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No More “Insight Porn”

568 pointsby jakobgreenfeldalmost 3 years ago

44 comments

MOARDONGZPLZalmost 3 years ago
I got super lucky. I started a company and didn’t really have any meaningful traction. I was about to shut it down. Walking out of the grocery store one night after work, I passed by my former manager when I was an intern. We got to talk for about 30 seconds, mentioned my company, she asked me to email her. I did, and that very quickly led to my first big customer which makes me about double what a FAANG swe would make.<p>My advice: get lucky.<p>My insight porn version: 10 easy steps I used to get $500K ARR and how you can do it too
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ycombinetealmost 3 years ago
Jonathan Haidt speaks about something similar in <i>The Happiness Hypothesis</i>. Epiphanies can only take you so far, before their novelty wears off and they lose the power to change your behaviour. This is why self-help book readers tend to keep reading self-help books. 4 weeks after finishing one they need another hit of epiphanies.<p>Even the lamest examples listed in the OP article can probably give someone a boost in productivity for a while, as long as that epiphanic rush lasts.<p>I&#x27;ve felt this in myself over the years. I&#x27;d hit a low point and try to hoist myself out of it, with some sombre new ethical code for creating a work ethic; some new note taking system; or epiphany gleaned from Shakespeare or Nietzsche.<p>You can see it in the Jordan Peterson clips that haunt my YouTube shorts.
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enos_feedleralmost 3 years ago
Out of the 3 &quot;Insight Porn&quot; examples linked in the article, I think the Paul Graham essay seems out of place. I know I know, this is hacker news. Yet another person sticking up for pg. But I just don&#x27;t think this essay (or others) is really trying to boil some dream&#x2F;goal into steps. In fact, in the &quot;How to get startup ideas&quot; referenced in this post, pg says:<p>&quot;So if you can&#x27;t predict whether there&#x27;s a path out of an idea, how do you choose between ideas? The truth is disappointing but interesting: if you&#x27;re the right sort of person, you have the right sort of hunches. If you&#x27;re at the leading edge of a field that&#x27;s changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you&#x27;re more likely to be right.&quot;<p>To me, he is doing the opposite of insight porn. Basically saying this might not even be for you. He doesn&#x27;t even suggest that you go become an expert in something. Rather, he just throws his hands up. He tries to spare you from the disappointment of hearing this by calling it &quot;interesting&quot;. That contrasts _a lot_ with what most of the insight porn is trying to convince you of. They rarely try to disappoint you and mostly just hype&#x2F;pump you up.
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bambaxalmost 3 years ago
I&#x27;m confused, it seems insight porn is this guy&#x27;s business. His article even ends with this:<p>&gt; <i>If you’d like to get more honest strategies and proven frameworks for winning in life and business, then simply join my free newsletter here.</i><p>Is he simply trying to trash the competition?
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anon25783almost 3 years ago
A crackhead never says &quot;I have no money, I guess I&#x27;m not smoking any crack today&quot;. Instead, they will go to an abandoned building and strip all the copper wiring out of it. Don&#x27;t let a crackhead out-hustle you today.
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nicboualmost 3 years ago
Some types of insight is still valuable, and tends to stick longer:<p>* &quot;Your perception of [practice] is wrong&quot;. Networking isn&#x27;t sales or marketing, it&#x27;s helping each other and building things together without sending invoices.<p>* &quot;You value the wrong things&quot;. You are paid to create value, not write code. Negotiation skills pay more than technical skills [1][2]<p>* &quot;The world doesn&#x27;t work that way&quot;. A lot of the content you read is sponsored [3]<p>* &quot;You&#x27;re doing something unpleasant&quot;. Don&#x27;t ask to ask [4]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kalzumeus.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;10&#x2F;28&#x2F;dont-call-yourself-a-programmer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kalzumeus.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;10&#x2F;28&#x2F;dont-call-yourself-a-pr...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kalzumeus.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;salary-negotiation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kalzumeus.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;salary-negotiation&#x2F;</a><p>[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;submarine.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;submarine.html</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dontasktoask.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dontasktoask.com&#x2F;</a>
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BoredPuffinalmost 3 years ago
Another piece of &quot;Insight Porn&quot; labelled as &quot;No more insight porn&quot;, how ironic.<p>And when do people like the author start labelling any over-doing, over-indulging behaviour &quot;porn&quot;?<p>Should I expect in a few decades time that people binge-watching documentary will give birth to &quot;doco-porn&quot;?<p>Catchy marketing at its worst.<p>On the topic though, beneath whatever words he put on top it&#x27;s an age-old idea that until you start doing something hands-on, it&#x27;ll be hard to tell what you already know and what you don&#x27;t.<p>The advice giving and taking is not a new concept, and data-driven is not going to change it. If one doesn&#x27;t like handling slimy things, no matter how good a piece of cooking advice is - it&#x27;s not going to help. Imagine capturing meat can be slimy in datasets.
