@russell_m You don't understand what research funding is, or apparently what private equity is either.

Research funding is not a donation to universities. Universities are contract researchers: they investigate questions the government wants answered, and the government pays the cost.

@esthercrawford I understand why a VC would do it: to prevent you from getting market price in your first funding round. But I don't understand why a founder would do it.

@SpencerHakimian Apparently he didn't notice who's in the car next to him...

@bscholl I tried to fund this startup several years ago. I still think it could work.

@brianrbell It wastes the time of the most talented people. Imagine Newton having to do it. And it's difficult both morally and practically to exempt them.

With every scientist who leaves or has to be fired due to research funding cuts, the median remaining university employee becomes woker.

I doubt anyone in the administration realizes it, but Trump's war on research universities will make them woker. At universities, wokeness is most concentrated where it began, in the humanities and social sciences. But the cuts to research funding mostly hurt the hard sciences.

@ahistoryinart The patterns of snow on the ice contain the seeds of midcentury modern.

@MancSam1985 This custom rapidly spread, aided by the fact that people were starting to forget what chandlers and coopers and even tailors were. So now some American nursery schools sound to English ears like a preindustrial job fair.

@MancSam1985 In America it's socially prestigious to have an English surname, even if it's an occupational name that wouldn't sound prestigious to an English person. In the 20th century people who were proud of their ancestors' surnames started giving them to their kids as first names.


@benhouston3d Did she say anything that was false?

This case will seriously damage Penn's reputation. It's bad enough to punish professors for speaking the truth, but even worse to punish them more severely when they won't agree to keep quiet about what you've done to them.

@levelsio He *started* OpenAI.

@BenjaminDEKR Occam's Razor has the answer, as it so often does: for the same reasons people usually leave organizations.

@ahistoryinart Electric lighting was still new in 1907, so among other things this is a picture of a daringly novel subject.

@AndyHillWrites There is.

@eastdakota @AlpacaAurelius I've often wondered about this, but I asked @MaxCRoser and the evidence doesn't seem to be there. https://t.co/puUvnDQq3s

Autumn: Rugby boots drying on the Aga. https://t.co/jbJ1vkm1Ue

Degrowthers should lead by example. Don't tell us how you think we should live. Live that way yourselves, and show us how much better it is.

@aidankanesxacc When I'm interested reading it.


@swombat If so they will ultimately lose for the same reason the Samwers did: they don't actually want to run these companies the way real founders do. They're just trying to get bought. So you can wait them out.

I disagree with Bill about some things, but I'm impressed by his candor here. Putting truth and good governance ahead of party loyalty and self interest is a rare quality.

Some people are attacking Bill Ackman for supporting Trump and then realizing some of his policies are mistaken. But this is better than not realizing it, or realizing it and keeping quiet, which is what practically everyone else who supported Trump has done.

@SpencerHakimian Not slow enough for your target audience. You should have said 3300B instead of 3.3T.

@cremieuxrecueil The most striking thing about that graph is how different the rest of California must be from the Bay Area.

@davidwbrw Imagine how many once overvalued startups that message had to pass through in order for us to see it.

@mmay3r Rapid movement in one direction is arguably good for startups, but rapid changes in direction aren't.

There will definitely be *some* founders who are motivated by the prospect of a price advantage. But they'll mostly be like the founders who start companies to take advantage of government set-asides. Those companies don't grow into Googles.

As a startup investor I should be excited by the prospect of tariffs enabling a new batch of American companies. But I'm not. The really big successes, like Microsoft and Google, grow out of the founders' own interests, not the prospect of a (probably temporary) price advantage.

@chris_j_paxton Knowledge of medieval history is a rare commodity.


