[bonoboTP]

This post would not survive blind review, though.

The author's brand makes it look very insightful but if you look closely it's really cliche. Yeah, no shit, successful people work hard on important problems, they have small-scale laser focus and also large-scale vision.

Seems like the wisdom tree has been plucked, these startup wisdom blogs are getting emptier and emptier (see also Paul Graham...).

[hellofunk]

I think it's common among many founders who became very successful for them to assume they have a special and deeper insight into how the universe works.

[eanzenberg]

VCs, too. Interesting how researchers are a bit more humble or realistic about achievements.

[randomsearch]

This is entirely inaccurate. Researchers are not as you describe at all, at least those who become professors. They are exactly the same.

[KKKKkkkk1]

There is a type of professor that's exactly like a VC. The guy who wrangles a team of postdocs writing grant applications, farms out the funding to students and postdocs for them to do the actual work, and then puts his name on the resulting papers.

[randomsearch]

> There is a type of professor that's exactly like a VC.

The vast majority of professors, I'd say, are like that.

[garmaine]

Why do you think "researchers" meant professors? That seems like a leap.

[solumos]

I think what they're saying is that there are plenty of researchers/professors with ego, who think they're God's Gift. At the same time, there are many more researchers who are very humble and realize their contributions are a small part of a larger whole.

In startups, it seems that a strong ego is an advantage - if not a necessity (see: Elon Musk, Adam Neumann, Steve Jobs). There's an attitude (usually explicit, but sometimes implicit) of "we're disrupting the _____ industry and changing the world!".

Overall, I think you can find strong egos in any industry or job. However, my guess is that if you (somehow) ranked researchers and founders by ego, you'd find that the distributions were quite different. My guess is that the majority of founders have strong egos, with a long tail of those less ego-centric and that researchers would be quite the opposite - generally less ego-centric, with a long tail of strong-ego individuals.

[garmaine]

Right, but a professor specifically is someone who in most instances can at best be said to have once done some research before graduating into managing researchers (grad students). It's like saying "programmers don't behave like _____, based on my experience with mid-level managers in technical organizations."

[randomsearch]

Almost all permanent research staff at universities are professors. Maybe the confusion is because some countries don't use that title?

Regardless, I'd say the definition of a "successful researcher" is usually someone who has become a professor.

Whilst there are many great postdocs, very few (any?) of the good ones become professors.

[pphysch]

A mathematician once said something like, "if the solution to the problem in front of you is not obvious, then you are not yet ready to work on it".

Which is to say that intellectual pioneers are often necessarily humble about their achievements, yet worked very hard to get there.

One wonders if it might be the opposite for some founders who were in the right place at the right time to hit the VC/acquisition jackpot.

[mkl]

Your comment is the only Google result for that quote as is, so I'm not sure you have it right. If it were true about mathematics, then it would be almost impossible to work on unsolved problems. Working on the problems is how you become ready to solve them, and for many real world problems it is far from obvious that you have found a correct solution until much later.

[fuzzfactor]

>"if the solution to the problem in front of you is not obvious, then you are not yet ready to work on it".

This could be interpreted favorably toward unsolved problems, which some of us still have thousands of, most of which will remain unaddressed forever.

Any solution requiring significant (or especially massive) effort can most confidently be undertaken the more obvious it is.

To some extent might as well pick an obvious one to invest major effort, where even sporadic progress will at least all be in the correct direction.

It could be good to put a lot of that under your belt to help better approach the less obvious problems, even if there is already an unfair advantage about things which are not so directly visualizable.

There could be unique outcome among your obvious problems if you choose one where others do not see any visible solution at all.

And you can become more ready for things put in front of you.

[pphysch]

Hence "something like". Paraphrasing. The message was conveyed though.

As a trained mathematician it certainly mirrors my experience. Banging away at a narrow problem typically either results in a) no solution or b) enough bullshit to convince everyone that you know what you are doing. The latter is sufficient to carry a career in many branches of pure mathematics.

