The logic behind the author's central thesis seems to be:
1. Humans live about 100 years.
2. The highest human ambitions, like writing a great novel, can only be reasonably accomplished in a well-balanced life if that life lasts more than 1000 years.
3. By definition, our life is absurd because we don't have enough time to reasonably accomplish our highest ambitions.
She concludes that human life could be made less absurd by extending life to 1000 years -- this I disagree with.
The problem I have with this thesis is that I think the phrase "highest human ambitions" is really a shifting goal. It's a goal that is set by the accomplishment of a person of extraordinary talent who dedicates her entire life to that one pursuit.
We think today that a brilliant novel on the order of Tolstoy is a high human ambition, only because it's the limit of what a human can do. Instead, consider if humans lived much shorter lives, reaching their cognitive peak at age 15. In such a world, few people would have time to learn calculus, and so solving a differential equation might be within the highest order of a human's mathematical ambitions.
Conversely, let me suggest that if the average person were to live to 1000 years, the definition of human ambition would scale accordingly. Imagine the absolute masterpiece symphony that Beethoven could write if he were alive today. He would have hundreds of years of experience. He would have seen the evolution of music and integrate all these advances in his repertoire. He could afford to spend 50 years writing his mater symphony. This level of music will be now our new target of ambition.
The central problem reduces down to this fact. The high water mark for an ambitious goal is always defined by people in that field who are unreasonably talented and dedicates an unreasonable fraction of their lives to the field. If these experts lives the same number of years as I do, since I'm a generalist of average talent dabbling in their field, I will never be able to accomplish anywhere near their level.
The absurdity here then seems to stem from the intrinsic human desire to always compare ourselves to the best, even when we realize we don't want to commit to the field (with good reason) as the best do.
"English-language conquest is not more efficient than polyglot science – it is just differently inefficient."
This seems to be the main thesis the article is trying to prove, yet there's no real clear analysis of the actual tradeoffs.
The argument that having multiple languages has some vague "multi-cultural" advantage over a single unique language is far from evident. The only real argument I can think of distills down to a sense of inequality that some people have 100% of major science article written in their native tongue (English), and all others have 0%.
The segway into the long history of languages in science seems like a non-sequitur for the article key thesis. But it does bring up a point that seems interesting: if one language is so efficient why did scientists fail to coordinate for so long?
Are you against the particular points in this lecture? The video seems like sound tactical advice on how to do a particular type of startup. He talks about things like looking for cofounders, hiring, and soforth. Very little time is spend haranguing students on raising money, or working 80 hour weeks.
Or perhaps you are speaking against the SV startup culture in general, with this video as a catalyst for touching off those thoughts? In that case, perhaps there's just a difference of values.
Get a stream of warm leads calling in ready to buy! No cold calls, no hard selling to uninterested buyers. Historical conversion rates are above 50%.
================================
Responsibilities:
• Answering inbound calls from warm prospects; providing detailed information about our product; selling to prospects.
• Following up on all calls at a time convenient to the customer.
• Responding to voicemails ASAP.
• Responding to sales inquiries via email.
Job:
- Part-time (10+ hr/wk) with opportunity to move to full-time (40 hr/wk).
- During part-time work you should be available on-call for 30+ hr/wk (perfect for those around the house, or working on other jobs that can be interrupted).
- Remote or local (Cambridge, MA) work are both fine. However, you should be generally available during USA Eastern Time business hours.
- For part time, we guarantee $20/hr minimum and you have an opportunity for 5% commission on revenue. For full time we guarantee $40k/year min, up to $100k/yr OTE. Rates flexible and vary with skill.
Ideal Candidate Qualifications:
• Half year or more experience in sales environment.
• Previous experience with education and especially test prep a plus.
• You are good at remembering customers and following up.
• Mastery of English.
To Apply:
- Please send a cover letter and resume to [email protected]
Hiring: Full Stack Engineer in Cambridge, MA for www.PrepScholar.com
- We're an education technology company based in Boston looking for good, all-around engineers working on both frontend and backend. You'll be creating new product features to improve our students' learning and create a compelling educational experience.
