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Comment by diego | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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