adamzerner
Yup! Mods: would you mind sharing how many have received payouts?
Other data points on the idea that stress and anxiety is incredible hard to avoid in various ambitious positions:
I felt lonely every day – maybe not constantly, but definitely every day for 9+ years. I haven’t talked to a CEO who didn’t feel extreme loneliness. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like I could be friends, even work friends, with anyone else on the team. That might have been my own baggage or a consequence of struggling to bring my whole self to work. The loneliness driver I’ve heard of most from other CEOs is the inability to talk with people about the emotional rollercoaster that’s inherent to the role.
I’m having a little bit of trouble understanding what you mean by this.
The way I see it (roughly) is that you can have a line somewhere that says “at this point the product becomes viable”, and you can have another line that says “at this point the product becomes lovable”. One thing you can argue about is where those lines belong. What exactly does it mean for a product to be viable? To be lovable?
A second thing you can argue about is which of those lines you should target (for a hypothesis test release).
A third thing you can argue about is where a current iteration of the product lies. Eg. with features A, B and C, where would you place the product along this spectrum? What if we added feature D? How far to the right does feature D move us? What about feature E?
With that stuff said, perhaps you are saying that people more or less agree on the first and second things, so there isn’t that much to discuss there, but there are substantial disagreements on the third thing, and thus most of the conversation is spent on this third thing. Is that what you mean?
Once you have agreement that you don’t really know what’s viable, lovable, or appropriate yet anyway, the wording is just bike-shed painting.
It seems to me like there are meaningful differences between these words: viable, lovable and appropriately gray. Viable is saying “the line is here to the left”, lovable is saying “the line is here to the right”, and appropriately gray is saying “there are tradeoffs involved in where you put the line”.
defining “possible” is usually the sticking point. This needs to be discussed in detail, not in general about whether it’s “viable” or “lovable”. What actual features do you want feedback on, and what set of operations/uses is anyone willing to pay for?
This is giving me a vibe of being similar to what my argument is about AGPs. Eg. you have to think about what line you want to target. Or am I misunderstanding your point?
The correct position on the viability axis will depend on the type of business you want to build. Experimenting on real users has one major cost: reputation.
That makes sense. I agree that reputation is a big factor to consider.
It’s also worth mentioning that in The Lean Startup, the author mentions that you can consider releasing products under a different brand name for this reason.
But if your business is something like a product that you only sell once, without any long-term client relationship then you can afford to alienate early users with a possibly crappy first product, and you should test stuff as soon as possible.
In retrospect, this is an important thing that I failed to bring up in my OP. Better late than never though. Thanks for prompting me to talk about it.
I’d like to distinguish between two different things. 1) Feedback releases and 2) hypothesis test releases (I just made these terms up). In the former, you just are pushing new code and getting feedback from users about it. In the latter, you are intending it as a hypothesis test, where if the results are good you keep going and if they are bad you pivot. For feedback releases, I think there are few reasons not to be super aggressive about it.
But I think that in talking about MVPs vs AGPs vs MLPs, the crux of the disagreement is regarding that second type of release: hypothesis test releases. MVPs say that you can do this quite early on. MLPs say the bar is higher and you want to make sure the product is lovable before you pivot. My point about AGPs is instead of just defaulting to something like “viable” or “lovable”, you should consider the tradeoffs at play.
That is sounding to me like it has a similar problem. How do you know when you reach that point of surpassing “zero advantages over what already exists”? Maybe you thought that feature A was unnecessary but it turned out you were wrong. Maybe you thought that the set of features A, B and C was what you needed, when in reality just A and B would have sufficed.
Yes, but we don’t know what that discrete feature set actually looks like. We have some amount of confidence that a given feature set will be an accurate test, and adding more features increases this confidence.
