Why is there not more ambition in the developed world? Say we wanted to boost ambition by 2X. What’s the actual constraint? What stands in the way?
Here's a guess: where it once was possible to be a one person wunderkind in scientific discovery or business, it no longer is.
Great achievements have become team sports. You need multiple experts in disparate skillsets to achieve a huge business or great discovery.
Anyone smart enough to have that kind of ambition is also probably smart enough to realize that it's a huge undertaking, and huge enough that they can't do it themselves.
It also likely comes with the parallel realization (or fear) that what drives their ambition is maybe not enough to get others to join their team.
I know that holds me back in my ambitions. It's hard to convince others you have the right ideas, and that they are worth working on.
I'm going to have to disagree with the interviewer's question. I do not think there's an absence of ambition at all. I think for a particular segment of society we've actually gotten much better at putting ambitious people to work. In the past, an ambitious person had fewer options and would strike out on their own, which fueled a entrepreneurship. Now there are hundreds (thousands?) of large enterprises that slurp up ambitious individuals and put them in charge of important things.
I've been reading about postwar corporate culture recently and its pretty amazing that orgs would just sit on these amazingly talented people - and knew they were talented - but just didn't care. Not only were some of their most skilled workers not promoted, they weren't even paid more. I think WWI and WWII greatly shaped the attitude of corporate leaders from this period that you just simply hired someone to do their job and made sure they did it well and that was that. Very reminiscent of military ranks. Seniority and loyalty each mattered just as much as skill.
>I think for a particular segment of society we've actually gotten much better at putting ambitious people to work
Yes yes yes!! There's this great essay from Stephen Jay Gould on why we haven't had 0.400 hitters in baseball for so long. His argument was that the overall pool of baseball players got too good so you're not seeing strong outliers anymore! I'd say that this is a phenomenon we see across all kinds of life, not just sports.
From a paper reviewing the evidence of Gould, I can't find the original essay online:
>Gould then supposes that the decline in batting average peak (the .400 hitter, the outlier) is due to decreased variation in the population of hitters. In other words, as the skills of both hitters and pitchers improved, and as the pool of talented players to choose from increased, the variation in talent (the difference between the best to the worst batting averages) should decrease. Therefore, players in Major League Baseball in more recent period are arguably reaching the “wall” of human performance. Gould’s analysis of the data supports this idea, as the standard deviation of league-wide batting averages has decreased steadily since the early 20th century.
On the other hand football has seen two of its best players ever (Messi and Cr. Ronaldo) just break all sorts of records until very recently, with Messi having a decent chance of being named the best football player of all times.
Football (and most other similar sports) offer more chances for creativity and variation than batting in baseball. Hitting a baseball is a very narrow and defined task with limited room for novel development or breakthroughs. Unless there are significant rule changes in baseball we're not going to see any batters revolutionise the act of batting in any meaningful way.
Getting a ball past several defenders and scoring a goal on the other hand can be done in a near infinite number of ways, meaning there is much more room for variation, improvement and evolution.
The closest equivalent I can think of in football is a penalty kick, and I don't think there is any evidence that players are getting significantly better at scoring off penalties.
> Football (and most other similar sports) offer more chances for creativity and variation than batting in baseball.
I agree, with the caveat that football is becoming more and more like baseball and other similar (mostly US) sports which are very heavy on numbers and on stats. The recent Norwegian sensation, Haaland, seems exactly to fit that trend, as he's not particularly super-good at anything but his numbers have just been phenomenal in the last 3-4 years (when he's been fit to play, that is).
We'll see if the future will bring more Kevin De Bruyne-type of players (i.e. a very creative guy) or more Haalands.
Messi is 35 and Ronaldo is 37. They emerged 20 years ago. The closest talent that the current generation can offer is Mbappe, and he is more one dimensional than either. Can you name someone else under age of 20?
However, watching any random league game from the big five (England, Spain, Italy, Germany, France), the standard is very high. Most players are amazingly fit and skillful, control ball extremely well. Teams play with cohesive plans. A lot of nice team movements. It shows that the standard at the professional level has risen considerably in the last few decades.
