Great article. This part especially rings true to me: "If researchers have an ideological bent, a meta-analytic null may just be an expression of the typical sentiments of researchers".
When I was in academia, it was increasingly the case that my peers thought of research less as a way to determine the truth, but just as a method to influence policy and public opinion. If we thought something was 80% likely to be true, there was pressure to "close ranks" and pretend as though it was 100% true, and to avoid publishing anything that contradicted it. It is also well known that papers that support certain "sides" tend to be easier to publish (and in higher ranked journals), plus can yield more media attention. See for example, this fraud in sociology - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_contact_changes_minds.
This may be better in the natural sciences, but in social science you should not trust any paper unless you read through and fully understand the methodology. Any non experimental results has so much wiggle room in the modeling methodology that it's easy to generate any result you want. The actual percentage of papers with credible results is very low, much lower than laypeople think.
Once, years ago, I got into a debate with somebody online who just kept dropping links to studies after making a statement as if it proved them correct.
One day, I got bored and decided to actually read every single study. The studies said nothing close to what the debater suggested and seriously opened my eyes to just how terrible some studies can be in terms of quality.
Now, I just assume that anybody who starts link bombing in a conversation has no idea what they're talking about and can't engage on a logical discussion.
Yep. This is why it makes me nearly physically ill when I hear people use terms like "science denier" or say things like "<insert political party here> don't believe in science" or "our laws should be based on science".
It is invariably some of the most scientifically illiterate, ideologically entrenched, and intellectually lukewarm people who spout this garbage as a retort to any sort of argument with which they do not wish to engage.
The tricky bit is there really are people who think that science is "just an opinion, man". See e.g. "teach the controversy" regarding evolution vs. creationism. There's certainly a place for "<X> don't believe in science" and "our laws should be based on science".
But the argument is so often misapplied that it's become meaningless.
I have argued against 5G deployment for example, not based on outlandish "zomg Bill Gates George Soros mindcontrol!!!11" or "brain tumours!!!11" nonsense, all of that is clearly nonsense. But the science is a lot less clear that there are zero effects than is sometimes made out to be, and there are also the ethical considerations of informed consent. I was, of course, immediately lobbed in with the crazies and called a science-denying conspiracy theorist, by someone with no expertise in the field who said I need to "listen to the science", in spite of my argument looking nothing like the anti-scientific nonsense from David Icke and the like.
Don't even get me started on COVID – any attempt to inject even the slightest sort of nuance was met with "you are literally murdering people with your unscientific nonsense!" and you were immediately lobbed in with COVID-denying anti-maskers or whatnot. At some point this stopped being a debate about trade-offs involving science and medicine on one hand and basic liberties and freedoms on the other and became some sort of moral crusade (and it seems it still is; there was a conference this month where masks at all times, full proof of vaccination, and a PCR test was still required, which seems a bit much for 2023).
A big issue is that any sort of nuance is often met with the most uncharitable interpretation because the genuinely crazy people have been getting so much attention.
The thing is, based on so many examples of people who cite “the science” that are clearly exaggerated or unsupported “just an opinion” isn’t too far off.
It shouldn’t be this way, but there’s a lot of undermining of trust in science because of this stuff.
Take evolution as an example. How many layers of scientific expertise have to be understood to really claim that you understand how evolution works? Archeology, biology, history, geology, genetics…potentially more?
At some point there’s a trust factor involved in accepting evolution.
Now apply that same realization with climate change.
The more complex, the more moving parts, the easier it is to find a part to be skeptical about and people will do exactly that. Especially if they are given reason to believe that the science is just there to support a political objective.
In the end, unless science can be easily replicated and demonstrated (gravity, boiling water, killing bacteria, generating power, flywheels, etc) it will boil down to trust for the vast majority of people.
Your last point is critical. People at the end of the 20th century had come to “trust the science” because it conferred tangible power on those who wielded it. “Science” could send a man to the moon or a bounce a phone call off a satellite to the other side of the world. Your average person doesn’t have to understand the rocket equation, or trust NASA. They can watch a launch in Florida and see with their own eyes the awesome power of “science.”
Then, folks started invoking the authority of “science” in connection with disciplines that don’t confer tangible power. For example, if “education science” worked, we would know it. It would convey power the results of which people could see with their own eyes without needed to pore through studies, or putting any faith in “education experts.”
I've come to the conclusion that science needs to be just another form of religion (without the theistic element). I don't have the time or the energy to go through the research to determine if climate change is real. I put my faith in the scientific process, which is probably the most successful thing we've ever come up with as a species. I'm not sure why I should believe some random dude, whoever he might be or what credentials he might have, on the radio/TV over the scientific community. Sure, they've gotten things wrong, but their success rate and their usefulness to our species is infinitely better than some politician being a climate change denialist just to appeal to voters. What process does he have and why should I trust it more than the scientific method?
I disagree with that attitude. I think most scientific information that comes to us through the media is reliable. If people stop trusting science (or they continue to stop trusting science), we are just left with superstition and religion. It was really hard for people to cope with the fact that during covid we started with the best explanations and then as we learned we improved on it and some ideas or expected safety practices changed. Good example is that many viruses spread through touch and covid spread through the air and that was a surprise.
People take that in and say I just don't trust anything. That is a problem with America because people stop believing in objective facts, saying that it goes against their beliefs. This is a major problem why America doesn't have enough engineers and scientists and mathematicians, because people haven't learned that your intuition can be wrong and you can overcome your strong expectation about something by studying something, debugging a program or whatever.
Yes. Even if the original information is correct it tends to be quite distorted by the media (the headlines are almost always hyperbolic), let alone when it gets picked up by the public and repeated.
It depends on how you define the “scientific community.” If your kid has a staph infection, there are people who make antibiotic creams that will make it disappear in days. They’re scientists. Their science gives them power you don’t have to “believe in,” because you can see the results.
Most people with a Ph.D. in a field with “science” in the name aren’t scientists. They work in fields that don’t have the same level of rigor as nuclear physics. (My degree is in aerospace engineering, and many real scientists would consider us bumpkins in how comparatively undisciplined our field is compared to their’s.) Those fields confer little to no power to produce tangible and undeniable results.
Like how North Korea is a ‘democratic republic.’ If you have to put ‘science’ or ‘evidence based’ after your discipline, it’s probably not science (or science with lots of problems).
See:
Social science
Political science
Evidence based naturopathy/chiro
You're right about this. And it makes discussion, much less "debate", so difficult. I'm pro-5G but willing to entertain the anti-5G evidence because what if there was some and it was true or at least unexplained?
There's another important part of this though, oil companies pay scientific researchers to publish views against the veracity of climate change, research and predictions. That's why they say it's science denialism because those people are making shoddy arguments. Disagreeing about whether you care about global climate change is not science denialism but making up things to say there's no science is denialism.
yes certainly science can inform policy decisions. How do I put this...
