Why Experts Make Bad Teachers - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cscalfani/why-experts-make-bad-teachers-ccaed2df029b#.75uxagozm <comment><USER2> Saying that all experts are bad teachers is like saying all <insert ethnic group> are <insert stereotype>.

Good teachers are good teachers. If the good teacher is an expert, then they are better than the good teacher who is not an expert, especially if they are trying to teach a nuanced topic.

Does every teacher need to be an expert? Of course not. But plenty of non- expert teachers will actually lead students astray by teaching them the wrong model.

I've had plenty of "bad teachers" who were experts. I've also had plenty of "bad teachers" who were not experts. I've had very few good teachers, period. Bad teachers in lower-level topics are not noticed very much, but they are the bane of undergraduates who are subjected to them often. Survivorship bias might lead me to conclude that most experts are bad teachers, but the better explanation is simply that teaching and being an expert in field X are distinct abilities/skills, and that it is rare to find people who have mastered both.

I aim to be an expert in my fields (currently 3 disparate ones in which I hold degrees). I also aim to be a good teacher, which means that I take time to figure out the best approach and experiences for teaching a particular topic. I consider my expert status to be an advantage that complements my teaching ability. Being an expert does not make me a bad teacher. Being a bad teacher makes me a bad teacher.

<comment><USER3> >> _" Saying that all experts are bad teachers is like saying all <insert ethnic group> are <insert stereotype>."_

To be fair, the linked article makes exactly 0 claims about "all experts." Instead, the claims pertain to "experts," which could be fairly interpreted as "some experts" or even "a preponderance of experts."

If the article meant "all experts" it surely would have said so. Neither the string "all experts" nor "every expert" appears in the linked article.

I know my objection seems pedantic but I see this happen _all the time_ , where someone makes a claim about e.g. "bicyclists do X" and then someone else gleefully and sanctimoniously jumps in with an objection like "How can you stereotype all cyclists like that, you are a terrible person!" When in fact the original claim explicitly did not pertain to "all cyclists" but rather merely to plural "cyclists." But now the claimer is super vilified as a cyclist-hater.

<comment><USER4> I don't think "some experts" nor "plural cyclists" is the most reasonable interpretation.

If I write "Black lives matter", it is not understood to mean that at least 2 lives matter (even though that's a perfectly valid, literal reading of the phrase).

<comment><USER5> You are arguing from extremes on both sides. A blog post is not a math PhD defense. Nor is it a formal systems proof. The words do not have one and only one possible interpretation.

It is extremely common writing style to dedicate an article to "X does Y" when trying to talk about an interesting tendency or correlation. Unfortunately, it is also extremely common for people who work in formal systems to get an allergic reaction and feel compelled to point out that "X does Y" is not formally, literally, universally correct under all conceivable circumstances. This leads to distracting arguments that waste huge amounts of time that could have been spent discussing the interesting tendency/correlation and what to do about it.

The proposed alternative is usually that the author should have peppered the article with caveats, exceptions, disclaimers and preferably citations of formally verified statistics. Again, this is not the Journal of Science. This is an opinion piece. Watering down every statement with disclaimers would be a distraction from the central point and would only serve to satisfy the allergies of a few highly formal readers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >Now imagine an expert who understands this model and tries to teach it to you. Would they take you out in the world and let you encounter Binkles? Probably not.

So it's not "experts" that are the problem, but "bad teachers". Trust me, not taking the time to teach properly is not something unique to experts. Plenty of non-experts fail to teach well, too. And plenty of experts teach well.

The best teachers are people who know the subject _and_ know how to teach. Eliminating them from teaching simply because they know the subject will eliminate the best teachers.

<comment><USER7> Yes this article is like "Experts have built all the abstractions which makes them completely unaware of these abstractions, which is likely false. And even more so if the expert has an advanced degree where they nearly always must teach some classes.

<comment><USER8> One factor, is that it really depends on how that person arrived at mastery and their level of metacognition in the process. If anyone fails to grasp the mindset of the person they are trying to explain a concept to, they will do a poor job.

What do a I know? What concept am I trying to convey? What context does the other person have? Based on their questioning what gaps do they have? How can I fill in the links in that concept graph so that making a connection to that new knowledge will fit in.

How does Feynman fit into the expert/teacher spectrum?

<comment><USER9> I agree. I call what I believe the critical factor in being a good teacher, "sympathetic imagination"\-- the ability to imagine what the other person perceives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I understand the article, but the best teacher I ever had was an expert in his field, and taught by the Socratic method. Only teacher I've ever had that had enough knowledge of a topic that he could both truly answer any question we asked via the method, _and_ answer in such a way as to direct the lesson. Miss that guy.

<comment><USER11> Everyone who thinks they understand a topic should try to conduct a lecture with this method. It's _so_ hard to not fall back on "because that's the way it is" or make declarations of truth. The effort involved in getting your audience to think though a subject often reveals how little careful thought we've put in ourselves.

<comment><USER8> I have often fallen into a trap where

      1. I really like a subject, I jive on it for awhile
      2. I try and teach it to people
      3. They immediately reach the bounds of my knowledge and I cannot answer their questions

To adequately teach a subject, the gap between the what you are teaching the student and your own knowledge needs to be adequately large because concepts will have "stringers" that exit that beginner sphere, loop around and re- enter. You can't teach to the limits of your own knowledge.

<comment><USER12> I've done this - but I also find for a limited group of subjects it's fine!

I know my music theory and I know how to play piano [0]. I gifted a close friend a keyboard and taught her everything I knew about piano and music theory. Within 3 months she was a better pianist than I was - and two years later she was playing for the school choir and talent show. But that is a subject in which "You learn the basics - and the rest comes with hours and hours and hours of practice."

Another example is language (can be iffy if your pronunciation/grammar isn't already near-fluent, even if your vocabulary or niche knowledge (eg: idioms) isn't fluent). You can teach someone the pronunciation, some basic grammar/vocabulary, and guide them towards becoming fluent themselves. A large part is being able to guide people towards resources so that after you've taught them all you know - they can teach themselves from there.

[0] Not very well, but just well enough to play this with only a few mistakes: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNajh166DBc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNajh166DBc)

<comment><USER8> I think what you are describing is boot-strapping your peers. This is often the case when there is a mix of advanced-beginners and total neophytes. Like one student explaining IDE configuration, or how to debug a problem by looking at log files. The teacher in this case often learns as much as the student.

<comment><USER12> I guess that is one way to describe it! I bootstrap people to help them become self-directed learners. I get them past the hardest part of learning something new: not knowing where or how to start.

<comment><USER8> I would never want to hamper the flow of information, or bootstrapping people into a new subject. But bootstrapping is somewhat different than having the deep knowledge that is required for really teaching a subject.

If the skill or area of knowledge lends itself to constructivism, then this style of pedagogy is a perfect match.

Boots on!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Perhaps someone can sort this into the fallacy in which it belongs.

Experts make bad teachers -- Most people make bad teachers -- easily explained by teaching being a skill separate from other skills.

"Technical people make bad managers" is another one I see put into use all the time.

<comment><USER11> The article is saying that having something explained to you by someone who's abstractions are closer to your level will be, in the default case, better than by someone who has more "advanced" abstractions. Additionally, great teachers are ones that can match abstraction levels with their students and slowly advance those abstractions as the student learns.

So, no it's not a fallacy, and yes the process of becoming an expert reduces the likelihood that someone will be a good teacher (of non experts).

<comment><USER14> > and yes the process of becoming an expert reduces the likelihood that > someone will be a good teacher (of non experts).

I agree, but would add that it loops around. Somebody with a very good grasp of the abstractions at some point can go back and review all of the intermediate ones. They can hold them simultaneously and help guide students through them. That makes them excellent teachers.

<comment><USER13> I've been thinking about this through the day and it really may depend on the domain being taught.

A non expert may be able to teach a well defined skill step by step better than someone else who performs those steps without thinking about them anymore.

I've done too many years of math tutoring to know that the non experts in math teaching math are not doing a consistently good job. A non expert in a complex field has no way of teaching off script -- which is where a lot of students will end up entirely by accident.

I see it all the time tutoring math. I'm helping students who wandered from the one way that it was being taught. I help them get back some understanding when they feel lost trying to execute algorithms to solve problems.

The article is very long on assertions and short on everything else. The final argument against this in my experience is that experts blow away non experts on fundamentals. Sports, math, science, writing, cooking, construction, painting etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Teaching is a skill that is orthogonal to the subject being taught. Like patience (closely related) and emotional intelligence (tangentially related), you either have it or you don't.

Purely anecedata, but I don't know of anyone I'd consider a good teacher that was taught to be such. It seems innate to them.

<comment><USER7> When that one teacher that everyone loves, but always seems exhausted, hears your request for help, takes a long tired sigh, then turns on a smile and spends the next 30 minutes walking you through the material....That's someone who had to learn to be a great teacher. It obviously costs them a lot to teach, yet teach they do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is one reason that can make it harder for "experts" to teach a subject that others may teach better.

