
How to Be an Expert in a Changing World - jayzalowitz
http://paulgraham.com/ecw.html
======
sytelus
I'm not exactly sure what is the grand insight(s) from this essay that
warrants it's rather link-baity lavish title. Does below captures all the tips
and techniques pg mentioned?

1\. _Don 't marry to your beliefs._ This is always a delicate balancing act
because we do have to have _some_ belief to make a decision, we just don't
know if it's a right.

2\. _Don 't predict the future._ Can be derived from #1 so I suppose
redundant.

3\. _Bet on people instead of ideas._ I think this is great advice for VCs but
have been covered many times by pg.

4\. _Make friends /Surround yourself with smart people._: Not extremely
practical unless you are a famous VC but even then not trivial.

It would have been great essay if pg shared some stories and shared non-
trivial insights that makes us better at _doing_ above. BTW, I did got tripped
at this line:

 _Another trick I 've found to protect myself against obsolete beliefs is to
focus initially on people rather than ideas._

Ummm... what was the first trick?

~~~
lsc
>4\. Make friends/Surround yourself with smart people.: Not extremely
practical unless you are a famous VC but even then not trivial.

I think it's quite practical to surround yourself with smart people without
being a famous VC. I've done it. it might even be easier without being famous,
unless by smart, you mean "Smart, tall and well-spoken" or "Smart, tall, and
able to hold the right kind of conflicting ideas in your head without
emotional distress" \- which is often what VC seem to mean by smart. I mean,
don't get me wrong, a lot of the ycombinater kids I've met really seemed
pretty smart, but they also had the social bits you need to be good business
people, and if you demand those social bits along with the 'smart' \- and you
should, if you are looking for business people and not just technical people -
those people become dramatically more difficult to find, and when you do find
them, they're difficult to be friends with, as you said, unless you are very
high status, because they are very high status.

If you just want someone with a high G, though, and are okay with people who
are short or shy or fat or who have emotional issues, as you should be if you
are looking for people who can become good technical people, G alone does not
confer much by way of status in this society. I've hired more than one person
who tests two standard deviations better than I do by that measure. hell I've
dated a few people who test two standard deviations better than I do.

Now, PG, I imagine, when talking about making investment decisions, probably
is talking about "vc smart" \- people who are smart, but also good looking,
who have good attitudes and who have the other business person attributes, so
in the context of this article, you're probably right. but I'm just saying,
smart people usually aren't high status people. It's not hard to get smart
friends, if you are willing to skimp on some of the status-granting
attributes.

~~~
paul
What makes you think height is so important? I have not noticed any
correlation. One of the nice things about startups vs politics is that
appearance is much less important for success. (unless you think Bill Gates is
some kind of super model :)

~~~
lsc
The relationship between height and income is very well documented, at least
for men.

It's not absolute, certainly, we can all come up with the names of successful
short men, just like we can come up with the names of successful black men and
successful women. It doesn't mean those things don't put you at a serious
disadvantage when talking to VC or trying to get a job.

~~~
paul
Show me the documentation where tall people get more venture funding.

~~~
lsc
I don't have that documentation.

I started this conversation, a couple messages back, in response to this quote
from sytelus:

>4\. Make friends/Surround yourself with smart people.: Not extremely
practical unless you are a famous VC but even then not trivial.

Which I read as someone claiming that it is difficult to become friends with
high-G individuals, unless you are a high-status individual.

My argument was that G, in and of itself, does not confer status, and thus
high-G individuals who aren't high-status aren't going to have any more people
competing to be their friends than people of similar status who are more
average.

If you want smart friends, go find them. There isn't much competition. That
was my point.

I don't think you took issue with any of that. I think the problem was that I
said:

>unless by smart, you mean "Smart, tall and well-spoken" or "Smart, tall, and
able to hold the right kind of conflicting ideas in your head without
emotional distress" \- which is often what VC seem to mean by smart.

And you taking offense to this, really, is pretty reasonable. I'd take it as
an insult if someone claimed people like me hired on irrelevant personal
biases, too.

One way to make this seem less insulting is to say that I lump in the "tall
and well spoken and able to hold the right kind of conflicting ideas in your
head" with "social and business skills" \- because in the work world, this has
been my experience.

It's possible that things are different in the VC world.

~~~
paul
Yes, I think tech is one of the few places in society where being awkward and
nerdy does not prevent you from being highly successful :)

------
nl
One interesting thing about beliefs in a changing world is how you deal with
contradictory beliefs.

I see "beliefs" as an optimisation that avoids having to return to first
principles for every single decision.

That speeds things up, but is obviously dangerous.

Sometimes it's possible to have two beliefs that contradict each other.
Usually this means they need reevaluating, but sometimes it means there is
context in which each is true.

