I built a tool that generates custom visualizations to prepare for big moments: http://bevictorious.co/
I'm an avid weekend golfer trying to improve. I noticed a lot of negative self-talk after a poor streak on the course and picked up "How Champions Think" as recommended by r/golf. In a chapter on optimism Bob Rotella shares a story about how, before he won the Master's for the first time, Seve's friend made him a tape of a fake news broadcast of him winning it that he listened to obsessively leading up to the tournament. Victorious lets users generate similar visualizations for any big moment (sports, performances, public speaking, job interviews, hard conversations...).
This is the second (that I've seen) submission of this horrifying idea. Classifying the commodification of homeless people is beyond politically incorrect- it's inhumane and representative of a total lack of perspective typical of so many of those who are privileged enough to attend institutions like MIT. For those behind it: adding a disclaimer to your site that suggests your actions are in good faith only further confirms, to me, your total lack of awareness about what it means to be disenfranchised in this society. Instead of resubmitting this link after your first entry got so much flak, why don't you try and exhibit even a minor degree of awareness and take the site down? You're shaming yourselves and your institution.
I agree with many of the points you raise, but I think you're trying to unite tangential concerns around a single issue.
The excerpt from your father's paper suggests that our problem solving can be inhibited by our initial impulses about a solution. I agree that this is often the case- most people seem to have a natural resistance against reversing out of a train of thought in order to choose a different branch. Our natural inertia tends to carry us forward. Even when we drive, think how awkward it feels to make a wrong turn and have to reverse down the street in order to correct your error. Obviously on the road this act puts your physical health at risk, so it's not a perfectly sound analogy, but the feeling is similarly uncomfortable with our problem solving tendencies. Most people would prefer to continue to drive and hope/wait to find a turn that will bring them back to the road they know or suspect they should be on.
Considering this tendency in the context of entrepreneurship, I agree that it would be inhibitory, but I also would suggest that the capacity to recognize a wrong turn and act appropriately to correct it is a necessary characteristic of a successful entrepreneur.
After the citations of your father's papers, you move into a sequence about how a self-contained entrepreneurship subculture might result in 'collaborative fixation'. I would argue that a central tenet of the culture, and something that makes it what it is, is that those individuals who self-select into that group de facto bring their own unique personality and background toward working on solutions to problems. If anything, the entrepreneurial subculture puts a premium on thinking differently than your peers, even if those peers also happen to consider themselves entrepreneurs.
Regarding the mini-terrier social network (dibs on that idea, by the way), there are always going to be individuals who copycat models and try and apply them to specified contexts. But, at least in my opinion, that kind of business doesn't exist in the same context as trying to address a Big Problem (then again, I don't have a mini terrier- maybe for some people it is).
I agree with you, again, about your last point regarding context. If a problem is really a Big Problem, it exists across multiple contexts, affecting a number of different people in different ways. That's why it's a Big Problem. As such, it's critical to be able to conceptualize approaching that problem from and through a variety of different contexts, and once again, that's a critical trait for an entrepreneur trying to address a Big Problem.
tl;dr:
After writing this, I'm wondering if it's not so much that the entrepreneurship subculture is inhibiting our capacity to address Big Problems as much as the problems themselves. That's why they're big in the first place right? In order to solve them, a person or group has to be agile enough to abandon their wrong answers, self-aware enough to stay true to the solutions they believe to be tenable, and diverse enough to consider a solution across diverse contexts. I think if anything, the entrepreneurship subculture encourages all these things, and if it were easy to uphold all three characteristics at any time in the face of any problem, entrepreneurship wouldn't be the art that it is.
Founder Dating claims to do that to an extent, but you have to apply and be accepted to one of their events.
As a non-tech looking for a technical co-founder, I got fed up with this search and decided I'd be better off just learning to build and code my idea(s) myself. It was actually the questions on the Y combinator app that made me realize that once you push out past the second or third degree of separation in your social network ("oh yeah the friend of my friend of a guy I used to work with can code") you're too far removed from this person, and a co-founder you don't know or can't trust seems like far greater a risk than investing the time to learn to do it yourself. Plus once you build your first project, I suspect it gets exponentially easier to make the next and the next thereafter!
Definitely- I was just thinking about whether and how this would be possible the other day- it's like gps on a micro scale.
For those of you who've read joshua foer's 'moonwalking with einstein' about memory competition and memory palaces, I thought this could be a great platform to create an app that builds and maps memory palaces out of your own physical spaces (like your house, friend's houses, office, etc) and uses the maps it creates to train your memory (so you too can memorize the order of two decks of cards in five minutes).
Really no flutter on this list? These are all great companies but I think flutter deserves a spot as a company with potential to really change how we interact with our devices. It seems like one of the few that is inventing a new space rather than improving on one that already exists (not that there's anything wrong with that).
As a non-technical learning to program on my personal time, I think this article captures the rise of programming tutorials accurately, and hints at the greater trend of the internet enabling a new kind of renaissance person that can know a little bit about a lot- at least enough to know "how these languages function within the internet". That being said, I don't think codecademy, at least as it's currently developing, is enough to turn the layperson into a programmer.
I'm an avid weekend golfer trying to improve. I noticed a lot of negative self-talk after a poor streak on the course and picked up "How Champions Think" as recommended by r/golf. In a chapter on optimism Bob Rotella shares a story about how, before he won the Master's for the first time, Seve's friend made him a tape of a fake news broadcast of him winning it that he listened to obsessively leading up to the tournament. Victorious lets users generate similar visualizations for any big moment (sports, performances, public speaking, job interviews, hard conversations...).