Why is Firefox's Reader View not available for posts on PG's seemingly minimal site?
Also, with my minimal knowledge of programming, I have no idea what's going on with that website's HTML markup. There's also a document type not mentioned error so that might be what's causing this.
I wonder why @pg doesn't change this? I presume it'll only stand to benefit him with a higher SEO ranking.
I can't imagine pg being too concerned with SEO. I don't think he's necessarily marketing his essays for discoverability nor do his essays bring in direct income aside from enhancing YC's already established credibility.
> Also, with my minimal knowledge of programming, I have no idea what's going on with that website's HTML markup.
It's what we in the business call "old"
That's just how we made websites before CSS was a thing. It still works, it's just horribly user unfriendly. Presumably Paul either doesn't care or likes the retro look.
I can't remember where, but I've heard the mathematical research process being described as (paraphrasing):
"Once in a while we get a giant that makes huge strides in many fields. What is left for the rest of us is to walk in their wake and clean up and tighten up the theory based on the ideas that they provided".
Graham's point about how being intelligent and having new ideas are two different things is interesting, but I'm not convinced that one is better than the other. I'm not sure a world full of giants is better - you need people who spend time tightening and working on the existing theory as well.
I mean, better and worse doesn't really exist. They just are. Being smart has certain consequences, and being inventive has others. And what's better for the world (for some definition of 'good') may not be what's better for the individual - just ask people who volunteer to pick up litter. Certainly it seems like being inventive is much more profitable for the individual than being smart, but of course that's not all that matters.
The world has no lack of people tightening and working on existing theory, basically every knowledge worker taking a salary performs that role. So moving a few more of those to try to do new things wouldn't budge that huge micro optimization machine much at all.
Moreover, ideas are worthless if you aren't smart and diligent enough to see them through. Emphasizing ideas, to me, feels like the wrong thing because this encourages, for most people, a lazy attitude where recognition is expected for having an idea (whereas recognition is only due for making something out of your idea). In the end, ideas are cheap. Every giant had both the idea (which may have been through luck and timing plus deep knowledge earned through hard work and persistence) plus those other abilities to make something out of it, without which they would not be giants.
Which everybody should (must?) read.
Seriously, should be a mandatory read in school curriculum, instead of "catcher in the rye" or some Scottish ballade [+].
[+] not that there's something wrong with any of them
To me, this is fundamentally the difference between science and engineering: Science involves discovering things which are new, while engineering takes those discoveries and makes them practically useful.
In terms of my own work, tarsnap is absolutely a work of engineering -- I very deliberately avoided doing anything new, instead using established and well-tested concepts. The exception to this is scrypt, which I designed -- and proved the security of -- because there was no existing password based key derivation function which met my standards for security. On that one occasion I crossed the line from engineering into science.
Science is great, but there's nothing to be ashamed about in doing engineering work. The world needs good engineers who can take basic scientific discoveries and make useful products out of them!
Even commodity manufacturing is its own art because you have to make millions of something per day instead of tens of thousands. You have to take material in one side of the factory and spit it out the other as fast as you can. You've crossed the limits of being able to warehouse half completed bits because machine #17 has gone on the fritz again and nobody can finish product.
So I need more reliable equipment and then I still need to make them at a lower price than the luxury model I'm copying.
I don't think anyone who has entirely avoided skilled manual labor in their lives quite comprehends how big a difference there is being able to do something well, and being able to do it at scale. It's almost not the same problem domain.
That descrption of mass manufacturing reminds me of building reliable computing systems from unreliable parts (server farm(s)), something I have never done, only read about. It is apparently very different from regular software development in similar ways.
If I think of PG's accomplishments they could be characterized as "discovering things which are new" to him, but also characterized as taking ideas that were cutting edge, uncommon, or out of favor and bringing them to fruition (sounds more like engineering).
I don't think of the YC structure as discovering anything inherently new but taking an approach that was not being done in the VC industry and trying to scientifically iterate on it.
Bayesian spam filtering seemed a discovery to him, but it wasn't for science: someone else had already published a paper even. However, the results of previous attempts weren't good enough until PG focused on the problem and used a large enough corpus of data.
If an engineer designs a bridge and says "well, it seems to stay up, but I don't know why... go ask a scientist?" they'll lose their license pretty damn fast.
I think the point is that bridge building originated as a craft that was informed by a lot of examples that happened to survive (ie. survivorship bias) leading to rules of thumb and patterns that gradually yielded to scientific explanations (often driven by trying to understand failed bridges designed according to rules applied / patterns extended outside of the context where they were valid).
