What happened to the days when you could be asked about your interests and you would get ads based on that, rather than voyeuristically watching your every move to predict what your next fix will be?
My attitude here is that they are welcome to target me based on the data I submitted to facebook directly and my interactions with facebook's website. Are the things I Like and the people I interact with really insufficient to create a profile for me? What I do on websites that are not facebook is none of facebook's concern, which is why I have been taking care to block those 'like' buttons that snoop on you all over the net.
It's obvious that there is some upper limit of companies per batch, past which it will be impossible for YC to source quality companies and advisors for batches. But why should we believe we've hit the point where the quality of advisors and peers decline as YC gets bigger? There are a lot more than 300 companies started per year...YC still only makes up a small fraction of the total. (And anecdotally just looking at this batch...I wouldn't care to bet that the quality of peers has decreased!)
> But why should we believe we've hit the point where the quality of advisors and peers decline as YC gets bigger?
We shouldn't, it's the exact opposite. As the network grows, the ecosystem of high quality advisors goes up, not just because better people join, but people are learning to become better advisors through being a part of the network. Not only that, but as the network grows so does the YC economy of potential partners. Instead of YC companies purchasing goods and services from outside the network (and thus bleeding valuation of the network) keeping money flowing in the YC economy only accelerates the value of the entire network. As this monetary flow through the network grows and accelerates so does the quality of the people managing the companies in the networks and thus potential future advisors to new companies joining the network.
You write like these are guaranteed outcomes, but organizations lose their ability to deliver value as they grow all the time, which is where startups come in...
Granted YC is probably more aware of these downfalls than most companies, and are trying to mitigate them, but to act like YC can only get better as it expands is really short sighted.
I'm sure every person on this board can think of dozens of companies that failed because they got too big and could no longer deliver value as well as smaller companies. The tech space is littered with them every year.
>but organizations lose their ability to deliver value as they grow all the time, which is where startups come in...
>I'm sure every person on this board can think of dozens of companies that failed because they got too big and could no longer deliver value as well as smaller companies. The tech space is littered with them every year.
Yes to both points. And so is the business (management) consulting and literature space littered with
stuff, a.k.a. work and talks and books and confs about all that. Throwing out a few words that give a flavor:
Disruption (ha!), Clayton Christensen, Tom Peters, reengineering, innovator's dilemma, the HP way, Lou Gerstner, Teaching Elephants to Dance, Jack Welch, the HP Way, the IBM Way, the Toyota Way, Made in America, Made in Japan, etc.
Tip of the iceberg.
That's not perfectly parallel as a belief. The parallel statement would be "If you believe that flat-Earth advocates don't actually care about whether the Earth is flat or not, they just want to prevent space exploration to keep us trapped on Earth"...that would be equivalent. And I can't speak for Scott, but I think he'd say if you believed that, your ability to reason about the Earth being flat is basically dead. It happens to be that you have the right answer (the Earth is round), but only by chance...if you were wrong, you wouldn't be able to be convinced to change your mind.
> The parallel statement would be "If you believe that flat-Earth advocates don't actually care about whether the Earth is flat or not, they just want to prevent space exploration to keep us trapped on Earth"
But...isn’t that statement either true or false, just like the statement “the Earth is flat” is either true or false? What’s the difference between the two statements? Is knowledge about one statement possible, but not the other?
If you believe "flat-Earth advocates don't actually care about whether the Earth is flat or not, they just want to prevent space exploration to keep us trapped on Earth" , this would pose difficulty for changing the belief "the earth isn't flat".
If someone believed "people who claim that 'flat-Earth advocates don't actually care about whether the Earth is flat or not, they just want to prevent space exploration to keep us trapped on Earth' don't actually care about whether flat-Earth advocates really [...], they just [idk, some absurd motivation for making the claim] ", that would pose difficulty for changing the belief "flat-Earth advocates really do believe that the Earth is flat".
> If you believe "flat-Earth advocates don't actually care about whether the Earth is flat or not, they just want to prevent space exploration to keep us trapped on Earth" , this would pose difficulty for changing the belief "the earth isn't flat".
I’m not sure why. The normal simple tests to distinguish between a flat Earth and a ball-shaped Earth ought to still work independent of what flat-Earth advocates believe.