Do Things that Don't Scale
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
July 2013
One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is
to do things that don't scale.  A lot of would-be founders believe
that startups either take off or don't.  You build something, make
it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a
path to your door as promised.  Or they don't, in which case the
market must not exist.
[
1
]
Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off.
There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually
it takes some sort of push to get them going.  A good metaphor would
be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters.
Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a
separate and laborious process to get it going.
Recruit
The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start
is to recruit users manually.  Nearly all startups have to.  You
can't wait for users to come to you.  You have to go out and get
them.
Stripe is one of the most successful startups we've funded, and the
problem they solved was an urgent one.   If anyone could have sat
back and waited for users, it was Stripe.  But in fact they're
famous within YC for aggressive early user acquisition.
Startups building things for other startups have a big pool of
potential users in the other companies we've funded, and none took
better advantage of it than Stripe.  At YC we use the term "Collison
installation" for the technique they invented.  More diffident
founders ask "Will you try our beta?" and if the answer is yes,
they say "Great, we'll send you a link."  But the Collison brothers
weren't going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe they'd say
"Right then, give me your laptop" and set them up on the spot.
There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users
individually.  One is a combination of shyness and laziness.  They'd
rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of
strangers and probably be rejected by most of them.  But for a
startup to succeed, at least one founder (usually the CEO) will
have to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing.
[
2
]
The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute
numbers seem so small at first.  This can't be how the big, famous
startups got started, they think. The mistake they make is to
underestimate the power of compound growth.  We encourage every
startup to measure their progress by weekly
growth
rate
.  If you have 100 users, you need to get 10 more next week
to grow 10% a week.  And while 110 may not seem much better than
100, if you keep growing at 10% a week you'll be surprised how big
the numbers get.  After a year you'll have 14,000 users, and after
2 years you'll have 2 million.
You'll be doing different things when you're acquiring users a
thousand at a time, and growth has to slow down eventually.  But
if the market exists you can usually start by recruiting users
manually and then gradually switch to less manual methods.
[
3
]
Airbnb is a classic example of this technique.  Marketplaces are
so hard to get rolling that you should expect to take heroic measures
at first. In Airbnb's case, these consisted of going door to door
in New York, recruiting new users and helping existing ones improve
their listings.  When I remember the Airbnbs during YC, I picture
them with rolly bags, because when they showed up for tuesday dinners
they'd always just flown back from somewhere.
Fragile
Airbnb now seems like an unstoppable juggernaut, but early on it
was so fragile that about 30 days of going out and engaging in
person with users made the difference between success and failure.
That initial fragility was not a unique feature of Airbnb.  Almost
all startups are fragile initially.  And that's one of the biggest
things inexperienced founders and investors (and reporters and
know-it-alls on forums) get wrong about them.  They unconsciously
judge larval startups by the standards of established ones.  They're
like someone looking at a newborn baby and concluding "there's no
way this tiny creature could ever accomplish anything."
It's harmless if reporters and know-it-alls dismiss your startup.
They always get things wrong.   It's even ok if investors dismiss
your startup; they'll change their minds when they see growth.  The
big danger is that you'll dismiss your startup yourself.  I've seen
it happen.  I often have to encourage founders who don't see the
full potential of what they're building.  Even Bill Gates made that
mistake.  He returned to Harvard for the fall semester after starting
Microsoft.  He didn't stay long, but he wouldn't have returned at
all if he'd realized Microsoft was going to be even a fraction of
the size it turned out to be.
[
4
]
The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this
company taking over the world?"  but "how big could this company
get if the founders did the right things?"  And the right things
often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time. Microsoft
can't have seemed very impressive when it was just a couple guys
in Albuquerque writing Basic interpreters for a market of a few
thousand hobbyists (as they were then called), but in retrospect
that was the optimal path to dominating microcomputer software.
And I know Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn't feel like they were
en route to the big time as they were taking "professional" photos
of their first hosts' apartments.  They were just trying to survive.
But in retrospect that too was the optimal path to dominating a big
market.
How do you find users to recruit manually?  If you build something
to solve
your own problems
, then
you only have to find your peers, which is usually straightforward.
Otherwise you'll have to make a more deliberate effort to locate
the most promising vein of users.  The usual way to do that is to
get some initial set of users by doing a comparatively untargeted
launch, and then to observe which kind seem most enthusiastic, and
seek out more like them.  For example, Ben Silbermann noticed that
a lot of the earliest Pinterest users were interested in design,
so he went to a conference of design bloggers to recruit users, and
that worked well.
[
5
]
Delight
You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users,
but also to make them happy.  For as long as they could (which
turned out to be surprisingly long), Wufoo sent each new user a
hand-written thank you note.  Your first users should feel that
signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made.
And you in turn should be racking your brains to think of new ways
to delight them.
Why do we have to teach startups this?  Why is it counterintuitive
for founders?  Three reasons, I think.
One is that a lot of startup founders are trained as engineers,
and customer service is not part of the training of engineers.
You're supposed to build things that are robust and elegant, not
be slavishly attentive to individual users like some kind of
salesperson.  Ironically, part of the reason engineering is
traditionally averse to handholding is that its traditions date
from a time when engineers were less powerful — when they were
only in charge of their narrow domain of building things, rather
than running the whole show.  You can be ornery when you're Scotty,
but not when you're Kirk.
Another reason founders don't focus enough on individual customers
is that they worry it won't scale.  But when founders of larval
startups worry about this, I point out that in their current state
they have nothing to lose.  Maybe if they go out of their way to
make existing users super happy, they'll one day have too many to
do so much for.  That would be a great problem to have.  See if you
can make it happen.  And incidentally, when it does, you'll find
that delighting customers scales better than you expected.  Partly
because you can usually find ways to make anything scale more than
you would have predicted, and partly because delighting customers
will by then have permeated your culture.
I have never once seen a startup lured down a blind alley by trying
too hard to make their initial users happy.
But perhaps the biggest thing preventing founders from realizing
how attentive they could be to their users is that they've never
experienced such attention themselves.  Their standards for customer
service have been set by the companies they've been customers of,
which are mostly big ones.  Tim Cook doesn't send you a hand-written
note after you buy a laptop.  He can't.  But you can.  That's one
advantage of being small: you can provide a level of service no big
company can.
[
6
]
Once you realize that existing conventions are not the upper bound
on user experience, it's interesting in a very pleasant way to think
about how far you could go to delight your users.
Experience
I was trying to think of a phrase to convey how extreme your attention
to users should be, and I realized Steve Jobs had already done it:
insanely great.  Steve wasn't just using "insanely" as a synonym
for "very."  He meant it more literally — that one should focus
on quality of execution to a degree that in everyday life would be
considered pathological.
All the most successful startups we've funded have, and that probably
doesn't surprise would-be founders.  What novice founders don't get
is what insanely great translates to in a larval startup.  When
Steve Jobs started using that phrase, Apple was already an established
company.  He meant the Mac (and its documentation and even
packaging — such is the nature of obsession) should be insanely
well designed and manufactured.  That's not hard for engineers to
grasp.  It's just a more extreme version of designing a robust and
elegant product.
What founders have a hard time grasping (and Steve himself might
have had a hard time grasping) is what insanely great morphs into
as you roll the time slider back to the first couple months of a
startup's life.  It's not the product that should be insanely great,
but the experience of being your user.  The product is just one
component of that.  For a big company it's necessarily the dominant
one.  But you can and should give users an insanely great experience
with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the
difference with attentiveness.
Can, perhaps, but should?  Yes.  Over-engaging with early users is
not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling.  For
most successful startups it's a necessary part of the feedback loop
that makes the product good.  Making a better mousetrap is not an
atomic operation.  Even if you start the way most successful startups
have, by building something you yourself need, the first thing you
build is never quite right.  And except in domains with big penalties
for making mistakes, it's often better not to aim for perfection
initially.  In software, especially, it usually works best to get
something in front of users as soon as it has a quantum of utility,
and then see what they do with it.  Perfectionism is often an excuse
for procrastination, and in any case your initial model of users
is always inaccurate, even if you're one of them.
[
7
]
The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users
will be the best you ever get.  When you're so big you have to
resort to focus groups, you'll wish you could go over to your users'
homes and offices and watch them use your stuff like you did when
there were only a handful of them.
Fire
Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately
narrow market.  It's like keeping a fire contained at first to get
it really hot before adding more logs.
That's what Facebook did.  At first it was just for Harvard students.
In that form it only had a potential market of a few thousand people,
but because they felt it was really for them, a critical mass of
them signed up.  After Facebook stopped being for Harvard students,
it remained for students at specific colleges for quite a while.
When I interviewed Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School, he said that
while it was a lot of work creating course lists for each school,
doing that made students feel the site was their natural home.
Any startup that could be described as a marketplace usually has
to start in a subset of the market, but this can work for other
startups as well.  It's always worth asking if there's a subset of
the market in which you can get a critical mass of users quickly.
[
8
]
Most startups that use the contained fire strategy do it unconsciously.
They build something for themselves and their friends, who happen
to be the early adopters, and only realize later that they could
offer it to a broader market.  The strategy works just as well if
you do it unconsciously.  The biggest danger of not being consciously
aware of this pattern is for those who naively discard part of it.
E.g. if you don't build something for yourself and your friends,
or even if you do, but you come from the corporate world and your
friends are not early adopters, you'll no longer have a perfect
initial market handed to you on a platter.
Among companies, the best early adopters are usually other startups.
They're more open to new things both by nature and because, having
just been started, they haven't made all their choices yet.  Plus
when they succeed they grow fast, and you with them.  It was one
of many unforeseen advantages of the YC model (and specifically of
making YC big) that B2B startups now have an instant market of
hundreds of other startups ready at hand.
Meraki
For
hardware startups
there's a variant of
doing things that don't scale that we call "pulling a Meraki."
Although we didn't fund Meraki, the founders were Robert Morris's
grad students, so we know their history.  They got started by doing
something that really doesn't scale: assembling their routers
themselves.
Hardware startups face an obstacle that software startups don't.
The minimum order for a factory production run is usually several
hundred thousand dollars.  Which can put you in a catch-22: without
a product you can't generate the growth you need to raise the money
to manufacture your product.  Back when hardware startups had to
rely on investors for money, you had to be pretty convincing to
overcome this.  The arrival of crowdfunding (or more precisely,
preorders) has helped a lot.  But even so I'd advise startups to
pull a Meraki initially if they can.  That's what Pebble did.  The
Pebbles
assembled
the first several hundred watches themselves. If
they hadn't gone through that phase, they probably wouldn't have
sold $10 million worth of watches when they did go on Kickstarter.
Like paying excessive attention to early customers, fabricating
things yourself turns out to be valuable for hardware startups.
You can tweak the design faster when you're the factory, and you
learn things you'd never have known otherwise.  Eric Migicovsky of
Pebble said one of the things he learned was "how valuable it was to
source good screws."   Who knew?
Consult
Sometimes we advise founders of B2B startups to take over-engagement
to an extreme, and to pick a single user and act as if they were
consultants building something just for that one user.   The initial
user serves as the form for your mold; keep tweaking till you fit
their needs perfectly, and you'll usually find you've made something
other users want too.  Even if there aren't many of them, there are
probably adjacent territories that have more.  As long as you can
find just one user who really needs something and can act on that
need, you've got a toehold in making something people want, and
that's as much as any startup needs initially.
[
9
]
Consulting is the canonical example of work that doesn't scale.
But (like other ways of bestowing one's favors liberally) it's safe
to do it so long as you're not being paid to.  That's where companies
cross the line.  So long as you're a product company that's merely
being extra attentive to a customer, they're very grateful even if
you don't solve all their problems.  But when they start paying you
specifically for that attentiveness — when they start paying
you by the hour — they expect you to do everything.
Another consulting-like technique for recruiting initially lukewarm
users is to use your software yourselves on their behalf.  We
did that at Viaweb.  When we approached merchants asking if they
wanted to use our software to make online stores, some said no, but
they'd let us make one for them.  Since we would do anything to get
users, we did.  We felt pretty lame at the time.  Instead of
organizing big strategic e-commerce partnerships, we were trying
to sell luggage and pens and men's shirts.  But in retrospect it
was exactly the right thing to do, because it taught us how it would
feel to merchants to use our software.  Sometimes the feedback loop
was near instantaneous: in the middle of building some merchant's
site I'd find I needed a feature we didn't have, so I'd spend a
couple hours implementing it and then resume building the site.
Manual
There's a more extreme variant where you don't just use your software,
but are your software.  When you only have a small number of users,
you can sometimes get away with doing by hand things that you plan
to automate later.  This lets you launch faster, and when you do
finally automate yourself out of the loop, you'll know exactly what
to build because you'll have muscle memory from doing it yourself.
When manual components look to the user like software, this technique
starts to have aspects of a practical joke.  For example, the way
Stripe delivered "instant" merchant accounts to its first users was
that the founders manually signed them up for traditional merchant
accounts behind the scenes.
Some startups could be entirely manual at first. If you can find
someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it
manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then
gradually automate the bottlenecks.  It would be a little frightening
to be solving users' problems in a way that wasn't yet automatic,
but less frightening than the far more common case of having something
automatic that doesn't yet solve anyone's problems.
Big
I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't
work: the Big Launch.  I occasionally meet founders who seem to
believe startups are projectiles rather than powered aircraft, and
that they'll make it big if and only if they're launched with
sufficient initial velocity.  They want to launch simultaneously
in 8 different publications, with embargoes.  And on a tuesday, of
course, since they read somewhere that's the optimum day to launch
something.
It's easy to see how little launches matter.  Think of some successful
startups.  How many of their launches do you remember?
All you need from a launch is some initial core of users.  How well
you're doing a few months later will depend more on how happy you
made those users than how many there were of them.
[
10
]
So why do founders think launches matter?  A combination of solipsism
and laziness.  They think what they're building is so great that
everyone who hears about it will immediately sign up.  Plus it would
be so much less work if you could get users merely by broadcasting
your existence, rather than recruiting them one at a time.  But
even if what you're building really is great, getting users will
always be a gradual process — partly because great things
are usually also novel, but mainly because users have other things
to think about.
Partnerships too usually don't work.  They don't work for startups
in general, but they especially don't work as a way to get growth
started.  It's a common mistake among inexperienced founders to
believe that a partnership with a big company will be their big
break.  Six months later they're all saying the same thing: that
was way more work than we expected, and we ended up getting practically
nothing out of it.
[
11
]
It's not enough just to do something extraordinary initially.  You
have to make an extraordinary
effort
initially.  Any strategy
that omits the effort — whether it's expecting a big launch to
get you users, or a big partner — is ipso facto suspect.
Vector
The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so
nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of
startup ideas as scalars.  Instead we should try thinking of them
as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s)
you're going to do initially to get the company going.
It could be interesting to start viewing startup ideas this way,
because now that there are two components you can try to be imaginative
about the second as well as the first.  But in most cases the second
component will be what it usually is — recruit users manually
and give them an overwhelmingly good experience — and the main
benefit of treating startups as vectors will be to remind founders
they need to work hard in two dimensions.
[
12
]
In the best case, both components of the vector contribute to your
company's DNA: the unscalable things you have to do to get started
are not merely a necessary evil, but change the company permanently
for the better.  If you have to be aggressive about user acquisition
when you're small, you'll probably still be aggressive when you're
big.  If you have to manufacture your own hardware, or use your
software on users's behalf, you'll learn things you couldn't have
learned otherwise.  And most importantly, if you have to work hard
to delight users when you only have a handful of them, you'll keep
doing it when you have a lot.
Notes
[
1
]
Actually Emerson never mentioned mousetraps specifically.  He
wrote "If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell,
or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs,
than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his
house, though it be in the woods."
[
2
]
Thanks to Sam Altman for suggesting I make this explicit.
And no, you can't avoid doing sales by hiring someone to do it for
you.  You have to do sales yourself initially.  Later you can hire
a real salesperson to replace you.
[
3
]
The reason this works is that as you get bigger, your size
helps you grow.  Patrick Collison wrote "At some point, there was
a very noticeable change in how Stripe felt. It tipped from being
this boulder we had to push to being a train car that in fact had
its own momentum."
[
4
]
One of the more subtle ways in which YC can help founders
is by calibrating their ambitions, because we know exactly how a
lot of successful startups looked when they were just getting
started.
[
5
]
If you're building something for which you can't easily get
a small set of users to observe — e.g. enterprise software — and
in a domain where you have no connections, you'll have to rely on
cold calls and introductions.  But should you even be working on
such an idea?
[
6
]
Garry Tan pointed out an interesting trap founders fall into
in the beginning.  They want so much to seem big that they imitate
even the flaws of big companies, like indifference to individual
users.  This seems to them more "professional."  Actually it's
better to embrace the fact that you're small and use whatever
advantages that brings.
[
7
]
Your user model almost couldn't be perfectly accurate, because
users' needs often change in response to what you build for them.
Build them a microcomputer, and suddenly they need to run spreadsheets
on it, because the arrival of your new microcomputer causes someone
to invent the spreadsheet.
[
8
]
If you have to choose between the subset that will sign up
quickest and those that will pay the most, it's usually best to
pick the former, because those are probably the early adopters.
They'll have a better influence on your product, and they won't
make you expend as much effort on sales.  And though they have less
money, you don't need that much to maintain your target growth rate
early on.
[
9
]
Yes, I can imagine cases where you could end up making
something that was really only useful for one user.  But those are
usually obvious, even to inexperienced founders.  So if it's not
obvious you'd be making something for a market of one, don't worry
about that danger.
[
10
]
There may even be an inverse correlation between launch
magnitude and success.  The only launches I remember are famous
flops like the Segway and Google Wave.  Wave is a particularly
alarming example, because I think it was actually a great idea that
was killed partly by its overdone launch.
[
11
]
Google grew big on the back of Yahoo, but that wasn't a
partnership.  Yahoo was their customer.
[
12
]
It will also remind founders that an idea where the second
component is empty — an idea where there is nothing you can do
to get going, e.g. because you have no way to find users to recruit
manually — is probably a bad idea, at least for those founders.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Patrick Collison, Kevin
Hale, Steven Levy, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, and Garry Tan for reading
drafts of this.
Japanese Translation
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@ahistoryinart No breasts; strange.

