Comment by Xcelerate
9 years ago
It's amazing to me the amount of negativity directed toward his projects and the millions of reasons people give for why they "won't work" (not necessarily on HN, but at least on general news websites).
I'm starting to believe the only difference between those who start their own companies and those who don't is that the latter convinces themselves that it is impossible, never builds anything, and from their own lack of having ever produced anything, concludes that their original supposition was indeed correct.
I think it's more nuanced than that.
You can break down the world into the 99% that "know" that it's impossible. They'll never invent that world-changing thing.
That leaves 1% that "don't know" that it's impossible. Of that 1%, 99% will try and fail.
The remaining 1% of the 1% succeed, like George Dantzig (who came late to a Stats class at UC Berkeley, thought some problems on the board were homework, and a few days later handed the professor solutions to some famous open problems in statistics), and Jack Kilby (who, seeing computer performance limited by the number of wires soldered by hand, demonstrated -- against the protests of his "we-know-better" co-workers -- that you could get rid of the wires, resulting in the integrated circuit).
It's important to remember the 99% of the 1%. There are probably people on HN who have tried and failed. But rather than simply saying that it is impossible, we should encourage people to share share how and why the problem is difficult, so that hopefully the next person to try won't waste their time retracing the failures of the previous generation.
Everybody is trying to invent shit and make things better. It's true from your waiter at your restaurant who will try to find a way to be more amiable to you, or it's true from the public researchers who just invented the artificial utero when they're being paid nips and wont become billionaires out of their invention. This is not Atlas Shrugged. This is the real world.
You're missing the point: This isn't simply about those who are trying to make things better, which is truly many people and is wonderful. This is that subset that go down road others have abandoned or won't go down because the solution is "known to definitely not be down that road."
Those people get flack -- they really do. Despite the inundation of aphorisms all over Facebook and LinkedIn belaboring the concept of radical thinking, when it happens in this, the real world, it's still met with rolled eyes and often anger.
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I agree.
The only way to justify a good idea is to have people argue that it is a bad idea. It's up to the person behind the good idea to prove the arguers are wrong.
Sometimes (usually?) that proof comes only in the happening of the impossible thing.
The 1% of the 1% had a good idea that no one else has ever had. This is not such an idea. This is a video of "what if subways were much less efficient?".
I find it hard to believe the common case for the 1% of the 1% always succeed because of sheer luck, brillance (although those things certainly can help).
The 1% of the 1% succeed because they are driven to find success, because they are relentlessly applying logic to the problems they face, because of determination - because they don't give up. I think the term thrown around these days is grit.
So yes, share what happened before, but more than likely those with 'grit' are going to figure out what has been tried before on their own and sometimes they'll reapply what failed in the past and make it work.
Those things are not mutually exclusive.
How many people in the world have tried this, let alone people on HN? Very, very few people even attempt things on this scale.
I love Elon as much as the next guy. I think SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI and even Neuralink are great companies tackling meaningful problems and wish them the best.
The Boring Company however, yeah, he messed this one up.
HN is full of Elon fanboys. I'm one myself. The die hard, willing to say "the world is flat" fanboys are out here defending him. Look, I like Elon. But the sane fanboys are trying to save Elon a lot of headache by not pursuing this venture.
Care to explain how he messed this one up?
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Engineers skew rational. They know that most ideas won't work. It's like aspiring actors or singers. Statistically, any given aspiring actors or singers won't become famous. The existence of Tom Cruise or Taylor Swift doesn't change that. Think about the dozen articles you read every day about some promising lab result or prototype that. How many of them do you ever hear about again?
Meat-space engineering is hard. I'm an early '90s kid who grew up hearing about how we're going to put people on Mars by 2020.[1] I got a degree in aerospace because of that! Then I realized that physics hates you most of the field is about eking out 1% more fuel economy every decade so United can turn a slight profit. Even Space X is more interesting from a business model point of view than an engineering point of view. It's like someone figured out how to make a $10 iPhone 3g in 2017. Neat, I guess.
[1] Almost everything pop science said would happen was a lie. Moon bases, NYC-London flights, flying cars, etc. Outside of computers and pharma, technology has progressed at a glacial pace over the last 40 years. If you transported someone from 1890 to 1950, planes, international calls, etc. would blow their minds. If you transported someone from 1950 to 2010, I think that they'd frankly be disappointed.
Engineers skew likes-to-tell-themselves-they-are-rational, but ironically I find belief in self-rationality interferes with listening and makes you less rational.
Engineers are more likely to be Creationists and/or conspiracy theorists than graduates of other STEM degrees:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineer_woo
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NYC-London flights were a lie?
It was proven impossible in the late 1930s.
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I think he meant supersonic NYC-London flights. Or perhaps even hypersonic.
