[HN Gopher] Half Baked
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Half Baked
Author : marban
Score : 82 points
Date : 2022-05-06 16:01 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (seths.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (seths.blog)
| golemotron wrote:
| > Paul's not a genius
|
| oh, yes he is.
| garyrob wrote:
| I'm not at all sure the evidence support's Seth's claim that Paul
| and John were not geniuses, at least at that point in their
| careers.
|
| The music for most recorded song of all-time, Yesterday, came to
| him in a dream; he went to the piano upon waking up and played
| it. That's just one example. If you won't call that "genius," as
| opposed to mere "skill," you have very, very high standards, I
| would think unrealistically so.
|
| But Seth is allowed to share his writing before it's fully-baked.
| :)
| kubanczyk wrote:
| The article is about these miniseries (not about the movie):
| https://m.imdb.com/title/tt9735318/
|
| Before you ask, they only stream on Disney+.
| 99_00 wrote:
| Making mistakes is painful. Risking judgment is painful. Respect
| to everyone who is able to walk through the pain even for a
| little while.
| hebsbxjsndbd wrote:
| The author of this post and I saw wildly different documentaries.
| It was obvious to me that Paul knew exactly how every part should
| be arranged and played in his songs, and that half of his battle
| was bringing folks along.
| Tao332 wrote:
| > John is the fifth hammer.
|
| I didn't know what this meant. Apparently there is a legend that
| Pythagoras discovered harmony accidentally by overhearing four
| hammers working. Upon closer inspection of the forge, he also
| heard a fifth hammer that was discordant to the other four, so he
| discarded it.
|
| Search "Pythagorean Hammers" for multiple shaky retellings that
| don't always include the fifth hammer, and a book named after it.
| drcongo wrote:
| "The sound you make is muzak to my ears"
| rektide wrote:
| What a fun post!
|
| The one thing I'd try to add or note is that, in a more public
| environment, I'd love to see more ability to signal how baked we
| think our shit is. A lot of being online is just fun & merry
| making & not heavy, is apt for spitballing & play & exploration,
| but that mixes in with so many serious, real, important shares in
| the mileau. Just having a knob, high or low bakedness,
| seriousness, doneness: this kind of information or annotation or
| metadata could help us better navigate our information spaces so
| much more clearly.
|
| Some bloggers have adopted attaching epistemic status to their
| posts. Gwern for example has a write-up on his blog's use of
| "status"[1], which is to inform the reader essentially of how far
| they've gotten diving into the topic.
|
| [1] https://www.gwern.net/About#confidence-tags
| tenkabuto wrote:
| That's a very cool idea and quite applicable to sites with
| pages that change over time, such as personal wikis. I think
| I'll add it to my personal wiki! (Feeds for posts of various
| maturities can be provided, too, which would be nice!)
| divbzero wrote:
| I really like the idea of indicating epistemic status for
| posts. The closest to that for code might be version numbers
| where anything under v1.0 should be taken with a grain of salt.
| This dynamic of spitballing-or-serious appears on HN sometimes
| when a personal project gets shared by a third party, is good
| enough to attract serious comments/critiques, but then the
| author of the project chimes in to say "I totally didn't expect
| this to be shared here it's definitely a work in progress..."
| tiffanyh wrote:
| The tech equivalent of "half baked" is "Beta" software.
|
| This was frequent term used in the 2000s.
|
| "MVP" software is the modern day equivalent of half-bake/beta.
| waynecochran wrote:
| I have worked with dev's and researchers who have a very
| sensitive "bullshit meter" which is good a lot of the time, but
| often prevented me from bringing my half-baked ideas to the
| table. I would wait until I knew I had something solid.
| zerkten wrote:
| I'm curious if they changed over time? I've observed this
| change in myself to a degree. There are things I'd not have let
| go in the past, but now I catch myself and evaluate the
| context. There is a fine balance between reducing bullshit that
| affects an organization and limiting the potential of the
| organization.
| waynecochran wrote:
| Eventually it has always improved over time in terms of
| others being open to my ideas. It sometimes takes awhile to
| develop a good reputation to be trusted.
| johnobrien1010 wrote:
| I'm a product manager. One of the things I'm moved towards doing
| with engineering teams over the years is bringing ideas when they
| aren't fully fleshed out sooner to engineering teams. It really
| helps do a couple of things- it saves time, if it is a bad idea,
| I found out sooner rather than later. And if it is a good idea,
| it gives other people the opportunity to contribute to it, making
| it their own as well as mine, which helps everyone on the team
| take more ownership of the outcome and have a better feeling of
| purpose in life. I think you need to earn credibility before you
| start doing it but once you have that credibility I highly
| recommend it.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| It's great that you share your ideas with your team. I've been
| in both product management and engineering roles and I can say
| with certainty that everyone has terrible ideas, including
| (sometimes especially) engineers.
|
| The thing is, you can't tell if an idea has legs until you
| share it. And even after going through your own filter and that
| of your colleagues and other disciplines, the only thing that's
| actually important is how the product is received by the
| audience.
|
| So holding it all close to your chest is just a really good way
| of reducing the likelihood of success. And because of this,
| wherever I can, I try to mock up a cheap prototype of a product
| first, something that expresses my ideas in a tangible way that
| others can understand, just to make sure that what I'm working
| on is actually worth the time.
| bredren wrote:
| How do you and GP feel about sharing half baked ideas with
| customers?
|
| For example, replacing a table view that gets limited
| engagement with a feed with some workflow actions.
|
| Half baked at this point might be some static screenshots
| from figma.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Paul's not a genius_
|
| This post feels like shallow, Malcolm Gladwellish, wrap-a-simple-
| idea-with-a-random-narrative stuff.
