evanwarfel

There's a difference between re-defining one's local monetary system to use 'chunks of time' instead of money, and variably pricing select goods and services in terms of 'how much money you make in an hour.'

The former scheme is hard because time, as the Ithaca HOURS currency experiment shows, isn't exactly fungible in the same way that money is. Being able to redeem 'an hour' assumes that all people can do the same level of work at all tasks.

The latter, however, requires a different way of thinking about pricing.

For instance, service providers might set their rates as multiples of one's hourly wage: a tennis teacher might charge 1x, a pro-tennis teacher might charge 3x, and a low-income psychotherapist might charge .85x... Such a scheme could work with a sufficient number of clients -- essentially one is sampling from the income distribution -- but the system is more equitable to income differences.

From this point, one can think of more complex schemes, like a non-linear mapping function that can prevent high-income individuals for paying drastically more than others.

Yes, one big issue is one of trust and verification of income... but if it were a culturally accepted practice, it could work. The other issue is the incentive to only target high-income people. Perhaps there could be a set of tax breaks for those whose distribution of client's incomes met some basic requirements.

On behalf of all us, thanks for your work. Does the distance between the two surfaces at different temperatures matter? I'm sure this has occurred to you and your team, but the ambient temperature inside of a bedroom, beneath the roof, could provide a greater temperature differential.

> “The two most coveted symbols online are an Instagram verification and being on Forbes 30 Under 30,” said Taylor Offer, founder of an apparel startup called Feat Socks, who mentions his Forbes win (class of 2018) in his Instagram bio. “It’s a mark of validation.”

A little digging reveals that Feat Socks sells socks and hoodies. (https://featsocks.com/)

>“Hell yeah, it’s better than going to Harvard or Stanford,” said entrepreneur Katelyn O’Shaughnessy, who didn’t attend either school.

For what, the social validation? O'Shaughnessy's business (https://doctours.com) appears to be a get-healthcare-in-another-country-and-have-a-vacation travel agency.

>“I wanted to throw up at the entire thing,” said Andy Sparks, an entrepreneur who was on this year’s list, describing his reaction to the Summit, a Forbes event that celebrates the Under 30 community. “I had an existential crisis coming back from it. I wondered why I wanted to get on the list and be a part of this community in the first place.”

Ah! A critical thinker.

> Corporate sponsors such as The Macallan whiskey and Courtyard by Marriott pay big fees to get their brands in front of the young professionals who flock to the events. In 2016, Ocean Spray created a cranberry bog in a wading pool in Boston during the event, partly to highlight the fruit as an ingredient in cocktails.

Sign. Me. UP.

Every time I read a new climate change article or headline, I think about how much of a squandered opportunity the MIT Media Lab represents. It has a budget of $80MM, access to some of the best minds on the planet, and not beholden to the perverse incentives that afflict politicians and corporate executives. Are we supposed to believe it's impossible to generate useful and commercializable IP while simultaneously tackling climate change?

If anyone wants to brainstorm... what would it take for universities to announce cross-campus climate change initiatives dedicated to rethinking basic social systems? The California-China Climate Change Institute is the only one that I know of (1).

(1) https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Jerry-Brown-to-...

> One day, he proposed, the company could “solve the problem of children without parents,” and from there go onto other causes such as eradicating world hunger.

>Mr. Neumann has told several people over the past two years that a personal goal is to become the world’s first trillionaire.

Am I the only person to think these two ambitions may be somewhat at odds? Or rather, they both seem to be egomaniacal in nature, and being an egomaniac doesn't seem to lend itself to solving nearly impossibly hard problems.

Maybe after he has his exit, he'll put his money with his mouth is and start working full time on a foundation like Bill Gates.

Oh no! Keep fighting the good fight.

Great, thanks for answering.

They may not! But there is information asymmetry between the advertisers and us individuals. Also, if enough people signed it, such a pledge could be used as a collective bargaining chip, one that could be used to convince C-suite executives to change how they do things.

That's a great point. People should be able to opt-out.

