I really enjoyed this article. For me, I have two main ones. Professionally, it is four freedoms computing and ways to empower people with it. Privately though, since I got out of the military, has been an obsession with geopolitics and geostrategy. You might be surprised how interrelated I increasingly think the two are.
What's it about geopolitics that makes it so interesting to you? It has always seemed like politicized BS to me. I think history shows quite well that once individuals and polities alike start on the path of pursuing/promoting some variety of economic freedom and classical liberal values (often including but not limited to what's known as liberal democracy), safety and stable cooperation become enough of a common interest to make most 'geopolitics' considerations quite irrelevant, and often misleading.
>What's it about geopolitics that makes it so interesting to you? It has always seemed like politicized BS to me.
Yeah, it's just how the lives of billions are organised, changed, and affected, no big matter...
>I think history shows quite well that once individuals and polities alike start on the path of pursuing/promoting some variety of economic freedom and classical liberal values (often including but not limited to what's known as liberal democracy), safety and stable cooperation become enough of a common interest to make most 'geopolitics' considerations quite irrelevant, and often misleading.
That's the very theory put forward just before 1914, about how a war in Europe was not possible anymore, because of "economic freedom and classical liberal values" promoting "safety and stable cooperation" between countries. The possibility of war was laughed at as "The big delusion". We know how that turned out.
Then there was the same idea, of the "end of history", with the triumph of "economic freedom and classical liberal values" put forward after the USSR collapsed. We also know how that turned out.
Historically, "economic freedom and classical liberal values" have been very good at war and fierce geopolitics.
For me it just started as trying to understand the why of the Iraq war. I worked my way up the chain from my grunts eye view and kept going up that chain. I think it had a very similar appeal to computers when I was younger, in that I could understand things that most others couldn't, and that was and is a good feeling in a strange way. Combined with a very American upbringing and the fact I swore an oath to the constitution also makes me feel like it is my duty in some way, especially given the kind of insight I have grown into. I started with the question "why", and my eyes didn't really open till I realized I was leaving all the other W's out. This is the obsessive part as referenced in the post, because a part of me wants to let it all go and just focus on trying disrupt society through tech, or art, or something equivalent, but it seems a Sisyphean task I can't let go of.
Not OP, but why not geopolitics? It's like thinking how your village's future will look like, but in a planet level...
For example the Iraq war quagmire has lead to Al-Qaida and ISIS (well, forest fires in Russia also caused grain harvests in Russia to suffer, food prices to go up, and the Arab Spring to happen), this has lead to the refugee crisis in Europe, that combined with austerity has lead to the rise of populism in Europe, and Brexit.
Fellow physicist-by-training. Got interested in "machine learning" and "artificial intelligence" a few years ago. As I delve into the roots of the field, I increasingly feel that many interesting ideas seem to have been discarded without justification other than the field switching en masse to a different fad at some instant.
Of late, I'm particularly fascinated by ideas in Cybernetics, but I don't see anyone else being interested in them right now. I think there might be interesting insights into both biological and artificial intelligence (with communication definitely being an important component; consciousness is a word I avoid till I can find a more concrete handle on it), but it's primarily based on interest/taste, rather than motivated goal chasing :-)
(I'm more interested in concrete ideas from Wiener, Ashcroft, etc. rather than the fluff that came later as the word's usage got stretched beyond meaning, as is now happening with "AI")
Yes to cybernetics. Its day will come again! If you go deep, it's a rabbit hole to discover why teleology in science is so controversial. Wiener said cybernetics started from the idea that Intelligence is all about decreasing local entropy.
Essentially, by modelling therapists' verbal patterns using Transformational Grammar a formal theory of mind was evolved that has lead to sophisticated algorithms for various kinds of psychological change.
Unfortunately, a lot of pseudo-science and "woo" has grown up around it, but please don't let that distract you, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
- - - -
In re: creating simple machines with intelligence, IMO cybernetics (i.e. what's in "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Ashby; I'm also not interested in fluff) is pretty obviously the way to go. Even the simple centrifugal governor "seems alive" in the words of early witnesses. Purposive behaviour is the domain of living systems, at least according to instinct and experience, eh?
I think one could use cybernetics to inform the design of robotic systems using e.g. the kind of simple controllers David Wyland talks about at the HomeBrew Robotics Club in this video: https://archive.org/details/HBRobotics_Forth
He's not explicitly talking about cybernetics, of course, but I think he's got the right idea and cybernetics shows the way forward.
I can't stop thinking about applied fun theory to card game mechanics. I'm building a card game where you never leave the flow state. (I know there's been a lot of cash grab card games recently. I just genuinely enjoy card games.)
Specifically this question -
Why is soccer more widely played than checkers?
Physical Mastery - repetitive exploration of real world ball physics encourages a sense of mastery. Checkers doesn't have this. I've built a physics sim into the card game to replicate this sense of building mastery through exploring the physics system to win.
Mental Mastery - Both soccer players and checker players make choices that feel fun and meaningful. When trying to dribble around an opponent, they have multiple options they must chose (right or left, fakeout). The player must have a model of what their opponent might do and react based on that. Updating their model is a sense of mental mastery that can be rewarding and contribute to flow.
Real Time - Soccer doesn't have turns. In checkers, waiting for the opponent can break the flow state if you already know your move. The demo allows players to play cards in real time. The catch is - when you run out of cards in hand you loose.
Accessibility - People can just pick up a ball shaped object and ball. I built a demo in WebGL so people can just hop in.
Simplicity of Rules and Depth of Choices - Instead of having a convoluted health system, the amount of cards in your hand are your health. This makes picking up the game easy, there's just one rule to keep in mind. This allows for a variety of fun choices because each card you play lowers your health. This creates a fun risk reward system with no additional rules.
The other idea is to use the existing physics system that players are already familiar with. That way there's no tutorial - players already know how cards handle and drop in real life.
I don't want to sound overly critical of your explanations but you seem to ignore the most important difference:
We play soccer with our entire bodies, muscles, heart, legs, lungs get a workout. Not to insult the players but mind and thought processes are somewhat secondary, it is about the "lizard brain": attack and defend with instincts and reflexes.
When you play checkers it is your mind that gets a workout. It is the intellect that gets a workout. The exact opposite of the soccer.
There are almost no similarities between the two! Making it into a physics simulator does not make it a physical excercise...
That's a great point! There's no workout/lizard brain attack defense component. It's also missing a physical exercise component. You're right that does seem like a huge part of the appeal. I'm wondering what I could do to add that appeal.
Beat Saber seems to handle the workout component slightly.
What about a VR version where cards come flying at you and you have to dodge them/block them? That might wake up the lizard/attack/defense part of the brain. That actually sounds pretty fun.
I don't think it was overly critical at all and appreciate the response!
> It is the intellect that gets a workout. The exact opposite of the soccer.
I think you deeply underestimate how much thought and intellect go into playing soccer. It is a game, and applying intelligence to it is necessary to be good at it.
Disclaimer: I don't like football (US: soccer), but I know very smart people that play.
I can get latched onto many subjects, most of them useless. Like, what is the best way to split firewood while living in an apartment building? Or what is the best RV for me (I'm not buying one until I spend X days renting)? It's really getting in the way of more worthwhile pursuits.
10 years ago I was quite engrossed in automatic layout of UI elements to automatically accommodate e.g. localized text of different size (Apple's iOS UI layout tools at the time were awfully crude, not sure about now). Around the same time I was much very into application state management (same problem solved by flux, but different approach). Having "solved" these two problems for my use case I have since moved on.
Recently I am into mapping business workflows to data structures, visualizing them back, and then providing control over them, e.g. order/invoice/shipping processing in wholesale trade. Nifty stuff, and trickier than the other two things.
I think to me this is the key question raised by the essay.
A lot of people with fixed and repetitive interests in something will be autistic. I'd be interested to know what the ratios are for autistic vs not for people who have this kind of obsessive interest.
Often, you can get close enough to make it a useful approach. Start from the easiest parts, and then gradually drill deeper while making sure that you're building up a solid understanding, without taking unclear, obscure shortcuts. This is not always easy, but the payoff can be quite real.
I was thinking the same thing. Being obsessively interested sounds neat when you watch others spend their entire lives, eg. collecting stamps and coins. According to this wisdom, when they find the rare gem that makes them a fortune they're geniuses. However, who can will themselves into becoming obsessive with something. Wouldn't it be kind of self-defeating if it is to take something out of it (ie. opposite of karma-yoga)?
What you can do:
- stop drinking, using drugs and passively consuming shit
- swim/exercise the body
- study what you're passionate about
- cultivate interest further, by iterating on building stuff, meeting peers who share similar interests, followup on your ideas and dreams
- long walks in nature to think about it deeper, periods where you remove yourself away from people
- balance your interests with sustainable living, because you're not doing it just to score big!
Not so sure people can will themselves to change that much.
You can enjoy life, cultivate what works and hedge your bets, in that order. By following your core life-theme and ideas, you should become more of what you already are.
I agree with this. One thing I’d add from personal observation: things get more interesting the more time you spend with them. I’ve done ‘total immersion’ kinds of things with both math and the boardgame Go, with pretty good results in both cases. I pretty much just kept the topic around all the time for a sustained period. Sometimes that meant reading about history or philosophy of the subject, consuming related media, etc.
Didn’t take long before I could look at a Go board and get sucked in, or at least have a fairly profound aesthetic experience if it was a nice configuration.
Took a lot longer with math, and there what I get is generally like reading about a nice idea from a sci-for short story.
I don’t think this would work without some genuine interest/curiosity in the subject to begin with though. And there were times with both where I was intimidated or there were tasks I needed to do in order to improve that I didn’t want to do, which seems fine as long as there’s a larger portion of gratifying experience.
Indeed. There are studies about grit and determination over time being strong indicators for possible later success. In any endeavour having some unknown value, overlooked by others, there will be periods where you feel all alone, experience some disinterest or need to grit through some necessary activities/work in order to push forward. There will not always be happy feelings about what you do or even why you do it, though such feelings will be more on the level of superficial aversion and procrastination. In activities and studies with heavy competition, that competition will be extremely hard to beat. Both may be overcome by grit and determination, while those with natural abilities or superior training, often give up earlier due to various unrelated reasons.
There is value in relaxing, there is value in letting go of control and following your impulses. Trying to drive out all fun may lead to a more productive life, but at the cost of a pleasurable life.
Yes. There is beauty in everything, if you look hard enough you can find it. This is something I've routinely done in my life, and I attribute it to most of my success. At some point in university I learned to enjoy doing my assignments and school work, which paid off dramatically.
However, I think that a prerequisite to this is to be a naturally curious person.
There are many ways to do this, like meditation, or some substances.
You basically imagine yourself in the future, having achieved some goal, or being in a situation that you like. This image has to be rich and invoke many emotions, so it becomes engraved in your neural paths.
You then work backwards from there, imagining different roads and specific steps on how to achieve that.
It literally and physically changes your brain over time, as you repeat it.
To quote Feynman: “Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.” It is relatively easy to get interested in various topics.
But being obsessively interested in one/few of them is a completely different matter -- a lot of other "normal" aspects of life tend to suffer as a side-effect. Our society does not do a good job of nurturing and encouraging such lopsided profiles, and trying to keep that spark alive while leading a "normal" life extracts an incredibly heavy cost. Understandably, most "normal" people (instinctively) find that to be a cost not worth paying. Embedded in contemporary society, few such people manage to pursue their interest to their satisfaction, and fewer do well enough to be considered "successful" by society (a vanishing fraction become outstandingly successful, and are then called "geniuses").
One way is to enter a competition with others. Using the example from the essay, a big part of obsession with bus tickets is probably explained by being able to show off rare bus tickets to fellow collectors. Incidentally, many cool things seem to spring out of some kind of a "scene" (which is defined by this friendly competition among its members).
> Using the example from the essay, a big part of obsession with bus tickets is probably explained by being able to show off rare bus tickets to fellow collectors.
Eh, I had a large collection. I still have a collection of a few hundred tickets (not worth much, a few hundred pounds). I started the collection in about 1997. I stopped in about 2003. I've never shown other collectors my tickets, and I've only put about 5 tickets online and that was only this year.
I think for this obsessional collecting it's really not about other people. It's about systematizing and categorising the world. Outside is chaos and confusion. In here, with this collection, there is order and control.
I love it that on HN my point can be disproved by an actual bus ticket collector! Still I think my larger point stands - Girardian mimetic desire (http://www.imitatio.org/brief-intro) is a powerful force that certainly can get you interested in something.
Oh! I don't want to say I'm disproving your point. I'm only providing a small counter example. Maybe most other people are driven by sharing their collection? Museums have been a big deal for a while and some of that is around collecting the obscure items in order to display them
For me, no, I don't think I can do that. For years I've been doing the "Electronics is cool, I should learn more about it but not today" routine. Now, I started doing some heavy research into solar energy, for purely practical reasons, and I'm finally actually interested in electronics and learning. I can't seem to summon interest in something unless I see at least a little bit of practical use for myself. I think one of the reasons is that learning is too abstract, unless connected to a particular problem I'm trying to solve.
With electronics, the issue is that yes it sounds very cool but I just didn't see what I could do with the knowledge. Sure, I'll buy an arduino and have it water my pot flower but that's utterly boring and useless.
But with solar energy systems, there are a lot of intricacies and compromises and learning electronics is very rewarding.
The downside is that I seem to lose interest very quickly, once I solve my particular problem. But I still learn a lot and have fun in the meantime.
Do you mean interested in something or interested in a specific topic?
If you’re not curious about the world in general, then I’m not sure anything can change that trajectory, although I could be wrong.
For a specific topic, I recommend learning about that topic from someone who is passionate about it and who is a good teacher.
Sometimes this can be as easy as reading books by a good author. When I was in high school, I despised history. It turns out that I despised it because I had never been exposed to compelling history. I ended up becoming friends with someone who was a passionate historian, and he pointed me to compelling resources that totally changed my mind about history.
In college, I had no interest in art or art classes. A friend of mine took a drawing class that she said “blew her mind”. I couldn’t believe it, but she just told me to trust her and take the class. I asked a few other people, and they all said the same thing. I took the class, and they were all correct. While the topic was technically drawing, the professor pushed us to explore what our drawing told us about ourselves, how we could expand our minds through drawing, and how our drawing related to our interactions with the world. Just re-reading that, it sounds like hippy-dippy bullshit, but to experience it was something else, and it is something most participants in that class took away in a positive way.
I ended up minoring in art, and I worked with another professor who really stretched my mind.
While these are my personal experiences (and there are many more that I didn’t mention), I think I have seen this pattern amongst my friends and acquaintances as well. As such, I recommend finding a good, highly recommended, talented teacher if you want to get interested in a new topic. Note that they are not always easy to find.
I love that he chose bus tickets, because I used to collect UK bus tickets. I started because I used to repair bus ticket machines (made by Almex Control Systems ltd) in the early 1990s.
