- creativity often arises by stumbling around in a problem space, or in operating "randomly" under an artificially-imposed constraint
- modern life is obsessed with metrics and goal-setting, and this has extended into creative pursuits including science, research, and business
- sometimes, short-term focus on the goal defeats the goal-given aims (see e.g. shareholder value focus)
- the authors point out that when they were researching artificial intelligence, they discovered that systems that focused too much on an explicitly-coded "objective" would end up producing lackluster results, but systems that did more "playful" exploration within a problem space produced more creative results
- using this backdrop, the authors suggest perhaps innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort and is instead driven by serendipitous discovery and playful creativity
I found the ideas compelling, as I do find Kay's description of the "art" behind research.
That book was written by computer scientists, and they demonstrate how the optimal search algorithm is often to pick the most unusual thing to try that you haven't tried yet. I'd like to see more discussion about this as an approach to personal development. Many people advise students and new graduates to sample the search space broadly, without detailed goals, just to see what's out there. It almost becomes the "do something every day that scares you" maxim. There is an old saying about "Everything you want in life is waiting just outside your comfort zone."
This is the difference between Research(which Kay excelled at) and Development and Commercialization (which he didn’t). Both are important. The latter requires focus, discipline and deadlines.
There is a related book, Strategic Intuition [1], by William Duggan, which speaks to the nature of creativity. Highly recommended read if you are interested in this topic.
"Erasmus Darwin had a theory that once in a while one should perform a damn-fool experiment. It almost always fails but when it does come off, it is terrific. Darwin played the trombone to his tulips. The result of this particular experiment was negative"
- the authors point out that when they were researching artificial intelligence, they discovered that systems that focused too much on an explicitly-coded "objective" would end up producing lackluster results, but systems that did more "playful" exploration within a problem space produced more creative results
A comment of mine from a year ago: "I think the way forward for AI will be in simulating human conciousness processes, including whatever limitations computationally that come with that. In this sense, I feel that the kind of AI that will break barriers first is going to be in a game, and not on a factory floor."
I'm coming here from the hackerbooks newsletter where I saw this book mentioned. Just wanted to chime in how compelling I find the ideas.
Though the book is slightly repetitive, what stuck with me is the idea of a "stepping stone approach". In order to discover something new or interesting, all we need to do is to find the next stepping stone to jump to. The rest is not is not in our hands. I tell this to myself whenever I think I have to have this "grand vision", which I never have so I don't do anything. I'm happy I stumbled upon it.
Off-topic: always interesting to see how referral links fare here.
I personally am not opposed if disclosed, since AFAIK (documented as of 2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4156414) this gives access to other items purchased in the same time frame (whether the specific item is purchased or not) and analytics for links with no orders.
If you read the threads you'll see that he has frequently continued conversations long after the submission dropped off the HN front page, and many topics have gotten developed further than one usually sees. HN's archives are full of gold and for me this one of the more obvious veins of it.
If anyone wants to spend some time aggregating and collating these writings, as the OP has done from emails, I would see about getting YC to fund the effort, subject to Alan's permission of course. Email [email protected] if you're interested.
>Socrates didn't charge for "education" because when you are in business, the "customer starts to become right". Whereas in education, the customer is generally "not right".
The thing is that Licklider's vision of computers as "interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans, pervasively networked world-wide" has already come to pass, and created huge economies of scale and exponential pressures for compatibility and conformity that didn't exist before.
In the 1970's a few dozen brilliant people could create
a completely new and self-contained computer system because the entire computing world was tiny and fragmented. there wasn't the imperative to be compatible to all-pervasive standards (even IBM's dominance in business was being challenged by the minis).
These day if you want to create a new computer system that people will use you need at the minimum to provide a networking stack and a functional web browser, some emulation or compatibility system to support legacy software that people rely on, device drivers for a huge range of hardware, etc. All this not only takes a huge amount of work, it also punctures the design integrity of your system, making it into a huge mountain of compatibility hacks before you even start on your own new concepts. But the deadliest enemy of innovation is the mental inertia of masses of users with a long history of interacting with computers. They are no longer the blank slates who have never seen a computer you had in the 70's.
Even in the realm of art people realized that the romantic or modernistic model of artistic revolution that Kay invokes is untenable and retreated into postmodernism.
I presume these e-mail excerpts are inspired by the end of HARC too? What happened?