@harjtaggar One of the best antidotes to this loneliness is to be friends with other CEOs. This is one of the subtler benefits of YC, and frankly one that we never anticipated when we started it, but I think it has been very useful for the CEOs of the most successful companies.

The Financial Times:

"Unless the Israeli government agrees to an immediate end to the war and a surge of aid into Gaza, western countries should be sanctioning Netanyahu and his government." https://t.co/nyxeEnEg7Y

Michael Benyair, former Attorney General of Israel:

"To eternal shame. Jews, who suffered a genocide 80 years ago, are committing genocide in Gaza. Shame, rage, and sorrow."

@AssalRad It was only because he talked openly about starvation, which officially is not happening.

@Austen It takes effort to find good nonprofits, just like it takes effort to find good books. But the best nonprofits, like the best books, are amazing. @NooraHealth has quietly saved tens of thousands of children's lives.

@guo_dini Their "narrow idea of entrepreneurship" is where the real money is. That's why they focus on that subset of it.

Indeed, this is why I never use the term "entrepreneurship," and talk about startups instead. Startup founders are a tiny subset of entrepreneurs.

@etahpilac @mehdirhasan @TheEconomist That's why it's an important sign that even they are saying "Enough."

@gabriel1 @BrandenburgDerk That was what I meant.

The Economist on Gaza:

"The continuation of the war in Gaza disgraces Israel. It no longer has a military justification." https://t.co/Dd7uLs7jwg


65 doctors, nurses, and paramedics told the New York Times what they saw in Gaza. What they saw was a pattern of children being shot in the head. https://t.co/DSsrkmA350

People seem to be gaming Polymarket at the moment, but the polls haven't changed. So unless for some reason the same poll numbers mean something different this week than they did last week, this presumably means there's an arbitrage opportunity...

@theonlybandthat @signulll When I wrote it in 2004 I was very far from being one.

@KuroiKumanoashi @signulll "Modern invention has been a great leveller. A machine may operate far more quickly than a political or economic measure to abolish privilege and wipe out the distinctions of class or finance."

– Ivor Brown, 1935

@signulll I wrote about this in "Mind the Gap": https://t.co/EPaJ5TCBib

12 yo and I are travelling. I asked him for a message I could send to Jessica, who's missing him. He told me to tell her "I need that sales report by Monday."

Is there a reliable source of restaurant ratings, like Zagat's used to be?

@cremieuxrecueil There are probably some people for whom this is true. The question is just how many.

12 yo is thinking of ditching his current Animal Crossing island and starting over. He's done this several times before. He says this time he's not going to rush through the early parts. I told him that this is a good plan for life too.

@jdmccafferty Dogaressa.


@jbelevate No. The Collison brothers are both pretty type A.

It's great when startups have co-CEOs in practice but not in name though. Stripe, for example, is a two-headed giant, no matter what the titles say.

There may be cases where it makes sense for established companies to have co-CEOs, but it's a red flag in an early-stage startup. It usually means the founders are fighting about who should get the title, and have declared a temporary truce.

@skdh He's very rich and not aggressively self-deprecating.

@ahistoryinart Lucian Freud. The chair opening up and dropping her out of the painting onto you, the obsessively observed patterns, the baby's head seen from such a strange angle that it looks like a hairy coconut.

@ahistoryinart This is reminding me a lot of someone and I can't figure out who...

@lefineder Did they all want to though? Till about WWII it was common for Oxford students not to "take degrees," as they called it when it was optional.

@abarrallen Compressing this period is probably the most valuable thing YC does.

Parker is just getting started. Rippling's published ambitions, big as they are, are a proper subset of their actual ones.

@onurdegirmnci No, just writing.


@lefineder Good news for FYROM.

@krishnanrohit In many decisions there's nothing unusual about consulting with one's family. But this is a special kind of decision: is one too old? That's getting uncomfortably close to the decisions families make about whether Dad should keep driving, or where he should live.

If your family is deciding whether you should stay in the race, you shouldn't stay in the race.

This looks like a Vermeer, but it was painted by Cornelis de Man, who was born in Delft 11 years before Vermeer. It seems unlikely that they both decided independently to use lenses, so one wonders who taught who. https://t.co/OFYRfn9u16

@PP_Rubens This is so Vermeery: https://t.co/cNYkws5G3L

@PP_Rubens I see lenses. But Vermeer was born 11 years later. I wonder if Vermeer learned about lenses from him.

12 yo: I can't believe I still have a week of school.

Me: Yeah, but you do nothing the last week.

12 yo: I'd rather do nothing at home.

@mcuban Engaging with people who are intellectually dishonest might briefly be fun, but long term it's just depressing. You're wasting your life, and you can feel it.

@IAmAndrewKirby I didn't say that, and I don't believe it either. I agree that it's a good idea to pay close attention to your users, but this isn't going to fix bugs in your software, or save you from a bad hire.

@itsehtasham @kendrictonn I didn't decide to get one. When we moved to England in 2016, Jessica bought one so she could watch Wimbledon.