Not really. You just, correctly, described the relationship between science and engineering as a feedback loop. But that also means there is no first and last.
A step in engineering reveals a problem that scientists can focus on. A scientific discovery makes new engineering possible. Progress of engineering enables building tools that make new kinds of observations possible, enabling scientific research that was previously not possible. Rinse, repeat. There's no separating one from another - they run in lockstep.
There is a lot of science which is "stamp collecting" or "puzzle solving", i.e. all the fiddly bits of fleshing out the new theory and its ramifications. There is also, in engineering, the occasional need to develop something really innovative and new.
The thing is, no one outside of science notices all the non-discovery stuff, because it doesn't make it into the textbooks or histories of science. But, it's most of what goes on in science. Also, in engineering, much of the most innovative stuff requires too much prior knowledge to even understand what it is, so not many people find out about it.
> Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas.
I don't consider myself smart. I certainly don't claim to discover new ideas. But through my work of explaining and polishing existing ideas, it seems I found a niche and an audience.
one of the things that helps generate new ideas that can be cultivated is the ability to be playful. once a given problem or subject is sufficiently loaded onto a brain, if that person can relax and have child-like naivete about poking and prodding, novel insight is usually not far.
cultivating this ability is fairly well understood in a lot of domains, i think. two examples that are top-of-mind are improv and jazz.
My guess: repeatedly zooming out and in again -- to look at the many parts of the whole to see how they all interconnect and interact to then wonder why and why not.
But this is wrong. The point of this essay is saying the opposite is true: A decent IQ gives you the chance to have a change of perspective.
IQ is the artistic equivalent of "how well can you draw a line?" You need a good foundation for artistic expression but many, many people have that and still don't create art worth remembering.
Intelligence (the capacity to process) combined with knowledge can give you that strong intellectual foundation -- but that's all it is. The rest is finding that change of perspective.
I do not think there is any disagreement here. Your reply, the essay, as well as the quote I posted are all about this distance between being naturally intelligent and making something out of it.
There is a disagreement, though, because it's about which aspect takes precedence -- which has the most value.
Imagine a test called Artistic Quotient which gives you a numeric value for how correctly you draw lines, circles, etc. An average artist might have an AQ of 100 and a very good artist an AQ of 120.
Now, imagine looking at a Van Gogh and saying, that the artistic expression he achieved is worth 80 AQ points, putting him on the level of someone who can free hand a perfect circle! It would sound ridiculous, right? Who cares if you can free hand a perfect circle? What does that give you? What's the value of that?
Instead you would tell an aspiring artist, get to an AQ 120 or so as your foundation and then it's all about making something out of it.
Being even a little clever—and that's the best I can claim—is living life on easy mode. It's so great. Once I realized that the other people in the room weren't not-saying the obvious thing because they'd already dismissed it for some reason I couldn't see, but because it wasn't obvious to them, it was like I unlocked a superpower. God, it's so wonderful. I half-ass my way through everything and get well-rewarded for it. Praise, money, recommendations. There is no chance I could do that without this (again, quite mild, I cannot emphasize enough that I'm not even all that smart) gift, the credit for which mostly goes to sheer chance and lucky circumstances.
> I grew up thinking that being smart was the thing most to be desired. Perhaps you did too. But I bet it's not what you really want. Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter.
Shit no, because the whole rest of the time I'm not coming up with those handful of new ideas, I'm less-smart. Reading is harder. Math is harder. Learning anything new is harder. Following complex conversations is harder. Picking out subtext, allusions, et c., in all media, is harder. Keeping up with, let alone constructively challenging, my smarter-than-me kids is harder. I'd hesitate to take that deal even if the ideas themselves made me rich enough I wouldn't need to work again. I might take it, but I'd have to give it a good think. It'd radically change the entire way I relate to the world.
I feel similarly having grown up near a computer when I was young. I can't imagine had I grown up busy farming and raising siblings and then children in my 20s I would have been able to accomplish anything at all. Or the fact that I got a rare fever from a tick as a child only a few years after an antidote was invented. The _vast_ majority of the pi-chart other than intelligence is luck.
I mean, intelligence is also luck. And (as much as people hate this), so is conscientiousness. At some point we have to acknowledge that dividing things into luck and not-luck is incoherent, and that we should use more useful axes.
