I wish pg would start writing longer form essays again. His startup essays had a huge impact on my approach to building startups. They were hugely insightful and inspirational for me.
This essay has a great core insight, and I get you don't need more words to say it, but I still miss the longer ones
I found the book super interesting in terms of explaining how innovations happen and how we talk about them in retrospect. Although it is about science, I think a lot of the thinking would apply to programming innovations too. And unlike most blog posts, there is actually some serious sociological research behind it :-).
Here "risk" is opportunity cost. You can spend all you life in theology and die unknown. Newton is famous only because of physics, the other fields were waste of his time. There are countless people who spend their life perusing projects that do not produce anything valuable. And then there are few that win Nobel.
>There are countless people who spend their life perusing projects that do not produce anything valuable.
It can't be understated how painful that has to be from their perspective.
I suppose a similar story is where they do produce something of value, but it's incremental in nature. Incremental advancements usually don't receive much recognition.
> It can't be understated how painful that has to be from their perspective.
Why? Somebody can play videogames all day, because it's fun, and then die all of sudden. They didn't produce anything valuable, and yet, they didn't feel bad about it.
It's only painful if you rethink it, and basically say, I should have spent my time doing something else. Which is a paradox of choice.
This is one of the main motivators in science. People do science trying to discover something no one knows and be recognized for that. Very few would be still motivated if you leave just discovery part and drop recognition.
> AI is an increasingly competitive field, and Apple's past reluctance to contribute to scientific knowledge may have scared away potential hires who wanted their discoveries recognized. If papers like these become relatively commonplace, Apple might have an easier time attracting the talent it needs for self-driving car platforms, Siri and other AI-based projects.
>You can spend all you life in theology and die unknown.
You can do that in physics and natural philosophy too. What's your point? There are plenty of theologians. This idea that the only noble pursuit is scientific, which PG seems to be saying in this essay from my reading, and in fact other commenters, is borderline scientism.
Why would theology have been a bad thing to pursue, other than some sense of satisfaction you don't even get from people remembering you after you are dead?
Sure, but I'm not sure it's clear that working in e.g. theology didn't help him in his more technical work.
Have a broad and well-rounded view tends to help. I don't know a good mathematician who doesn't read, write, play music, explore other fields with passion and vigor. You get fresh ideas and it keeps your mind limber and flexible.
I'm not sure you could say a Newton who knew nothing but physics and physics only would have made the same breakthroughs.
Sorry, Newton didn't "make bets", he was not a Silicon Valley VC. He worked on problems that he found interesting and that he believed would reveal eternal truths established and maintained by God.
Please don't get stuck on semantics. When you decide to take a longer route because you think there will be less traffic, you "make a bet". You "make a bet" by deciding to go to college instead of straight into the working world. Anywhere there is a decision to be made with uncertain outcomes, you "make a bet". It doesn't have to be about money, although it often is.
But none of that has to do with Newton. Was alchemy or physics the long route? Only Newton knows and he's dead.
Not trying to be dense here, I just don't see the insight. How is what you are saying any different than "you don't know what's going to happen" without Newton attached to it?
When you write "Was alchemy or physics the long bet?" it seems you concede that Newton made a bet, and that it didn't involve money. That was my only point: We all make decisions that involve some amount of guesswork on risk vs reward, and it's not always about money.
For sake of argument, let's say Newton's reward was the advancement of human knowledge. He made some high-risk bets that didn't pay off (alchemy, theology), and some that did (physics, calculus).
All PG is saying is that when we look at famous historical figures, after centuries of deification, we tend to focus only on the bets that paid off, and ignore all the failures. But those failures are crucially important to who these figures were as people, and it does them (and ourselves) a disservice to only focus on the successes.
I didn't 'make a bet' by going to college, it was the assumed thing in my family, it was culturally ingrained that I would go to college. This way of looking at life as a series of 'bets' that one makes is it's own particular kind of culture, one that Newton did not belong to.
Newton didn't investigate alchemy and theology because he was trying to diversify his fame investment portfolio. To see him this way is to do a disservice to him and to history.
I'd say that asserting Newton had no choice does him a greater disservice. Call them bets, choices or decisions; there were opportunity costs involved, paths to choose, and he chose some that worked out and some that didn't.
That's a blaming statement used to indicate someone is being pedantic, which can then be used to "prove" them wrong by the followup. All of your counter examples are based on the obtaining a better position, which is all about dealing with globalized suffering (money is stored work and work is a unit of causality and suffering is a result of causality).
Newton presumably pursued understanding the unknown, which means he chose his own suffering/work that was different from any objective based on making bets to get ahead in life at the time.
I think it's entirely fair to point out that Newton wasn't betting at the time. He was discovering purely for the sake of discovery.
Are you denying he had any choice in what areas of discovery to pursue? And that there were no trade-offs involved? If not, then you are stuck on semantics.
I'm not stuck on semantics, so that's the truth of the matter, whether you attempt to rationalize I am or not. Make no mistake that semantics are always important. Without the English language, neither you or I could communicate concepts here. It also allows you to attempt to reword what others are saying, but I'm not going to allow that here.
When you attempt to state someone is "stuck on semantics" and that person actually hasn't said as much, you are speaking for their intent. When that is backed up with the intent of proving them wrong on some topic, it only serves to indicate intent. The older I get, the more irritating this behavior becomes, especially when the person refuses to acknowledge what is being said and continues to rationalize from their point of view in order to frame a statement by someone else. You act as if language (and semantics) are logical. They aren't, and neither are humans. We'd do well to stop speaking for each other in aggregate in an attempt to make it more logical. This concept itself is counterintuitive.
Newton had every choice to pursue interests. Not having prior knowledge of "areas of discovery", it would appear he pursued what was interesting to him. If you look at Faraday, he pursued things to find a single source force - I would expect Newton though along the same lines. In fact, even if he knew someone else was interested in an "area of discovery", he could have just been interested in that topic for purely knowing purposes.
Wanting to know more about things, the nature of things if you will, is not something that can be considered a "bet". It's simply curiosity.
Look at Newton's Early life (0) and we can see that he did not 'make a bet' with his life. Though he managed to get into Cambridge on a scholarship (an element of luck), he was considered 'undistinguished as a Cambridge student.' His 3 really big accomplishments (optics, gravitation, calculus) were generated when he was on break for 2 years from Cambridge due to plague. The question we then must ask is: what would he have done otherwise? It's a 'bet' if there is an element of risk, though it seems this discussion is more about what different English speakers use the word 'bet' to mean. What were the downsides to just poking about with math and lenses in your 'free' hours? Maybe he missed out on some farming/church duties or he traded this time to do Optics instead of gossiping. I don't know. What did young mid-17th century celibate Englishmen do in those days while hiding from the black death? Tennis? Point is, he wasn't really risking anything but a little bit of time spent in the mid 1600's English countryside that he had to spend out there anyways. A 'real bet' would have been staying at Cambridge despite the plague to work on Optics with the professors, as the risk there was quite clearly your life.
He could have chosen to focus solely on theology. He could have chosen to focus on entirely different areas that were all dead-ends. People are really getting hung-up on the word "bet"; evaluating opportunity costs is part of life. To focus on one word and miss the forest for the trees speaks more about the critic than it does of Newton.
Judging that way each and every one of our actions (including me writing this comment) is a bet, because AFAIK we still live in a world where we do not have "complete information". From time to time I think about one of Mark Twain's short novels which I read as an adolescent, where a lady decides to take the left road instead of the one on the right (or vice-versa) when she reaches a road-junction, and because of that single decision her life changes dramatically.
Indeed! And how about that classic Robert Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken" [1]
Edit: WOW, after reading the commentary on the poem, I never realized how wrong I was. The poem is a joke, he's saying it didn't really matter which path he took. All these years I took it so seriously, which apparently is a common mistake dating back to the very first time the poem was read in front of an audience.
After reading the "poem guide" there I have to agree, WOW. My mind is blown. Despite destroying what it meant to me for 30 years, the older me appreciates the poem even more for its subtlety.
There wasn't quite the sharp division of disciplines, either. Thinking about it that way comes from the public school system (which the author ought to know, because if I'm not mistaken, he mentioned that in a previous essay). Mathematics (which didn't warrant a mention as a bet that paid off in a blurb about the guy that invented calculus), metaphysics, and the natural sciences were all areas of study, but they weren't different bets: they were interrelated components of our understanding of the universe.
I'd say co-invented would apply more if he worked together with Leibniz on it. Instead, they both invented it independently, around the same time (with differing notation, but both gave the means to reach the same results).
I think you are agreeing with the author, who is trying here to refute the misconception that Newton was simultaneously a brilliant, grounded, impartial truth seeker who discovered physics and a batshit conspiracist who dabbled in alchemy and theology.
Well, PG presents them as different bets, one of which paid off. They were the same essential bet from Newton's perspective. For example, books on physics at the time referred to religion heavily, sometimes as a cornerstone of an argument. Even Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica says "Collocavit igitur Deus Planetas in diversas distantiis à Sole, ut quilibet pro gradu densitatis calore Solis majore vel minore fruatur."
That's a very interesting insight, but isn't it also true that Newton decidedly left theology out of calculus and mechanics? What distinguished his three laws was that he chose not to explain, for example, the motion of something by its "ferver" or "jubilance," as his predecessors did. People at the time may not have treated the fields so separately, but Newton did.
Edit: I just ran the quote through Google Translate. Still, merely casting God as being ultimately responsible is a step forward from interweaving theology throughout your physical theories.