The Four Quadrants of Conformism
July 2020
One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree
and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate
system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the
left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis
runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. The
resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in
the upper left and going counter-clockwise: aggressively
conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively
independent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded.
I think that you'll find all four types in most societies, and that
which quadrant people fall into depends more on their own personality
than the beliefs prevalent in their society.
[
1
]
Young children offer some of the best evidence for both points.
Anyone who's been to primary school has seen the four types, and
the fact that school rules are so arbitrary is strong evidence that
which quadrant people fall into depends more on them than the rules.
The kids in the upper left quadrant, the aggressively conventional-minded
ones, are the tattletales. They believe not only that rules must
be obeyed, but that those who disobey them must be punished.
The kids in the lower left quadrant, the passively conventional-minded,
are the sheep. They're careful to obey the rules, but when other
kids break them, their impulse is to worry that those kids will be
punished, not to ensure that they will.
The kids in the lower right quadrant, the passively independent-minded,
are the dreamy ones. They don't care much about rules and probably
aren't 100% sure what the rules even are.
And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressively
independent-minded, are the naughty ones. When they see a rule,
their first impulse is to question it. Merely being told what to
do makes them inclined to do the opposite.
When measuring conformism, of course, you have to say with respect
to what, and this changes as kids get older. For younger kids it's
the rules set by adults. But as kids get older, the source of rules
becomes their peers. So a pack of teenagers who all flout school
rules in the same way are not independent-minded; rather the opposite.
In adulthood we can recognize the four types by their distinctive
calls, much as you could recognize four species of birds. The call
of the aggressively conventional-minded is "Crush <outgroup>!" (It's
rather alarming to see an exclamation point after a variable, but
that's the whole problem with the aggressively conventional-minded.)
The call of the passively conventional-minded is "What will the
neighbors think?" The call of the passively independent-minded is
"To each his own." And the call of the aggressively independent-minded
is "Eppur si muove."
The four types are not equally common. There are more passive people
than aggressive ones, and far more conventional-minded people than
independent-minded ones. So the passively conventional-minded are
the largest group, and the aggressively independent-minded the
smallest.
Since one's quadrant depends more on one's personality than the
nature of the rules, most people would occupy the same quadrant
even if they'd grown up in a quite different society.
Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote:
I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would
   have been had they been white and living in the South before
   abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists!
   They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and
   worked tirelessly against it.
He's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't. And indeed,
our default assumption should not merely be that his students would,
on average, have behaved the same way people did at the time, but
that the ones who are aggressively conventional-minded today would
have been aggressively conventional-minded then too. In other words,
that they'd not only not have fought against slavery, but that
they'd have been among its staunchest defenders.
I'm biased, I admit, but it seems to me that aggressively
conventional-minded people are responsible for a disproportionate
amount of the trouble in the world, and that a lot of the customs
we've evolved since the Enlightenment have been designed to protect
the rest of us from them. In particular, the retirement of the
concept of heresy and its replacement by the principle of freely
debating all sorts of different ideas, even ones that are currently
considered unacceptable, without any punishment for those who try
them out to see if they work.
[
2
]
Why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? Because
they have all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, for
example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right
when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can't do
that. For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not
merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it's no coincidence
that societies prosper only to the extent that they have customs
for keeping the conventional-minded at bay.
[
3
]
In the last few years, many of us have noticed that the customs
protecting free inquiry have been weakened. Some say we're overreacting
 that they haven't been weakened very much, or that they've been
weakened in the service of a greater good. The latter I'll dispose
of immediately. When the conventional-minded get the upper hand,
they always say it's in the service of a greater good.  It just
happens to be a different, incompatible greater good each time.
As for the former worry, that the independent-minded are being
oversensitive, and that free inquiry hasn't been shut down that
much, you can't judge that unless you are yourself independent-minded.
You can't know how much of the space of ideas is being lopped off
unless you have them, and only the independent-minded have the ones
at the edges. Precisely because of this, they tend to be very
sensitive to changes in how freely one can explore ideas. They're
the canaries in this coalmine.
The conventional-minded say, as they always do, that they don't
want to shut down the discussion of all ideas, just the bad ones.
You'd think it would be obvious just from that sentence what a
dangerous game they're playing. But I'll spell it out. There are
two reasons why we need to be able to discuss even "bad" ideas.
The first is that any process for deciding which ideas to ban is
bound to make mistakes. All the more so because no one intelligent
wants to undertake that kind of work, so it ends up being done by
the stupid. And when a process makes a lot of mistakes, you need
to leave a margin for error. Which in this case means you need to
ban fewer ideas than you'd like to. But that's hard for the
aggressively conventional-minded to do, partly because they enjoy
seeing people punished, as they have since they were children, and
partly because they compete with one another. Enforcers of orthodoxy
can't allow a borderline idea to exist, because that gives other
enforcers an opportunity to one-up them in the moral purity department,
and perhaps even to turn enforcer upon them. So instead of getting
the margin for error we need, we get the opposite: a race to the
bottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up being
banned.
[
4
]
The second reason it's dangerous to ban the discussion of ideas is
that ideas are more closely related than they look. Which means if
you restrict the discussion of some topics, it doesn't only affect
those topics. The restrictions propagate back into any topic that
yields implications in the forbidden ones. And that is not an edge
case. The best ideas do exactly that: they have consequences
in fields far removed from their origins. Having ideas in a world
where some ideas are banned is like playing soccer on a pitch that
has a minefield in one corner. You don't just play the same game
you would have, but on a different shaped pitch. You play a much
more subdued game even on the ground that's safe.
In the past, the way the independent-minded protected themselves
was to congregate in a handful of places   first in courts, and
later in universities  where they could to some extent make their
own rules. Places where people work with ideas tend to have customs
protecting free inquiry, for the same reason wafer fabs have powerful
air filters, or recording studios good sound insulation. For the
last couple centuries at least, when the aggressively conventional-minded
were on the rampage for whatever reason, universities were the
safest places to be.
That may not work this time though, due to the unfortunate fact
that the latest wave of intolerance began in universities. It began
in the mid 1980s, and by 2000 seemed to have died down, but it has
recently flared up again with the arrival of social media. This
seems, unfortunately, to have been an own goal by Silicon Valley.
Though the people who run Silicon Valley are almost all independent-minded,
they've handed the aggressively conventional-minded a tool such as
they could only have dreamed of.
On the other hand, perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry
within universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the
independent-minded as the cause. People who would have become
professors 50 years ago have other options now. Now they can become
quants or start startups. You have to be independent-minded to
succeed at either of those. If these people had been professors,
they'd have put up a stiffer resistance on behalf of academic
freedom. So perhaps the picture of the independent-minded fleeing
declining universities is too gloomy. Perhaps the universities are
declining because so many have already left.
[
5
]
Though I've spent a lot of time thinking about this situation, I
can't predict how it plays out. Could some universities reverse the
current trend and remain places where the independent-minded want
to congregate? Or will the independent-minded gradually abandon
them? I worry a lot about what we might lose if that happened.
But I'm hopeful long term. The independent-minded are good at
protecting themselves. If existing institutions are compromised,
they'll create new ones. That may require some imagination. But
imagination is, after all, their specialty.
Notes
[
1
]
I realize of course that if people's personalities vary in any
two ways, you can use them as axes and call the resulting four
quadrants personality types. So what I'm really claiming is that
the axes are orthogonal and that there's significant variation in
both.
[
2
]
The aggressively conventional-minded aren't responsible for all
the trouble in the world. Another big source of trouble is the sort
of charismatic leader who gains power by appealing to them. They
become much more dangerous when such leaders emerge.
[
3
]
I never worried about writing things that offended the
conventional-minded when I was running Y Combinator. If YC were a
cookie company, I'd have faced a difficult moral choice.
Conventional-minded people eat cookies too. But they don't start
successful startups. So if I deterred them from applying to YC, the
only effect was to save us work reading applications.
[
4
]
There has been progress in one area: the punishments for talking
about banned ideas are less severe than in the past. There's little
danger of being killed, at least in richer countries. The aggressively
conventional-minded are mostly satisfied with getting people fired.
[
5
]
Many professors are independent-minded  especially in math,
the hard sciences, and engineering, where you have to be to succeed.
But students are more representative of the general population, and
thus mostly conventional-minded. So when professors and students
are in conflict, it's not just a conflict between generations but
also between different types of people.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Nicholas Christakis, Patrick
Collison, Sam Gichuru, Jessica Livingston, Patrick McKenzie, Geoff
Ralston, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this.
German Translation
Korean Translation
Serbian Translation


@jgillis2004 Whatever the correct quote and source is, it's not that one.

https://t.co/i3tV4ucyw0

@Rainmaker1973 This is an urban legend.

@MihaiDoho That's fixable.

@nw3 Architecture: Boston. Weather: Corvallis.

@ration1lop98423 What was it?

At a talk in England I joked that applicants to Stanford had to say what startup they eventually planned to start as part of the college application process. It fell flat because the audience thought I was serious.

Armadio, by Richard Maury, 1987. That's him in the foreground. The woman with her back to us is his wife. https://t.co/FMQVS73FK7

@gmiller I thought brutalist architecture was all bad.

@typesfast @braveben @garrytan @bchesky It's a strong sign of independent-mindedness that he did this at RISD, where the aim of the median student, at least at the time, was to look like a heroin addict.

Something I explained to 12 yo: how fast time seems to pass depends on how much you've experienced, and this is why parents always seem to be living in the past. 10 years ago, when he was 2, feels like a lifetime ago to him, but it was yesterday to us.


@UID_ I feel the same.

@gfodor Yeah, people gave me a lot of shit about it at the time. I had a mini-mob after me just for publicly supporting him, so you can imagine what the scale of the main mob after Brian was like.

@mbacarella (a) They're huge and everything takes them a long time, and (b) their corporate culture has always been at the woke end of the spectrum.

This prediction turned out to be accurate. https://t.co/rvRt4XmkVf

@keshavchan @nikitabier I have learned one thing from it though: what bad writers most people are. So far every suggestion of this type has been as bad as yours.

@keshavchan @nikitabier No, they have different connotations. Confer implies something more organized.

Incidentally, though you may believe you were the first to think of it, this gag is getting old.

@arminkhaya How many good books they have.

This picture is from the Hay Cinema Bookshop, one of my favorite used bookshops in Hay on Wye and for that matter the whole world. It's always the one I visit first when I go to Hay to buy books.

I bet you can predict what people do here. Though to be honest I think I've tripped over it a couple times over the years. https://t.co/N1HtM9eo60

@nikitabier I've been told that the people who block acquisitions in the US and EU secretly confer about it.


I've said this before: no campaign can come back from this. And since there's no way to come back, the best thing they can do is exit gracefully.

George Clooney, who has hosted many fund-raisers for the Democrats, calls on Biden to drop out of the race. https://t.co/tkeyFDALUg

@RIPreason @America_2100 Some kinds do, yes. https://t.co/u7jRxinsi4

@raghavbansal_rb @waitbutwhy You can't predict. But in the English-speaking world this would have been the result if you did this at any time in the past 500 years or so, so our default assumption should be that the same thing will happen.

@waitbutwhy Overall better, but there will be some things that seem just crushingly worse.

@yheushen It's both: https://t.co/aSe6j3jcBE

@sentientist This will be the fate of any accidental moderate (https://t.co/xAgBPrEWd4).

@America_2100 The problem with Bukele's cabinet meeting, or whatever that was, is not symmetry per se, but an excessive, heavy-handed symmetry that crosses over into tackiness. I can easily believe you can't tell where that line is, but it exists nonetheless.

@America_2100 Since you clearly haven't done the reading for this class, here's what I wrote about the importance of beauty and symmetry: https://t.co/3GQUlfH58t

@vareck Yes, this morning.