We're competing with each other via billions of years of selection - there are major advantages if you're smart (and if you're pretty). You can also add the quality PG is talking about here which requires some amount of smartness as a prereq (curiosity?). I'm not sure how much it can really be cultivated above baseline, but it'd be interesting to know more. I'd guess there are some strategies, but a lot may still be tied to your inborn stats.
I'd argue we should strive for a society where the suffering you're exposed to if you're unlucky enough to be in the bottom quartile is bounded, while still allowing for the top to be unbounded in pushing humanity forward. Accepting there's natural variance here is part of that.
We're not all the same, things aren't fair. We shouldn't ignore that or pretend otherwise, but we also shouldn't think that means those dealt a bad genetic hand need to be totally screwed in our society (imo) and it doesn't mean you need to handicap the outliers on the other side in some Bergeron like pursuit of 'fairness' [0].
If the upperbound is unlimited doesn't the lower bound essentially converge to zero? Imagine the upper strata (literally and figuratively) in flying cars and flying restaurants. The simple farm house would now seem like a desolate situation. Or would it?
> I'd argue we should strive for a society where the suffering you're exposed to if you're unlucky enough to be in the bottom quartile is bounded, while still allowing for the top to be unbounded in pushing humanity forward.
FWIW, being unbounded in pushing humanity forward is different from being unbounded in pushing your individual wealth up, so those aren't really two sides of the same topic.
Or perhaps you really meant something different from what you wrote, because what you really meant doesn't sound so nice.
I'll second the recommendation of the Ted Chiang short story, it's well worth a read.
They're often related (look at Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc.) - I think it's good that the upper quartile creates new wealth (usually through reinvesting and building stuff). I think it's reasonable to try to structure things so that wealth doesn't give too much outsized political influence (easier said than done).
Allowing the incentives of unbounded wealth creation at the top is desirable imo.
I think it should be split into two graphs, practical and moral.
Practically, we all have to pretend we have free will. Hard work, diligence and deferment of the present for the future should be encouraged.
Morally, we shouldn't judge people who struggle with the above. "There but for the grace of god go I", etc etc. Society should try to be kind to all, resources permitting.
Kindness does indeed seem to be lacking. I constantly remind myself that all work is noble and aspire to extend empathy, compassion and sympathy to others.
I love this sentiment, and it's one of a few I try to keep at the ready. I think it's underrated, as simple lanes to guide one's thinking go. I'm all-around much better, including more content, FWIW, when successfully holding that lane in-place.
I mean, yeah, it's basically just one of the key heuristics of practicing Stoicism, plus a hundred other practical ethical frameworks and religions, but I think the particular framing & phrasing is especially apt.
The kids I grew up with in High School that attended the "Gifted And Talented" courses didn't really end up topping the gene pool after I met them at our 20 year reunion. The girl from our year book voted "most likely to succeed", did not meet her goals of being president, and probably may never do so... She actually had some rough life experiences like me too since then... I no longer have childhood goals of exceptionalism as a desire, nor the right social and political positioning for the role, not the right contacts or money. I just want to be happy and live on a tropical beach with a good wife and good kids without money problems to be honest.
Exceptionalism in this world is indeed luck, especially when you consider that there are almost 7 billion other people on this planet besides us, and limited world resources to share amongst us all...
To think that any one individual reached a point of higher talent or intelligence than everyone else is a total consumerism-driven lie. Movies and TV create celebrities because it drives profit and merchandise, not because they really feel the actors they back are unique and worthy. We find out often the people branded as "exceptional" suffer greatly for it very often because they gain popularity and consequently can't live up to the standards portrayed of them.
The biggest lie we can tell ourselves is that we're exceptional beyond everyone or anyone else, physically, spiritually, mentally, or in any other way. Somehow there's an ever present ideal pushed by Gyms, Churches, Psychologists, News Media, TV, and Movies that exceptionalism can exist, but it's simply not sustainable for any individual, and there's a pile of discarded celebrities down the hill by the river in Hollywood to prove it...
Once we're humble in life, and we realize that opportunity, paying attention, learning things, proper positioning, luck, and circumstance are what grant us the most potential for success -- It's the actions that we take to seize opportunities, THOSE ACTIONS WE TAKE are what set us apart from others who may be hesitant, not ready for, and/or unaware of and to the present opportunity.
When we reach points of success, it's important to remind ourselves of others and their situations and to not look down upon them, and to help others to succeed as much as possible in order to not feel isolated in ego and self praise.