I was putting a few examples on Instagram, but I don't really understand how Instagram chooses to crop images so I stopped until I have time to work it out. https://www.instagram.com/p/B1JpyfXHLRG/?utm_source=ig_web_c... If you're interested in classifying things you can sort tickets out in several ways -- by bus company operator, by year, by colour, by machine. If you're interested in social history you can use tickets to illustrate some small points - here's a "workman return" which would probably have a different name today: https://www.instagram.com/p/B1Lpy4kHKWR/?utm_source=ig_web_c...
Through this I met other transport ticket collectors, and other transport enthusiasts ("bus spotters", railway enthusiasts).
Paul starts his essay by mentioning natural ability. He then describes this obsessive interest as a third requirement, which implies to me that obsessive interest is not necessarily part of natural ability.
I'd be interested to know whether obsessive interest is something that can be learnt, or whether it's a feature of neuro-diversity and thus part of natural ability. One of the diagnostic criteria for autism is "fixed and repetitive interests".
I'm also interested to know whether people think their interests are obsessive. I stopped collecting transport tickets in the late 1990s, but I only found out a few years ago that the amount I know about UK bus tickets and ticket machines is unusual.
About 20 years ago I was having a quiet pint with a friend and he casually says "I wish I was passionate about something". It always stuck with me, still haven't found anything I'd consider I'm passionate about, still looking though!
Its funny, I'm the opposite, there's so many things I'm passionately interested in. The hard part is picking one or two. My one day I'll have to get back to that list is enough for a couple of lifetimes. I try top pick the ones that are the most useful, or perhaps least useless. Keep looking you'll find something.
I'm more like you. Into math, music, fitness, nature, literature, movies...
but can I actually say I'm "passionate" about any of them? On any given day, I've likely spent zero time or effort on at least one of the above. Simply can't have a day when I've studied math (beyond cursory readings on the phone), practiced an instrument, worked out, hiked/camped, read, AND watched a movie
Its hard, I found I just have to pick a few I like the most and leave the rest go, I promise myself I'll get back to them but it seems less likely as the years go by. On my holidays I usually get back to something.
Are you passionate in the same way the commenter's friend meant, though? Passion means different things to different people, and maybe his friend was expressing his desire to be more passionate, which actually sounds like a trait you share with him, considering you're not more passionate about any one particular thing over other things.
Yeah... although passion and obsession aren’t the same. Passion is the more palatable and friendly version of obsession. The use of ‘obsession’ by pg is deliberate. The set of things you can be passionate about is much more limited, often constrained by your perception of what others will think. We (over)share our passions but hide our obsessions.
What I find useful about going deep is not usually what I find at the bottom. It's the tools that I employed on the way that prove useful later. And that's not only if I'm the first to invent them! Even if they are a well-known pattern: I have now experienced them in ways that instruction cannot provide.
I think this is correct. The bad news is we are creating systems which minimise the number of geniuses entering each field.
In the past, science was an eccentric hobby, not particularly valued and certainly not a viable career option. Today it's all of these things - like becoming a doctor. Telling your mother you want to be a scientist is far better than saying you want to be a musician. A hundred years ago that wouldn't have been the case.
The consequence of this is that these fields are filled up with careerists - people who are socially driven rather than curiosity driven. I think this might go some way to explaining the slowdown in scientific progress, because people chase low-risk 'hot' fields to advance their careers, rather than splashing about in the unfashionable backwaters of science for the sheer enjoyment of it.
The 'problem' with modern science is that a large finite amount of stuff has been discovered, and new discoveries are most often built on that stuff. I splash around in the backwaters of machine learning, however I have to pick my targets carefully and maintain a very tight focus - the defined knowledge base has already grown to more than anyone can ingest in detail. Given the amount of knowledge that has to be absorbed to achieve mastery in a scientific discipline, and the fact that knowledge base keeps growing, it takes longer and longer to lay a foundation for just understanding what the hell people are talking about. Now, there are opportunities, for example the use of genetic algorithms as part of ML solutions, because for any 'real' researcher, GA's aren't the cool kid in the opinions of reviewers or funding agents. It's easier when you are the PI and the funding authority, even if the budget is quite a bit smaller
The problem with modern science is that there is no room for the unusual.
Faraday had no formal training, but his natural intuition, interest, and tenacity made him standout.
Newton was a brilliant, paranoid asshole.
Instead funding goes to credentialed career scientists whose greatest ability is self-promotion, fund raising, and stringing-along the public.
As an example: The next big particle accelerator sucks up billions; while alternative approaches to QM never get any attention because it’s a guaranteed way to kill a career and become a pariah.
So nobody is available to even try to create the theoretical framework at the investment of a few million.
From my experiences in the life sciences going through the academic credentialing process (PhD to postdoc), there was room for the unusual but the way it worked was a little convoluted. Basically the grant funding agencies give you money for a project that they can understand and follow your logic on why it will succeed. Then when they fund you, you cut back on the resources required to get to that success and spend the savings on new ideas. The fun part about the "new idea" spending is you can look at most anything that your instrumentation can look for. The idea being all the tools in your lab, your departments lab, even collaborating institutions are available to play around with and probe. You can even build new instrumentation to look at new things with that money. This is how modern life science pushes ahead.
Nobody's checking. The focus is on what you're going to spend next year's money on, not how you spent last year's money. And if you're savvy, you can use tools that were already bought for some other purpose, or that don't cost much.
Working a day job in industry isn't categorically different, except that someone is probably watching your spending more closely. You have to figure out a way to set aside some time to work on your own interest, whether you do it at work or at home.
As for money, you can get technology made for 1/10 of what it costs your employer, by choosing your battles, cutting out all of the overhead, and using free stuff.
So I moved into industry out of post doc and I can tell you as long as you're getting your day job done and it isn't that expensive you can test most any idea. I'd say it's even easier to do it in industry because "not that expensive" to industry is like 10-fold more than in academia.
Or the other option is you get funding for an idea that falls within the same realm as your unusual idea. Then you spend the money on those overlapping projects.
A great example is a chemist I knew that love research with selenium (an uncommon element). He was most interested in what role it plays in organic chemistry. That’s it.
But when he wrote up grant proposals it was always about the anti-cancer properties of selenium compounds. Never mind the fact he had zero plans to actually pursues that end.
There is still plenty of room for the unusual, it just isn't as easy as it was back in the day when most important discoveries were made by people working by themselves at home with little organizational funding.
It's a nice narrative that overgrown institutions are ruthlessly repressing all creativity. And I do believe there is some truth to that. We should work hard to understand why and then improve the situation. However, unfortunately, reality is usually more complex and also more mundane (in some ways) than any nice narratives we can come up with.
The people driven by curiosity will still be in those unfashionable backwaters of any field. I would think true progress is made by those individuals, not ones that chase ‘hot’ fields.
Bingo. I would add that the movers tend to define their own fields, and by action and driven by need/practicality, not marketing. Those seeking to enter a career, generally have a different set of goals and priorities, reguardless of overlap.
There's a much more obvious difference between now and 100 years ago: 100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific research was largely a closed shop for European-descended upper middle class men. There are certainly many geniuses obsessively researching into areas that stimulate their intellectual interest today that wouldn't have had the opportunity to do so back then.
I'm not sure being a scientist was that unfashionable 100 years ago anyway: research labs were a thing, academic work was arguably more prestigious than it is today, fortunes were being made from inventions especially in fields where there were low hanging fruit, competitions and societies and exhibitions to celebrate scientific achievement had come into existence and the idea of inventiveness was even tied up in popular contemporaneous notions of national and racial superiority. There might be more subfields and more research to build on nowadays, but the stereotype of scientists being underpaid eccentrics certainly hasn't gone away and nor has the fact a mathematics prodigy can make a lot more money working in financial services than academic research.
I'm also unconvinced scientific progress has slowed because today's geniuses are working on interpreting our genetic code, modelling solutions to climate change and solving scaling problems in computation rather than drawing taxonomy diagrams, inventing new types of consumer electronics and breaking the land speed record.
> 100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific invention was largely a closed shop for European-descended upper middle class men.
i.e. exactly the people who were, by far, most likely to be living a comfortable, stress-free life back then. We should not underestimate the sheer amount of material progress and economic growth that has occurred since then. A lot more people can have the luxury of getting playfully obsessed about something than could back then.
800 karma in 73 days. I wonder what the highest karma gain in two months was, in HN’s history. (From comments only, and with the top comment removed from consideration to avoid one-offs.)
I probably should have specified “besides tptacek.” He’s a fascinating outlier. He once claimed he was worried some Russians were going to harm him due to his HN comments. I still wonder if he was just saying that to sound cool, but truth is often strange.
That average does put things into perspective though.
How did you read 'hate' into that? Genuinely curious.
As an aside, I recently feel at odds with the language many people are using. The mere word 'hate' seems to have grown weird political connotations, while is suddenly okay to hate 'hate'. Is this not fostering the very emotion you revile, under twisted pretense? I remember 'love thy enemy' to have been the twist of the knife in peaceful protest, not sinking to their level with 'justified hate'. It feels hollow. If we want a change, we need to reach out first. /rant
There is a trend to demonize the Chinese and Russians governments (it is always about governments but then it translates to companies and then to people). This trend is very useful to promote different kinds of online censorship and put people into political boxes (e.g., you like this then you are that). Basically, when every single piece of material about a country is negative, you get a set of feeling where hate is not the least common. Then you go full paranoia cycle and expect that these same people also will punish you for what you write about them. One can benefit from these tendencies and ride them to get attention and respect of like-minded people, basically sell hate.
I’ve consistently gained karma faster than that. By my estimate, there’s still a handful of people who are currently accumulating karma even faster than I am (one of whom has been mentioned here), though I expect to only really be sure in a year or so.
100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific research by European-descended upper middle class men
was a thing.
50 years ago I wasn't expecting it to come back, it wouldn't have helped me anyway, overall scientific opportunities were far worse by then and the trend has continued. I wasn't waiting around for an uptick, I just started right away putting in the effort to try and compensate.
And I agree with this completely:
>There are certainly many geniuses obsessively researching into areas that stimulate their intellectual interest today that wouldn't have had the opportunity to do so back then.
There is so much brilliance in so many cultures through so many millennia, it can be seen that education and financial support are not even essential for genius, mainly for documenting, recognizing, and leveraging the influence of a very very small percentage of geniuses through history, only those few whose works were preserved and/or applied.
Surviving largely within a system of lesser thinkers whose works were better preserved and/or more stongly applied.
Which is why I think
>inventing new types of consumer electronics
can be a good thing if the consumer is given careful enough consideration.
Science has a level of technical difficulty and detail to not be obsessed about something in order to discover anything. Try one of those extract DNA from a strawberry kit for example. Even in big data science you find people who know a lot of math or applied math that have the technical insights. A lot of science today also requires collaborative cross discipline work to make progress as well. I don’t think careerism is an issue. We should encourage wacky ideas though through competitive grants.
The BIGGEST problem with research is this: it's HARD, not easy, to understand. Most papers written are absolute trash. Not because the content is. Because it's written in a shitty, overly braggy way (especially mathematics and physics), that's mostly shouting "I'm better than you and if you don't get it, you're an idiot". They are not written with any USER, let alone, READER, in mind. Anyone would immediately be fired by a remotely consumer-centric company.
Wikipedia was a huge step in the right direction: making everything easier to understand. With lots of proofs and examples.
I think you could easily become billionaire by improving Wikipedia and the "make science and knowledge easily absorbable" 10X easier
You could not "easily" become a billionaire by improving Wikipedia, which is the result of millions of hours of writing and editing. The fact is most low-hanging fruit has already been plucked, thus every scientific discovery relies upon more and more background knowledge. Yes, we do make innovations in explaining/teaching science more quickly to successive generations, but I doubt if we'll ever see a Newton or Darwin who can single-handedly, obsessively write and observe and calculate, by themselves, and then push science forward by leaps and bounds. The best research today is all done by teams, with experts on statistics, study design, clinicians, hardware experts - there are just so many niche fields that we MUST collaborate on extremely advanced work.
Your advisors were acting in your best interest. There is a time and place for readable science, and your thesis is not it. It has nothing to do with the power of the guild, and everything to do with assessing your knowledge and preparation.
The purpose of your thesis is to demonstrate to them (and perhaps the larger scientific community) that you can communicate to other scientist in the language of the field, that you possess the requisite knowledge, and that you are prepared to advance that field.
There is no guild, but there are gate keepers (reviewers of various sorts) and you must be prepared well enough to make convincing cases (for publication, funding, etc.) Your advisors were training you for this role.
Well, so sorry. If things are as bad as you sketch them then there may as well be a guild.
Science is first and foremost about understanding, and writing in a way that purposefully obfuscates and makes it harder to understand what is communicated is anathema to true science.
You misunderstand the purpose - it's not intentional obfuscation. Its the lingua franca of the field. A technical term can define in one phrase an entire concept that would be tedious to spell out each and every time. It can define one 'chunk' that you can then combine with other chunks to develop deeper understanding. Surely you can agree with that?
While I fully agree that ability to communicate science to the general public is incredibly important, the thesis is not necessary the place for this. Plenty of other places are (blogs, twitter, etc) and this ability is crucial for a publicly funded scientist. General large conferences that I am aware of often encourage non-technical translations of abstracts.
I don't think that's what 'jacquesm is talking about. It's not about the technical term that can communicate a lot of meaning in few characters. It's about constant use of obscure technical phrases that communicate the same or less than a plain-language description, except you have to work to decipher it. It's obfuscation, in a sense similar to what a JS obfuscator does to readable code.
That's one very interesting observation. I've commented in that vein a short while ago where I noticed that once I finally understood what some paper was about my usual response (definitely not always) would be 'That's it?'.
Wikipedia has been a godsend for me, to be able to understand core principles without having to wade through what seems to be obfuscated English in order to hide something relatively trivial at the heart of the document.
I long for voice, for playful humor, for that je ne sais quoi of good writing! Robert Anton Wilson wrote a marvelous book called Quantum Psychology, where he uses the insights of quantum physics to upend the prevailing Aristotelian view of is / is not logic in psychology and in scientific thinking generally. It was a genuine pleasure to read, as I sensed the intelligent, interested, living being doing the writing all throughout. It felt intimate despite its serious nature. I just don't understand why writing about a scientific subject, even in an obscure and rarified field, gives you a pass on crafting a piece of writing someone might actually want to read, might actually connect with on an emotional level.
It's worse than this. The careerists have taken control and use it to demand you work as they would like. They kill the creativity and passion and will not allow the real work to happen and make progress.
There is a formula you must fit into, 5 days a week, probably 50 hours, a specific attitude, and everything they can get from you. Try this: in your next offer negotiation, ask to cut your salary by 20% and get one day back.
Can't blame them. It is how Tesla and many other inventive minds have been made subject. It's not slavery but it doesn't honor the contributor acting in good faith.
> The consequence of this is that these fields are filled up with careerists - people who are socially driven rather than curiosity driven.
I think it's worse than this: school and academia is no longer the sole option for the ultra curious. Curiosity is better fed by the internet, which means we end up lacking a social institution which captures and unifies people like this.
> In the past, science was an eccentric hobby, not particularly valued and certainly not a viable career option. Today it's all of these things - like becoming a doctor.
