Let's all pat ourselves on the back with a fluffy blog post about how jolly wonderful we are. In about 10 years everyone else will be doing the same.
Just kidding. Every profession I have even a passing familiarity with is absolutely chockers with self-congratulatory fluff. And it's usually hilarious to the outsiders who can see the narrowness of a profession's vision.
Out of the professions I've seen, who have been the widest thinkers outside of their own field?
This post is brief, but not fluffy. I wish he had dug more into the forces at work here. But it is an important point nonetheless.
And we on HN could do better than merely dismiss it. We could try to dig into the underlying forces ourselves. E.g. not all hobbies consist of making the Apple I. So which do, and why? Are the things called hobbies two different types of work that are conflated by clueless observers simply because they're not the worker's day job? Or is there some amount of crossover between inventing the future and merely playing around?
Instead the top comment is the forum analogue of a fluff post: a cynical dismissal based on some presumed bad intention on the writer's part.
> I wish he had dug more into the forces at work here. But it is an important point nonetheless.
He was busy slapping all nerds everywhere on the back with reflected glory.
You're just reading in what you wanted him to say and judging your desired reading, not the original.
(Edit: and I did the same, fixating on the self-congratulatory fluff and ignoring the selection-biased hypothesis about making predictions.)
> Instead the top comment is the forum analogue of a fluff post: a cynical dismissal based on some presumed bad intention on the writer's part.
You're basically imputing to me a motive to impute a motive to Chris that in my estimation neither of us had. I mentioned Naïve Realism a while back in one of the various pitchfork debates (the Tesla test drive, I think). I think it's happening here too.
But really, this post was self-congratulation. I've read similar fluff from marketers and advertisers who see themselves as the lever-pullers of capitalism, from student politicians about their destiny as masters of all creation, from lawyers about the utter indispensibility of their ancient craft, from engineers ditto ... ad infinitum. In all such cases they could have written the same stuff about how they were shaping The Future Of The World years ago.
I'd be more interested in seeing the base rate on all the garage projects that go absolutely nowhere, achieve nothing and have no meaningful impact on the world. That would be most of them.
Which is fine. But let's not pretend that since Woz was a genius, the rest of us are also in the same category.
Which is fine. But let's not pretend that since Woz was a genius, the rest of us are also in the same category.
Totally agree. Let's see what the OP is suggesting:
1. People make awesome products/services on the weekends.
2. These awesome products/services will serve new industries.
3. So that means all awesome products/services should be built on the weekends so we can create new industries.
It’s a good bet these present-day hobbies will seed future industries.
I vehemently disagree. This is not a good bet. You know what's a good bet? That IBM's stock will continue to rise.[1] That SAP's stock will continue to rise.[2] It's also a good bet that these companies will continue (as they have for years) to create technology products that businesses want. There is a risk they won't, but it's a lower risk than the guy creating a product in his garage over the weekend.
What the smartest people do on the weekends is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.
This is the comment that really irks me and dually why this whole post is seen as self promotion. A 'bet' is something you risk against someone else's risk. Are people willing to tell me that they'd put more money down on the weekend projects than the companies who have been doing this for 10+ years? The OP is suggesting that there will be a higher percentage of new industries created (which might be possible), but then states that these industries will cause the working population to shift to this new industry. Bullocks. What evidence does anyone have to suggest this?
Good on the OP though...he got my eyeballs. Black swan sightings sell well.
He coined a nice epigram I will remember. That is enough for the article to be interesting.
What is the problem with being self-congratulatory? What is wrong with focusing on the positive and thinking that your hobby and life's work is worthwhile? Would anything be created if people were constantly doubting themselves and their creations? Would anything be better then?
What harm would there be in people hoping to be the next woz? And with the low base rate of garage projects going anywhere, which we are all painfully aware of, don't you think it's better to give encouragement and hope. I do, and I think a dismissal such as yours is harmful to the greater cause of creating interesting ideas, programs and thoughts.
