
John Carmack talks about “antifragile” idea generation (2015) [video] - deepaksurti
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSCBCk4xVa0
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csours
I don't believe in the 6 thinking hats methodology (I don't think it has
anything to do with psychology, but I do think it has something to say about
work), but I think I learned something from reading about it.

I have a certain mentality where I will plan a feature, and then I will spend
literally forever poking holes in that feature and thinking about all the ways
it will fail. This demotivates me greatly.

I think it is better to plan the happy path, then take a finite, planned
amount of time to mentally test it and note corners and edges, then take a
stab at iteration, then go back and re-evaluate. I think this is probably how
normal people do this, but I also think it's easy to get stuck on one of those
modes. One of my architects is stuck on happy-path mode, and it's really hard
to get them to actually think about implementations.

\---

Notes on the 6 hats: I think the important thing is not to get stuck on one
hat. You may pick some of these as your focus, but I think it's important to
have some balance as well.

Hat Color - Original Theme/My theme

White - Data/Data Analysis

Yellow - Optimism/Happy Path Plan, Architectural View

Blue - Process/ Project Manager, Task management, Scrum

Black - Pessimism/Testing view, how will it go wrong

Green - Creative/Implementation Phase (just write some code)

Red - Emotion/Iteration Review, Hot wash

~~~
contingencies
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats)

This was introduced to us during year 5 and 6 (ages 10-11) schooling in the
Australian public education system's gifted and talented stream. Great free
education!

~~~
mottey
same, I thought everyone learnt this in school when growing up...

~~~
6nf
I learned about the hats in primary school back in the 90s

~~~
pansa2
I’ve never heard of it before. Sounds like it’s well known in Australia
though!

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anonsivalley652
Carmack described the wantrepreneur. Beware the "idea guy," find the head-down
guy or gal who is smart and a workaholic; people who tend to work more than
socialize, fall in love with ideas and talk about work that they're not doing.

There's no free lunch and schlepping where others give up or aren't willing to
invest energy, time and money are also key. If something is relatively easy
for you but more difficult for most others, that's a good signal. And if that
something becomes very difficult for you, think of how hard it would be for
someone else... that has the potential to be a defensible business.

------
keanzu
Antifragile: "Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when
exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure,
risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there
is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. According to Taleb, the opposite
of fragile is antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness.
The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragile)

~~~
toohotatopic
Do those things become stronger or do they just remain while everything else
collapses? How much is this about being the real deal? In crisis, bullshit
doesn't work anymore.

~~~
ptah
from reading his book on the topic, my understanding is that they become
strionger. he would classify "just remaining" as robust as opposed to
antifragile

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scarejunba
Developing that skill is really hard. It isn't the methodology. It's that you
need the pervasive paranoiac scientific desire to poke holes in the idea. And
that's very hard for most people. Carmack applies evidence to develop his
posteriors very well.

i.e. when evidence comes along for an idea you have, most people will say to
themselves "Even though that's true it's not enough" or "but that doesn't
disprove it". In fact, I'd hypothesize (with poor evidence) that people who do
not alter their posteriors when presented with evidence cannot do this at all.
And that's very common - because lots of evidence won't disprove anything,
it'll only make it less likely. If you never alter your posteriors you will
dismiss it.

I know I sometimes fall in love with an idea and this happens.

By the way, here's a quick read of the idea if you can't read the video:
[https://amasad.me/carmack](https://amasad.me/carmack)

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sjg007
The best way to get over a brilliant idea is to start working on it.
Hopefully, that work inspires another idea and so on and so forth until you
end up with something real.

------
dang
URL changed from
[https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1232052215684177924](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1232052215684177924),
which points to this.

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cheschire
I encourage my devs with a similar mantra: treat your code like cattle, not
like pets.

~~~
anonsivalley652
The "big idea" folks typically go further by treating their ideas like their
offspring and insulate critiques of those ideas from the big, scary world of
reality. Also, making an analogy to "cattle" sends the wrong message to the
demographics of developers these days; I would replace that with something
inanimate.

~~~
mandelbrotwurst
Not all of us are fearful of apt metaphors. Hard eye roll. Excuse me while I
kill some processes.

~~~
catach
A metaphor ceases to be apt when a good portion of your audience interprets
your meaning in the opposite way that you intended.

~~~
mandelbrotwurst
I suppose whether that's true depends on whether you are looking for a
metaphor that is technically accurate and descriptive or one that is perceived
as such by your audience.