Science has nothing to say about what we should set as the objectives of our policy. Science can, however, inform our approach to attaining that objective.
My favorite term like that was “scientific consensus”. I used to point out that up until the 17th century the scientific consensus was that the Sun revolved around the Earth. I would get nothing but blank stares in response. It turns out that people who talk about “scientific consensus” typically don’t know whether the Earth revolves around the Sun, or vice-versa.
Yeah, but it means they're far more likely to be correct. Iconoclast / Galileo gambit outliers are near nil.
We collectively know more about everything every year, science has generally given us a self-correcting living corpus.
The argument you're making is the same made by anti-intellectuals: don't trust institutional knowledge and consensus because it's been wrong in the past, look at mistake X. It's something like a systemic ad hominem.
They are not near nil. Every idea ever conceived has either been rejected or altered to match new observations.
That means that most ideas will end up being wrong in some way. The smoking-gun laws of nature are few and far between.
If you consider what % of ideas throughout history were plain wrong, it’s hard to believe that we have finally figured it all out and the consensus finally reflects reality most of the time.
We're talking about wrong as in Galileo, as in radically upending, not modifications or normal gradients of wrongness. Knowledge is generally accretive, but we pay a lot of emotional and categorical attention to perspectives that break dogma. The vast majority absolutely do not, and they fade innumerably into the background of the industry they support.
It's easy (and trite) to cite the extremely limited pool of successful dogma-contrarians over time. Try making a list of the failed contrarians, and then another of all the knowledge (and its contributors) that didn't need fundamental reconsideration at some point in modernity.
The critical point is that contrarians are always necessary for science. If we always ignored dissenters then we would never make any progress. Even if most are wrong, contrarians are essential.
Thus deferring to the ‘consensus’ and implicitly ignoring contrarian views stops science in its tracks.
I don’t understand what you mean in your first paragraph, and I don’t support dogmatic positions so I’m not sure why you refer to ‘dogma-contarians.’ Contrarians are usually anti-dogmatic.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Unreasonable contrarians are generally annoying but essential.
The fallacy is assuming that consensus = probably true.
This is only correct when we have good evidence and good methods. That is why consensus breaks (like heliocentrism) occur during technological changes (development of telescope).
The critical point the parent is missing is that many fields have terrible data and terrible methods so the ‘consensus’ isn’t likely to be true (eg smoking is good for the nerves, butter is bad for you, the globe is too big for humans to cause changes)
It takes a lot of intellectual integrity to admit that many disciplines are not generating anything resembling ‘truth’. It’s easier to ignore and say: but the consensus is the best we have! Sometimes the heterodox view is the best.
It is especially frustrating when scientific ideas are applied to moral dilemmas. I see this from the far left wing frequently. The irony is that this same mindset is what led to the proliferation of eugenics apologists in the 1800s. The scientific consensus had absolutely no objections to eugenics on scientific grounds. In fact, "science" would seem to support it. Yet it is widely agreed that this practice is morally reprehensible nowadays, because humans were able to put aside their hubris and apply their moral reasoning.
Plenty of people realized that eugenics was unacceptable who were in the scientific world then, just like plenty of people understood that slavery was wrong. Which doesn't take away from the fact that plenty of terrible policies came out because leaders did have those views. I don't know what left wing ideas you've seen that are wrong, I'm sure that I've seen some left wing ideas that are wrong. I'm more worried about what do the leaders and the effective speakers in groups promote. Saying that I'm making you more free by taking away your choice of library books, or your choice about medical care, that's not an extreme view that only 1% of people have. It's pretty much the consensus leadership view of Republicans.
This is one reason Wikipedia discourages using primary sources (i.e. individual studies) as references. Not that using secondary sources is perfect either, but you can "prove" almost anything by linking to studies as there are just so many of them. Do 1,000 studies on homeopathy and some of them will show a positive effect (even when done well, ignoring there are also many bad studies on these kind of topics).
> One day, I got bored and decided to actually read every single study.
Nothing is more entertaining than the meeting after a business presentation where someone fact checks the reference after the power point. When we have vendor presentations, we started doing this because... so many claims, so little truth.
Maybe assess the argument by the first two studies. If either of them do not support the point (or as has frequently happened for me, actually oppose the point) then you can reply for posterity and no one else needs to replicate your debunking effort.
“Your first two studies not only don’t support your argument but invalidate it, and I stopped reading after that.” ends most disagreements.
You will have probably done more work than the poster who often has just discovered keyword searches and related articles in google scholar or science direct, but everyone will learn something.
I'm not saying you're wrong — I've got my name on exactly one paper so what would I know — but that being true would suggest that peer review is fundamentally broken.
No, it would suggest that every paper has something in it that can be considered a fatal flaw by a person biased against it. Peer review is precisely supposed to admit this and minimize flaws in conclusions given inevitable flaws in methodology.
Sort of a research paper equivalent of:
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." by Cardinal Richelieu
Peer review is not a certificate of truthfulness, peer review just says that a grad student reading the paper did not found anything too suspicious there and it looks like a typical paper in that field.
Peer review, at its core, is a social consensus process. It can work, but it is structurally inclined to propagate agreement.
I wonder if it serves to reinforce this problem, as those more motivated to reinforce certain literatures or perspectives will surface those repeatedly in reviews.
There's a popular work that comes to this conclusion in its beginning chapters [0]. The basic premise is that the act of science and knowledge acquisition cyclically devolves into ideology and is then disrupted. Typically those who initially disrupt a scientific dogma are not treated well. Eventually the old guard literally dies off and the new ideas can begin to take hold.
[0] The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, T. Kuhn
> The basic premise is that the act of science and knowledge acquisition cyclically devolves into ideology and is then disrupted.
This can happen of course, but it's not really what Kuhn is talking about. Kuhnian paradigm shifts are to science what massive refactorings are to a codebase: the problem isn't that the old code was wrong (though it might also be wrong), it's that it can't be extended to meet new requirements. And while some of us are better at writing extensible code than others, no one gets it right every single time.
Not even that. I was a grad student that reviewed a paper submitted to a well-known journal from a heavyweight in my field. The paper's own data showed that the authors were reporting 95% noise. My advisor rejected the paper only to see it published a few months later (in another famous journal) after the authors removed the data that allowed us to detect the noise throughout the data.
2nd grade we learned the scientific method. I don't remember peer reviewed being a thing.
Replication was critical.
Also, I've seen peer reviewed papers with atrocious stuff in them, unless I know the peer, it doesn't mean much to me. Give me 100 independent groups coming to the same conclusions. That has far more weight than a few of your friends/professors reading your paper.
I mean I think peer review kind of is fundamentally broken, but at the same time this phenomenon isn't necessarily a sign of it.