Reasoning in the face of contradictory beliefs is one of the most interesting
things about "knowledge", and something that humans can do surprisingly well -
at least until we realise we are doing it.

~~~
Dorian-Marie
Strangely reminds me of machine learning:

    
    
       1. We have some initial beliefs
       2. We use it to make decisions
       3. We receive some new data
       4. Given the new data, we confirm/change the beliefs
       5. We can make different decisions
       6. Go to 3.
    

The initial beliefs may or not be true, the key to get as much accurate data
as fast as possible.

A better algorithm would be to ask other systems beliefs and compare it to
ours too (eg: neuronal network).

~~~
kszx
Strangely reminds me of Bayesian statistics and updating of prior probability
distributions.

------
blrgeek
Coincidentally went to an effectual entrepreneurship workshop by Prof.
Sarasvathy y'day.

Her learnings from talking to 'expert entrepreneurs' are that

1\. they do not believe the future can be predicted, esp in the early stages
of a new venture

2\. they prefer to create the future in areas with high uncertainty by forging
partnerships with people they know already, and who are also investing in the
same areas

3\. they go to the customer at a very low 'acceptable loss' as they can,
building as little of the product as they can, investing as little as they
can, and getting the first initial set of customers as partners.

4\. they jump in to a fast iteration of execution/sales that helps them
discover/create the market, relying on sales as market research.

5\. they find pleasant surprises along the way that shape their
execution/market/venture and they change to fit the new reality - and they
shape that reality along the way

Finding great parallels with PGs essays here.. See
[http://effectuation.org/learn](http://effectuation.org/learn) Read also
[http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/how-great-
entrepreneurs...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/how-great-
entrepreneurs-think.html) and the original paper at
[http://www.effectuation.org/sites/default/files/documents/wh...](http://www.effectuation.org/sites/default/files/documents/what-
makes-entrepreneurs-entrepreneurial-sarasvathy.pdf)

~~~
wslh
It seems like Prof. Sarasvathy has a clear idea about what entrepreneurship
really is.

I understand that it is about a lot of uncertainty, coping with trial and
error, and getting information from the business black box as fast as you can.

One thing not addressed here is the importance of your location and your
status / credentials. Not everything is about your personal skills.

------
sitkack
This reminds me of Arthur C. Clarke's "Hazards of Prophecy"

> When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is
> possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is
> impossible, he is very probably wrong.

and Asimov

> Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those
> of us who do.

beliefs, like stereotypes are shortcuts in cognition. We should always be
applying the most powerful tool we have developed in the history of humanity,
the scientific method.

~~~
baddox
I've always wondered if Clarke's statement has anything to do with elderly
scientists in particular, or if he's just commenting that most things are
possible.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
An elderly scientist is often one who did all his work in an old theoretical
paradigm, a paradigm whose death is eagerly awaited by all the young PhDs
looking for jobs with a _new_ paradigm in their thesis.

~~~
waterlesscloud
A new paradigm that they'll stick to with an ironclad faith. Which is only
marginally better.

------
davemel37
I am noticing a trend in Paul's essays. The last two were about changing
paradigms. The first was about how a second read of a book leads to a
different understanding, and this essay is about not letting your previous
beliefs close your mind about things that can change.

I like though how he circles back to two fundamentals. One, human nature
doesn't really change, and Two, betting on people is a better indicator of the
future than betting on ideas.

Probably the biggest mistake people make is looking for confirming evidence
instead of using evidence to determine the relative likelihood of competing
hypotheses.

Even a large body of confirming evidence doesn't prove anything because that
same evidence could be consistent with other hypotheses you never considered.
You need to evaluate the diagnosticity of that evidence. (i.e. a patients high
fever has almost no diagnostic value in determining what is wrong, because so
many illnesses are consistent with that evidence.

Whereas, one shred of evidence can disprove a hypothesis completely. Which is
why good doctors rule out things to identify the most likely problem.

These ideas PG is talking about are, IMO, some of the most important things
for founders to understand.

Don't look to confirm your theories, look to disprove them. Don't accept lore,
challenge everything. Most importantly though, always evaluate competing
hypothesis to prevent you from just trying to confirm what you are looking
for.

~~~
vishnugupta
> Don't look to confirm your theories, look to disprove them.

I use this framework, though learnt it by reading Fenmayn's writings, when
there's a debate as to use tool A or tool B to get X. And it's been very
effective so far. I have a vague sense that B is better and a colleague is
particular about A. Earlier I used to look deeper and deeper into how B is
good at doing X. But realized that I wasn't convincing enough. Then I
remembered Feynman's saying to the effect "the best way to prove something is
to try very hard to disprove it". This has helped quite a lot in coming up
with objective comparisons and use right tool for the task at hand; or in
general to come up with the right solution the problem at hand.