Some Heroes
April 2008
There are some topics I save up because they'll be so much fun to
write about.  This is one of them: a list of my heroes.
I'm not claiming this is a list of the
n
most admirable people.
Who could make such a list, even if they wanted to?
Einstein isn't on the list, for example, even though he probably
deserves to be on any shortlist of admirable people.  I once asked
a physicist friend if Einstein was really as smart as his fame
implies, and she said that yes, he was.  So why isn't he on the
list?  Because I had to ask.  This is a list of people who've
influenced me, not people who would have if I understood their work.
My test was to think of someone and ask "is this person my
hero?"  It often returned surprising answers.  For example,
it returned false for Montaigne, who was arguably the inventor of
the essay.  Why?  When I thought
about what it meant to call someone a hero, it meant I'd decide what
to do by asking what they'd do in the same situation.  That's a
stricter standard than admiration.
After I made the list, I looked to see if there was a pattern, and
there was, a very clear one.  Everyone on the list had two qualities:
they cared almost excessively about their work, and they were
absolutely honest.  By honest I don't mean trustworthy so much as
that they never pander: they never say or do something because
that's what the audience wants.  They are all fundamentally subversive
for this reason, though they conceal it to varying degrees.
Jack Lambert
I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1970s.  Unless you were there it's
hard to imagine how that town felt about the Steelers.   Locally,
all the news was bad.  The steel industry was dying.  But the
Steelers were the best team in football — and moreover, in a
way that seemed to reflect the personality of the city.  They didn't
do anything fancy.  They just got the job done.
Other players were more famous: Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, Lynn
Swann.  But they played offense, and you always get more attention
for that.  It seemed to me as a twelve year old football expert
that the best of them all was
Jack Lambert
.  And what made him so
good was that he was utterly relentless.  He didn't just care about
playing well; he cared almost too much.  He seemed to regard it as
a personal insult when someone from the other team had possession
of the ball on his side of the line of scrimmage.
The suburbs of Pittsburgh in the 1970s were a pretty dull place.
School was boring.  All the adults around were bored with their
jobs working for big companies. Everything that came to us through
the mass media was (a) blandly uniform and (b) produced elsewhere.
Jack Lambert was the exception.  He was like nothing else I'd seen.
Kenneth Clark
Kenneth Clark is the best nonfiction writer I know of, on any
subject.  Most people who write about art history don't really like
art; you can tell from a thousand little signs.  But Clark did, and
not just intellectually, but the way one anticipates a delicious
dinner.
What really makes him stand out, though, is the quality of his
ideas.  His style is deceptively casual, but there is more in
his books than in a library
of art monographs.  Reading
The Nude
is like a ride in a
Ferrari.  Just as you're getting settled, you're slammed back in
your seat by the acceleration.  Before you can adjust, you're thrown
sideways as the car screeches into the first turn.  His brain throws
off ideas almost too fast to grasp them.  Finally at the end of the
chapter you come to a halt, with your eyes wide and a big smile on
your face.
Kenneth Clark was a star in his day, thanks to the documentary
series
Civilisation
.  And if you read only one book about
art history,
Civilisation
is the one I'd recommend.  It's
much better than the drab Sears Catalogs of art that undergraduates
are forced to buy for Art History 101.
Larry Mihalko
A lot of people have a great teacher at some point in their childhood.
Larry Mihalko was mine.  When I look back it's like there's a line
drawn between third and fourth grade.  After Mr. Mihalko, everything
was different.
Why?  First of all, he was intellectually curious.  I had a few
other teachers who were smart, but I wouldn't describe them as
intellectually curious.  In retrospect, he was out of place as an
elementary school teacher, and I think he knew it.  That must have
been hard for him, but it was wonderful for us, his students.  His
class was a constant adventure.  I used to like going to school
every day.
The other thing that made him different was that he liked us.  Kids
are good at telling that.  The other teachers were at best benevolently
indifferent.  But Mr.  Mihalko seemed like he actually wanted to
be our friend.  On the last day of fourth grade, he got out one of
the heavy school record players and played James Taylor's "You've
Got a Friend" to us.  Just call out my name, and you know wherever
I am, I'll come running.  He died at 59 of lung cancer.  I've never
cried like I cried at his funeral.
Leonardo
One of the things I've learned about making things that I didn't
realize when I was a kid is that much of the best stuff isn't made
for audiences, but for oneself.  You see paintings and drawings in
museums and imagine they were made for you to look at.  Actually a
lot of the best ones were made as a way of exploring the world, not
as a way to please other people.  The best of these explorations
are sometimes more pleasing than stuff made explicitly to please.
Leonardo did a lot of things.  One of his most admirable qualities
was that he did so many different things that were admirable.  What
people know of him now is his paintings and his more flamboyant
inventions, like flying machines.  That makes him seem like some
kind of dreamer who sketched artists' conceptions of rocket ships
on the side.  In fact he made a large number of far more practical
technical discoveries.  He was as good an engineer as a painter.
His most impressive work, to me, is his
drawings
.  They're clearly
made more as a way of studying the world than producing something
beautiful. And yet they can hold their own with any work of art
ever made.  No one else, before or since, was that good when no one
was looking.
Robert Morris
Robert Morris has a very unusual quality: he's never wrong.  It
might seem this would require you to be omniscient, but actually
it's surprisingly easy. Don't say anything unless you're fairly
sure of it.  If you're not omniscient, you just don't end up saying
much.
More precisely, the trick is to pay careful attention to how you
qualify what you say.  By using this trick, Robert has, as far as
I know, managed to be mistaken only once, and that was when he was
an undergrad.  When the Mac came out, he said that little desktop
computers would never be suitable for real hacking.
It's wrong to call it a trick in his case, though.  If it were a
conscious trick, he would have slipped in a moment of excitement.
With Robert this quality is wired-in.  He has an almost superhuman
integrity.  He's not just generally correct, but also correct about
how correct he is.
You'd think it would be such a great thing never to be wrong that
everyone would do this.  It doesn't seem like that much extra work
to pay as much attention to the error on an idea as to the idea
itself.  And yet practically no one does.  I know how hard it is,
because since meeting Robert I've tried to do in software what he
seems to do in hardware.
P. G. Wodehouse
People are finally starting to admit that Wodehouse was a great
writer.  If you want to be thought a great novelist in your own
time, you have to sound intellectual.  If what you write is popular,
or entertaining, or funny, you're ipso facto suspect.  That makes
Wodehouse doubly impressive, because it meant that to write as he
wanted to, he had to commit to being despised in his own lifetime.
Evelyn Waugh called him a great writer, but to most people at the
time that would have read as a chivalrous or deliberately perverse
gesture. At the time any random autobiographical novel by a recent
college grad could count on more respectful treatment from the
literary establishment.
Wodehouse may have begun with simple atoms, but the way he composed
them into molecules was near faultless.  His rhythm in particular.
It makes me self-conscious to write about it.  I can think of only
two other writers who came near him for style: Evelyn Waugh and
Nancy Mitford.  Those three used the English language like they
owned it.
But Wodehouse has something neither of them did.  He's at ease.
Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford cared what other people thought of
them: he wanted to seem aristocratic; she was afraid she wasn't
smart enough.  But Wodehouse didn't give a damn what anyone thought
of him.  He wrote exactly what he wanted.
Alexander Calder
Calder's on this list because he makes me happy.  Can his work stand
up to Leonardo's?  Probably not.  There might not be anything from
the 20th Century that can.  But what was good about Modernism,
Calder had, and had in a way that he made seem effortless.
What was good about Modernism was its freshness.  Art became stuffy
in the nineteenth century.  The paintings that were popular at the
time were mostly the art equivalent of McMansions—big,
pretentious, and fake.  Modernism meant starting over, making things
with the same earnest motives that children might.  The artists who
benefited most from this were the ones who had preserved a child's
confidence, like Klee and Calder.
Klee was impressive because he could work in so many different
styles.  But between the two I like Calder better, because his work
seemed happier.  Ultimately the point of art is to engage the viewer.
It's hard to predict what will; often something that seems interesting
at first will bore you after a month.  Calder's
sculptures
never
get boring.  They just sit there quietly radiating optimism, like
a battery that never runs out.  As far as I can tell from books and
photographs, the happiness of Calder's work is his own happiness
showing through.
Jane Austen
Everyone admires Jane Austen.  Add my name to the list.  To me she
seems the best novelist of all time.
I'm interested in how things work.  When I read most novels, I pay
as much attention to the author's choices as to the story.  But in
her novels I can't see the gears at work.  Though I'd really like
to know how she does what she does, I can't figure it out, because
she's so good that her stories don't seem made up.  I feel like I'm
reading a description of something that actually happened.
I used to read a lot of novels when I was younger.  I can't read
most anymore, because they don't have enough information in them.
Novels seem so impoverished compared to history and biography.  But
reading Austen is like reading
nonfiction.  She writes so well you don't even notice her.
John McCarthy
John McCarthy invented Lisp, the field of (or at least the term)
artificial intelligence, and was an early member of both of the top
two computer science departments, MIT and Stanford.  No one would
dispute that he's one of the greats, but he's an especial hero to
me because of
Lisp
.
It's hard for us now to understand what a conceptual leap that was
at the time.  Paradoxically, one of the reasons his achievement is
hard to appreciate is that it was so successful.  Practically every
programming language invented in the last 20 years includes ideas
from Lisp, and each year the median language gets more Lisplike.
In 1958 these ideas were anything but obvious.  In 1958 there seem
to have been two ways of thinking about programming.  Some people
thought of it as math, and proved things about Turing Machines.
Others thought of it as a way to get things done, and designed
languages all too influenced by the technology of the day.  McCarthy
alone bridged the gap.  He designed a language that was math.  But
designed is not really the word; discovered is more like it.
The Spitfire
As I was making this list I found myself thinking of people like
Douglas Bader
and
R.J. Mitchell
and
Jeffrey Quill
and I realized
that though all of them had done many things in their lives, there
was one factor above all that connected them: the Spitfire.
This is supposed to be a list of heroes.  How can a machine be on
it?  Because that machine was not just a machine.  It was a lens
of heroes.  Extraordinary devotion went into it, and extraordinary
courage came out.
It's a cliche to call World War II a contest between good and evil,
but between fighter designs, it really was.  The Spitfire's original
nemesis, the ME 109, was a brutally practical plane.  It was a
killing machine.  The Spitfire was optimism embodied.  And not just
in its beautiful lines: it was at the edge of what could be
manufactured.  But taking the high road worked.  In the air, beauty
had the edge, just.
Steve Jobs
People alive when Kennedy was killed  usually remember exactly where
they were when they heard about it.  I remember exactly where I was
when a friend asked if I'd heard Steve Jobs had cancer.  It was
like the floor dropped out.   A few seconds later she told me that
it was a rare operable type, and that he'd be ok.  But those seconds
seemed long.
I wasn't sure whether to include Jobs on this list.  A lot of people
at Apple seem to be afraid of him, which is a bad sign.  But he
compels admiration.
There's no name for what Steve Jobs is, because there hasn't been
anyone quite like him before.  He doesn't design Apple's products
himself.  Historically the closest analogy to what he does are the
great Renaissance patrons of the arts.  As the CEO of a company,
that makes him unique.
Most CEOs delegate
taste
to a subordinate.
The
design paradox
means they're choosing more or less at random.  But Steve
Jobs actually has taste himself — such good taste that he's shown
the world how much more important taste is than they realized.
Isaac Newton
Newton has a strange role in my pantheon of heroes: he's the one I
reproach myself with.  He worked on big things, at least for part
of his life.  It's so easy to get distracted working on small stuff.
The questions you're answering are pleasantly familiar.  You get
immediate rewards — in fact, you get bigger rewards in your
time if you work on matters of passing importance.  But I'm
uncomfortably aware that this is the route to well-deserved obscurity.
To do really great things, you have to seek out questions people
didn't even realize were questions.  There have probably been other
people who did this as well as Newton, for their time, but Newton
is my model of this kind of thought.  I can just begin to understand
what it must have felt like for him.
You only get one life.  Why not do something huge?  The phrase "paradigm
shift" is overused now, but Kuhn was onto something.  And you know
more are out there, separated from us by what will later seem a
surprisingly thin wall of laziness and stupidity.  If we work like
Newton.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Jackie McDonough for reading drafts of this.
Japanese Translation


