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December 2014  
  
If the world were static, we could have monotonically increasing confidence in
our beliefs. The more (and more varied) experience a belief survived, the less
likely it would be false. Most people implicitly believe something like this
about their opinions. And they're justified in doing so with opinions about
things that don't change much, like human nature. But you can't trust your
opinions in the same way about things that change, which could include
practically everything else.  
  
When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier
version of the world.  
  
Is it possible to avoid that? Can you protect yourself against obsolete
beliefs? To some extent, yes. I spent almost a decade investing in early stage
startups, and curiously enough protecting yourself against obsolete beliefs is
exactly what you have to do to succeed as a startup investor. Most really good
startup ideas look like bad ideas at first, and many of those look bad
specifically because some change in the world just switched them from bad to
good. I spent a lot of time learning to recognize such ideas, and the
techniques I used may be applicable to ideas in general.  
  
The first step is to have an explicit belief in change. People who fall victim
to a monotonically increasing confidence in their opinions are implicitly
concluding the world is static. If you consciously remind yourself it isn't,
you start to look for change.  
  
Where should one look for it? Beyond the moderately useful generalization that
human nature doesn't change much, the unfortunate fact is that change is hard
to predict. This is largely a tautology but worth remembering all the same:
change that matters usually comes from an unforeseen quarter.  
  
So I don't even try to predict it. When I get asked in interviews to predict
the future, I always have to struggle to come up with something plausible-
sounding on the fly, like a student who hasn't prepared for an exam.  But
it's not out of laziness that I haven't prepared. It seems to me that beliefs
about the future are so rarely correct that they usually aren't worth the
extra rigidity they impose, and that the best strategy is simply to be
aggressively open-minded. Instead of trying to point yourself in the right
direction, admit you have no idea what the right direction is, and try instead
to be super sensitive to the winds of change.  
  
It's ok to have working hypotheses, even though they may constrain you a bit,
because they also motivate you. It's exciting to chase things and exciting to
try to guess answers. But you have to be disciplined about not letting your
hypotheses harden into anything more.   
  
I believe this passive m.o. works not just for evaluating new ideas but also
for having them. The way to come up with new ideas is not to try explicitly
to, but to try to solve problems and simply not discount weird hunches you
have in the process.  
  
The winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain experts. If
you're sufficiently expert in a field, any weird idea or apparently irrelevant
question that occurs to you is ipso facto worth exploring.  Within Y
Combinator, when an idea is described as crazy, it's a compliment—in fact, on
average probably a higher compliment than when an idea is described as good.  
  
Startup investors have extraordinary incentives for correcting obsolete
beliefs. If they can realize before other investors that some apparently
unpromising startup isn't, they can make a huge amount of money. But the
incentives are more than just financial. Investors' opinions are explicitly
tested: startups come to them and they have to say yes or no, and then, fairly
quickly, they learn whether they guessed right. The investors who say no to a
Google (and there were several) will remember it for the rest of their lives.  
  
Anyone who must in some sense bet on ideas rather than merely commenting on
them has similar incentives. Which means anyone who wants such incentives can
have them, by turning their comments into bets: if you write about a topic in
some fairly durable and public form, you'll find you worry much more about
getting things right than most people would in a casual conversation.   
  
Another trick I've found to protect myself against obsolete beliefs is to
focus initially on people rather than ideas. Though the nature of future
discoveries is hard to predict, I've found I can predict quite well what sort
of people will make them. Good new ideas come from earnest, energetic,
independent-minded people.  
  
Betting on people over ideas saved me countless times as an investor. We
thought Airbnb was a bad idea, for example. But we could tell the founders
were earnest, energetic, and independent-minded. (Indeed, almost
pathologically so.) So we suspended disbelief and funded them.  
  
This too seems a technique that should be generally applicable. Surround
yourself with the sort of people new ideas come from. If you want to notice
quickly when your beliefs become obsolete, you can't do better than to be
friends with the people whose discoveries will make them so.  
  
It's hard enough already not to become the prisoner of your own expertise, but
it will only get harder, because change is accelerating. That's not a recent
trend; change has been accelerating since the paleolithic era. Ideas beget
ideas. I don't expect that to change. But I could be wrong.  
  
  
  
  
  
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