> What is the problem with being self-congratulory?
I'd like to say here that having some perspective can prevent certain kinds of mistake. I think that's correct.
I'd be on surer ground if I point out that a person entirely satisfied with their professional perspective isn't going to improve past a certain asymptote that they themselves are unable to perceive.
But honestly? I just find self-congratulation tremendously embarrassing. I don't know if it's inherited or a self-deprecating theme present in Australian culture or just plain old jealousy. Or some combination of the above.
Well, ideas are constantly being heavily pruned and cut to the ground on hacker news.
And some of that pruning is good and necessary. Otherwise, bad ideas would proliferate and take air and light from the good ideas. But often when I read HN's comments, the field just looks like scorched earth. A complete, overpowering negativity everywhere. And I think then the pruning has lost its purpose, and is a bad thing.
I suppose, I would like that whenever an idea was dismissed it would be by pointing to a better idea in the vicinity which could then be thought about or worked on instead. That way the true purpose of criticism and pruning would be clear: To not let the bad ideas take resources from the good ones.
With regards to self-congratulatory behavior in general: well I suppose I understand you. I've been brought up that way too, as has perhaps most people. Still, I recall Russel's own adage:
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts.”
I don't know the author of the OP, but I do certainly think that negative attitudes create even more doubts in the wise, while fools and fanatics likely are innately immune. Therefore, I don't think that unreserved dismissals usually will do anything to people's character, except for strengthening those traits you really want to see less of, in the wise.
Yeah, I think it's not only about self-deprecating humor, but as a broader approach to life, about not taking yourself seriously, ever. Those two are probably the greatest things a human being can have, and I always look for them in peers as a way to find some common ground. Are you embarassed for me?
Maybe I'm traveling in the wrong tech circles, but I hardly see insufficient confidence in the greatness of ourselves as the major problem facing techie culture, such that we need more encouragement to cultivate such a self-appreciation. How great and ahead of our times we are, especially compared to all those rubes who aren't techies, is sort of an axiom of the culture.
The word "smartest" in the title misses the mark slightly in a way that exposes the idea to too-easy dismissal. The way people commonly use "smart" (high IQ, basically) isn't super-correlated with what Chris is talking about. Many high-IQ people are too locked-in to Achievement to bother with disinterested play. You can redefine "smartest" to mean "those who turn out to have been most ahead of their time", but that's circular and doesn't help identify the quality.
The body of the post uses the word "hobby", though, and that's much better. Your hobby is the thing you do because you want to, whether or not anything comes of it and whether or not anyone thinks it's valuable. Hobbies are marginal, not one's main or proper thing (Woz was an engineer at HP). And they're often wild or eccentric. The main reason we wouldn't normally use the word "hobby" for important creative activity—that it seems too trivial—is actually a point in its favour. Incidentally, there's an earlier usage of the word "hobby" that was closer to what we now call "obsession" or "fixation". People would apologize for introducing their hobbies into polite conversation.
One must also insist on the fact that very often nothing does come of this quality. To imagine otherwise is to allow no room for randomness.
> You can redefine "smartest" to mean "those who turn out to have been most ahead of their time", but that's circular and doesn't help identify the quality.
> One must also insist on the fact that very often nothing does come of this quality. To imagine otherwise is to allow no room for randomness.
The problem is that it is fluffy, and self-congratulatory: it just pats us on the back and says, what we do in our spare time is the future. We are the future! Our hobbies are tomorrow's serious endeavors! This is boring pseudo-intellectualism, and what techie forums always risk decaying into. The part you identify as having been left out is the entirety of what would be interesting in the analysis: any kind of specificity beyond flattering the greatness and prescience of our very-smart techie hobbies.
From an evolutionary perspective, all these side projects represent mutations in technology. Environmental pressures are acting on these mutations to select the project that is a best fit for the masses and reward that best fit by reproducing it or as the author puts it, make it into our daily lives in ten years.