Best I can explain this is from a personnal story. I used to do rollerblade... I mean a lot of it. It was my main mean of transportation ans I could do easily 20-50km per day. Obviously after a year or two of this I got pretty good and many of my friends would ask me to teach them how to do it. And I did, relatively well, they got the hang of some subtelties of breaking and turning.

However, I noticed that as time went on, I found it more difficult to teach it. It got so natural for me that decomposing the movements in their atomic parts was difficult.

I cound identify two factors that contributed to me going from a decent teacher to a lousy one while at the same time I went from a decent rollerblader to a pretty good one.

For one, the abstraction went from a concious one to a subcouncious one. I no longer had to think about doing it right, I just did. Second I had not taught anyone for a while, so I did not keep in touch with how I built these abstractions in the first place. Both together contributed in me forgetting how to build these abstractions.

To teach one does not have to be a foremost expert in a field but just ahead of the target audience to be in control of the material they need to absorb. The greater the difference in knowledge between the target audience and the teacher the harder for the teacher to "bring down" his thaught processes to their level. That is unless you 1 - were teaching the whole time between getting from pretty good to expert. This way you've kept contact with the different steps and breakdown you'va had to go through yourself while learning. Here is probably where most have had their bad experience when an expert tried to teach them but miserably failed at it. 2 - are a natural pedagogue, in other words you are a genious at making things around you look simple. I think Richard Feynmann would be an stellar example of this.

That being said, as a corrolary to point 2 above, there are people that are just bad at teaching reagardless of any other factors.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've had this notion for a while that the most qualified person to teach you something is often a thoughtful person 1 or 2 levels above your current level of understanding, not someone all the way at the top who can no longer relate to your level of understanding.

All this said, being a truly good professional educator is a learned skill.

<comment><USER18> I second that. I remember having tutorials with professors that were highly decorated. FRS and a whole list of acronyms after their names.

I always found it a struggle to ask them questions that helped my understanding, because they were talking the expert language and I was talking layman. Before you know how a transistor works, how do you know to use words like "gate" in the way that explains how it works?

By contrast, the guy who was best at teaching was a phd student. He seemed to know exactly where I would struggle, and he had a very simple manner of explaining the next step.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I disagree with the premise:

> "We'd all agree that to teach a subject, you must know the subject. So you'd > think that experts would be the best teachers, but they're not. The question > is why?"

That is like saying that dogs are animals so you'd think all animals are dogs.

Moving past of it, I took a class on education which is probably the best class I've ever taken in my life. First they made us create a 1 sentence stating our goal for the teaching material we were going to create. Then we created the content outline and then they made us ask ourselves how the student would profit about each of them for the course objectives. We realized how many of the things we added were abstractions we learned through the years and totally unnecessary for a beginner in the subject.

To make the group assignment, we created a series of concrete tutorials where, through concrete examples, we tried to add a specific (or more) new material on each one while strengthening the previous learned lesson (each would build on each other).

I am interested mainly in group learning (though I do some one-to-one), so another important point is the speed of the learner due to previous abstraction models. While on one-on-one you can tune up/down to the person, with group learning the most you can do is to put them in knowledge groups or try to automate it (which is quite hard). For instance, unless we are talking about kids, most people know that you read top to bottom in English/most languages and left to right, so explaining that about programming is not only unnecessary but it makes your course boring. Then depending on the level you can skip variables, or variable types.

<comment><USER20> Lessons don't need to be 1:1 to be tuned up/down to the learner. For example, check out oppia.org, which has a range of lessons which students can take themselves without supervision.

They learn by answering questions, and the flow changes depending on their answers. Like an robot teacher using the socratic method.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The OP makes the false assumption that the goal of the teaching is to generate other experts. That may be true of some courses at some schools, but I would say that most teaching does not involve trying to turn a student into an expert.

For instance, I am a lawyer. I am an expert in certain areas of law. I teach/sell a lecture on intellectual property law, mostly to startups full of young people who don't know IP from IP addresses. I have no intention of turning them into IP experts let alone lawyers. That's not why they hire me. My job is to give them a taste of some basic rules, to give them enough knowledge so they can spot some red flags. And I'm there to answer specific questions, to address those red flags. That;s most teaching. You want the expert to relate a tiny piece of their knowledge, the focused bit you actually need, so that you don't have to spend years at law school. Half of the task is relating knowledge, the other half the selection of which knowledge to relate. The expert then goes away to continue learning in their field, returning as needed to keep you abreast of changes. The relationship remains asymmetrical.

</comment><comment><USER22> "If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself."

This quote is attributed to both Feynman and Einstein. Both were very good in breaking down complexity into chunks digestible by mere humans. Ironically the author choose an Einstein image.

<comment><USER23> Unexpectedly, it turns out to be pretty hard to explain _anything_ from the adult world to a six year old.

It's not so hard to come up with some massively simplified analogies that can give an adult the illusion they understand a topic they remain fundamentally clueless about - pop science does this professionally.

It's something else entirely to teach specific professional domain competence to the point where someone can work as an expert among other experts.

Oversimplification and popularisation do STEM no favours. It helps no one to believe they understand string theory or climate change when they know barely enough math to add two numbers together.

A more realistic understanding of how hard physics and engineering are would mean more respect from the public, from law makers, and from other professionals.

<comment><USER24> >Oversimplification and popularisation do STEM no favours. It helps no one to believe they understand string theory or climate change when they know barely enough math to add two numbers together.

While I understand your general point, I think that oversimplification is vital in order to convey the importance of scientific work to the (mostly) non-scientists that often control the purse strings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Very odd article to me and not particularly fond of what it's reaching for as a concept. I mean, I think the premise being promoted is debatable from an Educational Research perspective, which I got familiar with in graduate school.

Honestly I kind of bristle at the implication being done at the bottom of basically letting a child/student/trainee wander through the forest of music in the name of learning abstraction the hard way, because, you know, experts aren't good teachers. With something like guitar, I'd argue anything _but_ and expert makes a mediocre or even poor teacher because of the nature of the objective.

It's not against the rules to reply a student's question with "I don't know the exact answer to that, but I will get back to you" but I'd like to think those are infrequent asides in an otherwise useful exchange where the teacher/prof actually knows the ins and outs of things and can explain them because they had to learn them too.

Then we start getting into issues of diversity in learning styles and the conversation gets a lot more complex than what this piece asserts. Good food for thought and a neat topic, but I'd pass on endorsing its conclusion(s) as stated herein.

</comment><comment><USER26> I like this post, but perhaps it'd be more accurate to say that expertise is a necessary but not sufficient condition to teach a subject? I do find that the very best teachers have mastery of the material.

On a related note, when I posted this notebook about the sigmoid function to HN

[http://karlrosaen.com/ml/notebooks/logistic-regression- why-s...](http://karlrosaen.com/ml/notebooks/logistic-regression-why-sigmoid/)

it was upvoted to the front page (presumably by non-experts like me) but derided in the comments by some experts, I think in part because it seemed so obvious to not bare explaining. So I think a challenge of having expertise is to remember what it's like to not understand something and take the beginner on the journey somehow, as the article gets at. And from this perspective a non-expert or aspiring expert can be in a sweet spot of just having learned the material him/her self. But it can be dangerous if you end up with the blind leading the blind.

<comment><USER27> Maybe this came up in the earlier comments, but... why are you calling w_0 + w_1·x_1 + w_2·x_2 + ... + w_n·x_n a "linear combination" of the x values? It isn't. (Nor is the constant term really a "weight".)

<comment><USER26> How is is w1 _x1 + w2_ x2 +... wn*xn not a linear combination? Or is your objection that, upon adding w0 it is no longer a linear combination of x1,...xn? In that case would it be more accurate to say, "a linear combination of xs plus a constant"?

<comment><USER27> Correct, the constant term makes the function nonlinear. A linear function must necessarily satisfy f(0) = 0 (or, I guess, f(0) = infinity).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The author makes some very good points, but seems to have missed the real punchline. Instead of making this about experts-vs-non-experts, the real lesson is the value of _pretesting_ and similar methods.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/why-flunking- exam...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/why-flunking-exams-is- actually-a-good-thing.html)

The basic idea is simple. Instead of "telling people the answers", let them bang their heads against the wall first, trying to solve a problem that they have never studied before. Once they've realized that they don't know how to solve the problem, then teach them how to do so. This way, because the students have experienced the frustration of solving the problem themselves, they'll truly appreciate whatever knowledge you provide that can help them out.

</comment><comment><USER29> There are experts who are bad at teaching but be assured all good teachers will be good enough "experts".

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't agree that experts are necessarily bad teachers. Some of the best experts in physics have been those who were widely regarded as great teachers (Feynman and Heisenberg being great examples).

However, I think there is something to the article as applied to the software industry. Often times we have come to understand solely through abstractions and abstractions are dangerous in this regard particularly when they don't match reality.

A really good example of this was the effort to apply the OSI model of abstractions to TCP/IP back around the turn of the century. Without an understanding of what made the ITU OSI effort different from the DARPA TCP/IP effort, at best one got an overly confusing and misleading understanding of what was actually happening from a networking perspective.