Really! That's news to me. Are you aware of how much scientists are paid and their general career prospects?
The average tenured professor salary in the US is $141k. Star research directors with a proven record of bringing in grant money can easily earn two or three times that. In engineering, physics, med, and bio there are also lucrative consultancy opportunities.
The average scientist outside academia is probably doing grunt work and is paid badly - unless they're working in fintech, or something with an obvious financial upside.
The reality is that the entire research system is optimised for direct and indirect cash accumulation, not for genuine innovation or invention. There's some interest in blue sky funding, but if you're a fresh postgrad no grant body is going to give you a lot of money to go off and design a working warp drive unless you also have the bureaucratic skills to make your project sound like something they want to fund - probably for other reasons.
Researchers with good bureaucratic skills and genius-level scientific insights are exceptionally rare. And the publishing system isn't welcoming to talented semi-outsiders
Newton, Einstein, Darwin, and Ramanujan would really struggle in today's environment. Newton might be okay if he managed to get tenure, but the others not so much.
The big difference is that currently scientists are paid and their research equipment funded by someone else; contrasting to the earlier times where usually you could be a scientist if and only if had "passive income" (usually, inherited wealth), so that you would not need to work to earn money and could instead study (and pay for studies in a world without student loans) and research instead of that.
In 2016, American universities hired about 20,000 tenure-track faculty [1]. Adding up the major pro sports leagues, there are very very generously 10,000 American pro athletes, (i.e. people who don’t have day jobs).
I guess things change if you include all the minor league and farm teams, especially for the MLB.
...and then sold it all for $5 each or so. Plenty of folks have been there. The best case scenario at this point is finding your old HD/backup somewhere with that early-mined bitcoin wallet you had totally forgotten about.
This is why basic research is so hard to manage. If a company is no longer interested in researching area X and instead wants to shift focus to area Y, there is no real alternative to outplacing the area X researchers and hiring new for area Y.
Trying to shift the interest of area X researchers only results in their coming up with rationalizations about how what they have been doing all along is somehow related to Y.
I think males are more likely than females to become obsessed with narrow domains. (I used to be obsessed with chess, especially chess openings.) This may be a partial explanation of why there have been more male geniuses. Graham must be careful about what he writes, but he does say this:
"One interesting thing about the bus ticket theory is that it may help explain why different types of people excel at different kinds of work. Interest is much more unevenly distributed than ability. If natural ability is all you need to do great work, and natural ability is evenly distributed, you have to invent elaborate theories to explain the skewed distributions we see among those who actually do great work in various fields. But it may be that much of the skew has a simpler explanation: different people are interested in different things.
The bus ticket theory also explains why people are less likely to do great work after they have children. Here interest has to compete not just with external obstacles, but with another interest, and one that for most people is extremely powerful. It's harder to find time for work after you have kids, but that's the easy part. The real change is that you don't want to."
Both fathers and mothers care about their children, but on average mothers care more and think more obsessively about them.
> I think males are more likely than females to become obsessed with narrow domains.
I don't think this is the case. Males just have low visibility into typical female 'obsessions' (or just don't care all that much about them), but the reverse is also generally true. Females tend to obsess about things that have a 'social' side, like their shoes collection - whereas males are more into physical, material things that can be played with.
This is exactly right. I've come across this theory of obsession on my own and I've been helping my wife find what she's obsessed with. She watches things on YouTube like makeup tutorials that are things I would have never thought she was obsessed with.
Let's not be too hasty in concluding women's attention to their appearance and their children is completely genetic when all throughout history these were duties pushed onto them.
Darwin got to say "I'll be in my study" and "you take care of the kids and dinner and everything else" was just automatically implied.
You are arguing against an imaginary argument. Parent and grand parent comment did not say anything about genetics.
Darwin could go inside the study because his gender role was fulfilled by being rich. Had he been poor he might have said "I will be in the coal mine", and getting slowly and horrible killed.
Very few know people in history had the privilege to freely obsess over things which is outside their gender role, especially if the result leads to them not fulling that role through other means.
The comment from Bostonian did that. That person speculated that gender influence how obsessive a person is.
zozbot234 comment below that said "I don't think this is the case.", arguing instead that low visibility over gender lines makes people think that gender has an impact how obsessive a person is.
rhlsthrm comment below that one said "This is exactly right".
This is why I said parent and grandparent, ie zozbot234 and rhlsthrm comments, did not include genetics in their arguments, and I interpreted your comment as arguing against them as if they had argued in favor of genetics. If I am wrong and you directed your argument against the grandgrandparent then I am sorry for that interpretation.
Difficult terrain. Perhaps all these obsessions are fundamentally antisocial (hence some people call them autistic etc.) and women are raised to be more concerned about not being antisocial.
Having done passion projects for 15 years, the elephant in the room is: Do you have dependents and do they support you? At some point in time, your worthless obsession will feel like selfishness to your dependents and yourself. Its a material world after all. This is a great article, but a reality check will be helpful!
He talked about children in the article. And also, work that matters generally doesn’t leave a genius starving: it’s the difference between obsessive interest into things that matter and bus ticket collecting.
You could of course be at the point where you started too late and you haven’t time to ramp up useful work into successful outcomes through obsessiveness, as you already have dependents. Or you could be in the unlucky edge he talks about of people who only went down the wrong paths due to risks turning out wrong.
But I believe the article did address all of your points.
Obsession with work that matters won't leave you starving, but it will leave you starved for time; anything that's a priority will draw away time and attention from other priorities e.g. relationships and family.
Quite a lot. But, the one I spent most time was in creating a programming language that stores its source code as parse tree instead of text file. If you rename a variable, it will automatically change all the code, UI and DB that refers it.
That sounds like a very useful idea! IDEs have made refactoring large projects much easier than it used to be but I can still see how your representation is superior. Text files as storage for computer programs are awkward, you're always left with huge impedance mismatch between the form in which you specify what you want and the form it eventually takes.
Newton was not just a physicist who dabbled with occult. He turned occult into physics.
Before Newton scientists and natural philosophers like Descartes believed that movements were caused by physical contact.
Newton started traditionally and proposed the existence of ether that transmits forces. When he became interested in alchemy, he replaced ether with occult forces that repel and attract each other. Newton received criticism for his theory that gravity was worked through "action at a distance", because that is occult quality. His theory was not seen as physical theory at first, because 'physical theories' at the time were physical in the intuitive common sense meaning. Action at a distance, across a vacuum, was occultism.
Keynes called Newton the last magician. He was able to make similar leap as Einstein did.
I'm always amazed when I'm reminded of the genesis of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. Whether you think it sprung solely from his mind or not, the thought experiment is so simple a young child can understand but look at the ramifications which follow. Just remarkable.
What would it be like to ride on a beam of light? What would happen if you're on a motorcycle that's going the speed of light, that then has a headlight that's throwing light forward at the speed of light?
It's not possible even in a though experiment, as nothing that has mass (i.e. a motorcycle) can be going at the speed of light. It can be going (theoretically) at 99.999999% of lightspeed, but that's conceptually different.
Special relativity is the set of equations that arises when you take a hypothesis: "you always perceive light as traveling at a speed `c`, no matter how fast you're going" and work out what would have to change in order to allow this statement to hold true.
If you're in a spaceship with no windows, out in space, and you are in free-fall (not accelerating), there's no experiment you can do that will tell you whether you are moving or not.
If your spaceship has a window, and you look out and see another spaceship passing by (but nothing else) you can't tell whether you're still and it's moving, or you're moving and it's still, or you're both moving. You can detect the relative velocity between you and the other ship, but not the absolute velocity (because there isn't one.)
Intuitively we are used to a "absolute" reference frame provided by the bulk of the Earth but that's just a (highly) local context.
In space (which is to say, in our Universe) there's no absolute reference frame, so you literally cannot have an absolute velocity, and obviously you can't have a physical law described by an equation that includes a term that doesn't exist, n'est-ce pas?
Person A is on a moving train and tosses a ball into the air of height H. To this person the ball travels a distance of 2H to in a time T to return to his hand.
Person B is beside the tracks and sees the same event. To this person the ball travels 2 * (x^2 + H^2)^1/2, which we'll later call D, in the same time T where x is the distance the train traveled during this time.
Since velocity is a measure distance divided by time the velocity of the ball in Person A's frame of reference is 2H/T (V1). The velocity of the ball in Person B's frame of reference is 2D/T (V2). Obviously V2 is greater because the distance traveled is greater for the same amount of time.
Now suppose instead of tossing a ball into the air of height H, Person A shines a flashlight to a mirror at height H. The new constraint is this; the velocity of light is a constant and cannot be faster for Person B. Now what? Length contraction / time dilation is what.
Not a physicist, but my understanding (from having glanced at one of Einstein's 1905 papers a long time ago) was that the genesis of SR has a context. Specifically, the following observations bothered Einstein (below are my words, don't think anyone from 1905 would say it this way):
1. Maxwell's equations did not permit information to propagate faster than some finite velocity c, which (for many good reasons) can be identified with the speed of light in vaccuum.
2. Closely related mathemaical fact: Maxwell's equations were Lorentz invariant.
3. On the other hand if one envisioned a charged particle moving in a field, then Newtonian theory says the particle dynamics were galilean invariant.
But the particle and the field really are part of one system, and it would be odd for the two parts to have different symmetry properties, as this would mean for example that when one changes between two coordinate systems their equations of motion would transform in different ways.
I know lots of you know way more physics & history of physics than I. Please jump in!
Here's something I'd love for someone to explain about "magicians". I've read that Einstein was a great physicist for his work on relativity. I still don't know what he actually did.
Did he have some mountain of experimental data, to which he found a model which fit? Did he have sub-models which he unified, or simplified? What exactly were his inputs and outputs?
In school we're taught that the scientific method involves hypothesis, and experimentation, and confirmation or rejection, but in Einstein's case all I hear about are fully-formed theories -- and then confirmation by others, years after his death. Did he eliminate other possible theories through experimentation, or did he happen to get it right from the start? Was relativity the only possible solution, or was there also some luck involved?
Einstein's inputs were a bunch of scattered theories about electromagnetism and thermodynamics -- particularly, Maxwell's equations for the electromagnetic field, and the empirical description of the photoelectric effect, and Planck's description of blackbody radiation.
His outputs were deducing models that elegantly explained these phenomena: that a constant speed of light in all reference frames, as unintuitive as that is, would lead to the equations of relativity, and that energy being transmitted only in discrete quanta would lead to the photoelectric effect and blackbody radiation effects that were observed by others.
This was largely not a feat of producing theories on data. It was coming up with a simpler explanation for phenomena which had already been known, but for which existing explanations were far too complex.
For one, Mercury's orbit was pretty confusing, and needed a fudge factor when calculated with existing Newtonian methods. This is why some were so convinced that there had to be a tiny planet Vulcan between it and the sun. When you use Relativistic equations rather than Newtonian, the math just works out clean without a fudge factor.
Just to point out, we not only find stuff where our obsession lies, we can sometimes create complexity and interesting stuff where it lies, out of the thin air.
I'm obsessed about audio/music tech. Some part of this area is immensely complex due to people's obsession with good sound, or new interesting sounds, or new ways of altering it. They don't discover these things, they create it. Time stretch or pitch shift algorithms, for example, were created (I suppose) by obsessed people who like to create complexity and by extension, useful stuff.
So no, Darwin's invention model is not the only possible one.
I can't imagine how you can create useful complexity by collecting bus tickets, but who knows, maybe some key to inventing more efficient public transport lies there. Or at least more efficient bus ticket printing. Can be anything!
> I can't imagine how you can create useful complexity by collecting bus tickets,
Some people have an obsession for the actual tickets, while others have an obsession with the ticketing pricing system. These people can find useful oddities with the system. In some parts of the UK it's worthwhile buying a year long railcard for two stations that you will never travel to or from, because that gives you a gold card, and the gold card gives you 1/3 off other tickets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbrFze0XH5M
I guess this is a long-winded way of saying if you want to test systems you want a legitimate way for these people to look at it, because otherwise they may find ways that are problematic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_McCollum
But also, the essay does say that some obsessions are useful and others don't appear to have wider uses than being interesting for that individual person.
True, but my point was that it seems like usefulness can be created out of the think air, i.e. you don't discover it (or miss it) but instead you direct your obsession towards usefulness by adding complexity. I think maths is a great example of this, though some big part of it hasn't proved its usefulness yet.
I think bus ticket collecting was chosen as an example by the author exactly because starting a company about it is ridiculous to think about. So we can discuss just inner interest in something without thinking about outer reward.
Probably not... until some unexpected eureka moment comes.
What if bus tickets of certain style correlate to lower accident rates or more reliable schedules and no one else has noticed before?
What if a certain property of bus tickets is a predictor for some other societal result or economic trend in a way few would expect?
What if they are really tasty and nutritious but no one ever tried eating them?
Each one of these is farfetched enough that is no one is getting involved in collecting just to chase these possibilities. But only a collector, motivated by curiosity, is ever likely to catch them.
The example of Darwin kind of glosses over the fact that naturalists were becoming interested in ideas about evolution. It was controversial and nobody had any real good ideas, but it’s not exactly true that Darwin had no idea where he was going with that.
One of the stuble ways an obsession goes unnoticed, I believe, is due to schelp blindness [0].
For instance, a decade ago, I became super obsessed abt the state of emergency first-aid after going through harrowing experience of seeing one of my friends die stranded on a highway because the responders reached after 2 hours. Despite that, I never acted on it. I'm glad folks at http://gethelpnow.in (Uber for Ambulance) are going to fix it for India, and it is a great business opportunity too seeing how helpless and desperate the emergency situation really gets, compared to the West.
Speaking of ambulances, one of my cousins volunteers for the famed St. John's Ambulance Brigade [1] in Bombay and they were one of the first responders to the 2008 Bombay Terror Attacks [2]. Even though they're well funded and well-run for a non-profit, I firmly believe a for-profit business with skin-in-the-game would be able to provide more value.
I've been curious to the point of obsession abt a lot of things a lot of times and have seen numerous successful companies that were later built by sheer determination and rifle focus on solving the problem by the respective founding teams. When I see these companies (even in their infancy when success is not obvious), I have that urge to want to go work for them but end up stalking their progress instead, and that's because, I believe, I've been obsessed abt the problem they solve.
This seems to me that it applies so much to other aspects of life as well, not only for being "a genius". Perhaps this applies more to a particular subset of people who will think on this line.
For example, take the obsession and dial it down a little bit so it becomes a passion instead. Or even further so it becomes ordinary motivation. It becomes almost a linear scale that should match motivation with the effort you may need to achieve anything towards a particular direction. One may say, "that's common sense", but let's consider it anyway. Combine this with the fact that with any field, the further you go outwards, the more effort you will need to take another step. This is similar to the energy you will need to accelerate further, once you reach a particular speed. The faster you go, the more energy you need to go even faster.
