but basing the “doesn’t make sense” on the fact that a number of people I showed this blog post reached the opposite conclusion (namely, David is more impressive than Steve). See the comments on this Facebook post for instance.
It would be interesting to study this in more detail. If you interview college admissions people I think it would be good to ask them with of the two people they would prefer.
But the bulk of innovative activities probably don’t produce much value
Most startups fail. That doesn’t mean that starting a startup isn’t an activity with high social value.
Ancient Greece had their version of the steam engine that was build to impress people. They didn’t get economic value out of it, but the desire to build something to impress produced innovative thinking. A lot of innovation comes out of exploring a subject and simply trying to do something impressive.
Seeking to do things that are impressive produces memetic diversity. You want to have a society with people with diverse skill sets.
Having done QS effects the way I think about biological issues. I’m not “better” like your average biology student but there are a lot of average biology students that aren’t very distinct in their skill set. The low hanging fruit that you can pick with that particular skill set is picked.
Having an unusual skillset means that there might be things that are low hanging fruit for yourself but not for the average person in a field.
As answer to your recent post about biomedical research, CasioTheSane writes:
I would only recommend getting into the field if you have a strong passion for solving medical problems, and have some clear ideas about how you will attack these problems very differently than others already working on them.
Steve is more likely to tackle problems differently then the people who already work in a field than Dave. To the extend that I want to make strategic choices that encourage innovation, I want more people with the kind of mindset that Steve has.
In the context of people pursuing mainstream academics, they can be somewhat misguided about how well they understood material, but not too much.
That not true. There are studied engineers who sign petitions that there’s no way the world trade center collapsed due to planes flying into it because they can’t see how the plane flying into the building would make the building collapse. They expect too much that the real world behaves like their textbook problems. The real world is complex and things happen for complicated reasons.
People with strong statistics education often make the mistake of assuming that real life phenomena are normally distributed. I once read that a company engaged in bookmaking bets rather hired physics people than studied statistics folks because the statistics folks too much expect that real world problems are structured like textbook problems.
Instead of teaching to always use functions that are protected against SQL injections like Java’s prepared statements one of my tutors in the database lectures told us that sometimes using prepared statements might be more time efficient and sometimes using string concatenations might be more time efficient. He suggest that one is supposed to see which of the two alternatives are more effective for a particular software that you want to write. That’s incredibly bad advice from a software engineering standpoint.
If Steve writes applications for internships to a bunch of companies he has feedback in terms of the responses he gets. Most projects have internal feedback.
In my own QS involvement there was never really a time of not knowing what to do but there were time where doing something like calling up a place to ask whether they would provide a room for a meetup was very challenging and I therefore procrastinated the task.
Most startups fail. That doesn’t mean that starting a startup isn’t an activity with high social value.
This depends on the extent to which a startup’s success can be predicted in advance. My impression is that startup accelerators and venture capitalists do a reasonable job of predicting the set of startups that are likely to succeed. If a startup is in the threshold where a venture capitalist or accelerator considers them fundable, then yes, I think the activity has high social value in expectation, even if it ends up failing.
Ancient Greece had their version of the steam engine that was build to impress people. They didn’t get economic value out of it, but the desire to build something to impress produced innovative thinking. A lot of innovation comes out of exploring a subject and simply trying to do something impressive.
I would be interested in a more detailed analysis of the value produced by innovative thinking in such historical contexts. At the same time, it seems the case to me that if there is a choice between something socially valuable and something that’s not, then ceteris paribus, the more socially valuable thing is preferable.
In the context of people pursuing mainstream academics, they can be somewhat misguided about how well they understood material, but not too much.
That[’s] not true.
There could certainly be a disconnect between their academic understanding and their ability to deal with real-world phenomena that apply that academic understanding. My comment was more about their level of understanding with the specific academic realm. That said, I do think many people don’t learn even the material they are directly learning well enough. I’ve linked in the past to Eric Mazur’s video on physics teaching as am example.
Steve is more likely to tackle problems differently then the people who already work in a field than Dave. To the extend that I want to make strategic choices that encourage innovation, I want more people with the kind of mindset that Steve has.
Do you have the impression that people who design marketing materials for nonprofits are in general more likely to think out of the box than people who can learn a complicated subject such as Japanese calligraphy?
I would be mildly inclined in Steve’s favor based on what’s known in the post, but I don’t think the information as presented is strong enough to make a very strong case for one candidate.
The people I know anecdotally who did more of the Steve sort of stuff in high school don’t seem to have accomplished notably more in adult life than the people who did more of the Dave sort of stuff. This could be due to small sample size or selection bias in my sample.
I would be interested in a more detailed analysis of the value produced by innovative thinking in such historical contexts. At the same time, it seems the case to me that if there is a choice between something socially valuable and something that’s not, then ceteris paribus, the more socially valuable thing is preferable.
A good general book on the topic would innovation would be Jane Jacobs “The Economy of Cities”.
When doing something very innovative it’s often very hard to predict social impact. That’s partly because it’s innovative. You don’t know what you are going to get. You don’t really know how things are going to be useful.
Two years ago I would have predict that the knowledge gained through QS by this day would be higher. That it’s easier to get more people to gather meaningful data. I still learned a bunch of things that I wouldn’t have predict I would learn.
Do you have the impression that people who design marketing materials for nonprofits are in general more likely to think out of the box than people who can learn a complicated subject such as Japanese calligraphy?
I don’t think calligraphy is complicated. It fairly straightforward. It’s hard and you have to practice but I don’t see where it’s complicated. It’s always clear what the next step happens to be to get better at it.
