
General and Surprising - maguay
http://paulgraham.com/sun.html
======
clavalle
An unfortunate corollary is that slightly different general ideas are very
difficult to get people to listen to because they feel like they already know
it and it is not much new or the difference is negligible. This might be true
of any particular case someone might think of but when the entire landscape is
taken into account the multiplier pg mentions applies and can change things
dramatically. But people don't seem to be well wired to think of the general.

And for any general multiplier to work, people generally need to be on board.

For example: there is a difference between economic inequality and desperate
economic inequality -- the first is a mere difference in ownership and
control. The second is /also/ a difference in ownership and control but that
leaves one party or group bargaining against their physical well-being. There
is much said about mere economic inequality but, by leaving out the
desperation factor, the public conversation is tied up in knots (e.g. "Well
why don't we give everyone a million dollars?!" nonsense) and the real
problem, desperation and the conditions that lead to that state, persist
despite having the tools to potentially tackle it. But any single example -- a
single mother that has to take two minimum wage jobs to feed her kids -- can
be reduced away. She could just do x, y, or z and her particular problem would
be solved and she'd still be economically disadvantaged but not desperate to
the point of worrying about her kids starving. And the conversation ends. We
are back to the inconvenience of a weak bargaining position which is also
described by the phrase 'economic inequality' and it all feels like the same,
well trod and religiously guarded ground.

------
ballenf
> It's not true that there's nothing new under the sun. There are some domains
> where there's almost nothing new. But there's a big difference between
> nothing and almost nothing, when it's multiplied by the area under the sun.

I found that statement the most insightful of the essay. Helped me resolve
some cognitive dissonance.

Whether there really are totally new things and not just existing things in
new packaging depends on which level of abstraction you stop at with when
analyzing. For example, at a very high level you could say that the Internet
as a whole is really just a very advanced/efficient printing press. (And
automation like the printing press or assembly line, just efficiently
organized production.)

That level of abstraction may be less than helpful, unless there are insights
to be gleaned from where the internet is going by looking at printing press
technology. Their impacts on empowering the masses are similar, but they each
encouraged/enabled network effects to consolidate much power (newspapers and
goog/fb) and thereby effectively countering much of the effect.

~~~
wcarss
I agree, this statement seems like the most interesting one in the essay.

It reminds me of expected value calculations: extremely low probability events
of tremendously high impact could actually out-rate moderately probable events
of moderate impact in terms of how concerned you should be with them.
Assigning meaningful probabilities and impact values can be tricky though,
which adds a whole layer of complexity and hand-waving to the problem.

This is where discussions of nuclear war, strong AI, nazi-oriented political
resurgences, geothermal storms, epidemics, etc. can really go off the rails in
my opinion: two people can separately evaluate "worst-case scenario" as very
different realities, assigning very different intuited impact-values, and also
assign very different probability values. Even if they think about these
things from an expected-value perspective, a discussion between them becomes
at least a 2-variable linear equation, and the odds of even understanding each
other are stretched, let alone finding the same x and y and agreeing upon what
that means for the actions we should take in response.

Graham's point here on the positive side though is a refreshing step outside
of that domain. An idea recycled, if broadly applicable enough, only needs a
hint of novelty. It gives me some hope for being able to come up with useful
things.

------
perpetualcrayon
"the more general the ideas you're talking about, the less you should worry
about repeating yourself"

A rule-of-thumb I've generally followed when brainstorming is "never write
down the ideas". And if at all possible, try to forget them, good or bad. It
inevitably forces me to re-think the ideas "from scratch". I've never been
worried that an idea would escape me or that I would forget it, as I think the
exercise of re-thinking ideas from scratch has helped me build a relatively
solid mental model of the world. I feel that, with practice, this method of
brainstorming has started bringing me to the solid / useful (general /
surprising) ideas faster.

It has likely, over the years, added weeks or possibly months worth of time
that I've spent brainstorming the same (general) ideas over and over.

~~~
vanderZwan
As an aside, I can't say for sure how you use the term "brainstorming" here,
but there is plenty of evidence that _classic-style_ brainstorming in groups
leads to less ideas, and less creative ideas.