In order to start anything that may have enough of a struggle, we need to have enough of a motivation to have started it. Otherwise, when the times get tough and we face a brick wall, we can remind ourselves of that initial motivation to be brave enough to even consider running through that wall head-first even if it may hurt us in the short term. Ideally we should have tools or other people to help us in this task but when it comes to many unexplored areas of science, or even starting our own company, these tools or other people are not so available to us, therefore it is likely we will need that determination to allow us to do that sacrifice. Luckily, these tools/people problems are being resolved more and more every day. But, the further we go, the more we will need, so the thought still applies with the same effect, forever.
There should also be an expanding curiosity aspect to it, too. You have touched on this with being interested in different things. However, we need to actively keep in mind how these different things may be related to each other, perhaps literally, perhaps at a more abstract level. This way, we can continue our exploration of both by using these overlaps as foundations for new land between those landmasses. So that we will not need a complete context switch to consider the different subjects, but we keep building more bridges between them. I like to consider the metaphors of the steam engine to help describe the mind. I am unsure if Freud came up with these connections but they helped expand our minds about what it thinks about itself anyway.
So, does it mean, we are excused to say "follow your dreams"? I believe so. There may be a lot of other people who will say "that is foolish, you will struggle to live". If you look at the bigger picture and say, let's take that seriously: if 100 people try to follow their dreams and only 1 make it while the rest of the 99 suffer. The more you encourage, the more you make that 100 a 1000, and the 1 a 10. The 99 becomes 990. Now, the question becomes, is it worth it? You can guess my answer to this but I will leave it unanswered with the hopes to further discussion.
> When they get interested in something, however random, I encourage them to go preposterously, bus ticket collectorly, deep. I don't do this because of the bus ticket theory. I do it because I want them to feel the joy of learning, and they're never going to feel that about something I'm making them learn. It has to be something they're interested in. I'm just following the path of least resistance; depth is a byproduct. But if in trying to show them the joy of learning I also end up training them to go deep, so much the better.
I feel like this part captures the essence of it... to be _really_ good at something, you have to have deep interest which you can't force - so just forget about being good, it's not worth worrying about, instead discover what you can have fun with and get crazy about. This feels like such a natural thing to encourage in kids :)
Also the side effects of getting deeply interested in random things should not be underestimated, in my experience the connections between seemingly disconnected things are unexpectedly common.
When someone in a sports psychology session broke down motivation into internal vs external [1], they changed the way I would approach anything I do from then onwards. Literally changed my life in 20mins.
Paul seems to write about obsession as something that can be cultivated. In my personal experience, this has been either a personality trait or extreme focus and hard work because of some expected reward. For me this article feels more like a motivational speech rather than an actual theory.
Anyway - my question is this: Is that an elitist thought or is obsession also one of those things anyone can do if only...?
Depression can also lead to a singlar focus. I am pretty sure I have finished a few projects out of despair I would have never otherwise. Perhaps at the expense of other more 'practical' ones, but I have come to value them more.
> Which leads us to the second feature of this kind of obsession: there is no point. A bus ticket collector's love is disinterested. They're not doing it to impress us or to make themselves rich, but for its own sake.
I don't agree with this. They might very well do it to impress others. Most of all, they do it to impress each other. Go to any specialized forum of subreddit and you will find members arguing over details in order to gain respect. If I say X, you say Y and in the end X 'wins', I have gained some status. Bus ticket collectors are people, just like us, and need validation from their peers.
I think there is room for three types of folks along this dimension. Yes, some people enjoy the validation, but there are plenty of obsessive folks who simply don't care for the validation. They take delight in the subject matter independent of peers.
Definitely a lot of peer validation in niche obsession. But the single person niche exists as well (and people in a bigger niche, but isolated), and there the only person to impress is oneself. A bigger the niche means that chances to stumble upon something still undiscovered are lower, so peer validation is irrelevant or maybe even a negative signal for obsessions that might turn into genious.
> It's not merely that the returns from following a path are hard to predict. They change dramatically over time. 1830 was a really good time to be obsessively interested in natural history. If Darwin had been born in 1709 instead of 1809, we might never have heard of him.
This risk might be somewhat mitigated by the changing level of societal interest in different areas over time serving as a guide to interesting fields of study. If Darwin had been born earlier, surrounded by an entirely different set of books, writings, and people, he might also have been a lot less likely to be interested in natural history.
Finding inner motivation to do things other people find preposterous, tedious or uninspiring is the key. One should be driven by sincere curiosity. I don't know if I share PG's parenting strategy on "leave the generalism for someone else" - I think school does a crap job of general education, by dividing and labeling everything and implying it's covered ground.
Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this. I followed most of the rise of Dota from trashy Warcraft 3 mod to Valve's multi-million-dollar-prize-pool juggernaut.
The first few crops of Dota millionaires all had the same backstory: "I played this game 14 hours a day. If there were tournaments at all they didn't really pay anything. My parents said I was wasting my life. I never had a girlfriend. Everyone thought I was a loser, but I just wanted to play and win... and now I know it was all worth it."
And the thing that I couldn't help thinking is: was it? I'm not sure that any rational person would make that decision. Even if you could somehow know that competitive gaming would get big enough, and that your particular game would be popular enough, and that you could become good enough to win – that's just table stakes. You then have to actually play the game obsessively for a decade. There are, frankly, far more comfortable ways to earn a million dollars in exchange for 20,000 to 50,000 hours of your life.
It's kind of hard to take a coherent message away from that. Should you become a competitive gamer for the millions? Certainly not then, and definitely not now. Should you hope that your fringe interest (bus tickets, say) becomes a million-dollar enterprise? No, that's probably even less likely.
Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests. A combination that is increasingly rare in an economic system designed to squeeze out the inefficient. Lest we forget the Bell monopoly; we may never see such inefficiency again.
> Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests.
Where do you see that message? No luck was involved in your example, just hard work on behalf of the good players and of the Dota developers, and pursuing a hobby with passion is perfectly rational.
> ...pursuing a hobby with passion is perfectly rational.
To a point, yes. Though we may disagree on the threshold where it crosses over from rational to unhealthy obsession. And there is certainly luck involved when there are tens who found fortune out of millions participating.
The luck comes in that they opted to play Dota at just the right time. If someone had instead opted into becoming a really good Heroes of the Storm player (only to have the developer stop work on it) they would be in a really different position.
You could take this argument all the way down. Why did valve pick it up? I don't think they saw dota2 as a profit engine necessarily, though there is some argument for that. The company does tend to engage in bus ticket obsessions (VR, dota2). Sometimes it fails (artifact). But I strongly suspect that Gabe Newell bus tickets dota2. I would guess that like myself, he has no real skill at the game, but he just loves it. And he hired the guy (icefrog) that bus tickets dota2 mechanics. The combination is an enormously entertaining (for us fans) wildly unlikely tournament that has a 30 million dollar purse.
When valve picked up dota, league of legends was the most played multiplayer pc game in the world. I think it’s more likely that valve was afraid of exodus of pc gamers from their platform.
A bit of both. A group of people in Valve did become fascinated by Dota, though IIRC the leading figure was Robin Walker (of Team Fortress and Team Fortress 2 fame). That's why TF2 started sprouting MOBA-influenced weapons, for instance. But at the same time the business case for adopting Dota must have been quite clear, and surely was discussed seriously. (Valve also had plenty of experience in successfully bringing other people's existing games or mods in-house: TF and CS, Portal and Left 4 Dead.) Meanwhile Blizzard apparently continued to refuse all offers from the Dota developers.
Don't get hung up on the term genius, focus on the chance discovery part that is the actual topic of the article. Those first wave gaming professionals discovered a personal product market fit without trying, by being obsessed with an absurdly unprofitable pastime.
The article title contains the word ‘genius’ and it’s about doing ‘great work’. The fact that some people managed to turn their consumption-based entertainment hobby into a financial success really has nothing to do with genius or great work.
Society deify successful people when in reality they are nothing more than serial lottery winners. For every "Ronaldo" there are a myriad of people trying to get there that will end their life as losers because they made an high-stakes bet and lost. The truth in unconfortable and nobody wants to listen about it.
That's kinda the point. Work ethic and obsession are not enough: you have to also win a series of lotteries -- genetic and environmental -- to succeed in his field.
The fact that people become successful and/or notorious due to luck does not invalidate the fact that work ethic and your efforts play the largest controllable role you have. To focus on pure chance outcomes is unproductive and nonsensical.
Being better than other hard working people can also involve simply kicking the ladder from underneath you, playing the social status game or making bets at the edge of the law and shoving that risk onto other people.
And sometimes no matter how hard you work, you're one of those people under the rungs.
Success (by which most people mean financial success, fame, or winning in some competition) is certainly worshipped.
However, just being "a hard worker" in itself is considered a virtue by many people.
I hesitate to call it the Protestant Work Ethic or the Puritan Work Ethic, as it's far from limited to Protestants or Puritans, but that's really what it is. The harder you work, the more virtuous you are considered to be, and working less is considered sinful or lazy (in other words, unvirtuous and blame-worthy).
Most professional athletes aren’t obsessive just because they have a weirdly specific passion for their sport. They’re obsessive because they’re pathologically competitive. There’s stories about eg Michael Jordan buying a ping pong table and obsessively practicing at ping pong because he had a teammate who beat him at ping pong once and he wasn’t able to let it go until he beat the guy in a rematch. Obsession can come from many sources.
> That's kinda the point. Work ethic and obsession are not enough: you have to also win a series of lotteries -- genetic and environmental -- to succeed in his field.
Ok, you've heard of Cristiano Ronaldo. Yet, have you heard of Dani?
Like Ronaldo he was launched int Sporting Clube de Portugal's first team when he played for the club's U17 team. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani didn't had a heart condition. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani had more appearances in his first year in the first team, and was quickly picked by WestHam and Ajax.
Unlike Ronaldo, Dani had a notoriously poor work ethics. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani's impressive start was squandered and he went nowhere, he achieved nothing and has since been forgotten.
Work ethics is the deciding factor. You may have won the genetic lottery and be a bonafide ubermensch but if your work ethics suck then you'll quickly be surpassed by those lesser talented but more hard working than you.
I mostly agree with you but "work ethics" is also partially genetic. It's defined partly by a big five trait called conscientiousness which has a fair percentage of its effects not explainable by the environment or random chance.
Most top athletes have excellent work ethic but they also have natural ability. No amount of work ethic can compensate for lack of natural ability. You absolutely need that to get to the top.
Depends on the sport. Football, basketball and fighting sports require natural ability. Soccer does not require nearly as much natural athleticism. So since there is less of a genetic filter, players must work that much harder.
I think pg is trying to argue that passionate disinterest is different from work ethic. For a person like Ronaldo, all of the off-field training might be enjoyable. If it is, then is it really work ethic? Or is it just Ronaldo doing what he wants to do and would be doing anyway, if there were no such thing as money?
Maybe the serial lottery winning is what society subconscious worships.. they know that even with insane amounts of dedications, the others failed when a few particular ones got "lucky".
> For every "Ronaldo" there are a myriad of people trying to get there that will end their life as losers because they made an high-stakes bet and lost.
For every "Ronaldo" there are a small amount of moderately successful players playing soccer for a good living.
The myriad is the group of people that are coasting their way through life trying to put in as little effort as possible and naturally they don't succeed.
This is why having a social safety net is so important. If society can put a floor under how badly people can lose, they'll feel more free to try low-probability high-payoff endeavors.
This is possibly the greatest argument for social safety nets ever made, really.
The economy of today is so efficient and supply chains are so effective at moving things to people who need them, that it seems incredibly stupid to not use it to provide some kind of basic necessities to every human being, no questions asked.
If the US were to do this today, there would be more innovation, less misery, a supercharged economy as you've increased the purchasing power of millions of people overnight...It a fucking no brainer. And cutting taxes rather than providing more benefits seems like the most stupid way to run a country I've ever seen in my life.
So if you spend 14 hours a day for 5 years on a computer project that becomes useful, and a lot of people want it and pay you for it, you are willing to fork over most of that to the government since they provided you with the basic allowance that let you pursue this project, and your success is how they fund a basic allowance for everyone - you included.
While your friend, who did nothing for 5 years, maintains the same standard of living that you do.
I guess this could work, but to me, the level of "disinterest" required to be okay with this result is even more rare than genius.
Nobody on the planet has ever gone "oh fuck me I only made 300 million with my extremely successful business instead of 600 million. Well what a waste of time, I shouldn't have ever started it."
No rational person that isn't already well off would take a 1% shot at 1 billion over a 10% shot at 100 million.
Progressive taxation and social safety don't stifle economies, they make them thrive. They act as a negative tax on risk, and create a framework where actors are free to pursue higher EV bets without worrying as much about utility value. Literally the entire point is to create more pie for everyone.
Bludgers getting "free money" is just a side effect. You're not paying for them with your taxes, you're paying into an insurance fund with all the other innovators. Except this fund is +EV, subsidized by all the other countries in the global economy that aren't taking the same gains. You're the one getting the free money, and the leaners are taxing some percentage of that.
The only reason every successful country in the world isn't already doing it is because of this unintuitive "common sense" optic that you (and about a billion others, literally) are propagating: that somehow it breaks the rules of "fairness". The reality is it's got absolutely nothing to do with fairness, it's about maximizing the bottom line, just like in business. Governments don't give a shit about individual people, nor should they (at least not at the expense of society).
Also, I'd guess most first world countries could easily (and do) provide a world class social safety net without going over 50% taxation in any bracket, not even billionaires. Your example only applies if you're talking about taxation in the 70-100% range.
> While your friend, who did nothing for 5 years, maintains the same standard of living that you do.
Honestly, is this such a bad thing? Why do we incentivize innovation by promising people a basic standard of living? We reward people who take risks with something better than that anyways, so I see no problem with giving people not willing to take those risks something lesser than that “for free”.
>> Society deify successful people when in reality they are nothing more than serial lottery winners
This is absolutely false and a terrible thing to perpetuate. Work ethic has the highest controllable coefficient to success as an output. Luck exists and the universe is probabilistic, yes, but it is not non-deterministic.
This self-lashing of our community and amongst the populist movement that is growing in popularity in the EU and US is ridiculous, reducing the sum total of human achievement into lucky chance rather than actually understanding the probabilistic universe and knowing that while our actions do not wholly determine our fate, they play the single largest role we have control over, and as such, it would be better to believe the myth that we have full control over our destiny rather than this ridiculous concept that luck controls ~100% of circumstance.
Probability theory needs to be taught in primary school, apparently, because for members of even this community, the fallacy of determinism and binary outcomes run rampant.
>> it would be better to believe the myth that we have full control over our destiny rather than this ridiculous concept that luck controls ~100% of circumstance.
Why think in black and white ?
We have a lot impact on our lives, but there's also some luck involved, especially if we want to achieve extreme things.
> reducing the sum total of human achievement into lucky chance
Not the sum total of achievement, just a single individual's achievement. An individual's achievement can indeed be attributed ~100% to luck. For every Einstein there are hundreds of equally brilliant geniuses who died picking cotton in a field.
>It's kind of hard to take a coherent message away from that. Should you become a competitive gamer for the millions?