"This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all: And on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God Pantokrator,or Universal Ruler...." and, like, this stuff is all over the place in the Principia. You cannot separate Newton the theologian from Newton the mathematician from Newton the physicist.
He wagered his time. Everything you choose to work on means you're not working on something else. So by choosing to work on something, you're necessarily "betting" that it's going to be more fruitful than the infinitely many other things you could be doing.
Expending resources, whether time or money, on something with an uncertain outcome is a bet. I'm not sure what the objection is to using that term. Nobody said Newton was a Silicon Valley VC.
Loved the insight, but I don't agree with the conclusions. Maybe Newton was just genius all along, and we have yet to discover the "hugeness" of alchemy and theology.
I think what you're saying compliments the conclusions made by PG.
If you think alchemy might have promise, go and study it! You'll be taking a risk, but it might just change the world (and put you in the history books).
also, i have the impression that alchemy's bad reputation is a bit undeserved. IIRC some alchemists believed matter was made of fundamental components and followed the scientific method well. so, that bet may be less risky than we perceive it now. this only makes pg's point stronger: it'd be the most interesting for a biography of Newton to talk about alchemy.
Indeed. Alchemy was the precursor to chemistry. The whole turning lead into gold trope was an obvious failure in hindsight, but that was not the sole point of alchemy. An awful lot was learned about chemistry and the nature of matter.
I think alchemy at the time was just another domain of science than anything else. To them it was like today's dark matter and dark energy or figuring out cold fusion or reaction-less drives.
These are not really bets, it's all what Newton was, a man's passion, life and legacy.
How is calling it a bet missing the point? As a scientist investigating a phenomenon in the natural world, assuming you wish to make a new contribution to your field, you are betting your time that you will both arrive at a new understanding of your subject matter and also be the first to do so.
If you just bet that for example string theory is a good enough field for research then you'll be deeply disappointed if it turns out to be nothing but a mirage.
These people live for research. They can work on anything (because interests them) and no matter if it has earth shattering consequences or small breaks they can still be happy during the process, so calling it risky or dangerous is laughable.
I think the point was that Newton devoted a lot of time to things that are not optics, mechanics and mathematics - we do not remember him for the other things obviously, which is why it is rarely known, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton's_occult_studies
A couple of years ago, I went to a museum exhibition of DaVinci's notebooks.
I was completely unprepared for what was my primary reaction: that DaVinci just documented every idea in his head, and that some of them just happened to pan out. But for some reason, we credit him for the small percentage of ideas that just happened to work, and ignore all the wrong ideas. To me, he didn't seem like a genius, he seemed very much like a broken clock that just happened to be right twice a day.
There's a certain survivor bias in these sorts of discussions, where we identify great contributors as taking huge risks, and so forth and so on. This is true, but we also maybe tend to give them too much credit because we ignore all their failures. We tell ourselves that's why perseverence is so important, but then turn around and make fun of people or even become angry at them for wasting our time when so many things don't turn out. The difference between perseverence and shotgun approaches to pursuing knowledge seems arbitrary to me lots of times.
If you followed every one of DaVinci's ideas, for example, you'd be screwed, because he was so wrong about so many things. Today, he'd probably be seen as a crackpot because it would be so difficult to know when his idea was right and when it was wrong. The value of his ideas lies as much in his audience, the people who realized what of his ideas was correct, as much as, if not more, than in DaVinci himself.
I guess I've grown really disillusioned with advancements in science, because so much of it involves a sort of mythmaking that seems fairy-tale to me. To me, the reality seems more distributed, involving small contributions, gradually changing over time, with a lot of randomness involved.
I don't mean to come across as saying we shouldn't encourage experimentation and tinkering, or that it shouldn't be valued. In fact, I'd argue the opposite. But at the same time something seems off about our incentive structures--the way we give credit seems off.
Think of it this way: we do science because at some level, what's correct and what's not is an empirical idea. You could have 10 very reasonable explanations and 9 of them will be wrong "just because." In many cases, being intelligent has nothing to do with why the 9 are wrong, otherwise all we'd need would be philosophy and math. So why do we pretend that the 1 person who was correct was correct because they are a genius? It seems like you can't have geniuses and a need for science at the same time.
Re: DaVinci, do you think it's possible that he knew most of his ideas were bad? I write down every product idea I have, but I know that maybe 1 in 10 would actually be used by people and maybe 1 in 10 of the useful ones would be good investments of my time to work on. I think that writing down all the bad ideas helps me think of good ideas though.
Re: Scientific geniuses are admired too much, I think you're right. The Media totally picks out the success stories because that's what interests people. Then The Media is incentivized to make these successful scientists seem really smart, also because that's what interests people. Sam Altman has talked about a similar thing. When you meet the Brian Chesky's and Mark Zuckerbergs today, you see brilliant, confident entrepreneurs that seem like geniuses that must have some special DNA. However, the reality is that 10 years ago these people seemed totally regular, just struggling entrepreneurs like so many others. Though they are clever and hard working, it's not like they're made of a different thing than everyone else.
> He was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes. But he made mistakes in a good direction. I tried to imitate him. But I’ve realized that it’s very difficult to make good mistakes.
I bet if you compared DaVinci's mistakes to the mistakes of your average Renaissance thinker you'd find a striking difference in calliber (and breadth).
The other anecdote concerning Sir Isaac Newton that seems most apt, and it was particularly well dramatized in Neil DeGrasse Tyson's updated Cosmos series, arose when the Royal Society delayed publishing his Principia due to the spectacular failure of their Encyclopedia of Fish the year before! I am not sure which amazes me more: that "natural philosophy" encompasses everything in the cosmos from optics to marine life. Or contemporaneous short-sightedness can imbue one subject with the most paramount economic and social import, whilst viewing the other as nothing more than a mere parlor trick. Only to have the perspective of history upend such dogma centuries later!
Yay! I was going to mention Cosmos but you beat me to it. I certainly appreciated the deep and rich history associated with Newton in particular among others in the fields of math and science. Their lives were often hard and wrought with conflict vs. the powers of their times, which is hugely important.
There are plenty of discoverers who incurred some level of risk and lost in a way that isn't covered up by history. Marie Curie's discovery killed her. Tesla's genius manifested not only in groundbreaking discovery, but also mental illness and isolation. And just ask Elisha Gray about the risks of discovery.
But, yes, history has a survivorship bias. But that's literally one of the oldest observations made. It's often said, "History is written by the victors." What PG is saying is just another version of that age-old observation.
I'm not sure that those lines of study were actually considered separate at the time. A century earlier than Newton's time, math and geometry were considered subfields of astronomy; and astronomy was considered the observation of the realm of the divine. Not only was there not a divide between physics and theology, people actually thought that math was a tool for studying theology (one of Copernicus' sources of income was computing astrology charts for royalty).
I say this to reinforce Paul's statement, "But that's because we know how things turned out." "How things turned out" includes reclassification of what he was working out as belonging to different fields. I suspect that at the time, he didn't consider himself to be moving from one field to another but rather to trying to build upon his previous work.
PG wants to make startups/hackers surpass earth-shattering thinkers, by considering the differences in the existential risks taken by each. Newton was betting (in PG's interpretation) that he would not go crazy or be seen as crazy. The existential risk for thinkers. Now to make scummy => crazy, where "=>" can also mean "greater or equals to".
Usually I see "greater or equals to" written as >=
Anyways, why shouldn't founders/hackers reach for such heights? But if I didn't know Paul Graham's background, I wouldn't assume that's what this essay infers. Rather, the essay doesn't say anything directly about startups.
I had no time to write a full-fledged comment but people here took offense. Shrugs. I meant that the existential risk for founders is that of looking or being scummy. The precise, non-offensive definition of the sense of "scummy" that I intended, which unfortunately does not rhyme with "crazy", is, "profit from information asymmetry". Newton did not clearly "profit" --- though I had almost taken the 3 bets to mean the ones he placed on the South Sea --- even though he had a massive edge. (Pretty much people are arguing about scale here, in my opinion.) I do think PG wants a modern edge over Newton's methods, which concretely means pumping the applied intuitions/phronesis of the SV intellectual elite using software value capture or the VC network. By the way YC do employ heavy-duty "scum filters", e.g. the women interviewers. This is all consistent to the point of being trivial.
Thank you for reading and commenting with good faith and a, as far as I can tell, correct historical frame in mind. As opposed to with some literalist naive and/or hostile, contemporary-navel-gazing nonsense that is completely missing the point of the essay.
It is a filtering, nonsense expurgating mechanism. I have no sympathy for professional researchers. I for my part spent the first twenty three years of activity in a full-time highly demanding extremely stressful profession while studying, researching, and writing my first three books at night; it lowered (in fact, eliminated) my tolerance for fake research.
I wonder if that explains why his first 3 books where so much better than what he has written since....
"If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works at ninety percent. On the other hand, in part because of scientism and academic prostitution, in part because the world is hard, if you read anything by psychologists and behavioral scientists, odds are it works at less than ten percent"
Some of my favorite books of all time were Taleb's, but I have to say, his writing is the perfect demonstration of power law. 10℅ of his content is remarkably insightful and the remaining 90℅ is unadulterated bullshit.
I agree 90% of his insights are worthless, and yet the real insights that remain make reading his books very worthwhile. If I could produce 1 page of genius for every 9 pages of trash I would be ecstatic! Most authors never produce any real lasting insights at all.
The value of contrarians is not in the things they're wrong about, it's in the things they're right about. I'm pretty sure that was also the point of pg's mini essay.
Holy s*, you guys are right. I've been using this phone for three years and never realized that ℅ is not percent. I always just assumed it was a display glitch that caused the "break in the circle".