When I was forced by my boss to teach designers brainstorming, against my
better judgement, I instead made this slideshow summarising my frustrations
and what I would suggest people do instead:

[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EYyS4AtRhNa6i299R_RB...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EYyS4AtRhNa6i299R_RB0a54ePU2PEQsILQnwWgY9KU/edit?usp=sharing)

~~~
VLM
Nice presentation. Something I've seen a lot over the decades is internal
politics. One huge advantage of not using a brainstorming team is 99.999999%
of humanity is more creative by sole mass of brain power than the team will be
(Six billion people vs a team of ten people) so almost all good ideas, for any
problem, will be discovered outside the team.

If the team is in charge as a group of doing the brainstorming, 99.999999% of
the good ideas will come from non-team individuals who will be automatically
shot down as "not your job" "work on your own team" and similar primate
dominance games. If you brainstorm individually, that 99.999999% of good ideas
has a better change of getting implemented. Groups hate outsiders (and by
extension, their ideas), without a boundary there is no group.

Another internal politics problem is reward. Teams exist to funnel all success
upward and channel all failure downward. Everyone knows if they actually have
a solution its wasted on the team unless they're the leader. There are
financial and career pressures for teams to fail so individuals can keep the
fruits of their labor, so to speak. This can lead to very low team
performance.

~~~
vanderZwan
Thanks, although I personally feel it's more like a decent article disguised
as a bad powerpoint (text overload) - works better when sharing it afterwards
though.

I've been told it's better live when I combine it with barely-contained
frustration - turns out to be a very relatable experience for many.

I have been lucky enough to never have been in an organisation with a
dedicated brainstorming team, but your description definitely _sounds_ like
how it would play out in reality. Thanks for sharing, now I know it's a red
flag.

If you combine that with brainstorming being misused for identifying problems
(instead of solutions to _known_ problems) like I mention early on, things
probably get even worse.

~~~
vanderZwan
> _(instead of finding potential solutions to known problems)_

------
burger_moon
I'm glad Paul is still writing essays. It seems it has dropped off in
frequency, this essay kind of hints at one such reason for that. I hope he
continues to write even if people disagree with his ideas or if they are
repetitive.

~~~
saycheese
On the same note, PG's "official" HN account hasn't been active for years:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg)

~~~
ComodoHacker
One year ten months, to be precise.

~~~
dsacco
His account now makes comments once every year or year and a half, but it
hasn't been generally active for nearly 3.5 years (the last bunch of comments
in a row in a short time period was 1264 days ago, as of this writing).

------
happy-go-lucky
The essay itself is general and surprising, and the combination never loses
its effectiveness.

Ideas keep evolving. There was nothing new about the idea of a search engine
when Google came into existence in 1998.

In 1945, Dr. Vannevar Bush wrote an article titled As We May Think:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-
we-m...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-
think/303881/)

> he urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making
> more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.

In the 1960’s, Gerard Salton created and developed Salton’s Magic Automatic
Retriever of Text (SMART). He also authored a book called A Theory of Indexing
detailing his initial tests that search is largely based off of relevancy
algorithms. Here’s a very interesting blog post titled Search Down Memory Lane
by Tom Evslin who worked with Salton during this project:

[http://blog.tomevslin.com/2006/01/search_down_mem.html](http://blog.tomevslin.com/2006/01/search_down_mem.html)

Fast forward to 1990, a man named Alan Emtage created the first search engine
known as Archie which retrieved a database files by matching user queries
using regexes. Following the growth of Archie’s popularity, two similar search
engines Veronica and Jughead were created and they started indexing plain text
files.

In 1993, the first bot called World Wide Web Wanderer was created and then it
was upgraded to capture active URLs and store them in a database. Then came
ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing of the Web), which crawled meta information of
pages.

There’re others including WebCrawler (1994), Lycos(1994), AltaVista(1995),
Excite(1995), Yahoo(1995), Dogpile(1996), Ask Jeeves(1996).

This is just my superficial understanding of how the idea of search engines
was born and has evolved over time. They were very different from Google, but
they’ve similarities to how data is processed and analyzed today.

~~~
flexie
\- Facebook wasn't the first social network. People were connected, shared
pictures, and had friends before.

\- Amazon wasn't the first online store.

\- AirBnB wasn't the first short term rental website

\- Netflix wasn't the first online movie portal.

\- Apple didn't make the first cell phone or even the first smart phone, or
the first music player or the first home computer.

\- Tesla didn't make the first electric car.

\- etc.

Still, the one criticism that startup hear again and again is that "You are
late - it's already there".

~~~
chubot
Just to play devil's advocate, what was the first online store? I think Amazon
was pretty damn close, having started in 1994 as a store that simply stocked a
large selection of rare books. The shipping took weeks as I recall.

It was not an obvious idea at the time, simply because there weren't that many
people on the web. It was around the time that SSL was being developed [1] --
so if you were much earlier you probably couldn't take payments securely.

There were probably mail order catalogs that had websites, but I think that is
a different thing than a "web store".