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feintruledalmost 3 years ago
His six hour day thing reminds me of a wheeze a manager tried in my old company when it was coming up to crunch time. He sent an &#x27;inspirational&#x27; email where he said that if we all were to simply work an extra few hours after work each day, then four hours on each of Saturday and Sunday, then - voila - we would magically find ourselves with the equivalent of an 8-day week. I don&#x27;t think many took him up on this.<p>Though to be fair to him, it was very specific and actionable advice!
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minihatalmost 3 years ago
I think the invitation to subscribe to the author&#x27;s newsletter at the bottom of the page is ironic.<p>Love the label &quot;insight-porn&quot; though. Concisely captures the nauseous feeling of ingesting your 100th self help book.
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saxelsenalmost 3 years ago
This is a perfect post on what I hate (and can&#x27;t seem to quit) on my Twitter feed.<p>If you follow anyone in the startup space, the profiles and recommendations they generate will fill up your entire feed with useless, like-farming threads on &quot;how to be successful in 3 easy steps&quot;.<p>The part about it being extra dangerous because you feel productive even though you didn&#x27;t do anything, is so true. It&#x27;s like a new form of addictive, useless SoMe content for people over 25.
OrangeMonkeyalmost 3 years ago
I read a story where the main protagonist ran a business who did nothing but provide solutions to people. They would come in, pay a fee, and he would dispense a solution to their problem that would make things better if only the advice was followed.<p>I thought it delightful. A problem I have that I can simply ask for a solution and get it? That would be great.<p>The reason these bad actors exist is that they recognize the same: people struggle and just wish someone would offer real advice. If everyone wishes to dig for gold, sell shovels right? Well if everyone is dealing with failure, feelings of inadequacy, and a desire to change why not sell them the hope that if you do these simple things everything will be better.<p>It is a desirable thing, even for me who should know better.
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strkenalmost 3 years ago
It&#x27;s genuinely useful to know that making $X a year is the same as Y clients paying $(X &#x2F; Y &#x2F; 52) a week, if you&#x27;ve never thought about a business in concrete terms before.<p>Obviously this is old and repetitive if you&#x27;re a working software engineer who&#x27;s been reading HN for years and has seen a ton of motivational LinkedIn bullshit, but it&#x27;s the kind of thing a career councillor might go over to make running a business seem approachable. Equally obviously it would be much better advice if it came with a real-world example of a forecasting spreadsheet and a link to your government&#x27;s &quot;how to start a business&quot; website. That doesn&#x27;t make it bad advice.<p>The example thread from Naval is the same. Second tweet is basically &quot;conspicuous consumption wastes money, buy appreciating assets instead,&quot; but couched in pornographic insight. One of the later tweets is &quot;pick business partners...with integrity.&quot; <i>They&#x27;re both good bits of advice.</i> Just because you already know a piece of advice, and just because it&#x27;s given by a charismatic writer over far too many individual tweets, doesn&#x27;t make it bad advice.
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superasnalmost 3 years ago
The corollary being that people who are not peddling insight porn are often dismissed and have much much harder time to get their content shared.<p>I mean on one hand there is this guy with an incredibly feel good story about how all you have to do is just fill the gaps between the problem and solution and get rich. Then on the other hand there is this guy giving advice that looks like a steep uphill climb from your comfort zone where you to measure every single unique issue in your product and call customers 10 times a day to understand what&#x27;s not working and why they&#x27;re leaving, etc.<p>Most people will pick A since it makes em feel good and such wisdom like &quot;if your why is big enough the how takes care of itself &quot;
mmaunderalmost 3 years ago
“Many people that truly accomplished amazing things, when asked for the key to their success come up with some framework or playbook that they, in fact, never used themselves.”<p>And they rarely share the messy awkward embarrassing reality of their journey.
