ReadList 6 jun27



When Einstein Met Tagore

Collision and convergence in Truth and Beauty at the intersection of science and spirituality.

On July 14, 1930, Albert Einstein welcomed into his home on the outskirts of Berlin the Indian philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. The two proceeded to have one of the most stimulating, intellectually riveting conversations in history, exploring the age-old friction between science and religion. Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore recounts the historic encounter, amidst a broader discussion of the intellectual renaissance that swept India in the early twentieth century, germinating a curious osmosis of Indian traditions and secular Western scientific doctrine.

The following excerpt from one of Einstein and Tagore’s conversations dances between previously examined definitions of science, beauty, consciousness, and philosophy in a masterful meditation on the most fundamental questions of human existence.

EINSTEIN: Do you believe in the Divine as isolated from the world?
TAGORE: Not isolated. The infinite personality of Man comprehends the Universe. There cannot be anything that cannot be subsumed by the human personality, and this proves that the Truth of the Universe is human Truth.
I have taken a scientific fact to explain this — Matter is composed of protons and electrons, with gaps between them; but matter may seem to be solid. Similarly humanity is composed of individuals, yet they have their interconnection of human relationship, which gives living unity to man’s world. The entire universe is linked up with us in a similar manner, it is a human universe. I have pursued this thought through art, literature and the religious consciousness of man.
EINSTEIN: There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe: (1) The world as a unity dependent on humanity. (2) The world as a reality independent of the human factor.
TAGORE: When our universe is in harmony with Man, the eternal, we know it as Truth, we feel it as beauty.
EINSTEIN: This is the purely human conception of the universe.
TAGORE: There can be no other conception. This world is a human world — the scientific view of it is also that of the scientific man. There is some standard of reason and enjoyment which gives it Truth, the standard of the Eternal Man whose experiences are through our experiences.
EINSTEIN: This is a realization of the human entity.
TAGORE: Yes, one eternal entity. We have to realize it through our emotions and activities. We realized the Supreme Man who has no individual limitations through our limitations. Science is concerned with that which is not confined to individuals; it is the impersonal human world of Truths. Religion realizes these Truths and links them up with our deeper needs; our individual consciousness of Truth gains universal significance. Religion applies values to Truth, and we know this Truth as good through our own harmony with it.
EINSTEIN: Truth, then, or Beauty is not independent of Man?
TAGORE: No.
EINSTEIN: If there would be no human beings any more, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful.
TAGORE: No.
EINSTEIN: I agree with regard to this conception of Beauty, but not with regard to Truth.
TAGORE: Why not? Truth is realized through man.
EINSTEIN: I cannot prove that my conception is right, but that is my religion.
TAGORE: Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the Universal Being; Truth the perfect comprehension of the Universal Mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experiences, through our illumined consciousness — how, otherwise, can we know Truth?
EINSTEIN: I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man. Anyway, if there is a reality independent of man, there is also a Truth relative to this reality; and in the same way the negation of the first engenders a negation of the existence of the latter.
TAGORE: Truth, which is one with the Universal Being, must essentially be human, otherwise whatever we individuals realize as true can never be called truth — at least the Truth which is described as scientific and which only can be reached through the process of logic, in other words, by an organ of thoughts which is human. According to Indian Philosophy there is Brahman, the absolute Truth, which cannot be conceived by the isolation of the individual mind or described by words but can only be realized by completely merging the individual in its infinity. But such a Truth cannot belong to Science. The nature of Truth which we are discussing is an appearance — that is to say, what appears to be true to the human mind and therefore is human, and may be called maya or illusion.
EINSTEIN: So according to your conception, which may be the Indian conception, it is not the illusion of the individual, but of humanity as a whole.
TAGORE: The species also belongs to a unity, to humanity. Therefore the entire human mind realizes Truth; the Indian or the European mind meet in a common realization.
EINSTEIN: The word species is used in German for all human beings, as a matter of fact, even the apes and the frogs would belong to it.
TAGORE: In science we go through the discipline of eliminating the personal limitations of our individual minds and thus reach that comprehension of Truth which is in the mind of the Universal Man.
EINSTEIN: The problem begins whether Truth is independent of our consciousness.
TAGORE: What we call truth lies in the rational harmony between the subjective and objective aspects of reality, both of which belong to the super-personal man.
EINSTEIN: Even in our everyday life we feel compelled to ascribe a reality independent of man to the objects we use. We do this to connect the experiences of our senses in a reasonable way. For instance, if nobody is in this house, yet that table remains where it is.
TAGORE: Yes, it remains outside the individual mind, but not the universal mind. The table which I perceive is perceptible by the same kind of consciousness which I possess.
EINSTEIN: If nobody would be in the house the table would exist all the same — but this is already illegitimate from your point of view — because we cannot explain what it means that the table is there, independently of us.
Our natural point of view in regard to the existence of truth apart from humanity cannot be explained or proved, but it is a belief which nobody can lack — no primitive beings even. We attribute to Truth a super-human objectivity; it is indispensable for us, this reality which is independent of our existence and our experience and our mind — though we cannot say what it means.
TAGORE: Science has proved that the table as a solid object is an appearance and therefore that which the human mind perceives as a table would not exist if that mind were naught. At the same time it must be admitted that the fact, that the ultimate physical reality is nothing but a multitude of separate revolving centres of electric force, also belongs to the human mind.
In the apprehension of Truth there is an eternal conflict between the universal human mind and the same mind confined in the individual. The perpetual process of reconciliation is being carried on in our science, philosophy, in our ethics. In any case, if there be any Truth absolutely unrelated to humanity then for us it is absolutely non-existing.
It is not difficult to imagine a mind to which the sequence of things happens not in space but only in time like the sequence of notes in music. For such a mind such conception of reality is akin to the musical reality in which Pythagorean geometry can have no meaning. There is the reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by the moth which eats that paper literature is absolutely non-existent, yet for Man’s mind literature has a greater value of Truth than the paper itself. In a similar manner if there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.
EINSTEIN: Then I am more religious than you are!
TAGORE: My religion is in the reconciliation of the Super-personal Man, the universal human spirit, in my own individual being.

Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore is a sublime read in its entirety — highly recommended. Complement with Einstein’s letter to a little girl about science vs. religion.

Thanks, Natascha


What Happens to the Brain When You Meditate (And How it Benefits You)

Ever since my dad tried to convince me to meditate when I was about 12, I’ve been fairly skeptical of this practice. It always seemed so vague and hard to understand that I just decided it wasn’t for me. More recently, I’ve actually found how simple (not easy, but simple) meditation can be and what huge benefit it can have for my day to day happiness.

As an adult, I first started my meditation practice with just two minutes per day. Two minutes! I got that idea from Leo Babauta’s Zen Habits blog, where he points out how starting with a tiny habit is the first step to consistently achieving it. So even thought two minutes won’t make much difference, that’s where I started. Whether you’re as skeptical as I used to be, or you’re well ahead of me with a meditation habit of several hours, I think it’s always interesting to find out how new habits affect our brains. I had a look into meditation to see what’s going on inside our brains when we do this, and what I found is pretty interesting.

What is Meditation?

There are different ways to meditate, and since it’s such a personal practice there are probably more than any of us know about. There are a couple that are usually focused on heavily in scientific research, though. These are focused-attention, or mindful meditation, which is where you focus on one specific thing—it could be your breathing, a sensation in your body or a particular object outside of you. The point of this type of meditation is to focus strongly on one point and continually bring your attention back to that focal point when it wanders.

The other type of meditation that’s often used in research is open-monitoring meditation. This is where you pay attention to all of the things happening around you—you simply notice everything without reacting.

What Happens in Your Brain When You Meditate

This is where things get really interesting. Using modern technology like fMRI scans, scientists have developed a more thorough understanding of what’s taking place in our brains when we meditate. The overall difference is that our brains stop processing information as actively as they normally would. We start to show a decrease in beta waves, which indicate that our brains are processing information, even after a single 20-minute meditation session if we’ve never tried it before.