What usually works better is understanding the holistic environment around the problem, which is not always obvious at the outset, and then the "problem" becomes this little hole in a fabric of understanding and we go "duh" and solve it.

[closeparen]

How would you check whether someone has special and deep insight into how the universe works? Making a lot of correct predictions seems like some of the best evidence available.

[hellofunk]

Many people have accurate predictions, it's not so unusual. But not everyone has the ambition or circumstance to do anything about it (or even the desire). Being a successful founder is not always about anything other than an orthogonal motivation separate from intuition.

And how do you factor all the predictions that were incorrect? The success to failure ratio of a well-known founder is not necessarily any different than many "average" people, it's just been scaled up out of their own interests, and thus more visible.

Some people relish their position in the world as more than it is, that's all I'm saying, when in reality it is usually from factors beyond simple wisdom.

[cscurmudgeon]

Making accurate, specific and surprising predictions.

[jacobwilliamroy]

Being the CEO of Ycombinator, the business consulting firm, would give him very special insights into the industry, as many new companies would come straight to Ycombinator, looking for advice. Altman was in a good position to study the whole industry.

[Judgmentality]

You're saying he has special access to data, but it doesn't necessarily follow that he has special insight based on that data. That said, Sam is a smart guy, so he probably does have some special insight - but it's not immediately obvious and this is hardly an evidence-based argument.

[jacobwilliamroy]

Sam Altman's mind will never be beyond doubt. It's in his skull, so we can never know it. I'm just focusing on the concrete, observable details. I'll let the psychologists argue about Altman's mind.

[yt-sdb]

Right? Feels like an absurdly low-effort attempt at "thought leadership" with easily made connections to recently popular topics like Hamming and that ML guide. As a researcher, I have also thought about the similarities between starting a lab / research agenda and a startup, but this is a superficial analysis.

[throwawaygh]

> As a researcher, I have also thought about the similarities between starting a lab / research agenda and a startup, but this is a superficial analysis.

Yeah, academic research labs are strikingly similar to seed-stage start-ups (mid six/low seven annual burn for 3-20 employees laser focused on a particular vision). It's not at all surprising that the two career tracks attract similar types of people.

[satvikpendem]

This is an interesting point. Why does it feel like these blogs are getting shallower? For PG, more of his older blog posts were more interesting than his newer ones, with more concreteness in advice and experiences. The latest ones seem more observational of trends instead, which can be more vague in nature.

[GuiA]

Because they're getting further and further away from their maker/hacker roots, and are now fully in the investor/politician/executive role. Two very different kinds of thinking and seeing the world, and the former typically have a strong dislike for the thinking/operating style of the latter.

[Gatsky]

Speaking completely and only for myself, possibly because the people writing the blogs have grown and developed, whereas I haven't. How much extra insight does one need?

[alexashka]

To me, it feels like Gary Vee's cancerous idea of 'there is never enough content, post everywhere, all the time' has infiltrated culture - people have realized that they can stay popular and receive the many perks that come with it, from simply posting 'content' that barely has any actual content in it :)

I couldn't comprehend why anybody would watch daily videos from a guy/gal who does nothing but films him/herself filming shit (Casey Neistat being the first I believe), but I think I've figured it out.

It's like having an internet friend - if they like you, it no longer matters what you do, the same way you aren't having deep conversations with your friends, you're just 'hanging out'.

Sam Altman is doing the daily video version of hanging out, except he does it in blog format because he's an 'intellectual' or maybe just camera shy and the frequency seems to be a week or two apart.

It used to be that people would actually provide some value - a blog would at least aggregate interesting news stories (Daring Fireball) and provide some insight, but people have realized that doing all that work of actually reading, thinking and providing insight, is optional - you just need others to want to consume whatever you're providing and the bar has turned out to be far lower than any intelligent person can readily comprehend.

