Some advice from Jeff Bezos
37signals.com
37signals.com
This works both ways. If someone can't get more than one level below the surface and understand the details that form the whole, they’re also often wrong much of the time. Just ask any boss I've ever had.
Speaking of missing details and being wrong . . .
They just don’t have it in them to jump in and out of situations to think through the most trivial of problems from multiple angles. They don’t know in “5 seconds” if something can be done or if it’s complicated. It’s often a rush to tackle competition or cutting out the oxygen and “do whatever it takes”. Ordering subordinates to “deliver” in 3 weeks.
This is precisely the reason why I love someone like Larry Page or Sergey running Google. They just knew that recruiting Urs Holzle to build world class infrastructure early on was worth it.
A lifetime of learning to take noise in & conclude on the one signal that’s worth it.
The MBA gives you a few tools that are helpful, but mainly it's a way to brand yourself and have people give you the benefit of the doubt that you can do things other than strictly build stuff.
I personally think the anti-patterns you describe-- the "do whatever it takes" without having the first idea what that is-- are intellectually dishonest and a sort of management-by-roulette. Sometimes you get lucky and it works out, but I don't know how you'd sleep running things that way.
- public speaking because we had to do a presentation just about every other week
- how business people with little or no technology experience think and their perceptions about technology
- how to talk to the people in the above bullet about technology
- firing people because one of my groups had a member that was not pulling her own weight, and we were told to fire her from the group
I also agree that the branding aspect is also (somehow) helpful. I recently moved from Florida to SF and when I was looking for jobs you wouldn't believe how many people were really excited/impressed/whatever that I had an MBA in addition to being able to answer the tough software questions.
If I had a choice to go back and either spend $50k on an MBA or spend it traveling the world, I would definitely choose the latter, though.
I don't regret the choice, but I think an MBA from a top school can expose you to more complex and big $$$ business environments than you're likely to discover on your own as an outsider without much experience.
- quantitative marketing models (useful in forecasting + modeling)
- market research techniques (probably the most valuable skill to building products)
- VC from two internships @ early stage funds (useful in understanding how VC's think)
- negotiations
- entrepreneurship classes on opportunity analysis, fundraising, and valuation (useful in helping to avoid solving the wrong problems; articulating the business to investors; building with the end/exit in mind)
The previous line was important I thought. You have to understand a bit about everything. No point knowing a lot of technical details about something in a business but not understanding where you fit in that business.
What trait signified someone who was wrong a lot of the time? Someone obsessed with details that only support one point of view. If someone can’t climb out of the details, and see the bigger picture from multiple angles, they’re often wrong most of the time.
There are two points here: Getting lost in the details and getting stuck on a particular idea. Obviously they can reenforce each other in a bad way.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of people get it in their head that they've discovered the "right way" and dismiss every other idea. This problem is particularly notorious in subjects like quantum mechanics. The field is so confusing that people find some kind of local comprehension maximum that they get stuck in and refuse to budge from that sort of ideology (which is often the wrong ideology by the way since QM is such a deep subject. Throw some quantum field theory or standard model physics at a quantum chemistry professor or TA and they won't know what to make of it).
To give a more concrete example: did you know that a spinning ball weighs more than the same ball when it is stationary? Tell this to someone decently knowledgable in physics and there's a good chance they'll argue vehemently against you based on their misunderstanding (or misinformation) of what they've learned in the past. Sometimes the effort to convince someone of an idea like this isn't worth the time; these people are locked into one way of thinking and take it as an affront to their ego. There's limited intelligence here. Don't want to be like this? Don't get angry when someone challenges you. That's the best way to start. I've never understood why so many people get upset if you try to point out a flaw in their reasoning. I've noticed this sort of anger much less frequently on HN (on the other hand, there's significantly more "you're wrong" posts than a normal discussion board).
In fact, do a little experiment if you wish. Look through HN stories and find places where people challenge each other in the comments. If you notice someone who says "you know what -- you're correct" or "yeah, that makes more sense", there's a good chance they make a lot of intelligent posts on here. If you find someone that never concedes to anyone else, it's likely they are locked into one and only one way of thinking and are unlikely to ever do anything considered "genius".
So the analogy can also turn around and bite you here. If a researcher in Quantum theory were to get hung up on the apparent contradictions between her own research and the implications within one of the other models, she'd risk being distracted and lose the fruitful path of research within her given domain. In this case, a certain level of myopia is helpful.
