There are obvious advantages of being young, like having more time and energy. But there are also some more subtle advantages, like approaching the problem with fresh eyes, and the fact that your needs predict future demand, and those may be more valuable.

@rez0__ @yuris That's when the spike before the current trough began.

@yuris The average of the last 5 years is 48.6, which is pretty normal, so it's as if all the startups that would have gone public in the last 3 years just did it early.

I'm not saying that's what happened, just that the graph would look the same if it did.

An actual Land Rover ad from 1965. "Ideal for trackless wastes, car pools of small children, wretched ordeals, etcetera." https://t.co/oKsu3Xebxq

@Suhail Do you have a prediction for fourth?

@CburgesCliff That was terrifying. Don't do this to us.

Interesting data point about Elon's judgment though. I didn't find it implausible that he'd do this.

@Ljungman This was indeed a particularly wet one. It's a good thing iPhones are waterproof now because it was basically submerged when I was taking pictures.

@supermanuelsaez Actually I generally avoid making them do that.

@Rapahelz That may be the final step, but first you need to have something good to eliminate the unnecessary from.

@vizard_anon There are two signs you've gone too far: when the essay starts to sound choppy, and when it becomes less clear to readers.


Succinctness is Power
May 2002
"The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by
algebraic signs, is another circumstance that facilitates
the reasonings we are accustomed to carry on by their aid."
- Charles Babbage, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture
In the discussion about issues raised by
Revenge
of the Nerds
on the LL1 mailing list, Paul Prescod wrote
something that stuck in my mind.
Python's goal is regularity and readability, not succinctness.
On the face of it, this seems a rather damning thing to claim about a
programming language.  As far as I can tell, succinctness = power.
If so, then substituting, we get
Python's goal is regularity and readability, not power.
and this doesn't seem a tradeoff (if it
is
a tradeoff)
that you'd want to make.
It's not far from saying that Python's goal is not to be effective
as a programming language.
Does succinctness = power?  This seems to me an important question,
maybe the most important question for anyone interested in
language design, and one that it would be useful to confront
directly.  I don't feel sure yet that the answer is a simple yes, but it seems
a good hypothesis to begin with.
Hypothesis
My hypothesis is that succinctness is power, or is close enough
that except in pathological examples you can treat them as
identical.
It seems to me that succinctness is what programming languages are
for.
Computers would be just as happy to be told what to
do directly in machine language.  I think that the main
reason we take the trouble to develop high-level languages is to
get leverage, so that we can say (and more importantly, think)
in 10 lines of a high-level language what would require 1000
lines of machine language.  In other words,
the main point of high-level languages is to make source code smaller.
If smaller source code is the purpose of high-level languages, and
the power of something is how well it achieves its purpose, then
the measure of the power of a programming language is how small it
makes your programs.
Conversely, a language that doesn't make your programs small is
doing a bad job of what programming languages are supposed to
do, like a knife that doesn't cut well, or printing that's illegible.
Metrics
Small in what sense though?  The most common measure of code size is
lines of code.  But I think that this metric is the most common because
it is the easiest to measure.  I don't think anyone really believes
it is the true test of the length of a program. Different
languages have different conventions for how much you should put
on a line; in C a lot of lines have nothing on them but a delimiter or two.
Another easy test is the number of characters in a
program, but this is not very good either; some languages (Perl,
for example) just
use shorter identifiers than others.
I think a better measure of the size of a program would be the
number of elements, where an element is anything that
would be a distinct node if you drew a tree representing the
source code. The name of
a variable or function is an element;
an integer or a floating-point number is an element;
a segment of literal text is an element;
an element of a pattern, or a format directive, is an element;
a new block is an element.  There are borderline cases
(is -5 two elements or one?) but I think most of them are the
same for every language, so they don't affect comparisons much.
This metric needs fleshing out, and
it could require interpretation in the case of specific languages,
but I think it tries to measure the right thing, which is the
number of parts a program has.  I think the tree you'd draw in this
exercise is what you have to make in your head in order to
conceive of the program, and so its size is proportionate to the
amount of work you have to do to write or read it.
Design
This kind of metric would allow us to compare different languages,
but that is not, at least for me, its main value.  The main value
of the succinctness test is as a guide in
designing
languages.
The most useful comparison between languages is between two
potential variants of the same language.  What can I do in the
language to make programs shorter?
If the conceptual load of
a program is proportionate to its complexity, and a given programmer
can tolerate a fixed conceptual load, then this is the same as asking,
what can I do to enable programmers to get the most done?  And
that seems to me identical to asking, how can I design a good
language?
(Incidentally, nothing makes it more patently obvious that the old
chestnut "all languages are equivalent" is false than designing
languages.  When you are designing a new language, you're
constantly
comparing two languages-- the language if I did x, and if I didn't-- to
decide which is better.  If this were really a meaningless question,
you might as well flip a coin.)
Aiming for succinctness seems a good way to find new ideas.
If you can do something that makes many
different programs shorter, it is probably not a coincidence: you have
probably discovered a useful new abstraction.  You might even be
able to write a program to help by searching
source code for repeated patterns.  Among other languages, those
with a reputation for succinctness would be the ones to look to for
new ideas: Forth, Joy, Icon.
Comparison
The first person to write about these issues, as far as I know, was
Fred Brooks in the
Mythical Man Month
.  He wrote
that programmers seemed to generate about the same
amount of code per day regardless of the language.
When I first read this in my early twenties,
it was a big surprise to me and seemed to have huge implications.
It meant that (a) the only way to get software written faster was to
use a more succinct language, and (b) someone who took the
trouble to do this could leave competitors who didn't in the dust.
Brooks' hypothesis, if it's true, seems to be at the very heart of hacking.
In the years since, I've paid close attention to any evidence I could
get on the question, from formal studies to anecdotes about individual
projects.   I have seen nothing to contradict him.
I have not yet seen evidence that seemed to me conclusive,
and I don't expect to.  Studies
like Lutz Prechelt's comparison of programming languages, while
generating the kind of results I expected, tend to use problems that
are too short to be meaningful tests.  A better test of a language is
what happens in programs that take a month to write.  And the only
real test, if you believe as I do that the main purpose of a language
is to be good to think in (rather than just to tell a computer what to
do once you've thought of it) is what new things you can write in it.
So any language comparison where
you have to meet a predefined spec is testing slightly the wrong
thing.
The true test of a language is how well you can discover
and solve new problems, not
how well you can use it to solve a problem someone else has
already formulated.  These two are quite different criteria.
In art, mediums like embroidery and mosaic work well if you
know beforehand what you want to make, but are absolutely lousy if
you don't.  When you want to discover the image as you make it--
as you have to do with anything as complex as an image of a
person, for example-- you need to use a more fluid medium like pencil or
ink wash or oil paint.  And indeed, the way tapestries and mosaics are made in
practice is to make a painting first, then copy it.  (The word
"cartoon" was originally used to describe a painting intended for
this purpose).
What this means is that we are never likely to have accurate comparisons
of the relative power of programming languages.  We'll have precise
comparisons, but not accurate ones.  In particular, explicit studies
for the purpose of comparing languages,
because they will probably use small problems, and will necessarily use
predefined problems, will tend to underestimate the power of the
more powerful languages.
Reports from the field, though they will necessarily be less precise than
"scientific" studies, are likely to be more meaningful.  For example,
Ulf Wiger of Ericsson did a
study
that
concluded that Erlang was 4-10x
more succinct than C++, and proportionately faster to develop
software in:
Comparisons between Ericsson-internal development projects indicate
similar line/hour productivity, including all phases of software development,
rather independently of which language (Erlang, PLEX, C, C++, or Java)
was used.  What differentiates the different languages then becomes source
code volume.
The study also deals explictly with a point that was
only implicit in Brooks' book (since he measured lines of debugged code):
programs written in more powerful languages tend to have fewer bugs.
That becomes an end in itself, possibly more important than programmer
productivity, in applications like network switches.
The Taste Test
Ultimately, I think you have to go with your gut.  What does it feel
like to program in the language?  I think the way to find (or design)
the best language is to become hypersensitive to how well a language
lets you think, then choose/design the language that feels best.  If
some language feature is awkward or restricting, don't worry, you'll
know about it.
Such hypersensitivity will come at a cost.  You'll find that you can't
stand
programming in clumsy languages.   I find it unbearably
restrictive to program in languages without macros, just as someone used
to dynamic typing finds it unbearably restrictive to have to go back to
programming in a language where you have to declare the type of
every variable, and can't make a list of objects of different types.
I'm not the only one.  I know many Lisp hackers that this has happened
to.  In fact, the most accurate measure of the relative power of programming
languages might be the percentage of people who know the language
who will take any job where they get to use that language, regardless
of the application domain.
Restrictiveness
I think most hackers know what it means for a language to feel restrictive.
What's happening when you feel that?  I think it's the same feeling
you get when the street you want to take is blocked off, and you have to
take a long detour to get where you wanted to go.  There is something
you want to say, and the language won't let you.
What's really going on here, I think, is that a restrictive language is
one that isn't succinct enough.  The problem is not simply that you can't
say what you planned to.  It's that the detour the language makes you
take is
longer.
Try this thought experiment.  Suppose there were
some program you wanted to write, and the language wouldn't let you
express it the way you planned to, but instead forced you to write the
program in some other way that was
shorter.
For me at least,
that wouldn't feel very restrictive.  It would be like the street you
wanted to take being blocked off, and the policeman at the
intersection directing you to a shortcut instead of a detour.  Great!
I think most (ninety percent?) of
the feeling of restrictiveness comes from being forced to make the program
you write in the language longer than one you have in your head.
Restrictiveness is mostly lack of succinctness.
So when a language feels restrictive, what that (mostly) means is that it isn't
succinct enough, and when a language isn't succinct, it will
feel restrictive.
Readability
The quote I began with mentions two other qualities, regularity and
readability.  I'm not sure what regularity is, or what advantage,
if any, code that is regular and readable has over code that is merely
readable.  But I think I know what is meant by readability, and I think
it is also related to succinctness.
We have to be careful here to distinguish between the readability of
an individual line of code and the readability of the whole program.
It's the second that matters.  I agree that a line of Basic is likely to be
more readable than a line of Lisp.  But a program written in Basic is
is going to have more lines than the same program written in
Lisp (especially once you cross over into Greenspunland). The
total effort of reading the Basic program will surely be greater.
total effort  = effort per line x number of lines
I'm not as sure that readability is directly proportionate to succinctness
as I am that power is, but certainly succinctness is a factor
(in the mathematical sense; see equation above) in readability.
So it may not even be meaningful to say that the goal of a language is
readability, not succinctness; it could be like saying the goal was readability,
not readability.
What readability-per-line does mean, to the user encountering the language
for the first time, is that source code will
look unthreatening
.  So
readability-per-line
could be a good marketing decision, even if it is a bad design
decision.  It's isomorphic to the very successful technique of letting
people pay in installments: instead of frightening them with a high
upfront price, you tell them the low monthly payment.  Installment plans
are a net lose for the buyer, though, as mere readability-per-line probably
is for the programmer.
The buyer is going to make a
lot
of those low, low payments; and
the programmer is going to read a
lot
of those individually readable lines.
This tradeoff predates programming languages.  If you're used to reading
novels and newspaper articles, your first experience of reading a math
paper can be dismaying.  It could take half an hour to read a single page.
And yet, I am pretty sure that the notation is not the problem, even though
it may feel like it is.  The math paper is hard to read
because the ideas are hard.  If you expressed the same ideas in prose
(as mathematicians had to do before they evolved succinct notations),
they wouldn't be any easier to read, because the paper would grow to the
size of a book.
To What Extent?
A number of people have rejected
the idea that succinctness = power.  I think it would be more useful, instead
of simply arguing that they are the same or aren't, to ask:
to what
extent
does succinctness = power?
Because clearly succinctness is
a large part of what higher-level languages are for.  If it is not all they're
for, then what else are they for, and how important, relatively, are these
other functions?
I'm not proposing this just to make the debate more civilized.  I really
want to know the answer.  When, if ever,  is a language too succinct for
its own good?
The hypothesis I began with was that, except in pathological examples,
I thought succinctness could be considered identical with power.  What
I meant was that in any language anyone would design, they
would be identical, but that if someone wanted to design a language
explicitly to disprove this hypothesis, they could probably do it.  I'm
not even sure of that, actually.
Languages, not Programs
We should be clear that we are talking about the succinctness
of languages, not of individual programs.
It certainly is possible for individual programs to be written too densely.
I wrote about this in
On Lisp
. A complex macro
may have to save many times its own length to be justified.  If writing
some hairy macro could save you ten lines of code every time you use it,
and the macro is itself ten lines of code, then you get a net saving in
lines if you use it more than once.  But that could still be a bad move,
because macro definitions are harder to read than ordinary code.  You
might have to use the macro ten or twenty times before it yielded a net
improvement in readability.
I'm sure every language has such tradeoffs (though I suspect the stakes
get higher as the language gets more powerful).  Every programmer must
have seen code that some clever person has made marginally shorter
by using dubious programming tricks.
So there is no argument about that-- at least, not from me.  Individual
programs can certainly be too succinct for their own good.  The question
is, can a language be?  Can a language compel programmers to write
code that's short (in elements) at the expense of overall readability?
One reason it's hard to imagine a language being too succinct is that if
there were some excessively compact way to phrase something, there would
probably also be a longer way.  For example, if you felt Lisp programs using
a lot of macros or higher-order functions were too dense,  you could, if you
preferred, write code that was isomorphic to Pascal.  If you
don't want to express factorial in Arc as a call to a higher-order function
(rec zero 1 * 1-)
you can also write out a recursive definition:
(rfn fact (x) (if (zero x) 1 (* x (fact (1- x)))))
Though I can't off the top of my head think of any examples, I am interested
in the question of whether a language could be too succinct.  Are there languages
that force you to write code in a way that is crabbed and incomprehensible?
If anyone has examples, I would be very interested to see them.
(Reminder: What I'm looking for are programs that are very dense according
to the metric of "elements" sketched above, not merely programs that are
short because delimiters can be omitted and everything has a one-character name.)
Japanese Translation
Russian Translation
Lutz Prechelt: Comparison of Seven Languages
Erann Gat: Lisp vs. Java
Peter Norvig Tries Prechelt's Test
Matthias Felleisen: Expressive Power of Languages
Kragen Sitaker: Redundancy and Power
Forth
Joy
Icon
J
K