I do a lot of teaching these days as I have changed from being a self-employed consultant to being an employee at a Swedish consulting and training firm, and I do a lot of thinking as to "what are the right abstractions to push in this course?" In IT, that is a remarkably difficult question and one I answer largely through my love of history. For example, when I talk about object- orientation, I start with procedural programming, discuss why structural programming largely replaced it, and then discuss the problems of having your code contracts based on your data structures in C. From there I go to my main abstraction: Object orientation is an effort to hide state changes behind interfaces, to make the interface responsible for the state rather than the outside routine responsible for it. (This also makes it easy to start discussing functional programming.)

The danger of the expert is that the expert may become complacent about this question but the best experts are those who have not. Feynman wrote about insisting that he could explain his theories to his non-physicist relatives. Heisenberg wrote a book on the history of philosophy and how this applies to physics arguing the whole time that data does not imply theory.

If our experts aren't good teachers, that says more about what we want from experts and about our industry than it does about expertise generally.

</comment><comment><USER31> This article would be stronger if it were just about the importance of learning from concrete examples.

After all, education is all about taking shortcuts compared to figuring everything out from first principles.

</comment><comment><USER32> Richard Feynmann was one of the best teachers ever!

</comment><comment><USER33> >> Binkles have long plackerts and whipitat their snoblats when they get excited

What I was most interested by was how much of this example you could understand. A binkle is some kind of animal, a plackert is some kind of body part, i'd imagine a whipitat is some kind of action, and I'd imagine a snoblat is another kind of body part. Already I know more about binkles than I did.

You're also, however, a long way from a dog simply by describing a 'barking thing'. There are things that bark that are not dogs, and there are somewhere, dogs that do not bark. Wittgenstein demonstrated that there are an entire set of items that you could call a table than share no common features whatsoever.

I'm a fan of the dialectic method for this reason: it encourages people to go beyond the limits of their own knowledge by applying first principles to things they don't understand. This tends to take you a lot further than "here, learn this."

Further reading on this:

Wittgenstein: Blue and Brown Books ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_and_Brown_Books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_and_Brown_Books))

Plato, Meno ([http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1643/1643-h/1643-h.htm](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1643/1643-h/1643-h.htm))

</comment><comment><USER34> Well, no, experts teach just fine, if they're good teachers. I agree with the author's premise that "the only way to learn is the hard way", but there's not reason to think that being an expert in a subject means that you've forgotten the "path to learning". Experts still make better teachers because they understand why things are the way they are and can answer questions that somebody else might not even have thought of.

</comment><comment><USER35> There's another problem where a teacher makes a false generalization, maybe due to lack of expertise, and attempts to teach by writing an article about it.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure the "hard way" is the only way that works.

If you look at a new field, you can often do some meta-learning that will help you.

For instance, you can browse the introductory texts for common words. Words that are uncommon in normal English (ie not "the" or unspecific verbs like "do" or "have") will appear frequently. You'll quickly discover the subtopics this way. For instance, you will find the word "inflation" in an econ text and conclude it's something to be learned about.

The organization of the text is also a clue. You can scan headings and suppose that whatever terms are there are considered important.

Once you've done a scan you have some priors that hopefully will put your mind's model nearer to what the experts have, and you can start refining by actually reading.

Basically, apply some ML-like ideas to what you're looking at (clustering, correlations, and so on).

</comment><comment><USER36> Even though the article bungled the concept IMO, this is actually a pretty well-documented phenomenon in psychology and economics: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge)

</comment><comment><USER37> The article makes some good points, part of the problem I have with describing "functions" is that there really is a LOT to unpack there, but after years of software development the idea of a function with all its nuance is a single idea, very compressed. To teach that you have to unpack it and take it slow.

I would also note that expertise in one field doesn't mean you have expertise in another field. Many (or most) expert software engineers are not expert educators. They are separate skills. It's beautiful to watch someone with both skill sets work. I strive for understanding and expertise in both, and I hope that it helps.

</comment><comment><USER38> I think this might be a post hoc explanation of an old fallacy. People become teachers, and are promoted to a visible level, based on a combination of teaching skill and expertise in the field. If someone was a bad teacher and _not_ an expert, they'd be cut off. Thus, there are many teachers who are good at teaching with low expertise, and many teachers who are top experts with little teaching skill. I think there are also people who are top experts and good teachers (I've been fortunate enough to meet some), but they're obviously rare than the other two.

</comment><comment><USER39> I was a history major in college before joining Teach For America as a chemistry and physics teacher. That pivot often surprises and confuses people -- and is occasionally a reason they criticize TFA -- but I think it was done deliberately and for good reason: as a history expert I would have relied much more on my abstractions while teaching history than I did teaching chemistry/physics I had to re-learn from my high school notes and my students' textbook.

<comment><USER40> But then the students might as well just read the textbook. I had in high school, physics PhDs for physics and math and it was the best experience of my educational life. The much deeper level of understanding they brought to bear allowed them convey the material more clearly and also draw our attention to deeper connections with more advanced topics.

<comment><USER39> You should bear in mind that:

(1) At the high school level, for most students, a teacher's value-add is diagnosing and remediating misunderstandings. It's odd that we expect high school teachers to create curricula from scratch when it'd be better for a highly-optimized lecture (e.g. celebrated teacher recording a video lecture) to convey knowledge to lots of students and let teachers focus on the high- touch, one-on-one work of figuring out what individual students are misunderstanding and working with them to correct it.

(2) Teach For America works with students who are often far behind national standards. My students in Mississippi had one year of science between 5th and 9th grade, so most of the nuance of a physics PhD would have been wasted on remediating things like basic atomic structure. My anecdote is particular to a very low-performing region.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is why folks who complain about rote learning are on the wrong track. You have to learn things by rote before you can internalise the abstractions. Yeah, that means lots of boring scales before you can play a solo; it means sitting in a classroom saying, 'amo, amas, amat' before you read Bellum Gallicum; it means … whatever one does to first learn to program (it's honestly so long ago now that I really can't remember what it was like).

</comment><comment><USER42> Why can't the article simply say that being a subject expert is required to teach a topic to someone to an expert level, however you also need to be an expert in teaching, in other helping someone build a model of the knowledge in their mind. Both are required ?

</comment><comment><USER43> As many already said: being an expert does not magically make you a good teacher. But if you are an expert AND understang teaching you will be a great teacher.

</comment><comment><USER44> _We'd all agree that to teach a subject, you must know the subject. So you'd think that experts would be the best teachers,_

No I wouldn't. Why would anyone think that? This article is built on a foundation of affirming the consequent. (Sorta, there are enough fuzzy words to weasel around making a logical assertion, but it boils down to "if there's a lot of Q, then in that case surely there must be a lot of P")

If someone is going to write such bollocks, not only do I not trust their article, I stopped reading because I fear it will only make me stupider.

</comment><comment><USER45> Because few are experts in two things, the subject matter _and teaching_.

</comment><comment><USER46> Can anyone recommend a good book on teaching?

</comment><comment><USER47> Some please define expert for me.

</comment><comment><USER48> Subjective versus Objective</comment>


Hunt for Modern Polymaths: 20 Living Examples - <AUTHOR> http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/blog/ed-cumming/hunting-modern-polymaths

<comment><USER2> A lot of the "strings" seem expansions of others or superfluous. For example, it lists "Physicist, philosopher, author, mathematician" for Penrose. I'm not so sure that theoretical physics and maths are different enough to qualify you as a polymath, and "author" falls out of being a good physicist; he's not exactly writing fiction on the side.

<comment><USER3> My thoughts exactly. Taking this criteria, thousands of people can be listed, author just lists people he heard of. Not like any of them are a new Leo.

But yes, even in specialization age there are talented people who are successful in more than one discipline. There are many thousands of them. But "successful" and being world's best is different - there are what, zero people in this list who can be considered top of the crop in more than one listed area?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A Polymath is someone who knows a lot about a lot and whose expertise fills a number of significant subject areas.

I know that there are lots of people who'll fit the bill.

Who do you recommend as a living example of a modern polymath?

<comment><USER4> * Anthony Julius - Author, Literary Critic, Attorney

* Donald Knuth - Mathematician, Typographer, Musician, Philosopher

* Rudy Rucker - Mathematician, Science Fiction Writer

* Alex Kozinski - Federal Judge, Essayist, Humorist

* Murray Gell-Mann - Physicist, Mathematician, Linguist

<comment><AUTHOR> One more addition * Von Neumann - Mathematician, Economist,Game Theorist, Computer Scientist.

<comment><USER5> Eric Raymond perhaps? - Programmer, Musician, Media personality, Martial artist, Economist, Mathematician, Mystic, Essayist, Author

The man does have a way of 'inflating' what he does but these are things he claims to be.

<comment><USER6> you have to be good at those things to count

<comment><USER5> Point taken. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Startups can't explain what they do cos they're addicted to meaningless jargon - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/697558/internet-startups-cant-explain-what-they-do-because-theyre-addicted-to-meaningless-jargon/ <comment><USER2> Although I agree with the trend described I don't think words like synergy should be considered _jargon_...