Did Einstein's tremendous resistance to Heisenberg and Bohr impugn his accomplishments in any way? Of course not. I don't think anyone would use that as an example of diminished intelligence on Einstein's part.
Your broader point is valid: be open to other viewpoints. But at another level, taking up a position and defending it has its practical advantages, when the position/opinion shows fruitful results.
In software, I think of DHH's 'opinionated' approach to Rails and how that has informed and guided the whole Ruby community. For many programmers Rails' implicit, "magical" approach to coding is not as good as, for instance Django/Python's more explicit philosophy. Both points of view are valid, but the strengths of each would be diluted if they tried to do both. I also think of the Torvalds/Tanenbaum debate over Kernel architectures. Deciding which is correct is way above my pay grade, but it seems clear to me that Linus had to take up a position here and commit to it in order for Linux to thrive the way it has.
I also think of the common criticism of JavaScript's OO structures, that it's a confusing hybrid of Prototypical and Classical OOP, leading to inconsistent or confusing structures. Perhaps a thorough commitment to one or the other would have been better?
So, on the one hand a certain openness and teachability is necessary, but then at strategic points in the development of an idea, a certain stubbornness and myopia seems to be equally important to the ultimate execution of a vision.
And anyway isn't the idea of a "special case" another way of saying, "at certain scales/speeds the rules of the former don't apply in the context of the latter"?
But we digress...
> You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
I think that's the reason why I don't seem to be able to commit myself to one thing.
But is it mostly a personal trait and forcing yourself just can't work? How should it be possible to switch between openness and stubbornness on demand?
Perhaps that's the reason why there are different personal traits, because switching doesn't work, so it's easier to get the balance by different personal traits, arguing against each other.
There might be personalities, which are able to balance themself better, but I don't seem to be one of them.
Did you know that the Earth's rotation itself adds about 2.38 billion metric tons to its mass, and we have the Soviet Union to thank for figuring that out?
http://infranetlab.org/blog/2008/12/harnessing-the-energy-fr...
10^29?
"Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I'll move the world" - Archimedes
The proposed plan lacks a place to stand. Unless angular momentum is given to an extra-terrestrial object, the angular momentum of the Earth+apparatus system cannot change. While Earth's rotation rate could be slowed by turning on such a gyroscope, if you ever brought the gyroscope back to rest, Earth would be right back where it started. As Earth's moment of inertia and angular velocity would be the same as when you began, so would Earth's kinetic energy. The most energy you can get back from the gyroscope is the energy you put in to spin it up.
It is the same as the sadness that is http://xkcd.com/162/ Only the first turn's angular acceleration makes a difference in Earth's angular velocity/momentum. After that, it's just maintenance (which, in the case of the comic, still buys you time).
It is not dissimilar from trying to permanently stop a train from inside a boxcar. You can't; not without external help.
The tides slow Earth's rotation and generate heat, but the angular momentum exchange alters the lunar and solar orbits; the Sun and Moon are places to stand. Gravity is the lever.
If I'm in error, please let me know. I'd love to correct my understanding.
Every argument with such people is a downhill battle. I have yet to find out how to open their minds to broader perspectives. It's always back to the allegory of the cave. Even when you have them in a corner with no possible arguments, they'd still ask "why would I need that?".
People need to be curious in order to be open-minded. It's quite hard to stay curious as an adult in this world while it is inborn to children. I get extremely curious about quite a few domains myself at the cost of alienating a quite few people when I talk about them.
I found out these people are almost always very attached to their past work, and tend to do everything else in the same general direction. They are dead afraid if they change their mind, people will think everything they did before is worth nothing and so are they.
They are devoted to their tools and methods rather than their general domain of work. Tools and methods come, evolve and go but the domain they represent always endures time.
Another comment seems to claim that since E=mc2, rotational energy can be converted to to mass and viola, the earth is heavier because it has more energy! But that doesn't make sense to me.
Maybe frame dragging has something to do with it? Your pulling of space-time through rotation looks the same as your pulling of space-time from gravity so you appear heavier?
Or is it for the same reason that moving bodies are heavier? Every point of the ball is moving and therefore heavier, the fact that it's rotating makes no differece.
"Relativistic-mass" is the other use of "mass", although I prefer to just use the word "energy". As a particle's velocity increases, its relativistic-mass / energy increases as well, but its rest-mass does NOT. So you take mc^2 + the kinetic energy of the particle, and that gives you the total energy of the particle.