In the image below you can see how the beta waves (shown in bright colors on the left) are dramatically reduced during meditation (on the right).

Below is the best explanation I found of what happens in each part of the brain during meditation:

Frontal lobe This is the most highly evolved part of the brain, responsible for reasoning, planning, emotions and self-conscious awareness. During meditation, the frontal cortex tends to go offline.
Parietal lobe This part of the brain processes sensory information about the surrounding world, orienting you in time and space. During meditation, activity in the parietal lobe slows down.
Thalamus The gatekeeper for the senses, this organ focuses your attention by funneling some sensory data deeper into the brain and stopping other signals in their tracks. Meditation reduces the flow of incoming information to a trickle.
Reticular formation As the brain’s sentry, this structure receives incoming stimuli and puts the brain on alert, ready to respond. Meditating dials back the arousal signal.

How Meditation Affects You

Now that we know what’s going on inside our brains, let’s take a look at the research into the ways it affects our health.

Better Focus

Because meditation is a practice in focusing our attention and being aware of when it drifts, this actually improves our focus when we’re not meditating, as well. It’s a lasting effect that comes from regular bouts of meditation.

Less Anxiety

This point is pretty technical, but it’s really interesting. The more we meditate, the less anxiety we have, and it turns out this is because we’re actually loosening the connections of particular neural pathways. This sounds bad, but it’s not.

What happens without meditation is that there’s a section of our brains that’s sometimes called the Me Center (it’s technically the medial prefrontal cortex). This is the part that processes information relating to ourselves and our experiences. Normally the neural pathways from the bodily sensation and fear centers of the brain to the Me Center are really strong. When you experience a scary or upsetting sensation, it triggers a strong reaction in your Me Center, making you feel scared and under attack.

When we meditate, we weaken this neural connection. This means that we don’t react as strongly to sensations that might have once lit up our Me Centers. As we weaken this connection, we simultaneously strengthen the connection between what’s known as our Assessment Center (the part of our brains known for reasoning) and our bodily sensation and fear centers. So when we experience scary or upsetting sensations, we can more easily look at them rationally. Here’s a good example:

For example, when you experience pain, rather than becoming anxious and assuming it means something is wrong with you, you can watch the pain rise and fall without becoming ensnared in a story about what it might mean.

More Creativity

As a writer, this is one thing I’m always interested in. Unfortunately, it’s not the easiest thing to study, but there is some research into how meditation can affect our creativity.

Researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands studied both focused-attention and open-monitoring mediation to see if there was any improvement in creativity afterwards. They found that people who practiced focused-attention meditation did not show any obvious signs of improvement in the creativity task following their meditation. For those who did open-monitoring meditation, however, they performed better on a task that asked them to come up with new ideas.

More Compassion

Research on meditation has shown that empathy and compassion are higher in those who practice meditation regularly. One experiment showed participants images of other people that were either good, bad or neutral in what they called “compassion meditation.” The participants were able to focus their attention and reduce their emotional reactions to these images, even when they weren’t in a meditative state. They also experienced more compassion for others when shown disturbing images.

Part of this comes from activity in the amygdala—the part of the brain that processes emotional stimuli. During meditation, this part of the brain normally shows decreased activity, but in this experiment it was exceptionally responsive when participants were shown images of people.

Another study in 2008 found that people who meditated regularly had stronger activation levels in their temporal parietal junctures (a part of the brain tied to empathy) when they heard the sounds of people suffering, than those who didn’t meditate.

Better Memory

One of the things meditation has been linked to is improving rapid memory recall. Catherine Kerr, a researcher at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and the Osher Research Center found that people who practiced mindful meditation were able to adjust the brain wave that screens out distractions and increase their productivity more quickly that those that did not meditate. She said that this ability to ignore distractions could explain “their superior ability to rapidly remember and incorporate new facts.” This seems to be very similar to the power of being exposed to new situations that will also dramatically improve our memory of things.

Less Stress

Mindful meditation has been shown to help people perform under pressure while feeling less stressed. A 2012 study split a group of human resources managers into three, which one third participating in mindful meditation training, another third taking body relaxation training and the last third given no training at all. A stressful multitasking test was given to all the managers before and after the eight-week experiment. In the final test, the group that had participated in the meditation training reported less stress during the test than both of the other groups.

More Gray Matter

Meditation has been linked to larger amounts of gray matter in the hippocampus and frontal areas of the brain. I didn’t know what this meant at first, but it turns out it’s pretty great. More gray matter can lead to more positive emotions, longer-lasting emotional stability, and heightened focus during daily life.

Meditation has also been shown to diminish age-related effects on gray matter and reduce the decline of our cognitive functioning.

A Note on Getting Started

One of the best (free!) apps I’ve come across to help you get started with meditation is called Headspace. Invented by former Buddhist monk Andy Puddicombe, this is meditation geared towards busy people like you and me. Andy guides you through 10 minutes of simple meditation every day. You don’t have to do anything—just sit down and turn on the app and let Andy’s calm voice (his voice is truly amazing–the app is worth trying just for that!) explain how to approach meditation.

Want more tips and tricks for living life better? Check out other articles like this on Lifehacker.

128. BILL WATTERSON: A cartoonist’s advice

Bill Watterson is the artist and creator of (in my humble opinion) the greatest comic strip of all time, Calvin and Hobbes. I was a bit too young to appreciate it while it was originally published from 1985-1995, but I started devouring the book collections soon after. I think my brother had a few of the treasury collections and I must have read those dozens of times. I was hooked, and I remember copying Watterson’s drawings relentlessly as a kid (Calvin’s hair was always the hardest to get right).

To me, Calvin and Hobbes is cartooning perfection — that rare strip that has both exquisite writing AND gorgeous artwork. A strip that managed to convey the joy of childhood, absurdity of humanity and power of imagination all through the relationship between a boy and his stuffed tiger. And most importantly, a strip that was consistently laugh-out-loud funny. I flick through my Calvin and Hobbes books a few times a year, not to read them cover to cover anymore, but just to get lost in Calvin’s world for awhile and to remind myself what comics are capable of.

Besides the fact that Calvin and Hobbes is the comic I cherish above all others, Bill Watterson is my biggest creative influence and someone I admire greatly as an artist. Here’s why:

• After getting fired as a political cartoonist at the Cincinnati Post, Watterson decided to instead focus on comic strips. Broke, he was forced to move back in with his parents and worked an advertising layout job he hated while he drew comics in his spare time. He stayed at this miserable job and submitted strips to comic syndicates for four years before Calvin and Hobbes was accepted. About this period Watterson wrote: “The only way to learn how to write and draw is by writing and drawing … to persist in the face of continual rejection requires a deep love of the work itself, and learning that lesson kept me from ever taking Calvin and Hobbes for granted when the strip took off years later.” (Also see the Advice for Beginners comic.)

• Watterson sacrificed millions (probably hundreds of millions) of dollars by never licensing and merchandising Calvin and Hobbes. He went through a long and traumatic fight with his syndicate over the licensing rights, and although he eventually prevailed, Watterson was so disillusioned with the industry he almost quit cartooning. “I worked too long to get this job, and worked too hard once I got it, to let other people run away with my creation once it became successful. If I could not control what my own work was about and stood for, then cartooning meant very little to me.”

• Luckily Watterson didn’t quit and took a sabbatical instead. Eager to reinvigorate his creative mojo on his return, Watteron proposed a radical new layout for his colour Sunday strips. For those not familiar with comic strip lingo, each week a newspaper comic will have six ‘daily’ strips (usually black and white, one tier, 3-4 panels) and one ‘Sunday’ strip which is larger and in colour. Previously, the Sunday strip was comprised of three tiers of panels and looked like this. The layout was restrictive and the top tier had to be completely disposable because a lot of newspapers would cut it and only run the bottom two tiers in order to save space so they could cram in as many comics (or puzzles, or ads) as they could.