I may sound like the Dali Lama here, but fighting against our own internal ego in a world like this one is a constant battle, so I work hard every day to keep everything in this kind of context in my own life, and I'm not perfect just like everyone else. Whenever I'm driving my car out in public though, everyone's a "frickin' idiot", that will never change... :P
Don't underestimate ones ability to adapt and change their circumstances. I am a sample size of one, but I grew up busy farming and raising siblings. It is true that I was exposed to computers in the 80s, but didn't own one. In my mid-twenties I was able to re-orient my life, fail and succeed at startups, work at Be, Eazel, Apple, Amazon and more.
I have spent the last couple of years teaching adults whose backgrounds are filled with shocking adversity to think like programmers, build new careers and improve their lives. I am constantly amazed.
Modern medicine is miraculous. There is no doubt a vast amount of human potential has been saved from oblivion.
> I can't imagine had I grown up busy farming and raising siblings and then children in my 20s I would have been able to accomplish anything at all.
This really depends how you frame 'accomplishment', which is very much up to you. I think that successfully raising children who can successfully raise children is in and of itself an accomplishment; forming a family and keeping it intact through your inevitable troubles, working the land and producing enough excess food to earn everything else you need... our culture would be better if we actually viewed such people as 'accomplished' instead of pretending that being a C-suite officer of some SaaS b2b griftware is inherently of more value to anyone, anywhere.
> Shit no, because the whole rest of the time I'm not coming up with those handful of new ideas, I'm less-smart.
For better or worse, I am such a person: good at generating ideas and product vision, merely competent at technical execution. Put another way, my verbal iq and empathy (if that can be measured) are much stronger than my analytical iq, as confirmed by essentially every standardized test I’ve ever taken. As a result, I function and process information differently than a lot of my engineer peers. Some things are obviously harder for me, which can be painful and embarrassing, but as a rule I’m involved in lots of interesting discussions and design sessions and tend to be a de facto product manager. It’s just different, a trade off in mental styles.
I'm more of an analytical person myself, and my non-technical co-founder at our startup is much like you described yourself. I built the tech in the early days (today I mostly manage the tech team). He was the sales person and used his impressive communication skills to win our first key accounts. One thing that he though me long ago is that there are several types of intelligence. It's not linear. People usually assume the analytical type of intelligence is the true type of intelligence. I find that to be inaccurate.
> "Reading is harder. Math is harder. Learning anything new is harder. Following complex conversations is harder. Picking out subtext, allusions, et c., in all media, is harder."
smarts can't be summed up into a single all-encompassing quality that you have or you don't. you can be socially savvy and not be good at math, or great at basketball and be socially awkward. this is a 'not smart' observation that undermines your whole humble-brag.
I truly excel at the first three things -- I get high test scores and can get good at a wide range of things without even trying -- but I struggle to follow conversations due to ADHD + shyness and it drives me crazy.
Sure, the skills the parent comment mentioned are all separate skills, but they're probably pretty strongly (and positively) correlated with each other and with traditional measures of intelligence like performance on IQ tests. It's accurate to say that intelligence isn't the only thing that matters, and probably accurate to say that society generally overstates its importance, but claiming that intelligence doesn't exist is a severe and inaccurate overcorrection.
"The g factor (also known as general intelligence, general mental ability or general intelligence factor) is a construct developed in psychometric investigations of cognitive abilities and human intelligence. It is a variable that summarizes positive correlations among different cognitive tasks, reflecting the fact that an individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks. "
I read your comment as “yes I prefer life to be easier and complacent over difficult and interesting.” Is this too coarse of an interpretation? I seem to agree with pg: I’d much rather have good ideas and trouble “executing” because there are always smart people who can help me understand better, or execute better, or whatever; than being super smart and at the end of the day nothing to do with it.
Reminds me of genius programmers, who can easily coast through interviews or jobs, but who’ve otherwise got nothing of their own to write or show of it. That’s not bad, it just means their smarts are in service to someone else’s ideas—which is OK!
“Having ideas” isn’t “being an idea person”—the latter I hear colloquially to mean “spitballs superficial proposals that other people sort through”. I also don’t think what you suggest is what pg suggests. Einstein had ideas, but he didn’t just blather about them at a high level until some smart person did the “real” work.
I also didn’t mean to suggest I’d rather “just have ideas”, I meant “I’d rather have ideas and a difficult time executing on them” as opposed to “being smart with no ideas at all.”