Also, Netflix wasn't the first online movie portal, but I'm pretty sure they
were the first people to make a business out of mailing DVDs! It's crazy that
they started like that.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#SSL_1...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#SSL_1.0.2C_2.0_and_3.0)

~~~
keenerd
> _I think Amazon was pretty damn close, having started in 1994 as a store
> that simply stocked a large selection of rare books. The shipping took weeks
> as I recall._

Afaik, they didn't really carry any stock when they first started. They were
re-selling mail order books.

A while back there was a documentary about Amazon's early years. The part that
everyone always quotes is the thing about using doors as desks. (Which struck
me as silly, doors are expensive compared to many large, flat surfaces.)
Anyway, the part that really stuck with me was that they had one favorite
mail-order place, except that shop had a ten book minimum order. So Amazon
would order the one book someone wanted and then nine copies of some obscure
book about snails that was never in stock.

~~~
chubot
Yup I think I saw that same video on YouTube. They didn't have stock, so they
were sort of like a meta-retailer. They presented an illusion of large
selection.

I think the value was the interface and ease of searching, and not inventory
and retail operations.

------
kantian
Might a parallell be draw to Kant here?

General and bland would be as akin to "analytic a priori". All bachelors are
unmarried, that sorta thing.

Specific and surprising would be like "synthetic posteriori". Such and such
plant is blue and grows in the Himalayas.

The real gold would be in the "synthetic a priori" findings. Blending the
generalness of logic with the newness of empiricism. Like figuring out
geometrical laws from observing nature. New information AND far-reaching
implications.

Am I on to something here?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic%E2%80%93synthetic_dis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic%E2%80%93synthetic_distinction)

~~~
kantian
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-
synthetic/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/)

"While some trivial a priori claims might be analytic in this sense, for Kant
the seriously interesting ones were synthetic."

------
yeukhon

        [T]he more general the ideas you're talking about, the less you should worry
        about repeating yourself.
    

Organisms are used to train over and over to get better at things. Certain
abilities are innate, like a calf knows to stand up as soon as out of the
womb. But to stand firmly the calf has to keep trying.

When it comes to an idea, I believe that the broader I present the idea, the
easier it is to start a conversation, because others are more likely to show
interest, and eventually reach the point you find a focus point. However, I
still repeat myself, because I wouldn't invent a whole new dialogue next time
I bring up the same broad idea with another person.

On the other hand, I feel developing a product (startup or not), the more
general the idea is, the harder for me to explain my ideas concretely, much
like films have leading roles. The ideas present by the film can be broad, but
you don't want camera rolling on 200 actors in 1 hour 30 minutes, would you?
Your message can be interesting and novel, but I am going to be lost.

But yeah, on HN topics like "I quite FB", "security is hard", "Google is
evil", etc are common here, but I still comment on those topics when I feel
like to. My responses are usually similar, but I might add new thoughts, or
rephrase what I had written before. I called this introspection. I believe we
are not comfortable repeating ourselves, because we want to be interesting and
original, but we still have the urge to try to perfect our speech the next
time someone asks.

------
tw1010
When I read stuff like this and reflect on the fact that this is about the
peak quality of the philosophical discussion that is going on in our little
niche of the world, I get slightly depressed. I get that it's hard to find
people at the intersection of astounding writing and technical chops, but
still, it makes me want to distance myself and just go back to reading the
classics.

~~~
jessriedel
What community centered around professional skills do you think has better
philosophical discussion? Sure, there exists better philosophical discussion
elsewhere, and communities centered around academic disciplines can be more
sophisticated because that is their raison d'etre. But when I think of
professional communities (e.g., accounting, medicine, law, etc.), I can't
think of any better except insofar as they bleed into academia (e.g., blogs by
law professors, not practicing lawyers).

~~~
m_fayer
The medical field is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to talented
essayists, journalists, and biographers. I've also read a few wonderful
biographies written by restauranteurs. Our field unfortunately lags behind, I
think partially because it's rather dry compared to other fields, and
partially because SV ideology is pervasive, stifling, and indifferent to many
swathes of the human experience.

~~~
ak39
This is interesting. Would you say that engineers and mathematicians also
suffer the same embarrassment? If so, could all of this be a side-effect of
being in the world of precision vs being in the world of creative trial and
error (where every attempt at writing is judged on the interpretive aspect of
it)?

I am saying: I get nasty ineloquent on days I'm zoned into coding. Almost like
I'd rather not say than say anything I judge to be imprecise.

Like this post.

~~~
stillsut
This is something I've noticed too. I tend (when I'm coding well) to write
with many clauses, and also elaborate them with elaborate punctuation, [, ( ,-
, etc...

ak, I believe you may have just written something moderately insightful.
Anyone else?