The downside of course is that it makes games more mechanical and less emotional, and it's harder to tell one team from another.
> Messi having a decent chance of being named the best football player of all times.
There is no such thing. Being considered by many, yes.
It may seem like football hasn't changed but just think of the overall improvements in training, fitness, nutrition, sports medicine... Nevermind changes to the way matches are officiated and even in some cases the rules have changed. And the pitches! Imagine some players from the past playing on today's laser-levelled pitches where the length of the grass is mm perfect (and specified in the manager's contract!) instead of puddles and patches of bare dirt.
I would put Ronaldo above Messi purely because he's demonstrated elite status in a variety of scenarios compared to Messi who spent most of his career at a team that was built around feeding him (and once he left, he has not performed anywhere near as well.)
> Now there are hundreds (thousands?) of large enterprises that slurp up ambitious individuals and put them in charge of important things.
This is based on hearsay, but there's a fairly common sentiment surrounding certain big tech companies that they'll often hire highly skilled engineers to work on fairly mundane problems in order to restrict the available talent pool. Sometimes large companies will acqui-hire full teams just to avoid having to compete with them. Which is to say: I'm not sure that the allocation of talent is in an optimal configuration. But I'm also unsure how this hypothesis could be adequately falsified or measured.
"Now there are hundreds (thousands?) of large enterprises that slurp up ambitious individuals and put them in charge of important things."
I'm not sure I agree with that...
They slurp up ambitious people, put them in charge of something, work hard to convince them it's important, layer endless amounts of bureaucracy on top and around them, and pay them just enough to make sure they don't leave - I think this may be more accurate...
That's tech monopolies (FAANG etc.), which have more money than sense. In the normal businesses, there's hardly any busywork, because the relatively low margins don't allow for it.
Might there not just be a semantic issue here? Unless I'm mistaken you seem to be equating ambition with doing very well at something, such as successfully climbing a corporate ladder. And that's an absolutely reasonable ambition that's also more attainable than ever, as you mentioned. But I think Paul Graham was speaking of ambition in terms of revolutionary or world-changing type stuff.
For instance in a parallel world Elon Musk ends up going to work at Boeing and perhaps even gradually works his way up to becoming their chief engineer. But in this world it's unlikely he would have even been able to create fully reusable rockets. That was not only an expensive and extremely high risk venture, but one which many key people, such as Tory Bruno (CEO of ULA - a Boeing/Lockeed partnership), were aggressively dismissive and even mocking of, until SpaceX proved it. Let alone all his other ventures like Tesla or big picture goals like creating human colonies on Mars.
If I may riff off your comment: I want to work hard with kind, smart people on hard problems and then go home to my awesome family, not make shitty people wealthy.
Is Paul smart? Or his he smart and he got lucky, and he’s trying to launder that luck into status? I hear lots of “people don’t want to work anymore” from a whole lot of lucky wealthy (“right place right time”) folks, for example. Asking in a first principals sort of way.
“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." - Honore de Balzac
Balzac probably isn't wrong. You need at least one ruthless motherfucker on the team if you want to get dirty, shitty wealthy. Somebody has to be focused on the money; otherwise, nobody is.
I'd also postulate that a complete ignorance of money probably isn't ultimately productive to your goals. You can't work on your business without distractions if you're getting evicted, for example.
(This is assuming you're not generationally wealthy.)
“If I’ve learned one thing in this life, it’s that when it’s millions of dollars at stake: you keep your head down, your nose clean, and work twice as hard as the other guy. But when it’s billions of dollars?
The only thing that matters is never, ever saying no.”
pg had too much success too quickly for it to be chance (IMHO).
Leaving Viaweb aside (Yahoo was buying all kinds of stuff back then so it’s hard to know how cool-headed finance would have valued it) he clearly saw and exploited a massive opportunity around technology investment. And it’s worth bearing in mind that he drove several of the first few monster batches through an overall market meltdown that had a lot of VCs saying it was the end of the world.