The crux of the issue here is that it's not possible to know what someone else truly believes. You hear various forms of this argument all the time. Was Trump unable to string together a coherent sentence, or was his speech style a conscious choice to appeal to certain people? Are people who identify as LGBT doing so because that's what they truly feel about themselves, or because they want to be popular and fit in?
The statements being made aren't about the earth, but about people's perception of the earth. And ultimately you can't objectively determine someone else's qualia.
What GP is suggesting is that if the claimed flat-earth belief is simply a justification for a different goal (prevent space exploration), then providing contrary evidence doesn't matter, because the belief isn't core of the issue. But you can't really know that independently. And this is especially true where you get a sort of metacircularity in beliefs and belief systems. Identifying what the "real" axiom someone subscribes to is difficult.
To look at the conspiracy theory about flat earthers that GP proposed, imagine that tomorrow, suddenly, the Earth was flat. All of the historical record was the same. We have evidence and recordings that it was round, and that the Greeks agreed, but tomorrow we couldn't reproduce those experiments. The horizon suddenly looked different. A reasonable conclusion here might be that we're all suffering from a collective delusion (and that in fact the earth is still round[0]), because our prior that the earth could rearrange itself overnight is low. But, this person might believe that the collective delusion is the result of machinations of the flat earthers, trying to trick us all into stopping further space exploration by convincing us that the earth is flat. This despite there being no evidence that flat earthers were at fault, or even capable, of causing such a worldwide event.
[0]: This actually objectively doesn't make a whole lot of sense, if we're capable of being subject to a massive collective delusion at worldwide scale, it could be that we were doing so before, and that the change is the delusion wearing off, but I digress.
> The crux of the issue here is that it's not possible to know what someone else truly believes.
I don’t think there’s some process to follow to acquire knowledge with a guarantee that we haven’t made a mistake, but I don’t think that means it’s impossible to acquire knowledge. I think we can and do acquire knowledge about people’s beliefs and intentions and use that knowledge to solve problems. Obviously examples are convicting people of fraud and various crimes where the person’s intentions are relevant.
This gets more complex in the realm of, let's call it politics, where the quest for knowledge may be adversarial, and is played over long periods. With fraud and crimes of intent, you often have very clear evidence where the person was unguarded (they said a slur as they committed the crime, making it a hate crime, for example).
I'm not saying reliably discovering intentions is always impossible. I'm saying that it is not always possible.
That quote is NOT Scott saying that pro-life advocates are right about abortion or wrong about abortion. That quote is Scott saying that once you start to believe that "the enemy" is a cackling evil villain, who is lying about their true motivations and secretly is only advocating for their preferred policies because they want to do evil things...you are doomed, at least in terms of seeking truth. Because once you believe that, there is nothing that "the enemy" can ever say or do that will change your mind. It's always just a tactic to advance their evil plot.
Of course, Scott could be wrong about this thesis. It's possible that maybe believing that pro-life conservatives don't care at all about fetuses doesn't actually indicate that you have a trapped prior that will prevent you from ever hearing new arguments on the abortion issue. But that is the argument that Scott is advancing, not that you can't form opinions about the truth or falsehood of someone's political views at all.
I guess my question is whether the author believes that it’s possible to have knowledge about these sorts of things or not. Everything he says in this article sounds like he’s saying that obtaining such knowledge is impossible, or at least that neither side has obtained knowledge. He seems to only judge the validity of the opposing views by how strongly their proponents believe the views, and since the two views seem to be held equally strongly, he seems to conclude that there is no discernible difference in the validity of the views. But if it were possible to obtain such knowledge, then it would be possible to correctly say “both sides believe their views equally strongly, but side A is more correct and side B is less correct.”
There are outside groups with less of that type of bias that will often be able to see things in a more nuanced way that more closely reflects reality. For example, maybe someone from another country who is uninterested in politics.
That doesn't mean there are some people who have no bias at all. Just different ones that apply to other things.
In the examples you quoted, he was deliberately listing views extreme enough to be inaccurate. For example, both the liberal and conservative examples said the characterization applied to _everyone_ in those groups. The less-biased interpretations might be: _some_ conservatives really _do_ care about fetuses and lives, and _some_ liberals _do_ care about preventing COVID deaths.