@TeddysGrandson He did identify himself. Which you won't even do on Twitter.

Last night an English man asked me if Trump was a dictator. I said not quite, that he mostly just wanted attention, but that he did have some Goebbelses working for him.

@RonFilipkowski He wouldn't have in 1943. But he might well have in 1940, and that thought is frankly more damning than the hyperbolic claim that he would have in 1943.

He needed heroin to be able to sit still and read. So is he still doing heroin? Presumably not. Which implies he's not able to sit still and read.

@growing_daniel When I was a kid we used to dress up whenever we flew. IIRC it was the default. It seems backward to have to though.

@elonmusk Come on, Elon.

@LBFlyawayhome If he'd sold that in a gallery instead of doing it as an illustration for a children's book, it would be considered an early icon of photorealism.

@forkinggenius @brian_armstrong I assume so.

@brian_armstrong When I first bought some (or at least talked to you about buying some) in 2013, that was the reason: as insurance against it becoming the world's reserve currency.

@georg3 That's practically identical, just shot from a different angle.


@Chris_arnade I wonder if you could get a sophisticated local to teach you what to say so that you wouldn't get turned away. "I know I look like the sort of customer that might be a pain in the ass, but actually I'm easy going, and I'd really like to try your restaurant."

You don't need ketamine to make these. I always make them. In our family we call them "Robert towers," after Robert Morris, who also makes them.

@jdmccafferty I started at the top. That inscription doesn't look right at all, I thought. And that figure is very strange looking. Then I noticed the french fries.

@JTLonsdale Are you saying she's lying when she says her colleague told her that they needed to talk about her social media post? That she is flat out inventing that conversation?

@ButlerianIdeal Only if you want high performance.

Now that I have an old Land Rover and regularly take the dog with me I understand the appeal of the truck + dog combination. https://t.co/8LDclHHd28

@Mayanklll But they explicitly claimed they were going to be different.

What did she say?

"We can have criticisms of DEI without wanting to tear down the whole concept of diversity and inclusion."

https://t.co/CdSI255j6A

It turns out that the University of Austin isn't committed to free speech after all. If you write a post that offends a big donor, you're fired. https://t.co/p3YjZj8XR2

@AssalRad These are actual quotes, not scare quotes.