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bearjawsalmost 3 years ago
Gotta hand it to The Secret (2006) for kick starting near two decades of bull shit &quot;Insight Porn&quot;. I know a few people who got sucked into that universe and continue to read &amp; share this kind of media today.
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motohagiographyalmost 3 years ago
Sure, there&#x27;s a lot of crappy insight out there, and there are also styles of writing designed to take your time. It&#x27;s like Proust with product placement.<p>But when you look at psychology as a tool to dissolve artifacts of our internal logic that are causing suffering, using a neutralizing theory that temporarily dissolves meaning, the usefulness of some cliches and deepities becomes more apparent. These aren&#x27;t positive instructions, they&#x27;re a way to provoke a mind out of a kind of writers block or negative feedback loop about its idea of self.<p>An insight that reframes your perception of something can unlock what felt like a double bind or an inescapable situation. &quot;I can&#x27;t feel some joy because I am a this or that,&quot; is an example belief that an insight can unblock by reframing someones perspective to question the premises of that belief. Showing that your negative self beliefs are inconsistent enough for you to question them can be enough to relieve the suffering they cause, just long enough to do something about them. It&#x27;s a precision tool.<p>It&#x27;s relevant to look at the quality of insight and beliefs we&#x27;re having delivered by some carefully orchestrated psychological techniques, but this one felt bit like witnessing the birth of a new thought terminating cliche.
015aalmost 3 years ago
W.r.t the &quot;imagine your day is 6 hours long, then you could fit 3 days in one&quot; &#x27;advice&#x27;.<p>I haven&#x27;t read the original article, and won&#x27;t, but I&#x27;m imagining what they mean by that is 6*3=18 (+6 hours of sleep = 24).<p>I have two jobs right now; primary gig + ~10hr&#x2F;week contracting, both tech. I&#x27;m actually a big fan of this model of thinking, though not as extreme; I&#x27;ll elaborate:<p>Classify 3 days a week as &quot;hell days&quot;; 9a-6p job1 + 7p-9p job2. Tweak the numbers as you will for your own situation, but critically, for every hell day there&#x27;s a heaven day: Monday you&#x27;re working 12 hours, but Tuesday you&#x27;re only working 6 hours, and alternate.<p>I&#x27;ve found this model to work well, even when it was only applied to a salaried 40-hour-per-week job; Mon is 6h, Tue is 10h, etc. If you&#x27;ve got the right gig that can support something like this (many remote SE roles can). It averages out to the same (sometimes more) hours per week, you can plan for more fluidity (e.g. i&#x27;m going out drinking with friends thursday evening, so lets front-load some hell days early in the week so we get a heaven day friday), and it tends to really vibe well with engineering workloads (hell days are great for deep focus, centralize as many meetings as possible on heaven days, whatever works for you, etc).<p>And sure, I&#x27;m being a little vague in how to attain this for yourself, if its something you&#x27;d even want; the sin of Insight Porn. It really comes down to &quot;find a job that allows you to do it&quot;, and boom, Luck has entered the chat (with some mitigating &quot;Skill&quot; in being in a desirable field, knowing the right questions to ask in an interview, etc).<p>All that considered, I still like the advice. If I want to spend my free time with loved ones; its so much more valuable &amp; meaningful, to me, to spend an entire afternoon and evening every other day, or even only once&#x2F;twice a week, than just an evening some&#x2F;most evenings. Everything is better without interruption; work &amp; play; and classifying your days as &quot;WORK&#x2F;play&quot; versus &quot;PLAY&#x2F;work&quot; rather than trying to evenly split every day, has just been better for me. YMMV.*<p>Of course; extending this idea to &quot;3 work days per day, that&#x27;s 15 work days per week&quot; or &quot;6 hours of sleep per night&quot; is crazy and no one should live like that.
thenerdheadalmost 3 years ago
Life is always changing. What advice you read about today may not stick nor apply to you right now, but it may in the future. Things don’t change, we do.<p>&gt; Many people that truly accomplished amazing things, when asked for the key to their success come up with some framework or playbook that they, in fact, never used themselves.<p>This comment feels like a rant with no justification. I know many highly accomplished people who will tell you what they did to achieve the promotion, land the deal, or deliver the project. Are they fleeting generalizations in a self-help book? Not usually. But there are visions, systems, and frameworks they have developed over the years, simply summed up as their personal philosophy.<p>Insights can be profound to one and dumb to another. Does it make insights a bad thing? Absolutely not. Some people are ready for them, some people are not. Some people 10x their life with a simple idea like a vision board. Some never try it because they think it’s dumb. I’m of the opinion that unless you try everything at least twice, you can’t know if it works for you or not.
yamrzoualmost 3 years ago
My guess is that a big chunk of the &quot;insight porn&quot; and self-help landscape would fade away if it was subject to a data driven evaluation. Given a piece of advice or a self-help book, how many people did actually change their behaviour after reading it? And did the change persist long-term? Unfortunately, such data is not available.