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I don't really get the point of this comment. I'm also early 90's and I'm wondering why you're not more heavily for or against either side. You're living in an insanely fast paced world where, in 50 years, we will either be dead and roasted in Earth-Venus, or we will have carbon sequestration figured out and be on Mars. We need engineers to get option two, and you being neutral increases the chances of Earth-Venus.
Wait, there are actually people who think the Earth will be roasted in 50 years?
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I get what you're saying, but sometimes a bad idea is a bad idea. You can't just positive think yourself out of it.
Sure, but you can't make that call when you have no real clue what the actual idea is or have the full details.
The video has a lot of bad details. That's the call being made.
If Elon has figured out how to make tunneling cheaper, then he can dig tunnels and demonstrate it.
The video is clearly made to just hype it up. It serves no purpose other than Science fiction.
And there is the dilemma. :-)
Not with that attitude!
'The millions of reasons people give for why they won't work' are so important and useful not only for the development but for other possible innovations. They should be welcomed.
And I think there are no causation and correlation between thinking reasons that make it impossible and starting a company.
> 'The millions of reasons people give for why they won't work' [...] should be welcomed.
Not really. It's easy to think of reasons why something won't work. It requires an insanely small amount of effort compared to finding a way to make something work. "Reasons why not" are a dime a dozen.
> And I think there are no causation and correlation between thinking reasons that make it impossible and starting a company.
I certainly think there is. I haven't collected any evidence, but I wouldn't be surprised if those who find success are always looking for reasons why something will work, and those who run into failure are always looking for reasons why something won't work.
Now, to be fair, thinking of reasons "why not" does have its specialized use cases. Safety, for instance. But even then, that requires thinking outside of the box for unusual failure situations.
Identifying risk is one of the most valuable things startups can be doing. Ignoring that risk can be one of the most detrimental things. Good entrepreneurs treat that risk as opportunity. Bad entrepreneurs are paralyzed by it.
"Reasons why not" are indeed a dime a dozen, but that doesn't mean they are useless. It may be a bit annoying to have to filter through the feedback that identifies the wrong risks, but we shouldn't use that as an excuse to ignore critical feedback. Some of the best feedback I've ever received that got my mind churning was from people who truly understood the problems and were able to identify "reasons why not" that I hadn't thought of.
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> It's easy to think of reasons why something won't work. It requires an insanely small amount of effort compared to finding a way to make something work. "Reasons why not" are a dime a dozen.
I'd enhance that a little and say that it's easy to think of facile reasons it won't work. But let's say you think of a reason why a thing won't work after two minutes. If someone else has been working at the problem for two hours, or two days, or two months, or two years, what's more probable?
- They never made the initial connection to the flaw, and have failed subsequently to notice it or account for it.
- They thought of a solution to the flaw which you haven't.
Hrm. Maybe I just don't have that high of an opinion of my own faculties, but I tend to assume it's the latter. Especially if the person in question is a very intelligent person with a strong track record of outperforming expectations.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't probe, or seek clarification, or ruminate on the flaw. But if you tell someone who's been working on a tunnel boring problem for a whole quarter that "boring through rock is the most expensive way to connect 2 places (sic)" as at least one person in this thread has observed, I'd argue that that's not a useful reaction. My reaction is, "I wonder what he knows that I don't."
Criticism is the sign of a healthy society. If someone is afraid of criticism or doesn't want to take it, then they are only hurting their own work. That's not to say Musk is guilty of that, but his fans could accept it.
If we didn't have critics we'd still have kings with divine right. This seems like an exaggeration, but it's really just to say that we need people to look at things critically.
I haven't collected any evidence, but I wouldn't be surprised if those who find success are always looking for reasons why something will work, and those who run into failure are always looking for reasons why something won't work.
This isn't that far from prosperity gospel preaching. Believing doesn't make things happen, otherwise NeXT would be dominating the industry and not Apple because boy did Jobs believe and give it his all.
Sometimes smart people are wrong, and it doesn't hurt those people anyway if dummies are discussing their work.
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I'm sure Elon Musk is browsing Hacker News to find out what blind spots he has, that only Javascript programmers can see.
99% of popular critical feedback on ideas like this is nonsense so ill-informed it would take days to intelligibly refute to an objective third party - and the only way to convince the original negative Nancy would be to succeed.
It would be interesting to hear what experts think, though
Except most people have no idea what they are talking about beyond their obvious 2 second observations.
>I'm starting to believe the only difference between those who start their own companies and those who don't is that the latter convinces themselves that it is impossible, never builds anything, and from their own lack of having ever produced anything, concludes that their original supposition was indeed correct.