~~~
indiv0
I'm not sure if this is exactly the sort of insight you're looking for, but
personally I find that long periods of coding and being "in the zone" tend to
affect my speech in the same way. Essentially, I tend to try to be as precise
as possible when speaking, often going out of the way on increasingly specific
tangents or finding the most elaborate examples to demonstrate what I mean.
These tangents and examples always come back to the main point (so I'm not
just wandering off), but when considering conversations in retrospect I find
that they tend to just muddy the point I was trying to make.

Written language and code can afford the verbosity, because you can always
review the earlier points to see how they tie in, but speech should be short
and succinct, IMO.

I _believe_ this is similar to (but not exactly) what is meant by
"circumstantial speech" [0].

That said, the wikipedia article seems to indicate that what I'm trying to
describe is similar to circumstantial speech, but actually isn't:

"Some individuals with autistic tendencies may prefer highly precise speech,
and this may seem circumstantial, but in fact it is a choice that posits that
more details are necessary to communicate a precise meaning, and preempt more
disastrous ambiguous communication."

Does anyone know of a more accurate term for this?

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstantial_speech](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumstantial_speech)

------
ismail
Only slightly related but there is a great book for your children: "What to do
you do with an idea"

[https://www.amazon.com/What-Do-You-
Idea/dp/1938298071](https://www.amazon.com/What-Do-You-Idea/dp/1938298071)

~~~
almostarockstar
What _should_ one do?

------
csomar
Paul Graham is running out of ideas these days. (Partly joking).

This goes on to my same discovery: Life itself is a constant process of
incremental trial and error builds-up. Over a few billions years, you get
something out of it (human being playing snapchat)

If you keep counting from 0 to an infinitely large number, at some numbers
you'll "discover": Windows 7, Windows 7 Korean Language, Microsoft Office,
OSX, and every other game that human designed and developed. Plus a bunch of
other software from alternate realities that compile on our machines. Cool.

The process the human are doing is not much different (albeit one can argue
that it is much more efficient than stupidly counting) "Everything" is already
there. The new Audi A4? It was already "possible".

If there is one thing that will change the future, it is our discovery of the
link between "abstract" and "real" concepts. They share some important points
that I'd not be surprised that "real" and "abstract" are the same
thing/continuum. Like space and time.

~~~
edanm
That's an interesting thought. Just want to point out that complexity theory
from Computer Science fits nicely into this, because it asks, not what is
"possible" (e.g. finding all programs by counting all the integers), but what
is possible within limited resources, like e.g. time.

A nice addition to the thought that, theoretically, even if you can find the
Windows 10 source code by counting all integers, you can't actually do it
within the lifetime of the universe without a smarter algorithm.

~~~
csomar
More like infinite resources. But there is a lifetime for the universe?

------
fiokoden
A very academic / theoretical post. Not entirely sure the point.

It might have been easier to understand if bound to real world examples.

------
roceasta
>that territory tends to be picked clean, precisely because those insights are
so valuable

People often think that a field has been 'picked clean' and conclude that
either no further progress is possible or that further discoveries are going
to be rare and incremental.

e.g. "the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth
place of decimals" \-- Michelson, 1894

But there are always deep problems and this implies that unlimited progress is
possible. The really big discoveries can happen at any time and are of an
unpredictable nature, not least because they affect multiple fields. They
leave behind plenty of smaller problems for everyone to pick up.

~~~
andrewflnr
That's especially funny from the same Michelson who did the Michelson-Morley
experiment that basically kicked off relativity.

------
paulajohnson
The essay describes a 2x2 grid with axes of generality and surprise. Things
that are suprising and general are valuable. Things that are general but
unsurprising are platitudes, and things that are specific but surprising are
gossip. The essay itself is a platitude.

~~~
patio11
I think "Repeating close variations on your usual theme unlocks far more value
than you'd expect given minimal novelty value" is a surprising result. I
utterly buy it.

The advice I give which has produced the single biggest deltas in outcomes is
"Charge more." It is so simple that I could literally print it on T-shirts and
wear it to any event which discusses pricing. People know it is my catchphrase
and sometimes I get knowing laughter when I say it...

... and then a few minutes later they've agreed to try charging more, despite
having an accurate model which suggests "Hah, I bet when we ask Patrick about
our new pricing he is going to ask us what it is, think about it for less than
five seconds, and then suggest charging more." They knew what I'd say before I
even got in the room, but even the tiniest marginal connection to their own
pricing grid / customers / data pushes them to actually try it.

~~~
le-mark
> think "Repeating close variations on your usual theme unlocks far more value
> than you'd expect given minimal novelty value" is a surprising result. I
> utterly buy it.