Even within technical papers, let alone pop writing or internet discussions, many of the claims citations are provided for are broad e.g. "X can increase people's anxiety". A very rigorous study might exist showing that when X happens a specific way it does increase some form of anxiety in some specific subset of the population, but using it as a citation for the broad statement without further context can be misleading at times.
It's in fact possible that by considering different subsets of the same statement you'd get an opposite directional effect. That can certainly be used to confuse people, especially in a situation where it is unlikely most readers will dive deeply into the cited works.
As far as nit picking - the same general principle applies. There will always be some tradeoff between scope, rigor, and available resources to do the study. If we waited for papers to be perfect in both correctness and interestingness/utility there would be almost nothing to ever publish.
So I think the systemic problem here is moreso an undervaluing of review article and text book type resources (both reading them and writing them) in favor of vomiting out random individual paper citations for whatever claim. Science needs more heterogeneity in the roles different PIs fill for the system.
Improving peer review process would be great (and might indirectly help), but I don't feel it's the root.
Not exactly. Control for that in a future experiment?
To be fair, as you start to leave chemistry, true knowledge(the goal of science) is impossible to find. The best we can get is little glimpses of the truth.
To be fair, I have seen studies that were pretty bullet proof. It just seems that most are lazy or simply impossible to prevent variables.
I'll often read through the studies in an argument but it is very unfeasible to keep up with these people because they can just keep throwing crap at you, and if you disagree with the study, they'll throw another at you until you give up. I remember reading through one 80 page paper on how a public option for healthcare would bankrupt us, but if you actually read through the thing, it never accounts for all the money saved by not being spent on private healthcare (which would fund the entire thing). My local power company had a similar situation where they posted a huge study explaining why solar was costing them a bunch of money, but if you actually read the study it explains that it considers lost income from solar as costing them money (in the same way that moving to a more efficient AC system would "cost" the power company money). It's all bullshit, and it's too easy to abuse studies to defend your position.
If someone replies within a few minutes with a link to a study, you can usually just assume it doesn't even support their point unless they're actually a researcher in the field.
It takes way longer even for experts to read and digest a paper thoroughly to evaluate the methodology and results.
Googling for 5 minutes and skimming the abstract for keywords that might be related to whatever you were arguing about is usually the norm online.
It takes years of training and feedback to learn to properly evaluate a paper in your own field, and that's after years of undergraduate education at least. Most people online skip even the basic textbook level background and think they understand what they're reading.
mRNA vaccines are completely safe - Obviously false just like it is false for any vaccine since there are always going to be rare side effects in some members of the population. They very well may be just as safe as any other vaccine, but the truth is there are some things we won't know until a lot more time goes by. You can't say what the long term side effects are of something until it has been around for a long time.
Wind power is better for the environment - Similar to above, we don't really have data on the full lifecycle environmental costs of large scale wind farms. This is especially true because a good portion of the impact depends on how long the turbines last, what type of repair/recycle technologies are developed, and what type of policies get applied to recycling them. We see some things that look promising but others that are concerning.
Saying "mRNA vaccines are completely safe" is obviously not pedantically true. The same could be said of anything, not just mRNA vaccines. Nothing is ever absolutely 100 % safe.
It would, at least in theory, be better to realistically say what we knew and didn't know about the risks.
But public communication about those kinds of risks and tradeoffs is hard. If you say there might be any kind of a risk at all, some people are going to get hung up on that or grossly overestimate those risks compared to the benefits (or to the risks of not getting the vaccine -- also not something everyone would be affected by but clearly a non-zero risk).
Taking that into account, "completely safe" might be a better approximation than most other ones you could make.
While I understand what you are saying, I would disagree. Saying that something is completely safe when it isn't (as you say nothing is completely safe) makes it appear that people are being lied to when someone does have some type of reaction.
I think we are better of thinking of risk in terms of every day risk management. Comparing risks to things like driving 10 miles, getting hit by a meteor while sleeping, etc. can help create a better understanding of the risks.
I'm not sure I agree with it either. I'd personally much rather take a realistic estimate (in cases we have one anyway) than a simplified half-truth. But I think I can see a rationale for why some people doing the communicating may opt for the latter.
Comparing to something else that people might have a more realistic intuition of sounds like a good idea.
It is sort of like how when some people want to prove something is true they quote the Bible. I find the behavior especially strange when they are quoting the bible to prove the bible is true.
Sociology lives in an uncomfortable place at the intersection of "important" and "difficult". Forming a rigid experiment on human beings is vastly more difficult than a simple thing like an atom or a mineral, and so much worse with groups of human beings.
STEM people like to dismiss it because it doesn't produce the same kind of rigid results and is therefore useless. But sociology is nonetheless important. Like it or not, we have to make decisions about how the world will run, and the fact that we don't have perfect information doesn't let us opt out of that.
Combine that with all of the usual human failings -- pettiness, meanness, closed-mindedness, greed, etc -- it sounds impossible. But it does, slowly, gather data and formulate theories.
This isn't made better by the fact that most STEM people imagine they can read primary source material and understand it -- a mistake they wouldn't make for a "hard science" in a different discipline. Like every field, the frontiers are based on huge amounts of background material, which is even more vast for a field that's more complicated than the nice, neat laws of physics or chemistry.
None of that excuses those human failings of sociologists. They need to do better, and hold each other to account (and not just to foment their own failings in their place). But we do need to recognize that this work is important. The world is complex and difficult and we'll make better choices if we try to understand, rather than dismiss it as unknowable.
While I agree that there is some work in the field that is important, there is an absolute deluge of ideologically driven garbage. There is also a lot of garbage of the "yeah, duh, of-fucking-course" variety. studies like "negative interactions with community reduce feelings of belonging" ... uh yeah, no shit sherlock.
And then even the more important stuff cannot be investigated in the same rigorous manner as other scientific disciplines.
I think we just need to stop calling sociology papers "scientific". Fundamentally, they are not, and should almost always be taken with a massive grain of salt, and they damn sure shouldn't be influencing public policy decisions to the degree that they currently do.
> There is also a lot of garbage of the "yeah, duh, of-fucking-course" variety. studies like "negative interactions with community reduce feelings of belonging" ... uh yeah, no shit sherlock.
I think these studies are useful, first of all to test whether it's
actually true because sometimes "well du'h" turns out to be wrong, but also to
quantify the exact effects. Is it a large effect or a small effect? How large
exactly? Which factors exactly contribute to this effect? What exactly is the breakdown of the effects? It might be possible that 20% of the people are effected by it and 80% of people are not; or perhaps everyone is effected by it.
There's often all sorts of non-obvious nuance that's possible, which can be very significant.
Yes, that is true. However, I would posit that the actual result of the most well researched, scientifically backed, rigorous results in all of sociology essentially amounts to empowering governments and private companies to produce more effective advertising, propaganda, etc.
