All of Ki's Comments + Replies

Answer by Ki
10

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).
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2ajsutter
"Teach more faster to younger": We have had such a time in our history before: it was called the Cold War, and especially the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. I studied physics during that era, and it was way too fast with too little reflection. Some of the spirit of that age is captured in Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics. About the thermodynamic basis for e/acc more generally, it always interests me how people ascribe such authority to thermodynamics. The Laws of Thermodynamics are usually framed in an adiabatic regime, i.e., one where the time rate of change is very slow. The "laws" are silent about the rate of reactions. E.g., some people try to frame exhaustion of fossil fuels in thermodynamic terms, as exhaustion of "low-entropy resources," but in fact fossil fuels are renewables -- it just takes a very long time. Rates of reactions are covered by kinetics, not thermodynamics. I haven't yet seen any e/acc discussion framed in terms of kinetics. Here, too "faster" is not necessarily desirable. In chemistry, too-fast kinetics in an energy-releasing reaction can literally blow up in your faces. I suspect the same will be true at a metaphorical level: "explosions" of creative "energy," too,  often have unforeseen and unwelcome results. 
Ki
30

"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.

2NancyLebovitz
More general lesson: look at emotional factors about the founders, not just the abstract question of whether the business would be likely to succeed if it's run by sensible people. When the idea of that business was first floated, the thing that made me edgiest was actually that the person the storefront was bought from and who had a similar business seemed awfully eager to sell.