<comment><USER3> "Buzzword," perhaps. A hackneyed term that gets in the way of communication rather than providing enlightenment.

<comment><USER4> I'd go with buzzword as in "buzzword Bingo". I listen to start up elevator speeches and lots of times I go "OK, so what do you really do?"</comment></comment></comment>


Justices Weighing Wages for After-Work Screenings - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/04/business/justices-weighing-wages-for-after-work-screenings-.html

<comment><USER2> _Integrity Staffing is appealing a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which held that Mr. Busk had stated a legitimate wage claim. That court found that the security check at the Amazon warehouse was "necessary to the principal work performed," was "done for the benefit of the employer" and was therefore "integral and indispensable."_

I'm surprised they didn't go for the stronger (and more obvious) argument that loss prevention is by definition an integral part of a warehouse worker's job. The job description would include making sure merchandise only goes to the proper customer, and making sure all goods are secure at all times.</comment>


Take Two Hours of Pine Forest and Call Me in the Morning (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.outsideonline.com/1870381/take-two-hours-pine-forest-and-call-me-morning <comment><USER2> > Florence Williams travels to the deep woods of Japan, where researchers are > backing up the surprising theory that nature can lower your blood pressure, > fight off depression, beat back stress

Is this surprising?

<comment><USER3> Some parts are, as the article makes clear.

<comment><USER4> Where? To me it seems that all the article is about is how some people are getting hard data to support the very intuitive idea that being in a natural environment is good for you.

<comment><USER5> Me too. Some of the details of exactly how it works might be surprising to those who are familiar with the science involved but the general thesis that getting out for a relaxing walk in the woods is good for you is neither new nor surprising.

Also: couldn't they have found a stock picture of a pine forest?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


First dip into lean - <AUTHOR> http://aledalgrande.posterous.com/first-dip-into-lean

<comment><USER2> Great! Keep us updated on how it goes

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Will do it fo sure!</comment></comment>


LA landlords rip out escalators, walls to attract tenants like Google, Netflix - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-google-amazon-netflix-land-grab-20190616-story.html <comment><USER2> This article is written awkwardly enough that it's hard to tell what the facts are.

 _Companies including Google, Amazon and Netflix have agreed to rent entire buildings before construction has even begun.... Content creators, as such businesses are known, have rented more than 4 million square feet of Los Angeles County office space in the last three years, real estate brokerage CBRE said._

Google is not typically known as a "content creator" business. What sort of companies count towards this 4 million square feet figure?

Later the article refers to "FAANG-type tenants". FAANG is an acronym referring to 5 specific companies. What is a "FAANG-type tenant"? One of those five companies? Any tech company?

It also isn't clear from this article whether this 4 million square feet is a lot. I poked around and from [https://www.reonomy.com/properties/commercial- real-estate/us...](https://www.reonomy.com/properties/commercial-real- estate/us/california/los-angeles/1) it looks like about 250 million square feet of commercial real estate changes hands in LA every year. So this tech effect is almost 2% of the real estate market.

<comment><USER3> I think FAANG-type is defined a bit further down, he's talking about companies that have enough power and/or hype that they drive real estate demand in their surrounding areas.

>"The Netflix, Google and Amazons of the world are not going to their service providers," he said. "Their service providers are going to them."

It all seems pretty meaningless though. This is just a PR piece for CBRE, not any sort of journalism.

<comment><USER4> You can add Boeing and Seattle to that list.

<comment><USER5> Eh, Boeing has huge scale, but they havw a worse version of Amazon's recruiting problem. Terrible work environment for most employees (unless you like knuckledragger drivel), poor quality work by other teams being swept under the rug by managers, and large relocation/sign on bonuses being dangled in front of potential employees for year long commitments post-move.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
      "The idea of getting on
      escalators like you did in the
      1950s and '60s is not
      happening," said executive Bert
      Dezzutti of Brookfield Office
      Properties. "People desire to
      move around and be untethered.
      You're not using lazy old
      escalators anymore."

This can't seriously be a thing right, this is the story of 1 crazy man and his vendetta against escalators and not an entire community gone mad...

<comment><USER7> Who wants an escalator in an office building with more than two floors? They are literally designed to make it take longer to reach your destination than an elevator.

<comment><USER8> I worked at Google NYC for 6 years. It's a 16 story building that was designed to be a freight transfer terminal.

The elevators were very very slow. It was often significantly faster to walk up 10 flights of stairs than to wait. I would have killed for an escalator.

(In all fairness to the facilities team, they built new banks of elevators on a very regular basis. Still slow, depending on which floor you wanted to go to. But I'm sure it's much better now.)

<comment><USER9> SimTower with the critical insight... people will prefer escalators to elevators when they are going 5 or less floors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _One perhaps surprising trend is the excommunication of escalators, which > were long considered luxurious amenities. "The idea of getting on escalators > like you did in the 1950s and '60s is not happening," said executive Bert > Dezzutti of Brookfield Office Properties. "People desire to move around and > be untethered. You're not using lazy old escalators anymore."_

I never though about it before but that actually _is_ a fascinating cultural shift.

White-collar workers today spend so much time _sitting_ , and are so conscious of health and wanting to be active, that escalators aren't a luxury -- they're the antithesis of a healthy lifestyle.

If buildings necessarily express the values of the people in them, well values have changed. It's the age of Fitbit and walking around dense city centers and walking up stairs -- not being sedentary and driving and just _standing_ on an escalator.

(While elevators are still mandated for disabilities, which escalators were never good for anyways.)

<comment><USER11> This anti-escalator movement sounds like complete nonsense to me. First of all, office buildings almost never have escalators. They never did, and they never will. When a company buys an old mall or movie theatre or something else that had an escalator, it doesn't surprise me that they might gut them and not replace them, but it's not because this generation doesn't want escalators. They didn't build escalators in offices in the 50s and 60s either. This is just retail space undergoing renovation.

<comment><USER12> They're an expensive maintenance chore. A broken down escalator drags down the whole property

<comment><USER13> "An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience."

\- Mitch Hedberg

<comment><USER14> One issue that isn't capture by that quote is that an escalator cannot be used while being repaired. If the maintenance person is away while the escalator is part-way through being repaired it's very reasonable to see a "Temporarily Out of Order" sign.

<comment><USER15> Also escalators tend to be pretty bad at being stairs if you're not fit and healthy (and even then…), they usually have much higher steps and sharper edges than normal stairs, and are thus significantly less accessible when they're not operating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> ~From playing Dwarf Fortress, I learned that ramps are better at reducing pathing collisions than stairs. If these buildings take out their escalators and put in stairs or elevators instead, they might not see visible congestion, but their framerate will drop into the basement.~

But seriously, this is mainly about shopping mall conversions. I have only ever worked in a partially-converted shopping mall for a few months, but I thought it was great office space compared to floors in purpose-built office buildings, mainly because it still partially functioned as a mall. There was a sandwich restaurant, a movie theater, and a motor vehicles branch, and it had a public transit bus stop. The biggest problem was a lack of windows and natural light. I would argue that keeping the gross features of the interior space intact--such as the escalators--would make a better office space, as the mall was already designed to be attractive to visitors and move them around efficiently.

Besides that, the conference rooms have to be named after some of the former mall tenants. That's an unbreakable rule.

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting that escalators are considered passé now. Bloomberg was incredibly proud of their curved escalators and pointed them out repeatedly.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't know, if the alternative is elevators, that can quickly become a bottleneck shit show.

</comment><comment><USER19> _LA landlords rip out escalators, walls to attract tenants like Google, Netflix_

That's nothing. In Chicago, a real estate developer transformed a 10-story- tall refrigerator into offices for Google.

[https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2013/06/17/meatpacking-d...](https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2013/06/17/meatpacking- district-warehouse-tower-quickly-becoming-a-chic-loft-office-building/)

</comment><comment><USER20> [http://archive.is/dieqU](http://archive.is/dieqU)

<comment><USER21> Thanks for this. Drives me crazy that LA Times hard blocks all website access if you're in incognito mode

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The title of this post (at time of commenting) is exceptionally misleading. A more accurate one is "Landlords rip out escalators and walls to attract tenants like Google and Netflix", which is the one from the original article.

<comment><USER23> Thanks, we've updated it from the submitted "Google and Netflix Turning Real Estate Market in LA into the Bay Area" to the original (edited for length).

<comment><USER24> It does sound like the "LA" part of the original title is kind of important, though. It's implicit in the source (latimes.com), but the architectural details are only part of the story. The real point of the story, as I see it, is that these architectural changes are happening in Los Angeles. That's a new development in the type of business that LA caters to: it motivates architectural changes, and will motivate all kinds of other changes as the people actually occupy those buildings.

<comment><USER23> I think you're probably right that the domain is too subtle for this point—we've added an "LA".

<comment><USER25> It's still a confusing title. The article is about retail conversions, which of course require cutting the interior to remove useless parts. The interior space of the old buildings isn't the important part, except for one quote by the escalator hater.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Paradise_ftp is a native (golang) ftp server that is production ready - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/andrewarrow/paradise_ftp <comment><USER2> Honest question - are people really still deploying new FTP servers?

