Paul Graham's Talk at Startup School 2007
video.google.com
video.google.com
I don't think risk avoidance and need for structure will ever change. The real question is whether our conceptions of social status will change. So I've been writing a lot recently about how organizations and institutions exploit people's need for social status in order to secure cheap labor and make money.
The most obvious example is how WoW literally allows you to "level up." Even though objectively you are just spending 12 hours a day clicking on pictures of digital rats on a computer screen, qualitatively it's designed to make you feel like a hero. Everyone wants to be a hero in real life, but most people are just too lazy or untalented or risk adverse. It's not fair, but that's the way it is. Organizations have figured out how to tap into people's need to "be the hero" while extracting cheap labor (or purchases) from them.
A good example is when I was learning to play the trumpet. Learning to play a musical instrument is a very slow and continuous process. If my trumpet teacher were to have said, "ok, today you are level one trumpet. ok, now you're level two trumpet. etc." I think most people could figure out it's a scam. Improving at trumpet is a continuous function, not something that happens in levels.
The thing is, when people say, "ok, you're level one at education, you're level three at business." then no one realizes they are being exploited. In general, reality is very continuous. Whenever someone tries to represent a phenomena as something you can "level up" in, chances are they are trying to fuck you, take your money, or both.
Until people realize this is happening, professionalism will never go away. Instead people are obsessed with "climbing the ladder." Thing is, climbing the ladder benefits the people at the top, not the bottom. The average person doesn't even realize this.
I think in order for this mentality to end, two things are needed:
1) People currently view social status as a function of what people with money and power think of you. People need to instead view social status a function of your ability to MSPW.
2) We need new forms of social signaling that take this into account. Currently people identify themselves through college credentials, brand name clothes, etc. I think social signaling DOES have an important economic role to play, however, we need new forms of social signaling based around MSPW.
Capital has historically been a big factor in that equation as well. A factory worker couldn't very well take his machine around to different factories, whereas a mechanic probably has his own set of tools. Those of us in the computer field are fortunate that, at this point in time, capital requirements are very, very low. In other fields, though, large amounts of money are needed to be able to get off the ground. Who knows what the future will bring... less capital needs or more?
Incidentally, as much as I would have liked to see it, I couldn't take watching a bouncy image of some guy's ear next to a tiny Paul Graham. It would be great if they provided video of the whole thing for those of us not able to be there.
I do wish that the organizers had an 'official' video guy, with a tap into the house audio system, and uploaded the videos afterwards. maybe next year?
Do you have videos from any of the other lectures? If you do please post them, I am sure I (and everyone else who wasn't there) would be very appreciative
1) People can do more by themselves.
2) People can do more in loose association with others.
3) People can do more in informal organizations that operate outside the market sphere.
The idea being that if you get 100m in investment to start a steel mill, you need to earn 100m back just to break even so you need these very rigid systems in place to maximize profit. However, when you're business only costs 10,000 to start you can harness the power of informal systems and volunteers and crowd wisdom, etc. The perfect example of this would be Wikipedia. Because it costs so little to run, it can be run by informally organized volunteers and is free to operate as a non-profit.
Anyway it's definitely not a beach read, but it's one of those books where if you take a year or two to fully grok the ideas within then you'll be in a stronger position to MSPW.
By inference, I can only think of, "Make Shit, Prove Worth".
On the topic of leveling, it's simply a game mechanism (as you mentioned with WoW)...it's part of what makes games fun. Of course, learning any skill is continuous--even playing video games, but the introduction of levels is simply to give tangible, albeit artificial, goals. It makes the gamer/user/learner feel good that they achieved another level. There are other gaming mechanisms employed in web applications, such as collections. Pokemon comes to mind. This is also pretty apparent in Friendster and MySpace.
I'm not sure that there's exactly anything wrong with employing game mechanisms to make something previously tedious a bit more fun for humans, but I can see how having "the wrong metrics to measure level" would encourage people to optimize on the wrong things (climbing ladders), instead of actually focused on getting better at the game/their careers/their job.
No03: 08:16: Not determined enough
No04: 08:52: Not smart enough
No05: 10:08: Don't understand business
No06: 12:12: No co-founder
No07: 13:01: You have no idea
No08: 15:07: No room for more startups ( A fallacy)
No09: 16:06: Family to support
No10: 17:35: Need for structure
No13: 18:45: Fear and uncertain
No14: 19:24 You don't realize what you are waiting
No15: 21:17: You parents...
No16: 23:16: Job the default thing to do
thanks too!
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