The latter are also aware of survivorship bias
I don't know if there exists a proper antonym of "survivorship bias" but here is a nice "casualty" list of failed ventures from which plenty of good insights can be taken. https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/startup-failure-post-mortem/
I think that taking advice from those who failed is as important as from those who might suffer from a "survivorship bias". I am sure most of these failed startups initially followed Musk's (et al.) "impossible is nothing" mantra before venturing out into the market.
> The latter are also aware of survivorship bias
While that may be true, it would be interesting to compare the frequencies with which successful founders bring up the topic of survivorship bias vs the rate at which those who never found anything bring it up.
A measurement, which itself would suffer from the same bias.
Many people think and are incentivized to think about how to optimize for today.
Thinking about tomorrow can be counter-intuitive as to the way things work today, and it is pretty easy to construct negative arguments about tomorrow that are based on what we know right now.
I think the skepticism and pretty much well deserved. I would like to see both spaceX and Tesla being well profitable and sustainable without the need for direct/indirect taxpayer support.
Most of Musk's companies are about kicking the can down the road. I admire that he is mostly burning his own money on this but then skepticism of such ideas is natural. The man should probably stick to one thing and take it completion than starting 10.
It's amazing to me the amount of negativity directed toward his projects
His projects are cool.
The incessant "Elon is so smart and will save the world!" from this place is tiring. Everytime he tweets it makes the front page. Some people see there's more to these businesses than Elon being generous to us,and run a bit more skeptical. Perhaps it's you that needs to take a step back and assess what the other side is saying?
> Everytime he tweets it makes the front page
Not even close to true.
Who cares if The Boring Company fails? It looks cool! You know what happens if you don't try? Nothing. You never score for a shot you don't take!
If cities decide that The Boring Company is the way forward and it turns out not to be, that's lost opportunity cost and likely decades of people suffering increasingly poor transport infrastructure leading to more wasted time and less time that people can spend doing important things, like spending time being a productive member of society (not necessarily working a job - things like spending time with family and friends, educating oneself, etc etc, come under this).
Learning what strategies don't work well is being a productive member of society.
But you can score if you take the right shot.
It's about wasting time and money and talent instead of directing it towards "winning" ideas.
If you learn how to take the right shot beforehand, let the rest of us know :)
Society or a company of people operates like an organism at scale - it can get sick with the slightest imbalance of resources, so its collective experience builds antibodies to protect itself. If this was an idea for a portable gadget, it would probably be welcomed, but the underground tunnels and the risks that come with them (collapses, maintenance, infrastructure shifts, ecological impact) are scaring people. California's central valley and a lot of building foundations have been moving up and down with the drought and rains of late. Now imagine that happening with a mesh of concrete tunnels carrying people underneath.
That said, to assume feedback against one project is a testament to lack of entrepreneurial spirit, rings about as true as claiming people who don't like Justin Bieber are deaf.
One group convinces themselves that it is impossible and never builds anything. Musk's group convinces themselves it is possible and never builds anything. At least the former is honest.
>I'm starting to believe the only difference between those who start their own companies and those who don't is that the latter convinces themselves that it is impossible, never builds anything, and from their own lack of having ever produced anything, concludes that their original supposition was indeed correct.
And not because of socio-economic factors, obviously, no, it has to be that.
The fucking pretentiousness HN can have never ceases to amaze me.
Both groups are real. Certainly there are many, many disadvantaged people who never had much of an opportunity. At the same time, though, there are also plenty of people who have had opportunities and could've created something but didn't due to defeatism, and they're often the most vocal naysayers.
You're just not believing hard enough.
Well, that's a well-deserved negativity: they are the Juicero of mass transportation... they are trying to solve a problem that is already resolved with a very complicated and frankly ridiculous solution.
The lack of good mass transit is a political problem: why European mass transit is in general so good and why American mass transit is problematic? It's not a problem of technology. It's Politics, stupid. :)
The play on words in the name is used also used by a charity: Well Boring, who digs wells in rural Africa. The fact that we, as a species, have failed to deal with challenges like providing global simple access to water, make me think that a project like this is unrealistic in many ways.
Post-war London tried something similar, a futuristic vision of pedestrian walkways ("pedways") to separate people from the traffic. This failed, for various practical reasons, and you can see the remnants of the experiment throughout parts of London to this day.
This scheme would come at an unimaginable cost, surely changing planning laws to create less car-centric cities is a more realistic approach to the problem?
There is often enough a clear understanding why something is stupid.
Freaking solar roadways got 2 Million and more. A City payed them 500k to install that stuff. It is not hard to calculate the stupidity of this. Especially of a couple who is doing this in a garage. There is a reason why big companies are not doing it. It has to make sense and money.