The Power of the Marginal
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
June 2006
(This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and
Railsconf 2006.)
A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple
garage.  As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in
Saskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak
must have had to work in a garage.
"Those guys must have been
freezing!"
That's one of California's hidden advantages: the mild climate means
there's lots of marginal space.  In cold places that margin gets
trimmed off.  There's a sharper line between outside and inside,
and only projects that are officially sanctioned — by organizations,
or parents, or wives, or at least by oneself — get proper indoor
space.  That raises the activation energy for new ideas.  You can't
just tinker. You have to justify.
Some of Silicon Valley's most famous companies began in garages:
Hewlett-Packard in 1938, Apple in 1976, Google in 1998.  In Apple's
case the garage story is a bit of an urban legend.  Woz says all
they did there was assemble some computers, and that he did all the
actual design of the Apple I and Apple II in his apartment or his
cube at HP.
[
1
]
This was apparently too marginal even for Apple's PR
people.
By conventional standards, Jobs and Wozniak were marginal people
too.  Obviously they were smart, but they can't have looked good
on paper.  They were at the time a pair of college dropouts with
about three years of school between them, and hippies to boot.
Their previous business experience consisted of making "blue boxes"
to hack into the phone system, a business with the rare distinction
of being both illegal and unprofitable.
Outsiders
Now a startup operating out of a garage in Silicon Valley would
feel part of an exalted tradition, like the poet in his garret, or
the painter who can't afford to heat his studio and thus has to
wear a beret indoors.  But in 1976 it didn't seem so cool.  The
world hadn't yet realized that starting a computer company was in
the same category as being a writer or a painter. It hadn't been
for long.  Only in the preceding couple years had the dramatic fall
in the cost of hardware allowed outsiders to compete.
In 1976, everyone looked down on a company operating out of a garage,
including the founders.  One of the first things Jobs did when they
got some money was to rent office space.  He wanted Apple to seem
like a real company.
They already had something few real companies ever have: a fabulously well
designed product.  You'd think they'd have had more confidence.
But I've talked to a lot of startup founders, and it's always this
way.  They've built something that's going to change the world, and
they're worried about some nit like not having proper business
cards.
That's the paradox I want to explore: great new things often come
from the margins, and yet the people who discover them are looked
down on by everyone, including themselves.
It's an old idea that new things come from the margins. I want to
examine its internal structure.  Why do great ideas come from the
margins?  What kind of ideas?  And is there anything we can do to
encourage the process?
Insiders
One reason so many good ideas come from the margin is simply that
there's so much of it. There have to be more outsiders than insiders,
if insider means anything.  If the number of outsiders is huge it
will always seem as if a lot of ideas come from them, even if few
do per capita.  But I think there's more going on than this.  There
are real disadvantages to being an insider, and in some kinds of
work they can outweigh the advantages.
Imagine, for example, what would happen if the government decided
to commission someone to write an official Great American Novel.
First there'd be a huge ideological squabble over who to choose.
Most of the best writers would be excluded for having offended one
side or the other.  Of the remainder, the smart ones would refuse
such a job, leaving only a few with the wrong sort of ambition.
The committee would choose one at the height of his career — that
is, someone whose best work was behind him — and hand over the
project with copious free advice about how the book should show in
positive terms the strength and diversity of the American people,
etc, etc.
The unfortunate writer would then sit down to work with a huge
weight of expectation on his shoulders.  Not wanting to blow such
a public commission, he'd play it safe.  This book had better command
respect, and the way to ensure that would be to make it a tragedy.
Audiences have to be enticed to laugh, but if you kill people they
feel obliged to take you seriously.  As everyone knows, America
plus tragedy equals the Civil War, so that's what it would have to
be about. When finally
completed twelve years later, the book would be a 900-page pastiche
of existing popular novels — roughly
Gone with the Wind
plus
Roots
.  But its bulk and celebrity would make it a bestseller
for a few months, until blown out of the water by a talk-show host's
autobiography.  The book would be made into a movie and thereupon
forgotten, except by the more waspish sort of reviewers, among whom
it would be a byword for bogusness like Milli Vanilli or
Battlefield
Earth
.
Maybe I got a little carried away with this example.  And yet is
this not at each point the way such a project would play out?  The
government knows better than to get into the novel business, but
in other fields where they have a natural monopoly, like nuclear
waste dumps, aircraft carriers, and regime change, you'd find plenty
of projects isomorphic to this one — and indeed, plenty that were
less successful.
This little thought experiment suggests a few of the disadvantages
of insider projects: the selection of the wrong kind of people, the
excessive scope, the inability to take risks, the need to seem
serious, the weight of expectations, the power of vested interests,
the undiscerning audience, and perhaps most dangerous, the tendency
of such work to become a duty rather than a pleasure.
Tests
A world with outsiders and insiders implies some kind of test for
distinguishing between them.  And the trouble with most tests for
selecting elites is that there are two ways to pass them: to be
good at what they try to measure, and to be good at hacking the
test itself.
So the first question to ask about a field is how honest its tests
are, because this tells you what it means to be an outsider.  This
tells you how much to trust your instincts when you disagree with
authorities, whether it's worth going through the usual channels
to become one yourself, and perhaps whether you want to work in
this field at all.
Tests are least hackable when there are consistent standards for
quality, and the people running the test really care about its
integrity.  Admissions to PhD programs in the hard sciences are
fairly honest, for example.  The professors will get whoever they
admit as their own grad students, so they try hard to choose well,
and they have a fair amount of data to go on.  Whereas undergraduate
admissions seem to be much more hackable.
One way to tell whether a field has consistent standards is the
overlap between the leading practitioners and the people who teach
the subject in universities.  At one end of the scale you have
fields like math and physics, where nearly all the teachers are
among the best practitioners.  In the middle are medicine, law,
history, architecture, and computer science, where many are.  At
the bottom are business, literature, and the visual arts, where
there's almost no overlap between the teachers and the leading
practitioners.  It's this end that gives rise to phrases like "those
who can't do, teach."
Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study
in college.  When I was in college the rule seemed to be that you
should study whatever you were most interested in.  But in retrospect
you're probably better off studying something moderately interesting
with someone who's good at it than something very interesting with
someone who isn't.  You often hear people say that you shouldn't
major in business in college, but this is actually an instance of
a more general rule: don't learn things from teachers who are bad
at them.
How much you should worry about being an outsider depends on the
quality of the insiders.  If you're an amateur mathematician and
think you've solved a famous open problem, better go back and check.
When I was in grad school, a friend in the math department had the
job of replying to people who sent in proofs of Fermat's last theorem
and so on, and it did not seem as if he saw it as a valuable source
of tips — more like manning a mental health hotline.  Whereas if
the stuff you're writing seems different from what English professors
are interested in, that's not necessarily a problem.
Anti-Tests
Where the method of selecting the elite is thoroughly corrupt, most
of the good people will be outsiders.  In art, for example, the
image of the poor, misunderstood genius is not just one possible
image of a great artist: it's the
standard
image.  I'm not
saying it's correct, incidentally, but it is telling how well this
image has stuck.  You couldn't make a rap like that stick to math
or medicine.
[
2
]
If it's corrupt enough, a test becomes an anti-test, filtering out
the people it should select by making them to do things only the
wrong people would do.
Popularity
in high school
seems to be such a test.  There are plenty of similar ones in the grownup
world.  For example, rising up through the hierarchy of the average
big company demands an attention to politics few thoughtful people
could spare.
[
3
]
Someone like Bill Gates can grow a company under
him, but it's hard to imagine him having the patience to climb the
corporate ladder at General Electric — or Microsoft, actually.
It's kind of strange when you think about it, because lord-of-the-flies
schools and bureaucratic companies are both the default.  There are
probably a lot of people who go from one to the other and never
realize the whole world doesn't work this way.
I think that's one reason big companies are so often blindsided by
startups.
People at big companies don't realize the extent to which
they live in an environment that is one large, ongoing test for the
wrong qualities.
If you're an outsider, your best chances for beating insiders are
obviously in fields where corrupt tests select a lame elite.  But
there's a catch: if the tests are corrupt, your victory won't be
recognized, at least in your lifetime.  You may feel you don't need
that, but history suggests it's dangerous to work in fields with
corrupt tests.  You may beat the insiders, and yet not do as good
work, on an absolute scale, as you would in a field that was more
honest.
Standards in art, for example, were almost as corrupt in the first
half of the eighteenth century as they are today.  This was the era
of those fluffy idealized portraits of countesses with their lapdogs.
Chardin
decided to skip all that and paint ordinary things as he
saw them.  He's now considered the best of that period — and yet
not the equal of Leonardo or Bellini or Memling, who all had the
additional encouragement of honest standards.
It can be worth participating in a corrupt contest, however, if
it's followed by another that isn't corrupt.  For example, it would
be worth competing with a company that can spend more than you on
marketing, as long as you can survive to the next round, when
customers compare your actual products.  Similarly, you shouldn't
be discouraged by the comparatively corrupt test of college admissions,
because it's followed immediately by less hackable tests.
[
4
]
Risk
Even in a field with honest tests, there are still advantages to
being an outsider.  The most obvious is that outsiders have nothing
to lose.  They can do risky things, and if they fail, so what?  Few
will even notice.
The eminent, on the other hand, are weighed down by their eminence.
Eminence is like a suit: it impresses the wrong people, and it
constrains the wearer.
Outsiders should realize the advantage they have here.  Being able
to take risks is hugely valuable.  Everyone values safety too much,
both the obscure and the eminent.  No one wants to look like a fool.
But it's very useful to be able to.  If most of your ideas aren't
stupid, you're probably being too conservative.  You're not bracketing
the problem.
Lord Acton said we should judge talent at its best and character
at its worst.  For example, if you write one great book and ten bad
ones, you still count as a great writer — or at least, a better
writer than someone who wrote eleven that were merely good.  Whereas
if you're a quiet, law-abiding citizen most of the time but
occasionally cut someone up and bury them in your backyard, you're
a bad guy.
Almost everyone makes the mistake of treating ideas as if they were
indications of character rather than talent — as if having a stupid
idea made you stupid.   There's a huge weight of tradition advising
us to play it safe.  "Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps
silent," says the Old Testament (Proverbs 17:28).
Well, that may be fine advice for a bunch of goatherds in Bronze
Age Palestine.  There conservatism would be the order of the day.
But times have changed.  It might still be reasonable to stick with
the Old Testament in political questions, but materially the world
now has a lot more state.  Tradition is less of a guide, not just
because things change faster, but because the space of possibilities
is so large.   The more complicated the world gets, the more valuable
it is to be willing to look like a fool.
Delegation
And yet the more successful people become, the more heat they get
if they screw up — or even seem to screw up.  In this respect, as
in many others, the eminent are prisoners of their own success.  So
the best way to understand the advantages of being an outsider may
be to look at the disadvantages of being an insider.
If you ask eminent people what's wrong with their lives, the first
thing they'll complain about is the lack of time.  A friend of mine
at Google is fairly high up in the company and went to work for
them long before they went public.  In other words, he's now rich
enough not to have to work.  I asked him if he could still endure
the annoyances of having a job, now that he didn't have to.  And
he said that there weren't really any annoyances, except — and he
got a wistful look when he said this — that he got
so much
email
.
The eminent feel like everyone wants to take a bite out of them.
The problem is so widespread that people pretending to be eminent
do it by pretending to be overstretched.
The lives of the eminent become scheduled, and that's not good for
thinking.  One of the great advantages of being an outsider is long,
uninterrupted blocks of time.  That's what I remember about grad
school: apparently endless supplies of time, which I spent worrying
about, but not writing, my dissertation.  Obscurity is like health
food — unpleasant, perhaps, but good for you.  Whereas fame tends
to be like the alcohol produced by fermentation. When it reaches
a certain concentration, it kills off the yeast that produced it.
The eminent generally respond to the shortage of time by turning
into managers.  They don't have time to work.  They're surrounded
by junior people they're supposed to help or supervise.  The obvious
solution is to have the junior people do the work.  Some good
stuff happens this way, but there are problems it doesn't work so
well for: the kind where it helps to have everything in one head.
For example, it recently emerged that the famous glass artist Dale
Chihuly hasn't actually blown glass for 27 years.  He has assistants
do the work for him.  But one of the most valuable sources of ideas
in the visual arts is the resistance of the medium.  That's why oil
paintings look so different from watercolors.  In principle you
could make any mark in any medium; in practice the medium steers
you.  And if you're no longer doing the work yourself, you stop
learning from this.
So if you want to beat those eminent enough to delegate, one way
to do it is to take advantage of direct contact with the medium.
In the arts it's obvious how: blow your own glass, edit your own
films, stage your own plays.  And in the process pay close attention
to accidents and to new ideas you have on the fly.  This technique
can be generalized to any sort of work: if you're an outsider, don't
be ruled by plans.  Planning is often just a weakness forced on
those who delegate.
Is there a general rule for finding problems best solved in one
head?  Well, you can manufacture them by taking any project usually
done by multiple people and trying to do it all yourself.  Wozniak's
work was a classic example: he did everything himself, hardware and
software, and the result was miraculous.  He claims not one bug was
ever found in the Apple II, in either hardware or software.
Another way to find good problems to solve in one head is to focus
on the grooves in the chocolate bar — the places where tasks are
divided when they're split between several people.  If you want to
beat delegation, focus on a vertical slice: for example, be both
writer and editor, or both design buildings and construct them.