That seems overly cynical. At the end of the day sociology is like any other science: "find out more about the world". Doing that is rarely a bad thing.
> There is also a lot of garbage of the "yeah, duh, of-fucking-course" variety. studies like "negative interactions with community reduce feelings of belonging" ... uh yeah, no shit sherlock.
The importance of these studies are often not the expected results, but the average magnitude of the effect, and the parsing out of confounders.
Do chronic minor negative interactions have more of an effect on feelings of belonging than a single major negative interaction? This has policy implications.
What are the effects of negative interactions on highly social versus highly non-social individuals? What sorts of coping mechanisms do these two very disparate groups use to deal with negative community interactions?
I can think of a bunch more questions answerable by this type of research that don't have obvious answers. The importance of these questions depend on the magnitude and confounders of the original question.
> I think we just need to stop calling sociology papers "scientific". Fundamentally, they are not
They are, or are capable of being, as scientific as Darwin's crude observations of finch phenotypes.
I also do not regard Darwin as particularly scientific, though he broke open some flood gates for very scientific research.
And your comments on policy implications are precisely what I am saying we should avoid - Why would we set policy based on studies which 1) are not scientifically rigorous (based on self reporting, surveys, small population, low ability to control confounding variables, etc) 2) do not actually suggest that policy would be effective in rectifying the problems identified in the study and 3) do not necessarily identify problems (e.g. is it really the business of the government to set policy with the aim of optimizing some self reported individual metric, such as feelings of belonging?)
We shouldn't. If self-reports are ever used to set policy (and they should be) this should be on an individualized, ad hoc basis.
If a squeaky wheel comes to you, oil it. Maybe ask around if there are other squeaky wheels that no one in power is paying attention to. Oil them too. But don't go around oiling every wheel as a matter of policy, as you will end up with a bunch of overly oiled wheels having problems from over oiling.
Plenty of sociological studies (such as education interventions) aren't based on self-reports, but tested results.
> is it really the business of the government to set policy with the aim of optimizing some self reported individual metric, such as feelings of belonging?
The general governmental purpose here wouldn't be to make everyone feel like they belong, but to decrease as much as possible mass shooters, abusers, and the like. And to make it easy for people to report problems they are having, or for outsiders to discover problems. The Turpin case could have been nipped in the bud if the adults and children who noticed how unkempt and smelly the oldest daughter was when she was briefly publicly schooled had intervened (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turpin_case ).
The problem I have with your take is you mistake the voting population as a bunch of libertarians, something that is a very commonly held viewpoint here on HN. They are not.
Voting blocks have what they see as problems they want to change. If you come at them with sufficient evidence for a plan that may work to change the problem, there is a good bet they'll vote for it. If you decide science is too hard and that we shouldn't do that silly science stuff, they will line up right behind the next authoritarian that says 'make america simple again' and enact devastating plans that they believe will solve the problem.
I mean, you can get in front of the voting block and tell them that status quo is just fine if you like, but expect it to be hard work and don't expect much success.
I think I've learned the most about life as a citizen from the sociology lessons and a book written in late 70's or 80's. The stuff they've concluded then still stands today and I'm sure will still stand as long as there are humans. Such and eye-opening discipline and I remember it with fondness. Always surprised when people start bashing sociology for reasons unknown to me.
It is not better in natural sciences. Alzheimer’s disease treatment based on the amyloid plaque hypothesis being the prime example. Basically researchers closed ranks and doled out grant money disproportionately to the amyloid hypothesis researchers.
This is sort of like adding momentum to a gradient descent algorithm, though. It is rational congeal support around a plausible hypothesis to see if it pans out rather than pursue all hypotheses (whatever that would even mean) in a desultory fashion. In the case of amyloid plaques there may have been some academic misconduct involved as well.
Sometimes I feel like non-scientists have this idea that scientists should be super-rational actors and never be bamboozled or be wrong, but frankly, that isn't realistic. Scientists are fallible, have finite time, and are subject to social trends and pressures like the rest of us. Expecting that they always get it right is unrealistic and not good for science.
Scientists should not shut out other ideas for two decades even though there were serious challenges to the hypothesis the whole time. Part of being a good scientist is admitting your chosen hypothesis isn’t correct and that it’s time to create a new theory based on the experimental evidence available. Otherwise, it’s just a research based cult.
This almost never happens, to my knowledge. Most fields have people pursuing alternative hypotheses even when one thing is in vogue. For example, in the case of Alzheimer's Disease there were and are a lot of other threads of research and I would be that your typical AD scientist would have had a good grasp of many of them regardless of the research they were focusing on.
Yes. At least there is a plausible argument for it in many contexts. Imagine a suite of ten hypothesis, one of which is correct but each of which requires 6 effort units to prove or disprove or discover or whatever. If we only have a 10 units of effort to devote to research, we won't get anywhere if we divide them equally but we can eliminate each hypothesis if we work serially.
In reality I would expect the effect to be even more pronounced because progress on a hypothesis is almost certainly non-linearly related to the number of people working on it (with some point of diminishing return, of course). It is totally reasonable for a community to more or less work on proving or eliminating the few most reasonable hypotheses at a time rather than to spread themselves over the (frankly enormous) space of hypotheses relevant to a particular area.
I'd hardly argue that our system of allocating scientific research effort is perfect, but how could it be?
> Imagine a suite of ten hypothesis, one of which is correct but each of which requires 6 effort units to prove or disprove or discover or whatever. If we only have a 10 units of effort to devote to research, we won't get anywhere if we divide them equally but we can eliminate each hypothesis if we work serially.
A model of research without evidence demonstrating its accuracy is not convincing.
You might claim that we could never have discovered the Higgs without such coordinated efforts, and I could counter that without such coordination, we might have sooner discovered and advanced alternative paths that require considerably less funding and coordination, like wakefield accelerators.
I don't think science that advances by stepwise consensus will outperform random, independent search in general, but only in very limited scenarios.
> It is totally reasonable for a community to more or less work on proving or eliminating the few most reasonable hypotheses
Only if "the community" consists of largely independent thinkers that reach their own conclusions, and are not influenced by fads or celebrity personalities. That's the only way to actually ascertain "the most reasonable hypotheses", and unfortunately, scientists are not immune to such influences.
I think current funding mechanisms for science select for non-independent thinkers. At the beginning of the scientific era, most researchers were funded by patrons, which supported much more independent research (at least, independent of other researcher's opinions, not the patron).
If you are a physical anthropologist there are many questions you can not ask, and many findings that people do not want to hear. Tread carefully, because one wrong step can end your career.
“ thought of research less as a way to determine the truth, but just as a method to influence policy and public opinion. If we thought something was 80% likely to be true, there was pressure to "close ranks" and pretend as though it was 100% true, and to avoid publishing anything that contradicted it. ”
That seems to be the general spirit of this time. People feel the need to take sides and then make sure their side wins. Same happens in journalism. Most journalism these days seems to be about supporting a viewpoint and less about conveying neutral or complete information.