In the thread about first year reports a couple months ago, someone suspects that funding has ended too. Also, Bret Victor's work and name are conspicuously missing from the first year reports.
Thanks for the link by @j_s, I found following insightful comment by you (@chubot):
> The misleading thing about Linux is that it IS IN FACT a big idea -- it's just not a technological idea. We already knew how to write monolithic kernels. But the real innovation is the software development process. The fact that thousands of programmers can ship a working kernel with little coordination is amazing. That Linus wrote git is not an accident; he's an expert in software collaboration and evolution.
From your comment, I think the funding and development process of these post Bell Lab/PARC research projects might need a paradigm change from technology idea oriented to social development oriented due to the reality of our highly networked social environment (the dream of Licklider).
We can see that how much misunderstanding of each other exists in our tech community. There are much deeper social development problems to be solved than simple VC or philanthropy funding.
@vihart was right saying
> HN. You're a weird place.
It is a more fundamental problem that vihart and gang can’t solve. And that would be an opportunity at another meta level.
> Unfortunately, a combination of forces in the world make nonprofit long-term research a tough sell right now. It doesn’t matter how good we are at what we do. Everyone is overextended trying to solve all the world’s problems at once, and we’re in the unpopular space of being neither for-profit nor directly and immediately philanthropic.
> An example of the vision was Licklider's "The destiny of computers is to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans, pervasively networked world-wide". This vision does not state what the amplification is like or how you might be able to network everyone in the world.
i am going through licklider's 'the dream machine' book. it is quite long, and dense but ties together lots of individual threads (for me at least) that were kind of floating loose otherwise. i had known about luminaries in the field (and their work) specifically, licklider, shannon, norbert-weiner, cerf and kahn, metcalfe, von neumann, vannaver bush (to name a few) but this book brings them together.
interestingly though, licklider's background was in psychology, as opposed to ee/maths. did we lose some of the diversity of perspective ?
another book, that i found to be pretty good is 'the idea factory', it complements the 'dream machine' book quite well.
edit-001 : fmt changes, and added reference to another book.
The name Licklider is mentioned a couple of times. Recently I read a fascinating account of his work. Great read for those who want to know more about the history of computing and the internet: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FIPHEXM/
> The destiny of computers is to become interactive intellectual amplifiers for all humans, pervasively networked world-wide". This vision does not state what the amplification is like or how you might be able to network everyone in the world.
That's a vision that recognizes the value in creating tools, not constrained solutions for the current problem. Freedom can be frightening[1], but letting people explore what is possible with your new tool sometimes leads to unexpected uses and the occasional paradigm-shifting discovery.
[1] (with apologies to DHH[2]) If we give people unconstrained tools, they might change the String class to shoot out fireworks at inappropriate time!
Another way of thinking about this is that large companies have basically decided that executing optimally is more important than necessarily creating huge leaps themselves. They can just focus on making money, create a sizable amount of cash, and acquire new technology.
I'm sure there's a cultural effect here as well. Seems like there are fewer large companies that are willing to just let technologists "muck around for a bit" swinging for the fences without some kind of goal.
But, I just wonder, if VC-funded startups are where new tech grows, we end up just focusing on incremental improvements, instead of potential large leaps.
What this makes me wonder is, if the problem is not enough funding for visionary work, or more accurately that modern funders misunderstand how and why to find visionary work, then what will change their minds?
Because I feel like I've read a few of these posts, watched similar talks, and I nod along and agree every time. Only problem is, I'm not a wealthy benefactor, director of a research institute, or a business exec with control of discretionary R&D funding.
Where do those people hang out, what would convince them like this post convinces me, and is anyone working on that?
I think it is hard to get people to understand what they do not understand yet, actually what they have opposing experiences to. It seems to me making money is easy if you a) work hard b) are extremely goal driven (and obviously you need to be sufficiently smart). Now this seems to be working in research too, where the extremely goal driven part means you focus on publishing research papers in prestigious places.
I think it is working in research (given for example that some of the papers in conferences like POPL are just great). Of course you won't hear from those instances where it is not working (until it does).
The problem is you somehow have to decide who to give money to, and you cannot possibly know who carries a vision inside of them that they are actually able to realise given enough funding and time.
> set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather than gold. Require that the geese make plans and explain just how they will make the eggs that will be laid. Etc.
-- I have seen these types of situations so many times while project implementation.