Paul doesn’t seem to have gotten in any trouble for saying it. What makes you think that someone else would? The problem only comes up when you start trying to label other people’s beliefs as dogma.
This is about examining your own beliefs to root out dogma, and avoiding pushing your dogmas into others. Not about being a self-perceived victim of some other group oppressing you.
To explain: Assuming causality is a cognitive bias. Assuming causality in other people’s outcomes can be .. another kind of bias. Dogma comes in when only certain assumptions are permissible.
I don’t mean to drag the discussion through all this, I was just asking a question (above) and answering yours (here)
I’m not enough of an astrophysicist to do this math myself, but what would this kind of burst look like from Earth? Observable w a telescope? W the naked eye? Enter a bomb shelter and save yourself?
If it does generate a gamma ray burst, then that is a more interesting phenomena. Depending on whether or not it is pointed in our direction, we might see more or less energy from it directly. After travelling 8000 light years and passing through all the dust between us and the planet, it would be seriously attenuated and unlikely to cause any destruction or even noticeable effects on earth.
[1] Astrologers on the other hand, it could be the sign that the end of the world is nigh :-)
I enjoyed Phil's article on it, thanks for the link. The take away is pretty good, a lot of things would have to align for it to hit us, and if it did, the effects range from 'none' to 'extinction'. Which is true for a lot of things (like asteroids)
It suggests another interesting plot for a science fiction novel, an alien attack force is coming to invade the planet, and a GRB event goes of across the galaxy, missing Earth completely but killing everything on the alien armada. Which slowly drifts toward the inner solar system.
You can read the Wikipedia article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst but to summarize the burst is believed to be a 'jet' this forms as part of the explosion of the spinning masses.
Can you point me to a source for that "about 30 degrees away from us"? I haven't seen it.
And, how directional? All the energy is spread across half the sky? Only 10 degrees? Or only one degree? Is 30 degrees enough for it to completely miss us? Mostly miss us? Or are we still in the danger cone?
Finally, in a binary star system, is that 30 degrees going to change as the stars orbit each other? (Worse, IIRC, there's a third, more distant star. Can it change the orbit of the other two in a way that shifts that 30 degrees?)
About 5 years ago, it was being suggested that the Wolf-Rayet star WR 104 might cause a dangerous gamma-ray burst when it goes supernova, but these things are highly directional, and I think the current consensus is that it is not aligned closely enough to be harmful. Apep is at a similar distance (~8,000 light years), and the article seems to be suggesting it will likely be more powerful than WR 104 is expected to be, but there is at least one news article is claiming that it is probably not pointed at us.
This star system is about 8000 light-years away. For comparison, in 1572 a different star, also about 8000 light-years away, was observed to go supernova. At its brightest, it was reported to be about as bright as Venus. This supernova would probably reach similar brightness levels.
Interesting story. You have to wonder if the "Christmas" star was a supernova like this one. It suddenly appears, becomes visible during the day for a few weeks, then slowly vanishes for about a year.
There was a sci-fi short story about this, in which a team of explorers found the Christmas star...and the remnants of the civilization which wiped out as a consequence.
or, whether it actually happened. no other cultures with astronomical knowledge have ever been found to have reported on such a star ~2000 years ago. if there was a sighting visible in the med region, it was likely an asteroid or, possibly, Jupiter.
I saw that article. If you read a little further, the position of the comet couldn't have led the so-called wisemen to Bethleham (yet another apocryphal tale). So, still no other cultures.
There have been reports of Supernova's (SN 1006) @ a visual magnitude of -7.5 during the day which might be visible by human eyes, however this was a very long time ago.
If you could really start the company for $10k, I'd recommend self-funding out of savings. Save up $25k working (to give yourself a cushion) and give it a shot. If you have the skills to start a technology business, you definitely have the skills to earn $25k of working capital with your labor. People start small businesses that way all the time, and you can too.
Warning: it’s not an easy solution, just an effective one. The main idea is “memorize more” and “practice more”. Judging by his blog posts, it seems to work.