One especially good groove to span is the one between tools and
things made with them.  For example, programming languages and
applications are usually written by different people, and this is
responsible for a lot of the worst flaws in
programming languages
.
I think every language should be designed simultaneously with a
large application written in it, the way C was with Unix.
Techniques for competing with delegation translate well into business,
because delegation is endemic there.  Instead of avoiding it as a
drawback of senility, many companies embrace it as a sign of maturity.
In big companies software is often designed, implemented, and sold
by three separate types of people.  In startups one person may have
to do all three.  And though this feels stressful, it's one reason
startups win.  The needs of customers and the means of satisfying
them are all in one head.
Focus
The very skill of insiders can be a weakness.  Once someone is good
at something, they tend to spend all their time doing that.  This
kind of focus is very valuable, actually.  Much of the skill of
experts is the ability to ignore false trails.  But focus has
drawbacks: you don't learn from other fields, and when a new approach
arrives, you may be the last to notice.
For outsiders this translates into two ways to win.  One is to work
on a variety of things.  Since you can't derive as much benefit
(yet) from a narrow focus, you may as well cast a wider net and
derive what benefit you can from similarities between fields.  Just
as you can compete with delegation by working on larger vertical
slices, you can compete with specialization by working on larger
horizontal slices — by both writing and illustrating your book, for
example.
The second way to compete with focus is to see what focus overlooks.
In particular, new things.  So if you're not good at anything yet,
consider working on something so new that no one else is either.
It won't have any prestige yet, if no one is good at it, but you'll
have it all to yourself.
The potential of a new medium is usually underestimated, precisely
because no one has yet explored its possibilities.  Before
Durer
tried making engravings, no one took them very seriously.  Engraving
was for making little devotional images — basically fifteenth century
baseball cards of saints.  Trying to make masterpieces in this
medium must have seemed to Durer's contemporaries the way that,
say, making masterpieces in
comics
might seem to the average person
today.
In the computer world we get not new mediums but new platforms: the
minicomputer, the microprocessor, the web-based application.  At
first they're always dismissed as being unsuitable for real work.
And yet someone always decides to try anyway, and it turns out you
can do more than anyone expected.  So in the future when you hear
people say of a new platform: yeah, it's popular and cheap, but not
ready yet for real work, jump on it.
As well as being more comfortable working on established lines,
insiders generally have a vested interest in perpetuating them.
The professor who made his reputation by discovering some new idea
is not likely to be the one to discover its replacement.  This is
particularly true with companies, who have not only skill and pride
anchoring them to the status quo, but money as well. The Achilles
heel of successful companies is their inability to cannibalize
themselves.  Many innovations consist of replacing something with
a cheaper alternative, and companies just don't want to see a path
whose immediate effect is to cut an existing source of revenue.
So if you're an outsider you should actively seek out contrarian
projects.  Instead of working on things the eminent have made
prestigious, work on things that could steal that prestige.
The really juicy new approaches are not the ones insiders reject
as impossible, but those they ignore as undignified.  For example,
after Wozniak designed the Apple II he offered it first to his
employer, HP.  They passed.  One of the reasons was that, to save
money, he'd designed the Apple II to use a TV as a monitor, and HP
felt they couldn't produce anything so declasse.
Less
Wozniak used a TV as a monitor for the simple reason that he couldn't
afford a monitor.  Outsiders are not merely free but compelled to
make things that are cheap and lightweight.  And both are good bets
for growth: cheap things spread faster, and lightweight things
evolve faster.
The eminent, on the other hand, are almost forced to work on a large
scale.  Instead of garden sheds they must design huge art museums.
One reason they work on big things is that they can: like our
hypothetical novelist, they're flattered by such opportunities.
They also know that big projects will by their sheer bulk impress
the audience.  A garden shed, however lovely, would be easy to
ignore; a few might even snicker at it.  You can't snicker at a
giant museum, no matter how much you dislike it.  And finally, there
are all those people the eminent have working for them; they have
to choose projects that can keep them all busy.
Outsiders are free of all this.  They can work on small things, and
there's something very pleasing about small things.  Small things
can be perfect; big ones always have something wrong with them.
But there's a
magic
in small things that goes beyond such rational
explanations.  All kids know it.  Small things have more personality.
Plus making them is more fun.  You can do what you want; you don't
have to satisfy committees.  And perhaps most important, small
things can be done fast.  The prospect of seeing the finished project
hangs in the air like the smell of dinner cooking.  If you work
fast, maybe you could have it done tonight.
Working on small things is also a good way to learn.  The most
important kinds of learning happen one project at a time.  ("Next
time, I won't...")  The faster you cycle through projects, the
faster you'll evolve.
Plain materials have a charm like small scale.  And in addition
there's the challenge of making do with less.  Every designer's
ears perk up at the mention of that game, because it's a game you
can't lose.  Like the JV playing the varsity, if you even tie, you
win.  So paradoxically there are cases where fewer resources yield
better results, because the designers' pleasure at their own ingenuity
more than compensates.
[
5
]
So if you're an outsider, take advantage of your ability to make
small and inexpensive things.  Cultivate the pleasure and simplicity
of that kind of work; one day you'll miss it.
Responsibility
When you're old and eminent, what will you miss about being young
and obscure?  What people seem to miss most is the lack of
responsibilities.
Responsibility is an occupational disease of eminence.  In principle
you could avoid it, just as in principle you could avoid getting
fat as you get old, but few do.  I sometimes suspect that responsibility
is a trap and that the most virtuous route would be to shirk it,
but regardless it's certainly constraining.
When you're an outsider you're constrained too, of course.  You're
short of money, for example.  But that constrains you in different
ways.  How does responsibility constrain you?  The worst thing is
that it allows you not to focus on real work.  Just as the most
dangerous forms of
procrastination
are those that seem like work,
the danger of responsibilities is not just that they can consume a
whole day, but that they can do it without setting off the
kind of alarms you'd set off if you spent a whole day sitting on a
park bench.
A lot of the pain of being an outsider is being aware of one's own
procrastination.  But this is actually a good thing.  You're at
least close enough to work that the smell of it makes you hungry.
As an outsider, you're just one step away from getting things done.
A huge step, admittedly, and one that most people never seem to
make, but only one step.  If you can summon up the energy to get
started, you can work on projects with an intensity (in both senses)
that few insiders can match.  For insiders work turns into a duty,
laden with responsibilities and expectations.  It's never so pure
as it was when they were young.
Work like a dog being taken for a walk, instead of an ox being yoked
to the plow.  That's what they miss.
Audience
A lot of outsiders make the mistake of doing the opposite; they
admire the eminent so much that they copy even their flaws.  Copying
is a good way to learn, but copy the right things.  When I was in
college I imitated the pompous diction of famous professors.  But
this wasn't what
made
them eminent — it was more a flaw their
eminence had allowed them to sink into.   Imitating it was like
pretending to have gout in order to seem rich.
Half the distinguishing qualities of the eminent are actually
disadvantages.  Imitating these is not only a waste of time, but
will make you seem a fool to your models, who are often well aware
of it.
What are the genuine advantages of being an insider?  The greatest
is an audience.  It often seems to outsiders that the great advantage
of insiders is money — that they have the resources to do what they
want.  But so do people who inherit money, and that doesn't seem
to help, not as much as an audience.  It's good for morale to know
people want to see what you're making; it draws work out of you.
If I'm right that the defining advantage of insiders is an audience,
then we live in exciting times, because just in the last ten years
the Internet has made audiences a lot more liquid.  Outsiders don't
have to content themselves anymore with a proxy audience of a few
smart friends.  Now, thanks to the Internet, they can start to grow
themselves actual audiences.  This is great news for the marginal,
who retain the advantages of outsiders while increasingly being
able to siphon off what had till recently been the prerogative of
the elite.
Though the Web has been around for more than ten years, I think
we're just beginning to see its democratizing effects.  Outsiders
are still learning how to steal audiences.  But more importantly,
audiences are still learning how to be stolen — they're still just
beginning to realize how much
deeper
bloggers can dig than
journalists, how much
more interesting
a democratic news site can be than a
front page controlled by editors, and how much
funnier
a bunch of kids
with webcams can be than mass-produced sitcoms.
The big media companies shouldn't worry that people will post their
copyrighted material on YouTube.  They should worry that people
will post their own stuff on YouTube, and audiences will watch that
instead.
Hacking
If I had to condense the power of the marginal into one sentence
it would be: just try hacking something together.  That phrase draws
in most threads I've mentioned here.   Hacking something together
means deciding what to do as you're doing it, not a subordinate
executing the vision of his boss.  It implies the result won't
be pretty, because it will be made quickly out of inadequate
materials.  It may work, but it won't be the sort of thing the
eminent would want to put their name on.  Something hacked together
means something that barely solves the problem, or maybe doesn't
solve the problem at all, but another you discovered en route.  But
that's ok, because the main value of that initial version is not the
thing itself, but what it leads to.  Insiders who daren't walk
through the mud in their nice clothes will never make it to the
solid ground on the other side.
The word "try" is an especially valuable component.  I disagree
here with Yoda, who said there is no try.  There is try.  It implies
there's no punishment if you fail.  You're driven by curiosity
instead of duty.  That means the wind of procrastination will be
in your favor: instead of avoiding this work, this will be what you
do as a way of avoiding other work.  And when you do it, you'll be
in a better mood.  The more the work depends on imagination, the
more that matters, because most people have more ideas when they're
happy.
If I could go back and redo my twenties, that would be one thing
I'd do more of: just try hacking things together.  Like many people
that age, I spent a lot of time worrying about what I should do.
I also spent some time trying to build stuff.  I should have spent
less time worrying and more time building.  If you're not sure what
to do, make something.
Raymond Chandler's advice to thriller writers was "When in doubt,
have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand."  He followed
that advice.  Judging from his books, he was often in doubt.  But
though the result is occasionally cheesy, it's never boring.  In
life, as in books, action is underrated.
Fortunately the number of things you can just hack together keeps
increasing.   People fifty years ago would be astonished that one
could just hack together a movie, for example.  Now you can even
hack together distribution.  Just make stuff and put it online.
Inappropriate
If you really want to score big, the place to focus is the margin
of the margin: the territories only recently captured from the
insiders.  That's where you'll find the juiciest projects still
undone, either because they seemed too risky, or simply because
there were too few insiders to explore everything.
This is why I spend most of my time writing
essays
lately.  The
writing of essays used to be limited to those who could get them
published.  In principle you could have written them and just shown
them to your friends; in practice that didn't work.
[
6
]
An
essayist needs the resistance of an audience, just as an engraver
needs the resistance of the plate.
Up till a few years ago, writing essays was the ultimate insider's
game.  Domain experts were allowed to publish essays about their
field, but the pool allowed to write on general topics was about
eight people who went to the right parties in New York.  Now the
reconquista has overrun this territory, and, not surprisingly, found
it sparsely cultivated.  There are so many essays yet unwritten.
They tend to be the naughtier ones; the insiders have pretty much
exhausted the motherhood and apple pie topics.
This leads to my final suggestion: a technique for determining when
you're on the right track.  You're on the right track when people
complain that you're unqualified, or that you've done something
inappropriate.  If people are complaining, that means you're doing
something rather than sitting around, which is the first step.  And
if they're driven to such empty forms of complaint, that means
you've probably done something good.
If you make something and people complain that it doesn't
work
,
that's a problem.  But if the worst thing they can hit you with is
your own status as an outsider, that implies that in every other
respect you've succeeded.  Pointing out that someone is unqualified
is as desperate as resorting to racial slurs. It's just a legitimate
sounding way of saying: we don't like your type around here.
But the best thing of all is when people call what you're doing
inappropriate.  I've been hearing this word all my life and I only
recently realized that it is, in fact, the sound of the homing
beacon.  "Inappropriate" is the null criticism.  It's merely the
adjective form of "I don't like it."
So that, I think, should be the highest goal for the marginal.  Be
inappropriate.  When you hear people saying that, you're golden.
And they, incidentally, are busted.
Notes
[
1
]
The facts about Apple's early history are from an interview
with
Steve
Wozniak
in Jessica Livingston's
Founders at Work
.
[
2
]
As usual the popular image is several decades behind reality.
Now the misunderstood artist is not a chain-smoking drunk who pours
his soul into big, messy canvases that philistines see and say
"that's not art" because it isn't a picture of anything.  The
philistines have now been trained that anything hung on a wall
is art.  Now the misunderstood artist is a coffee-drinking vegan
cartoonist whose work they see and say "that's not art" because it
looks like stuff they've seen in the Sunday paper.
[
3
]
In fact this would do fairly well as a definition of politics:
what determines rank in the absence of objective tests.
[
4
]
In high school you're led to believe your whole future depends
on where you go to college, but it turns out only to buy you a couple
years. By your mid-twenties the people worth impressing
already judge you more by what
you've done than where you went to school.
[
5
]
Managers are presumably wondering, how can I make this miracle
happen?  How can I make the people working for me do more with less?
Unfortunately the constraint probably has to be self-imposed.  If
you're
expected
to do more with less, then you're being
starved, not eating virtuously.
[
6
]
Without the prospect of publication, the closest most people
come to writing essays is to write in a journal.  I find I never
get as deeply into subjects as I do in proper essays.  As the name
implies, you don't go back and rewrite journal entries over
and over for two weeks.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Paul Buchheit, Sarah
Harlin, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Olin
Shivers, and Chris Small for reading drafts of this, and to Chris
Small and Chad Fowler for inviting me to speak.
Japanese Translation
Chinese Translation