I have been following his work (and social media discussions) since Black Swan, and it seems to me that the ideas are becoming stronger (to me) with time. The later ideas reinforcing and expanding on earlier themes. For example, Black Swan was about unpredictable and catastrophic risk, later Anti-fragility was about how to deal with risks including Black Swans, his work in progress (Skin in the game) is how to make systems more anti-fragile.
I encountered his ideas (10 years back!) at a time when my default way of thinking was very intuitive instead of systematic and analytical thinking (which many of my high-performing peers had developed over the course of engineering education). Perhaps because of this, I took to his ideas like duck (swan) takes to water. I never acquired a systematic(analytical) thinking approach despite being in academia till mid twenties though I could hack decent academic performances. It was in an engineering profession that I realized the advantage and importance of systematic thinking and tried to consciously develop it.
Strangely, the use of systematic thinking has also actually increased my appreciation of his ideas after a period of wavering doubt. The systematic (analytical) way of thinking is too seductive and it's successes too apparent that it appears far superior to my earlier intuitive way of thinking. However, I am gradually coming to realize that the intuitive way of thinking has a deep logic of it's own which is not visible or may not even be decipherable. It's logic can only be inferred by its effect which ofcourse a critic can also be ascribe to luck!
It is also important to recognize that Newtons time had come. Newton doesn't make those discoveries 1000 years before or after. Our thoughts are placed in time, just as much as this message is in response to the timing of the authors post.
In addition, It's not too infrequent that you'll find another scientist who wrote about the same thing 30 years earlier, or in Newton's case with Leibniz, concurrent.
Rarely do we take a big view of the species, a creature that has been alive and thinking much longer than us, winding its way through time.
Yep, it's a reference to homosapiens. We have been talking to each other for a while now, spreading our knowledge. It's the stories we pass on, logic, math, physics and medicine that predicated inhabiting nearly everywhere and becoming so many. We are on a higher-order mutation now, many thoughts live and die in a generation. The advantageous ones stick around (eg. Newton's). We pass them on from generation to generation. Now we are more connected, and it's moving faster. Stay cool and and enjoy the ride cousin.
Yeah alchemy seem like a completely different field than astronomy today, but at the time it was considered deeply connected - the metals was corresponding to the planets and so on. Because the heavenly order was considered reflected in the earthly materials and vice versa, studying one would lead you to greater understanding of the other.
For a modern viewpoint it might seem like Newton was "hedging his bets" by contributing to several totally different fields, but I don't think it was seen like that at the time. It was all "philosophy".
Other "philosophers" in the early modern period had similar interests. For example Tycho Brahe is remembered as an astronomer with a strong focus on empirical observation, but actually was just as focused on astrology, alchemy and medicine (which was connected to alchemy and astronomy because of the same philosophy).
Ptolemy is likewise revered by astronomers as one of their founding fathers but they conveniently ignore the fact that in astrological circles he occupies a similar position due to his seminal work, the Tetrabiblos. Scientists can become very selective when dealing with alternatives to their world view.
I think you're talking about a different type of mistake than nitrogen is. You seem to be talking about accidental discoveries, or discoveries that were discovered while using mistaken techniques.
When Alexander Fleming discovered that penicillin fought bacteria, he was not mistaken at all. He was spot on- it did kill bacteria. Sure, its discovery may have been caused by a mistake, but what he learned about penicillin was correct, as far as I know.
Ah yes sorry I isolated the point up to cup's comment.
But I'm still sure that there are/will be times when great discoveries are proven to be mistakes. Barring practical ones like penicillin, there has been numerous 'discoveries' proven wrong much later; Newton's colour theory comes to mind, and of course the rather famous its-a-particle-no-a-wave ping pong.
What scientists cannot accept is that there are aspects of human life which are not observable or measurable. Science is good at measuring what is observable but many scientists then make that a foundation for denying, ridiculing or reducing what is not observable. Science then becomes, paradoxically, a religion.
Do you not also see a paradox in claiming to be able to observe the unobservable?
As others have mentioned in the thread, scientists didn't just wake up one day and decide to ignore everything supposedly "unobservable". Science was once intertwined with theology. Over the centuries, the methods we now call science produced results, while other supposed "ways of knowing" did not. Scientific knowledge converges over time, but religion diverges.
The unobservable category includes a lot more than religion. It may be that scientific knowledge converges more easily simply because it limits itself to what is observable or maybe, more accurately, what is mechanistic and observable. Take ghosts, for example. Do they exist? Let's conduct an experiment and take cameras to a supposedly haunted house. The ghosts in question decide to hide from the cameras. See, no ghosts. Told you so. The ghosts meanwhile laugh in background, taking a short break from scaring the inhabitants until the scientists leave.
Here's another question: does decadence exist? The physicist would say that it's a meaningless question; the historian -- or politician -- would be well advised not to listen.
(Barzun, in From Dawn to Decadence, defined a decadent period as one which has an objective which it wants to reach, which it could reach if it made the sort of changes which it has made in the past, and which it fails to reach nonetheless. I forget where I heard it, but there's an idea that there's social technology as well as physical -- and social technology is easier to lose.)
I think a lot of people mistake ghost hunting TV shows for actual science. The SciFi/SyFy channel is a shadow of its former self.
It seems also that you have a very caricatured understanding of scientists.
First of all, a claim of the existence of ghosts requires some evidence that cannot be explained by other, simpler means. The principle of parsimony (AKA Occam's Razor) is important because it works. So for our ghosts, we would need residents' observations of sounds, movement, or other unexpected events. They could keep a log of the time and place of every ghostly occurrence, and demonstrate that no other explanation (thermal expansion causing creaking floorboards, drafts moving the curtains, slightly asymmetrical mounting causing pictures to tilt, blood flow through the retina causing spurious visual patterns in the dark, etc.) explains the observations.
Then you bring in the scientists, and all of the observations cease as if by magic. There are still physical explanations. The scientists' movement may be masking subtler sounds. Their presence may have made the house warmer, so the joints are tighter and creak less. The lights may be on more of the time, so visual patterns caused by misfiring neurons aren't seen.
But even if you rule out all possible simpler explanations, you still have a way of fixing the ghost problem -- just sell the house to a family of scientists, or install cameras and microphones to scare the ghosts away.
--
Responding to the comment by clock_tower, that is the sort of platonic notion of "existence" that science avoids because it doesn't yield results. I'd say science doesn't really deal with "existence" in that sense, but "occurrence". So if you ask, "Does decadence occur?" The answer would quite obviously be yes. Using a more pragmatic definition of existence, you could say that any phenomenon you can define "exists", but you are likely to run into the problem of knowing which definition of a word someone is using.
Thus, I think you also may have a caricatured understanding of scientists, caused in part by the "fun-house mirror" effect from mechanically transliterating scientific jargon into a philosophical context.
This is clearly incorrect since cosmology operates with the distinction between the observable and the unobservable universe. But of course there have to be a reason (based on models which can be verified in observation) to assume the existence of the unobservable.
Science, by definition, makes no statements on way or another about what is unobservable. Some scientists may ridicule the concept, other scientists may revere that which they believe in, but science does not make claims about that entire field, and it wouldn't be improved if it did.
Also worth mentioning that his knowledge of alchemy got him an important job as Master of the Mint, where he worked to eliminate counterfeit coins. (Metallurgy is a branch of alchemy, and the purity of metals a major research area for alchemy.) Perhaps not as earth-shattering as principia, but from a personal perspective his investment in alchemy paid of handsomely.
And in a modern ironic twist, it turns out that the elements are connected to the stars.
Other than hydrogen, some helium, and a very small amount of lithium, all other elements were born of stars, through either normal fusion (helium, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, ...), supernovae (heavier atoms: nickle, iron, ...), and for the heaviest including gold, neutron-star collisions.
No, the models assumed by alchemists weren't right, but the central nugget was pointing in the right direction. And studying the metals does provide insight into the dynamics of stars.
(And yes: on Earth, helium and several other elements are found not formed by stars directly, but through the radioactive decay of heavier elements, though those are of stellar origins.)
Yes, Newton actually wanted to include "classical scholia" in the Principia showing that he was just recovering the occult knowledge of the ancients: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1984HisSc..22....1C
I don't know why he left them out -- I guess he knew it'd be controversial.
Makes you wonder what the "software industry" will look like in 300 years.
Good ideas tend to split & bifurcate, until the original term is considered simply common sense and the parts people care about are individual subfields that were trivial when they started. Recall that "industry" used to refer to anything that was mass-produced in a factory, which, back in the 1820s, basically meant textiles. As the general techniques proved their worth, "industry" split into subfields, such that we got the "oil industry" and "steel industry" and "auto industry" and "aviation industry" and so on.
I think a similar process is happening with software, where the "software industry" is bifurcating into embedded software, social software, payment software, etc, much of it in support of an existing industry; "software is eating the world". I suspect that we're in the very early phases of this. In the early history of the industrial revolution, most industries were ways to produce existing goods (clothing, iron, tobacco, energy) dramatically more efficiently, much like how much software today is embedded in old-line industries' line-of-business apps. But starting around 1900, you started getting industries (electricity, aviation, pharmaceuticals) that were largely unrecognizable compared to their substitutes. You're seeing the very beginning of that now with specifically Internet- and cloud-based industries, but it likely has another century to go.
The comment above yours made me think. If the outline holds, they are about to become even more worlds apart. It's funny to think that our grand children may marvel at how workers of today could move between fields with relative ease which then will be deemed worlds apart. We may all look a bit like renaissance men to them.