------
asimjalis
@pmarca has an interesting thread on this on Twitter [1]. In Peter Thiel’s
terminology [2], PG’s view is optimistic nondeterminate, which might be fine
for a VC but might not be the best choice for a founder.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/546533509922160640](https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/546533509922160640)

[2] [http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-
cs183-...](http://blakemasters.com/post/23435743973/peter-thiels-
cs183-startup-class-13-notes)

~~~
napoleond
Unfortunately Thiel's views don't really map to a "hard" 2x2 matrix--the axes
should be considered to represent spectra or gradients instead. (I'm not
presuming to be smarter than Thiel here, just extrapolating rationally...
nobody believes the future to be _entirely_ determinate or _entirely_
indeterminate.)

In light of that, I suspect PG and Thiel actually live in the same quadrant of
determinate optimism. I haven't read PG suggest that we should just "wait" for
the future to happen--he's merely suggesting that the most common path toward
building the future is on a wave. (And Thiel built PayPal that way--he
recognized a version of the future that was on the cusp of being realized and
took it upon himself to make it happen.)

------
KedarMhaswade
Kahneman attributes a lot to 'luck' of what experts achieve especially when it
comes to predicting something. I am a bit surprised that PG does not give
'shear luck' its fair share.

I am assuming that many (most?) of the startup founders, when they are being
interviewed by the potential investors, are 'complete strangers'. By focusing
objectively on ideas than subjectively or intuitively on people doing them,
they believe that they mitigate the so-called risk. I am not convinced that by
judging people rather than by judging ideas (in supposedly short amount of
time) the chances of succeeding go up, because if we are often wrong judging
ideas, what makes us good at judging people who are ever changing too?

Of course, there is an undeniable 'credit history' part wherein if a
'successful' founder comes back with another idea, many investors are ready to
'shower money' on her/him -- I don't find anything majorly wrong with that
attitude, but that alone does not guarantee success, I believe.

~~~
marcosdumay
That may be one of the very few context where judging people is easier than
ideas.

Ideas that grow huge look completely random, except when you happen to know
the one or two details that make them promising. And you can never know if you
know all of those details.

Almost all people that make something big share some few treats that most
people lack, what makes this a useful filter. Of course people can change,
what reduces the effectiveness of the filter, but it's still better than
random.

------
DanielBMarkham
I work with making technology teams deliver faster. It's nothing as complex
and tricky as what Paul's doing, but I also get to see lots of teams and make
correlations between people and performance.

One of the things I've noticed is that over a long period of time, the more
arrogant and certain team members are, the less likely they are to deliver.
Folks that are always learning have a tendency to kick ass. Not so much with
folks who think they've already arrived. I read in an article on HN a few
weeks back that Google calls this "intellectual humility" and looks for it as
a hiring trait.

~~~
nicklaf
The phenomenon you've observed in the arrogant individuals exhibit what Carol
Dweck calls a "fixed mindset".

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#.22Mindset.22](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#.22Mindset.22)

------
hayksaakian
I hear many startup people talk about "domain expertise"

I wish someone would write about that.

What is an expert?

What is a domain?

How do I become a domain expert?

Am I an expert at something I take for granted?

I love Paul Graham's essays but there's a lot of implied logic and jargon.
Maybe he should have a few non-startup, non-business people proof read them
too?

~~~
vinceguidry
One of the essential tensions of being a software developer is the fact that
software isn't really useful on its own. It has to do something. That thing
it's doing is the domain. Whatever very-specific information that the software
system is organizing and passing, more specifically.

For example, I maintain an e-commerce system. More specifically, I maintain an
e-commerce system built for a cosmetics company. E-commerce is a field,
cosmetics is a field, cosmetics e-commerce is specifically the domain I need
to become an expert in. The more I can differentiate cosmetics e-commerce from
other kinds of e-commerce, the more well-tailored I can make my app. And the
more well-tailored I can make this app, the better I'll be able to understand
the more general case of making custom e-commerce systems for other
industries.

The more I go through this process of understanding the specific needs of the
industry, the more domain expertise I'm building. Domains can subdivide as
much as industries subdivide. Say the cosmetic industry started to split along
product lines, then I might start gaining insight into how lipstick companies
operate, and be able to tailor a product offering straight to them.

The domain doesn't have to mean commercial industry. You might have domain
expertise, say, in XML parsing. Then you could wax poetic on the differences
between Nokogiri and say, Chrome's internal parser.

So, essentially, it just means "expertise". More specifically, the type of
expertise that allows you to customize a software system around it. Which can
be in practice quite different from normal expertise. The guy who devises our
makeup formulas is definitely an expert.

But he can't design the system to actually manufacture it. The guy who writes
those systems might not understand the actual formulas, so the two types of
experts have to work together.

