I think it’s still important to note that “not giving up” can lead not just to lack of success, but also to value destruction (Pets.com; Theranos; WeWork).
If you’re going to interpret the original “don’t give up” advice so literally and blindly that “no matter what the challenges are I’m going to figure them out” includes committing massive fraud, then yes, it will be bad advice for you. That’s a really remarkably uncharitable interpretation.
Not sure if this is your typo or a LW bug, but “essay” appears not to actually be hyperlinked?
I don’t think founder/investor class conflict makes that much sense as an explanation for that. It’s easy to imagine a world in which investors wanted their money returned when the team updates downwards on their likelihood of success. (In fact, that sometimes happens! I don’t know whether Sam would do that but my guess is only if the founders want to give up.)
I also don’t think at least Sam glorifies pivots or ignores opportunity cost. For instance the first lecture from his startup course:
And pivots are supposed to be great, the more pivots the better. So this isn’t totally wrong, things do evolve in ways you can’t totally predict.… But the pendulum has swung way out of whack. A bad idea is still bad and the pivot-happy world we’re in today feels suboptimal.… There are exceptions, of course, but most great companies start with a great idea, not a pivot.… [I]f you look at the track record of pivots, they don’t become big companies. I myself used to believe ideas didn’t matter that much, but I’m very sure that’s wrong now.
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More generally, I agree that this claim clashes strongly with some rationalists’ worldviews, and it’s plausible that it just increases the variance of outcomes and not the mean. But given that outcomes are power-law distributed (mean is proportional to variance!), the number of people endorsing it from on top of a giant pile of utility, and the perhaps surprisingly low number of highly successful rationalists, I’d recommend rationalists treat it with curiosity instead of dismissiveness.
Oops, thanks! Added a link to the signup form on my site. (And fixed my RSS rendering to not do forms like that in the future.)
Yes, and I think the different words were useful!
You’re repeating / elaborating on things that are in the post, but were not particularly emphasized. I didn’t emphasize them because I’ve personally had the “deeply internalized felt sense of how easy it is for humans to misunderstand each-other” that you describe for a long time, and only more recently got the “be curious” part, and so I emphasized that because it was the missing piece for me (and didn’t totally realize the degree to which the other part was load-bearing / could be the missing piece for others).
Yeah, if you don’t want to DIY it, you can apparently also use a teleprompter for a similar effect. I haven’t tried one, but am curious to! The only trade-off I can think of (other than cost and being cumbersome) is that you probably sacrifice some image quality from all the reflection shenanigans, but not sure how big of a deal that would be.
Even if decent, I’d be surprised if the microphone compares well to the BoomPro (it’s farther from your mouth so will pick up more noise, and most non-standalone mics are optimized for low cost not quality)
I think most earbuds are a lot worse than Pixel USB-C buds for calls—it looks like these have a relatively nice microphone, and relatively poor noise isolation (= allow you to hear your own voice much better)
Oh OK, then the audio improvements the post describes will work fine as-is (except for the non-headset mic) and the video ones are probably not worth it. And I guess the networking advice becomes “invest in properly debugging your wifi” instead of running a cable.
I assume you don’t care about video if you’ll be walking around? (I think you lose a lot by giving up video, but de gustibus non disputandum.)
For audio, you could possibly wireless-ify the audio setup in the article with something like an AptX Low Latency to 3.5mm adapter and switching from the BoomPro to the Antlion ModMic Wireless (since I don’t think those adapters support mics).
Note that Bluetooth sucks and I haven’t tested this so it may not work as well as it sounds like it should. But if you want to keep open-back headphones and a good mic, that’s probably your best bet.
Yay, happy to hear it was helpful!
FYI, you can also disable the red circle from within the Slack preferences (maybe you already knew this, but if not, sorry the post wasn’t more explicit!)
Thanks, fixed!
I’m confused about the “because I could not stop for death” example. You cite it as an example of GPT-3 developing “the sense of going somewhere, at least on the topic level,” but it seems to have just memorized the Dickinson poem word for word; the completion looks identical to the original poem except for some punctuation.
(To be fair to GPT-3, I also never remember where Dickinson puts her em dashes.)
Grubhub used to be over 50% but is now behind Doordash, so maybe doesn’t qualify.
Apple has a monopoly on iOS app distribution (aside from rooted phones) and is using it to extract rents, which is what the link is about.
Firefox has 4% market share compared to Chrome’s 65%.
Amazon has 40-50% of the ecommerce market depending on which stats you trust.
Google Search has 85%+ market share.
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a “monopolist” is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm’s market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages.
Oops this was super unclear, sorry—the thing that ties together all of these crappy websites isn’t money issues, just that they’re the winner in a network-effect-based business, thus have no plausible competitors and no incentive to become more useful / less crappy.
What is a “real average”?
I have almost no discipline, I’ve just spent a lot of time making my habits take so little effort that that doesn’t matter :) Figuring out how to make it easy for myself to prioritize, and stick to those priorities, every day is actually a common recurring weekly review topic!
(I considered laying out my particular set of todo-related habits, but I don’t think they’d be very helpful to anyone else because of how personal it is—the important part is thinking about it a lot from the perspective of “how can I turn this into a habit that doesn’t require discipline for me,” not whatever idiosyncratic system you end up with.)
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed them!
Oops—I forgot that this was going to be auto-crossposted to LW and probably would have prevented that if I remembered, since it’s weirdly meta (it was intended mostly as a placeholder for people visiting my website and wondering why there were no recent posts). I guess I’ll leave it here now since it got a lot more upvotes than I expected though :)