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luordalmost 3 years ago
Well, how sad. I have liked what Jakob wrote quite a bit but not only does this article betray a lack of self awareness as it describes quite a few of his own posts—not that there&#x27;s anything wrong with that as he has published truly insightful things too and the fluff I still liked for the positivity—but then he used an essay by PG as an example of this.<p>And now I&#x27;m not one of those people who think that everything PG writes is gold, but it&#x27;s hardly &quot;insight porn&quot;. In fact, if that particular essay is &quot;advice&quot;, it&#x27;s the advice to not even try as it&#x27;s likely just not for you, so it almost seems like Greenfeld misrepresented it just because of a single sentence.
naileralmost 3 years ago
You can be a billionaire in only 3 years by following this simple advice: every day, before you go to bed, save one million US dollars.
mft_almost 3 years ago
I&#x27;m totally with the author - what he calls &#x27;insight porn&#x27;, I think of as &#x27;grind porn&#x27; - as underneath the &#x27;insights&#x27;, I believe what the genre is really selling is the paradigm that <i>you&#x27;re not achieving enough, and you need to work harder, and because there are only so many hours in the day, you need to work smarter too, and to do that you need our insights to help you be much more efficient.</i><p>So I&#x27;d take it a step further - not just avoid insight-&#x2F;grind-porn, and <i>grind-adjacent-porn</i> too.<p>By this, I mean the equally large industry around life optimisation - and consider it adjacent because <i>of course you need to optimise your health, wellbeing, sleep, weight, muscle volume, whatever, to be a fully productive human and achieve the heights that are expected of you</i>.<p>Take (possibly) the Daddy of the all: Tim Ferriss&#x27; blog&#x2F;podcast. I believe it&#x27;s basically well-meaning, but holy hell if you wanted to learn from and apply the life optimisations of all of his guests, you&#x27;d almost need to make it a full-time activity. (I guess that&#x27;s why some of them --Peter Attia, for example-- are really appearing on the podcast to advertise their business, which [if you&#x27;re rich enough] will take most of the hard work out of figuring everything for yourself.) And of course, don&#x27;t get me started on trying to follow any of the advice while living in the Europe, without easy access to many of the items recommended.<p>And some of this slips out of the recrational space into the professional, too. A while back, I became aware of a professional&#x2F;life coaching business[0] which was more holistic than the usual behaviourally-focussed professional coaches I&#x27;d experienced. Lots of well-meaning advice... until it hit me: maybe if I need to employ all of the little lifestyle marginal gains --green tea, optimised sleep, optimised diet, exercise-- just to cope with my f*cking job, the toxic demands of job itself is the problem?<p>Is it possible we&#x27;ve gone too far towards accepting and adapting to the grind... and maybe it&#x27;s time to wind it back a little?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tignum.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tignum.com&#x2F;</a>
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sebastianconcptalmost 3 years ago
Good post. The metaphor is fair.<p>I remember being annoyed by way to many &quot;insights&quot; and &quot;words of advice&quot; that sounded plausible but in environments that were way too unattainable for me at the time, hence:<p>A) Not really plausible at all.<p>B) Too much self-referential and tautologic.<p>They pretended too much to be useful good advice but was actually just either show-off of success in disguise (false modesty&#x2F;success porn) or tautologic; like &quot;To be a multimillionaire just need to spend less than you earn but not earn low enough&quot;. Huh? Even a pigeon is smart enough to not need to hear that.
antonymyalmost 3 years ago
I&#x27;ve never tried to give advice to people in my life since my career is mostly founded on a series of coincidences and lucky breaks. I know that luck factors into a lot of people&#x27;s experiences, but in my case luck is the foundation of everything I have accomplished outside of school. I&#x27;ve built on top of this foundation, to be sure, but it&#x27;s like saying fishing is all about waiting for the fish to jump in your boat.