The gravitational force is a function of total energy [1]. This is why gravity bends the trajectories of photons (and other bosons) even though these particles have no rest-mass. The gravitational force between two systems is a function of the total energy of each system regardless of whatever kind of stuff makes up the system.
For an example, consider the earth + moon system. If you were to "weigh" this system, and then weigh the earth and moon separately, you would find that the sum of the individual weights is more than the sum of the two body system. This is because of the binding energy between the earth and the moon (which is negative). It is interesting to note that this potential energy is roughly equivalent to the mass of everyone on earth.
[1] Gravity is really unique in this regard. No other force is like it.
This is one of the first things I tell our new hires - please call us on doing something stupid or being closed-minded. Just like a child, ask "why" all the time. We may have the right solution in place to cover bizarre edge cases that they don't know about yet, but it's just as possible that their fresh perspective is a far better way to approach the problem.
I'll get annoyed if people are challenging stuff just for the sake of it, but any time there's a genuine improvement being proposed it's a welcome discussion.
When I first read that quote in early High School I didn't understand it. It was the kind of thing that ate at me, I could not get what he was trying to say. To me, consistency was an important part of life; the old adage that you stick to your word. However, that quote transcends the idea of being consistent, because when you often make decisions without all of the information (especially in startups). As new information becomes available, you have to incorporate it into your decision. Sometimes it makes you look like a dick, or someone that doesn't know what direction they want to go to, but that's where different skills (leadership and sales) come in to be able to hold people together.
A better quote for this idea: "Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."--Ayn Rand
Just letting a contradiction sit there is the lazy thing to do--it's the resolving of contradictions that's the fun part!
On the one hand, if I'm constantly changing my mind, and my mind tends to change toward a stable, slow-changing correct solution, by definition, I'll be "right a lot", so long as I've had sufficient time to converge. In any case, I'll be right a lot more than either a person whose mind does not tend to change toward the correct solution, or someone whose mind does not change. This seems true by definition.
On the other hand, if the correct solution changes rapidly and dramatically, and my mind does not change as quickly, I will trivially be wrong a lot.
Likewise, focusing too much on "details that only support one point of view" seems wrong by construction, unless you magically pick the right point of view to begin with.
I'm not trying to be snarky here, seriously. I just feel like I must be missing the significance. I've reread the post several times, but I don't see it. Perhaps someone could enlighten me?
When I was younger, I didn't know what confirmation bias was. I had to be introduced to the concept. After being introduced, I was able to make better decisions. Although it may seem trivially true to you (now?), it's not to everyone.
You may be reading more into "change their minds a lot" than is intended. A lot in this context means "more than most people". There's a reason phrases like "strong opinions, weakly held" become popular in rationalist circles. It's an emphasis on better decision making.
I think the first time I heard about this idea was in Marilyn vos Savant's Brain Building. She argued that societal infatuation with "having the courage of your convictions" is not the redeeming quality it's made out to be. She mentioned that she could always give her opinion on an issue, but she was also always prepared to change her opinion upon new information.
I'm pretty sure Bezos does not mean you should change your mind 180 degrees at each new contradictory piece of information. Like a Bayesian spam filter, if you've had lots of pieces of evidence for one position, it should take lots or very significant new evidence to change that position.
Decision making biases of various sorts are my chief pet peeve in modern life. It's almost impossible to discuss public policy with people, even in the smartest online forums I know. I think it's banned at Less Wrong. When I listen to the media, I spend most of my time ticking of the biases I hear.
Hah! You only think that because you're not counting the bad decisions.
>Decision making biases of various sorts are my chief pet peeve in modern life. It's almost impossible to discuss public policy with people, even in the smartest online forums I know. I think it's banned at Less Wrong. When I listen to the media, I spend most of my time ticking of the biases I hear.
But biases are like stereotypes in that they're shortcuts your mind has developed based on past experience. That's what people used to call "wisdom".
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_bias Sherlock holmes: eliminate the impossible, and what is left, however improbable is the truth. &tc.
Also Holmes is not a good example of a rationalist; his main ability comes from being a fictional protagonist. Holmes cannot be a much better source of rationality advice than Conan Doyle, who quite literally believed in fairies.
Although much of the work of discovering heuristics in human decision-makers was done by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman,[4] the concept was originally introduced by Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon. Gerd Gigerenzer focuses on how heuristics can be used to make judgments that are in principle accurate, rather than producing cognitive biases
As far as the details you get into about the constantly changing mind, the solution changing rapidly, and focus on self supporting details, I think you have made a mis-step with the idea of a rapidly changing solution.