Sad that scientists also feel that they should be activists.
I'm not sure if that particular study is a good example of this as everything and its aunt was getting published about COVID back then. It is disappointing that other studies were shut down on the assumption that the mortality results from such a limited (and fatally flawed) analysis were correct, especially given previous knowledge of the side effects and dosing considerations of hydroxychloroquine.
I had a job interview with Reddit last year for a modeling related position and it was one of the strangest and most user-hostile interviews I've ever had, even as someone who's spent many years working for SV adtech companies. All product interviews were laser focused on maximizing a few specific advertiser revenue metrics, anytime I brought up effects on the consumer it would immediately get dismissed and I'd be asked to refocus on advertiser effects. My guess is their leadership is pressuring the company hard to boost their numbers, no matter the long term cost.
I’m not sure how much to read into an interview, but how many times are we going to be surprised by this cycle? They don’t care about monetization until their user base has grown large and established, and then they do and monetize aggressively. Where have I seen this movie before?
Looking too closely at that abyss leads to some disturbing implications, for people who like to sit on their ass and collect dividends while other people work.
I think the point he's obliquely trying to make is that the monetization of attention is not a thing that can actually be done right, at all.
We should have solved the problem of bandwidth costs another way - taxes or paying individually for each thing. People keep saying the internet failed. No, the internet has been working perfectly while a bunch of bridge trolls came in and setup shop.
These two things have nothing to do with each other and this is a very black and white mentality. Reddit already had ads and already made money. This is about squeezing more money out of users, not any sort of charity for a system that doesn't sustain itself.
It's well known reddit has been eyeing up an IPO, and as a result it's pretty unsurprising they're searching for ways to juice their metrics in the build up. Tells a nice growth story so you can dump stock on retail and it's not really important if you do long term damage to the business - because it'll no longer be your business. Can't imagine that would be a great place to work unless they very strongly align your compensation with the IPO (commonly employees get the oppsite, a lock-up period after IPO to make sure all the juice is squeezed by the time they get to sell).
I do not remember the specific metrics, but there was a big focus on the fact that their CPC/CPM/etc was lower than alternative social media, meaning advertisers put less value on clicks/views from Reddit than other platforms. And they believed this was because their ads were not targeted enough since there was (is?) no fancy ML models behind it, advertisers could just chose some basic rules for what subreddits they want to target.
To solve this they were building out a huge ad relevancy team to target ads at users using posting history, similar to Meta/LinkedIn/etc.
I've been in marketing and media for almost 20 years, been a Reddit user for almost that long, and have run teams owning both buy and sell side, including at a publisher platform.
My $.02 CPM is that yes, Reddit can improve their rates by improving relevancy. But they don't capture anywhere near the volume or quality of signals to inform relevancy models as compared to others in the space.
From their privacy policy it looks like they may engage with vendors who enrich data that can be tied back to a hashed identifier. This seems in sync with the increased pushes to create accounts with emails (one of the main identifiers the industry relies on) as well as use the app (to get a MAID, though those are increasingly worthless for identity resolution vendors from a match rate standpoint).
Reddit is in a tough spot because a huge chunk of their users want to use them anonymously, or with minimum PI provided. This leaves Reddit in a position of needing to either push harder to get it (like if they added profile fields to collect more PI), or infer it from modeling based on the subs you visit, content you read or post, interactions with other users, etc. Which puts them in the crosshairs of privacy bodies depending on how far they go.
This is all my own personal opinions and conjecture.
It speaks to their incompetence really, because when I look at the list of subs I have subscribed to and interacted with, my Reddit history is very, very closely aligned with my interests, much more so than any of my other social media profiles. If they can't mine that data effectively then they don't deserve to make money.
The problem mentioned by parent comment is that it basically ends there: they struggle to cross-reference your Reddit persona (faithful ad it may be) with the bucketloads of signals advertisers get from other sites.
If you talk about buying a car on some random app, chances are that you'll then see ads on Facebook about used cars. Facebook gets to know what you do elsewhere, and offers advertisers extremely precise (and hence more valuable) targeting. That's what Reddit can't do.
They need a pixel/SDK to make that work. That should have been step 1 in relevancy. Seems like they could also gave used their sharing buttons but whoever is running their ads strategy may not be focused on the right things (i.e. Dr advertisers from adult and gaming to start with).
This jibes with my experience. I was looking to come in on a web platform team there but they tried to shift me over to an ad focused team. I said “no dice” and parted ways.
Ironically I now work for an email marketing platform company, but it’s great work and we just provide the tools to annoy people. It’s our customers that actually do it (I know, I know).
Back in 2018, I had incredible results running Reddit ads. A CTR of 1.7%, a cost per click as low as 22 cents, and my landing page was converting at 18%.
Even back then, 100% of traffic Reddit ads was coming through Mobile, which explains why they really want (need) users on their mobile app. Desktop users just don't click ads, and mobile users using other clients don't see Reddit ads.
The tools available to me back then to run Reddit ads were a joke compared to other platforms, but with user acquisition was costing me around a dollar per user, I didn't really care!
I try not to get all rose-tinted about reddit but this doesn't surprise me at all and appears to be the natural progression of what was signaled with the firing of Victoria Taylor. Reddit has clearly forgotten that, despite its more recent professional veneer, it is still held together by duct tapes and prayers - both of which are largely provided by their own moderators and 3rd party app developers. Yet with every passing year they've become increasingly hostile to both. Steve Huffman threatened to ban all of us last blackout, as if a bunch of volunteers (many of which probably would relish the opportunity to step away from reddit and just need a bit of a prod) can be truly threatened.
They're trying to saw off the table legs while they're setting the table for their big meal.
It would be the highpoint of immature unprofessionalism to reveal company strategy or policy in interview questions.
I ask a coding interview question where I tell my candidates "Assume you have to do everything in memory; there is no database - you just receive events; everything is in one host, or multi-tier architecture." That's because it's a test of their ability to reason about data structures, and implement a short (20-30 minute) algorithm.
In real life, there is no way the "feature" I ask them to implement would be done in memory, and the data would naturally be in a database. It's not a architectural design question (i have others for that), it's a coding question.
I should hope nobody comes out of it thinking "wow, the engineers at this company are under pressure not to use databases, or have durable L2 caches"
I suspect you are reading into the constraints of an interview question, and the effects on the consumer was just not relevant to the technical concepts they were trying to evaluate.
I am skeptical that this is due to any positives on the NYC side, but more a story of the Bay Area's decline.
Of the 796 US cities with 50k+ population, San Francisco ranks 796/796 in population growth % over the last 2 years (-7.5%) while NYC ranks 793/796 (-5.3%).