@jesslivingston @chafkin 145 companies!

Me: Most of the atoms in the Earth were made by suns, but other suns, not ours.

13 yo: So you're saying our sun is really our stepsun?

@matthiasoso @elonmusk It doesn't change anything at all. That's the point.

@elonmusk Ok, here it is with a more normal aspect ratio. https://t.co/DyiyP0GpI5

@therabbithole Whoah, look, the growth in the debt just got even worse. https://t.co/hxiztmNoL7

@DKThomp @jayvanbavel What's the answer?

@imdsms @CcibChris Sure enough. It's shot with a telephoto lens.

@AGHamilton29 @aviramj Asking people a question they don't dare answer honestly is not dishonest. Rather the opposite.

@misaligned_agi He only turned 13 less than 2 months ago.

@nikitabier @pitdesi Or drugs of some sort.


Damn, I used an s instead of z without realizing it. Next thing you know I'll be writing "colour," and it's only a step from that to "aluminium."

@bamitsmanas Before or while? Though to be honest I don't mind if it's the latter. I use some of my favorite books for that.

Interesting. Privatisation is good for mass transit.

@matthew_d_green @elonmusk @evilsocket Rozado's research is genuinely quite interesting though. There was a simultaneous and dramatic increase in the use of many words (you can probably guess which) in the early 2010s. It's still unclear why, but the most likely candidate is Twitter.

@Suhail I think someone shot one once but I don't know what came of it. Maybe they couldn't raise enough to release it.

The distraction could be dangerous to the startups. Documentary filmmakers always say they're going to be inconspicuous, but boy are they not.

