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I'm committing a major faux-pas by posting a second consecutive top-level comment, but it's been 12 hours and people need to post more. (Seriously, post a top level comment. Do it now.)
What's something that you were wrong about?
I'll start. I was wrong about marijuana legalization. It was a bad idea and we never should have done it. Marijuana is, contra urban legend, actually pretty addictive. And it makes productive people into unproductive people. The benefits, such as they are, are best enjoyed in moderation. But legalization has resulted in a whole new class of junkies that wouldn't have existed otherwise. Also, weed culture is gross.
Scott, as always, says it best:
In any case, what were you wrong about?
(Business theme here. Because I kind of want more business content on the Motte.)
I was wrong about Sales.
Beginning of my career, I was an engineer thinker, but who could Talk To Girls (TM), so I was sent out to talk to clients for technical sales reasons. Back then, I hated it because I was still trying to integrate the Autism firmware into my brain. Everything was logical, right? Cost-benefit analysis. Couldn't these stupid "customers" just see that our product provided value and pay us?
That's not how business works because that's not how humans work. Humans are not efficiency seeking automatons. We have problems, we want solutions. If we can't see how a thing helps us solve a problem, then that thing has a value of zero. Sales is the process of understanding problems deeply and then matching those problems (or not!) with a solution. It is applied empathy. It is one of the best skills to develop (so long as it is developed with integrity). If every Sales bro suddenly spent a year as therapists, we'd cure all this millennial mental health nonsense right away.
The fact is that deep engineer types who try to engineer products or services without caring about human interaction are truly trying to dehumanize humans. I get the same bad vibes from Sam Altman and Elon Musk because I truly believe both of them privately think, "Man, this would all be so much easier if like 90% of people just died." Technical elegance, engineering genius, physics-defying new invention don't. actually. matter if they fail to help people. I think the one hack here are the Theoretical Physicts who might actually be discovering capital-T Truth with math. But I'm too dumb to actually validate that.
But but but but ... Used car salesmen! Pushy boiler room stock brokers! The whole pharmaceutical industry! Can't sales be used for horrible awful very no-good reasons? Yes, but not try at scale for a long time unless there's tacit approval from lots of other humans. In all of the examples I provided, what's really going on is people want to defy reality in one way or another. They're being greedy. They don't want to live healthy they want to not feel pain. They want something they can't afford because they want to feel like they have certain status. Sales people playing into the self-deception of others isn't some black magic - it's psychological failure and manipulation that goes on constantly all over the world. Calling sales bad or evil is the same logical fallacy as calling human beings inherently bad or evil.
Can you tell I do a lot more sales and sales like things now? It's infinitely more satisfying that being a smarter than everyone else engineer. I'm not going to pretend like the software I've been involved with cured cancer, but, in many cases, I did see get applied to solve meaningful business problems. I like to think it contributed to economic growth in a small way.
If you want to be "part of a great effort to promote human flourishing" ... learn sales.
This is the thing that people who complain about Adobe's effective monopoly on creative software don't understand. Ignore the fact that most Adobe products have advanced features that the competition can't keep up with; it's not important. What is important is that, for all its complexity, Photoshop is easy to use for someone who has never used it before. The basic functions are intuitive. And if you learn how to do something more advanced, the program is structured in a way that you also learn the underlying logic behind how it's set up so that the next time you try to do something similar it will be easy to understand what you're doing.
Then look at an atrocity like Gimp. It's ugly, the basic stuff is intuitive enough but try to do anything beyond that and it's like pulling teeth. It owes its existence to an army of volunteers whose lone motivation is that they think software should be free. And that's pretty much where it ends; as long as they can make a product that looks enough like Photoshop to fool people who don't actually use Photoshop for anything serious, they'll always have an army of Linux fanboys who will whinge about Microsoft's OS dominance and point to Gimp as a perfectly acceptable alternative. And if you dare point out its shortcomings (which indeed are many), then you'll get scolded for not understanding that they don't have Adobe money and who cares what it looks like as long as it works and if it doesn't work then did you really need that feature enough to pay $10/month for it?
What they don't understand is that Adobe doesn't make its money on selling software to people who use it to make internet memes. Its customer base is people who actually use it for a living, and have to stare at the thing all day and don't have the time to deal with a janky workflow. I'm not even one of those people but even as a hobbyist I don't want to spend my leisure time dealing with the frustrations of crappy software. If you want your product to gain market share you have to give people a reason to use it, and "It's free" isn't a reason for people to use it if they're using it for business purposes — the up-front cost might be zero, but that doesn't account for the additional time spent using it and the loss in quality. Doing nothing is also technically free.
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