Watterson was sick of the format restraints and wanted more space to experiment and push his storytelling ability so he (with his syndicate’s support) gave newspaper editors a ballsy proposition. They would have to publish his Sunday comics at a half-page size with no editing, or not publish it at all. By this time Calvin and Hobbes had been running for over five years and was extremely successful so Watterson had the clout needed to pull this move off. Despite fearing many cancellations, he was pleasantly surprised that most newspapers supported the change. Free of the shackles of tiers and panel restrictions, Watterson gave us visually exciting and beautiful strips that hadn’t been since the glory days of newspaper comics in the 1920s and 30s. He was free to create strips like this, and this and this. “The last few years of the strip, and especially the Sundays, are the work I am the most proud of. This was close as I could get to my vision of what a comic strip should be.”

• After working on the strip for 10 years, when Calvin and Hobbes was at the height of its popularity and was being published in over 2,000 newspapers, Watterson stopped. He had given his heart and soul to one project for 10 years, had said all he wanted to say and wanted to go out on top. “I did not want Calvin and Hobbes to coast into half-hearted repetition, as so many long-running strips do. I was ready to pursue different artistic challenges, work at a less frantic pace with fewer business conflicts, and … start restoring some balance to my life.” Since retiring the strip, Watterson has pursued his interest in painting and music.

It’s pretty incredible when you think about. Could you say ‘no’ to millions, I repeat, MILLIONS of dollars of merchandise money? I don’t know if I could. Would you stop creating your art if millions of people admired your work and kept wanting more? I don’t know if I would.

Reprints of Calvin and Hobbes are still published in over 50 countries and the strips are as fresh and funny as they were 20-25 years ago. It has a timeless quality and will continue to entertain comic fans for generations to come. Great art does that.

- The quote used in the comic is taken from a graduation speech Watterson gave at his alma mater, Kenyon College, in 1990. Brain Pickings has a nice article about it. The comic is basically the story of my life, except I’m a stay-at-home-dad to two dogs. My ex-boss even asked me if I wanted to return to my old job. — My original dream was to become a successful newspaper comic strip artist and create the next Calvin and Hobbes. That job almost doesn’t exist anymore as newspapers continue to disappear and the comics section gets smaller and smaller, often getting squeezed out of newspapers entirely. I spent years sending submissions to syndicates in my early 20s and still have the rejection letters somewhere. I eventually realised it was a fool’s dream (also, my work was nowhere near good enough) and decided webcomics was the place to be. It’s mouth-watering to imagine what Watterson could achieve with webcomics, given the infinite possibilities of the online medium. — My style is already influenced by Watterson, but this is the first time I’ve intentionally tried to mimic his work. It’s been fun poring through Calvin and Hobbes strips the past week while working on this comic and it was a humbling reminder that I still have a long way to go. — The quotes I’ve used in the write-up above are taken from the introduction to The Complete Calvin and Hobbes collection, which sits proudly on my desk. — Thanks to Marlyn, Emily, Joseph, and Suchismita for submitting this speech.

US Military Scientists Solve the Fundamental Problem of Viral Marketing

Viral messages begin life by infecting a few individuals and then start to spread across a network. The most infectious end up contaminating more or less everybody.

Just how and why this happens is the subject of much study and debate. Network scientists know that key factors are the rate at which people become infected, the “connectedness” of the network and how the seed group of individuals, who first become infected, are linked to the rest.

It is this seed group that fascinates everybody from marketers wanting to sell Viagra to epidemiologists wanting to study the spread of HIV.

So a way of finding seed groups in a given social network would surely be a useful trick, not to mention a valuable one. Step forward Paulo Shakarian, Sean Eyre and Damon Paulo from the West Point Network Science Center at the US Military Academy in West Point.

These guys have found a way to identify a seed group that, when infected, can spread a message across an entire network. And they say it can be done quickly and easily, even on relatively large networks.

Their method is relatively straightforward. It is based on the idea that an individual will eventually receive a message if a certain proportion of his or her friends already have that message. This proportion is a critical threshold and is crucial in their approach.

Having determined the threshold, these guys examine the network and look for all those individuals who have more friends than this critical number. They then remove those who exceed the threshold by the largest amount.

In the next, step, they repeat this process, looking for all those with more friends than the critical threshold and pruning those with the greatest excess. And so on.

This process finishes when there is nobody left in the network who has more friends than the threshold. When this happens, whoever is left is the seed group. A message sent to each member of this group can and should spread to the entire network.

That’s a slick approach to a well-known problem. What’s got network scientists bogged down in the past is that they’ve always couched this conundrum in terms of finding the smallest seed group. Proving that the group you’ve found is the smallest really is a tricky problem.

But Shakarian and co make no such claim. “We present a method guaranteed to find a set of nodes that causes the entire population to activate — but is not necessarily of minimal size,” they say.

That suddenly makes the problem much easier. Indeed, these guys have tested it on a large number of networks to see how well it works. Their test networks include Flickr, FourSquare, Frienster, Last.FM, Digg (from Dec 2010), Yelp, YouTube and so on.

And the algorithm works well. “On a Friendster social network consisting of 5.6 million nodes and 28 million edges we found a seed set in under 3.6 hours,” say Shakarian and co. For this they used an Intel X5677 Xeon processor operating at 3.46 GHz with a 12 MB Cache running Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 6.1 and equipped with 70 GB of physical memory.

That’s a promising outcome and one that many people will find valuable. Shakarian and co say that using their approach to find a seed group on the FourSquare online social network, a viral marketeer could expect a 297-fold return on investment. Not bad!

For this reason, Shakarian and co could, and probably will, find themselves and their algorithm in demand from the legion of marketers wanting to make their product viral. Not least of these could be big internet companies such as Amazon and Apple who both have huge networks of customers and plenty of products to sell.

Expect to hear more!

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1309.2963 :A Scalable Heuristic for Viral Marketing Under the Tipping Model

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How to fake courage

I’m not the most courageous guy. It’s been one of those little hidden truths that has always both haunted me and motivated me.

I remember playing a tennis match for my high school team. It was overall rather insignificant, but I still remember it. The rest of the team had split their matches, and I was the last one to finish so it was on me to help the team win. I remember everyone gathering around my court, cheering me on. We had tied the set, and we were going into the tie-breaker.

I won’t bore you with the melodramatic details of a 15-year-old’s quest for greatness in JV tennis. But I still remember the feeling I had as I prepared to receive his serve. All of my intensity, all my focus, all of my training led me to this one thought: I wanted him to double fault. I didn’t see myself successfully beating him on my own—I needed him to fail on his own.

Of course he didn’t. We played some points — I won some, he won some. In the end he took the match.

It bothered me then and it bothers me now. I don’t like the way I stepped up for the challenge. I was just waiting for him to make unforced errors. It didn’t feel good at all.

***

I’ve been that same 15-year-old playing tennis many times in my various startups. During each investment round at both OpenVote and Flightcaster (my last companies), I negotiated poorly because I was so afraid of losing the deal. The acquisition of FlightCaster was the same story. I had the chance to walk away with a small win and so I took it. It wasn’t some grand triumph; it was just avoiding failure.

I bring all this up because I haven’t made the same mistakes at 42Floors. I don’t mean to say that I finally have found courage. I really haven’t. At every step along the way for 42Floors, I have been terrified about screwing it up. But yet, I haven’t made the same mistakes this time around (at least not yet!). Somehow I have found a way to not be as consumed by fear.

I wish I could say I’ve harnessed some deeper courage to take risks, believe in myself, yada yada yada.

But I don’t actually believe it be true. I think I just hacked my brain a bit. I knew a lack of courage was going to be a weakness going into 42Floors. So I tried a few things to address it head-on. Hopefully you find a few of these mind hacks helpful.