* About Us
- We’re making education more effective through customization. We learn the strengths and weaknesses of learners and create tailored learning programs through advanced statistics. We create compelling educational experiences for our students by truly understanding their problems. We’re starting off with test prep, a $4 billion+ industry, and want to expand to education at large.
- In addition to the founders, our company currently has two software engineers and seven instructors in a mixture of part-time and full time roles.
- We have over a thousand users and hundreds of paying customers and are growing quickly. We recently reached gross profitability.
- The founders are two Harvard/MIT grads who have started previous companies backed by Y Combinator and brought in over seven figures in revenue.
- We care about culture and a great work environment. We’re flexible with schedule, have efficient meetings, and want minimal hierarchy.
* We're Looking For
- Full stack development skills – you should have past experience on web backends (Django or similar, MySQL or similar) and frontends (JavaScript, HTML, CSS).
- Familiarity with web operations (Linux, Apache/nginx, AWS EC2) and our frontend stack (Backbone, SASS, Dust), and an eye for a design are large pluses.
- Willingness to try new things and pick up new technology quickly.
- We prefer an employee located in Massachusetts (we’re in Cambridge) or willing to RELOCATE (we will cover fees); however REMOTE working can be considered for strong candidates.
* Why Join Us?
- You’ll be a head engineer with an impact on company direction and culture. You’ll have the opportunity to lead the tech team and technical aspects of the company.
- We offer competitive market-rate pay with option for serious equity.
- Above all, you’ll be building something meaningful. Education is a linchpin of our country’s economy and empowers people to improve their own lives. For many reasons, education suffers throughout the country – class sizes too large, methods outdated, teachers underpaid. Here’s your chance to build a scalable solution that can disrupt education and leave a legacy.
* How to Apply
Send an email to [email protected] with your resume and cover letter. We'd love to see your work and personal projects, especially full-stack samples, so include any of these: your GitHub, project pages, or other portfolio.
Those of you who say that this research is just correlation need to read the paper for a few minutes. Shai's paper would be much less interesting if he just looked at many patents companies did pre and post IPO.
Shai looked at companies that pulled their IPO due to random external factors, and compared this to an group that didn't, and found that those that pulled their IPO innovated more afterwards. It's really this clever identification that makes this paper so well-done.
To the majority of users, including me, that idea is actually novel, and the novelty itself demonstrates the hidden corners that are lurking quite well.
I believe that point was well made, even though in a technical sense, the exact error was unfounded.
I believe that your metaphor above is correct in getting at some features of the startup world, namely:
1) Many founders are attracted by glory rather than logic.
2) Large companies receive research information from startup successes and failures.
But I don't agree with the gladiator metaphor at all because it implies a degree of deviousness and collusion that isn't present in the startup sphere, and is disingenuous to imply.
Take your example of the king offering $0.5M for the finder of a treasure. Here you imply that his goal of offering the prize is to "give villagers a fake hope" and "inspire the poor".
What if the treasure in reality was just worth $0.6M to him? Then the king might conclude a) if someone had the treasure, he'd be happy to pay $0.5, but b) suppose the cost of finding the treasure via hire at $1M, then it is not worth hiring people to dig it up.
Thus, the king may not decide to hire people to dig this, while happily posting a prize. He doesn't need to have ulterior motives to do this.
Now let's take the economics further. Suppose some people are efficient and other people are not efficient diggers (they're good bakers), and there is no way to observe this beforehand. Then if he hires people to dig, the king will lose money because he's at half efficiency with half bakers and half diggers. If he posts a prize, the efficient diggers will self sort into digging, and the bakers will produce real good.
Our data points are few, and really just 1) and 2), so we can't know for sure companies are being evil (and I don't believe they are). It's a classic case of an underdetermined system.
I disagree that a citizen of one country cannot complain about the actions of another country if his/her own country has some (perhaps worse) violations as well.
Applying this logic would mean that no one, say, in the 1980s Soviet Union had anything insightful to say about political oppression in the UK.
Speaking from the startup's side, I feel a lot of startup hate for Paypal comes from these horror stories. But in reality any low cost service will have bad customer support (Gmail customer support anyone?).
Also, take into account the fact that Paypal has millions of users, so even a 1:million horror story rate will explode into thousands, whereas for these new startups, I doubt they even have a million customers.
