't that much crypto work being done relatively speaking), how much work MIT are really doing on blockchain, or how smart the people working in crypto really are (some of them must be), or whether the career choices of these 20-somethings tells you anything more than crypto being a field that pays well (until recently).

I mean Michael Saylor went to MIT, and he's an unhinged lunatic who tells people to borrow money and mortgage their house to buy Bitcoin because it's going to a million.

I agree with you O'Leary is probably talking his book. And of course there are examples of highly intelligent individuals running off in irrelevant (or worse) directions.

Do you think there is nevertheless some predictive value in the direction that larger cohorts from elite institutions choose to take, even if that direction derives from market effects?

Many smart people are drawn to solving intellectually challenging problems. That's why many end up in academia doing research even though the research may never be useful in the real world. There are many challenging cryptographic, game-theoretic, and economic problems in the blockchain space. This, and of course the money, is probably what attracts people.

There are always tech fads and many of them don't pan out. There have been multiple waves of AI. We're now on the third VR fad. I remember microkernels, exokernels, unikernels, push, portals, CORBA/RMI, "XML everything", micropayments, P2P, mesh networks...

Define “useless”. Many pure mathematicians wouldn’t call their work useless, but also don’t care about its application to the ‘real’ world. G.H. Hardy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._H._Hardy):

“I have never done anything "useful". No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world.”

He also wrote:

“It is never worth a first-class man's time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that.”

Remember how 3D TV was "the future"? Boatloads of cash & brainpower were set on fire producing standards, devices, and content.

Issac Newton spent more of his intellectual capital on astrology and theology than mathematics or physics.

Like most leisured smart people of his time and place.

Good luck.

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