I agree that overall population metrics tell a story of both cities' decline, but in the context of startups it's important to understand who is moving in/out. Tech workers who are upper middle class are typically moving into these metros, while lower-income families who might not work in tech are moving out.
I find this article to be too high-minded. Most Americans don't own cars or support car-friendly policies due to some notion of car=freedom or some other culture wars nonsense.
Americans own cars because most of them live in single-family houses on large plots of land, and that doesn't make public transit for daily commuting a realistic possibility. In Paris car ownership is very low, maybe 1/3 of adults, but in rural France the car ownership rate is easily 95%+. I haven't seen a single developed area in the world that has violated the rule that low density = high car ownership and vice versa.
The other rule that I have never seen violated is that the large majority of middle and upper income people do not want to live near low income people, due to crime or other reasons. In Europe, poor people live in the suburbs, so the middle income live in the city with high density housing. In the US and some other places (south asia), low income people live near the business center, so the middle income live in low density housing in the suburbs. These are for historical reasons and cannot be easily changed.
America actually has a huge public transportation system servicing most homes in the US. It’s the bus system for public schools. Running local loops to pick people up in moderately high density neighborhoods with 1 acre per house or less every half hour or so is actually pretty easy. Just read up on the old trolly networks before cars took off.
The real reason Americans own cars is because we’re rich enough to afford a more expensive and more convenient system. Public Transit at scale is surprisingly cheap when compared to all the costs associated with car ownership * 10’s of thousands of people in even a fairly small community.
I lived in Copenhagen’s suburbs, Østerbro, for several years and the public transit—trains and buses with the occasional taxi—were finely grained enough schedule-wise for me to easily work as an appointment-based professional (video/film editing, compositing and FX). I LOVED not having to deal with a car.
I now live in the Seattle suburbs, Redmond — very close to the same distance from the work site as in Copenhagen — and there is no way I could realistically rely on public transit to hit appointments unless I left an hour or two early—and, in bad weather, many hours early. I can’t imagine doing what I do without a car.
You might be able to (hypothetically) do it what might aptly be called Seattle's sister city, Vancouver, BC. You do still need to somewhat deliberately find a spot nearish the train, or a major bus route, or just bike, but it seems like it'd be more doable here. Haven't owned a car in years.
Last time I was down in Seattle though, I noticed they were building a massive elevated (40 mile?) train thing quite far north, which looks somewhat impressive if it wraps up in the near future.
I'm not from Seattle, but it sounds like you're talking about the 3 Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Line_(Sound_Transit) which will join the current 1 Line and head north up to Everett, WA. Estimated completion date of either 2037 or 2041 based on funding.
When I visit Seattle I only use public transit or walk to get around. I use the light rail as much as possible, but it only gets you kind of the way to anywhere. Plan on an up to quarter mile walk to a bus stop and then probably an additional bus to actual get to where you want to go. The previous poster is right in that you need to add at least an hour to your transit time to account for waiting for connections.
Also, a large portion of 1 Line's southern section is at-grade with auto traffic.
Looking at things today doesn’t explain how they got this way. The existence of widespread car ownership changed the way Americans built, where they moved, etc.
I’ve done long commutes and I’ve lived close enough to walk to work. If I and millions of other people had prioritized car free lives 20 years ago we would already had noticeably different infrastructure. Instead I’m back to “needing” a car to get around based on these kinds of choices.
While it’s true we own more cars because we can afford them, a large percentage of Americans require them.
Tiny remote communities rarely make enough for transport entities to care. For instance, without vehicles, in the village I live in, we’d probably be connected via bus to the nearby town, where you can do some shopping from a dollar store and get something to eat at restaurants, but to be connected to the various cities? They may have daily shuttles, but the population (<300) may not make this worth it. And as established in the thread public transport sucks and would make running errands impossible.
This doesn’t even compare to the truly remote individuals who live in the country miles out.
Honestly I feel like people who live in cities really lose their sense of scale for how large the US really is and how small a large percentage of communities are. I mean almost 1/3rd of the US population is crammed into less than 1% of the total surface of the USA. Using the 333 most populace cities in the USA gives an average population density of ~3,150/square mile. Out in the country where I live, we’re maybe 50/sqm, and further out that can drop to .25/sqm or lower.
Not to mention the fact that the reason public school buses work is because for the better part of the year the destinations are ironed out and rarely change. Little Æ is going from home to school and back 90% of the time. That simply doesn’t reflect an adult’s lifestyle, because while every child in a given area goes to a single school, jobs are much less localized. Not to mention errands, hobbies, visiting friends.
A bus schedule simply cannot replace the flexibility of a car to a large percentage of America.
> While it’s true we own more cars because we can afford them, a large percentage of Americans require them.
If people stopped buying cars, and stopped voting for people promoting zoning and a car shaped country, shared transports (bus, be they public or private) would take over. The thing is as long as people keep buying and using cars, there is no market for the shared transport. And US people tend to have difficulty to grasp the concept of a non profitability focused public service.
The way it used to work is if your job was in a different town, you moved to that town. Cars are a relatively recent phenomenon and yes in your example they are more convenient, but that’s my point.
I grew up next to farms and a school bus showed up 4x a day to take kids to k-6, or 7-12. It was a long and inconvenient trip, but that’s because we were living in the middle of nowhere.
Historically the majority of farmers globally didn’t own horses. They require quite a lot of effort and food while only being partially useful a few times a year.
I wasn’t necessarily drawing a connection between horses and farmers, as I was tackling each point separately and meant modern farmers.
For one, the mere existence of horses and their relatives were mostly in Africa and Asia, meaning that for a lot of unrecorded and a decent chunk of recorded history whether you had one or not was location dependent. And while yes, horses were expensive, renting them when needed was comparatively cheap.
Additionally, especially in feudalist societies, land was especially difficult to own, and an entire village would work on the land surrounding them. Meaning you rarely had need for any sort of transport that wasn’t your legs, as everything you needed was located in your village.
Contrast all of that to modern farmers, who regularly live on hundreds of acres, miles away from the nearest pocket of civilization. Without private transport they’d be stranded.
Modern farmers still generally live within a days walk of hundreds of other people. 1 million acres is a mega farm and still fits in a 1.6 X 1.6 square mile box while needed several people to operate.
It’s again wealth that allows for the modern system of roads and private vehicles rather than inherent necessity. Remember the post office is sending vehicles to every single one of these properties 6 days a week on the cheap. A bus doing the same would be really inconvenient, but also quite cheap.
> The real reason Americans own cars is because we’re rich enough to afford a more expensive and more convenient system.
Are we? When you zoom in on things like road maintenance backlogs and auto loan delinquencies, it kind of seems like we are not rich enough but have been pretending to be.
They're rich enough to have cars even if some are "pretending" through risky loans. Contrast that to poorer countries where many people can't even pretend to have a car.