When startups talk about the need to be a domain expert, it means getting out
of just pure programming and into the actual meat. Rather than hire an expert,
to become one yourself. This not only allows you to reduce staff, it also
makes it easier to make better, more custom solutions. The Soylent guys have
to make the system to manufacture their product, but they also must understand
nutrition, food, the regulatory environment of the food market.

~~~
beat
I really feel this. As a founder, my biggest strength is that I'm a domain
expert. Right now, I'm doing coding because I don't have money to hire someone
else to do it, and I'm perfectly capable of it. But I feel _it 's not a good
use of my time_. Any decent programmer could do what I do most of the time
right now. What they can't do is understand the domain as intimately as I do.

So as soon as there's money to hire programmers, I'm getting out of the coding
biz and hiring others to do it. I want to focus on working with my customers,
understanding their needs better than I already do, and guiding programmers to
build for those needs.

------
akrymski
And yet the truly successful people have gotten to where they are by sticking
to their beliefs:

\- Warren Buffet has always believed that companies should be valued based on
their profits, not their share price performance. Thus he didn't invest in the
tech bubble of the 90s, and was forced to under-perform the market
significantly for many years whilst everyone thought he was getting too old
for the new way of things. Yet he stuck to his beliefs, and it turned out that
he was right - the Nasdaq bubble evaporated and he again out-performed other
funds in the long term.

\- Steve Jobs always stuck to his belief that computing devices for consumers
should be fully integrated and beautifully designed. After getting kicked out
of Apple and loosing the OS war to MS, he could have easily told himself his
approach was wrong. But whether he is right or wrong became irrelevant - his
belief was so powerful that it was contagious.

\- Zuck, Brin, and others have succeeded because they stuck to their beliefs
instead of selling out early on.

\- Darwin stuck to his unorthodox beliefs until his theories became accepted.

All of these people have/had a belief - a model of the universe which they
passionately believed in. Having such a model means that predicting the future
becomes possible, even though one can't predict exactly when that future will
come, the same way Warren Buffet will never tell you what the market will do
tomorrow, yet he certainly has a belief in where things are going long term.
Jobs was too early with the Newton, yet his continued belief caused him to
strike gold later on with the iPhone.

There is an interesting difference between fundamental beliefs and "expert
knowledge". The later constantly needs to adapt to take new information into
account, but it is our fundamental beliefs that determine how we interpret
that expert knowledge.

For what it's worth, my startup investment belief has always been to: invest
in companies that are run by great people that have created the best product
in a growing market that has profitable competitors. I'll leave it up to the
"experts" to speculate on which markets will grow most, or which competitors
will win out. If Warren Buffet can't do it, I won't bother either. All that we
can really judge to the best of our ability is the quality of the product and
the team.

~~~
davemel37
the difference is that all of these beliefs are rooted in change and/or going
against the grain...which is exactly PGs point.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I think PG's point conflates a whole bunch of unrelated stuff, including:

1\. Experts as people with unusual technical competence in one or more related
fields.

2\. Experts as 'big picture' prophets of the future.

3\. Experts as 'small picture' refiners of future tech.

4\. Experts as packagers, innovators, and marketers who create new markets for
the work of 2 and 3.

5\. Experts as investors who look for all of the above and try to work out if
they can make money from them.

Aren't these mostly unrelated job descriptions? There's no reason why a
brilliant academic who understands compiler design would have anything useful
to say about the future of consumer electronics.

Likewise, I wouldn't have expected Steve Jobs to contribute much to (say)
research into room temperature semiconductors. Steve Jobs was brilliant at
packaging and selling stuff, not at theoretical physics.

PG's real point seems to be that if you 'hire' smart, creative, hard-working
people, they're more likely to do something useful for you than people who
aren't smart, creative, or hard-working.

Which is surely true (if they're not difficult) but doesn't have much to do
with expert predictions about the future.

It's kind of a retread of Spolsky's 'smart, gets things done', with a more
entrepreneurial twist and an implied 'has original insights'. (Spolsky being
an excellent example of all four.)

------
vinceguidry
> If you're sufficiently expert in a field, any weird idea or apparently
> irrelevant question that occurs to you is ipso facto worth exploring.

My proudest creations all came from these weird ideas. Now I listen to them
very carefully and nurture them. They're starting to cohere and turn from
random ideas into an ideology. It will be fun to make that real.

------
evanwarfel
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.

~~~
unclebucknasty
I wonder if a lack of domain "expertise", but a general understanding of the
domain instead, can sometimes be an advantage in generating domain-changing
ideas.

~~~
kevan
There's definitely a risk as a domain expert that you'll take things for
granted. Henry Ford is a good example of this, he was never an expert in
horse-drawn carriages but he changed that domain drastically.

------
gbog
Great read. I would go a bit further and say that the goal is not to be an
expert and is not related to start-ups. The goal of being open minded and
sceptical as described in this essay, is to make sure one do not embrace
sheepishly some ideas that will be considered obviously stupid twenty years in
the future. For example in the 50s in Europe most intellectuals were communist
or pro communist. Only a very few were neither reactionary nor communist. The
goal, for me, is to be of these few. In the US history, it would mean to have
been e.g.among the earliest abolitionists.

------
mbesto
There's a subtle theme in this essay which describes the thought process of
how YC (well pg specifically) selects teams for YC. Perhaps in a way, bringing
clarity to what is generally seen as a non-scientific and highly complex line
of reasoning for hiring and selecting talent with very little limited context.
However, I still don't feel like I've still fully grokked it.

> _Within Y Combinator, when an idea is described as crazy, it 's a
> compliment—in fact, on average probably a higher compliment than when an
> idea is described as good._

Yet, outside the walls of YC, sounding crazy means you don't get in.