There's also a great deal of 'ignorance is bliss' when it comes to people like Paul Graham. His posts on Twitter strike me as him sharing what he considers to be insightful or interesting. It's revealing that rather than actually studying people who've come before him and devoted their life to contemplation, he's perfectly content to have 'insights' about his children's latest quip. You can't fault someone for it and I don't think Paul has ever claimed to be an intellectual, so it is perfectly good that he gets to have his simple fun of re-discovering the tried and true, rather than working hard on attempting to discover the novel. It's when he generalizes his personal little joys into theories about the rest of the world without any felt need for diligence (besides editing) or response to feedback, that his simple-mindedness is revealed and catches people who haven't lived a while, off-guard. Sam Altman may fall into this category.

[Gibbon1]

> people have realized that they can stay popular and receive the many perks that come with it, from simply posting 'content' that barely has any actual content in it :)

Mark Twain I think said: That man can pack the smallest ideas into the most words of any man I know.

Personal Hate: Essays that follow the NPR style of layering vast amounts of extraneous sub-anecdotes before getting to the point.

[rytill]

I think I know what you mean, but what do you mean by "sub-anecdote"? Pure curiosity.

[Gibbon1]

AKA I'm going to talk about song writer who wrote many songs you may be familiar with. But first I'm going to talk about his Swedish grandfather who owned a dairy farm in Wisconsin.

[Isamu]

But a surprisingly common alternative view is: it’s all about BORN TALENT, no amount of work will help you if you are not anointed.

Personally I find the born talent view to be lazy and not a little bit creepy.

[some_furry]

I have a relevant anecdote for this!

I was placed into the "gifted" program in the 1st grade of elementary school and told for many years that I was somehow special or "very" intelligent.

I never believed them, of course, because of two observations:

1. The adults who were telling me this did a lot of stupid stuff, which undermined the credibility of their claims.

2. Despite their best efforts to insulate us from the normal students, I knew people my age outside of the gifted program who were as clever -- if not even more so -- than my so-called "gifted" peers.

As an adult, I'm glad I never bought their hype. It's a one-way high-speed trip to narcissism, laziness, entitlement, and creepiness.

[war1025]

I was in the "Talented and Gifted" program all throughout school. I never understood what the point of it was. Mainly it meant I spent a decade interacting periodically with the same teacher who I never really got along with. It was a huge waste of time and resources to have that program at least as it was implemented at our school.

[non-entity]

Maybe to try and keep certain kids occupied?

I spent my school years getting kicked out and out back into those classes. Typically they would notice that the normal classes were too easy, put me in the "gifted" program which was just 100x more boring with a 10x larger work load, so I didn't do that shit, got kicked out and the cycle would begin a couple years again.

While there were certainly some very intelligent people in these classes, plenty of other struck me as not necessarily the brightest.

The one exception to this was in 5th grade, I was put into a gifted program that was markedly different from normal classes. For the most part, there was a lot of freedom to work on what you wanted, no busy work. Occasionally the rather group would go outside where we should chill and just discuss various things.

[fuzzfactor]

I can imagine in their time lots of everyday brilliant people used that as an excuse not to try and achieve if they couldn't be like DaVinci, Mozart or Edison were doing.

Not lazy icons these anyway.

[vikramkr]

I think it's because they just launched a new moonshot venture fund? Though in that context I'd be more curious about what they find different between researchers and entrepreneurs since presumably, they want to turn a lot of the former into the latter. What'll they have to do to bridge the gap and make their venture firm a success?

[ScottBurson]

Yes, this is what I was hoping the post would be about.

[p1esk]

What do you think the difference is?

[jefftk]

> this post would not survive blind review

If I wrote a post like this, people would very reasonably wonder what sort of experience I had informing these generalizations. Sam's background is very relevant for figuring out whether his thoughts are worth paying attention to here.

[some_furry]

If it weren't Sam Altman who published this article, it probably never would have made the HN front page. (None of my blog posts have done so, and I can say with confidence that my worst blog posts are still more fleshed out than this post.)