If you told these guys to be a competitive gamer for the millions, they probably would have stuck to competitive fishing or whatever they were doing anyway. Taking a message or leadership from it is kind of the antithesis of the point. The point is that some social pursuits are the birthplace of the next big thing and some people who are focused on socializing need to make the choice on pursuits that have a potential and pursuits that don't like. Dance class is pretty dead as a career, but we're going to need people who can sort quality from quantity in a few years, the people focused on a qualitative pursuit socially need to pick a field where it's obvious that's needed like journalism or the swath of video games sure to flood the market.
It doesn't have much to do with rational decision making in detail and is instead a generalized story about the different directions in life you can choose.
I disagree of how you define rationality here. If someone feels it serves them fine to play 14 hours of a game, it seems perfectly rational for me. Especially in the case that you mentioned, where they were playing before any big money was on the table. It means they liked, despite a lot of people judging them with an air of superiority.
It is objectively irrational. The ones who made a lot of money are 1%. The rest wasted their youth pursuing an impossible dream. They sacrificed their social development and their future job prospects.
No it is not. If someone is playing 14 hours of a game that is not even giving a lot of money (not even to any 1%, which is the initial situation mentioned before DOTA was big), then obviously they are not doing that for the money.
You'd be suprised. It's not uncommon to see players that only play that much because they want to become a pro player, but in the end they never make it, or qualify to 1-2 tournaments. The lucky ones end up making money from streaming, but a lot depend on their parents or girlfriend's for a place to live since they don't make enough money to live off of.
I think we are talking about two very different things. I am talking about bus ticket collectors and you are talking about gamers playing pro games giving millions of dollars in prizes.
edit: I re-read my previous comment and I am not sure I could make it more clear.
if a game does not gives money prizes at all, the ones who are playing it are not playing for the money.
>And the thing that I couldn't help thinking is: was it? I'm not sure that any rational person would make that decision.
You have to weigh your current abilities and their earning potential vs. the costs of venturing into a new field.
Being at the top of Dota is easier than being at the top of Math or Chess or Go, since Dota is a newer field. They aren't really comparable, but you still compare them if you are trying to figure out what you want to put your time into.
Some people just get lucky and find the thing they are good at on the first try. Then they can maximize their hours available for that thing.
Other people (probably the majority) have to try different fields and start later, and ultimately have less time overall to spend.
So it actually seems rational (if maximizing hours-spent is your goal) to go all-in on the first thing that grabs your interest, which could be Dota.
> Being at the top of Dota is easier than being at the top of Math or Chess or Go
I slightly disagree - neither Chess nor Go have nearly the millions of new players playing it obsessively as they come of age. Math is a bit different, but often times “good at math” isn’t very rewarding except as it pertains to an ancillary job, or if you’re one of the relative few who become a math major.
There’s also a major drop off over time with MOBA players - the average age is 22 or something for professionals. Eventually the reflexes get worse.
I'm going to have to disagree with you there. Being a top chess or go player in modern times necessitates being a child prodigy. The skill gap in chess and go is enormous. I don't think the number of players is the primary indicator of how difficult it is to be at the "top" of an activity.
Yeah, for reference, even mid-level people at FAANG in basically any field can make $1M in 2-3 years. I think most people have no idea how much some laborers can make in the US.
Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to be a genius to work in FAANG. It's a lot of luck. You just have to give yourself as many good chances in the interview pipeline as possible.
> Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this.
Anything competitive is emphatically not a good example of this. If you're in a competition, then by definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else. That's a guaranteed recipe for not accomplishing anything meaningful in life.
Competition can be great for cultivating positive character traits and developing certain skills, but at some point you need to move beyond it.
Competitive gaming was an extreme niche 20 years ago. Now its just a niche with lots of people. When these people started, the concept of competitive gaming didnt even really exist.
You're eliminating a big category of things most people recognize as genius here. There's a long history of recognized genius in the development of chess and go over time for instance. You may not consider this as meaningful as breakthroughs in physics and biology for instance (and I may agree), but I think it leaves out a pretty big part of our history to discount this altogether.
It might just be a matter of framing, but I do not understand: How could you ever do anything work related, void of competition for any significant stretch of time?
Even if you create or exploit something wildly new that is completely beyond reach for anyone else at that moment – let's say you made time travel viable tomorrow – as soon as you did and started commercialising it, competition would start forming later that day.
For everything else, you will right off the gate be competing with someone over something (at the very least time and money). Airbnb is competing with Hotels/Motels, Uber with Taxis, Facebook with MySpace. MySpace with more specialised communities and GeoCities. The internet was competing with telephones, mail, fax and the yellow pages.
I guess the rebuttal might go something like: Business is inherently competitive. Creating startups, you are usually competing not only with old line businesses but with other startups.
I guess the rebuttal to the rebuttal might sound something like Thiel's startup lectures: Startups should try to be anticompetitive, ideally carving out new niches. You don't want to engage in head-to-head competition.
The 3rd degree rebuttal might be something like: There are plenty of examples of successful startups that began as clones of other businesses (Facebook seems the canonical example).
But then as you say, they moved beyond being a clone of Friendster/Myspace/Tribe/etc... but isn't that the competitive process?
The key ingredient in the obsession is that you're not seeking personal advantage. I wish there was a better word for this than pg's "disinterested" because it sounds strange to have an intense, all-consuming interest in which you're disinterested (see his footnote about choosing this word).
Because you're not pursuing personal advantage, this kind of obsession is incompatible with competition. You're obsessively interested in collecting old bus tickets not because you want to get paid, not because you want to be famous, not because you want to change the world, and not because you want to win.
So it's a bit weird for pg to identify "heuristics you can use to guess whether an obsession might be one that matters". If you care about whether a thing matters, instead about the thing itself, then you're not really disinterested.
As soon as your obsession becomes influenced by thoughts of personal advantage, then it's about garden variety ambition and determination, not the magical property of disinterest that pg describes.
Disinterested obsession may be a powerful source of innovation and progress, but the instant you intentionally try to harness this power in pursuit of progress, you destroy the magic of disinterest.
[2] I worried a little about using the word "disinterested," since some people mistakenly believe it means not interested. But anyone who expects to be a genius will have to know the meaning of such a basic word, so I figure they may as well start now.
From dictionary.com, the second definition of disinterested is "having no interest in something," but the first is, "not influenced by considerations of personal advantage."
> I wish there was a better word for this than pg's "disinterested" because it sounds strange to have an intense, all-consuming interest in which you're disinterested.
It's interest in the sense of "conflict of interest", not in the sense of finding something fascinating.
I'd almost say "introversion" or "selfishness" is the right term, if the latter weren't so prejudicial. You aren't collecting bus tickets or obsessing over infinite series to advance your own material interests or standing in the external world.
"Disinterest" doesn't work at all in any sense of the term. In the absence of overt mental illness, the bus-ticket collector must see it as being in his best interest to spend his time collecting bus tickets, or he'd do something else instead. ("You are your calendar.") The search for gratification, however externally meaningless, is certainly a valid expression of self-interest.
Put another way, if you would object if you were forcibly stopped from pursuing a goal, then you cannot be described as "disinterested."
Trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis is doing the same thing like everyone else. Competition might actually force you to come up with a different approach.
What the above comment is about applies to so much in life, from education to careers because at their core, they are competitions.
> If you're in a competition, the. By definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else.
Not true.
There are people who play competitive, ranked, games 3 hrs a week and are happy with being in the top 50% of players
And there are people who spend 30hrs a week in a game and are profoundly unhappy they're only in the top 5% of players.
Those wind up being two very different paths, and it applies to way more than just gaming, like education, which I can speak from experience to that
From a young age I would spend hours upon hours on computers working on my games and random ideas. Even in school I would skip classes to work on my own projects in a computer lab.
My parents felt it was a complete waste of time (especially since it became a huge drain on my performance at school). I didn't have nearly as many close friends as I should have, didn't form a lot of the bonds people growing up do, it ruined my relationship with my parents.
At the end of the day through luck or something I scraped through high school with a .1 above failing GPA, dropped out of community college after failing 2 semesters and started a career in tech by freelancing.
Now 5 years later and the positions I've taken are consistently higher seniority than my friends who did CS in college, so it worked out, but at what cost?
Those years I lost, not even talking to one of my parents for over a year despite living in the same house, wasn't really worth it.
But it was an obsession, I didn't obsess over programming because I wanted to have a great career one day, it was because I couldn't help it. It was almost like an addiction that I got lucky enough to have double as a marketable skill.
It's crazy how much article really resonates with my experience, almost annoyingly so since I feel like a bus ticket collector sometimes, sure tech is a marketable skill, but you sure build a lot of unimportant stuff
Flipping light switches is not a competition... I wasn't being literal. I mean a great number of important things in life are competitions even if we don't see ourselves as competitors.
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But actually I disagree with saying Ramanujan wasn't competing with anyone, he just wasn't trying to compete
Plenty of people would consider any academic field a competition, even if not everyone in the field is there to compete
The competitive nature of the mathematics field easily have to do with why Ramanujan was not taken as seriously as he should have been at first. A "competitor" was coming with claims to grand contributions and that already created friction, which when combined with other factors about his non-traditional presentation became roadblocks.
> If you're in a competition, then by definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else. That's a guaranteed recipe for not accomplishing anything meaningful in life.
That's a mistaken conclusion because you didn't follow it properly to the narrowed end: if you're in a large field of competition at a thing and you're among the best in the world at it, then the exact opposite is more likely to be true (you will likely do something meaningful and have extreme success) and your supposed guaranteed recipe collapses.
This premise holds true in eg: business, acting, music, science, traditional sports, games like chess, and numerous other fields.
Right now, around the world, dozens (or hundreds) of scientists are competing to reach the same breakthrough. They may not know who all the competitors are and may not know they're all chasing the same thing, but they are. One or a small group of them will get there before the rest. It is competition and it doesn't exclude you from doing something meaningful: you need to win the competition.
See: Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Kurt Cobain, Whitney Houston, Craig Venter, Garry Kasparov, John Carmack, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos
All had to rise to the top of highly competitive fields with a large supply of competitors. How many other grunge bands were there next to Nirvana? How many other singers did Whitney Houston have to stand apart from? How many other women (frequently younger, a big deal in tennis) has Serena Williams had to competitively outlast over ~20 years to spend so much time on top of her sport and put together one of the greatest sports careers of all-time? It's a never ending supply of younger, highly talented competitors, and yet Williams did what she did.
> Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests
Nah, millions are delivered to those who already have millions, everything else is noise that is overemphasized to distract the bottom 80+%.
It might be worthwhile to remind ourselves here that making lots of money, acquiring status, and gaining power are obsessive interests that some people have.
I have a similar story. I dropped out of school at 16, and spent 14+ hours a day playing Stepmania Online, which was Dance Dance Revolution for your fingers. I was one of the best in the world! Then everyone stopped playing and nothing came of it. So for every DOTA millionaire or whatnot there’s likely thousands of people who are obsessed with something equally niche who haven’t realized any financial gains because of it.
Now I’m a software engineer, it’s working out way better than playing video games all day.
Ah, Stepmania Online...what a fun time that was. I remember putting in my 6-8 a day after school. I may not have been at the level you were at but I was roughly the same age and quite good. Then, I went to college and no longer had the same desire to play anymore.
Do you still crack open Stepmania every so often for old times sake? I have no idea if any kind of a community still exists around it.
Hah I haven’t for a couple years but last time I did I was amazed and dismayed at having the sensation that my mind knows what to do, but my fingers just aren’t quick enough. I’d guess if you were a musician or athlete who hadn’t played in awhile it’d feel similar. I end up shutting it off because my brain isn’t entertained by the slow songs and my hands can’t physically keep up with the fast ones that I loved so much, and it’d probably take me a few weeks to get any good again and I’m not willing to put in that kind of time with a family.
It also gave me a lesson in hierarchies of competence. Even though I was maybe one of the 20 best people ranked in Stepmania Online, there were people who despite the amount of time I’d put in were significantly better at the game. (The name Nima comes to mind, I think he was a concert pianist whose skills translated into perfect accuracy on Stepmania). Despite being really good, I felt like I’d never be the best.
It was also around that time that I met Day9, the pro Starcraft now relatively famous Twitch streamer at a LAN party and he introduced me to Beatmania, which was like Stepmania only more keys. He was so good at it (and arrogant, hah but isn’t any sixteen year old that can be?) that I sort of gave up on Stepmania because it felt like peanuts in comparison.
Yeah, I remember Nima, and I also remember a similar feeling upon discovering Beatmania. Now that I'm digging into the cobwebs of my memories, I am beginning to recall a game called O2Jam which was essentially a South Korean Beatmania flavored MMO. Very challenging, and it definitely usurped some of the space I was otherwise giving to Stepmania Online. Did you ever get into O2Jam? I think it might even still be around.
> There are, frankly, far more comfortable ways to earn a million dollars in exchange for 20,000 to 50,000 hours of your life.
Not everything is about ROI, I'm also not saying playing Dota for your entire life is going to be particularly fulfilling in many other ways thought - after all they are playing out their lives within the very finite confines of someone else's creation.
The author does point this out as a suggested heuristic, if you are obsessed with someone elses creation, it's probably not going to be very fruitful (whether fruitful means money, scientific discovery, or fulfillment ones curiosity etc).
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/paulg/status/1198189199641452544
For me it's an interest in animal consciousness and communication, even though I am a physicist by training.
Yeah, it's just how the lives of billions are organised, changed, and affected, no big matter...
>I think history shows quite well that once individuals and polities alike start on the path of pursuing/promoting some variety of economic freedom and classical liberal values (often including but not limited to what's known as liberal democracy), safety and stable cooperation become enough of a common interest to make most 'geopolitics' considerations quite irrelevant, and often misleading.
That's the very theory put forward just before 1914, about how a war in Europe was not possible anymore, because of "economic freedom and classical liberal values" promoting "safety and stable cooperation" between countries. The possibility of war was laughed at as "The big delusion". We know how that turned out.
Then there was the same idea, of the "end of history", with the triumph of "economic freedom and classical liberal values" put forward after the USSR collapsed. We also know how that turned out.
Historically, "economic freedom and classical liberal values" have been very good at war and fierce geopolitics.
The very idea of economy is competition.
For example the Iraq war quagmire has lead to Al-Qaida and ISIS (well, forest fires in Russia also caused grain harvests in Russia to suffer, food prices to go up, and the Arab Spring to happen), this has lead to the refugee crisis in Europe, that combined with austerity has lead to the rise of populism in Europe, and Brexit.
Of late, I'm particularly fascinated by ideas in Cybernetics, but I don't see anyone else being interested in them right now. I think there might be interesting insights into both biological and artificial intelligence (with communication definitely being an important component; consciousness is a word I avoid till I can find a more concrete handle on it), but it's primarily based on interest/taste, rather than motivated goal chasing :-)
(I'm more interested in concrete ideas from Wiener, Ashcroft, etc. rather than the fluff that came later as the word's usage got stretched beyond meaning, as is now happening with "AI")
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2xcyrl/i_a...
Essentially, by modelling therapists' verbal patterns using Transformational Grammar a formal theory of mind was evolved that has lead to sophisticated algorithms for various kinds of psychological change.