So it may be impossible to build a model of what projects will turn out like the Apple 1 and which ones will never be heard of because if technology works like evolution then it doesn't have to be a linear progression forward. It's just whatever tool solves the problem today.
From a personal perspective, I work on projects because I can't help myself. I see something that I would love to use and I need to build it. It's addictive. I'm not sure if there is much more to it than that.
On the off chance anyone actually reads this... :-)
He somewhat, and you more so, get to a point that has been bothering me a fair bit recently. How much should I care about meaning in what I do in my spare time. Possibly due to my upbringing, until recently I felt that if I had spare time I should be doing things that could ultimately lead to a new career, or that at least would produce things that are important. IOW, not just play games but program them. Go out on hikes, and take photography in a way designed to allow the experience to be shared for possibly publication.
However, the last couple of weekends I have forced myself (harder the first weekend than the last couple) to just veg and to play the two games I actually enjoy playing.
In part because the critical reception to most of my "serious" stuff has been lacking, and in part because I'm wondering if trying to do "important" stuff is keeping me from refreshing like I am supposed to do on the days I'm not at my main job.
To your point specifically, I would be curious to know whether the best use of our limited time (at least until we hit the singularity and then time becomes a different medium) is to be working on different aspects of ourself - or to try and fine ways to have fun devoid of any intended meaning?
I don't know how old you are, but I'm in my mid-40s. For the longest time, everything I did was related to learning more about computers. Over the past couple of years, that changed - I found that I was no longer interested in learning new stuff so much. It's easy to pick up new skills, but I don't seek them out the way I did.
I realized that I had completely forgotten what I LIKED to do, in favor of doing what I HAD to do to keep making money. I actually had to sit down and write a list of things I liked to do, and make sure to start doing them. It's easy to lose sight of why we are hear. No one ever wished they had worked more, as they lay dying.
My point is, don't feel bad about doing what you want to do.
to just veg and to play the two games I actually enjoy playing.
Really. I try hard to keep my tech-hobby time from being "productive". What I do with computers and/or sound is -fun- and the world'll be damn lucky if anything comes out of it but my amusement. When I was a kid I'd lay on the lawn staring at clouds (hard in winter) or run around everyone's houses and lawns with kids (several reasons that's no longer an option). Got another harness, go get yourself a horse.
>a cynical dismissal based on some presumed bad intention on the writer's part
I don't think jacq presumed bad intention or dismissed the post entirely. I appreciate someone calling out the combination of 'narrowness of vision' and a little self-righteousness. Chris' post was totally well-intentioned, but jacq's meta point adds value, as now there's the human component of self-importance in addition to the original point of the post
To start, I'm thinking of tests for things that aren't cultural trends, like the fist bump:
I think some differentiators between the two types of work under the umbrella term 'hobbies' is:
It's something where people are asking the question, "What can I do with this now, that I couldn't do before?" Hobbies like stamp collecting, or star wars trivia seem to fail this test.
It's something where other people can build upon the hobby to do other things. Hobbies like being a foodie and MUDs seem to fail this test.
As far as I can gather, it's people taking advantage of a new piece of knowledge or technology to try to figure out what new things it enables them to do.
Several times in my career I have found myself learning and reading and suddenly finding that what I want to do next has no blog posts, or third party frameworks - I have reached the state of the art in one (tiny) direction.
That is where the productive hobbies take you - to the point where to play some more you need to invent. At this point skills, available time all come to bear - but I now recognise this time - and refuse to waste the opportunities.
Not easy to spot for oneself - spotting it as investment - no idea :-)
> not all hobbies consist of making the Apple I. So which do, and why?
which grain of sand, dropped onto the pile, caused the avalanche, and why? :)
Must've been the red one. Last three times it was green green yellow red. Well, if you don't count the time when most of the top was already red, that stands to reason.
> Instead the top comment is the forum analogue of a fluff post: a cynical dismissal based on some presumed bad intention on the writer's part.
Personally I think, cynical as it may have been, the article does require a counterpoint to its "brief"-ness.
