This is one of the major problems with PG's essays---he frequently assigns the worst possible motives to the people he disagrees with.

gman83 did the same: "This smells like a way to justify ignoring difficult criticism."

but did he do it incorrectly, or frequently?

This kind of attitude seem to be very common among 'ambitious' founders, especially the YC crowd.

Historically parodied as "One day the world will understand my true genius. And then you'll all be sorry!"

It's trivially easy to disprove. Just read some vintage issues of Byte to see an impressive number of not entirely crazy novel ideas from established domain experts which crashed and burned.

Of course some of these ideas - a minority - turned out to be successful. But a little digging shows success was not about the quality of the tech, and more the quality of the marketing, with some occasional monopolist strong-arming.

In fact this is very much the US model. Take an okay to good idea, hype it into the stratosphere with a massive marketing and brand recognition campaign, and sell it at an inflated price.

If you're lucky you can pitch it as a B2C Veblen lifestyle good or a B2B strategic corporate necessity. Win.

That's very different to debating the tech itself purely on intrinsic technical merits.

In a very literal sense it's a different argument happening in a different space. It's neither helpful nor clarifying to imply it isn't.

> Just read some vintage issues of Byte

I still have the AI issue of Byte[0] and there still aren’t any robots that can draw for shit. /s

[0]: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-04

The word “idea” might be the problem. “Business plan” or “business strategy” might be better? Even “mission strategy”?

That encompasses the idea and how to get it executed and what resources are needed to get it to be sustainable, over what timescale.

This applies to business but also charity, non profit, political efforts etc.

Notice I didn’t mention profit or even revenue. These days ideas can go a long time being supported by investors who see the strategy.

For example I am thinking of YouTube, Tesla etc.

But there needs to be a strategy. Like a rocket launch or starting a campfire there might need to be different stages where the idea to the uninitiated looks very different at each stage, but it’s all part of the same master plan.

For example. Uber was a taxi firm + app at first. Peer to peer came later.

I don't think most crazy ideas crashing and burning is good enough to disprove the thesis. Even if 1 in 100 ideas that can bring about 10x change in important areas are all that succeed, we need those ideas to improve things. I think if you look for marketing you'll find it, so even ideas that win on technology can look like monopolist strong-arming if that's what you're looking for. Also not all ideas that win on technology are the very best the technology could be, they are often the right compromise that's a good deal better than what they competed against. Windows for instance did a lot of strong arming monopolist tactics but was also the clear technical winner on PC for ease of use for much of its existence. I don't think the monopolist tactics would be enough if the average joe found it too hard to use.

>> Even if 1 in 100 ideas that can bring about 10x change in important areas are all that succeed, we need those ideas to improve things

Even by your own math this is a bad idea, with 1 in 100 leading to a 10x improvement we'd be better to stick with what we've got.

That’s not how math works. 10x improvements don’t necessary capture 10x revenue. And 100 experiments don’t necessarily cost 1x revenue each.

If so that suggests it's the right attitude to have.

Not the first time, not the last time. We were misogynists when we were criticizing Elizabeth Holmes. It comes with the territory.

That conflates different cases in a way that strikes me as misleading.

The gist of it is that there was a flippant, reactionary tone to anyone criticizing Theranos, that attempted to brush off valid criticism with "you don't like her because she's a woman" or "you want to see the company fail because it's run by a woman". No, actually, I just want to see some data, regardless of who is in charge. Save the "women run the show in SV" rhetoric and flashy cover page photography for Vogue. This is strictly a business analysis. If we can't have a civil discussion about these things without being accused of being sexist, or envious, or whatever other pejorative people use to redirect criticism or probing questions, then we might as well not have a discussion at all because we all know how these things go. The comments write themselves.

Having said that, it's tiresome to have the same pile-on garbage of negative comments every time a PG article is posted. The last 4-5 of his articles invite so much backlash and scathing kneejerk rhetoric, I wonder why these people use HN forums at all.