One disadvantage Kamala has relative to Trump is that we take her seriously. So when she suggests dumb policies like focusing on grocery prices, everyone criticizes her, whereas when Trump suggests much dumber things, we just ignore him.

@ShabbyShambles That's why I said "selfishly." It might not be good for society to have the far left and far right drawn away to other places, but it would be a relief in the short term.

@mcuban I forget who was telling me about this, but apparently this is easy to do even with current models.

@ShabbyShambles There may be those too. But no one smart would want to be part of one, so there will always also be demand for a network of smart people. In fact come to think of it, I'd selfishly prefer a social network from which all the political extremists had been lured away.

@JimDMiller This is already possible now.

@tylergroce Suppressing trolls is a kind of censorship. But I don't think it costs you much. There are few if any interesting ideas that are only expressed by trolls. In fact trolls net decrease the expression of interesting ideas, by chasing away thoughtful people.

@rajatsuri I'm not worried about Richard Cromwell.

I think there will be a second wave of social networks that are explicitly designed to suppress trolls instead of treating this problem as an afterthought, just as there was a second wave of operating systems that were explicitly designed to be secure.

"With honourable exceptions, the Idealists brought into British philosophy a species of vivid, violent, and lofty imprecision which even in general literature had hitherto been rare."

— G. J. Warnock

Truly important news seems disproportionately likely to take the form of graphs.


@thomastupchurch If it's a reasonable person they'll often unblock you if you ask (or get a friend to ask for you). I pretty much always unblock people who ask.

@ThinkNBoutStuff @KurtisHanni If someone is an obsessive hater, it's better if they just don't see your stuff at all.

@seunosewa Whatever the cause is, it should be easy for AI companies to fix now that they're aware that there are such statistical "tells" in their programs' responses.

@pm I think they should make great things. https://t.co/KyyU7yotWA

@mattyglesias It says this in the third tweet in the thread you're quoting. And in the replies the guy who did the study on house sizes talks about how it's not the same with them.

https://t.co/rlsS4JBxU6

@KurtisHanni It depends how much exposure your tweets get. If they get a lot of exposure, Twitter is unusable without aggressive blocking.

Empirical observation: when people tweet pseudo-triumphantly about being blocked by someone, they're usually the ones at fault. When I'm blocked by someone I'm either sad, puzzled, or indifferent.

@sammarelich That's not true. I hated doing sales and had to force myself to learn how.

@sapinker @jflier In one way they're better: they're less driven by self-interest. A lot (probably most) of what was driving the Vietnam War protests was the protestors' fear of being drafted and sent to fight in it.

@nejatian That said, I don't think you could, or should, teach most high school students to write fiction. But you could and should teach them to write decent prose about something other than literature.