|
| Paul McCartney might be the greatest pop musician/songwriter of
| the 20th century. Some (most?) of his best works were performed
| _after_ the Beatles. If he 's not a genius, then no musician is a
| genius.
| golemotron wrote:
| Exactly.
| abbub wrote:
| Not only all of the above, but for Paul in particular, a genius
| who was in the midst of one of the largest creative highs of
| his entire career. I mean, some of the snippets of 'half-baked'
| songs he plays are songs that will figure well into his
| solo/Wings career. I honestly don't know how you can come out
| of watching Get Back with anything other than admiration for
| human creativity as personified by Paul McCartney during this
| amazing month that got captured on film.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Paul's not a genius_
|
| This post feels like shallow, Malcolm Gladwellish, wrap-a-simple-
| idea-with-a-random-narrative stuff.
|
| Yes, MVPs are good. But Paul McCartney might be the greatest pop
| musician/songwriter of the 20th century. Some (most?) of his best
| works were performed _after_ the Beatles. If he 's not a genius,
| then no musician is a genius.
| kansface wrote:
| > Some (most?) of his best works were performed after the
| Beatles.
|
| I imagine this is a _really_ unpopular and /or uncommon
| opinion! I do not share it.
| drcongo wrote:
| I can't think of a single post-Beatles McCartney song that I
| like.
| v-erne wrote:
| Have you heard Come On to Me ?
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeJLrtFY7Ds) For me this
| is the most Beatles like song by Paul done after Beatles.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| 'Maybe I'm Amazed?' is a terrific song. How about it?
| [deleted]
| teucris wrote:
| > If he's not a genius, then no musician is a genius.
|
| Maybe there's no such thing as genius. Maybe what we call
| genius is the synthesis of many people's work, or luck, or
| both.
|
| Not to say Paul isn't an incredible musician. Just that maybe
| the Beatles were genius, not any single member.
| Adraghast wrote:
| > This post feels like shallow, Malcolm Gladwellish, wrap-a-
| simple-idea-with-a-random-narrative stuff.
|
| You've identified Seth Godin's entire schtick. The man is the
| godfather of vapid "give me your email address in exchange for
| a free ebook where I teach you to how to become a billionaire"
| hucksters and is not worthy of respect.
| jwaterhouse wrote:
| It's a long form LinkedIn shitpost.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Agree that Paul is a genius, not so sure I agree his best works
| came post-Beatles. To be sure his catalog post-Beatles is
| greater, if good songs are a roll of the dice then five decades
| vs. one is kind of loading the dice....
|
| I'll argue that with John and his "fresh ears" Paul was able to
| write some of his most _creative_ songs with the Beatles.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| A century of pop musician/songwriters and you chose Paul
| McCartney as the greatest? That's a pretty high bar. His
| singing doesn't come close to the melodic, cat-drowning sound
| of Bob Dylan. I'd say it's much better in fact.
| Tao332 wrote:
| Don't cherrypick it then. The rest of the piece explains it.
| He's not someone who just walks into a collaborative process
| with wholly self-completed works of natural brilliance.
| Instead, he's someone who knows how to facilitate the emergence
| of a genius-level chemistry between himself and another.
|
| Now you can see that he is saying that Paul _is_ a genius, just
| that his true genius isn 't exactly what we think it is when we
| talk about creative genius.
| [deleted]
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > He's not someone who just walks into a collaborative
| process with wholly self-completed works of natural
| brilliance
|
| 'Yesterday':
|
| "I woke up with a lovely tune in my head," he told author
| Barry Miles for the biography Many Years From Now, which was
| published in 1998. "I thought, 'That's great, I wonder what
| that is?' There was an upright piano next to me, to the right
| of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano,
| found G, found F sharp minor 7th - and that leads you through
| then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads
| forward logically. I liked the melody a lot but because I'd
| dreamed it I couldn't believe I'd written it."
|
| https://www.biography.com/news/paul-mccartney-the-beatles-
| ye...
| draw_down wrote:
| marban wrote:
| _Because the half-baked work, shared in a trusting environment,
| is the fuel for the system that created the works of genius._
|
| Half-baked, not half-ass, is the key.
| waynecochran wrote:
| Yes. If you already have a positive proven history, the more
| you often you can bring your half-baked ideas to the table.
| marban wrote:
| I always try to apply this for an MVP (Yes, terrible word).
| booboofixer wrote:
| > shared in a trusting environment
|
| I thought this was the key. For the beatles it probably wasn't
| that hard to do. But for other people taking inspiration, know
| where and when to share.
|
| Had the beatles performed their half-baked songs in front of a
| mediocre band that was to perform the very next day in front of
| a large audience, what would have stopped this mediocre band
| from stealing a song and performing it as their own?
|
| Closed-source software makes all the money in the world today.
| dfee wrote:
| Seth didn't include a link to the series, but it's called "The
| Beatles: Get Back".
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles:_Get_Back
| paulpauper wrote:
| we need to stop using the Beatles as examples of practice and
| success. They are such a huge outlier.
| ellyagg wrote:
| There was a lot less coompetition and optimization back then
| m82labs wrote:
| " By putting themselves in a corner, he created (at no small
| cost) the conditions where he could do the work."
|
| I think this might be the more important part. I am a firm
| believer that you do your best and most creative work under known
| and limiting constraints. With the constraints in place you
| couldn't afford to NOT bring your half-baked ideas to the table.
| psb wrote:
| I was also impressed and surprised by how much time they spent
| screwing around singing with goofy voices and the like
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