Everything Paul wrote about in this post resonated with me. He avoided any examples, and looking through these HN comments, it's clear why. A lot of people assume that his experiences are specific, but no, there really is a culture of shooting down crazy new ideas.
I can think of a few examples of crazy ideas being dismissed. I remember seeing this post where someone was trying to figure out if it was possible to verify that a photo was either undoctored or else that someone went through a lot of trouble to hack the camera hardware of a phone. The post started off in the vein of, "Here's this idea, and even though it sounds crazy, I can't convince myself that it's a bad idea." The peanut gallery had all sorts of reasons that it was a bad idea -- I think my favorite reason was that it would be immoral to try to provide this capability. Paul's essay suggests a few reasons that this crazy idea might have generated such a personal attack.
Crazy new ideas are uncomfortable. I'm reminded of "Pitch Anything" by Oren Klaff, which describes the "croc brain" that protects the higher functioning parts of our brain by trying to discard anything that is uncomfortable. A crazy new idea challenges our worldview, so it's going to be uncomfortable.
There's a class of ideas that engineers are comfortable with: incremental improvements. If there's a framework in place to evaluate an idea, it doesn't make people so uncomfortable. By extension, if an idea is non-incremental, meaning it's a crazy new idea, then since it makes us uncomfortable, it should be rejected immediately.
I remember a conversation about the value of an idea. There's the school of thought that ideas are worthless -- a monkey with a typewriter can hammer out ten ideas before their breakfast banana. Another viewpoint recognizes that good ideas are important starting points, but after that the only thing that matters is hard work.
My feeling is that crazy new ideas are more like a lottery ticket: probably worthless. I don't know, maybe the peanut gallery is right. Since the lottery ticket is probably worthless, the easiest thing to do is to toss them all in the trash before checking them against the winning numbers.
I can think of a few examples of crazy ideas being dismissed. I remember seeing this post where someone was trying to figure out if it was possible to verify that a photo was either undoctored or else that someone went through a lot of trouble to hack the camera hardware of a phone. The post started off in the vein of, "Here's this idea, and even though it sounds crazy, I can't convince myself that it's a bad idea." The peanut gallery had all sorts of reasons that it was a bad idea -- I think my favorite reason was that it would be immoral to try to provide this capability. Paul's essay suggests a few reasons that this crazy idea might have generated such a personal attack.
Crazy new ideas are uncomfortable. I'm reminded of "Pitch Anything" by Oren Klaff, which describes the "croc brain" that protects the higher functioning parts of our brain by trying to discard anything that is uncomfortable. A crazy new idea challenges our worldview, so it's going to be uncomfortable.
There's a class of ideas that engineers are comfortable with: incremental improvements. If there's a framework in place to evaluate an idea, it doesn't make people so uncomfortable. By extension, if an idea is non-incremental, meaning it's a crazy new idea, then since it makes us uncomfortable, it should be rejected immediately.
I remember a conversation about the value of an idea. There's the school of thought that ideas are worthless -- a monkey with a typewriter can hammer out ten ideas before their breakfast banana. Another viewpoint recognizes that good ideas are important starting points, but after that the only thing that matters is hard work.
My feeling is that crazy new ideas are more like a lottery ticket: probably worthless. I don't know, maybe the peanut gallery is right. Since the lottery ticket is probably worthless, the easiest thing to do is to toss them all in the trash before checking them against the winning numbers.