Unfortunately, a lot of pseudo-science and "woo" has grown up around it, but please don't let that distract you, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
- - - -
In re: creating simple machines with intelligence, IMO cybernetics (i.e. what's in "Introduction to Cybernetics" by Ashby; I'm also not interested in fluff) is pretty obviously the way to go. Even the simple centrifugal governor "seems alive" in the words of early witnesses. Purposive behaviour is the domain of living systems, at least according to instinct and experience, eh?
I think one could use cybernetics to inform the design of robotic systems using e.g. the kind of simple controllers David Wyland talks about at the HomeBrew Robotics Club in this video: https://archive.org/details/HBRobotics_Forth
He's not explicitly talking about cybernetics, of course, but I think he's got the right idea and cybernetics shows the way forward.
Specifically this question -
Why is soccer more widely played than checkers?
Physical Mastery - repetitive exploration of real world ball physics encourages a sense of mastery. Checkers doesn't have this. I've built a physics sim into the card game to replicate this sense of building mastery through exploring the physics system to win.
Mental Mastery - Both soccer players and checker players make choices that feel fun and meaningful. When trying to dribble around an opponent, they have multiple options they must chose (right or left, fakeout). The player must have a model of what their opponent might do and react based on that. Updating their model is a sense of mental mastery that can be rewarding and contribute to flow.
Real Time - Soccer doesn't have turns. In checkers, waiting for the opponent can break the flow state if you already know your move. The demo allows players to play cards in real time. The catch is - when you run out of cards in hand you loose.
Accessibility - People can just pick up a ball shaped object and ball. I built a demo in WebGL so people can just hop in.
Simplicity of Rules and Depth of Choices - Instead of having a convoluted health system, the amount of cards in your hand are your health. This makes picking up the game easy, there's just one rule to keep in mind. This allows for a variety of fun choices because each card you play lowers your health. This creates a fun risk reward system with no additional rules.
The other idea is to use the existing physics system that players are already familiar with. That way there's no tutorial - players already know how cards handle and drop in real life.
We play soccer with our entire bodies, muscles, heart, legs, lungs get a workout. Not to insult the players but mind and thought processes are somewhat secondary, it is about the "lizard brain": attack and defend with instincts and reflexes.
When you play checkers it is your mind that gets a workout. It is the intellect that gets a workout. The exact opposite of the soccer.
There are almost no similarities between the two! Making it into a physics simulator does not make it a physical excercise...
Beat Saber seems to handle the workout component slightly.
What about a VR version where cards come flying at you and you have to dodge them/block them? That might wake up the lizard/attack/defense part of the brain. That actually sounds pretty fun.
I don't think it was overly critical at all and appreciate the response!
I think you deeply underestimate how much thought and intellect go into playing soccer. It is a game, and applying intelligence to it is necessary to be good at it.
Disclaimer: I don't like football (US: soccer), but I know very smart people that play.
It’s a lady who is a speech therapist who has taught her dog to communicate with pre-programmed push buttons.
10 years ago I was quite engrossed in automatic layout of UI elements to automatically accommodate e.g. localized text of different size (Apple's iOS UI layout tools at the time were awfully crude, not sure about now). Around the same time I was much very into application state management (same problem solved by flux, but different approach). Having "solved" these two problems for my use case I have since moved on.
Recently I am into mapping business workflows to data structures, visualizing them back, and then providing control over them, e.g. order/invoice/shipping processing in wholesale trade. Nifty stuff, and trickier than the other two things.
A lot of people with fixed and repetitive interests in something will be autistic. I'd be interested to know what the ratios are for autistic vs not for people who have this kind of obsessive interest.
What you can do:
- stop drinking, using drugs and passively consuming shit
- swim/exercise the body
- study what you're passionate about
- cultivate interest further, by iterating on building stuff, meeting peers who share similar interests, followup on your ideas and dreams
- long walks in nature to think about it deeper, periods where you remove yourself away from people
- balance your interests with sustainable living, because you're not doing it just to score big!
Not so sure people can will themselves to change that much.
You can enjoy life, cultivate what works and hedge your bets, in that order. By following your core life-theme and ideas, you should become more of what you already are.
Didn’t take long before I could look at a Go board and get sucked in, or at least have a fairly profound aesthetic experience if it was a nice configuration.
Took a lot longer with math, and there what I get is generally like reading about a nice idea from a sci-for short story.
I don’t think this would work without some genuine interest/curiosity in the subject to begin with though. And there were times with both where I was intimidated or there were tasks I needed to do in order to improve that I didn’t want to do, which seems fine as long as there’s a larger portion of gratifying experience.
Only 2 points seem timeless:
- study what you're passionate about
- cultivate interest further, by iterating on building stuff, meeting peers who share similar interests, followup on your ideas and dreams
There is value in relaxing, there is value in letting go of control and following your impulses. Trying to drive out all fun may lead to a more productive life, but at the cost of a pleasurable life.
However, I think that a prerequisite to this is to be a naturally curious person.
There are many ways to do this, like meditation, or some substances.
You basically imagine yourself in the future, having achieved some goal, or being in a situation that you like. This image has to be rich and invoke many emotions, so it becomes engraved in your neural paths.
You then work backwards from there, imagining different roads and specific steps on how to achieve that.
It literally and physically changes your brain over time, as you repeat it.
But being obsessively interested in one/few of them is a completely different matter -- a lot of other "normal" aspects of life tend to suffer as a side-effect. Our society does not do a good job of nurturing and encouraging such lopsided profiles, and trying to keep that spark alive while leading a "normal" life extracts an incredibly heavy cost. Understandably, most "normal" people (instinctively) find that to be a cost not worth paying. Embedded in contemporary society, few such people manage to pursue their interest to their satisfaction, and fewer do well enough to be considered "successful" by society (a vanishing fraction become outstandingly successful, and are then called "geniuses").
Eh, I had a large collection. I still have a collection of a few hundred tickets (not worth much, a few hundred pounds). I started the collection in about 1997. I stopped in about 2003. I've never shown other collectors my tickets, and I've only put about 5 tickets online and that was only this year.
I think for this obsessional collecting it's really not about other people. It's about systematizing and categorising the world. Outside is chaos and confusion. In here, with this collection, there is order and control.
But with solar energy systems, there are a lot of intricacies and compromises and learning electronics is very rewarding.
The downside is that I seem to lose interest very quickly, once I solve my particular problem. But I still learn a lot and have fun in the meantime.
If you’re not curious about the world in general, then I’m not sure anything can change that trajectory, although I could be wrong.
For a specific topic, I recommend learning about that topic from someone who is passionate about it and who is a good teacher.
Sometimes this can be as easy as reading books by a good author. When I was in high school, I despised history. It turns out that I despised it because I had never been exposed to compelling history. I ended up becoming friends with someone who was a passionate historian, and he pointed me to compelling resources that totally changed my mind about history.
In college, I had no interest in art or art classes. A friend of mine took a drawing class that she said “blew her mind”. I couldn’t believe it, but she just told me to trust her and take the class. I asked a few other people, and they all said the same thing. I took the class, and they were all correct. While the topic was technically drawing, the professor pushed us to explore what our drawing told us about ourselves, how we could expand our minds through drawing, and how our drawing related to our interactions with the world. Just re-reading that, it sounds like hippy-dippy bullshit, but to experience it was something else, and it is something most participants in that class took away in a positive way.
I ended up minoring in art, and I worked with another professor who really stretched my mind.
While these are my personal experiences (and there are many more that I didn’t mention), I think I have seen this pattern amongst my friends and acquaintances as well. As such, I recommend finding a good, highly recommended, talented teacher if you want to get interested in a new topic. Note that they are not always easy to find.
I was putting a few examples on Instagram, but I don't really understand how Instagram chooses to crop images so I stopped until I have time to work it out. https://www.instagram.com/p/B1JpyfXHLRG/?utm_source=ig_web_c... If you're interested in classifying things you can sort tickets out in several ways -- by bus company operator, by year, by colour, by machine. If you're interested in social history you can use tickets to illustrate some small points - here's a "workman return" which would probably have a different name today: https://www.instagram.com/p/B1Lpy4kHKWR/?utm_source=ig_web_c...
Through this I met other transport ticket collectors, and other transport enthusiasts ("bus spotters", railway enthusiasts).
Paul starts his essay by mentioning natural ability. He then describes this obsessive interest as a third requirement, which implies to me that obsessive interest is not necessarily part of natural ability.
I'd be interested to know whether obsessive interest is something that can be learnt, or whether it's a feature of neuro-diversity and thus part of natural ability. One of the diagnostic criteria for autism is "fixed and repetitive interests".
I'm also interested to know whether people think their interests are obsessive. I stopped collecting transport tickets in the late 1990s, but I only found out a few years ago that the amount I know about UK bus tickets and ticket machines is unusual.
but can I actually say I'm "passionate" about any of them? On any given day, I've likely spent zero time or effort on at least one of the above. Simply can't have a day when I've studied math (beyond cursory readings on the phone), practiced an instrument, worked out, hiked/camped, read, AND watched a movie
In the past, science was an eccentric hobby, not particularly valued and certainly not a viable career option. Today it's all of these things - like becoming a doctor. Telling your mother you want to be a scientist is far better than saying you want to be a musician. A hundred years ago that wouldn't have been the case.
The consequence of this is that these fields are filled up with careerists - people who are socially driven rather than curiosity driven. I think this might go some way to explaining the slowdown in scientific progress, because people chase low-risk 'hot' fields to advance their careers, rather than splashing about in the unfashionable backwaters of science for the sheer enjoyment of it.
When you come up with a good question, make sure lots of people hear it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems
Faraday had no formal training, but his natural intuition, interest, and tenacity made him standout.
Newton was a brilliant, paranoid asshole.
Instead funding goes to credentialed career scientists whose greatest ability is self-promotion, fund raising, and stringing-along the public.
As an example: The next big particle accelerator sucks up billions; while alternative approaches to QM never get any attention because it’s a guaranteed way to kill a career and become a pariah.
So nobody is available to even try to create the theoretical framework at the investment of a few million.
Working a day job in industry isn't categorically different, except that someone is probably watching your spending more closely. You have to figure out a way to set aside some time to work on your own interest, whether you do it at work or at home.
As for money, you can get technology made for 1/10 of what it costs your employer, by choosing your battles, cutting out all of the overhead, and using free stuff.
Newton and Einstein both hit on some big ideas during lulls (@home to avoid plague for the former; patent office work for the latter).
A great example is a chemist I knew that love research with selenium (an uncommon element). He was most interested in what role it plays in organic chemistry. That’s it.
But when he wrote up grant proposals it was always about the anti-cancer properties of selenium compounds. Never mind the fact he had zero plans to actually pursues that end.
It's a nice narrative that overgrown institutions are ruthlessly repressing all creativity. And I do believe there is some truth to that. We should work hard to understand why and then improve the situation. However, unfortunately, reality is usually more complex and also more mundane (in some ways) than any nice narratives we can come up with.
Now things are much more specialized and require years of formal study just to get a base level of knowledge in one tiny aspect.
We have the luxury of hindsight to know which peculiar schools of thought were rubbish, so we don’t even teach them.
I’m sure there are many, many theorems built up with Euclidean Geometry that we don’t bother teaching anymore.
Because modern methods make the results trivial.
Today, what are we burdening upcoming scientists with unnecessarily?
Then they got ignored, and then they finally got useful.
I'm not sure being a scientist was that unfashionable 100 years ago anyway: research labs were a thing, academic work was arguably more prestigious than it is today, fortunes were being made from inventions especially in fields where there were low hanging fruit, competitions and societies and exhibitions to celebrate scientific achievement had come into existence and the idea of inventiveness was even tied up in popular contemporaneous notions of national and racial superiority. There might be more subfields and more research to build on nowadays, but the stereotype of scientists being underpaid eccentrics certainly hasn't gone away and nor has the fact a mathematics prodigy can make a lot more money working in financial services than academic research.
I'm also unconvinced scientific progress has slowed because today's geniuses are working on interpreting our genetic code, modelling solutions to climate change and solving scaling problems in computation rather than drawing taxonomy diagrams, inventing new types of consumer electronics and breaking the land speed record.
i.e. exactly the people who were, by far, most likely to be living a comfortable, stress-free life back then. We should not underestimate the sheer amount of material progress and economic growth that has occurred since then. A lot more people can have the luxury of getting playfully obsessed about something than could back then.
I guess I’m a bus ticket collector of HN facts.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek
That average does put things into perspective though.
As an aside, I recently feel at odds with the language many people are using. The mere word 'hate' seems to have grown weird political connotations, while is suddenly okay to hate 'hate'. Is this not fostering the very emotion you revile, under twisted pretense? I remember 'love thy enemy' to have been the twist of the knife in peaceful protest, not sinking to their level with 'justified hate'. It feels hollow. If we want a change, we need to reach out first. /rant
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific research by European-descended upper middle class men
was a thing.
50 years ago I wasn't expecting it to come back, it wouldn't have helped me anyway, overall scientific opportunities were far worse by then and the trend has continued. I wasn't waiting around for an uptick, I just started right away putting in the effort to try and compensate.
And I agree with this completely:
>There are certainly many geniuses obsessively researching into areas that stimulate their intellectual interest today that wouldn't have had the opportunity to do so back then.
There is so much brilliance in so many cultures through so many millennia, it can be seen that education and financial support are not even essential for genius, mainly for documenting, recognizing, and leveraging the influence of a very very small percentage of geniuses through history, only those few whose works were preserved and/or applied.
Surviving largely within a system of lesser thinkers whose works were better preserved and/or more stongly applied.
Which is why I think
>inventing new types of consumer electronics
can be a good thing if the consumer is given careful enough consideration.
Wikipedia was a huge step in the right direction: making everything easier to understand. With lots of proofs and examples.
I think you could easily become billionaire by improving Wikipedia and the "make science and knowledge easily absorbable" 10X easier
The purpose of your thesis is to demonstrate to them (and perhaps the larger scientific community) that you can communicate to other scientist in the language of the field, that you possess the requisite knowledge, and that you are prepared to advance that field.
There is no guild, but there are gate keepers (reviewers of various sorts) and you must be prepared well enough to make convincing cases (for publication, funding, etc.) Your advisors were training you for this role.
Science is first and foremost about understanding, and writing in a way that purposefully obfuscates and makes it harder to understand what is communicated is anathema to true science.
While I fully agree that ability to communicate science to the general public is incredibly important, the thesis is not necessary the place for this. Plenty of other places are (blogs, twitter, etc) and this ability is crucial for a publicly funded scientist. General large conferences that I am aware of often encourage non-technical translations of abstracts.
Wikipedia has been a godsend for me, to be able to understand core principles without having to wade through what seems to be obfuscated English in order to hide something relatively trivial at the heart of the document.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I agree but I think it is driven by academia's incentive structure which promotes and rewards such behavior.
There is a formula you must fit into, 5 days a week, probably 50 hours, a specific attitude, and everything they can get from you. Try this: in your next offer negotiation, ask to cut your salary by 20% and get one day back.
