
The Surprising Value of Obvious Insights - ingve
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-surprising-value-of-obvious-insights/
======
gd2
". I felt like I was hearing from Pelé that the key to becoming a great soccer
player is wearing shoes."

It was just a movie, but in a movie about Pele, one of the memorable scenes
was he was playing with the neighborhood poor kids, against the rich kids in a
tournament. His team didn't have shoes or uniforms. And they didn't want to be
made fun of . They rather crookedly got shoes, but weren't use to them, and
they didn't fit.

By half time, they were losing badly. Pele took off his shoes, scored amazing
goals and the team came back to within one goal.

Kinda random, but what should I believe about shoes being obvious.

~~~
raisedbyninjas
I think the implied lesson was to wear decent quality, soccer shoes that fit
well. These obviously perform better than bare feet.

------
srj
Perhaps an obvious insight: the author found considerably more success by
attaching his idea to something that was mutually agreed upon. Even a mountain
of data was fruitless when posed in a confrontational manner.

I imagine this is broadly applicable anytime you are trying to win someone
over on an idea. I've noticed that for politically charged ideas it's
difficult to make progress because people attach their identity to their
opinion. But maybe this is just broadly the case, just more noticeable with
politics where opinions are strongly held. In any case as the author noticed
it's difficult to make any progress without rooting it in something other
people already believe.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I think this is what's wrong with political communication today. Neither side
will start talking from where their opponents are; both start where their
supporters are, and therefore talk only to their supporters.

~~~
catach
A large part of that seems to be due to the assumption that the competition is
irredeemable and malicious rather than simply mistaken.

~~~
reitanqild
Or even simpler: the assumption that I/we are right (we aren't always).

For one it isn't true:

I've read my fair share of vistory.

I'm provably smart, and yet one of the things I'm most happy with when it
comes to my time on HN is my ability to recognize when I'm wromg and change my
opinion.

Also I think it makes me more interesting to discuss with.

PS: not saying anyone should belive people at work who honestly believe in
chemtrails.

------
darkerside
I don't understand what is supposed to make an insight "obvious". Well, I do,
but only in that obviousness is a property of the relationship between an
individual and an idea, not a property of the idea itself. There are many
ideas that were once novel to me that are now obvious insights. Conversely,
there are many ideas that were once obvious to me that experience has since
contraindicated. With that personal definition of "obvious", reading this
article was a little bit of a bizarre experience.

