Patrick CollisonVerified account

If you read and enjoy the talk, there's a full book of this stuff: http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEngineering.pdf …. It is stellar.

One of my working perspectives is that Silicon Valley is substantially an engine for generating positive tail outcomes.

It does feel like a lot of questions in these debates come down in large part to optimizing for the median vs optimizing for tail outcomes.

Maybe they're useful to disentangle. Latter feels like an empirical question; former is of course just about values and has no right answer.

and, separately, to what degree intensity of application *causes* the latter.

Feels to me disagreement is over two separate things: what it is that people *should* be optimizing for (quality of life vs tail outcomes)…

(Much easier to endorse comfortable balance.)

No snark meant -- it's an important question for all of us, and he's giving voice to a harder-to-argue perspective.

I've been enjoying reading @rabois's debate with others over past day or two on the importance of hard work.

And https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/IdeaPF.pdf …, which is very readable and quite unsettling.

(By "a hack", I just mean something that sounds implausible at first blush. Without that, too likely it's already been attempted.)

Enumerating those characteristics sounds mundane, but I've started to notice more such ideas since putting the traits together.

Interesting category of ideas: things that are cheap, leveraged/scalable, and some kind of hack. ("CLH".) YC being an obvious example.

Internet of Things = things with fiddly wifi settings that you really should configure but continue to procrastinate on.