The Magic Roundabout. One day I will drive it. https://t.co/vQyPb64Vps

And incidentally, there's more here than just this business. You could use paid reservations as a beachhead to displace OpenTable.

@winterrose A firehose of mindless adulation mixed with mindless abuse.

There is a missing startup here. Restaurants should be making this money, not scalpers.

@garrytan She seems to be bad news overall though. Banning M&A harms economic growth more than banning noncompetes helps it.


@jfgruner I would have loved to, but I grew up in America, and there was roughly zero rugby in the suburbs of Pittsburgh in the 1970s.

@LinkofSunshine "I love the poorly educated."

@F_Botha_USA I bet this is a minority opinion among Bothas.

@ahistoryinart A polite dinner party sounds wonderful to be honest.

Rugby allows kids to experience something that would otherwise only exist in fairy tales: combat with giants. Here's 12 yo and two friends in action. (They did manage to keep the ball.) https://t.co/DC9WN9gY5w

@peterboghossian A few people have actually used that term! https://t.co/X2St4PdC7I

@peterboghossian "Enslaved people" is demeaning. It should be "individuals experiencing enslavement."

@ahistoryinart You haven't made a sudden change in what you post, so if you're losing followers suddenly, it can't be because of what you post.

I said earlier that such a sudden change might be due to a purge of inactive accounts, but I'm starting to think it might be people leaving Twitter.

"I have never seen ordinary effort lead to extraordinary results."

— Alexandr Wang

@perpetua1_stew In this case, smart and energetic, but inexperienced and working on an idea that's probably bad. I think he was 19 at the time.


The one good thing about Trump's wild policy oscillations is that they enable us to distinguish between his more principled supporters and the mere bootlickers. (The latter are the ones who rationalize each new move, only to be left hanging 12 hours later.)

@gaborgurbacs They make far fewer mistakes if they have procedures to guard against mistakes. That's the point.

@JuniperViews One of the things Twitter has taught me is how many people fail to understand the most basic things. It has presumably always been like this, but before everyone could tell you what they were thinking, it was hidden.

If anyone is wondering why we need that boring-sounding thing called "due process," it's because if you don't have it you're depending entirely on the word of the guy on the left. https://t.co/tTWBsCRwA9

@TeslaPrice Sure. You can hate someone for decades, and then suddenly lash out at them. In fact that's usually how such things happen.

@amasad Thanks Amjad!

@bregmafund The graph I posted doesn't show Republicans vs Democrats. It shows support for Trump declining among people who voted for him.

@crankycatcoder @MrRobzilla @ctjlewis @AlecStapp Investors do a way more thorough job of vetting people's ability than immigration bureaucrats do.

@HanchungLee But the situation is. So if you're not, you're simply mistaken.

@jmatthews005 I can imagine plenty of benefits for Trump, but none for Americans in general.


@___rikh___ You can buy a ton of used books without being rich. At a typical shop in Hay I'd buy 25 books and they might cost £150.

@Kappische All of some of them, some of most of them.

@anoopjohn I never will. Some I bought to have in case I need them or because they're books a house should have, others because there's one part I want to read in them, others will turn out to be bad, and others I simply won't get around to.

@AlecStapp I don't think admissions departments were against tests per se. They just made it harder for them to conceal what they were doing, because you could compare the admission rates for two groups with a given test score.

Here are all the books I bought: https://t.co/Dvuadafm3z

@FiskQuaid That's part of what I mean but only a small part.

@anufella Patina. Tiny scratches, repeated applications of wax, the wood changes color as it ages. Even texture if it's really old.

@genericdai They become softer. Ideally they fall open in your hand.

@andreslaley 1. Cars can have patina like anything else.

2. Old cars often look more interesting.

3. Once a car has a few scratches you don't worry about it so much.

When you buy things that are better used, your life doesn't automatically degrade over time the way it does when you buy things that are meant to be new and shiny. It's more restful.


@mblair If you look at the people trying to use it in this thread, that might change your mind. It's like a blooper compilation.

@markessien @AlecStapp That is certainly scandalous, but from what I've heard they've closed that loophole. I suspect the number now is much lower.

@EHumpierres Of course not. This doesn't apply to plays and poetry.

@sreecharan93 British writing is on the whole simpler than American.

@jk_rowling Don't feel bad. That's presumably not all that much hate.

@c_kiruStrategy For the sake of your readers.

@afrogodd Not always.

@JMDemma Depends on the situation. There are some where it would sound really wrong not to.

@dpachov Simplicity is one kind of beauty, and it's the kind most people will do best to aim for. A few writers can pull off ornateness, but if most people try it the result will be a McMansion.

@laserquest_ag Ugh, you're proving my point.


The Acceleration of Addictiveness
July 2010
What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is
that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors.
Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are.  And the
scary thing is, the process that created them is accelerating.
We wouldn't want to stop it.  It's the same process that cures
diseases: technological progress.  Technological progress means
making things do more of what we want.  When the thing we want is
something we want to want, we consider technological progress good.
If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that
seems strictly better.  When progress concentrates something we
don't want to want — when it transforms opium into heroin — it seems
bad.  But it's the same process at work.
[
1
]
No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing
numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like
too much.
[
2
]
As far as I know there's no word for something we like too much.
The closest is the colloquial sense of "addictive." That usage has
become increasingly common during my lifetime. And it's clear why:
there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the
extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been
transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in
food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the
buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers
and solitaire have been replaced by World of Warcraft and FarmVille.
TV has become much more engaging, and even so it
can't compete
with Facebook.
The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago.   And unless
the forms of technological progress that produced these things are
subject to different laws than technological progress in general,
the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did
in the last 40.
The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things.  I don't
mean to imply they're all to be avoided.  Alcohol is a dangerous
drug, but I'd rather live in a world with wine than one without.
Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful.
More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful
about.
Most people won't, unfortunately.  Which means that as the world
becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a
normal life will be driven ever further apart.  One sense of "normal"
is statistically normal: what everyone else does.  The other is the
sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a
piece of machinery: what works best.
These two senses are already quite far apart.  Already someone
trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of
the US.  That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced.
You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if
people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.
Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things.
I've seen that happen with cigarettes.  When cigarettes first
appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through
a previously isolated population.  Smoking rapidly became a
(statistically) normal thing.  There were ashtrays everywhere.  We
had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of
my parents smoked.  You had to for guests.
As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed.
In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something
that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something
movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of
addicts do outside the doors of office buildings.  A lot of the
change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation
couldn't have happened if customs hadn't already changed.
It took a while though—on the order of 100 years.  And unless the
rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the
accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new
addictions, we'll be increasingly unable to rely on customs to
protect us.
[
3
]
Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine
of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a
lesson to future generations—we'll have to figure out for ourselves
what to avoid and how.  It will actually become a reasonable strategy
(or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect
everything new
.
In fact, even that won't be enough.  We'll have to worry not just
about new things, but also about existing things becoming more
addictive.  That's what bit me.  I've avoided most addictions, but
the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using
it.
[
4
]
Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction.  We're
all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it.
That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I
want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world.
[
5
]
My latest trick is taking long hikes.  I used to think running was a
better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time.  Now
the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I
spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.
Sounds pretty eccentric, doesn't it?  It always will when you're
trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide
you.  Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric.
But if I'm right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this
kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate
of anyone who wants to get things done.  We'll increasingly be
defined by what we say no to.
Notes
[
1
]
Could you restrict technological progress to areas where you
wanted it?  Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state.
And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects.
"Good" and "bad" technological progress aren't sharply differentiated,
so you'd find you couldn't slow the latter without also slowing the
former.  And in any case, as Prohibition and the "war on drugs"
show, bans often do more harm than good.
[
2
]
Technology has always been accelerating.  By Paleolithic
standards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic
period.
[
3
]
Unless we mass produce social customs.  I suspect the recent
resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction
to drugs.  In desperation people reach for the sledgehammer; if
their kids won't listen to them, maybe they'll listen to God.  But
that solution has broader consequences than just getting kids to
say no to drugs.  You end up saying no to
science
as well.
I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people
plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books
a package tour.  Or worse still, has one booked for them by the
government.
[
4
]
People commonly use the word "procrastination" to describe
what they do on the Internet.  It seems to me too mild to describe
what's happening as merely not-doing-work.  We don't call it
procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working.
[
5
]
Several people have told me they like the iPad because it
lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would
be too conspicuous.  In other words, it's a hip flask.  (This is
true of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isn't as
obvious because it reads as a phone, and everyone's used to those.)
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and
Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.


@jessegenet It's a way both to diss the other person and excuse yourself for being fooled by them.

@useintro @blakeaburge @bchesky If I did I was quoting Aiken, who was the first to say it.

@JillFilipovic I care if they're using it to conceal their identity in order to do something bad.

@jessesingal This whole excerpt is a tour de force of intellectually dishonest writing.

@MicleMihai @CR_UK No, the form said it was just to keep track of repeat donors.