Are they, though? Surely some people have unusually expensive loans but the full cost of a car comes from loan interest, depreciation, tolls, insurance, parking, gas, maintenance, taxes and any emergency repairs you have to make when something breaks. That can add up to a lot.
The delinquencies are the ones you hear about. What doesn't get reported, statistically, is when people are balancing absolutely everything in their life on a knife's edge to fit the car in with all their other expenses when they are living on a meager salary (or unemployed).
And that is only on the private individual's side. Costing out car-dependent development in terms of building and maintaining roads, bridges, power lines, water pipes, trash collection, wastewater treatment, fire, police is all monstrously expensive, and it is one reason why when the roads get damaged from use and need repair, they get chronically backlogged and problems keep mounting for years and years.
One thing people notice about Japan and the Netherlands is how immaculately maintained the roads are. They are significantly more pleasant places to drive, specifically because they did not overbuild road infrastructure.
It's the age old "growth fixes the old stuff" (bit of a shameless plug but here you go, https://matthewc.dev/musings/no-roads-for-old-men/ couldn't find the HN discussion link). We expect new development to foot the cost for existing roads and infrastructure.
The majority of those risky loans are for cars much nicer than the absolute minimum. A significant percentage of the population is going to live above their means, even if making millions end up in significant debt.
That’s not quite true. The simple reason Americans drive cars is because it’s impossible to live without one. I spent a week in Austin and the difference between its suburban layout and that of any European city is stark.
It’s really hard for someone who hasn’t lived it to really understand what it means to be able to walk to the shop. Then compare to when that’s not physically possible.
>It’s really hard for someone who hasn’t lived it to really understand what it means to be able to walk to the shop. Then compare to when that’s not physically possible.
I got you, friend. I grew up in the USSR, where private cars were luxury and public transit was so abundant that people referred to locations by the subway stations. The cities were designed for the citizens without cars (no parking anywhere, "microdistricts" in the newly built areas). It objectively sucks. I now live in the USA and can compare, if you have any questions I will be glad to explain what the life without a car is really like.
Until 2 years ago, I lived without a car and walked to work until 2018 (when I switched to remote working). I know the pros and cons. The USSR being shit doesn't make living without a car shit.
Even now, owning a car, I typically walk or ride. If I tried to do this in the USA, I'd be getting scraped off a stroad.
I imagine that if you work at home, have no children and have other people driving cars for you (delivery, taxi etc) it's not that bad. Not many people can afford this lifestyle though.
You didn’t read what I said: I only started WFH in 2018. I used to commute on foot before that.
My fiancé’s mother can’t drive and managed to raise 3 children by herself without a car, too. In the right environment, yes it is possible. No, she’s not rich by any stretch.
I did read it, I don't know what you wanted this to express but I understood it as the admission that walking to work became untenable. 2018 is not 2020, WFH then had a great income/career progression penalty.
And a whole lot of people managed to raise even more children before cars were invented or even horses were domesticated. Eg my gran-gran raised 3 children without running water and electricity (and obviously no horse or car), that does not mean she enjoyed it.
> I understood it as the admission that walking to work became untenable
I don't understand how you inferred that unless you chose to.
> And a whole lot of people managed to raise even more children before cars were invented or even horses were domesticated.
What on earth are you talking about? Either you've never been to London, or any major European city, or you're making spurious comparisons in bad faith.
You mentioned some woman raising children without a car as if it somehow supported your point, I pointed out that somebody doing something in the past is not a proof of that being somehow superior or even acceptable now. Even in the present time millions live and raise children without running water and electricity, should we start arguing that Americans need to quit these too because they cannot imagine living without them?
> It’s really hard for someone who hasn’t lived it to really understand what it means to be able to walk to the shop.
Every time you reply you only further prove this point.
> I pointed out that somebody doing something in the past is not a proof of that being somehow superior or even acceptable now.
Either you’re unable to understand my point because your English comprehension is terrible or you’re arguing in bad faith. Either way, talking to you is a waste of time.
Okay, I see you are being just combative. As I said I lived in the USSR and not as a single childless man working remotely and ordering deliveries too (I was a child myself though).
People got around before cars existed, the ability for people to buy cars resulted in creating a system where they were needed. Now what would have happened if people couldn’t have afford cars? You don’t end up where we are today.
I lived within walking distance of my job and shopping for years near DC. To the point where I would go weeks without driving. But I didn’t sell my car and quickly went back to driving when it was even moderately less convenient.
Recognize that it's a fantasy for everyone to live near their job. As cities grow the mean distance between housing and job grows. It isn't so much social policy or cussedness or selfishness, as it is geometry.
We build cities based on peoples desires not some intrinsic need to separate jobs from homes, but that’s irrelevant here.
Both public transport and cars can both serve low density suburban commuters as demonstration by many cities around the world. America doesn’t lack public transportation because of it’s size, population density, layout etc, it’s simply people choosing driving consistently in how they vote, where they move, and what they do when given the option.
NYC doesn’t have good public transportation because New Yorkers are different, they have it because it’s the only option that scales.
That doesn't make the poor US city design the inevitable outcome, however. Not Just Bikes has some great videos outlining why US design is particularly shocking compared to other countries.
I compare Austin because I've been to Austin, so I saw it for my own eyes. I've been to a range of European cities (especially the UK where I live) and all of them were more walkable than Austin. I'm not the only person to observe this. There's a number of Youtube channels (Not Just Bikes for one) that talk about this in great depth.
Reading comments on this page, the problems with public transport are listed - not safe or clean or uncrowded enough.
But, the only alternative considered is private individual/family transport.
Why is private mass transport not more widely available given that it can solve a lot of these problems?
Having an Uber for buses which does smart scheduling based on current demand, possibly involving transfers so that frequent local routes connect with each other without long delays, should be possible.
Of course, prices will fall when things scale. So, the government can be involved as a facilitator but operations are mostly run by companies which can pay a fee to the government rent necessary infrastructure.
You still have the problem of higher prices for odd hours/locations but sharing costs ahould make it cheaper than uber.
Various places have carpool lots where you can park your car for the day and ride with someone else. They are often illuminated at night and patrolled by police.
No one does Uber for busses because it would be way too expensive. Fares don't even come close to covering the cost of running busses. If a company wasn't just burning money VC money, they would have to charge at least taxi rates to get on the bus and it would be significantly less convenient. Uber for cars is barely profitable now, and they get to be extremely cheap with driver labor.
> America actually has a huge public transportation system servicing most homes in the US. It’s the bus system for public schools.
That quite a straw man, my friend!
A bus that runs twice per day, with a fixed number of passengers, all of which go to the same destination... that's not really the kind of service that can get you free of private cars!
It actually does allow many one car families to stay one car families and saves an amazing amount of driving by parents in aggregate while being very cheap.