Appropriately Gray Products
In writing How much should we value life?, I spent some time digging into AI timeline stuff. It lead me to When Will AI Be Created?, written by Luke Muehlhauser for MIRI. He noted that there is reason not to trust expert opinions on AI timelines, and that trend extrapolation may be a good alternative. This point you’re making about GDP seems like it is real progress towards coming up with a good way to do trend extrapolation, and thus seems worth a full post IMO. (Assuming it isn’t already well known by the community or something, which I don’t get the sense is the case.)
Science as reversed stupidity
Epistemic status: Babbling. I don’t have a good understanding of this, but it seems plausible.
Here is my understanding. Before science was a thing, people would derive ideas by theorizing (or worse, from the bible). It wasn’t very rigorous. They would kinda just believe things willy-nilly (I’m exaggerating).
Then science came along and was like, “No! Slow down! You can’t do that! You need to have sufficient evidence before you can justifiably believe something like that!” But as Eliezer explains, science is too slow. It judges things as pass-fail instead of updating incrementally. It wants to be very sure before it acknowledges something as “backed by science”.
I suspect that this attitude stems from reversing the stupidity that preceded science. And now that I think about it, a lot of ideas seem to stem from reversed stupidity. Perhaps we should be on the lookout for this more, and update our beliefs accordingly in the opposite direction.
Zinc works by physically coating your throat to prevent infection, it’s not a nutrient in this case. You need much more than you think to achieve the effect, the brand I use barely fits in my tiny mouth.
Huh? I’m trying to picture what that would look like and I’m imagining a jawbreaker candy. That’s not that what you mean, is it?
And why would the size matter if the goal is to coat your throat? A larger size would mean more contact with your mouth, but not your throat.
I agree, but I think there is a place for both fun and seriousness. Also, I personally feel like stand-up comedy sometimes is the best way to get certain serious points across, and I’d expect the same thing to be true of stand-up philosophy. Seems like a happy consequence of babbling.
Very cool idea! My weak understanding is that this is something like what orators would do historically. Actually I guess there is a spectrum where giving a lecture is on one end and stand-up is on the other. I’m not sure where people fell historically.
Secular Therapy Project
I suppose the police would come along and knock it all down and arrest the person who did so.
Yeah, I am remembering a YouTube video, or maybe a documentary about this. It was exactly as you describe. Some generous individual had invented a type of pop-up home, something in between a tent and a super small home. They would go around building/giving them to homeless people, and the police would indeed knock it down. I don’t recall the police ever trying to arrest anyone though.
Ah, those examples have made the distinction between biases that misinform beliefs and biases of beliefs clear. Thanks!
As someone who seems to understand the term better than I do, I’m curious whether you share my impression that the term “cognitive” is often misused. As you say, it refers to a pretty broad set of things, and I feel like people use the term “cognitive” when they’re actually trying to point to a much narrower set of things.
Hm, can you think of any examples of cognitive biases that aren’t about beliefs? You mention that the term “cognitive” also has to do with perception. When I hear “perception” I think sight, sound, etc. But biases in things like sight and sound feel to me like they would be called illusions, not biases.
I suspect that the term “cognitive” is often over/misused.
Let me explain what my understanding of the term is. I think of it as “a disagreement with behaviorism”. If you think about how psychology progressed as a field, first there was Freudian stuff that wasn’t very scientific. Then behaviorism emerged as a response to that, saying “Hey, you have to actually measure stuff and do things scientifically!” But behaviorists didn’t think you could measure what goes on inside someone’s head. All you could do is measure what the stimulus is and then how the human responded. Then cognitive people came along and said, “Er, actually, we have some creative ways of measuring what’s going on in there.” So, the term “cognitive”, to me at least, refers very broadly to that stuff that goes on inside someone’s head.
Now think about a phrase like “cognitive bias”. Does “cognitive” seem appropriate? To me it seems way too broad. Something like “epistemic bias” seems more appropriate.
Interpreted charitably, I believe that mschons’ comment is claiming that for this situation in particular, combing through Google Scholar isn’t the best approach, not that it is inappropriate in general.
Sounds like enough to justify resolving the question as “yes” :) Thanks for the response Ruby.