I don't see any mention of SSL/TLS support - so this is intended for people who don't care about security but think vsftpd, proftpd, or pure-ftpd are somehow not up to snuff?

<comment><AUTHOR> hehe yeah this project is for a situation where 1000s of people have old FTP client software installed on their old old computers and are not technical enough to be asked to upgrade. So we are forced to support "classic ftp". Behinds the scenes when a "dir" command is sent, we query S3 and a few other locations and return a virual list of files. The end user is given the illusion of their normal FTP experience.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's next after ransomware - <AUTHOR> In the security space, it looks like these things come and go in batches. Rootkits were the rage a few years back, APT was on top not so long ago and these days, it's ransomware.<p>What's going to be it tomorrow? IoT threats? <comment><USER2> This would be an interesting AI exercise:

Train a model that gets personal IoT data (wearable sensors, lights activity, toaster, fridge, etc..) to automatically detect personalized "shameful" behavior (infidelity, etc) that can be extorted against bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pizzaware. Order a large Hawaiian pizza and a 2-liter diet coke delivered to the following address, and we'll unlock your computer.

<comment><USER4> I suspect that pizza would be delivered by a police car :)

<comment><USER3> I bet there's a way to make it work though. Somebody amongst HN's readers has got to have an ingenious work-around.</comment></comment></comment>


When Google acquisitions go wrong: the disappointing story of Urchin - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071008-when-google-acquisitions-go-wrong-the-disappointing-story-of-urchin.html

<comment><USER2> Um, no-brainer: if you sell something people can use can on their own servers, you can't spy on their logs. Everything Google does is geared towards collecting data, so the other Urchin products are really not relevant for Google.

<comment><USER3> They don't appear to be relevant to Google because they don't help Google better determine ways to leverage AdWords and AdSense. GA's JavaScript snippet in fact returns to Google more and more pertinent information than is resident in the average web server log file. Plus it removes the spiders and non-page view data just by _being_ a JavaScript-based tracking solution so that's less work and cleaner data for them (and anyone else who does this e.g. all of the other Web analytics vendors).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I sure wouldn't be disappointed if I had shares in Urchin, or Google for that matter.

I'm sure all the Game Neverending enthusiasts were bummed too. But as a startup founder, I'm not going to sympathize much over how Flickr was a "disappointing story" for them.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think it'd be neat if Google Analytics let you send your actual log data to them. Even in an efficient binary format it would be a lot of bandwidth, but the accuracy and extra information would be worth it to me.

<comment><USER3> I think it would be less bandwidth. Considering the overhead of all the individual HTTP headers both in request and response, you could reduce that significantly by batching up log files and uploading them at regular intervals, perhaps once a day? GA seems to perform batch updates at that interval in any case so it might not even put a big cramp in their style from that perspective.

However, there are a bunch more issues with this. To allow this, they'd have to be able to parse all of the most popular Web server log formats. This, in and of itself, is not that hard until you account for people customizing their logging format via measures like the LogFormat directive in Apache. As well, customizing the log format is a virtual necessity, as GA requires more information than is in the standard log formats of most web servers. Another issue is that the use of a JavaScript snippet on the page prevents non-browser user agents from appearing, clearing GA's logs of spiders and other such cruft that detracts from determining human user behavior (what they are apparently most interested in for the purposes of optimizing AdWords and AdSense).

But the biggest problem for them, I think, is that with this method they are no longer able to set first-party cookies on your user's browsers and thus (more) reliably track individual (read: human) users. So, in effect, they would waste time with this, in that they'd still have to make you put a JS snippet on the page to set cookies that you'd then have to modify your web server logging format to include in every hit. Urchin worked like this back when it was still alive and you could run it on your own servers. So, all in all, it seems like something Google would just be wasting their time in doing given what they want to get out of your data.

<comment><USER5> I meant that sending my log data to Google would require bandwidth to upload those logs. Using the javascript method requires bandwidth from Google and users, but not me as a site owner. Either way its not a big concern unless it's done in real-time.

Lots of requests to a site are not page loads that include Javascript. All static content requests, API calls, and anything called remotely is missed by GA.

More than just robots don't support Javascript. Many of mobile devices don't. The Javascript method is also inherently inaccurate. It relies on browsers doing something on each page, and that something doesn't always happen.

I think what they have is great, but it's not a complete analytics solution. I still have to analyze my log data because GA misses out on some very basic stuff. If someone wrote a competitor to GA and accepted my log data, so it was comprehensive and super accurate I would switch immediately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's the problem when you buy proprietary software; if the company decides to stop making it, you're screwed.</comment>


Newsflash: Time May Not Exist - <AUTHOR> http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/in-no-time?utm_content=buffer9a610&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer#.UlL7S2RgZWL <comment><USER2> I was going to complain about the links being broken, but I see it's six years old.</comment>


Mal Lisp for TempleOS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/bagnalla/holyc_mal <comment><USER2> I'd love to see HolyC ported to Linux. The language seems like a pleasure to use with some interesting features.

<comment><AUTHOR> HolyC is great -- default arguments and built-in exception handling are big pluses over C. There are a few shortcomings, though, such as the lack of short-circuiting logical operators and some unfortunate behavior related to variable declarations within nested scopes (just avoid doing that IMO).

<comment><USER3> The issues can probably be fixed by writing a bit of a better compiler, HolyC2 maybe?

<comment><USER4> Alternatively, HolyC++ or HolyD.

<comment><USER5> HolyMoly, duh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Terry Davis (TempleOS author) is now homeless and living in a van.

<comment><USER7> would be nice if someone could find him a place to live instead of a van

<comment><USER6> I am not sure that's enough.

Given the severity of his condition, I think he needs some sort of supervision and treatment.

Living in a vehicle, without a job, without medical treatment and driving around doesn't seem safe.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately the state of mental health care is somewhere between prison and a homeless shelter

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They glow in the dark</comment>


Startup Quote: Sean Parker, managing partner, Founders Fund - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/3786986653

<comment><AUTHOR> You have got to be willing to be poor as an entrepreneur.

\- Sean Parker

<http://startupquote.com/post/3786986653>

</comment><comment><USER2> He's also on record to have said...

<http://www.youknowwhatscool.com/></comment>


Too Many Medicines Simply Don't Work - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-30/too-many-medicines-simply-don-t-work <comment><USER2> Even to know (in the double-blind trials "gold standard" sense) whether a medicine works, you need to diagnose reliably what it is supposed to treat.

But the DSM is full of illnesses that are really a half dozen completely different conditions with the same (or just similar) apparent symptoms, each with its own cause, and no reliable way to distinguish it from the others except that maybe drug X helps one, and drugs Y, Z, W, and V are useless for it. Likewise, the one that Y helps, and the one that responds to Z, and the rest where nothing seems to work. In double-blind trials, V, W, X, Y, and Z are all "shown" to be equally useless.

That does NOT mean V, W, X, Y, and Z don't work. The "gold standard" is as subject to GIGO as everything else. You simply cannot tell anything about what it means without looking at underlying facts.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. When evaluating a drug we should not only be looking overall, but if there is a subset of the test population for which it behaves differently. This is especially true for any diagnosis of exclusion.

Such a drug should be approved but with a big warning that it only works in some cases.

<comment><USER4> You have to fix the hypotheses to test before you begin the experiment, as otherwise you will stumble upon a lot of spurious correlations. That your birthday is the same day than someone's in your class/work group is a rare event, that two people have the same birthday in your class/work group, not at all uncommon. This is the birthday paradox. In the same spirit, with a drug you'll always find groups where it works because of spurious correlations, specially if you don't fix beforehand the group where you want to test it.

<comment><USER5> Run one trial to find correlations with specific groups, then run another trial under the hypothesis that it works for that group.

<comment><USER6> Well sure but that costs a fortune. Drug development is already extremely expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 1\. Drug candidates seeking approval must show non-inferiority to gold standard, meaning they are not worse than the top choice for the same treatment. This non-inferiority is quite easy to game, as we all know statistics are fungible and may be manipulated. If all I have to show is no significant difference, and I can use one of 10 different outcomes or surrogates, well my job got a LOT easier than showing superiority on the primary outcome of interest.

2\. Before approval, drugs are tested in non-representative samples, either because they are too small in sample size, the disease is too rare, or because there needs to be a VERY large (post-market) population to tease out rare side effects.

3\. Doctors and geneticists should come together and provide genetic testing to ensure that patients and their drugs are appropriately matched. This could be done in cancer, for instance, as you can genotype the cancer and provide a drug cocktail specifically for it. Another instance would be depression, as some drugs do not work for people with certain neurotransmitter genotypes. Physically, this means that each of us may have slightly differently shaped receptors that different drugs bind to differently. This explains a lot of the difference in drug responses, whether it be SSRIs or alcohol or cannabinoids, people simply have different receptors/biochem.

