Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I found an interesting thesis that made me think "OK, parts of this sound plausible to me, help me connect the dots."

But then there were no dots to be found, let alone connections.

I am a very literal person, and in my youth I used to think this was a bit of a handicap, as "big thinkers" needed to be able to think of things in more abstract ways. As I've gotten older, though, I think I've become more aware of my blind spots that this literal thinking can cause, but I've also become more confident in that 90% of "big thinking" turns out to be marketing bullshit. Big ideas are one thing, but if you can't give clear, simple-to-understand examples of the point you are trying to make, you're probably full of shit.

View on HN

A “big idea” that sounds abstract to a literal thinker, should be seen as a hunch or an intuition about a situation. It can never be explained in satisfiable depth to a literal thinker. Only in hindsight will it be obvious.

You expect proof, or a literal pathway of thought and explanation, because it has served you well. This is the guaranteed route to proving an idea, if such a literal route exists. Such ideas are grounded in axioms that exist or can be built on smaller already established truths.

It is far more difficult to explain literally a strong hunch, that an excellent intuitive thinker has but which is lacking the necessary foundation axioms. Maybe this hunch or novel idea cannot be structured upon existing truths, because it looks beyond its current viewpoint. Or maybe the idea is about a situation that is happening outside the established system.

This doesn’t make this idea less valuable to pursue further. It might just be several magnitudes harder to wrap ones head around.

"This doesn’t make this [big abstract] idea less valuable to pursue further."

But such ideas often need to be heavily driven by the one with the idea. Even people receptive to the idea often misunderstand such a vision.

So for practical purposes the idea is BS unless the person with the idea is actively working on it. It doesn't need to be proven yet, but if the person with the idea isn't working on it, probably nobody else will.

Sure, sometimes big ideas inspire others, but often the ispiration is more of a winding path rather than a direct "I read this big idea and did it".

I disagree, or rather, I don't think I did a great job describing how I define my version of "literal thinking".

To use a specific example, virtually all big, new ideas are some version of the "underpants gnomes" meme: (1) collect underpants, (2) ???, (3) profit. That is, all of these big ideas have a big helping of unknowns that need to be figured out - after all, if things were already all known, it wouldn't be much of a new, big idea.

However, in my experience, big ideas that are likely to come to fruition are ones where proponents are actually able to break down the unknowns in the "2. ???" step into discrete problems that need to be solved or elucidated. This is in direct contrast to "bullshitters" who have a distinct inability to even identify what the critical unknowns are in the first place.

For example, take the crypto space (low hanging fruit I know because there is so much BS and grift in the crypto space). I think there are some areas where crypto ideas will prove useful - I've commented before that finding a replacement for the antiquated backend settlement our financial system uses in the US is a perfect application. But I contrast this with tons of crypto ideas where proponents care barely explain why setting is a benefit over existing solutions, or else they conveniently ignore all the issue the existing system solves that they pretend somehow don't exist with crypto.

It took me a while to realize that if people with experience do not agree with something but cannot explain why, you shouldn't ignore them, particularly if the area is complex. They may just be wrong but also they may have an insight that you yourself might have found hard to articulate.

You've hit the nail on the head with this. I often see "big idea" thinkers who I find to be brilliant, like Jordan Peterson, criticized, and I think a lot of that comes from literal thinkers who 1. apply a rigorous evidentiary standard when assessing their writings, when they should instead see them as well-articulated cases for a "hunch" and thus not expect them to contain proof for their theories, and/or 2. don't see the utility of expositions of hunches.

I wouldn't put this guy on a par with Jordan Peterson. JP appeals to masses of people because he explains his ideas -- he doesn't prove them.

You can state a big idea, but then you have to illustrate it. That can be with hard facts, or it can be poetic, but there needs to be something.

Most of the people who hate Jordan Peterson never read his books or listened to his lectures.

They were told to hate him and that if they agreed with his positions they were bad people.

There is an effort to get people to rationalize their hate but when they try to rationalize it they realize it's complete cult ideology not based in reality. Ending up as fans of his.

It happened to me. I was told how bad he was. In fact he is super reasonable to the majority.

https://youtu.be/XQR6rDOCxM0

Reply on news.ycombinator.com