Define your goal early and stay true to it

Early on, my cofounders and I agreed we would not stop short of fixing commercial real estate search world wide. We would be singularly focused on building a big, successful company—even if that meant increasing our overall odds of failure. That may sound trite, but I can tell you it has already impacted dozens of decisions. My mindset during FlightCaster was to simply not fail. Every time I could have rolled the dice, I took the risk-minimizing option.

At 42Floors, we’re okay with the prospect of failure. We’ll roll the dice every time to keep our full dream intact. Investors/employees/customers can smell the difference. We’ve said this from the beginning. And in the beginning it’s really easy to say because you have nothing to lose anyway. Now that our company is off the ground, we’ve simply gotten used to saying it.

Set a really big goal, go after it and ignore everything else.

Avoid isolation

What was so miserable about being on that tennis court as a 15 year old was that it was just me out there alone.

I’ve struggled at everything I have ever done. It took me years to see this, but I finally see that every other entrepreneur has had the same problems I’ve had. I did a YC a second time mostly because I wanted that community of peers again. As I’ve mentioned before, if you can’t get into a YC, make your own.

Believe that you can change

Paul Graham once said the hardest part about being an early stage investor is that founders can change. I was nervous when I applied to YC with 42Floors because I was afraid of repeating the same mistakes again. But fuck that! Those types of thoughts are worthless. Focus on the opportunity you have right now and become the person that can get it done.

I am vastly different founder in this company than ever before. I refuse to let my old weaknesses haunt me further.

Get a win under your belt

I have to include the acknowledgement here that this post is total bullshit. I didn’t gain this mindset until we had already sold FlightCaster. That win gave me a ton of confidence to swing bigger this time.

Don’t ever say you’re crushing it

Every time I hear an early stage entrepreneur talk about crushing it, I know they are fighting demons within themselves. There’s nothing worse than pretending to the world that you’re doing better than you actually are. All it does is isolate you even further. One of the most powerful parts of my blogging in the last few years is I’ve been able to share openly how hard things have been. It’s taken an immense stress off of me personally.

So, to all you founders out there thinking that other everyone else possess some genetic gift of unending courage that you lack. It’s not true. They’ve just faked it better. So can you.

Discuss on Hacker News

Today I Deleted My LinkedIn Account; You Probably Should Too

(Please note corrections after the post)

Today I will delete my LinkedIn account. I say I will instead of I have because I do not know how LinkedIn’s account settings work; deleting my account may require substantial effort on my part, it may not even be possible at all. The fact that I have no idea how my account works on LinkedIn should tell you two things: first, that the web services’ account persistence schemas are incredibly dense and durable, and second, that I have never so much as poked around my LinkedIn account. The first part is generally interesting, and extremely important on a blog like this. Why and how web apps choose to persist user data is in many ways the essence, or at least an exemplar, of big data and analytics. It deserves its own blog post, and it will only be addressed here as it connects to the second item: my particular experience with LinkedIn, and why it convinced me to delete my account.

To begin, some statistics: As of this post, LinkedIn claimed to have over 225 million registered members. That’s a lot of people. For context, Instagram claims around 100 million users, and world-heavyweight Facebook tops the chart at over 1 billion users. For those of you keeping score at home:

  • Facebook > 1,000,000,000
  • LinkedIn > 225,000,000
  • Instagram > 100,000,000

That kind of feels right, but something is off. Facebook is so massive that it distorts just about every metric it touches. It just does. But the amount of email spam I get from LinkedIn feels MUCH higher than the Facebook flood. Without thinking too hard about it, there are a few obvious reasons for the disparity.

First, I hate LinkedIn emails. Seriously, they are by far the most annoying spam I get from a serious organization. Why is that? Well, for starters, LinkedIn had the terrible idea to route their spam through user email addresses. Seriously, go check your inbox for an “Invitation to connect on LinkedIn”. They don’t come from *@linkedin.com, which THEY ABSOLUTELY SHOULD. To be clear, LinkedIn asked for — and received — my permission to use my email address this way. Users — myself included — SUCK at managing 3rd party login permissions. A quick scan of my Google account reveals that I have granted access to 49 different websites. AND I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT MOST OF THEM ARE, OR WHAT PERMISSIONS I GAVE THEM. Worse, I am a (new) web developer, so I have at least a basic understanding of how these authentication systems work. If you’re like most people, the idea that you would voluntarily give a third party control of your Gmail makes no intuitive sense. It’s your gmail, why would LinkedIn be sending emails from my.name@gmail.com? Even worse, if you are a normal person, you probably don’t even have the vocabulary available to ask that question. Go ahead, try to find your Google account’s permissions. I’ll wait here. When you give up, you can click here for instructions.

The point isn’t to beat up on Google, or make fun of the average user. Facebook’s API’s are in some way more invasive than Google’s, or at least, they hold the potential for equally bad abuse by malicious users, and I think software should be targeted to the average “normal” user. (In fact, I so strongly believe this that I was apparently the only person on Facebook or HackerNews who thought this article was 100% dead-wrong. I am in fact so opposed to this thinking that I will address it in a dedicated blog post, but let me be clear: abstraction and specialization are the CORRECT ways to design complex systems for common use, and I think the average user should learn as much programming as they do plumbing to fix their sink, which is to say exactly the minimum needed to keep things working for them and nothing more.)

Software that traps standard users, or invites crappy 3rd party developers to trick them is bad software. Complexity should be abstracted away from users until normal users can reach something like the 80/20 balance — where they can get 80% of the software’s utility with 20% of a full understanding of its functioning. For what it’s worth, that’s a really hard UX goal to reach, and I respect engineers on the front and back end enormously for the challenge they face. But that does not mean that it is ok for Google to make it that easy for LinkedIn to email people from your email address, and it certainly does not make it ok for LinkedIn to do it! Allocating blame is tricky here: Google is the holder of your information and manager of your identity, and so it has the final responsibility not to let spammers get access to it. But they’ve made a tremendously powerful tool for developers available in their account API’s, and I am more upset with a social network mammoth like LinkedIn for abusing a tool like that than I am at its makers for making it available. Exactly how you judge everyone involved is up to you, but the point is there’s something wrong.

Nailing it down: the first reason I hate LinkedIn emails so much is that they are delivered in an inherently abusive way. They are sent through the personal email addresses of people I know, despite the fact that they are marketing emails sent from a large company.

The second reason I hate LinkedIn emails so much is that they are marketing emails for a service that I don’t use, and neither do you. When I get a marketing email from Facebook, the odds are very good that I will intuitively understand the context surrounding it. The emails describe an action that happened, and the people involved in that action, so that I am brought up to speed before I even click through to the website. THIS IS A GOOD DESIGN.

Moreover, the average Facebook user is way more likely to be active than a LinkedIn user. That means that people tend not to lurk as hard on Facebook as they do on LinkedIn. Think about that for a second. Sounds crazy right? Since both companies are publicly traded, you don’t have to take my word for it:

For the quarter ending June 2013, Facebook reported 1,155,000,000 monthly active users. Calling their original registration numbers ~ 1,300,000,000 which is generous), that means that 88% of Facebook’s users actually use the site regularly.

Compare that to LinkedIn, which claims that 170,000,000 of its 218,000,000 users logged in during the quarter ending March 2013, for a total of closer to 77%. That number actually understates the disparity, because it just measures unique visitors. While LinkedIn users spend an average of 8 minutes on the site daily, Facebook users hang round for over 33 minutes, or OVER HALF AN HOUR each. In fact, LinkedIn puts this problem much better than I can:

“The number of our registered members is higher than the number of actual members and a substantial majority of our page views are generated by a minority of our members. Our business may be adversely impacted if we are unable to attract and retain additional members who actively use our services.” (source)

(traffic stats: Facebook, LinkedIn, SEC data: LinkedIn, Facebook).