In all honesty, it's because I did not know that paying for Reddit / Youtube would turn off the ads.

Ah yes, the other end of the spectrum, which I also find not unattractive.

Great question / good points! I don't mean to single out word of mouth recommendations. Perhaps the pledge could be individually modified so that one could specify per-platform definitions.

I have not heard of the Boulder Pledge, thanks for linking to it. I imagine Roger Ebert was on the receiving end of a lot of unsolicited offers, being a public figure and all.

G4S is the world's third-largest private employer; they run private prisons.

Nice idea. One issue is that most users will think that you have responded to the incentive to inflate the prices and make yourself look better by comparison. Some ways you can make your estimates more credible include:

  - 1) give ranges of price estimates

  - 2) communicate the uncertainty around different parts of the estimate

  - 3) show what size team you are estimating will be working on your project

  - 3b) have a slider so that people can play around with the team size (and explore the team-size / price / time tradeoff)
 
  - 4) show an estimate of what kind of volume the finished mvp can handle

  - 5) show real-life estimates you've gotten on a set of projects. possibly include how much it would have cost to build this very website at both a large institutional design agency and a well-regarded boutique agency.

Other than closely reading the literature that informs what you are writing about, one way to write better quality papers is to reach out to the relevant academic researchers and engage with them. If they are interested in your ideas, they might be open to giving you their feedback. It's also impossible to write in a vacuum. I'm friends with a few people who were grad students when I met them, and are now either post-docs or working in industry; without them, I'd be lost.

Another thing to do is to hire an academic editor. Even though it might not get everything right, there is nothing like peer-review quality feedback on a paper that highlights both the strengths and weaknesses of your writing. One thing to keep in mind is that a peer reviewer will be less likely to tell you that your whole paper needs restructuring. They are often instead focused on "within-the-box" improvements.

Seeing that a paper needs to be completely restructured can stem from being a good non-fiction writer in general, rather than being a good "paper-writer." It's a general skill relating to effective and efficient communication, and it can be improved by writing blog posts, more feedback, and writer's workshops. Similarly, to publish a paper without a PhD, you are probably going to have to become, at the very least, a "lay-scholar" in the field you are thinking about anyways. Maybe you are already well on your way.

Also, I went through a phase of thinking that I was special due to what I was attempting to write and get published. I'm pretty sure that I was looked at oddly by academics during this time. Maybe this is common for those of us trying to publish a paper and who are right out of college. My point is that this phase gave me the energy to submit to peer review, which was great. At the same time, I'm very grateful to have outgrown it. I suspect this phase is something many people go through; it's common.

Because not everything has finite variance.

I agree.

It's interesting that you use a metaphor of "going deeper." The way I came to the same conclusion (that, at some point, all of us share a common goal) was to view the problem not 'deeper' but more and more abstractly -- you can get to a point where you've abstracted away any specific rung of, for example, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

And while, yes there is a limit to how far we'll get without wide-spread introspection of our own thought-processes (as opposed to our thought-content), we could afford people the space to do so.

Sweet! We'll need more things like this if we want to see our share of societal progress. I have faith that more programs like this will blossom in the coming years.

@sama -is this only for severely resource intense research projects? And do you envision this turning into an alternative to graduate school too?

I've always wondered why we don't see more of the studio model (like Pixar) in tech companies. Especially ones focused on innovation -- Thomas Edison didn't just invent a single product, and that trend still influences how GE operates today. It's a bit of a stretch, but with some fuzziness around the boundaries, the idea of an over-arching studio seems to mostly describe YCombinator too.

Ah, perhaps. Our systems will only improve to the extent that someone takes the inherent issues on as personal problems.

And in some sense, what we are saying is that systems with metrics that are only shallow proxies for actual success (citations, valuations) often fall into multi-polar-trap type situations [1].

I fully believe it's possible for new(ish) models to outperform Academia and some of the sillier SV practices. It's a question of getting things right in the beginning.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

+1

The state of Academia in the softer sciences is now a negative feedback loop -- as the system gets worse, the only people who are attracted to the system are those incapable of making it better. The people who have the capability for self-actualized, mission/vision oriented true leadership are the ones that will be attracted to startups over the current circus.