> _But we could tell the founders were earnest, energetic, and independent-
> minded. (Indeed, almost pathologically so.)_

How is it possible to discern this in a YC application?

This is all reminiscent of the talk Gabe Newell, CEO and founder of Valve,
gave on the hiring practices at Valve.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU#t=1291](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU#t=1291)
Here he mentions the following: (paraphrased) "One of the first programmers of
the company was the manager of a waffle house. He was one of the most and
still one of the most creative people in the industry" So what made them take
the risk? What makes Valve turn away every waffle house manager that applies
today? What made YC take the risk on Chesky, Gebbia, and Blecharczyk?

~~~
sillysaurus3
Determination seems to be one decisive trait. If you're determined, people
often want to help you succeed or to work with you. Determination also seems
to matter more than raw intelligence, and betting on determined people tends
to be a good bet.

~~~
kimdouglasmason
Being willing to work for low payoff seems to be one decisive trait. If you're
willing to work for low payoff, people often want to take advantage of you.
Being a sucker also seems to matter more than raw intelligence, and betting on
suckers tends to be a good bet.

------
holri
The human nature is not static as well. Humans are able to think and act very
differently. If I look back what I was thinking and doing 20 years ago, I have
to shake my head in astonishment.

~~~
marcosdumay
Yes, a person evolves that fast.

But a population is much slower. To the point where "human nature doesn't
change" is an extremely useful heuristic. If you look for counter examples,
you'll find a few changes that took only a century or two, but in practice
you'll probably never see one of those changes.

------
lyricalpolymath
ASK PG: when you are saying "energetic" people, do you also mean "passionately
convinced"?

It's interesting that on one side you try to avoid the pitfalls of your own
beliefs (by smartly adopting meta-beliefs and techniques that sidestep the
problem, like believing in change and focusing on people) but at the same time
you are suggesting that you somehow accept, or decide to trust, the worldview
of "energetic" founders.

You might not mean it, but this connection is somehow untold in the classical
narrative of the driven founder: there is a fine line between "energetic" and
"passionately convinced", which also suggests that they might have and
communicate strong beliefs in their success or their idea. Of course I
understand that "strong beliefs" aren't forcefully connected with being an
expert, which is your main argument.

PG, Where do you stand on this? do you believe in founder's beliefs? Do
founders who passionately believe in something convince you?

I feel very sympathetic to the argument of your essay, for many reasons, and
have grown to use the same meta-belief of believing in change; however,
instead of sidestepping the problem, I tackle it heads on, by incorporating
Doubt and Relativism in my decision making. I feel, and strongly believe ;),
that Relativism is the cure to many cognitive biases; if you doubt yourself
you can't be affected by the Dunning-Kruger effect; I think everybody should
train themselves in managing the unavoidable cognitive dissonances of day to
day life, it would make the world a better place. Relativism is also an
important tool for creativity: the moment you doubt your frame of reference,
you start seeing the picture outside of the box, new possibilities open up.

Of course Relativism has it's shortcomings, and beliefs, which are rooted in
emotions, command our behaviours more powerfully that the logical reasonings
of Relativism. However, I believe, there are ways for us to be both
"passionately convinced" and relativistic at the same time; I try to be like
Cezanne, who would ask himself: "is this what I see?"

------
zan2434
I wonder if being open minded is enough. The "winds of change" aren't always
very strong, and accordingly new opportunities aren't (at least initially)
better alternatives to the status quo, they just happen to have incredible
future potential. To fully take advantage of this, the expert would have to
move backwards, quite possibly endangering himself, while a new entrant to the
field has no risk to assume by doing so. To use the hill-climbing metaphor
described by other commenters, a new climber can begin climbing the new
potentially tall mountain immediately, while the "expert" will first have to
descend his peak.

------
kordless
> The winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain experts. If
> you're sufficiently expert in a field, any weird idea or apparently
> irrelevant question that occurs to you is ipso facto worth exploring.

I frequently wrangle with challenges related to finding other people who are
open to listening and helping me explore these less-than-complete ideas in an
unbiased way. It's always an enjoyable moment when someone listens and then
adds to the conversation, instead of immediately trying to negate the kernel
of the idea based on the fact it's in a chaotic state at the time.

------
UhUhUhUh
Talking about non-conform ideas, I would like to add that what should be of
interest is not what changed but what doesn't. And I would like to offer that
this idea of a world of accelerated change might in fact be a self-serving,
Ptolemaic fantasy of omnipotence. What counts hasn't changed much in
centuries. We're still using steam engines to produce electricity. And society
is very similar to what it was in the Bronze Age.

------
armansu
The quote I'm adding to my Evernote:

 _" It seems to me that beliefs about the future are so rarely correct that
they usually aren't worth the extra rigidity they impose, and that the best
strategy is simply to be aggressively open-minded. Instead of trying to point
yourself in the right direction, admit you have no idea what the right
direction is, and try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of change"_.

------
silverlake
"Expert Political Judgment", by Tetlock, has a lot to say about this. It adds
data to the story about the Fox and the Hedgehog. Basically, the hedgehog
knows one big thing and tries to force the world into their mental model. The
fox knows many things, allowing him to be more flexible thinking about a messy
world.

------
sidcool
The first paragraph is a gem. It took me few readings understand it in
entirety. Great essay, Paul!

> protecting yourself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you have to do
> to succeed as a startup investor

This statement is not only true for startups, but for life in general.

------
whiddershins
I don't agree that this essay is arguing for indeterminate optimism. I think
you can consciously and deliberately shape the future while simultaneously
being open to the reality that things are constantly changing.

------
McUsr
What I got out of this essay, which I found to be good, is that you should
investigate your hunches, more deliberately before dismissing them. That is
hindsightly (From my hindsights :) )a great wisdom from Paul Graham.

------
bane
Expertise is a weird thing. In today's world, one that changes so rapidly,
it's very hard to become an expert in something and have the value of that
expertise remain valuable. It used to be that expertise in some field or area
would last generations, and guild-like systems of master/apprentice developed
in response. Now you can't even make it through a degree program before the
things you started to learn about at the beginning become virtually obsolete
by the end. Watching the front page of HN and you'll see entire frameworks and
languages come and go virtually as quickly as the seasons. When I was starting
out, it was fully possible and reasonable to consider becoming an expert in
COBOL and one or two kinds of mainframes and make a career of it.

Expertise today requires that you start to think and operate at a higher level
of abstraction in order to cover what you know, and where your knowledge might
go. Or it might require you to make connections between old ideas that are
still valid and new ideas as they appear. You might even be able to change
career paths entirely, but things you learned as an expert in your old one
might make you special and unique in your new one -- somebody with rare and
unique talents. Like automating business processes in a non-technical career.

I've been thinking a lot about beliefs and belief systems recently. I'm not
quite sure I have any meaningful or concrete conclusions yet, but I'm pretty
sure I'm going down the path of thinking that beliefs should generally be
treated and handled with extreme caution, that they're some kind of holdover
from an earlier evolutionary stage -- a vestigial kind of proto-thought
process wedged somewhere between pure animalistic instinct and enlightened
reason.

They aren't inherently bad just like instincts aren't inherently bad, the
instinct to pull your hand off a hot stove is good for example. Perhaps they
some kind of optimized way of thinking that evolved when we had less hardware
to compute with. An estimation system that got us through hundreds of
thousands of long cold nights, alone in the world of beasts...when we couldn't
_quite_ think through everything. But now we can, and this old wetware
technical debt kind of gets in the way now and again.

It tends to make us rigid and lazy in our thinking...why think when believing
is less work?

Maybe it's possible to hack our beliefs be believing in the right things, by
believing in reason, or believing that things _should_ be changing, believing
that we should evaluate and challenge ourselves from time to time, believing
that we should feel like we're just on the edge of discomfort and force us to
use this new better and harder to use equipment we've been gifted with.