The assumption is (I believe) that innovation is better when it's not goal-oriented. Currently much of the funding goes to projects that have a clear path to results, but finding that path is a prerequisite, and is not funded.
Kay makes a distinction between invention and innovation. Invention is the creation of qualitatively new things and innovation is the betterment of pre-existing things. The AI research that’s happening now sounds more like innovation. Innovation is fine, but civilization-changing things (like the constitution or Internet) are the result of invention, not incremental improvement (to paraphrase Kay’s argument).
Makes me wonder, what could we do, or what could current organizations do to recreate that environment of research and creativity in today's (and tomorrow's) world? Also, what do you do in your own life (if any) to create that sort context that is conductive to this kind of creativity?
Hire a bunch of smart people, give them advance funding for 5 years without strings attached, tell them to build the future without specifying what that means.
From a personal view I have plenty of ideas for things never built before, but I lack the time and energy to do it after hours and I can almost never fit it into the scope of my professional work. Sometimes this makes me sad.
Committees impose compromises and conditions on funding, so govt or public company money won't work, as Kay points out. It must be pvt money, like the Medicis funding the renaissance. Something like the Gates Foundation. It could be a prestige project for Bezos or Zuck.
> Parc was "effectively non-profit" because of our agreement with Xerox, which also included the ability to publish our results in public writings (this was a constant battle with Xerox).
Parc was "effectively non-profit" because there was no way to collect or monetize reams of user data like there is today. If there had been, either Kay wouldn't have gotten that agreement or Parc would have been much more selective about what constituted "results."
For example: how many companies have solved the talk-to-our-computers-and-our-computers-talk-back problem now?
"An important part of any art is for the artists to escape the "part of the present that is the past", and for most artists, this is delicate because the present is so everywhere and loud and interruptive. For individual contributors, a good ploy is to disappear for a while"
reminded me of John Carmack explaining in his .plans how he would go off and seclude himself for a couple of weeks to start a new iteration of the id technology.
It is a very difficult narrative. Mainly because while reading it, I had to think constantly about survivorship bias and appeal to authority. Would I really read this if it was written by a 20 year old without a track record? Or how many Alan Key's are out there that completely failed and would prescribe a totally different approach and attribute the cause and effect on other factors?
I also totally get the point of funding problem finding versus funding business plans that are full of bullshit and pretend to have a risk free solution with a play book that just needs some money to execute it linearly step-by-step. So, for that part it is written very well and the point is clear.
Another topic is: would all kind of innovations really emerge if the funding mechanism was radically different in the last 20 years? Would we see all kinds of big leaps or was ARPA-Parc just a serendipity moment that couldn't be repeated no matter what the funding structure was?
On your second point -- namely why does Juicero get funded and qualitative innovation doesn't -- I think it comes down to the still very real weight given to subjective alpha-primate-ness in business decision making.
On two occasions I've had VC types (in one case post-beer) tell me they almost never fund anyone who doesn't have (paraphrasing) "presence" or "a reality distortion field" etc. I would have assumed it to be subconscious but these comments convinced me that it's a conscious explicit bias in at least some cases.
Put enough weaponized extroversion and alpha primate signaling behind it and you can get people to invest in millions in absolute BS. You can also over-inflate the value of something real to stratospheric degrees. See also: Uber.
On the other hand if you have an underspoken introvert try to sell something outstanding, the majority of businesspeople will not pay attention.
I have seen a case where a meek soft-spoken woman tried to pitch a mobile startup with outstanding user base growth, revenue, and cash efficiency numbers and got yawns. She wasn't asking for much. This was seed stage stuff and these were crazy amazing numbers. In the same pitch fest the investor panel perked up for a number of vapid pre-revenue proposals backed by more extroverted alpha personalities. I don't think it was just sexism since one of these was also a woman. (I suspect some sexism is actually this bias since it may be tougher for women to play the alpha primate card with men.)
Most innovators ("artists") are more on the introvert end of the spectrum.
Edit: this may be rational for funding things that rely heavily on in-person salesmanship, but it's applied broadly.
Edit #2: another reason this may be rational for VCs is that they are only thinking about their cash-out. They may be looking for people who can pump the value of the company's stock to later investors more than people who can actually deliver lasting value. The company's product is its stock, not its product.
I think Parc was a unique "a serendipity moment". These Cambrian Explosion type moments happen frequently in history: high creativity in which a new form is developed, followed by an increasing focus on small incremental improvements, and finally stagnation. The amount of potential a new form has determines how long this process takes.