I really disagree with these question/statements implying how surely there must be underlying causes why one hobby results in "inventing the future", and another does not, as if these causes have any validity outside our monkey brain's 20/20 hindsight.
By that I mean, creative hobbies are great. And they should be encouraged, for people that like that sort of thing (which is probably 99.9% of the HN crowd, but believe it or not, not all people everywhere). A tiny few of those hobbies will turn out "inventing the future" (like the term btw).
But there's two ways of going about that and there is no reason to believe that one has higher odds of being successful than the other (except for a very deep and very human desire to believe): You can either chase the dragon, imprint order onto the chaos that the future grows from, believing you can bend it to your will. Or you can just have some fun.
Can't you do both? Why yes, you can. Buying lottery tickets, some people seem to greatly enjoy imagining they can apply their will to a random process. I don't know if they have creative hobbies, though (but I'm not judging). Or maybe interpretation of Tarot cards, that's both creative, and applying your will to a random process. ... come to think of it, it is also "inventing the future", in a different sense :)
>And we on HN could do better than merely dismiss it.
What, embrace it? I'll take self-deprecation over rejection of self-deprecation.
>We could try to dig into the underlying forces ourselves. E.g. not all hobbies consist of making the Apple I. So which do, and why? Are the things called hobbies merely two different types of work that are conflated by clueless observers simply because they're not the worker's day job? Or is there some amount of crossover between inventing the future and merely playing around?
Maybe if the article did that it wouldn't be so fluffy. It's fluffy because its terminology is closer to "Rock Star" than "Guitar Lesson."
If you are still inclined to view
jacques_chester's post as fluff, consider at least that _submission quality affects comment quality._
I know you're not likely to respond to my comment. I'm partially just wondering why you're wading into the field personally to address a meta point.
No, not to embrace it. But to ask and answer the more interesting question: "How do we differentiate between hobbies that changes the way the world does things, and hobbies that don't?"
Let's say jacques_chester was right. It was fluff and self-congratulatory. What comes of it? There's nothing to take home there. But if we had moved the discussion to the more interesting question (that the OP failed to cover, but we also failed to discuss), then that has pretty wide implications of how we might tackle our life's work.
That's funny because most i've met are narrow minded about their own field.
At least when I went chatting with lawyers and interviewing after I first got out of law school, every non-academic lawyer I met in the field of IP law was fairly narrow minded.
Even asking them things that their businesses depended on, like "What do you think will happen as patents on computer implemented inventions become significantly more popular?" and "If large-money companies start suing each other over these kinds of patents, do you think it will eventually cause significant scaling back in what is allowed?"
The answers I got told me that most couldn't even theorize/be visionary/plan about things absolutely critical to their current business//field.
Note: I was talking to people who were managing partners/etc, who were making significant money due to the upswing in patenting software. They were also not stupid people, just, AFAICT, bad at business. Most lawyers i've met are actually very bad at running businesses, but i'll save these stories for another topic.
My current lawyer is a technology entrepreneur on the side.
My law lecturers were variously keen observers of politics, literature, art, human nature and economics. One of the people I most admire as an essayist and thinker has three (three!) law degrees.
However, putting aside the exchange of anecdotes at twenty paces: you're absolutely right. In every profession there are people whose vision never rises above their own blinkered view of the universe.
I guess my point is that being intellectually parochial is ... well, it has drawbacks. Especially if you set out to explain why your profession is amazing and you have nothing whatever to compare it with except ... your profession.
Every time I wander out of my own field I first of all make a total arse of myself. But I always come back clutching something very useful. I never thought Olympic weightlifting would have given me useful life insights, it has. I never thought that learning muscular physiology would help me better understand software architecture, it has. I didn't think systems dynamics or fuzzy logic would upend my view of the world. They have. I didn't think that learning the basics of accounting would change the way I think about how to pick startup ideas, it definitely has.
And studying law, even though I dropped out because it made me unhappy compared to cutting code, gave me training in a model of thought that I still find tremendously useful.
