[underdeserver]

I wonder what these differing qualities are, then.

It sounds very generic, but I've found it to be true. If I spend time thinking about what's the best way forward, then just do it, relentlessly and persistently, and with a healthy disregard for cynicism and disbelief from others, I get a lot done.

It also reminds me of the concept of "taking ideas seriously": https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8jyAdRYbieK8PtfT/taking-ide...

[lisper]

> I wonder what these differing qualities are, then.

The most obvious is that researchers care about finding truth for its own sake even if that truth doesn't have any commercial value, and founders care about producing a product for a market, even if that means ignoring some truths.

[vikramkr]

In the link you posted, there's a disclaimer that the author no longer endorses the post. Do you know why/is there an updated post from the author? I'm curious what changed in the author's thinking and what particularly they no longer agree with.

[underdeserver]

I just noticed that too. No idea.

I also disagree with a lot of how the idea is presented in that text, but the idea itself - that if you get convinced of a basic point, you should extract the second, third, fourth and fifth order effect of that idea - is profound.

It reminds me of a story of a startup that did cybersecurity for SCADA systems, for factories. They would connect to diagnostics APIs, do anomaly detection, and could then alert on any cyber attacks.

Turns out factories are extremely sensitive to downtime (millions lost per hour of downtime), and a lot of them operate under "if it works don't touch it". So they pivoted - instead of actively tapping APIs, they would passively sniff network traffic, draw a picture of the network and what talked to what, and do anomaly detection on that.

But reality took the passivity idea seriously - and the value to factory operators ended up being visibility into the network topology. The company pivoted away from cybersecurity and into analytics and made a lot of money.

[vikramkr]

I wondered if maybe he'd posted something else in the blog and I think I found it. Something about bad style, too few details, and something about contributing to bad norms?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QePFiEKZ4R2KnxMkW/posts-i-re...

""Taking Ideas Seriously": Stylistically contemptible, skimpy on any useful details, contributes to norm of pressuring people into double binds that ultimately do more harm than good. I would prefer it if no one linked to or promoted "Taking Ideas Seriously"; superior alternatives include Anna Salamon's "Compartmentalization in epistemic and instrumental rationality", though I don't necessarily endorse that post either."

[dbt00]

This appears to be his latest statement in that forum on that post.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QePFiEKZ4R2KnxMkW/posts-i-re...