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Comment by CJefferson | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting idea, but I feel it's not calibrated right -- I'm an academic, so I'd imagine I work with many "domain experts" (if you don't think so, that's of course another valid discussion). I don't think "if you bet on the entire set of implausible-sounding ideas proposed by reasonable domain experts, you'd end up net ahead.".

I hear a implausible sounding ideas all the time. I think one of the main points of academia is to give people the chance to explore those ideas. But they don't turn out good "on average", not even close.

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The median implausible-sounding idea is bad, for sure.

But if you never bet on any implausible-sounding ideas, you exclude the chance of being an early participant in any big paradigm shift.

A good exercise is to back-test your rule against big ideas through their history. Would you have invested time in solving Schrodinger’s weird equation in 1925? 1927? 1940? Would you have invested time in public key cryptography in 1975? 1976? 1980? 1990?

People who got in early, got to make the big discoveries in those fields.

> A good exercise is to back-test your rule against big ideas through their history.

Everyone assumes they would always have been on the right side of history. It's basically impossible to know what you would have been like had you been born in those times. Better is to back-test your rule against paradigm shifts that have occurred in your own lifetime. What are some ideas you dismissed that turned out to work? What are some products or projects you have a revulsion against that are still succeeding years later? What caused you to reject them? What did you miss?

I've found that you can get surprisingly far in life simply by being willing to fix your mistakes and switch your bets once it becomes apparent you're wrong.

I initially dismissed the WWW as a disorganized mess when I first encountered it in 1994 - I liked Gopher better. By 1997 I had changed my tune and was all-in on learning HTML and CGI and even some of the new technologies like Java applets, RealAudio, and DHTML. (Note that Java and RealAudio were themselves eventually losers, but by then I was all-in on Javascript.) It felt like I had missed the boat in 1997; the dot com boom was in full swing and people were getting rich off much more sophisticated stuff all around me (TBF, I was in high school). But the WWW and Javascript/DHTML remained a lucrative career for 20 years afterwards.

A lot of people, once they take a position on something, dig in and don't change that position for a lifetime, then miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime because they dismissed it to begin with. But truly world-changing ideas usually have a lot of room to grow. If you're wrong for 2-3 years and then change your mind, you'll feel really stupid, like you totally missed the boat, but that's nothing compared to the 20-30 years left of growth that the idea might have.

A very smart professor of mine once thought "They added pictures to hypertext, that's sort of cool I guess."

Looking backwards definitely biases you to seeing things you didn't see at the time. Even memories get tinged. But memories are probably the most accurate you can do.

I missed bitcoin entirely despite knowing many people who bought as I still don't understand what the appeal is. It doesn't seem efficient to me as a payments technology or from a privacy perspective. I kind of wish I bought early even though I probably would have cashed out way too soon, as the money would have been nice.

I liked Stripe due to my revulsion to PayPal but wasn't exactly going to be on them winning. I was pleasantly surprised. Ditto Shopify because of my dislike of Amazon stores. I think I underestimate the chances of good ideas and good products winning because I know it's very hard.

I took a few bets early in my career on start-ups. I think I underestimated the difficulty of selling into retail on one company that I still think had a good idea. The others ended up being acquisitions, although the products weren't continued. I still believe social notetaking is an interesting hard problem in need of a good solution but I don't think we had found it.

I think the big lesson for me is to not get taken in by the cult of personality around strong founders and focus more on the merits of the ideas. That can be tricky as you're not getting the full picture when you interview making it even harder to see a crazy idea as good for the right reasons but it's the right approach.

Yeah, and some ideas are just ahead of their time, like the noted pets.com 90s failure contrasted with chewy.com's success today.

Good point!

Ordering pet food over the internet in 1995: crazy moonshot weirdo stuff.

Ordering pet food over the internet in 2021: just another day.

This is an excellent point, and I think this comment thread would have much less negativity if everyone asked themselves this question.

But then they’d have to own up to the nauseating idea of callously dismissing some truly spectacular sea changes, such as failing to buy 1000 Bitcoins for a few dollars in 2009. I think most people are too full of envy to do that.

How many can honestly say they kept an open mind to the handful of such paradigm shifts we’ve experienced in the last 20 years?

You only have to be right a few times in your life to make your career. Most people are right zero times, and hardly anyone is right 10 times. Von Neumann might have hit 10.

So regretting past mistakes is a big waste of time. Learn from them, but don't let it get to you emotionally. (All easy advice to give, and hard to follow.)

But keep in mind each of those was one of n implausible sounding ideas at the time. Even if you might have been willing, would you have had the resources to put into it, or would they have already been wasted on implausible ideas we don't remember?

Ending up "net ahead" does not necessarily mean maximizing the fraction of successful projects. I don't think pg is saying that implausible-sounding projects usually turn out good. He is saying that when they turn out good, they have outsized impact, precisely because they initially sounded implausible and therefore produce lots of new information if true.

Yes, because even when those implausible ideas fail, your more likely to learn something than when experimenting on an existing hypothesis with just a minor change.

Your framing of the question totally ignores opportunity cost. All that time spent working on ultimately failing crazy ideas is time you did not spend working on anything else, either marginal and likely or less risky/crazy.

As you point out, it depends on how we define "domain expert". I may be a "blockchain domain expert" but I also need to understand what consumers need from a blockchain in order for it to be a profitable venture. My idea may be very innovative, but if it doesn't solve people's problems it's not going to make much of a difference.

In other words, a successful business requires not only producing an innovative product, it also requires knowing if people actually demand this innovative product. One half is the core idea, the other half is how this idea interfaces with the world.

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