> there was a flippant, reactionary tone to anyone criticizing Theranos

That's inaccurate. No doubt some responses were like that; "anyone" is an extreme exaggeration.

The internet hivemind (which is all of us) leaps from a few data points to anyone, always, everytime, etc., surprisingly seamlessly. Truth be told, one can even substitute "single" for "few" in the previous sentence without too much loss of fidelity—but perhaps it's cynical to insist on it.

This is largely just how human memory works, but I pay close attention to it because it deeply affects this community's perception of itself, and that is a big problem because such false feelings of generality skew sharply negative.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

p.s. I completely agree that we need to have substantive discussion about these things.

Holmes was a domain expert, wasn't she? I guess con artists also happen to be domain experts sometimes. Oh no, is it possible your precious founder is confusing chance with wisdom or luck with skill?

I don't know if she was or not, nor if that idea would particularly count as crazy. It's a little silly to misread pg as saying that every such idea must be true. Also, why be so mean? It only makes things worse.

Are you sure that a community idolizing the utterances of a winning gambler isn't what makes everything worse?

There are many things making things worse, and one does not rule out another, so that question is a bit of a distraction. I'd like to know what you think you gain by being so mean. Surely that's not the kind of person you want to be?

The idea that this community "idolizes" PG is trivially disproven by glancing through any recent thread on his writings, including this one.

There is some irony in invoking ad hominem arguments while claiming my critique is a distraction. I'm simply acting as an arbiter of which intellectual sausage makes the world worse, just as you are. We have different opinions about which wurst is worse. If your view of reality is that these people don't idolize a gambler masquerading as a philosopher, then I'd absolutely love to agree with you if I could.

I suppose you could say that my question were an ad hominem argument if it were an argument, but it's not - it's a question. Your comments shocked me by how mean they were, even relative to the other stuff that I read on here. And I have vague memories of having been shocked in the past by how mean you were on other occasions—I don't remember anything specific, but I have a residual Pavlovian wince about it. All of that made want to ask you why.

You're getting a bit semantic in defending what you certainly know is ad hominem misdirection. But if you want to double-down on it, it doesn't faze me. Your contention is that it is more important that I, a random commenter on the internet, am psychoanalyzed than to consider the substance of the argument I made. Your concern was how it was presented, not its content. I'll take that as a concession that the argument had enough validity that you'd prefer not to address it.

I answered your argument in my initial reply (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27070820): pg isn't saying that all crazy ideas by domain experts must be true, so a flagrant counterexample doesn't prove anything. Indeed, flagrant counterexamples are to be expected, since almost by definition, crazy ideas will have more variance than conventional ones.

The problem is that there wasn't really much of an argument there. You converted his point into something stupid that he didn't say, and then did a bunch of name-calling. Since the "argument" was so flimsy and the name-calling so mean, I asked why you would bother to do that. I'm still interested in the answer, even if the answer is that you don't think you did that. It's not really personal, I'm just curious. But yes I understand how it could come across that way.

No, your reply was a flagrant straw man. "every such idea must be true" != "confusing chance with wisdom or luck with skill." A straw man is where you're evading an argument by pretending it's something it isn't.

I certainly didn't "convert his point" into anything more "stupid" than what he said. In a somewhat farcically stereotypical way, this venture capitalist argues he makes decisions -- better than a coin toss presumably -- based on the notion that "domain experts" know what they're talking about. My contention was that venture capitalists don't pick winners better than a coin toss at all. They are simply gambling. When they win a jackpot, they construct a fiction that the win was predestined on some rational basis and not simply chance.

(Persisting with your ad hominem, by the way, isn't working.)

Your just not a domain expert on ideas though. Just look at all the words he wrote on ideas. You should be more open to his absurd belief in the idea of Mighty App being a game changer.

Please don't be snarky or take HN threads even further in the flamewar direction. No matter how you feel about $person or $subject, it's bad for community to pee in the swimming pool this way. It encourages the more discerning swimmers not to stick around—and we're trying for something else in any case.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html