~~~
tjl
> it's very hard to become an expert in something and have the value of that
> expertise remain valuable.

That may be true in programming, but that's not the only field. Much of my
mechanical engineering knowledge dates from the 19th century and earlier and
is still valuable. Even my FEA knowledge (which relates heavily to
programming) is still good. Practically all my undergraduate knowledge is
still valuable, let alone my Master's and PhD knowledge.

It's quite clear that you're approaching this strictly from a single
viewpoint. If you really want to think, you need to broaden your view.

Even in programming there's still things that change at a slower pace. Sure
there's a lot of things changing in regards to the web, but areas such as
numerical methods change more slowly.

~~~
_delirium
Even on the web, imo a large portion of the interesting stuff done today is
strongly based on decades-old expertise. For example, Google's V8 JS engine
was built largely on techniques developed in the late '80s and early '90s for
implementing Self and Smalltalk, by people who had developed their expertise
in the Smalltalk world. That expertise didn't remain static, of course. But it
was highly relevant and formed the basis of the further developments, which is
why Google specifically went out and hired those people to develop V8, because
having expertise in implementing Smalltalk efficiently is useful if you want
to implement Javascript efficiently.

If you approach things very shallowly, learning how-to-set-up-technology-
stack-X type bags of tricks, those become obsoleted quickly, but lots of
technical expertise is quite durable.

------
fubarred
_Life is suffering, change, taxes and death._

The meta of Buddhist philosophy (sans religion, spirituality, etc.) appears to
be one of the most honest of the major, religion-derived belief systems.

------
oldpond
Beliefs like JEE is a good thing? Like object oriented development is a good
thing? Like Portal Server is still relevant? Yeah, I hit the wall with those
all the time. Lots of ego in the way of changing those beliefs because the big
guys have been selling this for the last two decades. How would you like to be
the guy trying to convince enterprises that loosely coupled is the way to go
when they've been sold on "silos are bad we need integrated systems"? I feel a
little bit like Chicken Little at times. :)

------
andyidsinga
re this : "if you write about a topic in some fairly durable and public form,
you'll find you worry much more about getting things right than most people
would in a casual conversation."

i wonder what the bar here is - certainly more than blog posts / self
published websites as those are fairly close to casual conversation imho.

glad to see pg picking up the pace on the writing!