Sam, if you're reading this and want to challenge my hypothesis, all you need to do is make a pen name and register a domain name to go with it, then publish your next post of the same caliber under that persona and see how well it sinks/swims on HN.

[lazyjeff]

That's pretty harsh, maybe because the expectations are unfairly high for Sam. It's just someone writing on their blog some thoughts they had, so maybe we should treat it like that.

But for some constructive criticism, there are some actual topics I'd be interested in hearing discussion about, on researchers vs founders. I've been a bit of both, and I'd say the more practical similarities are:

- "unlimited" freedom to work on what you think is important, usually in something you think is different, but with a existential constraint. For founders, it's the business model -- your pitch deck needs a convincing business model to survive regardless of the product (which is what a lot of founders really care about). Whereas in research, you need a long-term vision that is attracting to funding to survive, which can be a deep expertise in something societally-relevant, or evidence of success in doing something novel

- the game: there's sort of a game to play for both. With startups, there's the optimization of MAUs and acting like a startup and growing fast; there's the established ways of getting funding from angel investment to series of investments, attorneys and payments, and then different ways to exit. For research, there's the game of publishing, annual cycles of recruiting great students and advising, reputation and finding your niche, and the academic system in general.

- management: on both cases you're managing a small team, usually under 50 people, so small enough that you know everyone and can be a bit involved in what they're doing, but big enough that you need a bit of hierarchy.

There's also some major differences:

- Equity vs reputation. Early startup employees work for less pay (moreso in the past) for the chance their equity will be highly valuable. Early stage researchers (PhD students or Postdocs) work for less pay for the chance to discover/invent something amazing to become a tenured professor or leading scientist.

- Formal mentorship credit: researchers get credit for being mentors for people that leave and do well later. PhD students are partly known for who their advisor is. When a student does well at an institution and goes to another one, the first institution is acknowledged indefinitely. Papers credit the authors as well as the institution before a single line of text. In startups, when someone amazing leaves it's a major negative thing. When someone says "GreatProgrammer was previously at Foo startup with HappyCTO" there isn't that same admiration for Foo startup or HappyCTO as if you say "GreatResearcher did their PhD at Foo University in Professor Happy's lab."

[GuiA]

> It's just someone writing on their blog some thoughts they had, so maybe we should treat it like that.

I don’t disagree, we should all be kind.

That said, this post gets voted to the top because it has (samaltman.com) next to it. If it had (jonnybeeble.blogspot.com), it’d get maybe a few upvotes and comments and that’d be that. But here it immediately gets upvoted to the front page, therefore receiving intensive scrutiny, and here we are at 80+ comments all kind of saying the same thing.

[not_a_moth]

But the author's brand - his unique position working among world class talents - is what gives weight to the words.

But I think the post called for examples of specific founders/researchers and their situations, e.g. how they manage going deep in weeds vs. steering long term vision, either practically or emotionally, is there something special in how they manage this? Or on persistence is he seeing people sacrificing weekends for 2 years in a row or mastering deep work practices or...

[vincentmarle]

Welcome to Sam Altman's blog, his posts always read like a poor attempt of Paul Graham-esque essays.

[abnercoimbre]

On the blog I can't even properly query who the author is! Clicking on the Twitter button triggers a weird referral that requires me to login? I'm inclined to submit this as a dark pattern [0].

[0] https://www.darkpatterns.org/

[derekdahmer]

Sam’s name is the heading of the page, in the title and the domain name. The blog doesn’t have an about page.

Twitter is asking you to login because you clicked the “tweet” button to post a tweet linking the article and tweeting requires a twitter account.

Sam Altman is the former president of YC.

[abnercoimbre]

I was inquiring about an About page; of course the name is visible.

The Tweet button says "Follow @sama" which isn't about tweeting. The convention is to link to https://twitter.com/sama and not to ask you to log in.

I'm happy to know who he is now.