Quite so. What we now call natural science was all mixed together with supernatural, occult sciences. The two were separated only as a result of centuries of careful thought, plus the fact that the natural sciences made enormous progress, whereas the occult sciences just kept going around in the same circles.
It goes even deeper than that. At the time at Cambridge there was only one subject to study, called the Tripos, which included all these things. Overtime they've gradually stripped parts of the course into their own separate subjects. The only thing left is mathematics, which leads to a curious ceremony when you graduate with a maths degree which none of the other subjects have. So to Newton Theology and Maths were taught in the same major!
Also worth mentioning is the old universities did not have formal assessments so 100% students graduate with certificate. While this would be a bit woolly in our hyperactive world, I think being able to study without that pressure could significantly loosen up our perceptions of what we can and cannot learn. But since the sum knowledge base acquired by the human race has grown considerably (I know, a total understatement) true polymaths will continue to be rare. But in the first place, no one should be pressured to become one. There is so much content made accessible today that 'tinkerer' IMO is an honourable occupation. It probably needs a more glamorous label though ...
deGrasse's talk on science and theism has interesting remarks on when (and how) the "God in the gaps" appears on Newton's work, shows how back then natural/supernatural was mixed together.
I find it funny that capitalism requires what is essentially an irrational behavior. It seems to me that big public corporations, which avoid risk, and only buy startups once they have been established, are the rational actors. On the other hands, three guys in the garage doing a startup often do it not because they calculate expected profits, but because they want to do it for other than monetary reasons - typically to show that things can be improved and done differently. And so they are willing to take huge, irrational risks.
This is actually on the mark. Evolution doesn't care about individual outcomes, it concerns with survival of the genes, or species.
So even if those guys in the garage act irrationally as individuals, someone has to take those risks, otherwise the society as a whole would be out-competed.
And that's why some people have evolved (not me :-)) to take more risks, at the personal expense.
Startups are not much risk, though. You start out without, you try to make something, if it doesn't work out just having the experience as long as it wasn't a total catastrophe makes you hirable anywhere you want or you try again.
The most you might lose is the support of friends and family if your dreams aren't fully realized. Which can be a lot, but that is why the people who have the most to lose don't try startups.
There is opportunity cost which is working for a big company from the start.
If startups are not risky enough to be irrational to get involved, are you saying then the big companies are acting irrationally when not getting involved?
That's of course a dual view. But it seems to me that the big corporation is more likely the one that calculates the correct expected ROI than the startup in the unknown space..
Of course not, it's hyperbole. Your criticism can be applied to anything [1], because nothing will make someone hireable everywhere.
The point is that if you go through a decent period [2] of running a start-up you will acquire experience and skills that will make you much more attractive for hire compared to yourself without that experience. What's more, the quality of this real world experience will most likely far surpass anything you would gain in a classic university in the same amount of time [3].
--
[1] Depending on how literal we want to be with these word games, there are some tricks that can be done with the "you want" part of the phrase to adjust how much it applies.
[2] Let's say 6 months full-time minimum.
[3] There's no way to give a universal estimate here for everyone. However for people who are capable of self-teaching, the startup experience can be orders of magnitude more useful than university time.
Capitalism don't require irrational behavior. What is needed are things like comparative advantage and economic profit[1]. Someone who has capital has different incentives than someone who whose major offering is labor or expertise.
Newton's studies were motivated by his dislike of farming and need to revenge a bully. He got time for his most productive work because plague closed the University for two years.
----
[1]: if you are not familiar with these terms, look up definitions, because they don't mean what you think they mean.
Do you agree there is a difference in behavior between startups and big companies, though? In the way they are willing to invest into something?
If you agree, then how can you say both act rationally?
Why wouldn't rational people who have labor to offer, instead of joining a startup, go work for a big company? The pay is usually better I hear.
Addendum: I am sure you can explain the difference in behavior by invoking "preferences" or "utility" (which is actually meaningless in humans, cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13276760, but that aside) of monetary rewards; however, that doesn't explain why there is the difference in the first place. If some entities are rational, they should perceive the world the same way and thus have the same preferences.
>If some entities are rational, they should perceive the world the same way and thus have the same preferences.
This is incorrect. Rational economic behavior is sequence of choices that gives the optimal level utility for the actor. Utility function is given and outside rationality.
Different people have different capabilities and resources available to them. Even if they had different utility functions they would behave differently for the reasons I described above.
Surely the optimal way to proceed when faced with betting on a coin toss is to keep your stake and guarantee you walk away with some money.
Now it may be possible to evaluate the utility of engaging in a start-up and so act rationally in entering in to such an endeavour but I'd warrant that's not how it [ever] happens. Instead it's far more realistic to assume it follows the lottery model: that people's sense of hope, or wishful thinking, makes them choose to play [at lottery, or startups] despite the analysis indicating an alternate choice is most logical. We humans are not creatures of logic.
Capitalism is also quite rational - feeding human greed while exploiting the proletariat. Initially, it can be irrational to take some risk, but beyond that, it's clean-cut rationality, and a business must behave rationally (considering rising returns as a consequence of rational conduct) or be out-competed or fail.
Depends, is non-monetary benefit rational? Doing something that risks your food/shelter/comfort/family without guaranteed material return is probably always irrational; doing something for the thrill, or out of love, for friendship, to have the experience, etc.. All ultimately irrational wastes of energy.
There is no rational reason for you to live, you can - and hopefully do - want to, but that's not rationality. That's irrational humanity, or based on irrational axioms.
How's taking a calculated risk an irrational behavior? By your definition rational behavior would require perfect knowledge about the future, a goal forever beyond those of us mere mortals.
Calling his study of theology and alchemy "crazy" seems a bit short sighted. Newtons intense devotion to understanding the scriptures was likely what allowed him to make so much progress in science. Since God saw what a devoted student he was, chose to reward him in that manner of scientific enlightenment. The study of scripture was primary, his science, secondary.
Except that that fails to account for the many devout believers who tried and failed for such enlightenment, or the fact that others have reached great scientific and mathematical heights without being devout students.
Also, having read a fair bit about his life, his scientific and mathematical endeavours were most definitely not secondary to anything.
It's amusing that he uses a modern chauvinism ("making a bet") in this way, while noting that some of Newton's "bets" were only "wasteful" (risky, bad, whatever) when viewed through the lense of modern knowledge.
He has a good point, put poorly, and without good support in his chosen example.
What do you mean by calling the phrase "making a bet" a chauvinism? It just seems like a figure of speech. Gambling has existed for a very long time.
(I don't mean to disagree or agree with you, just genuinely don't know what you mean, might end up going either way after you explain your cryptic (to me) remark)
In this context it imposes a modern view of "opportunity cost" that would simply not have occurred to Newton or any of his contemporaries. It's just too far back in history to really be useful as a support for his argument, especially given the convoluted and mixed approach used.
I think you have a point here. Newton seems to have been encouraged in his mathematical/physical pursuits by several people early in his career, when he was studying and, later, a young professor at Cambridge.
This kind of slow work and accumulating recognition (by a series of Cambridge alums up through the Lucasian professor at the time, throughout 1661 to 1672) is not really well-described as a "bet".
But... isn't it true that at Newton's theology was at the foundation of his physics? The idea of a single deity whose intelligence crafted a rational world, the laws of which it is man's duty to uncover, is certainly not incidental to his discoveries.
I've been saying this for years: science is far too conservative, dogmatic, and risk-averse.
The reality is that genius minds are intellectually fearless. Newton was into alchemy and fringe theology. Edison tried to build a machine to contact the dead. Many of the great minds of the 60s who at least envisioned everything you're using now were into all kinds of "crazy" stuff: parapsychology, psychedelic consciousness expansion, shamanism, etc.
Was some of that stuff silly? Sure. Was some or even most of it a dead end? Sure. But that's not the point. The point is that great minds fear no idea.
Wait, I thought alchemy and theology were pretty mainstream back then? How was it risky? Just because they turned out to be wrong, I don't think it was crazy for someone to be studying these things back then. Seems like a modern example would be someone studying something like string theory or dark matter and later we discover these things are wrong... but there is no reason to think that today.
While I appreciate what you are saying, I think the type of risk pg was talking about was the risk of wasting his time/career, not the risk to his life. The more I think about it, I think a good modern example may turn out to be someone studying AI (specifically AGI). If it turns out to be possible, and you succeed, it would be huge. If it turns out to be not possible, you would have wasted your career. So maybe the lesson is to do more than one thing.
Newton had an epic insight into combinatorics. The calculus work he did during the university quarantine shutdown is great to page through. I wonder how much farther Newton, Gauss, Euler, and Erdos would have gotten if they knew how to code.
I don't think that studing chemistry (I like to think about alchemy as a precursor of chemistry) or theology should be stigmatized. I understand that it was just an example to support the core idea of the article, but it still leaves a bad taste.
You cannot study what -by definition- it's impossible to observe or measure directly or indirectly. Believing in God it's an act of faith, you cannot KNOW nothing.
So yes, in modern times, theology and alchemy has the same scientific value: none
Scientific value != value. I view theology as a study of how humans characterize their relationship to that which is beyond logic: god, infinity, existence, whatever. To me, this study has individual and collective value even in modern times, despite the fact that it has no scientific value.
"You cannot study what -by definition- it's impossible to observe or measure directly or indirectly"
You're limiting knowledge to the hard sciences.
That kind of thinking is not scientific, but merely Scientism.
You're also ruling out many scientific domains, e.g. history which operates according to the historical method.