Sending resumees to a bunch of non-profits till one accepts you isn’t something that most people do.
He not only created marketing materials but attended various UN summits and interacted face-to-face in that enviroment with a lot of high status politicians.
I think it’s teaches a more broad perspetive to discuss political issues if you actually talked with the people who are responsible at high stakes political summits.
There could certainly be a disconnect between their academic understanding and their ability to deal with real-world phenomena that apply that academic understanding. My comment was more about their level of understanding with the specific academic realm.
You don’t go to school to be good at school. You go to school to learn skills to do something outside of school. The grades you get at school don’t measure your real world skills directly. They are a proxy.
The people I know anecdotally who did more of the Steve sort of stuff in high school don’t seem to have accomplished notably more in adult life than the people who did more of the Dave sort of stuff. This could be due to small sample size or selection bias in my sample.
I have to admit that I don’t have enough have a sample to make definite conclusions.
It would be interesting to study this in more detail. If you interview college admissions people I think it would be good to ask them with of the two people they would prefer.
Most startups fail. That doesn’t mean that starting a startup isn’t an activity with high social value.
Ancient Greece had their version of the steam engine that was build to impress people. They didn’t get economic value out of it, but the desire to build something to impress produced innovative thinking. A lot of innovation comes out of exploring a subject and simply trying to do something impressive.
Seeking to do things that are impressive produces memetic diversity. You want to have a society with people with diverse skill sets.
Having done QS effects the way I think about biological issues. I’m not “better” like your average biology student but there are a lot of average biology students that aren’t very distinct in their skill set. The low hanging fruit that you can pick with that particular skill set is picked.
Having an unusual skillset means that there might be things that are low hanging fruit for yourself but not for the average person in a field.
As answer to your recent post about biomedical research, CasioTheSane writes:
Steve is more likely to tackle problems differently then the people who already work in a field than Dave. To the extend that I want to make strategic choices that encourage innovation, I want more people with the kind of mindset that Steve has.
That not true. There are studied engineers who sign petitions that there’s no way the world trade center collapsed due to planes flying into it because they can’t see how the plane flying into the building would make the building collapse. They expect too much that the real world behaves like their textbook problems. The real world is complex and things happen for complicated reasons.
People with strong statistics education often make the mistake of assuming that real life phenomena are normally distributed. I once read that a company engaged in bookmaking bets rather hired physics people than studied statistics folks because the statistics folks too much expect that real world problems are structured like textbook problems.
Instead of teaching to always use functions that are protected against SQL injections like Java’s prepared statements one of my tutors in the database lectures told us that sometimes using prepared statements might be more time efficient and sometimes using string concatenations might be more time efficient. He suggest that one is supposed to see which of the two alternatives are more effective for a particular software that you want to write. That’s incredibly bad advice from a software engineering standpoint.
If Steve writes applications for internships to a bunch of companies he has feedback in terms of the responses he gets. Most projects have internal feedback. In my own QS involvement there was never really a time of not knowing what to do but there were time where doing something like calling up a place to ask whether they would provide a room for a meetup was very challenging and I therefore procrastinated the task.
This depends on the extent to which a startup’s success can be predicted in advance. My impression is that startup accelerators and venture capitalists do a reasonable job of predicting the set of startups that are likely to succeed. If a startup is in the threshold where a venture capitalist or accelerator considers them fundable, then yes, I think the activity has high social value in expectation, even if it ends up failing.
I would be interested in a more detailed analysis of the value produced by innovative thinking in such historical contexts. At the same time, it seems the case to me that if there is a choice between something socially valuable and something that’s not, then ceteris paribus, the more socially valuable thing is preferable.
There could certainly be a disconnect between their academic understanding and their ability to deal with real-world phenomena that apply that academic understanding. My comment was more about their level of understanding with the specific academic realm. That said, I do think many people don’t learn even the material they are directly learning well enough. I’ve linked in the past to Eric Mazur’s video on physics teaching as am example.
Do you have the impression that people who design marketing materials for nonprofits are in general more likely to think out of the box than people who can learn a complicated subject such as Japanese calligraphy?
I would be mildly inclined in Steve’s favor based on what’s known in the post, but I don’t think the information as presented is strong enough to make a very strong case for one candidate.
The people I know anecdotally who did more of the Steve sort of stuff in high school don’t seem to have accomplished notably more in adult life than the people who did more of the Dave sort of stuff. This could be due to small sample size or selection bias in my sample.
A good general book on the topic would innovation would be Jane Jacobs “The Economy of Cities”.
When doing something very innovative it’s often very hard to predict social impact. That’s partly because it’s innovative. You don’t know what you are going to get. You don’t really know how things are going to be useful.
Two years ago I would have predict that the knowledge gained through QS by this day would be higher. That it’s easier to get more people to gather meaningful data. I still learned a bunch of things that I wouldn’t have predict I would learn.
I don’t think calligraphy is complicated. It fairly straightforward. It’s hard and you have to practice but I don’t see where it’s complicated. It’s always clear what the next step happens to be to get better at it.
Sending resumees to a bunch of non-profits till one accepts you isn’t something that most people do.
He not only created marketing materials but attended various UN summits and interacted face-to-face in that enviroment with a lot of high status politicians.
I think it’s teaches a more broad perspetive to discuss political issues if you actually talked with the people who are responsible at high stakes political summits.
You don’t go to school to be good at school. You go to school to learn skills to do something outside of school. The grades you get at school don’t measure your real world skills directly. They are a proxy.
I have to admit that I don’t have enough have a sample to make definite conclusions.