I was hoping for an example, but your example of repeating your catch phrase
doesn't quite fit imo. There's no variation. Is there a variation of your
catch phrase or message you're not mentioning here?

~~~
jacalata
I think the variation at each point is that he says "charge more because (some
detail about the askers customers/costs/business model)".

------
d_burfoot
A couple of years ago I wrote a book about a new philosophy of science based
on the following methodology:

\- Obtain a large dataset of observations related to a phenomenon of interest
(eg English text, bioimaging data, economic reports, car-mounted camera
recordings, etc)

\- Develop a theory of the phenomenon, or revise a previous theory

\- Build the theory into a lossless data compression program

\- Score the theory by invoking the compressor on the dataset, taking into
account the size of the compressor itself; lower codelength is better.

\- Adopt or discard the theory as appropriate and return to step #2.

I believe that this is a valid _variant_ of the traditional scientific method,
in which data compression takes the place of experimental prediction. In
Graham's terms, this idea is a small delta of novelty, but since it refers to
a predecessor idea of tremendous significance and generality, it could be very
important. The book is available here:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1104.5466](https://arxiv.org/abs/1104.5466)

I've spent a few years pursuing this methodology in the domain of English
text. The result is a sentence parser, which works quite well, but was built
completely _without_ the use of hand-labelled training data (eg the Penn
Treebank). You can check out the parser here:

[http://ozoraresearch.com/crm/public/parseview/UserParseView....](http://ozoraresearch.com/crm/public/parseview/UserParseView.jsp)

I'm always happy to talk to people about these ideas, ping me at daniel dot
burfoot at gmail if you're interested.

~~~
jsweojtj
This is interesting. I don't have an intuition on how well this could work on
different problems.

Do you think this approach would work for something, let's start simple, like
ballistics neglecting rotation of the Earth and drag? If you fed in thousands
of starting velocities and angles, and the resulting distance traveled, will
this process end up with equations of motion that are as compact as can be
found in first year physics?

~~~
indiv0
I think the problem here is that _you_ are still the one that needs to develop
the equations of motion that will be tested for compression.

What this describes is a method for _testing_ theories, not _generating_ them.
You still need to study the data to try and properly analyze it so you can
understand the rules yourself, or at least be able to see the edges of them.

Now if you could find a way to generate moderately accurate equations
automatically by analyzing the dataset, I think that would be a real leap
forward. Is there a related mechanism to the one presented by the parent which
could be used to generate theories?

~~~
d_burfoot
Yes, it is a method for testing theories; it does not give you a procedure for
developing the theories. It is agnostic about whether the theories are
developed by humans or algorithms.

There is not going to be any universal and practical algorithm for
automatically generating the theories, at least in the short term. But you can
think about algorithms that apply to particular domains. For example in my
field of text analysis, you can imagine techniques for automatically inferring
grammar rules from a large quantity of text. Some such methods already exist,
but have not been pursued extensively.

We could also develop algorithms for inferring equations of motion from
astronomical and celestial observations, as the parent mentioned. The
compression principle wouldn't give you the real Newtonian equations, but it
would correctly identify them as being superior to other candidates. But this
would be a bit of an academic exercise, since we already have the Newtonian
equations and relativity. What's more interesting to me is an attempt to build
modern astronomical theories (eg about black holes, the Big Bang, cosmic
inflation, dark energy, etc) into a compressor that will apply to an
astronomical data set like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. My guess is that such
an attempt would reveal important shortcomings in the theories, or perhaps
highlight regions of space that confound the theories.

------
dasil003
I think pg is falling prey to the whole post-hoc founder story phenomenon
here. He sees so many startups, he hears so many stories about them, and he
works hard to distill it into some kind of actionable and scalable investment
strategy.

The problem is that the facts which led to the success of the business are not
the same thing as the best insights a founder can come up with about why it
succeeded. The latter is subject to an incredible amount of confirmation bias
and the simple desire to tell a good story—in fact you _have_ to do that to
get investment.

In reality, novelty of ideas is meaningless, because the massively
overwhelming majority of ideas in the world never get executed on. Even within
contexts where people and companies have the means, most ideas—even good
ones—don't get executed on because they conflict with other ideas and don't
win the battle for resources.

What _matters_ for an idea is execution and context. If you bring the right
resources: skills, connections, go-to-market strategy, smaller supporting
ideas, and it gels with the current zeitgeist of whatever market you are in,
then it can get some traction. From there you learn and gain more insights
which can be leveraged to scale up. You do this over and over again, and if
you are lucky you can make an 8, 9, 10-figure company.