The point of all this isn’t to dump on LinkedIn. If nothing else their engineering team is absolutely amazing. The point is that they’re a company that is already starting with an unengaged userbase, which means they face a higher bar for unsolicited emails they send their users. When LinkedIn emails me something — let alone by hijacking a user’s email address (see above) — it is not going to trigger the same easy context recall that Facebook’s or Google’s will.

People tend to intuitively sense LinkedIn’s broad-but-shallow userbase problem. Everyone knows that everyone has a LinkedIn profile, but I challenge you to find three friends who use theirs actively. Now try it with Facebook. Until today I had never read the statistics I linked to above, but it just feels obvious when you read your LinkedIn mail that it isn’t being generated by eager friends trying to network. LinkedIn should not be sending annoying emails like that. The company is facing pressure because the average user is turned off from deep engagement. But the way to fix that absolutely IS NOT to spam them, which makes people even more leery, and irritated with your service.

What all of this means is that LinkedIn faces a serious challenge in a crappy environment. I don’t envy them. Overall, there are a small number of very good reasons for me to get rid of my account, which I’ve discussed above. They more or less boil down to this: I find the user experience annoying and intrusive. But the real problem with LinkedIn is not that it’s kind of annoying. There are lots of kind of annoying services that I continue to use, and will continue to use as long as they provide me with something of value. The real problem with LinkedIn is that it does nothing useful for me. Nothing. In fact, aside from generating a boatload of spam, I can’t tell how exactly LinkedIn is even supposed to impact my life. I know I’m supposed to “network” with it, but I already “network” with Facebook, and Twitter, and beer.

Maybe some people are finding hot job leads through LinkedIn and I’m just missing the party. That sounds facetious, but the truth is I am willing to believe that I’m just not getting the full value out of this tool. The problem is I am not willing to put in a substantial investment in learning how to use it (like I said, 80/20) without a decent value proposition ahead of time. I’d rather spend my time learning Javascript, or blogging. Useful career tips or leads tend to come from real friends of mine, who I tend to interact with in person or on real social media. LinkedIn seems just a touch too tone-deaf to be useful for building real career networks for me for now. The fact that they operate as a borderline spam factory would be bad for any service that I wasn’t completely sold on. The fact that it’s one struggling with bored users and a weird image makes it downright toxic. So for now, goodbye LinkedIn, maybe we’ll connect again in the future.

———————————-

I have officially shut down my LinkedIn account. To their credit, “closing” my account was relatively simple. An odd coda for a pecuilar performance. If I ever make a new account with LinkedIn, I will be sure to post my experiences.

Corrections:

After publishing this post on Monday a few readers took me up on my advice to:

go check your inbox for an “Invitation to connect on LinkedIn”

and called me out because I MADE A MISTAKE. It turns out I made a technical error, and I’m extremely grateful some readers took the time to point it out, so here are corrections:

I had contended

  1. 1) that LinkedIn is engaged in a spammy practice of sending messages pretending to be from a user when in fact they are from the service itself and
  2. 2) that Google had enabled this bad behavior by making it possible to send email through users’ Gmail accounts.

The first point IS TRUE. LinkedIn has engaged in the practice of sending users email that purports to be from other users, instead of from them. Here is a screenshot of one such email as recently as 2012. But it looks like LinkedIn has made the decision to move away from this route, at least for some of their emails. This is a good thing.

As some readers pointed out, what they were doing was probably meant with good intentions, but the fact is that they were spoofing, using the same technique that spammers and phishing attacks use to trick users. The good news is that LinkedIn is (I assume) not trying to steal anything from users. Instead, they’re trying to sneak past your mental spam filters: when you get an email from someone you know, you’re more likely to read it than if it were from a big impersonal organization, like LinkedIn. As far as I’m concerned then, the way they send (or apparently — sent) their emails is spammy, and should not be used by a serious organization. This goes double for any company tha,t like LinkedIn, is literally built on the notions of professionalism and professional-communication. It’s just wrong. Thus, my main point remains, and I stand behind it. With that said, I absolutely did get the technical point wrong there, and for that I apologize to anyone who I accidentally misled.

As to the second point: I have done a little more digging, and it appears that Google does not offer programmatic access to users’ email, and so as I said above, I was wrong. But again, and this part is actually a bit more worrying, it looks like Google is still at least somewhat at fault here after all. When you spoof an email in Gmail, it usually warns the recipient about what’s happening. So for example if I did what LinkedIn does, and sent you an email pretending to be from your own account, you’d get a big flag when you read the message, alerting you to the fact that it was not from you, that it was fraudulent.

Gmail does not raise these alerts for LinkedIn messages, which is presumably a choice Google made, to permit them to pass through as if they were real. (If I am wrong on this point I invite anyone from Google to comment, or send me an email.) If this is true, then it’s actually more of a problem than my original accusation. In the post, I argued that Google had exposed users to abuse by spammy organizations like LinkedIn, but that it was an open question to me whether that was an acceptable trade-off for the amazing flexibility it gave developers. It turns out that Google DOES NOT expose users in this particular way, and so I was wrong on the technical aspect. But the deeper point remains, and is kind of crappy — that Google permits certain users to abuse their email system to the detriment of users.

Anyhow, read it and make a decision for yourself about whether LinkedIn is a good system to be plugged into. I said my piece, and I stand behind it. Next time I’ll work on getting all the moving parts more exactly correct.

The shittiest project I ever worked on

Sometimes in job interviews I’ve been asked to describe a project I worked on that failed. This is the one I always think of first.

In 1995 I quit my regular job as senior web engineer for Time-Warner and became a consultant developing interactive content for the World-Wide Web, which was still a pretty new thing at the time. Time-Warner taught me many things. One was that many large companies are not single organizations; they are much more like a bunch of related medium-sized companies that all share a building and a steam plant. (Another was that I didn’t like being part of a large company.)

One of my early clients was Prudential, which is a large life insurance, real estate, and financial services conglomerate based in Newark, New Jersey—another fine example of a large company that actually turned out to be a bunch of medium-sized companies sharing a single building. I did a number of projects for them, one of which was to produce an online directory of Prudential-affiliated real estate brokers. I’m sure everyone is familiar with this sort of thing by now. The idea was that you would visit a form on their web site, put in your zip code or town name, and it would extract the nearby brokers from a database and present them to you on a web page, ordered by distance.

The project really sucked, partly because Prudential was disorganized and bureaucratic, and partly because I didn’t know what I was doing. I quoted a flat fee for the job, assuming that it would be straightforward and that I had a good idea of what was required. But I hadn’t counted on bureaucratic pettifoggery and the need for every layer of the management hierarchy to stir the soup a little. They tweaked and re-tweaked every little thing. The data set they delivered was very dirty, much of it garbled or incomplete, and they kept having to fix their exporting process, which they did incompletely, several times. They also changed their minds at least once about which affiliated real estate agencies should be in the results, and had to re-send a new data set with the new correct subset of affiliates, and then the new data would be garbled or incomplete. So I received replacement data six or seven times. This would not have been a problem, except that each time they presented me with a file in a somewhat different format, probably exported from some loser’s constantly-evolving Excel spreadsheet. So I had to write seven or eight different versions of the program that validated and loaded the data. These days I would handle this easily; after the first or second iteration I would explain the situation: I had based my estimate on certain expectations of how much work would be required; I had not expected to clean up dirty data in eight different formats; they had the choice of delivering clean data in the same format as before, renegotiating the fee, or finding someone else to do the project. But in 1995 I was too green to do this, and I did the extra work for free.

Similarly, they tweaked the output format of the program repeatedly over weeks: first the affiliates should be listed in distance order, but no, they should be listed alphabetically if they are in the same town and then after that the ones from other towns, grouped by town; no, the Prudential Preferred affiliates must be listed first regardless of distance, which necessitated a redelivery of the data which up until then hadn’t distinguished between ordinary and Preferred affiliates; no wait, that doesn’t make sense, it puts a far-off Preferred affiliate ahead of a nearby regular affiliate… again, this is something that many clients do, but I wasn’t expecting it and it took a lot of time I hadn’t budgeted for. Also these people had, I now know, an unusually bad case of it.

