On Newness
01 Jun 2020No News is Good News
New is not, by default, good or bad. By definition, being new means not being understood enough to be labelled good or bad.
It’s kind of like that quote, “Half of what we currently believe is true is actually wrong; we just don’t know which half.” Except it’s probably more than half with new things, because they haven’t stood the test of time. This is why, with books for example, you only really want to read ones that have been thoroughly read/ reviewed (and found valuable).
This is a good argument for not following the news. Much of what is reported in the daily news cycle will be found to be irrelevant and inconsequential. The most critical pieces of new information will bubble to the top and find their way to us through the channels we trust.
New Ideas and Technologies
Good and bad are also blanket terms that aren’t super helpful when describing new things, since new things are usually unique and harder to categorize. Some aspects may be good, some bad and all of that is still not understood.
It may also be that the current version of something new is missing some critical insight or component in order to be truly great. In order to find out that missing piece, the new thing must be tried and tested.
The ultimate test of something new is the marketplace. Whether something new survives or dies in the market is the highest standard for its value.
The market isn’t immediately omniscient though either, with respect to whether a new idea or technology will be “good” or “bad” over the long term. (Although the efficient market hypothesis claims that it will be in the limit.)
For example, the VC investment market. Emntrepreneurs can exchange equity in their startup company, which essentially just an idea at the earliest stage, for cash investments. However, many startups will fail to ship a viable product to market (if the idea is too expensive or isn’t working) and many more will fail to survive in the market even after shipping a product.
Technological Progress
Consider also the fact that technological progress hasn’t necessarily made us happier, even though it’s made us vastly more productive in the market. For example, farming allowed us to make much more food per capita than ever before; but it’s also made us more sedentary and has had negative effects on our health.
Another example is Slack versus email. In many ways Slack blows email out of the water, but those of us who use Slack everyday can appreciate its downsides as well (e.g. too many channels, highly disjoined/ disorganized communications). The bottomline is that Slack is new, in some ways it will be better and maybe later we’ll understand ways in which it’s also been worse.
There are many other examples from technology where later on we’ve realized the unexpected ways a technology has made us worse: cars and climate change, the internet and misinformation, automation and underemployment (still TBD).
So this should inform our view of technology, and generally things that are new. The goal of new things is to add value over existing things while not adding too many downsides (side effects, cost, etc). If something new isn’t an obvious improvement, it shouldn’t be shipped. (Some use the heuristic of at least a 10X improvement, which is useful.) Similarly, if something has too many obvious downsides.