Also these busses generally go by homes 4x times per day twice for middle school and twice for high school. They don’t go by every home every time if no kid lives on a street, but in suburbs there’s a lot of school bus traffic.
Expanding that to adults would require more trips and a backbone network between collection points. But, the point still stands that sending busses to most homes in America say 40x or more times a day is hardly impossible when we are already sending them 8x a day on the cheap. Being inconvenient compared to a more expensive car option is the core reason why this doesn’t happen.
Public transportation operated by public entities in the U.S. outside of a handful of large, dense cities always sucks. The reason lies with the "operated by public entities" bit. Heck, even in NYC, private companies built the lion's share of the subway system, then the city "nationalized" them and very little additional development was done.
Around the world governments "nationalize" what they allow themselves to, and at each level they nationalize the most salient and notable industry that's not too small to be small potatoes. In the U.S. the federal government doesn't allow itself to nationalize anything, the States do allow themselves but they can't bring themselves to hurt their industry as they compete with other States, but cities don't see themselves as competing with other cities, and cities allow themselves (and the States allow them to) to nationalize public transportation.
Take Argentina where a strong national government has at times nationalized steel production, oil production, etc., but they wouldn't deign to bother with nationalizing bus service -- it's like it's beneath them -- and so Buenos Aires has one of the most fantastic privately operated public bus systems in the world. You never have to wait more than a few minutes for a bus during business hours. But in the U.S. you're lucky if buses run more often than every 30 minutes at rush hour.
Do you want Americans to not drive their cars so much? Fine, it's easy: allow private companies to operate all public bus services, and also to operate small buses without set routes (a sort of Uber of buses). If you insist on the cities running public transportation then you can be sure that the public transportation system will never ever be good enough that Americans will be happy to relinquish their cars.
It's that simple.
And no, trains won't cut it. Laying tracks down is unbelievably expensive, will never pay for itself, and you can't ever change them afterwards, and you won't be able to place them where people can use them because that would be way too disruptive unless you make it subways, and that's even more unbelievably expensive.
You could also argue that we should try to follow a formula where high population density = low car use and vice versa.
I live in a large European metropolitan region with excellent public transport and bicycle infrastructure - at least comparatively. While both leave massive room for improvement a car is not needed, especially as alternatives like car sharing exist for moving heavy stuff once every few months.
There is quite the large support to completely prohibit car use in the inner city aside from transportation, taxis and deliveries. There are hundreds of streets and places where cars have NO value, take a lot of room, blockade other participants in public life and actively worsen the urban environment for everyone. Getting rid of personal cars in these areas would free up massive amounts of space as parking slots can be reutilized and 3-lane roads become single lane.
I love cars and love driving but I hate hate hate them in inner cities. Dense, well-connected urban centers are very suitable to completely outlaw cars whereas suburban or rural areas are absolutely unsuitable to do so.
Both can be true. America also has a "missing middle" urban planning problem - not that that's by chance. Zoning laws, NIMBYs and mandatory parking all favor this outcome.
But also, compare average car sizes to the EU. The average car in the US is a fuel-guzzling battle tank, side by side. The options for anything else are pretty sparse, but they do exist.
I was surprised by the stat, it does check out. Out 130 M housing units, 90M are single family (on a phone, citation needed, but that us what I found after a quick google)
It does feel like there are more and more startups every YC batch that are just cynical cash grabs. For example, all the recent LLM-related startups that are just UI wrappers around APIs - its hard to imagine that the founders built them for any reason other than to make money, or solely for the reason of wanting to be in YC.
Unfortunately, this is a tech industry problem, not just a YC problem. Tech skills and tech jobs are now seen as a status symbol, and increasingly new entrants in the field are the types of folks who would've gone into law or finance in the past.
> Tech skills and tech jobs are now seen as a status symbol
Its about $$$, there's been a ton of disillusionment about all the companies especially unicorns who've taken billions in investment and still have yet to prove that they can make a continuous profit. All the ride shares, delivery apps, so many SaaS companies are all burning massive amounts of cash trying to get to a network effect and becoming an "infrastructure provider" but every time there's more than 1 and they have to actually compete it turns out they can't survive without more investor money. That and people finally realizing that the crypto industry is a den of snakes and grifters.
For the past 3 years on the Who's Hiring threads almost every other post was crypto, now its LLMs - they're the companies that are getting investments from VCs, almost purely out of hype or not wanting to miss the "next big thing".
The tech sector as a whole seems to be primarily about moving money out of legacy industries (advertising, business solutions, automation) and into knowledge workers. The thing is its also an engine for massively concentrating money power and wealth. Human labor is getting cheaper by the minute and there's a massive power and wealth imbalance. Which is ironic given how in the early days tech skills were very democratizing of earnings and power. I hope something comes along that will bring about that sort of thing again. Or at minimum maybe we can provide a basic standard of living for everyone - an iPhone doesn't give shelter.
> its hard to imagine that the founders built them for any reason other than to make money
...Yes? It's a company, the sole purpose is for the founders to make money from their products, which a VC like YC would also want. At least it's better than companies which don't make money (or profit, rather), like many in the 2010s.
YC used to be about "There's a need that I care about. Let's see if I can build a company to fill that need." That's massively different from "I want to build a company that makes money. What can it do?"
How is it massively different? In one case you care about the need; in the other case you care about money. From those different motivations flow different actions, which lead to different kinds of companies (and even different kinds of comments on HN).
How do you distinguish a "cynical cash grab" from something else, what do you think makes a startup a "cynical cash grab"?
Like... whether they truly believe their product is going to make the world a better place, or something like that?
I think a number of startup entrepeneurs who in the past may have truly believed that, were... well, pretty wrong, perhaps willfully fooling themselves.
The VC's are mostly investing based on whether they think a thing will make them lots of money, and always have been, no?
Your last sentence asks about VCs but the parent comment is talking about founders. Considering that, it doesn't seem that the things are mutually exclusive. It could be that founders are increasingly starting businesses that "are just cynical cash grabs" (I'm not attempting to define that, FWIW) and VCs "are mostly investing based on whether they think a thing will make them lots of money".
> I think a number of startup entrepeneurs who in the past may have truly believed that, were... well, pretty wrong, perhaps willfully fooling themselves.
This is likely a common thing, which further ambiguates this. Makes me wonder if there's something about recent goings-on which makes founders more willing to deceive themselves, therefore increasing the likelihood that their intentions are assumed by outside observers to be more negative.
There are fewer obvious untackled problems that are amenable to technical solutions, it’s natural.
Also startups are about making money (generally), it’s a means to an end. Otherwise it would be an open source GitHub project, no?
If someone can make $1bln integrating some APIs and negotiating hard, writing a bunch of CRUD code duplicating what a bunch of other folks have already done is pretty silly.
Yes. Even YC veterans like Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell have talked about it in videos like these below [0]. They call these people "conformists"