~~~
marvy
He said what the bar is in one of the footnotes: something with a title. I
guess for him at least, the blog posts count.

~~~
andyidsinga
yeah - I saw that, but seems to me it only barely meets the "fairly durable"
test if you assume cache's and other history keeping mechanisms.

I wonder if what is additionally required is : "someone you respect asks you
to write on a topic". In PG's case, his audience might substitute, for others
an employer or publisher might be what it takes.

------
theoh
The idea that a static world implies monotonically increasing confidence in
your beliefs is really shaky, logically. Hill-climbing in a landscape of
belief-fitness could easily arrive at a local maximum. To further improve your
beliefs you might need to become less certain.

Apart from that, how can something (confidence) increase in a static world? PG
has clearly tossed this essay off without serious thought or discussion. A
waste of time.

~~~
nl
_The idea that a static world implies monotonically increasing confidence in
your beliefs is really shaky, logically. Hill-climbing in a landscape of
belief-fitness could easily arrive at a local maximum._

Exactly, and it's common to see that in many fields. People are persuaded by
things that were bad ideas when they were new, and aren't swayed by new
evidence to the contrary.

 _To further improve your beliefs you might need to become less certain._

Isn't that sort of the point of the essay?

 _Apart from that, how can something (confidence) increase in a static world?_

I don't understand. Didn't your previous point argue exactly how hill-climbing
could happen, and isn't that a (bad) example of confidence changing?

Or are you _really_ arguing over the semantics changing beliefs in a static
world? I hope you aren't; otherwise, like you said: _A waste of time._

~~~
theoh
This is definitely a waste of time but my point is that you don't need to have
a changing (dynamic) fitness landscape for monotonicity to be insufficient in
the long term - you could get stuck at a local maximum _even_ in a static
world.

The second point is that drawing a line between the "world" and your beliefs
about it is a pretty dopey dualistic way of thinking. But hey, Graham doesn't
care that there might be real knowledge and valid experience of these matters
in the accumulated history of philosophy or psychology, he just shoots from
the hip with some flaky positivistic analogy with computation... Ridiculous.

~~~
ncallaway
This assumes you can only hold beliefs that are adjacent to your current
beliefs (i.e. the graph of your beliefs over time must be continuous). I
disagree with that assumption.

You can explore ideas that you don't hold, and these can be quite varied from
your current beliefs. Once you find an idea that you put more confidence into
that your current beliefs, then that idea becomes your belief.

The local optimum from high-climbing doesn't constrain you in a world where
your beliefs can teleport from one hill to another.

------
ExpiredLink
"Anyway, the thing about progress is that it always seems greater than it
really is." Wittgenstein

------
C2E2
More I read these VC spreading their wisdom, more I find the Silicon Valley
barely a caricature.

------
jsonmez
Have strong convictions, but hold on to them loosely.

------
pitchups
There is an additional attribute that goes a long way in staying an expert in
a changing world - humility or acknowledging that you do not or cannot know
the future. PG hints at this when he says.. "...admit you have no idea what
the right direction is, and try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of
change...". It is also paraphrased quite well in the maxim of "Stay hungry,
stay foolish" popularized by Jobs.

But humility that stems from ignorance is at odds with popular expectations of
an expert. The problem is what worked in the past may not work in the future.
Being sensitive to changes in the world around you, requires you to
momentarily stop being an expert and look at the world from the eyes of a
novice or beginner. This is not only hard but sometimes impossible to do
because of how we change as we acquire new knowledge. [2]

So the trick is to be somewhat schizophrenic - being able to simultaneously
view the world as an expert with the fresh thinking of a beginner or a novice.