By the time all this happens you'll have some tremendous insights, but they
will be specific to the context in which they were gleaned. The "generality"
we observe of these insights is just a result of our pattern-matching and
story-telling brains. The "surprisingness" comes after the fact to varying
degrees based on existing preconceptions and perhaps how the world has changed
over time. In other words, I don't think there is such a thing as a hugely
valuable insight per se, rather this: we have insights, we believe in them to
varying degrees, and based on how well it maps to our actions and their
results, we later declare the "value" of the insight.

------
nate
On the "surprising" part of this - Murray Davis had some related research and
writing about being interesting:
[https://proseminarcrossnationalstudies.files.wordpress.com/2...](https://proseminarcrossnationalstudies.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/thatsinteresting_1971.pdf)

"An audience finds a proposition ‘interesting’ not because it tells them some
truth they thought they already knew, but instead because it tells them some
truth they thought they already knew was wrong."

------
robertlagrant
Is this a stealth "I'm done with the small delta of novelness Arc already has
and am stopping on it. If you can't appreciate that then you need to look
harder" article? :-)

------
brlewis
At the beginning:

 _The most valuable insights..._

Toward the end:

 _So it 's doubly important not to let yourself be discouraged by people who
say there's not much new about something you've discovered. "Not much new" is
a real achievement when you're talking about the most general ideas. Maybe if
you keep going, you'll discover more._

I really feel like Paul is conflating valuable and novel here. When you create
something that solves someone's problem, who cares whether the ideas behind it
are novel or not?

~~~
robertlagrant
This is a good hackers and painters juxtaposition: in STEM, it doesn't have to
be novel as long as it is better. In art it doesn't have to be better as long
as it's novel :-)

------
mack1001
PG makes it all look so neat and tight, however he fails to mention the number
of serendipitous instances that drive insights and new ideas.

~~~
jamesrcole
I think the essay is intended to describe one approach, not to provide a
complete account of how you can get good ideas.

------
jacalata
Well, that was certainly general.

~~~
enriquto
...and not very surprising. Thus, platitude! :)

~~~
jacalata
Indeed. The number of votes this has received is an amusing insight into how
many people must upvote based on origin and not content. If this were
published on some anonymous medium blog, it would be lucky to be +2.

~~~
tinco
Not everything that is a platitude is necessarily bad. Reinforcing, clarifying
or rediscovering knowledge certainly has value.

If Paul Graham writes an essay then that is relevant to Hacker News so it
should be upvoted regardless of whether it is shit.

~~~
jacalata
So...you are agreeing with me that this has been upvoted based on origin and
not content, and you're just repeating what I said to reinforce the point?

~~~
tinco
Origin and context give extra meaning and weight to content. That seems
trivially true to me. If Paul Graham writes this then that means the topic is
on the mind of someone influential and important in our community, thus it is
worthy of scrutiny and thought, thus worthy of an upvote.

Hacker News is not some game where people compete to create content with
maximum merit. It is a source of new content relevant to this community.

------
stonesixone
There's also a class of valuable insights that are general and not surprising,
but rather obvious. For these, the challenge is that no one previously had the
insight to observe and _state_ what is obvious. Maybe the surprise for these
isn't in the truth but rather that no one had stated them before.

------
harscoat
"surprising" in patent law
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-
obvious...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousness)

------
econ1212
F = ma is interesting because there are universal forces like electricity,
gravitation and electromagnetism that we use for our daily life. Moreover
there is a marriage between maths and physics since acceleration is the second
derivative of space with respect of time. If you are a new Newton you should
create the new concepts and develop the new maths to create a surprising step
forward. Looking for a word that goes from gossip to F=ma is like using a
telescope to watch a worm. Concepts are about frameworks and using a right
scale to focus concepts.

------
thriftwy
For me, general and surprising things are coming in the form of "X doesn't
seem to work".

The reasoning goes like this: X is described like a good thing and a lot of
resources poured in it. But there are documented failures of X - are they
spurious or causes by X not actually doing what is advertised?

More often than not the working answer "it probably doesn't work" which is
often "a thing you can not say" due to general consensus, good feelings and
above mentioned amount of resources poured in X.

~~~
jakubp
Can you give examples of such things that probably don't work, but you can't
say it if you don't want to be ostracized?

~~~
thriftwy
For example, Yugoslavia had what was described as the most progressive ethnic
minorities policy in the world (regarding official languages use,
representation of minorities, etc, etc), and then it violently fell apart in a
series of ethnic conflicts.

------
hnaccy
This post is lacking in the latter.

------
outworlder
> It's not true that there's nothing new under the sun. There are some domains
> where there's almost nothing new. But there's a big difference between
> nothing and almost nothing, when it's multiplied by the area under the sun.

PG, I see what you did there. The rest of the essay is just a setup for this
single paragraph. This is your own small delta of novelty. Well done.

------
lr4444lr
I'd say this post was "general, not surprising".

------
amelius
Too abstract to be useful.

------
JepZ
My personal image about this topic is the fact that the general relativity
theory is more advanced than the special relativty theory.

It reminds me that creating something more general is harder than creating
something specialized for a specific problem. For programmers this seems to be
obvious, but for others this is counter intuitive.