Dear @CR_UK, would you please make your online donation form not require a UK phone number? People with phone numbers from other countries want to donate too. I had to enter a fake number to donate. Presumably most people without UK numbers just give up.

@_karthik They found cheaper infrastructure.

@johnevigar Hmm, 1901 but the figures are 18th century.

@ilyasu Thank God we can joke about it now. At the time it wasn't clear how far things would go.

@jessesingal Presumably the fact-checkers correctly identify it as a mere ritual gesture rather than a statement of fact that would have to be checked.


The Hardware Renaissance
Want to start a startup?
Get funded by
Y Combinator
.
October 2012
One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we
see trends before most other people.  And one of the most conspicuous
trends in the last batch was the large number of hardware startups.
Out of 84 companies, 7 were making hardware.  On the whole
they've done better than the companies that weren't.
They've faced resistance from investors of course.  Investors have
a deep-seated bias against hardware.  But investors' opinions are
a trailing indicator.  The best founders are better at seeing the
future than the best investors, because the best founders are making
it.
There is no one single force driving this trend.  Hardware
does
well
on crowdfunding sites.  The spread of
tablets
makes it
possible to build new things
controlled
by
and even
incorporating
them.
Electric motors
have improved.
Wireless connectivity of various types can now be taken for granted.
It's getting more straightforward to get things manufactured.
Arduinos, 3D printing, laser cutters, and more accessible CNC milling are making hardware easier to prototype.
Retailers are less of a bottleneck as customers increasingly buy
online.
One question I can answer is why hardware is suddenly cool.
It always was cool.
Physical things are great.  They just haven't
been as great a way to start a
rapidly growing
business
as software.  But that rule may not be permanent.  It's not even
that old; it only dates from about 1990.  Maybe the advantage
of software will turn out to have been temporary.  Hackers love to
build hardware, and customers love to buy it.  So if the ease of
shipping hardware even approached the ease of shipping software,
we'd see a lot more hardware startups.
It wouldn't be the first time something was a bad idea till it
wasn't.  And it wouldn't be the first time investors learned that
lesson from founders.
So if you want to work on hardware, don't be deterred from doing
it because you worry investors will discriminate against you.  And
in particular, don't be deterred from
applying
to Y Combinator
with a hardware idea, because we're especially interested in hardware
startups.
We know there's room for the
next Steve Jobs
.
But there's almost certainly also room for the first
<Your Name Here>.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, David Cann, Sanjay Dastoor,
Paul Gerhardt, Cameron Robertson, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for reading drafts of this.
A Hardware Renaissance while Software Eats the World?


@TheWorthyHouse Have you accomplished anything of this type?

@abusulayman Not one, fortunately.

@mattyglesias Or a thousand fake accounts run by some country that wants to cause trouble in America.

@richardmcj You are on a roll.

A Palestinian child's life is worth as much as an Israeli child's life.

@Chris_arnade @growing_daniel It certainly helped a lot. But yes, I think so, because there are people whose judgment about art I respect who've never painted themselves.

@dapppunk @AsyncCollab @eigenrobot Mainly because it's interesting to look at. It's astounding what a good painting will do to a room it's hung in. But in the case of very old paintings I'm also somewhat influenced by their interest as historical artifacts.

@rmcwhorter99 @eigenrobot There are lots of people who buy art because they genuinely appreciate it. There are a huge number of artists who are good but relatively obscure and whose work is thus comparatively inexpensive. Anyone who buys it is presumably buying it simply because they like it.

@AsyncCollab @eigenrobot It means buying good art instead of being tricked into buying meretricious and/or fashionable art.

Sigh. Should I even waste my time replying to this willful misrepresentation? I'll give it one last try.

I care a lot about art. I spent several years studying painting at one point. I despise the idea of buying art to impress people. And it's precisely because the art world is so pervaded by this practice that it's hard to buy art well. If you walk at random into a prestigious gallery in a big city, chances are you're walking into a place that specializes in selling art for this purpose. It takes a conscious effort to avoid the pervasive bogusness of the art world and find the stuff that's actually good.


One of the most surprising things I've learned from Twitter is how petty and dishonest many professors are. When I was in college they seemed like gods. But I suspect pettiness and dishonesty were as prevalent then. They just didn't show like they do now.

@UmarQadmiri He's not. He's one of the most upstanding people in the tech world.

@garrytan Perhaps you could do an interview with him. Imagine yourself on the right. https://t.co/XVcXr1j4VN

Garry Tan is now so popular that even Australian reporters are trying for the Tan look. https://t.co/dE38pI7CPG

@nfergus Interesting. How far do you have to go back in time before debt service is lower than defense spending?

@dconroybeam Wow, that was stunningly intellectually dishonest. You run away from criticism, and to cover your retreat you try to slur a Jew as nazi-adjacent?

@nfergus The British Empire spent more on debt service than defense?

@MermaidsPurseJ Yes. Strange as it may sound, Roman slaves could make money and could even use it to buy their freedom.

@matthew_d_green Annual recurring revenue.

Not surprisingly, the company with this graph was successful at fundraising. This is Speak, which just closed a round at a $500m valuation. They've been focusing on AI since long before it was cool, so when the technology matured, it shot them forward.


I notice they've been careful to write these laws so that they compare the median salary not to that of the highest paid employee but to that of the highest paid "managerial" employee, or all the SF sports teams would be fucked.

Why kids at British schools are usually called by their last name: 17 yo was in a five-a-side football match, and all five boys on the team had the same first name.

Our dog, at right, with some of his colleagues. https://t.co/kbjGcvsWFe

Elon should call the combined company " X".

PSA: It's 1950s, not 1950's. The apostrophe is for missing letters, and there are no missing letters here.

(So what's the missing letter in the possessive? An e that became silent in speech in Chaucer's time.)

Don't believe what xenophobes tell you: financially America is net ahead on immigrants. They're entitled to dislike people from certain countries if they want to (and are willing to admit that's what drives them), but the economic argument is bullshit.

Someone asked about tricks for meeting eminent people. I said the best plan is just to do really good work. Then you'll tend to meet them organically. In the worst case you'll see one whenever you look in the mirror.

You can tell how bad things got in the 9th century from how few things remain that were made then.

I struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to me at lunch. She turned out to be 93. It's not often you can compliment someone by saying they look 80.

As a child during the war she saw a German fighter plane shot down. It just missed their house. Her mother said she'd seen the pilot struggling with the controls, poor man. She was shocked to hear her mother call him "poor man." He was a German!


@wilgieseler Why wouldn't it have ChatGPT conversations in its training set?

@wilgieseler I tried asking ChatGPT and here's what it said: https://t.co/R7oiOhZkZO

@wilgieseler The first half of the answer seems plausible, and the second half is definitely correct. I use it mostly as a sort of encyclopedia.

I asked ChatGPT what other people ask it about. Sounds a lot like the sections of a newspaper. https://t.co/UIRukfKIxD

@pitdesi I asked it what I ask about unusually often. It told me "you show a recurring interest in exploring linguistic nuances, scientific phenomena, and obscure historical facts." I think that's because I use it mostly as a sort of encyclopedia.

@mwilcox @keshavchan I'd get drafted to write down the plan of whatever we decided to do. But since the details would be vague initially, most of the plan would be mine :^)

@maircomm That's his favorite book.

12 yo had to write a review of Waiting for Godot for school. He asked if he could be candid about how boring it was. I told him to go ahead, but that the reaction would be unpredictable. Sometimes you get "How dare you?", sometimes you get "I secretly think so too."

@KevinSVanHorn Learn to cook, loser.

@jdbarelytweets Interesting thought. We didn't deliberately arrange that the founders would smell cooking when they showed up, but it did usually work out that way for the first few years.