Theology (in the original Christian sense of the word) stands on the historical method. It's interested primarily in those historical events from which we can learn about God. If Jesus is not historical, if God has not acted in history, then there's nothing to know about God, and there's no such thing as Theology.
History is studied through indirect measurements - written accounts, archaeology, oral history. All reasonable scientific routes. As allowed by the OP?
But that is different to the "observe", "measure", rinse-and-repeat methodology which is commonly understood as the scientific method.
The methods by which one studies physics and history are different, but history is no less scientific, and it falls within the sciences, as does theology since it depends on the historical method.
Theology cannot argue or learn anything about God for which there is no historical basis.
Do you know of any unambiguous breakthroughs in understanding that have come out of academic theology in the past, say, 200 years? By "unambiguous" I mean "accepted by the majority of other academic theologians."
I have nothing against theology as a hobby or religious pursuit, but at some point we have to say "the well is dry" and admit that there is no grounds for spending public funds on it. Specifically: the only payback we can expect lies in the student's personal religious experience.
I don't think they should be stigmatized, but I also don't think that was really what pg meant to do. How much was Newton able to contribute to theology and chemistry, compared to how much he contributed to physics?
Sure, maybe he just worked less hard on theology+chemistry, or he wasn't good at those topics, but what seems more likely is that there were no useful discoveries to be made there at the time given the tools + world context Newton had.
What exactly was Newton risking? An entrepreneur who quits her job and takes out a mortgage to start a business is risking her livelihood. If she fails, she and her family could end up on the street. Newton came from a wealthy family. If he failed in his intellectual endeavors the "risk" for him was to live out his life as an ordinary rich person and only ending up in the more obscure history books.
I think Fredrick Smith (founder of Fedex) is a much better example of someone taking an entrepreneurial and intellectual risk.
I may be mis-understanding the authors intent, but I don't see him as saying that Newton risked wealth or comfort, rather that he risked time-spent on fruitful endeavors.
Newton's theology was extremely heretical (to all major religious factions, as he was an anti-Trinitarian!) at a time when religious politics in England were brutal and could easily be fatal; being expelled from Cambridge for violating the religion oaths/tests would've only been the start. And, incidentally, alchemy was, besides being highly disreputable & associated with con artists, illegal in England for centuries before and for most of Newton's career: punishable by death and then confiscation of the deceased's estate (Levere, _Transforming Matter: A History of Chemistry from Alchemy to the Buckyball_). So if the full extent of Newton's activities & beliefs had been known, he could have lost his good name, job, life, and any family wealth.
Good points. His position must have been tenuous anyway as it was a requirement of Cambridge that all Fellows become ordained Anglican priests. Newton only avoided this by special exemption from Charles II and it is not likely that he could afford to be exposed as breaking other regulations. Maybe this is part of the reason he was so reluctant to publish, he may have wondered if his physical reasoning could be construed as somehow against the prevailing religious beliefs of the time, especially when you see the approbation Newton's intellectual predecessor Galileo suffered for his new physics.
But you are actually making my point for me. Opportunity cost is a vacuous argument. Everything you do has an opportunity cost. That's not a risk, it's just a consequence of the laws of physics.
Maybe publishing would have counted as taking a risk for the reasons you cite, but Newton resisted publishing for a very long time, so he was actually avoiding that risk. So once again it really seems to me that Newton is not a good example of the merits of taking risks. (Quite the contrary in fact.)
Newton's family was not well off. His father, a yeoman, died before he was born, his mother remarried a reverend, who also died before Newton came of age. His mother wanted him to be a farmer, which is not lucrative unless you have huge tracts of land(which he did not).
When he was first admitted to Trinity, he was a subsizar - that is, he had to perform valet duties in order to pay for his education. He only stopped doing those duties when he was awarded a scholarship.
An addendum to this: Many of the greatest unconventional thinkers of our time are similar to Newton in that they are right about one non-consensus thing and wrong about lots of others.
Some of those people become fantastically rich as a result of the one right thing.
Just because someone is wildly successful and right about one non-consensus bet, doesn't mean they aren't wrong about most of their other beliefs.
The occasional out-of-the-mainstream idea is a revolution, but the vast majority are just nutty and wrong.
Plus there is the Newton Project, http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/prism.php?id=1. One time I looked his alchemy writings were in a code that he had concocted. I recall he had astronomical (astrological) terms for chemicals. Maybe, that ties in with what someone else wrote above about there being a belief at the time that things on earth reflected what was in the heavens.
For people who wonder why YC and pg are okay with some of Peter Thiel's more extreme behavior, this is why.
It's pretty interesting that pg describes the possible outcomes of contrarian ideas as either positive for society or merely a waste of time. Even though the pursuit of risky and contrarian ideas can also be hugely harmful for society.
Peter Thiel isn't a regular guy with an imaginative twitter stream. He's an influential and highly connected billionaire. This has nothing to do with free speech.
Really, whatever you think about Thiel -- the decision of whether to maintain a high-profile business relationship with someone -- or chose not to, for whatever reason -- has nothing -- whatsoever -- do with "free speech" rights, in the usual sense.
There was a good discussion related to this yesterday on Dr. Michael Burry. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13374573 Interesting discussions about reasonable risks, even when we know in hindsight that the outcomes were good.
Interesting discussion, although I disagree with the conclusion.
I don't think betting the house on a single event is "insane". Businesses make these all-in bets all the time and we're fine with it. Every Hollywood blockbuster is also a billion dollar all-in bet, but nobody bats an eye at that either. Individuals bet a huge percentage of their net worth when they buy a house. Yet when a person invests a large amount of their net worth in a single stock it's suddenly irresponsible? Hogwash.
The way we perceive risk in society is extraordinarily polarized. Some moderately risky behavior is considered normal, and other moderately risky behavior is deemed "insane". I don't think there is any rhyme or reason to it; just a matter of arbitrary cultural norms.
It's not necessarily as arbitrary as you're making it out. For businesses, the cost of failure is low and the potential upside is enormous. As a result, risk-seeking behavior makes sense, and people generally respect that. For humans, the cost of failure is very high, and the upside is only the productivity of one 2 meter bag of flesh with a brain inside. Taking existential risks as a human is foolish for reasons that do not apply to businesses.
I'm not sure what to make of your response. Texting while driving, or simply driving inattentively, is an existential risk. Investing aggressively on the stock market is not. Yet one thing is considered normal, while the other thing is considered reckless. Businesses tend to take too many risks. After all, decisions are made with other people's money, and there are career benefits to taking a risk that works out but there is hardly a penalty for squandering the company's money. Individuals tend to to take the wrong kind of risks: too careless about getting seriously injured and too timid about financial and career risks.
I'm not claiming that all risks by society are judged incorrectly, just that it happens frequently enough that much is to be gained by being really skeptical towards the consensus views on risk.
pg has no reason to fear for the impact of "contrarian ideas" like fascism. His person is secure for life. Nobody has threatened his way of life, and he knows nobody can credibly threaten his way of life.
Lost lives may be merely wasted time if you take a maximally macro view of humanity. That detachment is likely comforting if you can pull it off. Me, personally though... I'm a social human being and I care about - even love - other human beings, and their lives represent far more to me than that.
For people who wonder why YC and pg are okay with some of Peter Thiel's more extreme behavior, this is why.
For his "weird" behavior, yeah, probably.
For some of his "other" behavior -- his support for Trump, generally; and his (very recent, and very disturbing) attemps to soft-peddle, and normalize sexual violence -- more likely it's because they lack awareness of some basic political history.
It mostly refers to a discussion -- now flagged, though there's no reason it should be, as it's perfectly within HN's community guidelines -- about an interview he had in the NYT recently ("Peter Thiel, Trump's Tech Pal, explains himself", or some variant thereof) in which he definitely soft-peddles, and attempts to district attention from the famous Billy Bush tape, in which the Grabber-in-Chief-Elect says, well, you know what:
That's what I mean by "normalizing" -- "it's no big deal, what are all these people so uptight about?" -- that whole line.
As for "basic awareness of political history", I'm referring of course to events in the 1920s and early 1930s. With respect to which it is, in my view, really, really hard not to see close parallels (despite certain differences) with the current situation. Unless, that is, one spent one's formative intellectual years going out of one's way to not become aware of certain things.
Or maybe its because Thiel is a useful person to associate with and enough money is on the line that pg's claim that he'd be the "first to bring about the resistance" doesn't apply because Thiel, like Andreessen, is too important to be stood up to.
I've lot so much respect for YC wrt Thiel. Trump is such an obvious villain that if you're not against him you're an enabler. I don't care that he's become normalized in the American and Russian press the rest of the world is laughing at the USA and crying inside. We're slowly finding out which people are actually committed to their ideals and which are just interested in being more powerful, even if it comes at the cost of allowing a total maniac to the nuclear throne.
About 23%, actually. Roughly half the country didn't vote, or they did but their votes weren't counted because of voter suppression laws largely passed by Republicans.
I respect the 28% of voting age America that voted for HRC. I also have respect for the people that voted Stein or Johnson in non-battleground states. Call it 30%. But as a Canadian who's been to America dozens of times over the years I've slowly lost respect for the GOP and Trump was the final nail in the coffin. 90% of the GOP is evil or brainwashed. The other 10% that I still have a small modicum of respect for includes people like Kasich.
So I respect about a third of American electorate. The third that didn't vote I don't respect. The third that voted for Trump I don't respect.
As for America the country, I respect most of the intelligent people working at the State Department and the CIA that I truly believe are working towards a peaceful more prosperous world, though I admit that their history is much more checkered (waterboarding, etc) than their counterparts in Germany, but they've done good work basically everywhere outside of the Middle East. Tough area to play right though, lobbyists, Israel, Turkey, multiple religious factions, critical market for the economy / national security.