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closedloop129almost 3 years ago
&gt;When I’m consuming non-fiction content, I try to write down specific experiments I can try that put the things I “learned” into practice.<p>Could you turn this into a social network where people cooperate to do these experiments? It could be used to figure out which ideas are helpful and it could be used to help people when they are stuck implementing an idea.
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EmilyHughesalmost 3 years ago
Why does everything have to be some kind &quot;porn&quot; nowadays. Does anybody seriously think this is funny?
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kwertyoowiyopalmost 3 years ago
This gives me a whole new perspective on the multiple “insight porn” articles on HN’s front page right now.
fouricalmost 3 years ago
I really like this idea!<p>You can find it in all sorts of places. Here&#x27;s one in video games: there are a lot of League of Legends videos by a channel called &quot;Skill Capped&quot; that each claim to have &quot;one neat rule&quot; or &quot;5 mistakes to watch out for&quot; to help you get better at the game. The only problem? The &quot;one rule&quot; is something like &quot;don&#x27;t do this thing unless you know that there&#x27;s an 80% chance that it&#x27;ll work&quot; - and that&#x27;s the hard part, that the video does nothing to help with.<p>I think that this is another flavor of &quot;insight porn&quot; where the video portrays itself as boiling down something hard into a simple insight - yet that insight is tautological, not useful, and&#x2F;or skips the hard part.
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fastballalmost 3 years ago
Not sure I agree about Naval&#x27;s thread[1]. There is a lot of actionable stuff in there.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;naval&#x2F;status&#x2F;1002103360646823936" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;naval&#x2F;status&#x2F;1002103360646823936</a>
swayvilalmost 3 years ago
&gt;Many people that truly accomplished amazing things, when asked for the key to their success come up with some framework or playbook ... It’s just that people love to say things that make them look good.<p>Or they really are trying to package their trick in a way that&#x27;s universally useful, but failing.<p>Because that&#x27;s hard. Because people differ widely in the way they see and think. It&#x27;s SO much easier to assume that they don&#x27;t. But they do. One size does not fit all.<p>A truly sciency approach might be the missing link. Firmly establish a common context and such. But that might be tedious and off-putting.
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peso4ekalmost 3 years ago
Totally agree with author. I hate the popular books about successful success, like &quot;The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People&quot;. I said it to every fan of this bullshit for 10 years maybe.
anonualmost 3 years ago
Nice meta blog post. Some great insights on insights.
mkl95almost 3 years ago
Actual insight can be tough to hear. No one wants to be told they would be doing better if they had worked their ass at some innovative company early in their career instead of taking an office job with a lower ceiling. Learning they can pull off some &quot;life hack&quot; to become rich will give them a much needed dopamine boost.
zcw100almost 3 years ago
“It’s advice that sounds plausible and breaks down a goal many people dream about into actionable steps.”<p>Sounds like scrum.
hamiltoniansalmost 3 years ago
another piece useless insight porn is to say &#x27;no&#x27; to anyone or anything you dont want to do
madroxalmost 3 years ago
There is very little advice that&#x27;s good, but if you make a living producing content, you gotta get your quota up. The algorithm prioritizes new content. People want something to read every day over coffee, even if there&#x27;s nothing new to read that&#x27;s good.
czernobogalmost 3 years ago
This is really interesting. I like the blog, I don&#x27;t want to subscribe for emails but I would like and RSS but I don&#x27;t see it
nottorpalmost 3 years ago
&gt; When I’m consuming non-fiction content.<p>So non-fiction content is not worth <i>reading</i>. And doesn&#x27;t qualify as a book either.
greenie_beansalmost 3 years ago
it&#x27;s a shame that our society causes us to optimize our time spent to make the most amount of money. we need to do the opposite of this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;naval&#x2F;status&#x2F;1002103360646823936" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;naval&#x2F;status&#x2F;1002103360646823936</a>
felipelallialmost 3 years ago
Put the word &quot;porn&quot; on the title and get trillion upvotes.
sagaroalmost 3 years ago
Pretty much all of Linkedin is insights porn and self patting.
ndgoldalmost 3 years ago
Thank you for this. Seriously, it had to be said.
upupandupalmost 3 years ago
The biggest insight porn is indiehackers
dafty4almost 3 years ago
TLDR; any mention of Tim Ferriss?