Haters
January 2020
(I originally intended this for startup founders, who are often
surprised by the attention they get as their companies grow, but
it applies equally to anyone who becomes famous.)
If you become sufficiently famous, you'll acquire some fans who
like you too much. These people are sometimes called "fanboys," and
though I dislike that term, I'm going to have to use it here.  We
need some word for them, because this is a distinct phenomenon from
someone simply liking your work.
A fanboy is obsessive and uncritical. Liking you becomes part of
their identity, and they create an image of you in their own head
that is much better than reality. Everything you do is good, because
you do it. If you do something bad, they find a way to see it as
good. And their love for you is not, usually, a quiet, private one.
They want everyone to know how great you are.
Well, you may be thinking, I could do without this kind of obsessive
fan, but I know there are all kinds of people in the world, and if
this is the worst consequence of fame, that's not so bad.
Unfortunately this is not the worst consequence of fame. As well
as fanboys, you'll have haters.
A hater is obsessive and uncritical. Disliking you becomes part of
their identity, and they create an image of you in their own head
that is much worse than reality. Everything you do is bad, because
you do it. If you do something good, they find a way to see it as
bad. And their dislike for you is not, usually, a quiet, private
one. They want everyone to know how awful you are.
If you're thinking of checking, I'll save you the trouble. The
second and fifth paragraphs are identical except for "good" being
switched to "bad" and so on.
I spent years puzzling about haters.  What are they, and where do
they come from? Then one day it dawned on me. Haters are just fanboys
with the sign switched.
Note that by haters, I don't simply mean trolls. I'm not talking about
people who say bad things about you and then move on. I'm talking
about the much smaller group of people for whom this becomes a
kind of obsession and who do it repeatedly over a long period.
Like fans, haters seem to be an automatic consequence of fame.
Anyone sufficiently famous will have them. And like fans, haters
are energized by the fame of whoever they hate. They hear a song
by some pop singer. They don't like it much. If the singer were an
obscure one, they'd just forget about it. But instead they keep
hearing her name, and this seems to drive some people crazy.
Everyone's always going on about this singer, but she's no good!
She's a fraud!
That word "fraud" is an important one. It's the spectral signature
of a hater to regard the object of their hatred as a
fraud
. They
can't deny their fame. Indeed, their fame is if anything exaggerated
in the hater's mind. They notice every mention of the singer's name,
because every mention makes them angrier. In their own minds they
exaggerate both the singer's fame and her lack of talent, and the
only way to reconcile those two ideas is to conclude that she has
tricked everyone.
What sort of people become haters? Can anyone become one? I'm not
sure about this, but I've noticed some patterns. Haters are generally
losers in a very specific sense: although they are occasionally
talented, they have never achieved much. And indeed, anyone
successful enough to have achieved significant fame would be unlikely
to regard another famous person as a fraud on that account, because
anyone famous knows how random fame is.
But haters are not always complete losers. They are not always the
proverbial guy living in his mom's basement. Many are, but some
have some amount of talent. In fact I suspect that a sense of
frustrated talent is what drives some people to become haters.
They're not just saying "It's unfair that so-and-so is famous," but
"It's unfair that so-and-so is famous, and not me."
Could a hater be cured if they achieved something impressive? My
guess is that's a moot point, because they
never will
. I've been
able to observe for long enough that I'm fairly confident the pattern
works both ways: not only do people who do great work never become
haters, haters never do great work. Although I dislike the word
"fanboy," it's evocative of something important about both haters
and fanboys. It implies that the fanboy is so slavishly predictable in his admiration
that he's diminished as a result, that he's less than a man.
Haters seem even more diminished. I can imagine being a fanboy.
I can think of people whose work I admire so much that I could abase
myself before them out of sheer gratitude. If P. G.  Wodehouse were
still alive, I could see myself being a Wodehouse fanboy. But I
could not imagine being a hater.
Knowing that haters are just fanboys with the sign bit flipped makes
it much easier to deal with them. We don't need a separate theory
of haters. We can just use existing techniques for dealing with
obsessive fans.
The most important of which is simply not to think much about them.
If you're like most people who become famous enough to acquire
haters, your initial reaction will be one of mystification. Why
does this guy seem to have it in for me? Where does his obsessive
energy come from, and what makes him so appallingly nasty? What did
I do to set him off? Is it something I can fix?
The mistake here is to think of the hater as someone you have a
dispute with. When you have a dispute with someone, it's usually a
good idea to try to understand why they're upset and then fix things
if you can. Disputes are distracting. But it's a false analogy to
think of a hater as someone you have a dispute with.  It's an
understandable mistake, if you've never encountered haters before.
But when you realize that you're dealing with a hater, and what a
hater is, it's clear that it's a waste of time even to think about
them. If you have obsessive fans, do you spend any time wondering
what makes them love you so much? No, you just think "some
people are kind of crazy," and that's the end of it.
Since haters are equivalent to fanboys, that's the way to deal with
them too. There may have been something that set them off. But it's
not something that would have set off a normal person, so there's
no reason to spend any time thinking about it. It's not you, it's
them.
Notes
[1] There are of course some people who are genuine frauds. How can
you distinguish between x calling y a fraud because x is a hater,
and because y is a fraud? Look at neutral opinion. Actual frauds
are usually pretty conspicuous. Thoughtful people are rarely taken
in by them. So if there are some thoughtful people who like y, you
can usually assume y is not a fraud.
[2] I would make an exception for teenagers, who sometimes act in
such extreme ways that they are literally not themselves. I can
imagine a teenage kid being a hater and then growing out of it. But
not anyone over 25.
[3] I have a much worse memory for misdeeds than my wife Jessica,
who is a connoisseur of character, but I don't wish it were better.
Most disputes are a waste of time even if you're in the right, and
it's easy to bury the hatchet with someone if you can't remember
why you were mad at them.
[4] A competent hater will not merely attack you individually but
will try to get mobs after you. In some cases you may want to refute
whatever bogus claim they made in order to do so. But err on the
side of not, because ultimately it probably won't matter.
Thanks
to Austen Allred, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison,
Christine Ford, Daniel Gackle, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris,
Elon Musk, Harj Taggar, and Peter Thiel for reading drafts of this.
Japanese Translation
Arabic Translation
Polish Translation


How You Know
December 2014
I've read Villehardouin's chronicle of the Fourth Crusade at least
two times, maybe three.  And yet if I had to write down everything
I remember from it, I doubt it would amount to much more than a
page.  Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy
feeling when I look at my bookshelves. What use is it to read all
these books if I remember so little from them?
A few months ago, as I was reading Constance Reid's excellent
biography of Hilbert, I figured out if not the answer to this
question, at least something that made me feel better about it.
She writes:
Hilbert had no patience with mathematical lectures which filled
  the students with facts but did not teach them how to frame a
  problem and solve it. He often used to tell them that "a perfect
  formulation of a problem is already half its solution."
That has always seemed to me an important point, and I was even
more convinced of it after hearing it confirmed by Hilbert.
But how had I come to believe in this idea in the first place?  A
combination of my own experience and other things I'd read.  None
of which I could at that moment remember!  And eventually I'd forget
that Hilbert had confirmed it too.  But my increased belief in the
importance of this idea would remain something I'd learned from
this book, even after I'd forgotten I'd learned it.
Reading and experience train your model of the world.  And even if
you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model
of the world persists.  Your mind is like a compiled program you've
lost the source of.  It works, but you don't know why.
The place to look for what I learned from Villehardouin's chronicle
is not what I remember from it, but my mental models of the crusades,
Venice, medieval culture, siege warfare, and so on.  Which doesn't
mean I couldn't have read more attentively, but at least the harvest
of reading is not so miserably small as it might seem.
This is one of those things that seem obvious in retrospect.  But
it was a surprise to me and presumably would be to anyone else who
felt uneasy about (apparently) forgetting so much they'd read.
Realizing it does more than make you feel a little better about
forgetting, though.  There are specific implications.
For example, reading and experience are usually "compiled" at the
time they happen, using the state of your brain at that time.  The
same book would get compiled differently at different points in
your life.  Which means it is very much worth reading important
books multiple times.  I always used to feel some misgivings about
rereading books.  I unconsciously lumped reading together with work
like carpentry, where having to do something again is a sign you
did it wrong the first time.  Whereas now the phrase "already read"
seems almost ill-formed.
Intriguingly, this implication isn't limited to books.  Technology
will increasingly make it possible to relive our experiences.  When
people do that today it's usually to enjoy them again (e.g. when
looking at pictures of a trip) or to find the origin of some bug in
their compiled code (e.g. when Stephen Fry succeeded in remembering
the childhood trauma that prevented him from singing).  But as
technologies for recording and playing back your life improve, it
may become common for people to relive experiences without any goal
in mind, simply to learn from them again as one might when rereading
a book.
Eventually we may be able not just to play back experiences but
also to index and even edit them. So although not knowing how you
know things may seem part of being human, it may not be.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading
drafts of this.
Japanese Translation


@Austen I have one in my trunk that I use as a backup. I actually had to use it a couple months ago when the M4 was closed. (Usually you can assume they're not going to close the M4).

@soona I don't think so, and for a sad reason: there's not enough demand. Most people just want to have their biases confirmed.

In practice, you have to be politically neutral, or more precisely, an accidental moderate (https://t.co/ogMaJHs63d), to be good at not being tricked. The partisan are too tempted by disinformation that favors their cause.

When can you believe things? My rule is when I hear them from people whose judgement I trust. It's not enough to be smart. They also have to be good at not being tricked.

AI plus social media are going to create such a supply of disinformation that anyone who wants to live in a political dream world will easily be able to find the necessary materials.

For those of us who don't, the rule is going to have to be: disbelieve by default.

@DrFrancisYoung It's true that there was a fashion for Egyptian-looking things in the early 20th century, but this is a bad example. This looks modern because it's so simple, and the simplicity of modernism didn't come from this fashion.

@VcWabKDHN9OVdYq @francoisfleuret These are YC founders, who tend to be good programmers, and good programmers wouldn't tolerate AI filling their source files with crap.

@francoisfleuret One of the most obvious indicators is the percentage of code that's now written by AI. I ask all the software companies I meet about this. The number is rarely lower than 40%. For some young programmers it's 90%.

I was astounded when a friend told me that 30 year old BMW 325is now sell for $15k or more. He said that the prices of good old piston-engined cars have risen dramatically, because new ones are "nerfed by regulations".

@nikitabier @samdaceo 15.3% richer. (If you avoid losing 13.3%, you're 15.3% better off.)