Anyway, we finally got it just right, and it had been approved by multiple layers of management and given a gold star by the Compliance Department, and my clients took it to the Prudential Real Estate people for a demonstration.

You may recall that Prudential is actually a bunch of medium-sized companies that share a building in Newark. The people I was working with were part of one of these medium-sized companies. The real estate business people were in a different company. The report I got about the demo was that the real estate people loved it, it was just what they wanted.

“But,” they said, “how do we collect the referral fees?”

Prudential Real Estate is a franchise operation. Prudential does not actually broker any real estate. Instead, a local franchisee pays a fee for the use of the name and logo and other services. One of the other services is that Prudential runs a national toll-free number; you can call this up and they will refer you to a nearby affiliate who will help you buy or sell real estate. And for each such referral, the affiliate pays Prudential a referral fee.

We had put together a real estate affiliate locator application which let you locate a nearby Prudential-affiliated franchisee and contact them directly, bypassing the referral and eliminating Prudential’s opportunity to collect a referral fee.

So I was told to make one final change to the affiliate locator. It now worked like this: The user would enter their town or zip code; the application would consult the database and find the contact information for the nearby affiliates, it would order them in the special order dictated by the Compliance Department, and then it would display a web page with the addresses and phone numbers of the affiliates carefully suppressed. Instead, the name of each affiliate would be followed by the Prudential national toll-free number AND NOTHING ELSE. Even the names were suspect. For a while Prudential considered replacing each affiliate’s name with a canned string, something like “Prudential Real Estate Affiliate”, because what if the web user decided to look up the affiliate in the Yellow Pages and call them directly? It was eventually decided that the presence of the toll-free number directly underneath rendered this risk acceptably small, so the names stayed. But everything else was gone.

Prudential didn’t need an affiliate locator application. They needed a static HTML page that told people to call the number. All the work I had put into importing the data, into formatting the output, into displaying the realtors in precisely the right order, had been a complete waste of time.


How to hire

After startups raise money, their next biggest problem becomes hiring. It turns out it’s both really hard and really important to hire good people; in fact, it’s probably the most important thing a founder does.

If you don’t hire very well, you will not be successful—companies are a product of the team the founders build. There is no way you can build an important company by yourself. It’s easy to delude yourself into thinking that you can manage a mediocre hire into doing good work.

Here is some advice about hiring:

*Spend more time on it.

The vast majority of founders don’t spend nearly enough time hiring. After you figure out your vision and get product-market fit, you should probably be spending between a third and a half of your time hiring. It sounds crazy, and there will always be a ton of other work, but it’s the highest-leverage thing you can do, and great companies always, always have great people.

You can’t outsource this—you need to be spending time identifying people, getting potential candidates to want to work at your company, and meeting every person that comes to interview. Keith Rabois believes the CEO/founders should interview every candidate until the company is at least 500 employees.

*In the beginning, get your hands dirty.

Speaking of spending time, you should spend the time to learn a role before you hire for it. If you don’t understand it, it’s very hard to get the right person. The classic example of this is a hacker-CEO deciding to hire a VP of Sales because he doesn’t want to get his hands dirty. This does not work. He needs to do it himself first and learn it in detail. Then after that, he should lean on his board or investors to give him opinions on his final few candidates.

*Look for smart, effective people.

There are always specifics of what you need in a particular role, but smart and effective have got to be table stakes. It’s amazing how often people are willing to forgo these requirements; predictably, those hires don’t work out in the early days of a startup (they may never work).

Fortunately, these are easy to look for.

Talk to the candidates about what they’ve done. Ask them about their most impressive projects and biggest wins. Specifically, ask them about how they spend their time during an average day, and what they got done in the last month. Go deep in a specific area and ask about what the candidate actually did—it’s easy to take credit for a successful project. Ask them how they would solve a problem you are having related to the role they are interviewing for.

That, combined with the right questions when you check references, will usually give you a good feel about effectiveness. And usually you can gauge intelligence by the end of an hour-long conversation. If you don’t learn anything in the interview, that’s bad. If you are bored in the interview, that’s really bad. A good interview should feel like a conversation, not questions and responses.

Remember that in a startup, anyone you hire is likely to be doing a new job in three to six months. Smart and effective people are adaptable.

*Have people audition for roles instead of interviewing for them.

This is the most important tactical piece of advice I have. It is difficult to know what it’s like working with someone after a few interviews; it is quite easy to know what it’s like after working with them

Whenever possible (and it’s almost always possible), have someone do a day or two of work with you before you hire her; you can do this at night or on the weekends. If you’re interviewing a developer, have her write code for a real but non-critical project. For a PR person, have her write a press release and identify reporters to pitch it to. Just have the person sign a contractor agreement and pay them for this work like a normal contractor.

You’ll get a much, much better sense of what it’s like working with this person and how good she is at the role than you can ever get in just an interview. And she’ll get a feel for what working at your company is like.

*Focus on the right ways to source candidates.

Basically, this boils down to “use your personal networks more”. By at least a 10x margin, the best candidate sources I’ve ever seen are friends and friends of friends. Even if you don’t think you can get these people, go after the best ones relentlessly. If it works out 5% of the time, it’s still well worth it.

All the best startups I know manage to hire like this for much longer than one would think possible. Most bad startups make excuses for not doing this.

When you hire someone, as soon as you’re sure she’s a star you should sit her down and wring out of her the names of everyone that you should try to hire. You may have to work pretty hard at this.

Often, to get great people, you have to poach. They’re never looking for jobs, so don’t limit your recruiting to people that are looking for jobs. A difficult question is what you should do about poaching from acquaintances—I don’t have a great answer for this. A friend says, “Poaching is the titty twister of Silicon Valley relationships”.

Technical recruiters are pretty bad. The job boards are generally worse. Conferences can be good. Hosting interesting tech talks can be good for technical hiring. University recruiting works well once you’re reasonably established.

Don’t limit your search to candidates in your area. This is especially true if you’re in the bay area; lots of people want to move here.

View candidate sourcing as a long-term investment—you may spend time now with someone that you don’t even talk to about a job for a year or more.

Use you investors and their networks to find candidates. In your investor update emails, let them know what kind of people you need to hire.

As a side note, if I were going to jump into the mosh pit of people starting recruiting startups, I would try to make it look as much like personal network hiring as possible, since that’s what seems to work. I’d love a service that would let me see how everyone in my company was connected to a candidate, and be able to search personal networks of people in the company (LinkedIn is probably good at this for hiring sales people but not very good at this for developers).

*Have a mission, and don’t be surprised at how much selling you’ll have to do.

You need a mission in order to hire well. In addition to wanting to work with a great team, candidates need to believe in your mission—i.e., why is this job more important than any of the others they could take? Having a mission that gets people excited is probably the best thing you can do to get a great team on board before you have runaway traction.

As a founder, you’ll assume that everyone will be as excited about your company as you are. In reality, no one will. You need to spend a lot of time getting candidates excited about your mission.

If you have a good mission and you’re good at selling it, you’ll be able to get slightly overqualified people—although, in a fast-growing startup, they’ll end up in a role that they feel not quite ready for quickly anyway.

You should use your board and your investors to help you close candidates.

Once you decide you want someone, switch into closing mode. The person that the new hire will report to (and ideally also the CEO) should be doing everything possible to close the candidate, and talking to her about once a day.

*Hire people you like.

At Stripe, I believe they call this the Sunday test—would you be likely to come into the office on a Sunday because you want to hang out with this person? Liking the people you work with is pretty important to the right kind of company culture. Only a few times have I ever seen a scenario where I didn’t like an otherwise very good candidate. I only made the hire once, and it was a mistake.