If there is a correct solution to a problem, it will never change. Our understanding of the solution can change, the problem could change which would require a new solution. But the correct solution (again assuming one exists) to a set problem can not change.
When he is talking of this changing mind, he is referring to a human's natural process to build it's understanding of our environment, or some problem space, on previous data and conclusions. The problem that most people have is they accept their many previous conclusions as fact, so they are unable to see problem from the correct perspective, because that perspective would require some previous belief to be wrong, thus they never consider that correct perspective. A good example here would be a creationists inability to come to correct scientific conclusions because they believe the world is only a few thousand years old. Bill Nye!
But the worst kind of person to be if you desire to reach genius status is one that searches for validation of their beliefs over truth. Most of us have this in us, I know I do even though I think of myself as open minded. The best example for this would be for you to go out and debate a friend with opposing political views. At some point you will find yourself defending something that you don't fully understand, your friend will make a valid point, and this little asshole inside you will tell you to defy his point at all costs. But you won't, because you started this conversation searching for truth over validation, and then you will consciously understand the desire to search for validation.
Smart people are open to evidence and argument. But also I think many really smart people recognise that their own cognition is a mutable thing, that the mind changes as we age and that we can play a role in that. They change their minds.
By immersing themselves in hard, interesting problems, surrounding themselves with other smart or inspiring people and by savouring experiences - that they change the thoughts that occur to them, the memories they can build upon, and the way in which they can form conclusions.
Maybe the really really smart people can even direct change in their mind about how they change their mind.
Then again, maybe that kind of meta-cogitation is tail-recursive.
Average people think the the genius are genius because they're right all the time. But that's not the case. We're all human and we're all wrong a lot. The most remarkable characteristic of geniuses is that they realize they're wrong a lot, while others live under the illusion they're right a lot. Both the average and the genius are wrong often. What sets both apart is the genius notices it, changes his course and -- at the end of the day -- makes a better decision.
The significant bit to take from here is, don't try to be right at your first impression. You're not dumb for getting it wrong the first time. It's ok, just be a skeptic, think about it and don't be afraid to change if you later find that you were wrong.
"Jason Fried is the fastest white man you'll ever meet."
Is Jason actually really fast and/or was he an athlete at a prior time?
Racism is where you advocate treating somebody differently because of these differences. So it would be racist to say "White men are too slow therefor should be banned from taking part in the olympics"
Racism has nothing to do with facts. It is all about promoting hatred based on superficial differences.
It's a line that I'm not clever enough to tread, but other people seem to pull it off. Look at Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder. Very racial, not really racist.
This is a common misunderstanding about the nature of racism. Read about Asian Americans and the model minority.
Sure, some things that aren't mean-spirited or demeaning are also racist, but that doesn't mean that everything is. Am I missing something? Serious question.
JF: That was an old bio that someone wrote for me. I guess it's probably all true, except for the break dancing part. I really don't have any desire to do that.
I think it's a stupid policy in general though.
People like security and therefore stability, it's one of our basic needs. We like stable environment, including people's opinions. Imagine everyone changes their opinion all the time, it could be fun but not everyone would like that :)
Also, people who often change opinions may look dishonest, opportunistic and unpredictable.
Therefore a simplistic view is that the closer to that person you are, the better. Some people may even think they are that person.
Realising that you are not going to be correct 100% of the time is the first step. The second step is working out when you are wrong, so you know when to change your opinion. Nobody manages both these steps all the time, some people rarely manage either.
The problem with this, is that most opinions are applied to most circumstances in highly contextual ways. What's the best database? It's one thing to talk about it in abstract and another entirely to talk about it for a specific project.
> Therefore a simplistic view is that the closer to that person you are, the better. Some people may even think they are that person.
When human knowledge, technology, and political circumstances mostly changed slowly, this was a good heuristic. Now, it's pretty rotten. It's better to take things up one level of indirection and instead of observing their opinions, note how they absorb new knowledge and circumstances instead. Observe if they are a good listener. Observe if they can alter their mental model in the light of new facts.
> Some people may even think they are that person.
Stay away from that person! Things change too fast nowadays. Look for the "beginner's mind."
That doesn't prevent someone from being right 100% of the time. It may prevent them from saying "x is the best database", but not from saying "x is the best for y use, z is the best for... etc"
The problem is with the fact that no-one is capable of always being right, not that the hypothetical person couldn't always be right.
