Stop the Presses: Essay Shows That Hard Work Can Be Unpleasant | Hacker News Reader

Stop the Presses: Essay Shows That Hard Work Can Be Unpleasant

diegobasch.com

54 pointsdiego28 comments

Here's the big thing that you missed in PG's analysis:

>The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps. That's schlep blindness.

Thus defined, schlep blindness isn't the unwillingness to do hard work. Instead, it's the unconscious aversion to ideas that have unpleasant tasks associated with it. This idea is actually pretty profound and it's good to have an awareness of it.

That concept is made up by him. I, as well as many other people, am absolutely aware of great ideas that involve painful schleps. I've discussed startup ideas with different people since the 90s. A reason to discard an idea was "that's a cool problem, only we'd be in for a world of pain."

I don't see any evidence to support his assertion that "your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps." It's just psychobabble to me.

You and "many other people" is not everyone. You're a smart, accomplished guy in your early 40s (whose work wrt Lucene I'm studying right now for a Clojure application). Maybe you've lucked out and have always just been surrounded by smart, motivated people with superb powers of critical thought and a lack of naivete.

If not, surely you're being just a bit disingenuous? Of course there are an enormous number of people who have no bleeping idea what hard work is. They have not bred the "know-it-all" gene out of the human race. People think they know far more than they actually do; this domain of knowledge over which they believe they have mastery inevitably, in some percentage of cases, includes "what it really takes to make a company successful" or "what hard work and sacrifice really is."

I think you took his use of the "you" pronoun a bit too personally. In a previous life of mine there were frequent occasions where my group would get lectured, collectively, on some topic like drunk driving or safe sex. These lectures were always prompted by the acts of one or two of us. The person doing the lecturing would always say something like, "If this doesn't apply to you, then don't worry about it."

Same deal here. If this doesn't apply to you personally, don't worry about it. I feel like, just playing the odds, his essay probably rings pretty true with a ton of people.

You should read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, which says basically the same thing in thorough detail. The fact that you know of some number of difficult things that you've seen and considered says very little about whether there's a cognitive bias against doing so in general - how can you even start to quantify all the things that you may have missed?

I've read it. Daniel Kahneman says something very different than what Paul Graham says. Graham is making an unsubstantiated assertion about a very specific hypothesis for which he has no evidence: that people generally fail to see ideas that would require hard work. That's not one of the many very specific biases and cognitive illusions pointed out by Kahneman which he substantiates with studies and experiments.

The unifying characteristic of the many specific biases and cognitive illusions Kahneman discusses is that System 2 systematically defers to System 1 to avoid doing work. I appreciate your point that Graham's specific claim is not substantiated by direct experimental evidence, but I think it's likely that the task of picking a business idea is subject to the same biases as any other task. It's certainly not as ludicrous a suggestion as you're making it out to be.

yes I am working with an API and its obvious that the people that developed it did not want do the hard work to make the api what it needs to be (and what my employer is paying for).

You could say the same about the original SMTP standard it dodged a lot of the "hard issues" when you compare it with the richer and harder to develop X.400 standard.

I think this analysis is a little unfair. It may be true that pg wasn't really saying anything new. That doesn't mean that it wasn't worth writing about, however, because it is one of those lessons that seems to continually go unlearned.

I don't believe his allusion to the inverse correlation between the age of founders and the likelihood of big successes is entirely unfair, either. Of course there are exceptions, but in general I've noticed that as my friends grow older, they have become more risk averse. They seems to be much more likely to talk themselves out of pursuing big ideas by enumerating all of the ways in which they might fail.

Having said that, I think there's a lot of value in older founders who can use their experience and judgement, but are still willing to adopt a "damn the torpedos, full speed ahead" attitude when they realize that a lot of hard, boring work lies between them and their goal.

The obvious question is, how many of your older friends are founders? The fact that someone is an older founder means he/she is less risk averse than other people.

I think that this is only half of what PG was trying to say. It's not just that hard work can be unpleasant - it's that hard work can be unpleasant and this blinds people to working on problems with large impact, simply because they will hard. He's describing a very particular failure mode of potential startup founders that he sees.

If this weren't a real problem - why are so few people trying to tackle actual problems that make millions of people miserable? Like health & sanitation in the third world. Or fixing the political process in the U.S. (and everywhere) so that people with less than a million dollars actually have a voice? Or matching up the millions of job seekers with the millions of jobs that go unfilled because there's nobody suitably skilled for them? Or finding a sustainable energy source so that we can maintain our lifestyle when the oil dries up?

There is a simpler explanation: the perception of risk / reward for those problems is too low.

Reward = how fun the work is + potential payoff (money, recognition, etc.)

I don't think anyone is blind to those problems. Bill Gates is trying to fix sanitation in poor countries. I believe that's awesome. Would I do it? No, the risk/reward ratio doesn't work for me.

I agree with you. Especially if you don't have FU money. Your first priority in your mind is to avoid working your entire life. That's first and foremost. After you achieve that, you can start worrying about problems with more risk.

Lots of people are trying to tackle these "actual problems". There's just no money in it, so it doesn't get funded.

Or if there is money in it, people criticize things. Oprah has practically become a saint, for opening a school that graduates ~100 students a year. Foxconn provides hundreds of thousands of migrant workers with the money they need to send their kids to school, and they are practically the devil incarnate. It's complicated.

"""Oprah has practically become a saint, for opening a school that graduates ~100 students a year. Foxconn provides hundreds of thousands of migrant workers with the money they need to send their kids to school, and they are practically the devil incarnate. It's complicated."""