This video above looks nice but if you think just a step back, it is probably 1000x cheaper and a much better solution to make the existing streets automaticly drivable instead. How much does it cost to build this? How much does it cost to build automatic driving into every car who wanna use a highway which is only accessible to automatic driving?
You can't have cars driving at 200 km/h on city streets.
I was not talking about city streets. And it doesn't matter. How long do you think does it take for a car to go to a highway?
It doesn't take to long is still much cheaper.
In munich you have a autobahn/cityring in the city. It takes perhaps 20 Minutes in city traffic to get onto the autobahn / highway.
There is a reason why we have only underground trains and why it takes years to build a new tunnel for them.
Also having the city traffic more autonomous would increase the traffic flow.
It's possible to start your own company and still think Musk's ideas are foolish. People are giving millions of reasons why they won't work not because they are haters, but because there are millions of reasons why they won't work.
> and still think Musk's ideas are foolish
With Musk's established track record I think it's pretty arrogant for anyone to call his ideas foolish. He has achieved things that people thought were impossible or bound to fail. You can say: “I can see this potential problem”, or “I wonder how he's going to deal with this physical limitation” or similar sorts of statements. That's feedback and analysis given with respect. Simple dismissive negativity against ideas put forward by a person who would already rank in the top 10 in the world today for technological and engineering achievement is arrogance and narrow-mindedness.
So because he has a "track record" of founding companies that achieved impressive feats he it's now forbidden to call out his ideas as foolish?
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Backing a few good ideas doesn't mean he will never back a bad one.
I think it's both, actually. There's lots to criticize and there's also lots of hate/jealousy/whatever.
The Genius of the Crowd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gifEn61dZBc
I wonder if these naysayers realize that their modern lives stand on the shoulders of giants like Musk, and that Musk's predecessors had to deal with the naysayers' predecessors.
Reminds me of the "Are we the Baddies?" sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU (I'm not calling anyone nazis)
It's not about what is or isn't possible. This video participates in an awful kind of ignorance about the ecological impact of tunneling.
This can work if you are starting on blank slate aka building a new city from scratch. It won't work with an existing city.
This 'boring company' is one of the worst ideas ever.
The intelligent criticisms I have read of this concept don't claim that it "won't work" or that it isn't possible.
Its just a really bad solution to a problem we have at least a dozen other, easier, cheaper, simpler solutions for already.
Imagine we wanted to go to the moon, but the shuttle and all its parts had to be made of platinum. We also have to make sure all the astronauts have at least a 40 BMI and will bring everything they currently own with them. It might still be possible, but its stupid.
edit: don't feel like arguing. Best of luck to Musk.
> The Hyperloop was supposed to be a revolutionary form of transport, turns out it was overblown.
He didn't launch the Hyperloop, though. He explicitly said he wasn't personally going to pursue it, he was just putting the idea out there. You can't put the fact that it hasn't yet been implemented (even though there are people working on it) on him. I've seen no evidence that the concept is infeasible, or poorly thought out.
It is infeasible, if it's going to be vacuum, for a pile of practical and safety reasons:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk
Maybe it will pivot into something not-as-originally-hyped by the same name.
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> The fact that people feel the need to defend unfinished (and very unproven) projects of a billionaire says a lot.
The fact that people think they can spend two seconds evaluating and dismissing an engineering idea from someone who literally sends things into space is hilarious.
> If you live by hype at some point you gotta start delivering.
If putting cars on the road and rockets on the launchpad doesn't count as "delivering", I don't know what does.
Where have you been exactly? He receives the hype precisely because he has delivered after people insisted he couldn't.
He and his companies have delivered the Falcon, Model S, Modex X, and a concept Model 3 set to be delivered soon, along with a Falcon Heavy.
If any person were able to deliver even one of those products, they'd be deserving of attention. And that's not even everything he's delivered.
If delivering three groundbreaking products (as in you can go out and use them right now) is hype, then I think maybe you need to revise your definition of "hype".
The SpaceX stuff is actually amazing.
The Tesla stuff is over-hyped by people who think that it's currently the global leader in everything they do, be it manufacturing or self-driving tech. In reality, the EV space is competitive as all get out and Tesla is a pretty small player.
The boring stuff? I have no idea.
If you live by hype at some point you gotta start delivering (edit: this is overstated, but whatever).
He's delivering to the freakin' International Space Station. What have you delivered lately?
> Musk is a master of hype. > If you live by hype at some point you gotta start delivering
In your book, Musk hasn't delivered enough yet? But why am I arguing with a Ph.D student. I wish you that your life is as fullfilled as Musk's.
>The fact that people feel the need to defend unfinished projects of a billionaire says a lot.
I'm confused as to who exactly you're referencing here seeing as Musk has no stake in any of the hyperloop companies currently operating.
You don't have an argument.