There was a definite luck factor called the iPhone: someone was going to build an army of businesses on the back of a platform revolution like that, but he got there first and executed.
Now the public good component is a more complicated story, I honestly don’t know if replacing one club of secret-handshaking insiders who routinely fail up with a different one is a net win, and I certainly don’t buy the argument that you can measure it by market cap, but at least the new club doesn’t care who your parents are I guess? I think it’s probably a win vs. an admittedly abysmal bar.
I’ve thought about this comment a lot since you wrote it. I’m reminded of Bill Gross, “the bond king,” who founded PIMCO. Skilled, wanting to win at all costs, but who built a strategy primarily for a declining interest rate macro (“structural alpha”) that slowly became less effective near the end of his career, requiring creative maneuvers to successfully compete against competitors.
I’m not ignoring the varying degrees of skill, education, and intelligence. I’m emphasizing the luck required for all that to be effective.
Great comment, appreciate the history lesson and teachable moment.
I’m flattered that you got value from my comment, I think it’s just stuff people my age ended up watching: I think I joined HN in like 2007/2008 and that’s when pg’s essays were still considered radical and no YC company had IPO’d for zillions yet.
An Orleanist interpretation of this aphorism is as credible as Louise-Phillip's claim to the French throne. Vautrin derives this statement from a near endless litany of examples. I would strongly recommend reading Balzac to get to the origins of all this.
You can share all the true examples you want. But 19th century France and 20th century America have completely different economic models. So we can't understand that purely by studying French literature.
Balzac's pronouncement assumes the world is zero-sum; ie that wealth must be stolen from others. While that may have been true of many fortunes for many centuries on earth, it is not true now. The essence of Silicon Valley is the positive-sum game. Paul's at the heart of it.
Paul has done a lot of good for a lot of people, including the founders who went through YC, which is why people pay attention to his opinions.
Giving $10k out to each founding team in the first year of YC wasn't laundering luck into status. (I doubt he cares about status.) It was changing how tech investing worked in order to liberate more tech people to recombine with each other in order to work on hard problems.
There aren't many great fortunes, they usually require dominating an industry (say, come to be one of top 5 vendors out of industry that initially had 10,000 competitors), and I think it's pretty unrealistic to believe you could dominate an industry without getting your hands dirty. There may be exceptions like Warren Buffet, but I think the dark path is much more common.
This is simply untrue. The number of great fortunes itself has vastly increased in tech's positive-sum economy. The increase in the number of multi-millionaires, and the growth of that class, has been deeply impacted by tech. And it's not just founders. Lots of execs and senior software engineers now possess fortunes that past ages would have considered great, even in real vs nominal dollars.
Not all industries are winner take all. And many industries remain to be invented by founders.
This fortune == crime is part of a scarcity mindset, and it's a shame that limits people.
Another dimension is access to money and financial knowledge, which I find strangely missing from the context.
Assuming you have to pay for schooling, that along with the disproportionately increasing cost of rent and property factors into people being less ambitious due to the necessity of settling for a job that pays enough to support oneself. I'm curious how Paul Graham did it, given that he has multiple higher education degrees in philosophy, attended art school in Italy, and what capital he could rely on from his parents.
It would be disappointing if they both come from money yet miss this point, given the emphasis of progressive politics on socioeconomic or cultural privilege. Of course one doesn't have to agree with it, but shouldn't it at least be discussed?
Thanks for linking that; seems like it's a bit of both:
on one hand he notes that "computers were expensive in those days and it took me years of nagging before I convinced my father to buy one, a TRS-80, in about 1980", but later during his adult years "wanted to go back to RISD, but I was now broke and RISD was very expensive, so I decided to get a job for a year and then return to RISD the next fall."
I doubt an undergrad chooses not to go into science today because they see it being too collaborative. They don’t because they realize they can become a finance bro and make a metric ton more.