Can't blame them. It is how Tesla and many other inventive minds have been made subject. It's not slavery but it doesn't honor the contributor acting in good faith.
I think it's worse than this: school and academia is no longer the sole option for the ultra curious. Curiosity is better fed by the internet, which means we end up lacking a social institution which captures and unifies people like this.
Really! That's news to me. Are you aware of how much scientists are paid and their general career prospects?
The average scientist outside academia is probably doing grunt work and is paid badly - unless they're working in fintech, or something with an obvious financial upside.
The reality is that the entire research system is optimised for direct and indirect cash accumulation, not for genuine innovation or invention. There's some interest in blue sky funding, but if you're a fresh postgrad no grant body is going to give you a lot of money to go off and design a working warp drive unless you also have the bureaucratic skills to make your project sound like something they want to fund - probably for other reasons.
Researchers with good bureaucratic skills and genius-level scientific insights are exceptionally rare. And the publishing system isn't welcoming to talented semi-outsiders
Newton, Einstein, Darwin, and Ramanujan would really struggle in today's environment. Newton might be okay if he managed to get tenure, but the others not so much.
Are you joking? A small child literally has a better chance of growing up to become a professional athlete than a tenured research professor!
In 2016, American universities hired about 20,000 tenure-track faculty [1]. Adding up the major pro sports leagues, there are very very generously 10,000 American pro athletes, (i.e. people who don’t have day jobs).
I guess things change if you include all the minor league and farm teams, especially for the MLB.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/12/about-three-q...
Trying to shift the interest of area X researchers only results in their coming up with rationalizations about how what they have been doing all along is somehow related to Y.
"One interesting thing about the bus ticket theory is that it may help explain why different types of people excel at different kinds of work. Interest is much more unevenly distributed than ability. If natural ability is all you need to do great work, and natural ability is evenly distributed, you have to invent elaborate theories to explain the skewed distributions we see among those who actually do great work in various fields. But it may be that much of the skew has a simpler explanation: different people are interested in different things.
The bus ticket theory also explains why people are less likely to do great work after they have children. Here interest has to compete not just with external obstacles, but with another interest, and one that for most people is extremely powerful. It's harder to find time for work after you have kids, but that's the easy part. The real change is that you don't want to."
Both fathers and mothers care about their children, but on average mothers care more and think more obsessively about them.
I don't think this is the case. Males just have low visibility into typical female 'obsessions' (or just don't care all that much about them), but the reverse is also generally true. Females tend to obsess about things that have a 'social' side, like their shoes collection - whereas males are more into physical, material things that can be played with.
Darwin got to say "I'll be in my study" and "you take care of the kids and dinner and everything else" was just automatically implied.
Darwin could go inside the study because his gender role was fulfilled by being rich. Had he been poor he might have said "I will be in the coal mine", and getting slowly and horrible killed.
Very few know people in history had the privilege to freely obsess over things which is outside their gender role, especially if the result leads to them not fulling that role through other means.
I agree with you that most men over the course of history did not have the luxury that Darwin did.
zozbot234 comment below that said "I don't think this is the case.", arguing instead that low visibility over gender lines makes people think that gender has an impact how obsessive a person is.
rhlsthrm comment below that one said "This is exactly right".
This is why I said parent and grandparent, ie zozbot234 and rhlsthrm comments, did not include genetics in their arguments, and I interpreted your comment as arguing against them as if they had argued in favor of genetics. If I am wrong and you directed your argument against the grandgrandparent then I am sorry for that interpretation.
You could of course be at the point where you started too late and you haven’t time to ramp up useful work into successful outcomes through obsessiveness, as you already have dependents. Or you could be in the unlucky edge he talks about of people who only went down the wrong paths due to risks turning out wrong.
But I believe the article did address all of your points.
What were those? Genuinely interested, I'd rather hear about people's passion projects all day long than about ways to make money.
Thank you for answering my question.
Newton was not just a physicist who dabbled with occult. He turned occult into physics.
Before Newton scientists and natural philosophers like Descartes believed that movements were caused by physical contact.
Newton started traditionally and proposed the existence of ether that transmits forces. When he became interested in alchemy, he replaced ether with occult forces that repel and attract each other. Newton received criticism for his theory that gravity was worked through "action at a distance", because that is occult quality. His theory was not seen as physical theory at first, because 'physical theories' at the time were physical in the intuitive common sense meaning. Action at a distance, across a vacuum, was occultism.
Keynes called Newton the last magician. He was able to make similar leap as Einstein did.
1.) Maxwell's equations permit no other speed for light than c.
2.) All physical laws (such as Maxwell's) are the same in all inertial reference frames.
From those two the rest flows.
If it wasn't true, if there was a difference in some physical law due to your motion, you would be able to detect the One True Frame of the Universe. Now here's where I get a little fuzzy, I think it was up for grabs, and then they tried (Michelson–Morley experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper... ) and couldn't do it. (See also Mach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Mach#Philosophy_of_scien... )
If you're in a spaceship with no windows, out in space, and you are in free-fall (not accelerating), there's no experiment you can do that will tell you whether you are moving or not.
If your spaceship has a window, and you look out and see another spaceship passing by (but nothing else) you can't tell whether you're still and it's moving, or you're moving and it's still, or you're both moving. You can detect the relative velocity between you and the other ship, but not the absolute velocity (because there isn't one.)
Intuitively we are used to a "absolute" reference frame provided by the bulk of the Earth but that's just a (highly) local context.
In space (which is to say, in our Universe) there's no absolute reference frame, so you literally cannot have an absolute velocity, and obviously you can't have a physical law described by an equation that includes a term that doesn't exist, n'est-ce pas?
Cheers!
Person A is on a moving train and tosses a ball into the air of height H. To this person the ball travels a distance of 2H to in a time T to return to his hand.
Person B is beside the tracks and sees the same event. To this person the ball travels 2 * (x^2 + H^2)^1/2, which we'll later call D, in the same time T where x is the distance the train traveled during this time.
Since velocity is a measure distance divided by time the velocity of the ball in Person A's frame of reference is 2H/T (V1). The velocity of the ball in Person B's frame of reference is 2D/T (V2). Obviously V2 is greater because the distance traveled is greater for the same amount of time.
Now suppose instead of tossing a ball into the air of height H, Person A shines a flashlight to a mirror at height H. The new constraint is this; the velocity of light is a constant and cannot be faster for Person B. Now what? Length contraction / time dilation is what.
1. Maxwell's equations did not permit information to propagate faster than some finite velocity c, which (for many good reasons) can be identified with the speed of light in vaccuum.
2. Closely related mathemaical fact: Maxwell's equations were Lorentz invariant.
3. On the other hand if one envisioned a charged particle moving in a field, then Newtonian theory says the particle dynamics were galilean invariant.
But the particle and the field really are part of one system, and it would be odd for the two parts to have different symmetry properties, as this would mean for example that when one changes between two coordinate systems their equations of motion would transform in different ways.
I know lots of you know way more physics & history of physics than I. Please jump in!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17098.Isaac_Newton
It doesn't shy away from what later hagiographies deride as "religious superstition", but what according to Gleick was integral to Newton's worldview.
Did he have some mountain of experimental data, to which he found a model which fit? Did he have sub-models which he unified, or simplified? What exactly were his inputs and outputs?
In school we're taught that the scientific method involves hypothesis, and experimentation, and confirmation or rejection, but in Einstein's case all I hear about are fully-formed theories -- and then confirmation by others, years after his death. Did he eliminate other possible theories through experimentation, or did he happen to get it right from the start? Was relativity the only possible solution, or was there also some luck involved?
His outputs were deducing models that elegantly explained these phenomena: that a constant speed of light in all reference frames, as unintuitive as that is, would lead to the equations of relativity, and that energy being transmitted only in discrete quanta would lead to the photoelectric effect and blackbody radiation effects that were observed by others.
This was largely not a feat of producing theories on data. It was coming up with a simpler explanation for phenomena which had already been known, but for which existing explanations were far too complex.
The amazing part is that he did this four times in one year (1905): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers
I'm obsessed about audio/music tech. Some part of this area is immensely complex due to people's obsession with good sound, or new interesting sounds, or new ways of altering it. They don't discover these things, they create it. Time stretch or pitch shift algorithms, for example, were created (I suppose) by obsessed people who like to create complexity and by extension, useful stuff.
So no, Darwin's invention model is not the only possible one.
I can't imagine how you can create useful complexity by collecting bus tickets, but who knows, maybe some key to inventing more efficient public transport lies there. Or at least more efficient bus ticket printing. Can be anything!
Some people have an obsession for the actual tickets, while others have an obsession with the ticketing pricing system. These people can find useful oddities with the system. In some parts of the UK it's worthwhile buying a year long railcard for two stations that you will never travel to or from, because that gives you a gold card, and the gold card gives you 1/3 off other tickets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbrFze0XH5M
I guess this is a long-winded way of saying if you want to test systems you want a legitimate way for these people to look at it, because otherwise they may find ways that are problematic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_McCollum
But also, the essay does say that some obsessions are useful and others don't appear to have wider uses than being interesting for that individual person.
What if bus tickets of certain style correlate to lower accident rates or more reliable schedules and no one else has noticed before?
What if a certain property of bus tickets is a predictor for some other societal result or economic trend in a way few would expect?
What if they are really tasty and nutritious but no one ever tried eating them?
Each one of these is farfetched enough that is no one is getting involved in collecting just to chase these possibilities. But only a collector, motivated by curiosity, is ever likely to catch them.
For instance, a decade ago, I became super obsessed abt the state of emergency first-aid after going through harrowing experience of seeing one of my friends die stranded on a highway because the responders reached after 2 hours. Despite that, I never acted on it. I'm glad folks at http://gethelpnow.in (Uber for Ambulance) are going to fix it for India, and it is a great business opportunity too seeing how helpless and desperate the emergency situation really gets, compared to the West.
Speaking of ambulances, one of my cousins volunteers for the famed St. John's Ambulance Brigade [1] in Bombay and they were one of the first responders to the 2008 Bombay Terror Attacks [2]. Even though they're well funded and well-run for a non-profit, I firmly believe a for-profit business with skin-in-the-game would be able to provide more value.
I've been curious to the point of obsession abt a lot of things a lot of times and have seen numerous successful companies that were later built by sheer determination and rifle focus on solving the problem by the respective founding teams. When I see these companies (even in their infancy when success is not obvious), I have that urge to want to go work for them but end up stalking their progress instead, and that's because, I believe, I've been obsessed abt the problem they solve.
In any case, it is always easier said than done.
[0] http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John_Ambulance
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks
This seems to me that it applies so much to other aspects of life as well, not only for being "a genius". Perhaps this applies more to a particular subset of people who will think on this line.
For example, take the obsession and dial it down a little bit so it becomes a passion instead. Or even further so it becomes ordinary motivation. It becomes almost a linear scale that should match motivation with the effort you may need to achieve anything towards a particular direction. One may say, "that's common sense", but let's consider it anyway. Combine this with the fact that with any field, the further you go outwards, the more effort you will need to take another step. This is similar to the energy you will need to accelerate further, once you reach a particular speed. The faster you go, the more energy you need to go even faster.
In order to start anything that may have enough of a struggle, we need to have enough of a motivation to have started it. Otherwise, when the times get tough and we face a brick wall, we can remind ourselves of that initial motivation to be brave enough to even consider running through that wall head-first even if it may hurt us in the short term. Ideally we should have tools or other people to help us in this task but when it comes to many unexplored areas of science, or even starting our own company, these tools or other people are not so available to us, therefore it is likely we will need that determination to allow us to do that sacrifice. Luckily, these tools/people problems are being resolved more and more every day. But, the further we go, the more we will need, so the thought still applies with the same effect, forever.
There should also be an expanding curiosity aspect to it, too. You have touched on this with being interested in different things. However, we need to actively keep in mind how these different things may be related to each other, perhaps literally, perhaps at a more abstract level. This way, we can continue our exploration of both by using these overlaps as foundations for new land between those landmasses. So that we will not need a complete context switch to consider the different subjects, but we keep building more bridges between them. I like to consider the metaphors of the steam engine to help describe the mind. I am unsure if Freud came up with these connections but they helped expand our minds about what it thinks about itself anyway.
So, does it mean, we are excused to say "follow your dreams"? I believe so. There may be a lot of other people who will say "that is foolish, you will struggle to live". If you look at the bigger picture and say, let's take that seriously: if 100 people try to follow their dreams and only 1 make it while the rest of the 99 suffer. The more you encourage, the more you make that 100 a 1000, and the 1 a 10. The 99 becomes 990. Now, the question becomes, is it worth it? You can guess my answer to this but I will leave it unanswered with the hopes to further discussion.
I feel like this part captures the essence of it... to be _really_ good at something, you have to have deep interest which you can't force - so just forget about being good, it's not worth worrying about, instead discover what you can have fun with and get crazy about. This feels like such a natural thing to encourage in kids :)
Also the side effects of getting deeply interested in random things should not be underestimated, in my experience the connections between seemingly disconnected things are unexpectedly common.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#Incentive_theories:...
Anyway - my question is this: Is that an elitist thought or is obsession also one of those things anyone can do if only...?
Depression, for example, can sap the motivation to do anything.
I don't agree with this. They might very well do it to impress others. Most of all, they do it to impress each other. Go to any specialized forum of subreddit and you will find members arguing over details in order to gain respect. If I say X, you say Y and in the end X 'wins', I have gained some status. Bus ticket collectors are people, just like us, and need validation from their peers.
This risk might be somewhat mitigated by the changing level of societal interest in different areas over time serving as a guide to interesting fields of study. If Darwin had been born earlier, surrounded by an entirely different set of books, writings, and people, he might also have been a lot less likely to be interested in natural history.
The first few crops of Dota millionaires all had the same backstory: "I played this game 14 hours a day. If there were tournaments at all they didn't really pay anything. My parents said I was wasting my life. I never had a girlfriend. Everyone thought I was a loser, but I just wanted to play and win... and now I know it was all worth it."
And the thing that I couldn't help thinking is: was it? I'm not sure that any rational person would make that decision. Even if you could somehow know that competitive gaming would get big enough, and that your particular game would be popular enough, and that you could become good enough to win – that's just table stakes. You then have to actually play the game obsessively for a decade. There are, frankly, far more comfortable ways to earn a million dollars in exchange for 20,000 to 50,000 hours of your life.
It's kind of hard to take a coherent message away from that. Should you become a competitive gamer for the millions? Certainly not then, and definitely not now. Should you hope that your fringe interest (bus tickets, say) becomes a million-dollar enterprise? No, that's probably even less likely.
Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests. A combination that is increasingly rare in an economic system designed to squeeze out the inefficient. Lest we forget the Bell monopoly; we may never see such inefficiency again.
Where do you see that message? No luck was involved in your example, just hard work on behalf of the good players and of the Dota developers, and pursuing a hobby with passion is perfectly rational.
Frankly, back 20 years ago I would have never thought that watching someone play a game would become a form of entertainment.