~~~
marcosdumay
For anybody that ever used some kind of math, it is obvious. But "counter
intuitive" could be Mathematics middle name.

------
graphememes
> It's not true that there's nothing new under the sun.

Philosophically this statement is false.

Mental health wise, it's a lot nicer to keep in mind than the truth of reality
that you reside within.

~~~
msla
Hm. Can something be philosophically false but factually correct?

~~~
graphememes
Love is an example I can think of.

------
jackblack8989
This guy pretends to be an intellectual but is the biggest wannabe I know. He
tried to block the latest Steve Jobs film because it showed how much of an
asshole Jobs was

~~~
123lalala123
The guy, ironically enough, is the living proof that capitalism doesn't reward
talent.

------
w_t_payne
There are also the platitudes that everybody knows but that nobody does
anything about.... Oftentimes there is virtue in simply being unusually
conscientious.

------
trapperkeeper74
Diff eq-like behavior is everywhere: species population, popularity,
technology, market saturation, economics, spring rates, etc.

(Malthus was partially ;) mistaken.)

------
raldi
What are some examples of past insights someone has made by discovering
something slightly surprising about the general world?

------
golemotron
I think Nassim Nicholas Taleb's work epitomizes the "general yet surprising"
territory.

------
grappler
Clearly Paul Graham is defending the Bodega vending machine here ;)

------
peterwwillis
tl;dr if you have an idea that isn't very "new" then keep working on it until
it is "more new"

There should be a twitter account that just summarizes rambling think pieces.

------
rehevkor5
F=ma is surprising? We took two values and combined them to define a new one.
You can define all sorts of new things this way, how is that surprising?

~~~
alexashka
You're making a valid point in a not-so-nice way.

What he meant was F=ma combined with other formulas that make use of F, make
up a system that's surprisingly useful while remaining simple to use.

I imagine you already knew that.

If you're acting as an editor, you can phrase your point better. if you're
merely nitpicking for things to 'gotcha' someone - I assure you that's not a
smart longterm strategy :)

------
lotusko
It's very resonant,ths for sharing.

------
kadenshep
Paul Graham doing what he does best. Pseudo-philosophical musings with no
basis or any kind of rigorous pass through. Why is this gaining visibility? If
anyone else had posted this it'd never see the light of day on here.

~~~
alexashka
I found it to be a nice little reminder of 'don't worry about being original,
keep digging and maybe there'll be a gem there someday'.

The simple things are good to be reminded of, on a regular basis, that's why
:)

------
QuantumRoar
This is not true as often you find surprising things that are not general
which ARE NOT GOSSIP. To stay with the physics theme, the Schwarzschild
solution of general relativity is a very special one and I don't think anybody
thinks that black holes are gossip.

And it is certainly not surprising that amateurs in general forget that F = ma
is only valid if the mass does not change. The more general expression is F =
dp/dt, where p is the momentum. But this, of course, is also only valid in
inertial systems. It's not really important to the article but it does kind of
annoy me that he uses the most special case of an expression in an argument
about it being general.

He could have actually made the point about generality by comparing this
expression to the most general one for the force (in a frame of reference that
accelerates). That would have also shown why generality can quickly become
infeasible in practice. If he knew how many approximations people make in the
real world, not because they want to, but because they HAVE TO, his worldview
might be a different one.

I feel like he's trying to make a point about a very specific scenario but
doesn't mention it explicitly. Instead he tries to be general and therefore
fails to understand that his view doesn't actually apply in general.

~~~
oldandtired
Theoretical entities called "black holes" cannot exist in finite universe (no
matter the perspective changes that are applied). The result (if I understand
it correctly) applies to a universe in which there is a single massive body
and universe is eternal.

Hence, if time dilation exists (under increasing levels of gravity) "black
hole" cannot form in any finite time. Since there are many massive bodies in
our universe, solution to problem is not applicable.

So, in that context, "black holes" ARE GOSSIP!!!!

Let the "GOSSIP" wars commence.

Other than that, I think you make some very salient points, especially about
the approximations that we make and the validity of those approximations to
the specific applications/situations being studied.

~~~
QuantumRoar
Yes, the current understanding is that general relativity breaks down inside
of black holes and, to understand how it really works, we need a quantum
theory of gravity.

However, I would not call it gossip since, by your reasoning, anything could
be gossip then. I understand gossip as being something unimportant but the
Schwarzschild solution was a major milestone in the understanding of general
relativity. Moreover, all scifi movies considering wormholes and such, can be
traced back to the usual visualization of the black hole distorting space
time. Pretty consequential discovery I'd say.