Early Work
October 2020
One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work
is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an
irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on
where they don't seem very impressive, even to their creators. You
have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies
beyond. But many people don't. Most people don't even reach the
stage of making something they're embarrassed by, let alone continue
past it. They're too frightened even to start.
Imagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame.
Imagine how much more we'd do.
Is there any hope of turning it off? I think so. I think the habits
at work here are not very deeply rooted.
Making new things is itself a new thing for us as a species. It has
always happened, but till the last few centuries it happened so
slowly as to be invisible to individual humans. And since we didn't
need customs for dealing with new ideas, we didn't develop any.
We just don't have enough experience with early versions of ambitious
projects to know how to respond to them. We judge them as we would
judge more finished work, or less ambitious projects. We don't
realize they're a special case.
Or at least, most of us don't. One reason I'm confident we can do
better is that it's already starting to happen. There are already
a few places that are living in the future in this respect. Silicon
Valley is one of them: an unknown person working on a strange-sounding
idea won't automatically be dismissed the way they would back home.
In Silicon Valley, people have learned how dangerous that is.
The right way to deal with new ideas is to treat them as a challenge
to your imagination  not just to have lower standards, but to
switch polarity
entirely, from listing
the reasons an idea won't
work to trying to think of ways it could. That's what I do when I
meet people with new ideas. I've become quite good at it, but I've
had a lot of practice. Being a partner at Y Combinator means being
practically immersed in strange-sounding ideas proposed by unknown
people. Every six months you get thousands of new ones thrown at
you and have to sort through them, knowing that in a world with a
power-law distribution of outcomes, it will be painfully obvious
if you miss the needle in this haystack. Optimism becomes
urgent.
But I'm hopeful that, with time, this kind of optimism can become
widespread enough that it becomes a social custom, not just a trick
used by a few specialists. It is after all an extremely lucrative
trick, and those tend to spread quickly.
Of course, inexperience is not the only reason people are too harsh
on early versions of ambitious projects. They also do it to seem
clever. And in a field where the new ideas are risky, like startups,
those who dismiss them are in fact more likely to be right. Just
not when their predictions are
weighted by outcome
.
But there is another more sinister reason people dismiss new ideas.
If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope,
consciously or unconsciously, that you'll fail. They worry that if
you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them.
In some countries this is not just an individual failing but part
of the national culture.
I wouldn't claim that people in Silicon Valley overcome these
impulses because they're morally better.
[
1
]
The reason many hope
you'll succeed is that they hope to rise with you. For investors
this incentive is particularly explicit. They want you to succeed
because they hope you'll make them rich in the process. But many
other people you meet can hope to benefit in some way from your
success. At the very least they'll be able to say, when you're
famous, that they've known you since way back.
But even if Silicon Valley's encouraging attitude
is rooted in self-interest, it has over time actually grown into a
sort of benevolence. Encouraging startups has been practiced for
so long that it has become a custom. Now it just seems that that's
what one does with startups.
Maybe Silicon Valley is too optimistic. Maybe it's too easily fooled
by impostors. Many less optimistic journalists want to believe that.
But the lists of impostors they cite are suspiciously short, and
plagued with asterisks.
[
2
]
If you use revenue as the test, Silicon
Valley's optimism seems better tuned than the rest of the world's.
And because it works, it will spread.
There's a lot more to new ideas than new startup ideas, of course.
The fear of making something lame holds people back in every field.
But Silicon Valley shows how quickly customs can evolve to support
new ideas. And that in turn proves that dismissing new ideas is not
so deeply rooted in human nature that it can't be unlearnt.
___________
Unfortunately, if you want to do new things, you'll face a force
more powerful than other people's skepticism: your own skepticism.
You too will judge your early work too harshly. How do you avoid
that?
This is a difficult problem, because you don't want to completely
eliminate your horror of making something lame. That's what steers
you toward doing good work. You just want to turn it off temporarily,
the way a painkiller temporarily turns off pain.
People have already discovered several techniques that work. Hardy
mentions two in
A Mathematician's Apology
:
Good work is not done by "humble" men. It is one of the first
  duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate
  a little both the importance of his subject and his importance
  in it.
If you overestimate the importance of what you're working on, that
will compensate for your mistakenly harsh judgment of your initial
results. If you look at something that's 20% of the way to a goal
worth 100 and conclude that it's 10% of the way to a goal worth
200, your estimate of its expected value is correct even though
both components are wrong.
It also helps, as Hardy suggests, to be slightly overconfident.
I've noticed in many fields that the most successful people are
slightly overconfident. On the face of it this seems implausible.
Surely it would be optimal to have exactly the right estimate of
one's abilities. How could it be an advantage to be mistaken?
Because this error compensates for other sources of error in the
opposite direction: being slightly overconfident armors you against
both other people's skepticism and your own.
Ignorance has a similar effect. It's safe to make the mistake of
judging early work as finished work if you're a sufficiently lax
judge of finished work. I doubt it's possible to cultivate this
kind of ignorance, but empirically it's a real advantage, especially
for the young.
Another way to get through the lame phase of ambitious projects is
to surround yourself with the right people  to create an eddy in
the social headwind. But it's not enough to collect people who are
always encouraging. You'd learn to discount that. You need colleagues
who can actually tell an ugly duckling from a baby swan. The people
best able to do this are those working on similar projects of their
own, which is why university departments and research labs work so
well. You don't need institutions to collect colleagues. They
naturally coalesce, given the chance. But it's very much worth
accelerating this process by seeking out other people trying to do
new things.
Teachers are in effect a special case of colleagues. It's a teacher's
job both to see the promise of early work and to encourage you to
continue. But teachers who are good at this are unfortunately quite
rare, so if you have the opportunity to learn from one, take it.
[
3
]
For some it might work to rely on sheer discipline: to tell yourself
that you just have to press on through the initial crap phase and
not get discouraged. But like a lot of "just tell yourself" advice,
this is harder than it sounds. And it gets still harder as you get
older, because your standards rise. The old do have one compensating
advantage though: they've been through this before.
It can help if you focus less on where you are and more on the rate
of change. You won't worry so much about doing bad work if you can
see it improving. Obviously the faster it improves, the easier this
is. So when you start something new, it's good if you can spend a
lot of time on it. That's another advantage of being young: you
tend to have bigger blocks of time.
Another common trick is to start by considering new work to be of
a different, less exacting type. To start a painting saying that
it's just a sketch, or a new piece of software saying that it's
just a quick hack. Then you judge your initial results by a lower
standard. Once the project is rolling you can sneakily convert it
to something more.
[
4
]
This will be easier if you use a medium that lets you work fast and
doesn't require too much commitment up front. It's easier to convince
yourself that something is just a sketch when you're drawing in a
notebook than when you're carving stone. Plus you get initial results
faster.
[
5
]
[
6
]
It will be easier to try out a risky project if you think of it as
a way to learn and not just as a way to make something. Then even
if the project truly is a failure, you'll still have gained by it.
If the problem is sharply enough defined, failure itself is
knowledge: if the theorem you're trying to prove turns out to
be false, or you use a structural member of a certain size and
it fails under stress, you've learned something, even if it
isn't what you wanted to learn.
[
7
]
One motivation that works particularly well for me is curiosity.
I like to try new things just to see how they'll turn out. We started
Y Combinator in this spirit, and it was one of main things that
kept me going while I was working on
Bel
. Having worked for so long
with various dialects of Lisp, I was very curious to see what its
inherent shape was: what you'd end up with if you followed the
axiomatic approach all the way.
But it's a bit strange that you have to play mind games with yourself
to avoid being discouraged by lame-looking early efforts. The thing
you're trying to trick yourself into believing is in fact the truth.
A lame-looking early version of an ambitious project truly is more
valuable than it seems. So the ultimate solution may be to teach
yourself that.
One way to do it is to study the histories of people who've
done great work. What were they thinking early on? What was the
very first thing they did? It can sometimes be hard to get an
accurate answer to this question, because people are often embarrassed
by their earliest work and make little effort to publish it. (They
too misjudge it.) But when you can get an accurate picture of the
first steps someone made on the path to some great work, they're
often pretty feeble.
[
8
]
Perhaps if you study enough such cases, you can teach yourself to
be a better judge of early work. Then you'll be immune both to other
people's skepticism and your own fear of making something lame.
You'll see early work for what it is.
Curiously enough, the solution to the problem of judging early work
too harshly is to realize that our attitudes toward it are themselves
early work. Holding everything to the same standard is a crude
version 1. We're already evolving better customs, and we can already
see signs of how big the payoff will be.
Notes
[
1
]
This assumption may be too conservative. There is some evidence
that historically the Bay Area has attracted a
different sort of person
than,
say, New York City.
[
2
]
One of their great favorites is Theranos. But the most conspicuous
feature of Theranos's cap table is the absence of Silicon Valley
firms. Journalists were fooled by Theranos, but Silicon Valley
investors weren't.
[
3
]
I made two mistakes about teachers when I was younger.  I
cared more about professors' research than their reputations as
teachers, and I was also wrong about what it meant to be a good
teacher. I thought it simply meant to be good at explaining things.
[
4
]
Patrick Collison points out that you can go past treating
something as a hack in the sense of a prototype and onward to the
sense of the word that means something closer to a practical joke:
I think there may be something related to being a hack that can
  be powerful  the idea of making the tenuousness and implausibility
a feature
. "Yes, it's a bit ridiculous, right?  I'm just trying
  to see how far such a naive approach can get." YC seemed to me
  to have this characteristic.
[
5
]
Much of the advantage of switching from physical to digital
media is not the software per se but that it lets you start something
new with little upfront commitment.
[
6
]
John Carmack adds:
The value of a medium without a vast gulf between the early work
  and the final work is exemplified in game mods. The original
  Quake game was a golden age for mods, because everything was very
  flexible, but so crude due to technical limitations, that quick
  hacks to try out a gameplay idea weren't all
that
far from the
  official game. Many careers were born from that, but as the
  commercial game quality improved over the years, it became almost
  a full time job to make a successful mod that would be appreciated
  by the community. This was dramatically reversed with Minecraft
  and later Roblox, where the entire esthetic of the experience was
  so explicitly crude that innovative gameplay concepts became the
  overriding value. These "crude" game mods by single authors are
  now often bigger deals than massive professional teams' work.
[
7
]
Lisa Randall suggests that we
treat new things as experiments. That way there's no such thing
  as failing, since you learn something no matter what. You treat
  it like an experiment in the sense that if it really rules something
  out, you give up and move on, but if there's some way to vary it
  to make it work better, go ahead and do that
[
8
]
Michael Nielsen points out that the internet has made this
easier, because you can see programmers' first commits, musicians'
first videos, and so on.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, John Carmack, Patrick Collison, Jessica
Livingston, Michael Nielsen, and Lisa Randall for reading drafts
of this.


@TheHoneyDoneApp @ycombinator That they are.

Regular and portable cuneiform tablets. The one on the left is a typical inventory. The one on the right is a lightweight miniature tablet carried by a messenger, describing the food and drink he's entitled to at rest stops. https://t.co/4o6WR5PUwB

@theiconographer Master of 1518?

@Chris_arnade What do they like about him?

Today in the "you can't make this stuff up" department: how the GOAT founders set up four cream puff stores to generate passive income while working on their startup, and after the crash of 2008 had to run them themselves, coding in between customers.

@gmiller She's wise and reasonable and understands how government works, which is enough to make her a better president than Trump.

@Liv_Boeree This seems much healthier than US politics, where two factions that hate each other fight over a few swing voters.

@0xluffy It's better odds than enterprise software.

12 yo's class had to design a product. 12 yo's was Biscuit Roulette. "Five biscuits are delicious. One is full of industrial adhesive." https://t.co/Wph8ouRkpX

And that in turn means Biden is unlikely to be the nominee. If a sitting president decides to run, "party discipline" (with the Republicans just as much as the Democrats) means everyone has to support him. But once there is open rebellion, it can't be turned back off.


