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Comment by barishnamazov | Hacker News Reader

Law 20 seems to express the state of most startups these days:

> "A bad design with a good presentation is doomed eventually. A good design with a bad presentation is doomed immediately."

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Imagine that you're a highly intellectual, highly technical, and highly responsible person in control of large sums of governmental or corporate money. You don't want to waste the money, you want stellar results (in spacecraft industry, maybe literally so).

Would you assign a large sum of money to a group that cannot present their design clearly, neatly, and concisely? If they are struggling even with that, would you trust them to be good at actually designing a spacecraft soundly, economically, and in a reasonable time?

"If you can't explain it to a five-years-old, you likely do not understand it yourself", said one of the greatest modern scientists, who also was notoriously good at explaining things.

I think that Feynman was talking about preparing a freshman-level lecture for Caltech-standard freshmen, but maybe you have somebody else in mind.

I would say: You either don't understand your subject, or don't understand your audience, if you can't explain your subject to your audience, at the highest level they can understand, coherently.

The average person can understand anything ... at some level. Being able to match that level is positive evidence (but not proof) of competence.

Duality: Being unable to match that level is positive evidence (but not proof) of incompetence.

I suspect Feynman actually haven't been to the world of the middle-to-bottom sections of the bell curve, where that thinking becomes toxic. It only works because there's collective illusion that minority theorizations can be more correct. Absent that, or that inverted, majority becoming assumed likely more correct, not only one's explanations will be interpreted biased as likely more wrong, but acts leading to majority groups following your round-Earth hypothesis can be seen as manipulative and/or fraudulent. That kind of people(which exist) abusing versions of those lines get annoying fast.

I think if you understand something really well (anything: the law of gravity, the Curry-Howard isomorphism, electrolytic dissociation, general relativity,...), you can find a bunch of comparisons, or metaphors, or other ways to explain it so that an interested five-years-old will get a rough idea. A very rough idea indeed, but one that could allow them to ask qualitatively reasonable questions, and that forms an intuition which helps during a real study.

The "interested" part does a lot of lifting though. It's really hard to explain things to uninterested people.

If the person you are explaining your project to is not interested in the technical side, presumably under the rather confused but popular theory that technical aspects are not relevant to technology ventures, you'll not be making headway. It's much better to just make up some dollar numbers and run with that.

What often happens next is, another party comes up in the middle to manage the interaction between both of you (with the proper bump in the ask price), because there's not only so many decision makers looking for neat presentations and whatnot but also there's only so many teams willing to do the actual work.

> Would you assign a large sum of money to a group that cannot present their design clearly, neatly, and concisely? If they are struggling even with that, would you trust them to be good at actually designing a spacecraft soundly, economically, and in a reasonable time?

This mentality seems very US-Amercian to me.

> "If you can't explain it to a five-years-old, you likely do not understand it yourself", said one of the greatest modern scientists, who also was notoriously good at explaining things.

OK, challenge: explain A1 homotopy theory to a 5-year old child: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C2%B9_homotopy_theory

Lesson learned: very commonly you need a deep knowledge of a topic to understand advanced scientific theories.

What problem in the physical world does a knowledge of A1 homotopy theory enable you to solve?

A¹ homotopy is currently still a research area, but if you read the linked Wikipedia article:

"The underlying idea is that it should be possible to develop a purely algebraic approach to homotopy theory by replacing the unit interval [0, 1], which is not an algebraic variety, with the affine line A¹, which is."

In other words: it's a novel approach towards homotopy theory, which does have applications in the physical world.

Even better (Wikipedia article):

"[A¹ homotopy theory] has also recently revolutionized the theory of enumerative geometry problems."

Enumerative geometry does have applications in the physical world.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-XVII...

I'd add to that: If you recognize a good design presented poorly, be the one to stand up and present it well, otherwise you will be stuck with the bad one.

This is key to fulfilling a senior tech leadership role and substantially what people expect to pay you for, if you ever wonder what the mysterious "impact" really means.

Sure, but I want everybody to do it. I've seen too many times where a person presented an idea to a group, the idea was publicly shunned by the group, then later a few members of the group discussed the idea in private amongst each other as good.

When I was the one who presented something poorly, I've even had people who publicly shunned it privately tell me they support the idea but the group rejects is so they reject it publicly too. This is dumb.

Wow are they that cuthroat? Sounds like politics not regular dev work. Must be Google I would guess :)

I got agree must be the Google

> If you recognize a good design presented poorly, be the one to stand up and present it well, otherwise you will be stuck with the bad one.

I do, and I can tell you the result: you will be branded as a troublemaker.

That's what happens when the likely success scenario is selling out to an existing company rather than growing to be a genuinely large and long lived company.

There are beef companies and milk companies, depending on the way they plan to use their cash cow.

(Most VC funding is used to quickly produce a beefy market share, and sell it to those who think they can milk it, or to profitably butcher it.)

Trying to get milk out of the kind of cattle one raises for beef is a pretty good analogy for using an IPO to offload a questionable company onto the public.

realy like the cattle analogy, and it can be extended further, Dexter cattle are dual use cattle, and the worlds smallest breed, so increadably popular for small acerages and single family cows, so in a way the type of thing that is terrifying for big operations, as they are not monetisable at scale, but idealy suited to a distributed network that is also a peer to peer economical exchange.

I wish I knew more about cattle to add to the analogy but I do very much appreciate it as is.

Hiring salesmen to talk to other salesmen is always the sleaziest part of doing anything productive. You could say the same thing about opening a restaurant.

Petro Tyschtschenko is a good salesman.

   https://youtu.be/0-z1TaNx7TM

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