But all their work is jeopardized by this horrible demagogue and enough of America either stayed home or voted for him. A man that bragged about sexual assault and swindled the poor for their student loan money and chanted "lock her up" to crowds of tens of thousands. We're laughing at America in the morning, but we're crying at night.
He's a villain to you because you have different ideals. To many, he is a figurative Bruce Wayne in the Gotham City of corruption that is D.C. Any man who "is with her" either has a confused sense of allegiance to the USA or needs a shot of testosterone.
If what you say is true then pg's essay is deliberately deceptive, and pg is deliberately holding Thiel to a different standard. Although possible, I think it's much more likely that pg is sincere in his convictions. Regardless, I find Thiel's vision for America as reprehensible as you do.
By definition contrarian ideas are pretty harmless, since pursuing an idea in a society that disagrees with you is like pushing a boulder up a hill. The results are also very hard to predict - sometimes you think about the weird behaviour of light and set the stage for the atomic bomb, and other times you start out making explosives for Nazi Germany and end up feeding the third world. Finally, they can be the product of their environment as much as a single intellect, as with Newton/Leibniz. For those reasons, which make genuinely contrarian ideas unpredictable and unstoppable, I think trying to prevent them is a bit of a red herring.
Peter Thiel isn't like Haber or Einstein, because most of his potentially dangerous ideas are only contrarian in our little bubble. When he challenges democracy, he's on the side of millennia of kings and queens and emperors and chieftains, as well as everyone who has ever said "if I were king for a day..."; when he manages to be the highest profile Trump supporter in the tech world, he is backed by nearly half the voters in America; when he says that a monopoly is exactly what a company should aim for, a great many CEOs and HN readers privately nod. His genuinely contrarian ideas aren't frightening, they're considered laughable, which is why the media mocks him so much for seasteading and "vampirism".
The most valuable thing we have is time. Unless you are born rich or wealthy time is sustenance and living money. The tradeoffs and risks involved for those born rich and those who have to work for a living are world's apart.
In the era Newton came from you would have to be wealthy to be able to afford other interests beyond surviving. So a lot of the big leaps were made by those from rich families or those lucky enough to have some sort of wealthy backer.
Plus certain things like education, family, kids are attached to specific timelines in a typical life. Health and the ability to do things are also attached to timelines. When you take a risk you could be putting all of those on line.
The ability to expend time with no certainty of returns is a luxury only those from a wealthy background have. And naturally they will be more successfuly as there are more efforts from people of those backgrounds.
Newtons dabbling in Alchemy made him very sick, so there was definitely a risk there. He also invested and lost his life savings in a speculative stock bubble. The bet that really paid off financially was his occult connections that got him a job as warden of the royal mint where his currency manipulation lead to an increase in demand for coins and made him a huge personal fortune. At least that's what I heard. Happy to be corrected.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadThis essay has a great core insight, and I get you don't need more words to say it, but I still miss the longer ones
I found the book super interesting in terms of explaining how innovations happen and how we talk about them in retrospect. Although it is about science, I think a lot of the thinking would apply to programming innovations too. And unlike most blog posts, there is actually some serious sociological research behind it :-).
It can't be understated how painful that has to be from their perspective.
I suppose a similar story is where they do produce something of value, but it's incremental in nature. Incremental advancements usually don't receive much recognition.
Why? Somebody can play videogames all day, because it's fun, and then die all of sudden. They didn't produce anything valuable, and yet, they didn't feel bad about it.
It's only painful if you rethink it, and basically say, I should have spent my time doing something else. Which is a paradox of choice.
The motivation for most people when they pursue something is to succeed, and their efforts to have mattered.
Is this really the motivation for anyone?
https://www.engadget.com/2016/12/26/apple-publishes-first-ai...
> AI is an increasingly competitive field, and Apple's past reluctance to contribute to scientific knowledge may have scared away potential hires who wanted their discoveries recognized. If papers like these become relatively commonplace, Apple might have an easier time attracting the talent it needs for self-driving car platforms, Siri and other AI-based projects.
You can do that in physics and natural philosophy too. What's your point? There are plenty of theologians. This idea that the only noble pursuit is scientific, which PG seems to be saying in this essay from my reading, and in fact other commenters, is borderline scientism.
Why would theology have been a bad thing to pursue, other than some sense of satisfaction you don't even get from people remembering you after you are dead?
Have a broad and well-rounded view tends to help. I don't know a good mathematician who doesn't read, write, play music, explore other fields with passion and vigor. You get fresh ideas and it keeps your mind limber and flexible.
I'm not sure you could say a Newton who knew nothing but physics and physics only would have made the same breakthroughs.
Not trying to be dense here, I just don't see the insight. How is what you are saying any different than "you don't know what's going to happen" without Newton attached to it?
For sake of argument, let's say Newton's reward was the advancement of human knowledge. He made some high-risk bets that didn't pay off (alchemy, theology), and some that did (physics, calculus).
All PG is saying is that when we look at famous historical figures, after centuries of deification, we tend to focus only on the bets that paid off, and ignore all the failures. But those failures are crucially important to who these figures were as people, and it does them (and ourselves) a disservice to only focus on the successes.
Newton didn't investigate alchemy and theology because he was trying to diversify his fame investment portfolio. To see him this way is to do a disservice to him and to history.
That's a blaming statement used to indicate someone is being pedantic, which can then be used to "prove" them wrong by the followup. All of your counter examples are based on the obtaining a better position, which is all about dealing with globalized suffering (money is stored work and work is a unit of causality and suffering is a result of causality).
Newton presumably pursued understanding the unknown, which means he chose his own suffering/work that was different from any objective based on making bets to get ahead in life at the time.
I think it's entirely fair to point out that Newton wasn't betting at the time. He was discovering purely for the sake of discovery.
When you attempt to state someone is "stuck on semantics" and that person actually hasn't said as much, you are speaking for their intent. When that is backed up with the intent of proving them wrong on some topic, it only serves to indicate intent. The older I get, the more irritating this behavior becomes, especially when the person refuses to acknowledge what is being said and continues to rationalize from their point of view in order to frame a statement by someone else. You act as if language (and semantics) are logical. They aren't, and neither are humans. We'd do well to stop speaking for each other in aggregate in an attempt to make it more logical. This concept itself is counterintuitive.
Newton had every choice to pursue interests. Not having prior knowledge of "areas of discovery", it would appear he pursued what was interesting to him. If you look at Faraday, he pursued things to find a single source force - I would expect Newton though along the same lines. In fact, even if he knew someone else was interested in an "area of discovery", he could have just been interested in that topic for purely knowing purposes.
Wanting to know more about things, the nature of things if you will, is not something that can be considered a "bet". It's simply curiosity.
(0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Isaac_Newton
Edit: WOW, after reading the commentary on the poem, I never realized how wrong I was. The poem is a joke, he's saying it didn't really matter which path he took. All these years I took it so seriously, which apparently is a common mistake dating back to the very first time the poem was read in front of an audience.
[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poe...
Edit: I just ran the quote through Google Translate. Still, merely casting God as being ultimately responsible is a step forward from interweaving theology throughout your physical theories.
http://inters.org/Newton-Scholium-Principia-Mathematica
"This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all: And on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God Pantokrator,or Universal Ruler...." and, like, this stuff is all over the place in the Principia. You cannot separate Newton the theologian from Newton the mathematician from Newton the physicist.
Expending resources, whether time or money, on something with an uncertain outcome is a bet. I'm not sure what the objection is to using that term. Nobody said Newton was a Silicon Valley VC.
If you think alchemy might have promise, go and study it! You'll be taking a risk, but it might just change the world (and put you in the history books).
Except it was three:
- Optics
- Gravitation and mechanics
- Mathematics
There are many scientists out there who spend a lifetime on theories that turn out to be bogus, but calling it a bet is entirely missing the point.
Maybe he's referring to the bets Newton (somewhat implicitly) made by dedicating time to physics/science as well as alchemy and theology.
These are not really bets, it's all what Newton was, a man's passion, life and legacy.
These people live for research. They can work on anything (because interests them) and no matter if it has earth shattering consequences or small breaks they can still be happy during the process, so calling it risky or dangerous is laughable.
I was completely unprepared for what was my primary reaction: that DaVinci just documented every idea in his head, and that some of them just happened to pan out. But for some reason, we credit him for the small percentage of ideas that just happened to work, and ignore all the wrong ideas. To me, he didn't seem like a genius, he seemed very much like a broken clock that just happened to be right twice a day.
There's a certain survivor bias in these sorts of discussions, where we identify great contributors as taking huge risks, and so forth and so on. This is true, but we also maybe tend to give them too much credit because we ignore all their failures. We tell ourselves that's why perseverence is so important, but then turn around and make fun of people or even become angry at them for wasting our time when so many things don't turn out. The difference between perseverence and shotgun approaches to pursuing knowledge seems arbitrary to me lots of times.
If you followed every one of DaVinci's ideas, for example, you'd be screwed, because he was so wrong about so many things. Today, he'd probably be seen as a crackpot because it would be so difficult to know when his idea was right and when it was wrong. The value of his ideas lies as much in his audience, the people who realized what of his ideas was correct, as much as, if not more, than in DaVinci himself.
I guess I've grown really disillusioned with advancements in science, because so much of it involves a sort of mythmaking that seems fairy-tale to me. To me, the reality seems more distributed, involving small contributions, gradually changing over time, with a lot of randomness involved.