A lot of science seems highly collaborative yes but that’s not because of a lack of choice. It’s honestly a cop out way of doing it. See the competition between the massive effort of the human genome project and Venter going rounds around them with a small team and in the end they announced together they sequenced the human genome to save face.
> I doubt an undergrad chooses not to go into science today because they see it being too collaborative. They don’t because they realize they can become a finance bro and make a metric ton more.
It is also years of PhD and postdocs where you work a lot for a little money while having super large chance to be forced out despite your efforts. And having to move every few years where you get the job, which makes families more complicated.
Plus, competition for those slots is still high. It is not like there would be unfilled PhD or postdocs positions. There is more interests then available slots, leading to all kind of abuse.
They go into finance because everyone since the Boomers has faced a nightmare of a job market in academia and science. Why spend 5+ years for a 15% chance at a middle class job when the alternative of doing anything else is so much easier?
Kids don’t come out of college wanting to be corporate or finance bros. That happens after the world grinds them down.
"Great achievements have become team sports. You need multiple experts in disparate skillsets to achieve a huge business or great discovery."
Whether this is true or not depends somewhat on definitions, but I am going to take the counter-argument.
This is just not the case, you won't be able to evidence it that it is, and it might be this assumption that is holding you back.
In our age, momentum is towards large org-charts, and it is not clear that any greatness comes from it. The foundation of unix came from two people. Craigslist has 50 employees. Pre-acquisition, Twitter had 7000. Facebook has nearly ten times that. There is astonishing talent at the big silicon valley firms yet they reliably fall short of greatness. If lots of well-trained minds was the gateway to greatness, those firms would already have it.
Yet the original concept of twitter was great, and it was such a simple thing. If any of us went back in time to 1995, we'd build a first cut of Twitter in a weekend. But it went undiscovered until all those years later.
In this thread, Walter Bright is taking a hammering on votes for his comment. Yet here is someone who is known to have built complete toolchains for C and C++, also a java-to-native compiler, and his own language that is well-regarded, written variety of articles for journals, built applications. Here is someone who can do great things working alone. (He has also held various dayjobs building other stuff.)
"what drives their ambition is maybe not enough to get others to join their team ... holds me back"
Is it possible that your faith in the team sports model is itself what's holding you back? What could you achieve if you role-play that as being false, and consider how you would organise in light of that? What if you stopped spending energy trying to convert the unworthy, and instead put that energy to be broader yourself. You could still work with people with compatible ideas. Your profile says you are a fpga engineer. The building blocks you work with are some of the most flexible humans have had access to. There will be undiscovered twitters in your space.
An extension of that, we are still doing ego worshipping and attributing the success to single individuals. Both in academia (PIs get the fame, money and recognition even when they didn't initiate or even believed in the idea) or in business (CEOs or founders get pretty much the same treatment). And I wonder if that's not impending on the success of the teams.
I think in line with your point, if we did increase ambition 2x, are there enough people in a position to action their ambitions? I think there is plenty of ambition, but many people, probably the majority, are focused on making ends meet and the daily grind.
I think the 4 day work week is a great step toward enabling people to be ambitious and innovative, in whatever field drives them.
> As for upper bounds, de Bruijn showed back in 1950 that {\Lambda \leq 1/2}. The only progress since then has been the work of Ki, Kim and Lee in 2009, who improved this slightly to {\Lambda < 1/2}. The primary proposed aim of this Polymath project is to obtain further explicit improvements to the upper bound of {\Lambda}. Of course, if we could lower the upper bound all the way to zero, this would solve the Riemann hypothesis, but I do not view this as a realistic outcome of this project
To your point, there was some excitement and progress in the beginning, but it remains an unusual approach to mathematics.
Why is there not more ambition in the developed world?
Maybe there is just as much ambition as there ever was. Maybe people have just shifted their goals. Maybe they have different drives. Instead of aspiring to be the next Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, maybe people have realised that this is not really what they want in life. Instead of having a strong desire for financial and business success, maybe people in the developed world have started to shift their focus to other things like friendship, family, enjoying life, and learning to be satisfied with less. Maybe in this new world we live in to be ambitious means something else. I don’t know.