4\. Medicine has always been a battle between doing nothing, providing the placebo effect, providing beneficial treatment, and avoiding/minimizing harm. In medieval times, exposure to medicine was tantamount towards increased risk of death and complication (see leeching, blood letting, terrible hygiene in surgery/childbirth, etc). Even now in modern times, going into a hospital is risky: hospital-associated infection is a massive killer, never mind acute psychological stress leading to delirium. We demand improvements in healthcare, new drugs, innovations, and extending life, and yet that is a very complex and challenging process that we will work on for centuries to come.

Simply put, doing medicine well has always been very hard. We have many legacy treatments and practices which probably should be put on the back shelf, but as with coding practices and legacy code, it is very hard to stop practices with momentum and inertia, whether the field is energy (fossils dominate), medicine, coding, or anything.

<comment><USER8> > 1\. Drug candidates seeking approval must show non-inferiority to gold > standard, meaning they are not worse than the top choice for the same > treatment. This non-inferiority is quite easy to game, as we all know > statistics are fungible and may be manipulated. If all I have to show is no > significant difference, and I can use one of 10 different outcomes or > surrogates, well my job got a LOT easier than showing superiority on the > primary outcome of interest.

Before they to the test they have to declare a primary outcome to avoid this issue. And most diseases just don't have that many outcomes relevant outcomes you can test for.

> 3\. Doctors and geneticists should come together and provide genetic testing > to ensure that patients and their drugs are appropriately matched. This > could be done in cancer, for instance, as you can genotype the cancer and > provide a drug cocktail specifically for it. Another instance would be > depression, as some drugs do not work for people with certain > neurotransmitter genotypes. Physically, this means that each of us may have > slightly differently shaped receptors that different drugs bind to > differently. This explains a lot of the difference in drug responses, > whether it be SSRIs or alcohol or cannabinoids, people simply have different > receptors/biochem.

They're trying, and they're failing hard. Precision medicine has been pretty useless outside of cancer.

<comment><USER9> Even in cancer precision medicine is pretty crap. It works, but only sometimes. Most of the time even a correctly targeted drug results in a resistant tumor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think a big part of this is that statistical significance is taken as a surrogate for clinical significance. They are not the same. Antidepressants for instance may be statistically significant in meta-analyses, but the average gain is less than 3 points on the Hamilton scale which is not even detectable by most people or doctors. The same goes with these other measures such as slight tumor shrinkage, ect. Its a difference that doesn't make a difference clinically.

<comment><USER8> The effect size of xanax is .3, antidepressants .3, and morphine .4. So if the effect size of antidepressants aren't clinically significant than neither are xanax and morphine.

<comment><USER11> For anxiety at least, benzos like xanax are extremely effective. If they weren't addictive, chronic anxiety would be pretty much cured.

<comment><USER8> Yeah same with morphine

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I recently ran into this issue with statins. Doctors are eager to prescribe them, but there seems to be conflicting evidence of them ultimately changing outcomes: [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150220110850.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150220110850.htm)

<comment><USER2> Statins have only ever been shown to help people who have had a heart attack, or were in imminent danger of one -- despite decades of effort by Big Pharma to find other benefits. (Big Pharma wants every drug they sell to be needed continuously from today until you drop dead. Statins would perfect because they are also extremely cheap to make.)

What we do know about statins is that they have terrible long-term side effects that might not put off somebody worried about dropping dead at any moment, but should give everyone else the heebie-jeebies.

They interfere with the liver's production of cholesterol, but we (like every other animal) need cholesterol to live.

<comment><USER13> Please share a link to this stuff that I can share with my parents

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This study doesn't mention "number needed to treat" \- if we give X people this medication we'd expect to prevent Y occurances of this condition. Sometimes X can be surprisingly high and Y worryingly low.

It also doesn't mention the drug company funding provided to some patient campaign groups. It's pretty cynical: you know your medication is not effective enough for the cost, so you give money to dying people and their families to campign to get your med provided by single payer systems and insurance companies.

<comment><USER15> Can you give this "number needed to treat" for some common medications?

<comment><USER14> Here's an article that mentions a few of them: [http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/clinical/clinical- specialties/pr...](http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/clinical/clinical- specialties/prescribing/nnt-how-many-is-too-many/20033549.article)

> For example, for every thousand low-risk patients prescribed statins for > primary prevention, only a single stroke is prevented per year. Meanwhile, > you would need to treat more than a thousand people with antihypertensive > therapy per year to prevent one death. This is a far higher NNT than that of > many interventions GPs are advised against prescribing due to lack of > efficacy.

[https://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g3458/rr/761453](https://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g3458/rr/761453)

> Enas bases his numbers on a 2013 Cochrane review. Enas reports that NNT > equals 167 for low risk (less than 1%) and 67 for intermediate risk (1-2%) > individuals. Enas reinterprets this as meaning 1000 low-risk people would > need to be treated for five years to prevent six major adverse > cardiovascular events. Enas notes the increased risk of type II diabetes > from statin use and also estimates that 100 of the thousand people treated > would have myopathy (that the same might occur with placebo is irrelevant as > I will not be taking a placebo). Enas judged that the benefits of treatment > in low risk subjects far outweigh any possible hazards and concluded that > early and aggressive statin therapy offers the greatest potential for > reducing the continuing epidemic of coronary artery disease among Indians.

<comment><USER16> The accepted NNT for antihypertensives is around 1 in 100 depending on the exact metric you use ([http://www.thennt.com/nnt/anti-hypertensives-to- prevent-deat...](http://www.thennt.com/nnt/anti-hypertensives-to-prevent- death-heart-attacks-and-strokes/)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Related, Recommended:

[https://www.amazon.com/Medical-Nihilism-Jacob- Stegenga/dp/01...](https://www.amazon.com/Medical-Nihilism-Jacob- Stegenga/dp/0198747047)

You can listen to a recent EconTalk podcast for a one hour summary of the book.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is obviously a hard and serious problem to address. That said, I little part of me smiled a bit at 5 withdrawals out of 93 drugs. It's bizarrely close to what blindly applying 95% confidence intervals get you. I'm both terrified and impressed that it's that close enough.

<comment><USER19> Passing a 95% significance test doesn't have any connection to the notion that there is a 5% chance the drug is no good.

This is what you would expect from a blind application of a 95% confidence interval only if 50% of tested drugs were good.

<comment><USER20> Care to clarify?

My understanding was that a 95% confidence interval implies the chance of a false positive of 5%.

From [http://www.mit.edu/~6.s085/notes/lecture2.pdf](http://www.mit.edu/~6.s085/notes/lecture2.pdf)

"In particular, we can ask for an interval around ˆp for any sample so that in 95% of samples, the true mean p will lie inside this interval. Such an interval is called a confidence interval."

<comment><USER21> The false positive rate has nothing to do with positive examples (hugely counterintuitively). A false positive happens when there's nothing there but you think there is. The rate of these is compared to all incidents where there's nothing there. So it's the fraction of _negative instances_ where you think there's a positive. No actual positives have to come into the picture.

<comment><USER20> Ah you're right that makes a lot of sense thanks for the explanation

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My favorite example of this was when the feds essentially replaced pseudoephedrine (which works brilliantly, but now you're treated like a criminal if you need to buy it) with phenylephrine (which, quite frankly, doesn't do a damned thing: [https://www.jwatch.org/na39054/2015/09/17/phenylephrine- no-m...](https://www.jwatch.org/na39054/2015/09/17/phenylephrine-no-more- effective-placebo-nasal-congestion) \- it's worse than a placebo in that it has side-effects AND doesn't do anything for what it's supposed to treat!)

<comment><USER23> Anecdotally, I find phenylephrine to be definitely effective as a topical decongestant (nasal spray); especially more so than its alternative (oxymetazoline), so it's not a placebo effect. But I agree that it doesn't do a thing as an oral drug.

</comment></comment><comment> village-idiot Statins are very notorious in this regard. While they do indeed affect cholesterol, for most members of the population it does nothing to change all cause mortality.

</comment><comment><USER24> What about the placebo effect? They've done studies where the patients knew that they were taking placebos, but still saw improvements...

<comment><USER25> The placebo effect causes all sorts of problems for drug trials in certain areas where the control arm does much better than expected swamping the statistics of the treatment arm (trials are powered with an assumption of how well the placebo will work).

Interestingly, the unexpectly effective placebo effect seems to be limited to the USA. Why nobody is sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> ctrl+f for phenylephrine.

That was my first thought.

<comment><USER27> I ended up getting phenylephrine once because I was vacationing in the US. Needless to say, I was not impressed. How do you guys treat colds?

<comment><USER28> Get real Sudafed from behind the counter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Slightly off topic, but one medicine that really does work is Accutane (Isotretinoin) for cystic acne, and I'm super grateful for it. If you still have acne, I highly recommend trying it.

I came across it on reddit a while back and it's basically solved my acne problem. You get a super dry face and chapped lips, but there are lots of products to help mitigate that.

The Accutane subreddit is full of tips and before/after photos - [https://www.reddit.com/r/Accutane/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Accutane/)

<comment><USER30> There was a story on the BBC site about accuntane recently.