All the more stagnation and incrementalism for the rest of us to innovate around and profit from.

I think it's time to replace 'Make something people want' with 'Solve a problem that people have'. This works regardless of if people can cogently articulate their problem.

There is one, and only one reason to be 'data driven'. Or to test one's hypotheses, for that matter. And that is to make sure you aren't fooling yourself; that you haven't fallen prey to the myriad cognitive biases; to prevent your preconceived notions from clouding your judgement of reality, aka what is actually going on.

While data always provides more information, the less strong your prior beliefs, the less informative your experiment will be -- If you believe something and it turns out to be majorly false, you get a nice shift in expectations. If you believe in something and it turns out to be very true, you gain lots of information in terms of quantifying the effect you are looking into.

If you are Google, looking to eck out every last 1/1000th of a penny on ads, yeah, maybe a/b testing the shade of blue of a button can be justified.

The more other companies are "Data Driven" [like the somewhat unfortunate examples the author chose], as opposed to "Hypothesis Driven", the more there is room for somebody else to fry bigger fish.

In other words, it's not the "data's" fault, it is ours.

Good to know that YC doesn't seem to be affected by biased selection process. The low overall percentage of minority or female founders is a reflection of the current state of society, which, alas, isn't where it could be.

Updating one's beliefs to get more accurate priors is something we should all strive to do. There is no such thing as having two beliefs of equal weight that contradict each other - that's an illusion created by either applying a different definitions to each belief, or a refusal to admit that you believe one more than the other.

...

> "The winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain experts."

I would also add that domain expertise is when one's internal model / map matches the territory. When this happens, one's intuition is accurate and one can notice patterns that other people can't, or one can make predictions that turn out to be right.

I have a hunch that impostor syndrome is also a symptom of poor / unempathetic* management - while the implication that there might be something 'wrong' with the individual may or may not be true, I would not be surprised if impostor syndrome could be partially accounted for by a difference in how people process and express prosocial cues.

*unempathetic in the scientific sense; of not being able to fully comprehend how and why a person is thinking and feeling the way they do.

Also, it is probably more important to tell people that personality is malleable and can change - this seems to be one of the root causes of resiliency (C. Dweck et al., 2014).

It's not so much that pg has a different definition of 'meanness', it's that he has a broader notion of 'success'.

If we define successful as playing the capitalist game well, then sure, Steve Jobs, Zuckerberg, Gates, Ellison and others are all successful because they were sufficiently ruthless. Yet this too is selection bias, as there will surely be plenty of examples in the intersection of "people who don't fit pg's thesis" and "rewarded by society". There are, however, counter-examples: Warren Buffet comes to mind.

Just because something is rewarded by society doesn't automatically mean it is good. In fact, if you can succeed at capitalism and not be a dick, seems to me that's an even rarer thing to do, and all the more respect for doing it. In light of the current state of society, it seems a good idea to re-examine what society happens to reward.

We'll never know if Steve Jobs and others were/are truly happy. In fact, in a certain light, Jobs wasn't successful. For all his money, he happens to be rather dead. Who knows what truly great things he could have done after a successful battle with cancer. Every time Jobs is mentioned, until he fades from public view, people will talk about his storied career, his reinvention of Apple, his vision, etc. Everyone will also mention that he was an ass and died too young, because he couldn't get out of his own way and seek proper medical care soon enough.

Given that we all operate in contemporary society, there is of course a place for being assertive and ruthless when one needs to. But PG / Ycombinator is starting to tweak his/their definition of success. In 200, 500 or 1000 years, will anyone remember Loopt? Not likely. But if a YC company successfully develops a fusion reactor the size of a shipping container, or successfully develops a cure for HIV/AIDS, and does something truly great, then YC will still be talked about for quite a long time. Much like how we still talk about Archimedes today.

It's subtler than a facial tattoo, louder than the startup-school after party, and it looks gaudier than be-sequined sliced bread.