That being said, remember you want at least some diversity of thought. There are some attributes where you want uniformity—integrity, intelligence, etc.—and there are some where you want coverage of the entire range.

*Have a set of cultural values you hire for.

Spend a lot of time figuring out what you want your cultural values to be (there are some good examples on the Internet). Make sure the whole company knows what they are and buys into them. Anyone you hire should be a cultural fit.

Andrew Mason says “Values are a decision making framework that empower individuals to make the decision that you, the founder, would make, in situations where there are conflicting interests (e.g. growth vs. customer satisfaction)”.

Treat your values as articles of faith. Screen candidates for these values and be willing to let an otherwise good candidate go if he is not a cultural fit. Diversity of opinions and certain characteristics (e.g. you want nerds and athletes both on the team) is good; diversity of values in a startup is bad.

There are some people that are so set in their ways they will never get behind your values; you will probably end up firing them.

As a side note, avoid remote employees in the early days. As a culture is still gelling, it’s important to have everyone in the same building.

*Don’t compromise.

In the grind of a startup, you’ll always need someone yesterday and it’s easy to hire someone that is not quite smart enough or a good enough culture fit because you really need a specific job done. Especially in the early days, never compromise. A single bad hire left unfixed for long can kill a company. It’s better to lose a deal or be late on a product or whatever than to hire someone mediocre.

Great people attract other great people; as soon as you get a mediocre person in the building, this entire phenomenon can unwind.

*Be generous with compensation packages, but mostly with equity.

You should be very frugal with nearly everything in a startup. Compensation for great people is an exception.

Where you want to be generous, though, is with equity. Ideally, you end up paying people slightly below to roughly market salaries but with a very generous equity package. “Experienced” people often have higher personal burn rates and sometimes you’ll need to pay them more, but remember that great companies are not usually created by experienced people (with the exception of a few roles where it really matters a lot.)

I am sure I will get flamed for saying this, but it’s the right strategy—if you want an above-market salary, go work at a big company with no equity upside.

Ideally, you want to pay people just enough they don’t stress about cash flow. Equity is harder, but a good rule for the first 20 hires seems to be about double what your investors suggest. For a company on a good but not absolute breakout trajectory, some rough numbers I’ve seen are about 1.5% for the first engineer and about 0.25% for the twentieth. But the variance is huge.

Incidentally, a very successful YC company has a flat salary for effectively all of their engineers, and it seems to work well. It’s lower than what these people could get elsewhere, but clearly they enjoy the work and believe the stock is going to be worth a lot. The sorts of people that will take this deal are the kind of people you want in a startup. And unless something goes really wrong, at this point, these engineers are going to make way more money than that would have taking higher salaries elsewhere—not to mention how much better their work environment has been.

You will likely have to negotiate a little bit. Learn how to do this. In general, materially breaking your compensation structure to get someone is a bad idea—word gets out and everyone will be upset.

*Watch out for red flags and trust your gut.

There are a few things in the interviewing/negotiating process that you should watch out for because they usually mean that person will not be successful in a startup. A focus on title is an example; a focus on things like “how many reports will be in my organization” is an even worse example. You’ll develop a feel for these sorts of issues very quickly; don’t brush them off.

If you have a difficult-to-articulate desire to pass, pass.

*Always be recruiting.

Unfortunately, recruiting usually doesn’t work as a transactional activity. You have to view it as something you always do, not something you start when you need to fill a role immediately. There’s a fair amount of unpredictability in the process; if you find someone great for a role you won’t need for two months, you should still hire her now.

*Fire fast.

I have never met a newbie founder that fires fast enough; I have also never met a founder who doesn’t learn this lesson after a few years.

You will not get 100% of your hires right. When it’s obviously not working, it’s unlikely to start working. It’s better for everyone involved to part ways quickly, instead of hanging on to unrealistic dreams that it’s going to get better. This is especially true for the person you have to let go—if they’re just at your company for a couple of months, it’s a non-issue in future interviews. And everyone else at the company is probably aware that the person is not working out before you are.

Having to fire people is one of the worst things a founder has to do, but you have to just get it over with and trust that it will work out better than dragging things out.

*Put a little bit of rigor around the hiring process.

Make everyone on your team commit to a hire/no hire decision for everyone they meet, and write up their thoughts. If you get it wrong, this is useful to look back at later. It’s good to have a brief in-person discussion with the entire interviewing team after a candidate leaves.

Have someone take the candidate out to lunch or dinner. Insist that everyone is on time and prepared for interviews/auditions. Make sure every candidate leaves with a positive impression of your company.

Be organized—one person should coordinate the entire interview process, make sure every topic you want to cover gets covered, convene people for the discussion after all interviews are done, etc. Also, have a consistent framework for how you decide whether or not to hire—do you need unanimous consent?

Remember that despite being great at what they do your team may not be great interviewers. It’s important to teach people how to interview.

*Don’t hire.

Many founders hire just because it seems like a cool thing to do, and people always ask how many employees you have. Companies generally work better when they are smaller. It’s always worth spending time to think about the least amount of projects/work you can feasibly do, and then having as small a team as possible to do it.

Don’t hire for the sake of hiring. Hire because there is no other way to do what you want to do.

Good luck. Hiring is very hard but very important work. And don’t forget that after you hire people, you need to keep them. Remember to check in with people, be a good manager, have regular all hands meetings, make sure people are happy and challenged, etc. Always keep a sense of momentum at your company—that’s important to retaining talent. Give people new roles every six months or so. And of course, continue to focus on bringing talented people into the company—that alone will make other good people want to stay.

Always be identifying and promoting new talent. This is not as sexy as thinking about new problems to solve, but it will make you successful.

Thanks to Patrick Collison, Andrew Mason, Keith Rabois, Geoff Ralston, and Nick Sivo for reading drafts of this.

9 Philosophical Thought Experiments That Will Keep You Up at Night

Sometimes, the best way to illustrate a complicated philosophical concept is by framing it as a story or situation. Here are nine such thought experiments with downright disturbing implications.

Top image: Isaac Gutiérrez Pascual; published with permission.

1. Prisoner’s Dilemma

This is the classic game theory problem in which a suspect is confronted with a rather difficult decision: Stay silent or confess to the crime. Trouble is, the suspect doesn’t know how their accomplice will respond.

Here’s the Prisoner’s Dilemma in a nutshell, via the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Tanya and Cinque have been arrested for robbing the Hibernia Savings Bank and placed in separate isolation cells. Both care much more about their personal freedom than about the welfare of their accomplice. A clever prosecutor makes the following offer to each. “You may choose to confess or remain silent. If you confess and your accomplice remains silent I will drop all charges against you and use your testimony to ensure that your accomplice does serious time. Likewise, if your accomplice confesses while you remain silent, they will go free while you do the time. If you both confess I get two convictions, but I’ll see to it that you both get early parole. If you both remain silent, I’ll have to settle for token sentences on firearms possession charges. If you wish to confess, you must leave a note with the jailer before my return tomorrow morning.”

This thought experiment is troubling because it teaches us that we don’t always make the “right” decisions when confronted with insufficient information and when other self-interested decision-making agents are thrown into the mix. The “dilemma” is that each suspect is better off confessing than staying silent — but the most ideal outcome would have been mutual silence.

This has implications to everything from the coordination of international cooperation (including the prevention of nuclear war) through to our potential contact and communication with extraterrestrial intelligences (i.e. despite the fact that all interstellar civilizations would benefit from cooperation, it would likely be more prudent to take the dominant strategy of unleashing self-replicating berserker probes against everyone else before they do it).

2. Mary the Colorblind Neuroscientist

Sometimes referred to as the Inverted Spectrum Problem or the Knowledge Argument, this thought experiment is meant to stimulate discussions against a purely physicalist view of the universe, namely the suggestion that the universe, including mental processes, is entirely physical. This thought experiment tries to show that there are indeed non-physical properties — and attainable knowledge — that can only be learned through conscious experience.