[https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47952076?intlink_from_url=ht...](https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47952076?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/c34vnl2xl5pt/medicine&link_location=live- reporting-story)

I approached my GP after suffering with acne who put me on tetracycline which has some horrible side-effects such as staining your teeth and it didn't work for me at all.

I bypassed my GP and bought accutane online. The side-effects are some of the worst I've had from a medicine, dry skin and eyes, regular nose bleeds, sensitivity to the sun etc. Nothing mental though. That said. It works.

Before I used accutane I had several acne spots turn into keloid scars which I have been treating over the last decade with corticosteroid injections.

<comment><USER31> PSA to anyone reading this thread: Do not take Accutane without a prescription. There are _very good_ reasons that doctors don't want to prescribe it, and if you can't find someone willing to do it, it means that the risks very likely don't outweigh the benefits in your case. Doctors are going to want you to try more conservative treatments _first_ , and you shouldn't second-guess that.

Accutane makes the "horrible side-effects" of Tetracycline look like a mild headache. Aside from being a powerful teratogen (i.e. it causes nasty birth defects), Accutane is linked to suicidal tendencies, liver damage, heart damage, and more. It's not a drug anyone should be taking without supervision.

<comment><USER32> OTOH, it's often that the risks _to the doctor_ outweigh the benefits _to the doctor_ of recommending you use it. Correlated with but far from the same as the risks/benefits to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Other points not covered.

We need to end off label use. Saying a drug is approved for one diagnosis and then allowing it for any other diagnosis is, in the modern age, simply crazy. One might as well not have fda approval.

The problem of tainted and ineffective generics confounds the analysis. A recent investigation shows the fda's proceedure of unannounced inspections only in the us means that 75 percent of indian and Chinese generics makers failed inspections during the few years when unannounced inspections were done. Now they have moved back to announcing. It is not sure that each failure meant there are bad drugs out there, but a majority of failures were 100 percent faked test data regarding the chemicals inside the drugs.

<comment><USER34> As somebody that benefits from using a drug 'off-label' I strongly disagree.

There are many cases where off-label drug use gives a minority of people tremendous benefit. Take a look at the people with various brain disorders using Ambien off-label. It can literally bring people out of coma-like states temporarily.

Other examples off-label use: * Propranolol for anxiety. * Guanfacine for blood pressure issues, now used on label for ADHD.

<comment><USER14> > Propranolol for anxiety.

Is that off-label?

[https://bnf.nice.org.uk/drug/propranolol- hydrochloride.html](https://bnf.nice.org.uk/drug/propranolol- hydrochloride.html)

<comment><USER22> As far as I'm aware there's no beta blocker that's approved for performance anxiety in the US.

Paperwork for Propranolol in the US has on-label usages listed as: Hypertension, Angina Pectoris, Atrial Fibrillation, Myocardial Infarction, Migraine, Essential Tremor, Hypertrophic Subaortic Stenosis or Pheochromocytosis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is the sort of headline that fuels the likes of anti-vaxxers.

</comment><comment><USER36> tl;dr: sometimes medicines don't achieve their early promise. But what are you gonna do about it?

<comment><USER37> Especially in the studies they're talking about here, which are about cancer drugs. It's life-and-death stuff, and it's not so simple as "Well, we haven't proven this yet, so you just run off and die while we run a few more studies."

We have a hard enough time keeping desperate people from trying things that we know for a fact are scams. Perhaps doctors could put the studies in clearer context when prescribing, but they are always clear that these drugs aren't perfectly effective and that it's kind of a crapshoot.

When you've got patients who will die anyway, it's no surprise that we end up treating them as a final stage of clinical trials. You need to be honest about that and get consent, but many will give it willingly.

<comment><USER36> Actually, my sister's full-time job is explaining to folks at the end of their cancer journey that there's actually one more thing they can try. It very likely will not help them survive. Not for themselves, but for people that come after. A drug that might not do anything, or it might do a little, or it might be what we've been praying for.

And those Iowa farmers and shopkeepers and schoolteachers at the end of their lives sign the form. An unreasonable population of them. For no reason but to help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I wonder how many of these are pushed as mandatory vaccines

<comment><USER39> "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment>


What We Learned After Getting Our First 20,000 Users - <AUTHOR> http://blog.leapfor.it/post/19580872440

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, just wanted to pass along a few learnings. Let me know if you have any questions!</comment>


How to sell complex product? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> My response assumes that there is a need for a complex product. In general, unless there is a specific need for complexity, complexity is incompleteness, lack of polish, or a failure to target needs properly. Customers don't want complex products they want simple products. However, showing a simple "slice" of a complex product that addresses a larger problem or need makes sense, and is a case for the complexity.

Understand your customers needs and how you provide value.

The existing comments provide a good jumping off point, but with few specifics we can only speak in general. If you add more details I will follow-up.

The bottom-line is that your customers don't care about your product. They care about how your product helps them.

You want to understand the processes and problems that each individual customer is dealing with. If you don't have intimate knowledge of these already you have to ask strategic questions that reveal these.

Once you understand this, and demonstrate it in relevant terms to the customer, ask for the business. This not meant to be sarcastic or condescending at all. I have been in numerous meetings with smart people, executives, sales people. So often, they understand the need and demonstrate it, and then never ask, and they wonder what happened. Typically, it helps if you are confident when you ask.

<comment><USER3> I would add that complex is a relative term. If your product can't be put in terms that are easy for your customer to understand then you have the wrong customer or the wrong product.

As noted above -"The bottom-line is that your customers don't care about your product. They care about how your product helps them."

Selling me an apparatus that I can ride and has a combustion engine with wheels will not sell me on a product. Telling me that a machine can get me from point A to point B easily and fast and it's called a car. Will definitely get my attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Will assume you refer to pitching / sales conversation.

The worst you can do in sales is talk a lot (a good rule is talking 20% of the time, maximum).

I'd recommend: \- writing down the types of customers you might have (user personae) \- capturing the value you offer to each segment in 1 sentence.

Let's take Facebook example: For users: Connect 24/7 with your friends For businesses: Sell products to your target in a clic! For game developers: Push your apps to the biggest pool of players. For media: Your content introduced to up to 1.7 billion people worldwide... For investors: Get great ROI on a growing product the whole world is using.

A first conversation should spark interest. Then, you can ask questions and go on to features / details.

It's very hard to be concise, you might fear leaving some advantages of your product out, and it takes a lot of work and market feedback to make a short pitch right ...

I hope this helps :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :)

Can I have your email id for conservation? mine is firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd echo a lot of the other things people said here: simplify your product.

Even if you are selling a complex product. There are probably certain components/services that are simple. Try to isolate those simple components and just sell those. Talk to your customers, they are probably buying for just 1 reason not all the features that you offer. Make all the other parts add-on features.

I recently read about the XYZ statement that I think would be helpful in your case. [https://medium.com/pitch-like-a-pro/creating-a-pitch-deck- si...](https://medium.com/pitch-like-a-pro/creating-a-pitch-deck-simplify- your-message-1b8a3959a577)

</comment><comment><USER6> tl;dr I don't know what you're asking.

I've gone to look at your other comments and submissions, and I'd guess that English is not your native language. As a result you might (probably will) find it hard to write a short paragraph expanding on your question.

But with a simple, bare question like this you are unlikely to get any kind of response. You really need to explain more. Why is your product complex? Who is it for? Have you tested your market to make sure that what you have made is relevant to someone? How many have you sold so far? If only one or two, can you get your customers to talk to other possible customers? Do you know who your potential customers are?

If you haven't sold any at all, why did you develop it? Who did you have in mind?

Given my assumption that English is not your first language, here's a thought. Write a more complete description about your product, question, problem, etc, in your own language. Then at the top explain that English is not your first language, include your original, and then include a Google translate of it. If you use short, very simple sentences, then Google Translate can usually carry the meaning, but not the subtle nuances.

I hope that helps.

</comment><comment><USER7> What do you mean by "complex" and compared to what?

"Complex" is different from "complicated". Just as "easy" is different from "simple".

Enterprise solutions seem pretty complex, but if you're focusing on small businesses, then even a mobile app could be considered complex.

Completely depends on the situation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's enterprise product. we are targeting small businesses and corporate.

Our product solves hassles of business cards, the solution is very simple ; we do digitize existing business cards and integrate with an app. but the app has multiple features to share and manage all business cards, meeting notes and follow-up reminders at one place.

One to one sales would go very slow, we are getting local customers through sales . But to capture global market we want to make a pitch very simple and easy.

<comment><USER8> RE:"But to capture global market we want to make a pitch very simple and easy."

Part of your sales format could be like a FAQ setup where the most compelling features are part of the question (How-do-I, Could I?, etc).

This way potential customers do not have to wade through info on features that don't interest them.

If you could incorporate video into the answers it would be even more powerful.

Hope this insight helps.