You suffer exactly what you criticize. You preach cross discipline, yet make an absurd generalization that people from a single domain are the best at not being in a single domain.
Do you have evidence to back this up? Something more then anecdote?
You cannot know everything about every domain. There are people better than you at everything. The balance between specializing and diversifying depends on so many variables. This isn't something you can make a trite generalization about.
edit: And out of the professions I've experienced, the most widely diversified one is "I don't have the data to tell you."
Jacques seems to mean that as a group, lawyers are more open to other domains. This is probably because there is no domain of "the law" by itself--law is merely a reflection of society.
For example, regulatory laws must take into account political restrictions, economic theory and realities, and the goals and pragmatic realities and of the specific industry or industries being regulated. Criminal laws must do all that and take into account various socioeconomic factors. Tax law is a balance of economic theory, revenue generation, political restrictions, and pragmatic realities of accounting across thousands of industries.
That's got a lot to do with it. A lawyer might specialise in some area of law, but the clients who come in will have troubles in or questions about an unlimited number of problem domains. So lawyers get to a surprising amount of the rest of the world outside of their profession.
Some other professions off the top of my head that can't "stick to their knitting": mathematicians, programmers, philosophers, psychologists and economists.
This isn't fluff. It's saying that what you love doing (if you're not getting paid) might be the future. If the activity has enough value on its own to be worthwhile without immediate monetary reward, then it's a good bet there's something valuable about your activity that will ultimately be recognized by the market.
It's not much different from investing. If we see company X investing in space mining even though it's not even paying off right now, there's good chance they Know it's worth the investment (or are at least confident enough to gamble on it).
If the activity has enough value on its own to be worthwhile without immediate monetary reward, then it's a good bet there's something valuable about your activity that will ultimately be recognized by the market.
Where is the evidence for that? Where are the broad data that looks at what has been done over, say, the last 20 years and examines what has been recognized by the market and what has not?
You can't just look at things that we now know to be successful, you have to (some how, if even possible) look at what was done and never became more than a hobby.
That's a good point. And in that respect, my comment and the blog post are fluff since they're not backed up by any research. And I think I overstated my point in the quote you selected.
But I think you can research it by looking at popular languages/libraries/technologies and who invented them for fun and their impact on the market. Yes, it's false to say that everything that's a hobby now is serious business in 10 years. The article limits it to very smart people. I'd limit it further to very smart and lucky people, like Linus for instance.
I see your point, but the original article is a interesting take on "how to see the future", which is a powerful thing to do if you're trying to found a startup that succeeds big.
So it's worth the read to me. Just a little mind-stretcher, but one of the things I come to Hacker News for.
Predicting the future is, as the saying goes, hard.
Humans are basically awful at it. Even the smartest and best informed humans, as Philip Tetlock demonstrated pretty convincingly.
Some forms of knowledge are profoundly retrospective. You can deduce general principles, you can load up your squishy neural net with subtle patterns to match, but ultimately lots of things can only be guessed at with a great deal of innate fuzziness and uncertainty.
The process of forming such a system of judgement is called "wisdom". It's slow, inefficient and it's still absolutely crushed by simple statistical heuristics such as "40% of the time things stay about the same".
And it's usually hilarious to the outsiders who can see the narrowness of a profession's vision.
The post list stuff like 3D printing (i.e. decentralized/democratized manufacturing). If just that one technology becomes widespread (and it's well on the way) it's going to radically alter the world. All your stuff is going to be made differently. There will be different constraints on how you can treat your stuff and who can decide what it looks like, and that's going to change how you feel about most of the things you own. How much broader a vision could you possibly ask for?
Just kidding. Every profession I have even a passing familiarity with is absolutely chockers with self-congratulatory fluff. And it's usually hilarious to the outsiders who can see the narrowness of a profession's vision.
Out of the professions I've seen, who have been the widest thinkers outside of their own field?
So far: lawyers. I'm serious.