PG has noted that Robert Morris was one of the smartest people he knew, because he always knew when he shouldn't give an opinion.
> The problem is with the fact that no-one is capable of always being right, not that the hypothetical person couldn't always be right.
No disagreement there. A corollary: a big problem is embodied in people who don't know that the above is the case and take steps to mitigate it.
A subtly different view: The hypothetical cleverest, most correct person possible would be right close to 100% of the time because they would change any wrong opinion almost immediately.
And with this view, the closer you are to that person, the better you really are.
Actually, no, it is not better.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with changing your mind as your understanding evolves.
It's a very basic concept. Changing your mind almost necessarily involves admitting you were wrong in the first instance — if you do not admit it outright, someone else will likely confront you on it.
People don't like admitting they were wrong. It makes one look bad, and provides one's enemies with ammunition.
Consistency is good. Blind devotion is bad.
Often people change their argument istead because at new time different position benefits them most. Or because they don't think trough what they are saying. Or there are simply people who like to win. In my experience the later ones happen lot more often than people getting better understanding.
Changing opinions in smart people are often not oposites of previous one, but upgrade of previous position.
In a typical Big Corporate workplace, to be seen as quickly decisive is to be seen as a strong leader. To change one's mind is to project weakness and indecisiveness. Perhaps in complete contradiction to Bezos's opinion, the prevailing opinion among most corporate managers -- even C-level execs -- is that those who can quickly arrive at a conclusion are the smartest, and are most likely to be correct. In reality, we all know where this usually leads. But there's still a prevailing opinion that jumping to conclusions, and doing anything to support them, is the ideal way to act.
Compounding this problem is a well-known and well-documented cognitive bias, present in some extent in all human beings. It's known as the "confirmation bias." Essentially, the way our brain works is to draw up a quick hypothesis about a situation, and then to look for any information that supports the hypothesis. We actually have to train our minds to look for contradictory or challenging evidence, because doing so is not hard-wired into us.
The confirmation bias happens at the subconscious level, and there's actually good evidence that it served as an adaptive, successful trait in human evolution. Back when we lived in the wild, we didn't have a lot of time to analyze threats, weather patterns, or other major situations. So being able to mentally "shorthand" a situation was a benefit. It still is in many instances, but it becomes a hurdle when we need to make longer-term, more complex decisions. In those cases, we need to bring conscious, analytical thought to the table.
They are also meant for ICs, not just people-manager leaders. They are used as touchstones for interviews and performance evaluations.
So, the verb form is OK but the noun form is absolutely not.
Or perhaps another way of looking at it is they are trying to represent voters better. Since that's, well, their job.
We should not get onto politicians for representing voters, rather than themselves. Changing their approach to public policy is a very good way for a public official to better represent voters.
You can honestly change your opinion and point of view, and you can also lie. Changing your opinion and point of view is not seen as negative, but deception is generally frowned upon to the point of societies making fraud a higher level crime (see Perjury).
If a politician changes his view and publicly states that he held a very different view before but he was swayed by x, y, and z then I think nobody would accuse them of flip-flopping.
For example, John Kerry's "for it before I was against it" sounded to some like he was dissembling and hiding that he may have changed his opinion on an appropriations bill simply because the wars were becoming less popular with the public.
This particular trait is of a much bigger idea - an active, aware, never satisfied beginners's mind, popularized in US by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunryu_Suzuki
A settled, stale, stagnant mind is a worst possible mental decease from a Buddhist perspective, and, ironically, the most desired state of the mind for a member of a totalitarian country or organization.)
Personally I don't care if someone (including myself) is right or wrong. I often have to make technology recommendations that may turn out to be wrong years down the line and end up costing the organization time and money. So far I've been pretty lucky. I find it helpful to always include caveats in my proposals and explain reasoning behind my recommendations. Of course putting in the time to understand the issue, the market and the history is key.
I don't have a problem taking a stand and be proven wrong or adjusting my position when new information becomes available. However, I wonder if this attitude is hurting my standing with the organization compared with this other guy who never seems to be wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox
Note that (1) I agree and (2) there is nothing silly about the comments or the link.
Scientists have known this for years. They have made it their whole way of life—because it works, and it's true.
Smart people in all walks of life most certainly follow those same kinds of scientific principles. Bezos is spot on, there's just an entire branch of knowledge that's been spot on way before he was.
I think he's spot on, and this has been the basis for my manifesto (http://jamesthornton.com/manifesto) -- I like to think of it as continually refining your perspective.