The originator of the concept, Frank Jackson, explains it this way:

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’…What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?

Put another way, Mary knows everything there is to know about color except for one crucial thing: She’s never actually experienced color consciously. Her first experience of color was something that she couldn’t possibly have anticipated; there’s a world of difference between academically knowing something versus having actual experience of that thing.

This thought experiment teaches us that there will always be more to our perception of reality, including consciousness itself, than objective observation. It essentially shows us that we don’t know what we don’t know. The thought experiment also gives us hope for the future; should we augment our sensory capabilities and find ways to expand conscious awareness, we could open up entirely new avenues of psychological and subjective exploration.

3. The Beetle in the Box

This one’s also known as the Private Language Argument and it’s somewhat similar to Mary the Neuroscientist. In Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, he proposed a thought experiment that challenged the way we look at introspection and how it informs the language we use to describe sensations.

For the thought experiment, Wittgenstein asks us to imagine a group of individuals, each of whom has a box containing something called a “beetle.” No one can see into anyone else’s box. Everyone is asked to describe their beetle — but each person only knows their own beetle. But each person can only talk about their own beetle, as there might be different things in each person’s box. Consequently, Wittgenstein says the subsequent descriptions cannot have a part in the “language game.” Over time, people will talk about what is in their boxes, but the word “beetle” simply ends up meaning “that thing that is in a person’s box.”

Why is this bizarre thought experiment disturbing? The mental experiment points out that the beetle is like our minds, and that we can’t know exactly what it is like in another individual’s mind. We can’t know exactly what other people are experiencing, or the uniqueness of their perspective. It’s an issue that’s very much related to the so-called hard problem of consciousness and the phenomenon of qualia.

4. The Chinese Room

Philosopher John Searle asks us to imagine someone who knows only English, and they’re sitting alone in a room following English instructions for manipulating strings of Chinese characters. So, for those outside of the room, it appears that the person inside the room understands Chinese.

(Credit: Elysium)

The argument is supposed to show that, while advanced computers may appear to understand and converse in natural language, they are not capable of understanding language. This is because computers are strictly limited to the exchange of symbolic strings. The Chinese Room was meant to be a killer argument against artificial intelligence, but it’s a rather simplistic view of AI and where it’s likely headed, including the advent of generalized, learning intelligence, (AGI) and the potential for artificial consciousness.

That said, Searle is right in his suggestion that there is the potential for an AI to act and behave as if there’s conscious awareness and understanding. This is problematic because it may be convincing to us humans that true comprehension is going on where there is none. We best be careful, therefore, around seemingly “smart” machine minds.

5. The Experience Machine

Philosopher Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine is a strong hint that we should probably just plug ourselves into a kind of hedonistic version of The Matrix.

From his book, Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974):

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life experiences?…Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think that it’s all actually happening…Would you plug in?”

The basic idea, here, is that we have very good reasons to plug ourselves into such a machine. Because we live in a universe with no apparent purpose, and because our lives are often characterized by less-than-ideal conditions, like toil and suffering, we have no good reason to not opt for something substantially better — even if it is “artificial.” But what about human dignity? And the satisfaction of our “true” desires? Nozick’s thought experiment may appear easily dismissible, but it’s one that’s challenged philosophers for decades.

6. The Trolley Problem

Here’s one for the ethicists — and you can blame the renowned moral philosopher Philippa Foot for this one. This thought experiment, of which there are now many variations, first appeared in Foot’s 1967 paper, “Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect.”

Imagine that you’re at the controls of a railway switch and there’s an out-of-control trolley coming. The tracks branch into two, one track that leads to a group of five people, and the other to one person. If you do nothing, the trolley will smash into the five people. But if you flip the switch, it’ll change tracks and strike the lone person. What do you do?

(Credit: We Love Philosophy)

Utilitarians, who seek to maximize happiness, say that the single person should be killed. Kantians, because they see people as ends and not means, would argue that you can’t treat the single person as a means for the benefit of the five. So you should do nothing.

A second variation of the problem involves a “fat man” and no second track — a man so large that, if you were to push him onto the tracks, his body would prevent the trolley from smashing into the group of five. So what do you do? Nothing? Or push him onto the tracks?

This thought experiment reveals the complexity of morality by distinguishing between killing a person and letting them die — a problem with implications to our laws, behavior, science, policing, and war. “Right” and “wrong” is not as simple as it’s often made out to be.

7. The Spider in the Urinal

This one’s reminiscent of Plato’s Cave, another classic (and disturbing) thought experiment. Proposed by Thomas Nagel in his essay, “Birth, Death, and the Meaning of Life,” it addresses issues of non-interference and the meaningfulness of life. He got the idea when he noticed a sad little spider living in a urinal in the men’s bathroom at Princeton where he was teaching. The spider appeared to have an awful life, constantly getting peed on, and “he didn’t seem to like it.” He continues:

Gradually our encounters began to oppress me. Of course it might be his natural habitat, but because he was trapped by the smooth porcelain overhang, there was no way for him to get out even if he wanted to, and no way to tell whether he wanted to…So one day toward the end of the term I took a paper towel from the wall dispenser and extended it to him. His legs grasped the end of the towel and I lifted him out and deposited him on the tile floor.
He just sat there, not moving a muscle. I nudged him slightly with the towel, but nothing happened . . . . I left, but when I came back two hours later he hadn’t moved.
The next day I found him in the same place, his legs shriveled in that way characteristic of dead spiders. His corpse stayed there for a week, until they finally swept the floor.

Nagel acted out of empathy, assuming that the spider would fare better — and perhaps even enjoy life — outside of its normal existence. But the exact opposite happened. In the end, he did the spider no good.

This thought experiment forces us to consider the quality and meaningfulness of not just animal lives, but our own as well. How can we ever know what anyone really wants? And do our lives actually do us any good? It also forces us to question our policies of intervention. Despite our best intentions, interference can sometimes inflict unanticipated harm. It’s a lesson embedded within Star Trek’s Prime Directive — but as the Trolley Problem illustrated, sometimes inaction can be morally problematic.

8. The Replacement Argument

In this thought experiment, we are asked to imagine a world in which humans don’t care for the taste of meat. In such a scenario, there would be no animals raised as livestock. And by consequence, there would be a dramatic decrease in the number of animal lives, like pigs, cows, and chickens. As Virginia Woolf once wrote, “Of all the arguments for Vegetarianism none is so weak as the argument from humanity. The pig has a stronger interest than anyone in the demand for bacon. If all the world were Jewish, there would be no pigs at all.”

This line of reasoning can lead to some bizarre, and even repugnant conclusions. For example, is it better to have 20 billion people on the planet in a poor standard of living than 10 billion in a higher standard of living? If the latter, then what about the 10 billion lives that never happened? But how can we feel bad about lives that never occurred?

9. Original Position

This thought experiment is why I’m a complete fanboy of John Rawls. He asks us to imagine ourselves in a situation in which we know nothing of our true lives — we are behind a “veil of ignorance” that prevents us from knowing the political system under which we live or the laws that are in place. Nor do we know anything about psychology, economics, biology, and other sciences. But along with a group of similarly situation-blind people, we are asked, in this original position, to review a comprehensive list of classic forms of justice drawn from various traditions of social and political philosophy. We are then given the task of selecting which system of justice we feel would best suit our needs in the absence of any information about our true selves and the situation we may actually be in in the real world.

So, for example, what if you came back to “real life” to find out that you live in a shanty town in India? Or a middle class neighborhood in Norway? What if you’re a developmentally disabled person? A millionaire? (Or as I proposed in my paper, “All Together Now,” a different species?)

According to Rawls, we would likely end up picking something that guarantees equal basic rights and liberties to secure our interests as free and equal citizens, and to pursue a wide range of conceptions for the good. He also speculated that we’d likely choose a system that ensures fair educational and employment opportunities.