~~~
oldandtired
You miss the point that the Schwarzschild solution was for a very specific
universe that does not in any way match ours. Hence, saying that the solution
is applicable to our universe and WILL give rise to the theoretical entity
know as a "black hole" is pushing the solution well beyond it actual
applicability.

Much as I like good SF (and even mediocre SF), I believe there is enough
evidence to say that our understanding is very incomplete and that GR (though
it give some good approximations in general) may be a complete furphy.

Our problem at this time is that any time conflicting evidence comes up. it
tends to get either buried or ignore or those bringing it up get ad hominem
attacked.

If the evidence is obviously incorrect then it should be a simple matter of
showing exactly how it is incorrect. My observations of the actions of the
proponents of GR are that they tend towards dogmatism and and not discussion,
ridicule and not rebuttal.

If odd things are found, then the prevailing theory (in this case GR) should
be able to fairly handle these discrepancies.

There are no "stupid" questions.

------
matt4077
This genre of writing is also neatly categorised into one of three categories:
Obvious, unactionable, or wrong.

PG sometimes meanders into actual meaning. But the likes of Tim Ferris or Seth
Godin absolutely excel at this drivel.

------
quuquuquu
It's funny, a lot of my imposter syndrome comes from an anxiety about not
having massive "deltas of novelty", as PG would call it.

I guess all I can do now is hope that whoever is listening can see the value
in incremental change :)

~~~
heavenlyblue
Most probably your impostor syndrome comes from an anxiety. That's it. There's
nothing more to it. It's unhealthy.

Stop being anxious, go out in the world and see what your ideas are worth.

\- Capitalism would define their value on how much you'd earn from these
ideas.

\- Writers would value them based on how many readers buy your books.

\- Developers would value them based on how many contributors your open-source
projects has.

\- Or die and keep your diary and maybe in 50 years you will turn out to be
the genius who saw the future.

But still - none of that absolutely requires anyone to be anxious.

~~~
jamesrcole
> Most probably your impostor syndrome comes from an anxiety. That's it.
> There's nothing more to it.

This implies that anxieties themselves have no causes.

> Stop being anxious

I'd like to see your advice on other things. "Stop being sick!", "Stop being
afraid of spiders!", "Stop being introverted!"

~~~
jschwartzi
Anxiety is caused by a form of ruminating about the future in which you focus
on uncertainty. Get out there and eliminate all uncertainty and you will feel
your anxiety disappear! Tell your boss you feel unappreciated, talk to
strangers, and generally do things that you feel anxious about.

If your anxiety is so strong that you can't do those things, then get therapy!
It changed my life, and a good therapist can change yours as well.

~~~
maxxxxx
I think it's great that you are sharing your personal experience. This can
help others. But saying "and a good therapist can change yours as well" is a
dangerous thing. It worked for you but you can't know for sure if it will work
for others.

Share your experience but don't tell others that your way will work for
everyone.

~~~
jschwartzi
I used "can" to mean that there is a possibility. I did not say "will" which
removes all doubt.

~~~
maxxxxx
"Can" means that he can do it. "May" would be a better word.

------
coldtea
> _Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, and Jessica Livingston for reading
> drafts of this._

This (a very basic 400 word essay/post) needed "drafts" and 3 people going
through them?

I like some of PG's essays, but this one just has a couple of trivial
insights.

~~~
HiroshiSan
Yes it's called writing.

~~~
coldtea
Wooosh. That would be a relevant answer if I had asked about the practice of
writing drafts and having friends go through them in general.

My point was different: several drafts and editors were needed for this tiny
and banal result?

It's like seeing someone ordering a $10,000 AGA cooker, buying all kinds of
spices, herbs and fresh ingredients, amassing several Kitchenaid appliances,
getting into an apron and a chef's hat, and then proceed to make ...a grilled
cheese sandwich.

~~~
psyc
PG lets his inner circle read all of his posts first, whether it's strictly
necessary or not. Also, I thought it was commonly accepted that a lot of work
goes into distilling simple expressions of ideas.

~~~
coldtea
> _Also, I thought it was commonly accepted that a lot of work goes into
> distilling simple expressions of ideas._

That's only for when you actually distill complex ideas into simple
expression. E.g. explaining a complex subject in a succinct and simple to
understand way, like Feynman's lectures.

A mere simple expression of something banal to begin with shouldn't take lots
of work, the same way writing "The sun is hot, we should better not walk on
it" shouldn't.