I had a similar thought reading this, and I looked up ambition to check myself. ‘The desire to achieve fame, rank or power.’ You raise a good question: does power lie in solely material gain? Of course not, more and more people understand that controlling one’s own attention and time _is_ the material gain we seek. The equation is changing (has been for years, accelerated by the pandemic), not just in ‘the developed world’.
Aside: Still waking up and chewing on why the developed world is called out specifically as a thing in this question. Where does the developed world end and the undeveloped world begin?
Even simple things are hard to do in developed countries. Building a house now requires experts.
From what I've seen developing countries don't have that luxury and they accept everything might kill you. Though driving a car is much more dangerous.
Self-sufficiency and other "simple" things are possible in developed countries, they are just intrinsically hard and this is probably a good limiting factor because basically lots of things (eg foraging) don't generally scale if a lot of people want to do them.
I think there's an ongoing bias for many of us. During our lifetimes things have changed so rapidly, and generally positively, that we kind of assume that this is the normal direction of things. And so when things slow down we look for some profound meaning to it. In reality, we have all been fortunate enough to live through a really weird time in history.
One of my favorite quotes: "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. ... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." - Albert Michelson, 1894
That quote is from from Albert Michelson of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment. [1] For some really brief background, before Einstein it was believed that light had to have a medium to travel through in space. Light was seen as a wave, and waves can't propagate in a vacuum. That medium was called the luminiferous (light) aether. Morley set out to experimentally prove the existence of this medium by showing that the speed of light measured from 2 perpendicular directions would be different, given that the trajectory of the aether, and thus the speed of propagation, would be different.
Yet he kept measuring near the exact same value for light. He was so convinced in the correctness of the luminiferous aether (which had dominated scientific thought for centuries, and was imminently logical) that he doubted his own results and would continue to repeat similar experiments for decades. Hence, the context of his quote. But then of course Einstein was soon enough to be on his way and discover relativity, which would not only completely invalidate the aether but completely revolutionize science. And then quantum mechanics was also right on the way.
The point of all of this is that Albert Michelson was convinced science had effectively come to an end in terms of major discoveries, let alone revolutions, let alone those driven by one off thinkers, in much the same way you do. And there's no real reason to think anything has really changed. Science has historically always had long lulls, as well as societies driven to the point of assuming as absolutely true ideas which are ultimately proven to be fundamentally and completely wrong, and whose assumption of truth was actually one of the reasons progress lulled.
> Great achievements have become team sports. You need multiple experts in disparate skillsets to achieve a huge business or great discovery.
The best way to get great people to work with you is to build things that people care about. That's something you can do alone, and it's never been more accessible than it is today.
There's also the problem of housing and that living in or very close to big cities (which you need to do in order for your "ambitions" to be noticed) has become expensive as hell.
Which is to say that almost no-one has time for shitty "ambition" that would make some multi-millionaires (angel investors and the like) into multi-multi-millionaires or even into billionaires, people have to live and to pay rent and to purchase very expensive avocados (because that's the only thing that they eat, of course).
But maybe the trust-fund kids who don't have to worry about all of these things will be able to find enough ambition among themselves in order to move things forward.
> What’s the actual constraint? What stands in the way?
Consider the tsunami of hate and ridicule and "you didn't build that" directed at Elon Musk for having the temerity to think he could build rockets and having the gall to be highly successful at it.
Oh, and also build a competitive electric car company and school all the established car makers.
Here's a guess: where it once was possible to be a one person wunderkind in scientific discovery or business, it no longer is.
Great achievements have become team sports. You need multiple experts in disparate skillsets to achieve a huge business or great discovery.
Anyone smart enough to have that kind of ambition is also probably smart enough to realize that it's a huge undertaking, and huge enough that they can't do it themselves.
It also likely comes with the parallel realization (or fear) that what drives their ambition is maybe not enough to get others to join their team.
I know that holds me back in my ambitions. It's hard to convince others you have the right ideas, and that they are worth working on.