
The (Bayesian) Advantage of Youth: Why our lack of experience is a good thing - danw
http://many.corante.com/archives/2007/05/19/the_bayesian_advantage_of_youth.php
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mdakin
The world is not a bag of marbles and it didn't change over night.

Making something people want involves two main constraints: the making and the
people.

Human nature has remained constant for thousands of years (read some of the
Latin or Greek or Chinese classics and you'll likely agree).

The art of 'making' is shifting faster but perhaps not as fast as some people
try to make it seem. Lisp is a 50 year old technology and it's still viable
today. The Internet is 45 year old technology and we're still only beginning
to realize its potential.

If you are a smart, flexible person doing something you love "experience" will
only make you more effective.

~~~
zach
This is like the fifth Clay Shirkey article I've read over seven years or so,
and they've all been rambling and uninteresting. I guess I'm too old to read
any more.

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bootload
_'... The mistakes novices make come from a lack of experience (kids) ... they
make this kind of mistake a thousand times before they learn better. But the
experts (grown-ups) make the opposite mistake, so that when a real once-in-a-
lifetime change comes along, they are at risk of regarding it as a fad. As a
result of this asymmetry, the novice (kids) makes their one good call during
an actual revolution, at exactly the same time the expert (grown-up) makes
their one big mistake, but at that moment, that`s all that is needed to give
the newcomer a considerable edge. ...'_

Interesting. You can see this direct observation with the actions of any child
who randomly practice and play with things they encounter to create or do
something new. Older, wiser people with years of experience are either bored
and see no advantage in play so they don't. Only to realise later that they
should have tried this earlier. Is this a natural adaption process that adults
outgrow? Is this process a non-optomised way for chance discovery and
improvement?

There is also a dark side. Experts are experts for a reason, conservative
competence. You don't want your accountant or lawyer advising you on something
using trial and error techniques. The lack of experience in some skill-sets
will also cause startups to fail ( _#14, Poor investor management_ ~
<http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html> ). Successful entrepreneurs
need to harness playfulness and hope their lack of experience doesn't cause
them to fail. Serial entrepreneurs turn the playfulness on or off when
required or find alternative strategies to plug areas they don't their
inexperience into failure.

Maybe thats why a few grey heads are sometimes an advantage in guiding
startups?

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startupper
This writer uses Tivo as an example of something that could not have been
founded by older people. Well actually Tivo was founded by Silicon valley
veterans Barton and Ramsay. Not exactly young. More like 40+ somethings. Bad
example.

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phil
I'm pretty skeptical too. I don't think Clay gives nearly enough credit to
people's ability to learn new things and forget the past.

I asked the two nearest people (one young, one old) the VCR/PC and radio/phone
questions. The old one answered telephone without hesitation, and had to think
about VCR. The young one did just the opposite. And, Mike Ramsay was in his
40s when he started Tivo.

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gibsonf1
If this theory is true, that the advantage of young entrepreneurs is their
lack of experience and hence lack of knowledge about what could possibly go
wrong, then age is actually not the issue, it's experience in the field. So
for older entrepreneurs (30+) that are entering the tech startup world for the
first time, they would share the ignorance benefit (assuming this is a
benefit)

~~~
danw
I suppose you could also say that reading news.YC makes you a worse
entrepreneur! You're learning the rules that others before you have held true
instead of just making up your own from scratch.

~~~
gibsonf1
Damn, you're right. I'm outta here! :)

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machine
The problem with the colored balls example is that the person drawing the
balls from the bag assumes the balls are i.i.d. (independently identically
distributed). Put in real world terms, according to the example entrepreneurs
believe their field is unchanging. I don't think many entrepreneurs believe
this. If the person drawing balls from the bag doesn't make this (wrong)
assumption, then he is not at any disadvantage for having seen more draws from
the bag.

~~~
npk
The problem is this article is using scientific buzzwords to explain something
that can be explained without the buzzwords. 300 years ago, "calculus", 50
years ago FFT, 15 years ago "Chaos Theory, 10 years ago, "Wavelets" and
apparently now, "Bayesian statistics."

You raise a good point. I'm afraid that debating the essay on its technical
merits will lead you to a fruitless discussion.

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JohnN
the article seems to be suggesting, the older you are, the less original your
thinking can be. we know this is not necessarily true but is it generally
true? though the "idea" is central to a start-up, older entrepreneurs can add
experience if they have dealt with banks, lawyers, vc's, operations, hiring
etc in the past. These less glamorous tasks can often be the difference
between success and failure. don't write off older entrepreneurs just yet!

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ced
This works when you want to revolutionize a field, but a lot of the web is
much more incremental. Experience should be an asset. Look at Jobs.