I believe that for workstation/desktop computing we have already hit stagnation. I also suspect that programming languages have not advanced in any significant way since around 1990. By this perhaps surprising claim, I mean that the languages available today are no more capable than those available in the 1980s.
> I once gave a talk to Disney executives about "new ways to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs". For example, set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. (etc.)
however it's really hard to argue that Apple, Microsoft, or indeed IBM or Disney ever killed the geese that lay the golden eggs.
Or if they did, they had plenty others running around.
>It is a very difficult narrative. Mainly because while reading it, I had to think constantly about survivorship bias and appeal to authority. Would I really read this if it was written by a 20 year old without a track record?
That's not a problem I see, because this is not about Alan Kay's personal track record.
The kind of organizational freedom he describes was available in Park and Bell Labs, and it wasn't just Kay, but tens of people, one after another creating the most important technologies, while it was on.
> Most don't think of the resources in our centuries as actually part of a human-made garden via inventions and cooperation, and that the garden has to be maintained and renewed.
[+] [-] pixelmonkey|8 years ago|reply
http://amzn.to/2CtIrRR
There's a YouTube talk by the author on the subject here:
https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI
The rough idea is this:
- creativity often arises by stumbling around in a problem space, or in operating "randomly" under an artificially-imposed constraint
- modern life is obsessed with metrics and goal-setting, and this has extended into creative pursuits including science, research, and business
- sometimes, short-term focus on the goal defeats the goal-given aims (see e.g. shareholder value focus)
- the authors point out that when they were researching artificial intelligence, they discovered that systems that focused too much on an explicitly-coded "objective" would end up producing lackluster results, but systems that did more "playful" exploration within a problem space produced more creative results
- using this backdrop, the authors suggest perhaps innovation is not driven by narrowly focused heroic effort and is instead driven by serendipitous discovery and playful creativity
I found the ideas compelling, as I do find Kay's description of the "art" behind research.
[+] [-] tacon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phodo|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Strategic-Intuition-Creative-Achievem...
[+] [-] pvg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arca_vorago|8 years ago|reply
A comment of mine from a year ago: "I think the way forward for AI will be in simulating human conciousness processes, including whatever limitations computationally that come with that. In this sense, I feel that the kind of AI that will break barriers first is going to be in a game, and not on a factory floor."
[+] [-] bewe42|8 years ago|reply
Though the book is slightly repetitive, what stuck with me is the idea of a "stepping stone approach". In order to discover something new or interesting, all we need to do is to find the next stepping stone to jump to. The rest is not is not in our hands. I tell this to myself whenever I think I have to have this "grand vision", which I never have so I don't do anything. I'm happy I stumbled upon it.
[+] [-] j_s|8 years ago|reply
I personally am not opposed if disclosed, since AFAIK (documented as of 2012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4156414) this gives access to other items purchased in the same time frame (whether the specific item is purchased or not) and analytics for links with no orders.
[+] [-] dang|8 years ago|reply
If you read the threads you'll see that he has frequently continued conversations long after the submission dropped off the HN front page, and many topics have gotten developed further than one usually sees. HN's archives are full of gold and for me this one of the more obvious veins of it.
If anyone wants to spend some time aggregating and collating these writings, as the OP has done from emails, I would see about getting YC to fund the effort, subject to Alan's permission of course. Email [email protected] if you're interested.
[+] [-] ontouchstart|8 years ago|reply
I did a search in my mailbox and found a small branch of a huge discussion thread tree 555 days ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11958781
Perhaps we can build a "systemland" in some way.
[+] [-] jarmitage|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crispinb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzahola|8 years ago|reply
Very important takeaway!
[+] [-] roi|8 years ago|reply
In the 1970's a few dozen brilliant people could create a completely new and self-contained computer system because the entire computing world was tiny and fragmented. there wasn't the imperative to be compatible to all-pervasive standards (even IBM's dominance in business was being challenged by the minis).
These day if you want to create a new computer system that people will use you need at the minimum to provide a networking stack and a functional web browser, some emulation or compatibility system to support legacy software that people rely on, device drivers for a huge range of hardware, etc. All this not only takes a huge amount of work, it also punctures the design integrity of your system, making it into a huge mountain of compatibility hacks before you even start on your own new concepts. But the deadliest enemy of innovation is the mental inertia of masses of users with a long history of interacting with computers. They are no longer the blank slates who have never seen a computer you had in the 70's.