Yes, their customer support is stubborn, paranoid, and OCD. They might even sneer at you, but learning to work with them may be one of the best paying skills to have if you're processing volume.
Also, I give paypal credit for taking almost everyone under their wings. Half the people using paypal couldn't get a merchant account with any real reputable bank. They have paranoid security because their standards are so low.
And of course on the other side, if you're willing to give up a percent or two for being treated kind and by the "right people" then of course these startups will probably suit your need better.
You're right that a lot of outcome comes from past experience. I don't think a resourceful person riding a bike for the first day can be nearly as good as a non-resourceful person who's been riding for decades. So outcome isn't purely a function of past experience.
But let's take a group of people who have the same experience in a domain. Then I would define resourcefulness as the component of outcome that depends on the person, specifically how much self-drive the person has, and how much the person can leverage the tools in his or her situation.
Resourcefulness, as define this way, I think is some part skill. You have to be intelligent enough to put the match and sandpaper together to start a fire. Part of it is tolerance for being burned -- it's much harder to cold call a VC if to you it's personally painful to be told to shove off. And as pg mentioned in previous essays, the last part is determination. Resourcefulness is inherently related to schlepp and you won't schlepp unless you really, really, care about the problem.
Basically, I think you're right in that some situations really benefit those who've seen it before. But at the same time, to dismiss the effort and self-ambition of the person isn't quite right either.
Take your example of sunglasses. A quick search on wikipedia shows that the precursor were glasses with a thin slit in them. It was never squinting, and then BOOM, Oakleys.
There was always a gradual change that is only missed in retrospect because of how standardized and popular the winner is.
Name a few popular products and services, and I bet there have been similar solutions beforehand.
I think that can be applied to technologies that aren't open -- and it can be a property of the technology itself.
In fact, one entire category of technology that's overlooked right now is sensors. Besides sound (mic) and light (camera), accelerometers and magnetometers are already there. Some other detectors of "state" that make sense:
Pressure (think of being able to predict rain)
Humidity/Temperature (think of an environment controller)
Directional Microphone (4): Conferencing, noise cancellation, etc.
99 Designs has actually worked pretty well in my experience. It's like Derek Siver's strategy to have a bunch of people do the work you want be done, and then hiring the best.
One big assumption that the article is leaving unstated is that the market is valuing things fairly. That is, the analysis depends on the market valuation being correct.
In fact, it usually tends to be the other way around. PE ratios predict future returns in a negative way. A high PE means a company is generally overpriced, empirically more often than the earnings will just grow.
1. Humans live about 100 years. 2. The highest human ambitions, like writing a great novel, can only be reasonably accomplished in a well-balanced life if that life lasts more than 1000 years. 3. By definition, our life is absurd because we don't have enough time to reasonably accomplish our highest ambitions.
She concludes that human life could be made less absurd by extending life to 1000 years -- this I disagree with.
The problem I have with this thesis is that I think the phrase "highest human ambitions" is really a shifting goal. It's a goal that is set by the accomplishment of a person of extraordinary talent who dedicates her entire life to that one pursuit.
We think today that a brilliant novel on the order of Tolstoy is a high human ambition, only because it's the limit of what a human can do. Instead, consider if humans lived much shorter lives, reaching their cognitive peak at age 15. In such a world, few people would have time to learn calculus, and so solving a differential equation might be within the highest order of a human's mathematical ambitions.
Conversely, let me suggest that if the average person were to live to 1000 years, the definition of human ambition would scale accordingly. Imagine the absolute masterpiece symphony that Beethoven could write if he were alive today. He would have hundreds of years of experience. He would have seen the evolution of music and integrate all these advances in his repertoire. He could afford to spend 50 years writing his mater symphony. This level of music will be now our new target of ambition.
The central problem reduces down to this fact. The high water mark for an ambitious goal is always defined by people in that field who are unreasonably talented and dedicates an unreasonable fraction of their lives to the field. If these experts lives the same number of years as I do, since I'm a generalist of average talent dabbling in their field, I will never be able to accomplish anywhere near their level.
The absurdity here then seems to stem from the intrinsic human desire to always compare ourselves to the best, even when we realize we don't want to commit to the field (with good reason) as the best do.