How to Disagree
March 2008
The web is turning writing into a conversation.  Twenty years ago,
writers wrote and readers read.  The web lets readers respond, and
increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their
own blog posts.
Many who respond to something disagree with it.  That's to be
expected.  Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing.
And when you agree there's less to say.  You could expand on something
the author said, but he has probably already explored the
most interesting implications.  When you disagree you're entering
territory he may not have explored.
The result is there's a lot more disagreeing going on, especially
measured by the word.  That doesn't mean people are getting angrier.
The structural change in the way we communicate is enough to account
for it.  But though it's not anger that's driving the increase in
disagreement, there's a danger that the increase in disagreement
will make people angrier.  Particularly online, where it's easy to
say things you'd never say face to face.
If we're all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to
do it well.  What does it mean to disagree well?   Most readers can
tell the difference between mere name-calling and a carefully
reasoned refutation, but I think it would help to put names on the
intermediate stages.  So here's an attempt at a disagreement
hierarchy:
DH0. Name-calling.
This is the lowest form of disagreement, and probably also the most
common.  We've all seen comments like this:
u r a fag!!!!!!!!!!
But it's important to realize that more articulate name-calling has
just as little weight.  A comment like
The author is a self-important dilettante.
is really nothing more than a pretentious version of "u r a fag."
DH1. Ad Hominem.
An ad hominem attack is not quite as weak as mere name-calling.  It
might actually carry some weight.  For example, if a senator wrote
an article saying senators' salaries should be increased, one could
respond:
Of course he would say that.  He's a senator.
This wouldn't refute the author's argument, but it may at least be
relevant to the case.  It's still a very weak form of disagreement,
though.  If there's something wrong with the senator's argument,
you should say what it is; and if there isn't, what difference does
it make that he's a senator?
Saying that an author lacks the authority to write about a topic
is a variant of ad hominem—and a particularly useless sort, because
good ideas often come from outsiders.  The question is whether the
author is correct or not.  If his lack of authority caused him to
make mistakes, point those out.  And if it didn't, it's not a
problem.
DH2. Responding to Tone.
The next level up we start to see responses to the writing, rather
than the writer.  The lowest form of these is to disagree with the
author's tone.  E.g.
I can't believe the author dismisses intelligent design in such
  a cavalier fashion.
Though better than attacking the author, this is still a weak form
of disagreement.  It matters much more whether the author is wrong
or right than what his tone is.  Especially since tone is so hard
to judge.  Someone who has a chip on their shoulder about some topic
might be offended by a tone that to other readers seemed neutral.
So if the worst thing you can say about something is to criticize
its tone, you're not saying much.  Is the author flippant, but
correct?  Better that than grave and wrong.  And if the author is
incorrect somewhere, say where.
DH3. Contradiction.
In this stage we finally get responses to what was said, rather
than how or by whom.  The lowest form of response to an argument
is simply to state the opposing case, with little or no supporting
evidence.
This is often combined with DH2 statements, as in:
I can't believe the author dismisses intelligent design in such
  a cavalier fashion.  Intelligent design is a legitimate scientific
  theory.
Contradiction can sometimes have some weight.  Sometimes merely
seeing the opposing case stated explicitly is enough to see that
it's right.  But usually evidence will help.
DH4. Counterargument.
At level 4 we reach the first form of convincing disagreement:
counterargument.  Forms up to this point can usually be ignored as
proving nothing.  Counterargument might prove something.  The problem
is, it's hard to say exactly what.
Counterargument is contradiction plus reasoning and/or evidence.
When aimed squarely at the original argument, it can be convincing.
But unfortunately it's common for counterarguments to be aimed at
something slightly different.  More often than not, two people
arguing passionately about something are actually arguing about two
different things.  Sometimes they even agree with one another, but
are so caught up in their squabble they don't realize it.
There could be a legitimate reason for arguing against something
slightly different from what the original author said: when you
feel they missed the heart of the matter.  But when you do that,
you should say explicitly you're doing it.
DH5. Refutation.
The most convincing form of disagreement is refutation.  It's also
the rarest, because it's the most work.  Indeed, the disagreement
hierarchy forms a kind of pyramid, in the sense that the higher you
go the fewer instances you find.
To refute someone you probably have to quote them.  You have to
find a "smoking gun," a passage in whatever you disagree with that
you feel is mistaken, and then explain why it's mistaken.  If you
can't find an actual quote to disagree with, you may be arguing
with a straw man.
While refutation generally entails quoting, quoting doesn't necessarily
imply refutation.  Some writers quote parts of things they disagree
with to give the appearance of legitimate refutation, then follow
with a response as low as DH3 or even DH0.
DH6. Refuting the Central Point.
The force of a refutation depends on what you refute.  The most
powerful form of disagreement is to refute someone's central point.
Even as high as DH5 we still sometimes see deliberate dishonesty,
as when someone picks out minor points of an argument and refutes
those.  Sometimes the spirit in which this is done makes it more
of a sophisticated form of ad hominem than actual refutation.  For
example, correcting someone's grammar, or harping on minor mistakes
in names or numbers.  Unless the opposing argument actually depends
on such things, the only purpose of correcting them is to
discredit one's opponent.
Truly refuting something requires one to refute its central point,
or at least one of them.  And that means one has to commit explicitly
to what the central point is.  So a truly effective refutation would
look like:
The author's main point seems to be x.  As he says:
<quotation>
But this is wrong for the following reasons...
The quotation you point out as mistaken need not be the actual
statement of the author's main point.  It's enough to refute something
it depends upon.
What It Means
Now we have a way of classifying forms of disagreement.  What good
is it?  One thing the disagreement hierarchy
doesn't
give us is
a way of picking a winner.  DH levels merely describe the form of
a statement, not whether it's correct.  A DH6 response could still
be completely mistaken.
But while DH levels don't set a lower bound on the convincingness
of a reply, they do set an upper bound.  A DH6 response might be
unconvincing, but a DH2 or lower response is always unconvincing.
The most obvious advantage of classifying the forms of disagreement
is that it will help people to evaluate what they read.  In particular,
it will help them to see through intellectually dishonest arguments.
An eloquent speaker or writer can give the impression of vanquishing
an opponent merely by using forceful words.  In fact that is probably
the defining quality of a demagogue.  By giving names to the different
forms of disagreement, we give critical readers a pin for popping
such balloons.
Such labels may help writers too.  Most intellectual dishonesty is
unintentional.  Someone arguing against the tone of something he
disagrees with may believe he's really saying something.  Zooming
out and seeing his current position on the disagreement hierarchy
may inspire him to try moving up to counterargument or refutation.
But the greatest benefit of disagreeing well is not just that it
will make conversations better, but that it will make the people
who have them happier.  If you study conversations, you find there
is a lot more meanness down in DH1 than up in DH6.  You don't have
to be mean when you have a real point to make.  In fact, you don't
want to.  If you have something real to say, being mean just gets
in the way.
If moving up the disagreement hierarchy makes people less mean,
that will make most of them happier.  Most people don't really enjoy
being mean; they do it because they can't help it.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell and Jessica Livingston for reading
drafts of this.
Related:
What You Can't Say
The Age of the Essay
Italian Translation
Russian Translation
Swedish Translation
Spanish Translation
German Translation
French Translation
Arabic Translation
Finnish Translation
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Apparently the cliff in the distribution of French companies is not due to companies constraining their size, but lying about their size. If you generate the histogram from data about individual employees, the cliff disappears. I wonder if this is true for houses too... https://t.co/jX2GNwD4cn

@eftegarie Can you find a cliff in a histogram to show this?

@AFitzgerald1992 How much of this is people deliberately constraining the size of their businesses, and how much is people lying about their revenue?

There's a cliff in the distribution of Spanish companies too, because once you have over 50 people there are additional regulations about firing employees. https://t.co/8lROXDOTrh

@whyvert I posted both of these too.

@tom_doerr Massive unintended consequences usually are.

The distribution of house sizes in France looks a lot like the distribution of business sizes, and for the same reason: a regulation that kicks in at a certain size. https://t.co/XmDbLrkmUh

@markessien That's a kind of rot too, but the degree depends on how selective the university is. The more selective the university, the bigger the lie involved in accepting legacy kids who've reverted to the mean.

@garrytan A week or two into the batch we knew we were onto something. We didn't know how big it could be, but we were fairly confident that it at least wouldn't lose money.

@garrytan That's true. And it worked even better than we'd hoped. Even though we designed the batch structure with this in mind, we were pleasantly surprised how much the founders in the first batch helped one another.


12 yo was encouraged by a teacher to sign up for an essay competition. I told him I could teach him how to write good essays. He said he wasn't that interested in learning, because essays were boring. He didn't want to read them, so why would he want to learn how to write them?

@XFaure Thanks! I always ask this one when I show up at a new school.

When we lived in Silicon Valley, I asked an elementary school teacher what were the most important things parents didn't understand. This was number one.

@dadiomov They don't have to survive forever though, just long enough for Boom to replace them.

@afshawnl Cook rice and beans.

https://t.co/F1adqpvR8w

@JohnDCook Can you give an example of what you mean?

@johnmaeda I think I understand what Eames meant to say, but the way he said it here is mistaken. The man-made things that have survived the longest have almost all survived because they looked good.

@schwabpa You should try reading as far as the second tweet in that thread...

@firasd The same argument "proves" that ChatGPT can never answer any question correctly.

Some people responding to this seem to assume that ChatGPT would need real-time access to other conversations to answer this question correctly. But obviously it wouldn't; training data would be sufficient to answer a question about something that changes so slowly.


@tracewoodgrains Obviously children have to do this a lot. Anyone answering "No" still believes in Santa Claus. A better question would be: how long has it been since this happened?

@DylanoA4 This seems mistaken. One of the keys to writing well is to be annoyed by bad writing.

@JimStevenson @typesfast No, it's very widespread.

@JosephPolitano To be fair though, he has deleted that tweet.

@rohindhar Meta did. But the story about why they didn't stay there makes the East Coast look even worse.

@TomJervis1 @typesfast By choosing one's opinions individually instead of getting them in bulk: https://t.co/ogMaJHs63d

@mattyglesias I don't think it's necessarily for *personal* gain. As far as I can tell he genuinely believes that it's critical for Trump to win the upcoming election. But lying, yes.

@JosephPolitano I don't think Elon truly believes all the things he says at this point. I think he thinks the election is so important that it justifies some amount of lying. But that's a bad road to go down.

@McCormickProf IMO the problem with this claim is not that it's heresy, but that it's false.

@typesfast One of the things that surprised me most about the woke, for the first few years, was how ignorant of history so many of them were. But perhaps this is not surprising; perhaps you couldn't be woke without also being ignorant of history.


@cremieuxrecueil A lobbyist I once met told me that this was true specifically of members of Congress — that the way to influence them was with stories, not numbers.

@yuris What planes were they flying?

Bold leadership from Alexandr Wang.

"Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale."

https://t.co/WkoJxVYziT

Instant 10% increase in likes. Large numbers of people must have different opinions than they dare express, to move the total number of likes by that much.

@Liv_Boeree I successfully ignored that fashion till it passed.

@micsolana You can't really expect people to assume that's what you're implying, since it's unlikely he'll get jail time for that particular conviction.

@micsolana Is there any crime for which you feel it would be appropriate for Trump to be jailed? Presumably. And if so it's not inherently a threat to democracy for a candidate to be jailed.

@ahistoryinart Interesting index of his skill level when painting realistically. Do you have other examples?

@nikitabier @DougDeMuro A Boxster.

Judging from the size of the puddles (which has to be a decent proxy for mass) our new puppy is between 2 and 3 times the size he was when we first got him.