Even in the realm of art people realized that the romantic or modernistic model of artistic revolution that Kay invokes is untenable and retreated into postmodernism.
[+] [-] chubot|8 years ago|reply
http://blog.ycombinator.com/harc/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11679680
In September "eleVR" said it was leaving YC research:
http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/
I presume these e-mail excerpts are inspired by the end of HARC too? What happened?
In the thread about first year reports a couple months ago, someone suspects that funding has ended too. Also, Bret Victor's work and name are conspicuously missing from the first year reports.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15564072
https://harc.ycr.org/reports/
[+] [-] ontouchstart|8 years ago|reply
> The misleading thing about Linux is that it IS IN FACT a big idea -- it's just not a technological idea. We already knew how to write monolithic kernels. But the real innovation is the software development process. The fact that thousands of programmers can ship a working kernel with little coordination is amazing. That Linus wrote git is not an accident; he's an expert in software collaboration and evolution.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15164092
From your comment, I think the funding and development process of these post Bell Lab/PARC research projects might need a paradigm change from technology idea oriented to social development oriented due to the reality of our highly networked social environment (the dream of Licklider).
If we read the CRAZY eleVR thread as a tree/forest, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15162957
We can see that how much misunderstanding of each other exists in our tech community. There are much deeper social development problems to be solved than simple VC or philanthropy funding.
@vihart was right saying
> HN. You're a weird place.
It is a more fundamental problem that vihart and gang can’t solve. And that would be an opportunity at another meta level.
Think what Lick would do.
[+] [-] ontouchstart|8 years ago|reply
http://elevr.com/elevr-leaving-ycr/
[+] [-] j_s|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] signa11|8 years ago|reply
i am going through licklider's 'the dream machine' book. it is quite long, and dense but ties together lots of individual threads (for me at least) that were kind of floating loose otherwise. i had known about luminaries in the field (and their work) specifically, licklider, shannon, norbert-weiner, cerf and kahn, metcalfe, von neumann, vannaver bush (to name a few) but this book brings them together.
interestingly though, licklider's background was in psychology, as opposed to ee/maths. did we lose some of the diversity of perspective ?
another book, that i found to be pretty good is 'the idea factory', it complements the 'dream machine' book quite well.
edit-001 : fmt changes, and added reference to another book.
[+] [-] evaneykelen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdkl95|8 years ago|reply
That's a vision that recognizes the value in creating tools, not constrained solutions for the current problem. Freedom can be frightening[1], but letting people explore what is possible with your new tool sometimes leads to unexpected uses and the occasional paradigm-shifting discovery.
[1] (with apologies to DHH[2]) If we give people unconstrained tools, they might change the String class to shoot out fireworks at inappropriate time!
[2] https://vimeo.com/17420638#t=27m27s
[+] [-] mr_tristan|8 years ago|reply
I'm sure there's a cultural effect here as well. Seems like there are fewer large companies that are willing to just let technologists "muck around for a bit" swinging for the fences without some kind of goal.
But, I just wonder, if VC-funded startups are where new tech grows, we end up just focusing on incremental improvements, instead of potential large leaps.
[+] [-] forapurpose|8 years ago|reply
I wonder if this is true. Many of the major computer industry companies have labs: Google, Microsoft, IBM ... (Apple? Facebook? Amazon?)
I wonder if it's more or less than before.
[+] [-] sgentle|8 years ago|reply
Because I feel like I've read a few of these posts, watched similar talks, and I nod along and agree every time. Only problem is, I'm not a wealthy benefactor, director of a research institute, or a business exec with control of discretionary R&D funding.
Where do those people hang out, what would convince them like this post convinces me, and is anyone working on that?
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] auggierose|8 years ago|reply
I think it is working in research (given for example that some of the papers in conferences like POPL are just great). Of course you won't hear from those instances where it is not working (until it does).
The problem is you somehow have to decide who to give money to, and you cannot possibly know who carries a vision inside of them that they are actually able to realise given enough funding and time.
[+] [-] chauhankiran|8 years ago|reply
-- I have seen these types of situations so many times while project implementation.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Jyaif|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hashmal|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Glench|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulsutter|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
Unless there are any great results, no, they are not.