~~~
gniv
I think the meaning here was ideas that are assumed widely used, and the
surprising value is in the fact that they are not widely used, and the need to
be spelled out.

~~~
darkerside
Right... but assumed by whom? The author of course. But anyone else? Maybe I'm
the only one here with uncommon sense.

------
ABCLAW
During my attempts to push the performance envelope, I've determined that even
pushing into the top 0.1 - 1.0% segment of the performance population is
primarily just consistency in avoiding brain-dead stupid obvious mistakes.

------
vinceguidry
Humans are forever attracted to the new and shiny. They are attracted to it so
much that they start chasing it before they have it in place to make sure the
old new and shiny that they chased two weeks ago isn't going to just
disappear.

The example given in the article is "meet your new hires on the first day."
This was a new and shiny at one point in time. It's become new and shiny
again, because now someone is paying attention to it. But it will soon become
old and crufty, and then forgotten, unless one can manage to _enshrine_ it.

Find out where in the organizational vision this insight belongs. The
organizational vision is the new and shiny that stays new and shiny, because
everyone participates in and contributes to it.

This doesn't just happen. It's the job of upper management to keep the
organizational vision alive. If it doesn't, then it gets old and crufty, and
then forgotten, like everything else, until someone suddenly wakes up again
and says, "hey this would be really cool!"

This applies to personal life as well.

------
arikr
From patio11 on twitter:

[https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/936615043126370306.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/936615043126370306.html)

Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the
same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been
taught before.

In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have
Told You Already.

Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think
you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk
about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this
will mark you as clueless. Technologists tend to severely underestimate the
difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do
not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software
is so easy there, amirite guys?")

Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and
is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The
news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday.
What it says is important usually isn't.

Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-
working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances.
This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably
proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.

The hardest problem in B2C is distribution. The hardest problem in B2B is
sales. AppAmaGooBookSoft are AppAmaGooBookSoft primarily because they have
mortal locks on distribution.

Everyone in Silicon Valley uses equity, and not debt, to fuel their growth
because debt is not available in sufficient quantities to poorly capitalized
companies without a strong history of adequate cash flows to service debt.

Investors in venture-back companies are purchasing a product. It is critically
important to understand that that product is growth. The reason tech is
favored as an asset class that it appears to be one of few sources of growth
available on the market at the moment at any price.

The explosive growth of the tech sector keeps average age down and depresses
average wages. Compared to industries which existed in materially the same
form in 1970, we have a stupidly compressed experience spectrum: 5+ years
rounds to "senior." This is not a joke.

The tech industry is fundamentally unserious about how it recruits, hires, and
retains candidates. About which I have a lot more to say than could fit in a
tweet, but, a good thing to know.

If you are attempting to hire for an engineering position, greater than 50% of
people who apply for the job and whose resume you select as "facially
plausible" will be entirely unable to program, at all. The search term for
learning more about this is FizzBuzz.

Software companies in B2B which aspire to growing quickly will eventually
spend more on sales and marketing than they do on engineering. You can read
S-1s of successful IPOs and calculate the ratio; it is sometimes 2X++.

The chief products of the tech industry are (in B2C) developing new habits
among consumers and (in B2B) taking a business process which exists in many
places and markedly decreasing the total cost of people required to implement
it.

There is no hidden reserve of smart people who know what they're doing,
anywhere. Not in government, not in science, not in tech, not at
AppAmaGooBookSoft, nowhere. The world exists in the same glorious imperfection
that it presents with.

Significant advances shipped by the tech industry in the last 20 years include
putting the majority of human knowledge in the hands of 40%++ of the world's
population, available on-demand, for "coffee money" not "university money."

Weak-form efficients market hypothesis is a good heuristic for evaluating the
public markets but a really, really bad heuristic for evaluating either
technical or economic facts about tech companies, startups, your career, etc
etc. Optimizations are possible; fruit hangs low.

Startups are (by necessity) filled with generalists; big companies are filled
with specialists. People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at
things which are done by specialists. People underestimate how deep
specialties can run. These are simultaneously true.

Most open source software is written by programmers who are full-time employed
by companies which directly consume the software, at the explicit or implicit
blessing of their employers. It is not charity work, any more than they
charitably file taxes.

The amount of money flowing through capitalism would astound you. The number
and variety of firms participating in the economy would astound you.

We don't see most of it every day for the same reason abstractions protect us
from having to care about metallurgy while programming.

CS programs have, in the main, not decided that the primary path to becoming a
programmer should involve doing material actual programming. There are some
exceptions: Waterloo, for example. This is the point where I joke "That's an
exhaustive list" but not sure that a joke.

Technical literacy in the broader population can be approximated with the
Thanksgiving test: what sort of questions do you get at Thanksgiving? That's
the ambient level of literacy.

Serious people in positions of power eat Thanksgiving dinners, too. Guess what
they ask at them.

Salaries in the tech industry are up _a lot_ in the last few years, caused by:
a tight labor market, collapse of a cartel organized against the interests of
workers, increasing returns to scale at AppAmaGooBookSoft, and the like.

Investor money _does not_ pay most salaries.

This concludes, for the moment, an off-the-cuff list of things which would
otherwise be too obvious to bring up in conversation.

Meta thought: you radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other
people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it.

------
klank
I don't even know how to gauge whether something is obvious or not. What
qualities does an "obvious idea" have?

------
ummonk
There are hundreds of “obvious” insights. Which ones are most important and
should be prioritized isn’t so obvious.

------
rsrsrs86
Oxymoronic headline. Probably not worth reading