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8754334](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8754334)

~~~
powertry
This assumes that the goal is to be Jobs, and I completely agree with the
assessment that you need to be schizophrenic. I would like to point out, the
expectation is to be detail oriented(execution/expert) while leading a larger
org macro goal (learning/strategy). In the right contexts with appropriate
resources, this can & does magnify personalities and outputs!

------
jcr
I spotted the following in my usual reading this morning:

> _" Until this point, I have been describing the stereotyping process as a
> negative force for individual and team functioning. However, this process
> actually stems from an adaptive, often functional psychological process.
> Mental heuristics and cognitive shortcuts enable us to process information
> without conscious deliberation: they fill in the informational gaps we often
> experience when making decisions. In other words, habits of mind help us to
> save brain power for more difficult tasks. Joseph Pieper's classic "Leisure,
> the Basis of Culture" sets out this theory well. In the 1980s, people
> thought we could create expert systems by interviewing experts like brain
> surgeons or oil exploration specialists, and creating a rule chaining prolog
> environment that would recreate their decision-making ability. The problem
> was the experts did not know how they knew what they knew. That is, experts
> are creating associations between disparate experiences and pieces of
> knowledge, using the subconscious brain."_ [1]

The quote above reminded me a bit of the previous "How You Know" essay by Paul
Graham [2,3]. At times it's disheartening to realize the discrepancy between
how much I read, and how much of it I can actually remember, but it's nice to
know at least some of it manages to stay with me somehow.

In this new essay, pg says:

> _" When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier
> version of the world."_

Stereotyping and similar classification are essentially heuristic modeling
based on past experience. Some substantial part of our mental models are based
on "Unknown Knows," or better said, our mental models are based on experiences
we cannot consciously recall but still somehow know unconsciously. Even if we
keep the models updated to have a "current version of the world" through
seeking new experiences, we are still often incapable of either anticipating
or handling new surprises.

Maybe people who regularly succeed as startup investors (i.e. anticipating and
handling surprising exceptions) have learned to retain some degree or form of
suspended disbelief when applying their models to the world?

It's trivially easy to suspend disbelief for the sake of entertainment like
enjoying a fictional story. Intentionally escaping reality for a while is an
established habit for most people. On the other hand, intentionally suspending
a bias, belief or model in the real world seems to take more effort, but
that's possibly due to my own lack of practice.

[1] [http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/11/179827-the-data-on-
div...](http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/11/179827-the-data-on-
diversity/fulltext/)

[2] [http://paulgraham.com/know.html](http://paulgraham.com/know.html)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8753526)

~~~
AndyNemmity
"... intentionally suspending a bias, belief or model in the real world seems
to take more effort, ..."

For most people this seems to be the case, but I have found a way to do it
regularly. I evoke empathy before logic.

By being empathetic and transporting yourself into another person's values,
you then use your logic to deduce the answers and details from their point of
view. This allows you to escape your own details.

I use this often. But I can never start with logic, I have to start with
empathy. From there, I can then calculate.

You can do this as a thought experiment, and you'll find it becomes trivially
easy.

I work with customers often, and when I work with them I just pretend I work
for them. My desires and goals change dramatically from what I would suggest
for them if I didn't pretend in my head that they hired me.

I also tend to distance myself from... caring?.. about outcomes. The less I
care about what the result is, the better I am at changing my perspective.

This suspension of disbelief, and the practice of it allows you to quickly
shift your entire world view. The shifting isn't really the hard part, the
allowing yourself to shift is.

I hope this is clear, I feel like this is difficult for me to communicate
well. I think a back and forth conversation would make more sense for this
topic.

------
dschiptsov
"an expert in a previous version of the world" is a good metaphor.

Old people in general are such experts, or some "fundamentalists" or
"conservatives" \- those, who are trying to "preserve" the world they grow up
in, everyone who follow and worship a "ritual", a "process", stuck up
"creationists" or "froidians", "public static void" guys - the list is
surprisingly long.

Some "teachers" said millennias ago "be the change", others said that "we are
never the same". Perhaps, they have tried to capture this notion of "an ever
changing process" \- us (we are processes, not entities, they said) in a
"beginningless and endless change" which they call "That" or "Tao", and we
call Universe.

------
te_platt
In the context of this article I think it's important to make a distinction
between an expert and a specialist. I think of an expert as someone who almost
always gets things right. For example, an expert pianist plays great music but
it seems a bit off to think of an expert meteorologist. Weather is so variable
it's just not realistic to expect anyone to get forecasts as accurate as
pianist at a keyboard. But it makes good sense that a specialist will be able
to better than most. I would change "When experts are wrong, it's often
because they're experts on an earlier version of the world." to "When
specialists get things wrong, it's usually because the world is so complex."

So I agree that it's important to protect against obsolete beliefs it's also
important to consider when the belief is really wrong and when it was just
overloaded with confounding events.

------
soup10
What a dumb assertion that someone can be an expert on changing the world.
Paul graham has lived in the startup world bubble for too long and is a bit
off his rocker when it comes to having perspective on the larger picture of
changing industries and global trends and dynamics. The next big thing is not
some social media garbage app for sharing cat pictures. That much is clear.
Take a look at the kind of low impact garbage YC specializes and funding to
get a clear look at how paul graham views successful startup ideas and teams.
It needs no reminder that the vast majority of YC companies, fail, have no
impact, dissolve and get aquired by other teams or if they are lucky get a
talent aquisition by a bigger fish with a bloated mergers and aquisitions
budget. My advice to Paul, write essays about what you KNOW, not what you feel
like rambling on about. You have lots of experience in the world of seed
staging and getting small teams to make the leap into legitimate hard working
business entities with growth potential. You don't have a ton of wisdom to
share outside of that domain so stop acting like you do.

~~~
scrollaway
PG does not in fact talk about being an "expert on changing the world" but of
being an "expert IN a changing world". And indeed the essay talks about...
well, seed funding, investment etc. Not random "out-of-bubble" assertions.

You seem to have read the title and just spouted your vomit onto your keyboard
then hit send. That's not really a good path to constructive criticism there,
is it?

~~~
ofir_geller
nor will it keep your keyboard in mint working condition.