Tons of research money where poured into AI in the 60s-70s too, and when it got nowhere great, it all folded in the so-called "AI winter".
[+] [-] bboreham|8 years ago|reply
Billions poured into AI have produced some interesting tricks but little that changed the entire world of computing in the way those things have.
[+] [-] icc97|8 years ago|reply
The people being given money for AI are expected to work on AI, not on whatever they think is cool.
[+] [-] imrehg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Joeri|8 years ago|reply
Hire a bunch of smart people, give them advance funding for 5 years without strings attached, tell them to build the future without specifying what that means.
From a personal view I have plenty of ideas for things never built before, but I lack the time and energy to do it after hours and I can almost never fit it into the scope of my professional work. Sometimes this makes me sad.
[+] [-] osullivj|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jancsika|8 years ago|reply
Parc was "effectively non-profit" because there was no way to collect or monetize reams of user data like there is today. If there had been, either Kay wouldn't have gotten that agreement or Parc would have been much more selective about what constituted "results."
For example: how many companies have solved the talk-to-our-computers-and-our-computers-talk-back problem now?
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Jare|8 years ago|reply
"An important part of any art is for the artists to escape the "part of the present that is the past", and for most artists, this is delicate because the present is so everywhere and loud and interruptive. For individual contributors, a good ploy is to disappear for a while"
reminded me of John Carmack explaining in his .plans how he would go off and seclude himself for a couple of weeks to start a new iteration of the id technology.
[+] [-] mitchtbaum|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cateye|8 years ago|reply
I also totally get the point of funding problem finding versus funding business plans that are full of bullshit and pretend to have a risk free solution with a play book that just needs some money to execute it linearly step-by-step. So, for that part it is written very well and the point is clear.
Another topic is: would all kind of innovations really emerge if the funding mechanism was radically different in the last 20 years? Would we see all kinds of big leaps or was ARPA-Parc just a serendipity moment that couldn't be repeated no matter what the funding structure was?
[+] [-] api|8 years ago|reply
On two occasions I've had VC types (in one case post-beer) tell me they almost never fund anyone who doesn't have (paraphrasing) "presence" or "a reality distortion field" etc. I would have assumed it to be subconscious but these comments convinced me that it's a conscious explicit bias in at least some cases.
This is a really outstanding book on the topic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet:_The_Power_of_Introverts...
Put enough weaponized extroversion and alpha primate signaling behind it and you can get people to invest in millions in absolute BS. You can also over-inflate the value of something real to stratospheric degrees. See also: Uber.
On the other hand if you have an underspoken introvert try to sell something outstanding, the majority of businesspeople will not pay attention.
I have seen a case where a meek soft-spoken woman tried to pitch a mobile startup with outstanding user base growth, revenue, and cash efficiency numbers and got yawns. She wasn't asking for much. This was seed stage stuff and these were crazy amazing numbers. In the same pitch fest the investor panel perked up for a number of vapid pre-revenue proposals backed by more extroverted alpha personalities. I don't think it was just sexism since one of these was also a woman. (I suspect some sexism is actually this bias since it may be tougher for women to play the alpha primate card with men.)
Most innovators ("artists") are more on the introvert end of the spectrum.
Edit: this may be rational for funding things that rely heavily on in-person salesmanship, but it's applied broadly.
Edit #2: another reason this may be rational for VCs is that they are only thinking about their cash-out. They may be looking for people who can pump the value of the company's stock to later investors more than people who can actually deliver lasting value. The company's product is its stock, not its product.
[+] [-] BaronSamedi|8 years ago|reply
I believe that for workstation/desktop computing we have already hit stagnation. I also suspect that programming languages have not advanced in any significant way since around 1990. By this perhaps surprising claim, I mean that the languages available today are no more capable than those available in the 1980s.
[+] [-] bambax|8 years ago|reply
> I once gave a talk to Disney executives about "new ways to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs". For example, set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. (etc.)
however it's really hard to argue that Apple, Microsoft, or indeed IBM or Disney ever killed the geese that lay the golden eggs.
Or if they did, they had plenty others running around.
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
That's not a problem I see, because this is not about Alan Kay's personal track record.
The kind of organizational freedom he describes was available in Park and Bell Labs, and it wasn't just Kay, but tens of people, one after another creating the most important technologies, while it was on.
[+] [-] jasonkostempski|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quantumofmalice|8 years ago|reply
Just right.