I don't mean to come across as saying we shouldn't encourage experimentation and tinkering, or that it shouldn't be valued. In fact, I'd argue the opposite. But at the same time something seems off about our incentive structures--the way we give credit seems off.
Think of it this way: we do science because at some level, what's correct and what's not is an empirical idea. You could have 10 very reasonable explanations and 9 of them will be wrong "just because." In many cases, being intelligent has nothing to do with why the 9 are wrong, otherwise all we'd need would be philosophy and math. So why do we pretend that the 1 person who was correct was correct because they are a genius? It seems like you can't have geniuses and a need for science at the same time.
Re: DaVinci, do you think it's possible that he knew most of his ideas were bad? I write down every product idea I have, but I know that maybe 1 in 10 would actually be used by people and maybe 1 in 10 of the useful ones would be good investments of my time to work on. I think that writing down all the bad ideas helps me think of good ideas though.
Re: Scientific geniuses are admired too much, I think you're right. The Media totally picks out the success stories because that's what interests people. Then The Media is incentivized to make these successful scientists seem really smart, also because that's what interests people. Sam Altman has talked about a similar thing. When you meet the Brian Chesky's and Mark Zuckerbergs today, you see brilliant, confident entrepreneurs that seem like geniuses that must have some special DNA. However, the reality is that 10 years ago these people seemed totally regular, just struggling entrepreneurs like so many others. Though they are clever and hard working, it's not like they're made of a different thing than everyone else.
> He was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes. But he made mistakes in a good direction. I tried to imitate him. But I’ve realized that it’s very difficult to make good mistakes.
I bet if you compared DaVinci's mistakes to the mistakes of your average Renaissance thinker you'd find a striking difference in calliber (and breadth).
But, yes, history has a survivorship bias. But that's literally one of the oldest observations made. It's often said, "History is written by the victors." What PG is saying is just another version of that age-old observation.
I say this to reinforce Paul's statement, "But that's because we know how things turned out." "How things turned out" includes reclassification of what he was working out as belonging to different fields. I suspect that at the time, he didn't consider himself to be moving from one field to another but rather to trying to build upon his previous work.
Anyways, why shouldn't founders/hackers reach for such heights? But if I didn't know Paul Graham's background, I wouldn't assume that's what this essay infers. Rather, the essay doesn't say anything directly about startups.
I'm curious what's scummy about them to you?
For more thinking in a similar direction, see Nassim Taleb's excerpt on the Lindy effect (https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146e...), where he elaborates on the connection between risk and survival of ideas.
I wonder if that explains why his first 3 books where so much better than what he has written since....
Some of my favorite books of all time were Taleb's, but I have to say, his writing is the perfect demonstration of power law. 10℅ of his content is remarkably insightful and the remaining 90℅ is unadulterated bullshit.
The value of contrarians is not in the things they're wrong about, it's in the things they're right about. I'm pretty sure that was also the point of pg's mini essay.
I encountered his ideas (10 years back!) at a time when my default way of thinking was very intuitive instead of systematic and analytical thinking (which many of my high-performing peers had developed over the course of engineering education). Perhaps because of this, I took to his ideas like duck (swan) takes to water. I never acquired a systematic(analytical) thinking approach despite being in academia till mid twenties though I could hack decent academic performances. It was in an engineering profession that I realized the advantage and importance of systematic thinking and tried to consciously develop it.
Strangely, the use of systematic thinking has also actually increased my appreciation of his ideas after a period of wavering doubt. The systematic (analytical) way of thinking is too seductive and it's successes too apparent that it appears far superior to my earlier intuitive way of thinking. However, I am gradually coming to realize that the intuitive way of thinking has a deep logic of it's own which is not visible or may not even be decipherable. It's logic can only be inferred by its effect which ofcourse a critic can also be ascribe to luck!
In addition, It's not too infrequent that you'll find another scientist who wrote about the same thing 30 years earlier, or in Newton's case with Leibniz, concurrent.
Rarely do we take a big view of the species, a creature that has been alive and thinking much longer than us, winding its way through time.
For a modern viewpoint it might seem like Newton was "hedging his bets" by contributing to several totally different fields, but I don't think it was seen like that at the time. It was all "philosophy".
Other "philosophers" in the early modern period had similar interests. For example Tycho Brahe is remembered as an astronomer with a strong focus on empirical observation, but actually was just as focused on astrology, alchemy and medicine (which was connected to alchemy and astronomy because of the same philosophy).
Newton was a "renaissance man".
No, they just remember people for their contributions rather than their mistakes.
Could you give a few examples?
When Alexander Fleming discovered that penicillin fought bacteria, he was not mistaken at all. He was spot on- it did kill bacteria. Sure, its discovery may have been caused by a mistake, but what he learned about penicillin was correct, as far as I know.
But I'm still sure that there are/will be times when great discoveries are proven to be mistakes. Barring practical ones like penicillin, there has been numerous 'discoveries' proven wrong much later; Newton's colour theory comes to mind, and of course the rather famous its-a-particle-no-a-wave ping pong.
As others have mentioned in the thread, scientists didn't just wake up one day and decide to ignore everything supposedly "unobservable". Science was once intertwined with theology. Over the centuries, the methods we now call science produced results, while other supposed "ways of knowing" did not. Scientific knowledge converges over time, but religion diverges.
(Barzun, in From Dawn to Decadence, defined a decadent period as one which has an objective which it wants to reach, which it could reach if it made the sort of changes which it has made in the past, and which it fails to reach nonetheless. I forget where I heard it, but there's an idea that there's social technology as well as physical -- and social technology is easier to lose.)
It seems also that you have a very caricatured understanding of scientists.
First of all, a claim of the existence of ghosts requires some evidence that cannot be explained by other, simpler means. The principle of parsimony (AKA Occam's Razor) is important because it works. So for our ghosts, we would need residents' observations of sounds, movement, or other unexpected events. They could keep a log of the time and place of every ghostly occurrence, and demonstrate that no other explanation (thermal expansion causing creaking floorboards, drafts moving the curtains, slightly asymmetrical mounting causing pictures to tilt, blood flow through the retina causing spurious visual patterns in the dark, etc.) explains the observations.
Then you bring in the scientists, and all of the observations cease as if by magic. There are still physical explanations. The scientists' movement may be masking subtler sounds. Their presence may have made the house warmer, so the joints are tighter and creak less. The lights may be on more of the time, so visual patterns caused by misfiring neurons aren't seen.
But even if you rule out all possible simpler explanations, you still have a way of fixing the ghost problem -- just sell the house to a family of scientists, or install cameras and microphones to scare the ghosts away.
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Responding to the comment by clock_tower, that is the sort of platonic notion of "existence" that science avoids because it doesn't yield results. I'd say science doesn't really deal with "existence" in that sense, but "occurrence". So if you ask, "Does decadence occur?" The answer would quite obviously be yes. Using a more pragmatic definition of existence, you could say that any phenomenon you can define "exists", but you are likely to run into the problem of knowing which definition of a word someone is using.
Thus, I think you also may have a caricatured understanding of scientists, caused in part by the "fun-house mirror" effect from mechanically transliterating scientific jargon into a philosophical context.
Other than hydrogen, some helium, and a very small amount of lithium, all other elements were born of stars, through either normal fusion (helium, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, ...), supernovae (heavier atoms: nickle, iron, ...), and for the heaviest including gold, neutron-star collisions.
No, the models assumed by alchemists weren't right, but the central nugget was pointing in the right direction. And studying the metals does provide insight into the dynamics of stars.
(And yes: on Earth, helium and several other elements are found not formed by stars directly, but through the radioactive decay of heavier elements, though those are of stellar origins.)
I don't know why he left them out -- I guess he knew it'd be controversial.
Good ideas tend to split & bifurcate, until the original term is considered simply common sense and the parts people care about are individual subfields that were trivial when they started. Recall that "industry" used to refer to anything that was mass-produced in a factory, which, back in the 1820s, basically meant textiles. As the general techniques proved their worth, "industry" split into subfields, such that we got the "oil industry" and "steel industry" and "auto industry" and "aviation industry" and so on.
I think a similar process is happening with software, where the "software industry" is bifurcating into embedded software, social software, payment software, etc, much of it in support of an existing industry; "software is eating the world". I suspect that we're in the very early phases of this. In the early history of the industrial revolution, most industries were ways to produce existing goods (clothing, iron, tobacco, energy) dramatically more efficiently, much like how much software today is embedded in old-line industries' line-of-business apps. But starting around 1900, you started getting industries (electricity, aviation, pharmaceuticals) that were largely unrecognizable compared to their substitutes. You're seeing the very beginning of that now with specifically Internet- and cloud-based industries, but it likely has another century to go.
This is the kind of thoughtful comment I come here for - it's given me some ideas to go research on my own.
https://youtu.be/N7rR8stuQfk?t=8m44s
So even if those guys in the garage act irrationally as individuals, someone has to take those risks, otherwise the society as a whole would be out-competed.
And that's why some people have evolved (not me :-)) to take more risks, at the personal expense.
The most you might lose is the support of friends and family if your dreams aren't fully realized. Which can be a lot, but that is why the people who have the most to lose don't try startups.
If startups are not risky enough to be irrational to get involved, are you saying then the big companies are acting irrationally when not getting involved?
That's of course a dual view. But it seems to me that the big corporation is more likely the one that calculates the correct expected ROI than the startup in the unknown space..
The point is that if you go through a decent period [2] of running a start-up you will acquire experience and skills that will make you much more attractive for hire compared to yourself without that experience. What's more, the quality of this real world experience will most likely far surpass anything you would gain in a classic university in the same amount of time [3].
