Scientist, sadly incarcerated with a life sentence on a prison colony called Earth.
Ki
Karma: 4
“Anecdotally, Dropbox was founded by two guys who had just met each other.”
No, not anecdotal. While I appreciate Paul Graham’s cherry picked examples just like the next person, having looked at the history of hundreds of companies, it is all over the map. In general, you can’t “create” success, you can simple try to avoid or mitigate failure. “People” make great companies, by being great about making it work.
But, sadly, and I really mean, sadly, monetarily successful companies (which may not be great companies) are for the most part simply created by having a product people want to buy. You can have a staff of imbeciles selling sugar to children.
Indeed.
There is a tremendous urge among intelligent people to reduce things to ‘first principles.‘
And, of those first principles, to think of them as maths, or applied maths.
On this topic ‘e/acc’ I’ll stick more to epistemology, ontology, and even taxonomy.
Personally, I enjoy that people are even getting excited about this concept socially, since, chaos or long-term planning aside, activating people to push things to be faster, simpler, etc. is a strong win while we work out everything else (please stop enabling anything that is related to physical paperwork).
So I’m going to look the other direction, for example at the table filled with Bank/Credit card machines at any point-of-purchase-brick-and-mortar-retail-store, and all the horror of waste (time, money, complexity) this represents, and continues to cause.
...and juxtapose that to curing cancer, et al.
I ended up here on LessWrong today and finally (after watching it from birth, signed up) because I was curious why people were adding ‘e/acc’ to their Twitter (=X=) profiles.
All said… Cool, finally a movement I can at least appreciate.
So, and also, let’s go backwards in time and ask ‘What would you try to accelerate first if you were offered the chance?’ #timetravel
My answer is always the same for this ‘teach more faster to younger.’