Even after popular chess matches on TV in the 80's, 90's?
Then what the hell are NFL, NBA, etc? People have been watching others play a game as a form of entertainment for as long as society can remember:
To a point, yes. Though we may disagree on the threshold where it crosses over from rational to unhealthy obsession. And there is certainly luck involved when there are tens who found fortune out of millions participating.
So, did they play these games in the hope to make millions, or because they liked them?
Tarn and Zach Adams are also bus ticketers.
As a result, more and more areas of science and technology get stuck near local maxima. The same happened in all ancient civilisations.
I think you are confusing financial success with contributing to artistic/scientific/intellectual progress.
If the definition of success is wealth or notoriety, there are certainly people who achieve it without those traits.
And sometimes no matter how hard you work, you're one of those people under the rungs.
However, just being "a hard worker" in itself is considered a virtue by many people.
I hesitate to call it the Protestant Work Ethic or the Puritan Work Ethic, as it's far from limited to Protestants or Puritans, but that's really what it is. The harder you work, the more virtuous you are considered to be, and working less is considered sinful or lazy (in other words, unvirtuous and blame-worthy).
Have you given thought to whether these are the absolute baseline...or actually the consequences of practices more fundamental?
Ok, you've heard of Cristiano Ronaldo. Yet, have you heard of Dani?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dani_(footballer,_born_1976)
Like Ronaldo he was launched int Sporting Clube de Portugal's first team when he played for the club's U17 team. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani didn't had a heart condition. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani had more appearances in his first year in the first team, and was quickly picked by WestHam and Ajax.
Unlike Ronaldo, Dani had a notoriously poor work ethics. Unlike Ronaldo, Dani's impressive start was squandered and he went nowhere, he achieved nothing and has since been forgotten.
Work ethics is the deciding factor. You may have won the genetic lottery and be a bonafide ubermensch but if your work ethics suck then you'll quickly be surpassed by those lesser talented but more hard working than you.
For every "Ronaldo" there are a small amount of moderately successful players playing soccer for a good living.
The myriad is the group of people that are coasting their way through life trying to put in as little effort as possible and naturally they don't succeed.
The economy of today is so efficient and supply chains are so effective at moving things to people who need them, that it seems incredibly stupid to not use it to provide some kind of basic necessities to every human being, no questions asked.
If the US were to do this today, there would be more innovation, less misery, a supercharged economy as you've increased the purchasing power of millions of people overnight...It a fucking no brainer. And cutting taxes rather than providing more benefits seems like the most stupid way to run a country I've ever seen in my life.
While your friend, who did nothing for 5 years, maintains the same standard of living that you do.
I guess this could work, but to me, the level of "disinterest" required to be okay with this result is even more rare than genius.
No rational person that isn't already well off would take a 1% shot at 1 billion over a 10% shot at 100 million.
Progressive taxation and social safety don't stifle economies, they make them thrive. They act as a negative tax on risk, and create a framework where actors are free to pursue higher EV bets without worrying as much about utility value. Literally the entire point is to create more pie for everyone.
Bludgers getting "free money" is just a side effect. You're not paying for them with your taxes, you're paying into an insurance fund with all the other innovators. Except this fund is +EV, subsidized by all the other countries in the global economy that aren't taking the same gains. You're the one getting the free money, and the leaners are taxing some percentage of that.
The only reason every successful country in the world isn't already doing it is because of this unintuitive "common sense" optic that you (and about a billion others, literally) are propagating: that somehow it breaks the rules of "fairness". The reality is it's got absolutely nothing to do with fairness, it's about maximizing the bottom line, just like in business. Governments don't give a shit about individual people, nor should they (at least not at the expense of society).
Also, I'd guess most first world countries could easily (and do) provide a world class social safety net without going over 50% taxation in any bracket, not even billionaires. Your example only applies if you're talking about taxation in the 70-100% range.
Honestly, is this such a bad thing? Why do we incentivize innovation by promising people a basic standard of living? We reward people who take risks with something better than that anyways, so I see no problem with giving people not willing to take those risks something lesser than that “for free”.
This is absolutely false and a terrible thing to perpetuate. Work ethic has the highest controllable coefficient to success as an output. Luck exists and the universe is probabilistic, yes, but it is not non-deterministic.
This self-lashing of our community and amongst the populist movement that is growing in popularity in the EU and US is ridiculous, reducing the sum total of human achievement into lucky chance rather than actually understanding the probabilistic universe and knowing that while our actions do not wholly determine our fate, they play the single largest role we have control over, and as such, it would be better to believe the myth that we have full control over our destiny rather than this ridiculous concept that luck controls ~100% of circumstance.
Probability theory needs to be taught in primary school, apparently, because for members of even this community, the fallacy of determinism and binary outcomes run rampant.
Why think in black and white ?
We have a lot impact on our lives, but there's also some luck involved, especially if we want to achieve extreme things.
Not the sum total of achievement, just a single individual's achievement. An individual's achievement can indeed be attributed ~100% to luck. For every Einstein there are hundreds of equally brilliant geniuses who died picking cotton in a field.
If you told these guys to be a competitive gamer for the millions, they probably would have stuck to competitive fishing or whatever they were doing anyway. Taking a message or leadership from it is kind of the antithesis of the point. The point is that some social pursuits are the birthplace of the next big thing and some people who are focused on socializing need to make the choice on pursuits that have a potential and pursuits that don't like. Dance class is pretty dead as a career, but we're going to need people who can sort quality from quantity in a few years, the people focused on a qualitative pursuit socially need to pick a field where it's obvious that's needed like journalism or the swath of video games sure to flood the market.
It doesn't have much to do with rational decision making in detail and is instead a generalized story about the different directions in life you can choose.
I disagree of how you define rationality here. If someone feels it serves them fine to play 14 hours of a game, it seems perfectly rational for me. Especially in the case that you mentioned, where they were playing before any big money was on the table. It means they liked, despite a lot of people judging them with an air of superiority.
edit: I re-read my previous comment and I am not sure I could make it more clear.
if a game does not gives money prizes at all, the ones who are playing it are not playing for the money.
You have to weigh your current abilities and their earning potential vs. the costs of venturing into a new field.
Being at the top of Dota is easier than being at the top of Math or Chess or Go, since Dota is a newer field. They aren't really comparable, but you still compare them if you are trying to figure out what you want to put your time into.
Some people just get lucky and find the thing they are good at on the first try. Then they can maximize their hours available for that thing.
Other people (probably the majority) have to try different fields and start later, and ultimately have less time overall to spend.
So it actually seems rational (if maximizing hours-spent is your goal) to go all-in on the first thing that grabs your interest, which could be Dota.
I slightly disagree - neither Chess nor Go have nearly the millions of new players playing it obsessively as they come of age. Math is a bit different, but often times “good at math” isn’t very rewarding except as it pertains to an ancillary job, or if you’re one of the relative few who become a math major.
There’s also a major drop off over time with MOBA players - the average age is 22 or something for professionals. Eventually the reflexes get worse.
They played the game they loved and they loved to win at it
When money arrived into e-games they were most prepared
I don’t like competitive gaming so even if you tell me there are millions to be made I still won’t do it, it seems something so unattainable
Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to be a genius to work in FAANG. It's a lot of luck. You just have to give yourself as many good chances in the interview pipeline as possible.
Anything competitive is emphatically not a good example of this. If you're in a competition, then by definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else. That's a guaranteed recipe for not accomplishing anything meaningful in life.
Competition can be great for cultivating positive character traits and developing certain skills, but at some point you need to move beyond it.
Even if you create or exploit something wildly new that is completely beyond reach for anyone else at that moment – let's say you made time travel viable tomorrow – as soon as you did and started commercialising it, competition would start forming later that day.
For everything else, you will right off the gate be competing with someone over something (at the very least time and money). Airbnb is competing with Hotels/Motels, Uber with Taxis, Facebook with MySpace. MySpace with more specialised communities and GeoCities. The internet was competing with telephones, mail, fax and the yellow pages.
Can you elaborate?
I guess the rebuttal might go something like: Business is inherently competitive. Creating startups, you are usually competing not only with old line businesses but with other startups.
I guess the rebuttal to the rebuttal might sound something like Thiel's startup lectures: Startups should try to be anticompetitive, ideally carving out new niches. You don't want to engage in head-to-head competition.
The 3rd degree rebuttal might be something like: There are plenty of examples of successful startups that began as clones of other businesses (Facebook seems the canonical example).
But then as you say, they moved beyond being a clone of Friendster/Myspace/Tribe/etc... but isn't that the competitive process?
Because you're not pursuing personal advantage, this kind of obsession is incompatible with competition. You're obsessively interested in collecting old bus tickets not because you want to get paid, not because you want to be famous, not because you want to change the world, and not because you want to win.
So it's a bit weird for pg to identify "heuristics you can use to guess whether an obsession might be one that matters". If you care about whether a thing matters, instead about the thing itself, then you're not really disinterested.
As soon as your obsession becomes influenced by thoughts of personal advantage, then it's about garden variety ambition and determination, not the magical property of disinterest that pg describes.
Disinterested obsession may be a powerful source of innovation and progress, but the instant you intentionally try to harness this power in pursuit of progress, you destroy the magic of disinterest.
Maybe "impersonal"? Still weirdly contradictory but closer to the meaning maybe.
"detached" or "impartial"?
The limitations of English are weird.
[2] I worried a little about using the word "disinterested," since some people mistakenly believe it means not interested. But anyone who expects to be a genius will have to know the meaning of such a basic word, so I figure they may as well start now.
From dictionary.com, the second definition of disinterested is "having no interest in something," but the first is, "not influenced by considerations of personal advantage."
"Intrinsic motivation", perhaps?
It's interest in the sense of "conflict of interest", not in the sense of finding something fascinating.
"Disinterest" doesn't work at all in any sense of the term. In the absence of overt mental illness, the bus-ticket collector must see it as being in his best interest to spend his time collecting bus tickets, or he'd do something else instead. ("You are your calendar.") The search for gratification, however externally meaningless, is certainly a valid expression of self-interest.
Put another way, if you would object if you were forcibly stopped from pursuing a goal, then you cannot be described as "disinterested."
What the above comment is about applies to so much in life, from education to careers because at their core, they are competitions.
> If you're in a competition, the. By definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else.
Not true.
There are people who play competitive, ranked, games 3 hrs a week and are happy with being in the top 50% of players
And there are people who spend 30hrs a week in a game and are profoundly unhappy they're only in the top 5% of players.
Those wind up being two very different paths, and it applies to way more than just gaming, like education, which I can speak from experience to that
From a young age I would spend hours upon hours on computers working on my games and random ideas. Even in school I would skip classes to work on my own projects in a computer lab.
My parents felt it was a complete waste of time (especially since it became a huge drain on my performance at school). I didn't have nearly as many close friends as I should have, didn't form a lot of the bonds people growing up do, it ruined my relationship with my parents.
At the end of the day through luck or something I scraped through high school with a .1 above failing GPA, dropped out of community college after failing 2 semesters and started a career in tech by freelancing.
Now 5 years later and the positions I've taken are consistently higher seniority than my friends who did CS in college, so it worked out, but at what cost?
Those years I lost, not even talking to one of my parents for over a year despite living in the same house, wasn't really worth it.
But it was an obsession, I didn't obsess over programming because I wanted to have a great career one day, it was because I couldn't help it. It was almost like an addiction that I got lucky enough to have double as a marketable skill.
It's crazy how much article really resonates with my experience, almost annoyingly so since I feel like a bus ticket collector sometimes, sure tech is a marketable skill, but you sure build a lot of unimportant stuff
The examples given in the post are not competitions.
The bus ticket collector is interested in old bus tickets, and is not competing with anybody.
Ramanujan obsessed over series, and was not competing with anybody.
But actually I disagree with saying Ramanujan wasn't competing with anyone, he just wasn't trying to compete
Plenty of people would consider any academic field a competition, even if not everyone in the field is there to compete
The competitive nature of the mathematics field easily have to do with why Ramanujan was not taken as seriously as he should have been at first. A "competitor" was coming with claims to grand contributions and that already created friction, which when combined with other factors about his non-traditional presentation became roadblocks.
That's a mistaken conclusion because you didn't follow it properly to the narrowed end: if you're in a large field of competition at a thing and you're among the best in the world at it, then the exact opposite is more likely to be true (you will likely do something meaningful and have extreme success) and your supposed guaranteed recipe collapses.
This premise holds true in eg: business, acting, music, science, traditional sports, games like chess, and numerous other fields.
Right now, around the world, dozens (or hundreds) of scientists are competing to reach the same breakthrough. They may not know who all the competitors are and may not know they're all chasing the same thing, but they are. One or a small group of them will get there before the rest. It is competition and it doesn't exclude you from doing something meaningful: you need to win the competition.
See: Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Kurt Cobain, Whitney Houston, Craig Venter, Garry Kasparov, John Carmack, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos
All had to rise to the top of highly competitive fields with a large supply of competitors. How many other grunge bands were there next to Nirvana? How many other singers did Whitney Houston have to stand apart from? How many other women (frequently younger, a big deal in tennis) has Serena Williams had to competitively outlast over ~20 years to spend so much time on top of her sport and put together one of the greatest sports careers of all-time? It's a never ending supply of younger, highly talented competitors, and yet Williams did what she did.
Nah, millions are delivered to those who already have millions, everything else is noise that is overemphasized to distract the bottom 80+%.
I have a similar story. I dropped out of school at 16, and spent 14+ hours a day playing Stepmania Online, which was Dance Dance Revolution for your fingers. I was one of the best in the world! Then everyone stopped playing and nothing came of it. So for every DOTA millionaire or whatnot there’s likely thousands of people who are obsessed with something equally niche who haven’t realized any financial gains because of it.
Now I’m a software engineer, it’s working out way better than playing video games all day.
Do you still crack open Stepmania every so often for old times sake? I have no idea if any kind of a community still exists around it.
It also gave me a lesson in hierarchies of competence. Even though I was maybe one of the 20 best people ranked in Stepmania Online, there were people who despite the amount of time I’d put in were significantly better at the game. (The name Nima comes to mind, I think he was a concert pianist whose skills translated into perfect accuracy on Stepmania). Despite being really good, I felt like I’d never be the best.
It was also around that time that I met Day9, the pro Starcraft now relatively famous Twitch streamer at a LAN party and he introduced me to Beatmania, which was like Stepmania only more keys. He was so good at it (and arrogant, hah but isn’t any sixteen year old that can be?) that I sort of gave up on Stepmania because it felt like peanuts in comparison.
Not everything is about ROI, I'm also not saying playing Dota for your entire life is going to be particularly fulfilling in many other ways thought - after all they are playing out their lives within the very finite confines of someone else's creation.
The author does point this out as a suggested heuristic, if you are obsessed with someone elses creation, it's probably not going to be very fruitful (whether fruitful means money, scientific discovery, or fulfillment ones curiosity etc).
>> it's more promising if you're creating something, rather than just consuming something someone else creates
Gaming consumes the creative efforts of others. It's fun, invigorating and a healthy pass-time. But it's not good ground for growing genius.