Best of success.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Simplify it.</comment>


Why the First Round Capital Entrepreneur's Exchange fund is good - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aweissman.com/2010/01/venture-innovation-or-why-first-round.html <comment> daniel-cussen The monotype is a really techie touch.</comment>


The surprising results of a performance comparison of current Cloud Servers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wiemann.name/cloud-performance-comparison

<comment><USER2> If you really want to be surprised add some results for dedicated servers like Hetzner and SecuredServers.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article has the amount of RAM for ec2 servers off by one tier of service. It lists small as 613M, when that is the micro size for RAM; small has 1.7G.

It raises the question of whether he was comparing like sized servers in the benchmarks.

<comment><USER4> thanks, I'll fix that right away!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I once for the sake of it create a four node HPC cluster using Micro instances in the Amazon Cloud.

Performance was dreadful

[http://manyrootsofallevilrants.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/amazon...](http://manyrootsofallevilrants.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/amazon- ec2-micro-instance-linpack-hpl.html).

Too much of cheap skate to test other instance sizes.

I might try the free options in azure but then comparison wouldn't be like for like</comment>


The real reason about windows 10 is not windows 9 - <AUTHOR> http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk8/jdk8/jdk/file/687fd7c7986d/src/windows/classes/sun/tools/attach/WindowsAttachProvider.java#l41

<comment><USER2> I do not think this is the real reason. They could easily fix this issue by changing what os returns to something like "Windows Nine (9)"</comment>


Psychology's favourite thought experiment doesn't predict real-world behaviour - <AUTHOR> https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/06/21/psychologys-favourite-moral-thought-experiment-doesnt-predict-real-world-behaviour/ <comment><USER2> I think it's important that they examined at least the correlation between the thought-experiment answers and the actual behavior.

If there's one thing that makes me immediately suspect a study, it's when the data includes in significant part anything self-reported by the study subjects, without accompanying _very_ strong evidence (ideally from someone else's much larger study) that such self-reporting corresponds to something more objectively measurable.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full title is too long: Psychology's favourite moral thought experiment doesn't predict real-world behaviour</comment>


Peter Thiel Wants to Inject Himself with Young People's Blood - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/peter-thiel-wants-to-inject-himself-with-young-peoples-blood <comment><USER2> There are dozens of medications made from human blood, which are used to treat everything from infections to hemophilia. No one thinks anything about it (not to mention all the people who get whole blood transfusions for surgery or trauma).

This is just a hit piece that's been generated because Thiel has recently been declared an Enemy of the State.

<comment><USER3> Peter Thiel has expressed public support for, and invested in, numerous life- extension technologies such as human growth hormone and cryogenics. I doubt either Vanity Fair or Inc Magazine (who published the original article[0]) just made up his quotes about an interest in parabiosis as well.

Calling it a "generated" (by that I assume you mean fabricated?) piece seems a bit hyperbolic.

[0][http://www.inc.com/jeff-bercovici/peter-thiel-young- blood.ht...](http://www.inc.com/jeff-bercovici/peter-thiel-young-blood.html)

<comment><USER2> No, by "generated" I meant "generated". If I'd meant "fabricated" I'd have said it.

You can tell that this is a generated hit piece due to Thiel's politics by the very first sentence, which begins "Trump delegate and Gawker bankrupter Peter Thiel...".

<comment><USER3> I don't disagree with you that Vanity Fair is probably a bit anti-Thiel or anti-right in general, but I don't know what "generated" is supposed to mean in this context. I don't see a lot of mockery or ridicule in this particular article.

I also don't know what the "hit piece" part is supposed to be. He is a Trump delegate, he did finance Gawker's bankruptcy, he does espouse the ideals presented in the article, and he has invested in life-extension technologies. Can it be a hit piece if it's actually correct?

<comment><USER2> "He is a Trump delegate, he did finance Gawker's bankruptcy"

Both of which are totally irrelevant to the alleged topic under discussion.

<comment><USER3> The conflation of Thiel's libertarian ideals with his pursuit of life extension technologies was made by Thiel himself, as quoted in the same article:

         "I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives,
        and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every
        individual," he (Thiel) wrote in libertarian journal Cato
        Unbound seven years ago.

The tone of the article doesn't seem to be mocking him, so I don't think it is a hit piece. If Peter Thiel does literally believe that injecting himself with the blood of young people will extend his life then blame him for that, not the people reporting it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe be he reads hacker news?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10621238](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10621238)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11887812](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11887812)

</comment><comment><USER5> Can't even make this shit up.

Billionaire vampires.

<comment><USER6> That was my initial reaction too :) but his approach to trying to solve the issues that result from aging is not unfounded.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Just launched an app.how to reach out to people? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> I launched an app to share articles,thoughts on a topic you are good at. eg:- "Fixing a refrigerator" to "Python for kids" and share everything you know and learn under it. How do i reach out to more people and build audience?

<comment><USER2> Link to the site?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://pipecourse.com/](https://pipecourse.com/)</comment></comment></comment>


Looking into the eyes of failure - <AUTHOR> https://mentalhealthinstartups.com/looking-into-the-eyes-of-failure-f1523b6a70a7#.guolltwql <comment><USER3> _> It was the fear of failing (or admitting failure) that lead us to fail, because we were afraid to fail, we failed._

You can do everything right and still fail. That's just life -- it's no fun facing it, but that's the way it is.

EDIT: also, another bit of wisdom from the realm of inspirational quotes:

 _> There is always doubt. No sane man would deny that. But no good captain would admit it. What good would that knowledge do to the men who are trying to focus on doing their jobs? So we dance the dance. Never was there a caesar who couldn't sing the tune._

<comment><USER4> And one of the more famous quotes of a certain starship captain - "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life."

<comment><USER5> Somewhere in the Bhagavad Gita there is this quote: "You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty.". So you have a duty do your best but there is no guarantee that it will result in success. There is still an element of Karma or luck, whatever you may call it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Don't connect your identity to the business.

In a whole range of ways a business is a standalone entity, including legally and personally.

You'll be a better entrepreneur when you feel that you are not your business. Businesses come and businesses go, some you might own 100%, others you might have a small stake in. Just see them as "things" rather than "you".

<comment><AUTHOR> Great advice - <USER2>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish investors would stop putting money into businesses run by 22 year olds with no life experience. The human cost of throwing someone this young into the deep end with a sink or swim attitude is far too high.

<comment><USER8> Truth, but most older folks will not buy their kool-aid.

<comment><USER7> Exactly. It is even more exploitive if you know this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Personally, it could have been considered a great success — at 24 I'd raised > $1m in investment, built a team and a tech product which operated at > relative scale, I'd learnt an enormous amount and I had an incredible > network in the UK startup ecosystem.

None of that is success. Success is taking in enough money to pay your employees, your expenses, and have something left over to put in a bank.

I get so tired of these flimsy companies touting their "success" which is nothing more than money from investors buying things they haven't earned. Just because you aren't profitable doesn't make you a failure, but neither does having investor money in your bank account make you successful.

<comment><USER10> I think the key word is "personally". That stuff doesn't equal a successful company, but it does look nice on a resume.

<comment><USER9> I don't disagree with that, but your bullet point cost somebody a million bucks and from the sound of things, a few people are out a livelihood too while he's off to his next big adventure. It doesn't seem like the Author is owning any of the fallout from it.

<comment><USER11> I don't know, sounds like he went through nine pretty miserable months dealing with the failure, and now is starting a mental health startup to help others manage the mental challenge of startups. Feels to me like he felt the weight of this failure, my read is that the statement about success was himself still trying to tell himself he's ok. Failing in a startup sucks. People kill themselves over that (including a friend of mine). I think we should forgive those who fail, it's a necessary part of the startup ecosystem, and let them move on with their lives.

<comment><USER9> The way I read it he's building a support group for other CEO's of failed startups, other people with new adventures, flush bank accounts and the kind of folks who write these mostly self serving "what I learned" things. Granted this one isn't nearly as self serving as most, but what about the engineers scrambling to get a job so they can feed their kids? How about the marketing people searching for work to cover their mortgage? How about everyone else scrambling to not lose a car?

We never hear about those people because they're too busy scrambling for a life raft to write long sappy "what I learned" medium posts.

<comment><AUTHOR> You clearly haven't read any of my other posts. Dealing with failure is the hardest thing I've ever done and seriously affected my mental health. Everyone who worked for us went into better jobs than previously and all I'm doing is trying to help more and more people. You are far too quick to judge and seem very bitter about a lot of the startup BS, which I can understand.

When I talk about the fact that the business could have been seen as a success for me, that is because success and failure are completely relative. Many of the people around me would laugh when I said I'd failed, because they were judging it by how far I'd come and the experience I'd gained.

You're absolutely right the business was a complete failure and we spent $800k of someone else's money to get those learnings', but just because someone was a founder/CEO you shouldn't think they're in a different position to anybody else - both financially and emotionally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the key things I worked out quite a long time after my startup failed is that a person can't be a failure. A failure is an _event_. If it happens you reflect on it, you learn from it and then you move on. Sometimes that means trying again, but equally sometimes you learn that you can't do what you set out to do so you should do something different instead. Sometimes you learn your limits, and that's OK.

</comment><comment><USER13> Founding startups seems to be a form of self-harming caused by high self- esteem.</comment>