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[1] Depending on how literal we want to be with these word games, there are some tricks that can be done with the "you want" part of the phrase to adjust how much it applies.
[2] Let's say 6 months full-time minimum.
[3] There's no way to give a universal estimate here for everyone. However for people who are capable of self-teaching, the startup experience can be orders of magnitude more useful than university time.
Newton's studies were motivated by his dislike of farming and need to revenge a bully. He got time for his most productive work because plague closed the University for two years.
----
[1]: if you are not familiar with these terms, look up definitions, because they don't mean what you think they mean.
If you agree, then how can you say both act rationally?
Why wouldn't rational people who have labor to offer, instead of joining a startup, go work for a big company? The pay is usually better I hear.
Addendum: I am sure you can explain the difference in behavior by invoking "preferences" or "utility" (which is actually meaningless in humans, cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13276760, but that aside) of monetary rewards; however, that doesn't explain why there is the difference in the first place. If some entities are rational, they should perceive the world the same way and thus have the same preferences.
>If some entities are rational, they should perceive the world the same way and thus have the same preferences.
This is incorrect. Rational economic behavior is sequence of choices that gives the optimal level utility for the actor. Utility function is given and outside rationality.
Different people have different capabilities and resources available to them. Even if they had different utility functions they would behave differently for the reasons I described above.
Why should there be only 1 optimal way to play this game?
Example of a game with 2 optimal ways to play - tossing a coin and betting on head or tail.
Now it may be possible to evaluate the utility of engaging in a start-up and so act rationally in entering in to such an endeavour but I'd warrant that's not how it [ever] happens. Instead it's far more realistic to assume it follows the lottery model: that people's sense of hope, or wishful thinking, makes them choose to play [at lottery, or startups] despite the analysis indicating an alternate choice is most logical. We humans are not creatures of logic.
There is no rational reason for you to live, you can - and hopefully do - want to, but that's not rationality. That's irrational humanity, or based on irrational axioms.
Also, having read a fair bit about his life, his scientific and mathematical endeavours were most definitely not secondary to anything.
He has a good point, put poorly, and without good support in his chosen example.
(I don't mean to disagree or agree with you, just genuinely don't know what you mean, might end up going either way after you explain your cryptic (to me) remark)
This kind of slow work and accumulating recognition (by a series of Cambridge alums up through the Lucasian professor at the time, throughout 1661 to 1672) is not really well-described as a "bet".
The reality is that genius minds are intellectually fearless. Newton was into alchemy and fringe theology. Edison tried to build a machine to contact the dead. Many of the great minds of the 60s who at least envisioned everything you're using now were into all kinds of "crazy" stuff: parapsychology, psychedelic consciousness expansion, shamanism, etc.
Was some of that stuff silly? Sure. Was some or even most of it a dead end? Sure. But that's not the point. The point is that great minds fear no idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSolPNn0G7M
His theological conclusions would have been considered heresy. The penalty for heresy was the loss of all property and status and, sometimes, death.
He was indeed taking a serious risk in studying these things.
So yes, in modern times, theology and alchemy has the same scientific value: none
You're limiting knowledge to the hard sciences.
That kind of thinking is not scientific, but merely Scientism.
You're also ruling out many scientific domains, e.g. history which operates according to the historical method.
Theology (in the original Christian sense of the word) stands on the historical method. It's interested primarily in those historical events from which we can learn about God. If Jesus is not historical, if God has not acted in history, then there's nothing to know about God, and there's no such thing as Theology.
But that is different to the "observe", "measure", rinse-and-repeat methodology which is commonly understood as the scientific method.
The methods by which one studies physics and history are different, but history is no less scientific, and it falls within the sciences, as does theology since it depends on the historical method.
Theology cannot argue or learn anything about God for which there is no historical basis.
I have nothing against theology as a hobby or religious pursuit, but at some point we have to say "the well is dry" and admit that there is no grounds for spending public funds on it. Specifically: the only payback we can expect lies in the student's personal religious experience.
Sure, maybe he just worked less hard on theology+chemistry, or he wasn't good at those topics, but what seems more likely is that there were no useful discoveries to be made there at the time given the tools + world context Newton had.
I think Fredrick Smith (founder of Fedex) is a much better example of someone taking an entrepreneurial and intellectual risk.
http://about.van.fedex.com/our-story/history-timeline/histor...
So what exactly was Newton risking?
Everything.
Maybe publishing would have counted as taking a risk for the reasons you cite, but Newton resisted publishing for a very long time, so he was actually avoiding that risk. So once again it really seems to me that Newton is not a good example of the merits of taking risks. (Quite the contrary in fact.)
When he was first admitted to Trinity, he was a subsizar - that is, he had to perform valet duties in order to pay for his education. He only stopped doing those duties when he was awarded a scholarship.
http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/9-things-you-may-n...
"When Newton was three, his mother wed a wealthy clergyman, Barnabas Smith..."
"In 1705, Newton was knighted by Queen Anne. By that time, he’d become wealthy after inheriting his mother’s property..."
Newton's mother died in 1679, when Newton was 37. Principia was published in 1687.
Some of those people become fantastically rich as a result of the one right thing.
Just because someone is wildly successful and right about one non-consensus bet, doesn't mean they aren't wrong about most of their other beliefs.
The occasional out-of-the-mainstream idea is a revolution, but the vast majority are just nutty and wrong.
It's pretty interesting that pg describes the possible outcomes of contrarian ideas as either positive for society or merely a waste of time. Even though the pursuit of risky and contrarian ideas can also be hugely harmful for society.
Which makes him totally different from the Member of Parliament for Cambridge, Master of the Mint, intellectual grandfather of the enlightenment, etc.
By the way, Isaac Newton MP did have a somewhat lasting influence on theology: he got to vote in 1688.
I don't think betting the house on a single event is "insane". Businesses make these all-in bets all the time and we're fine with it. Every Hollywood blockbuster is also a billion dollar all-in bet, but nobody bats an eye at that either. Individuals bet a huge percentage of their net worth when they buy a house. Yet when a person invests a large amount of their net worth in a single stock it's suddenly irresponsible? Hogwash.
The way we perceive risk in society is extraordinarily polarized. Some moderately risky behavior is considered normal, and other moderately risky behavior is deemed "insane". I don't think there is any rhyme or reason to it; just a matter of arbitrary cultural norms.
I'm not claiming that all risks by society are judged incorrectly, just that it happens frequently enough that much is to be gained by being really skeptical towards the consensus views on risk.
Lost lives may be merely wasted time if you take a maximally macro view of humanity. That detachment is likely comforting if you can pull it off. Me, personally though... I'm a social human being and I care about - even love - other human beings, and their lives represent far more to me than that.
For his "weird" behavior, yeah, probably.
For some of his "other" behavior -- his support for Trump, generally; and his (very recent, and very disturbing) attemps to soft-peddle, and normalize sexual violence -- more likely it's because they lack awareness of some basic political history.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13378029
That's what I mean by "normalizing" -- "it's no big deal, what are all these people so uptight about?" -- that whole line.
As for "basic awareness of political history", I'm referring of course to events in the 1920s and early 1930s. With respect to which it is, in my view, really, really hard not to see close parallels (despite certain differences) with the current situation. Unless, that is, one spent one's formative intellectual years going out of one's way to not become aware of certain things.
Unless that's the only tool of "expression" they have.
I've lot so much respect for YC wrt Thiel. Trump is such an obvious villain that if you're not against him you're an enabler. I don't care that he's become normalized in the American and Russian press the rest of the world is laughing at the USA and crying inside. We're slowly finding out which people are actually committed to their ideals and which are just interested in being more powerful, even if it comes at the cost of allowing a total maniac to the nuclear throne.
So I respect about a third of American electorate. The third that didn't vote I don't respect. The third that voted for Trump I don't respect.
As for America the country, I respect most of the intelligent people working at the State Department and the CIA that I truly believe are working towards a peaceful more prosperous world, though I admit that their history is much more checkered (waterboarding, etc) than their counterparts in Germany, but they've done good work basically everywhere outside of the Middle East. Tough area to play right though, lobbyists, Israel, Turkey, multiple religious factions, critical market for the economy / national security.
But all their work is jeopardized by this horrible demagogue and enough of America either stayed home or voted for him. A man that bragged about sexual assault and swindled the poor for their student loan money and chanted "lock her up" to crowds of tens of thousands. We're laughing at America in the morning, but we're crying at night.
Peter Thiel isn't like Haber or Einstein, because most of his potentially dangerous ideas are only contrarian in our little bubble. When he challenges democracy, he's on the side of millennia of kings and queens and emperors and chieftains, as well as everyone who has ever said "if I were king for a day..."; when he manages to be the highest profile Trump supporter in the tech world, he is backed by nearly half the voters in America; when he says that a monopoly is exactly what a company should aim for, a great many CEOs and HN readers privately nod. His genuinely contrarian ideas aren't frightening, they're considered laughable, which is why the media mocks him so much for seasteading and "vampirism".
In the era Newton came from you would have to be wealthy to be able to afford other interests beyond surviving. So a lot of the big leaps were made by those from rich families or those lucky enough to have some sort of wealthy backer.
Plus certain things like education, family, kids are attached to specific timelines in a typical life. Health and the ability to do things are also attached to timelines. When you take a risk you could be putting all of those on line.
The ability to expend time with no certainty of returns is a luxury only those from a wealthy background have. And naturally they will be more successfuly as there are more efforts from people of those backgrounds.