I'm aware that there is value in both of those, and as such am willing to
strive for both, but moreso to the extent that I trust that those with whom I
am communicating are doing the same. In this case, I'm not sure that good
faith is there.

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samsquire
Ideas are so valuable, the meme that ideas are worthless without
implementations needs to die.

~~~
gmfawcett
Can you explain why you think that? What makes ideas valuable without
implementations?

~~~
yocheckitdawg
Good novel ideas that identify a consumer/user demand are always high value
whether implemented or not.

Zero to One by Peter Thiel basically implies this with his "Competition is for
suckers, monopoly is where it is at". Yet how many businesses and tech
companies get founded doing the same think everyone else is doing (or at least
half a dozen competitors)?

Truly novel ideas, truly thinking outside the box, truly seeing possibilities
that aren't in existence is HARD. Extremely hard. I can understand why the
idea that ideas without implementation is meaningless became so prominent, but
that is mainly because most of the ideas people have have been had by 1000
other people so if you arne't implementing they aren't of any use.

Whereas ideas that are truly novel are still extremely valuable because it
gives all the hard workers something worthwhile to shoot for (as opposed to
yet another social media app).

As an example think of blockchain. Fairly basic from a techincal or
implementation sense, it is the idea that was really novel. Even if Bitcoin
hadn't been made, the idea itself is enormously valuable. There are 1000s of
ideas out there like this waiting for a novel thinker to draw them out of the
fog and make them clearly visible.

~~~
hcarvalhoalves
The Bitcoin “idea” was the actual implementation showing it could work in
practice.

I don’t think you’re using the term “idea” the same way.

~~~
davidivadavid
I don't think people even know what they mean when they talk about startup
ideas generally.

If the Bitcoin paper is an implementation, then what is the idea? You could
argue that the "idea" would be something like "a distributed trustless
transaction protocol" or something.

But then you could as easily argue that that's not an idea. That's a goal.

Inversely, you could argue that the Bitcoin paper is not an implementation,
that the implementation is the actual software that... implements the content
of the paper.

The problem with "idea" and "implementation" is that they're relative concepts
that can be used to separate arbitrary parts of complex systems into two
buckets, but where that separation doesn't always provide any insight.

Is general relativity an idea or an implementation (of the idea "a better
theory of gravitation than Newtonian mechanics")? Is a winning trading
strategy an idea or an implementation (of the idea "something that makes money
on the stock market")? Etc.

The whole concept of a "startup idea" itself is fraught with imprecisions. Not
to mention the assumption that startups are to be based on one singular idea,
which is highly debatable.

------
taeric
I think this conflicts a little with my view of antifragile.

Or maybe it compliments it. Can't say clearly.

My view is that having multiple ways to do things often leads to an
antifragile system. Reason being that busting one way only busts that one way.
This plays out in the likes of timsort. The point is to pivot not just the
same strategy on the data, but to pick your strategy on the data.

------
juskrey
How about really antifragile generation: you just quit 5/9 job, have a long
walk, take a good nap, and ideas come by themselves.

Carmack, with all of his all-work no-rest culture, is hardy antifragile. Or
did he change his attitude?

~~~
rbasu
From what I have read, he always advocated 8 hours of rest, without which his
productivity decreases, this tweet being a recent one:
[https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1232668344307810305](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1232668344307810305)

As he said in this tweet, even with 8 hours of sleep, there's a lot of time
left per week and people like Carmack makes the most out of those remaining
hours.

~~~
juskrey
I think idea of 8 hour sleep can be revolutionary only for someone born in the
office cubicle.

~~~
rbasu
I know a lot of people outside the normal 9-5 job who overwork themselves and
takes less than 8 hours of sleep though. I think it has a lot to do with the
fact that people just react to stuff and it's easy to come up with short term
thought process of "less sleep = more work", instead of working fewer hours
one day in order to keep long focussed hours in the long term. Also, some
people can't afford 8 hours of sleep, as far as I have seen, unfortunately.

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tuckerpo
Ah, fresh (to us) Carmack babble. Perfect way to spend a Friday night.

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th0ma5
I had read that antifragile is always such until something exposes a
previously unassumed fragility?

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ChrisArchitect
In case the (2015) is misleading, this is newly released video from an
internal-to-facebook talk he gave in 2015. Cool

~~~
MikusR
It's very misleading. While it was filmed in 2015 it was published in 2020.

~~~
kaens
I don't think it's misleading, the date a talk was given can be very relevant
for context.

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erikpukinskis
The date of the talk is useful information, but I would assume the date on the
HN title is the publish date.

