On Newness
01 Jun 2020No News is Good News
Ever hear this quote?
Half of what we currently believe is true is actually wrong. We just don’t know which half.
Except, when something is new–say, like a new scientific discovery–it’s probably wrong more than 50% of the time because it hasn’t yet stood the test of time.
This is why you may want to read only older books that are “good” because they’ve already been thoroughly read/ reviewed and found valuable. If someone says a new book is “good”, it’s more likely they’re wrong.
(Per the Lindy effect, things that have been around a long time will likely be around a lot longer still.)
This is also the reason to not follow the news. Much of daily news will be found to be inconsequential, and some of it flat-out wrong. The most critical, important pieces of information will survive and find you through channels you trust.
New Ideas and Technologies
To be fair, good and bad are also blanket terms that aren’t very helpful when describing something new, since new things are usually unique and harder to categorize. Some aspects may be good, some may be bad, but all of that is not yet understood.
It may be that the current version of something new is missing a critical insight in order to be truly great. To find that missing piece, the new thing must be tried and tested.
The ultimate test of something new is the market. Whether something new survives or dies in the market is the highest standard for value. The market isn’t always immediately right as to whether a new idea/ technology will work, but the efficient market hypothesis claims it will be in the long run.
Take, for example, the venture capital (VCs) market. 90%+ of startups evenutally fail, so it’s extremely hard to pick ones early on that do ultimately win. That’s basically proof that new ideas are unlikely to be good ones.
Technology and Progress
Consider that technology hasn’t necessarily made us happier, even though it’s made us vastly more productive. For example, farming allowed us to make much more food per capita than ever before; but it’s also made us more sedentary, which has had a negative impact on our health.
Another example is Slack versus email.
In many ways, Slack blows email out of the water. But those of us that use it everyday appreciate its downsides as well (e.g. too many channels, highly disorganized communication, etc).
The bottomline is that Slack is new. In some ways it’s better and then later we’ll come to understand ways it’s also been worse.
There are countless other examples where later on we’ve realized unexpected ways a technology has made us worse: cars and climate change, social media and misinformation, automation and underemployment, etc. (Jury’s still out on that last one though.)
Newness and Risk
These facts about technology should inform our view of things that are new in general. New things always have the risk of side effects, which can often be unforeseen.
In a very real way, newness correlates with risk. New things have more uncertainty and thus more risk. Therefore, we should probably hedge against the risk of a new thing by making sure there’s enough upside to make up for the risk of side effects.
If something new isn’t an obvious improvement (some use the ~10X better heuristic, for example), it probably shouldn’t be adopted or used. Otherwise, there’s too much risk of side effects that haven’t been realized yet.