How good of Foxconn. If only they didn't make ten times the money or more off of each migrant worker while forcing him to work in shitty conditions capitalizing on the fact that they are kind of the only game in town and/or have agreements with fellow factory owners to keep the wages down/conditions bad...

Foxconn - revenue $59.3 billion, profits $2.2 billion (2010). They can't really afford to raise their costs that much. OK, a large part of their revenue might be components, but even then, they aren't exactly rolling in cash.

There are plenty of people working on sustainable energy. You just don't see more because it is largely still in the R&D phase- the problem is not executing the solution & monetizing, it is finding the solution. Renewables cannot yet pay for their own R&D, so they are inherently limited in research scale right now.

Well, most first-time parents confess surprise at how difficult it being a parent turns out to be. Among them are parents who did their research, knew lots of other first-time parents, and didn't believe they would be surprised.

It turns out that believing you are prepared for something and actually being prepared are often not the same thing, hence the "blindness" pg refers to.

You say "Don't be fooled, what pg is doing here is thinking like the VC that he is." I say, don't be fooled by analyzing the source, "schlep blindness" really does exist.

He's also writing about fear and perfectionism. And I find his admonition to

"...ask 'what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?' ... there's plenty still broken in the world, if you know how to see it."

to be useful.

It's fine to point out his (VC) bias, but I think you're doing a disservice in not pointing out that he's also giving useful advice.

I'm not convinced. He says:

"There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call schlep blindness. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasant task."

I wouldn't say we don't see them. The problem is we don't want to take on them. Founders know that the odds of getting rich are slim, so they (we) want to have fun during the journey. Investors on the other hand, want to make money. They don't care if founders have fun. They need to convince founders to do unpleasant things that have a chance of doing spectacularly well.

I think you're interpreting "don't see them" in a way different from how PG meant it. Of course we "see them", as in "are aware of them". There're pretty common threads on HN and Reddit where people lament "Oh, wouldn't be awesome if <big hairy audacious goal> were solved!"

I think he meant "see them" as "see them as something that could realistically be solved by my startup". And that's not really divorceable from being willing to take them on. After all, if you recognize that something is a problem and recognize that you can solve it - why wouldn't you? What's holding you back?

I could solve problems that are extremely unrewarding to me. Some problems are very unsexy to most people. In order to tackle those problems you must be motivated by either extreme altruism, or a belief that your odds of success are high. The latter is probably unrealistic and irrational for most problems worth solving.

Some problems are also beyond most of our scope. Most people here think they're extremely smart. smarter than the average person. But all we really possess are superior technical skills. In reality, we just own a tool others don't. But solving those hairy problems requires special insight/research outside of technology. Having those technical skills(coding, design, user experience, etc) is just a pre-requisite and let's you into the arena.

I disagree that the point of the article was to make the obvious point that hard work is unpleasant. Rather, I thought he was trying to illustrate that there are components of many tasks that are easy to discount the importance of. Instead of attending to certain details that seem pointless on the margin, or may have less obvious benefit, the focus may be placed on more mission-critical tasks. It's not that those other tasks don't require hard work; it's that it may be easier to place the focus on them because it's more apparent why they need to be done.

Perhaps, it would do everyone some good to focus on the things we suck at doing or can't see the obvious benefit to doing.

One of the general failings of smart people is that they tend to breeze through school without ever trying very hard, and thus lack some of the necessary skills when faced with an arduous problem. This is probably what PG is getting at.

"He makes it sound like he just invented faster-than-light travel, even though every person who ever ran a successful business can tell you this"

I don't think he wrote it for people who run successful businesses, but for other hackers. The thing is that as a hacker it does not seem unreasonable to possibly get away without doing unpleasant work. After all you enjoy programming, and most business tasks seem algorithmic. Your business is going to be making the computer work for you, hence no Schlep.

It really only makes sense if you consider the target audience.

I respect PG very much. His past successes, YC, and his essays are great. He's not infallible though and I'm glad someone had the balls not just to put their disagreement in writing but to post it here on HN too. The author makes some good points and if the Schlep Blindness essay was written by anyone else there wouldn't be such a knee-jerk reaction to come to his defense like there is here. This community pays a lot of lip service to being the best, the brightest, critical and independent thinkers but then we all end up looking like hypocrites in situations just like this one. While there's no doubt that PG is am exceptional person I really think his celebrity and a ton of groupthink influences our interpretation of what PG says and how we react when someone doesn't fall in line to compliment him or do anything but disagree with what he says. I also shouldn't have to litter my opinion here with qualifications about how I think PG is great but without doing so I'll probably get bullied into submission via downvotes and various snarky comments. When the author of this article pointed out that the PG essay was basically telling us what we already knew while tricking us into thinking it were so profound the lightbulb went off in my head that inspired this. Anyway, we should all take what PG says like something any mere mortal would come up with. Some of its good, some not as good. Putting him on a pedestal impedes pour ability to think critically about the content of the writing and let it pass as high quality no matter what.

The two top-rated entries in the HN comments for PG's essay are disagreements, both stating that the essay is flawed. I'm not so sure the groupthink is really that bad here on HN.

I think PG does make one contribution in this essay -

"The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps. That's schlep blindness."

The critical post left out that single observation and just ran with "creating a business involves lots of unpleasant work" which is not even the point. How many times have people named files with time stamps and version numbers in them? Yet it took a Houston to see that version control is useful for normal people too and build a company around it.

And working at a start up isn't "dirty" work try working as as a sewer cleaner or a miner for example.

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