I see it as a trade-off between "glory" and having an otherwise very nice life, as framed—trading "being smart" for "having some really good ideas", which is a rather odd trade, but I'm addressing the text in its own terms. Between "have some very good ideas" and "be even a little smart the entire rest of the time", if I can only choose one, yes, I'm strongly inclined to choose the latter.
"Being smart" benefits me and shapes my very identity by affecting my perceptions and experience of everything, every waking second; having some very good ideas might make me money and make me known as "the guy who came up with X, Y and Z". Having both would be great, obviously! But if PG's presenting some weird "pick one" choice between the two, then claiming it's obvious which one a person would pick, yeah, I'm leaning toward, "no, your assertion and assumptions on which you're couching this entire line of argument are far too broad, it's 'be smart' by a mile and I doubt I'm alone in that choice".
It's Achilles' choice, as I see it (though, again, it's a weird pair of things to ask people to choose between) and as much as I like reading about him, and as impressive as it is that we still know his name and what he did (taking the stories as true, and the character as real, for the sake of lending what he opted for the most possible appeal), thanks but no thanks.
I find it interesting how people want to characterize your choice between "living easy" versus "living interesting". Or "living simple" versus "living complacent". There seems to be this tendency to inject some negative connotations into the approach of "living simple" such as "it's not interesting", "it's not difficult", "you aren't challenging yourself", "you are being lazy", "you are being complacent". There seems to be something innate in people that needs to attack this alternative approach to life.
It seems to be going over peoples heads that being personally smarter has the potential to enrich your own life in ways that being rich/being the "idea guy" don't. If you "aren't smart", it doesn't matter how much immense wealth you have, your personal relationships will be affected in some pretty fundamental ways.
I think there is a philosophy at the heart of Y Combinator and their philosophy that "ideas and execution are everything" - you need to start from a creative place and can fill in smart people as tools to enable your vision later. A corollary to this attitude is that they look for passionate younger people and foster an approach which is work very hard during your younger years building on your idea.
I find it relevant to share the Parable of the Fisherman from the 4 day workweek:
An American investment banker was taking a much-needed vacation in a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. The boat had several large, fresh fish in it.
The investment banker was impressed by the quality of the fish and asked the Mexican how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied, “Only a little while.” The banker then asked why he didn’t stay out longer and catch more fish?
The Mexican fisherman replied he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.
The American then asked, “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican fisherman replied, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos: I have a full and busy life, señor.”
The investment banker scoffed, “I am an Ivy League MBA, and I could help you. You could spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat, and with the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats until eventually, you would have a whole fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to the middleman you could sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You could control the product, processing and distribution.”
Then he added, “Of course, you would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City where you would run your growing enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But señor, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15–20 years.”
“But what then?” asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You could make millions.”
“Millions, señor? Then what?”
To which the investment banker replied, “Then you would retire. You could move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
I think you're reading into the thoughts of others elsewhere too much. I don't think living a "simple life" or whatever is objected by anyone. I don't think "having ideas" is also some big stakes quality that totally upends someone's lifestyle. A lot of the most creative, interesting, and idea-ful people in history lived simple, modest lives. Many writers, painters, musicians, mathematicians, scientists, philosophers, etc. were well known for "schedules" that consisted of waking up late, having a nice meal, going for a walk, doing some creative stuff for a few hours, having a nice dinner, etc etc. A "simple" lifestyle is completely compatible with originality, productivity, creativity, and personal growth. Denying that would be a crime against yourself.
Yes, I think in this forum, sometimes there are hyperbolic takes on working hard, grinding, etc., but I think that's an orthogonal concern about work, startups, and the like.
These negative connotations that you mention come from obvious places. "I'm smart, life is easy, and I'd like to keep it that way." How is this not complacency? It's the epitome of self-satisfaction and a desire to remain static. What on earth grows, evolves, or improves without difficulty, self-imposed or otherwise? This angle works whether it be biological, social, intellectual, artistic, or technical. The very nature of improvement necessarily involves failure, and I contend a desire for comfort—especially that which is stood up from some natural intelligence—is equally a desire to not fail.
Having ideas is one manifestation of an avenue for failure. Most ideas are bad and don't work. Again, "ideas" here transcend business proposals, as we might assume here on HN. For instance, I'm an amateur classical musician, and sometimes when I'm playing a piece, I will try different things not marked in the score. Maybe they'll be good, maybe not. But I'd rather have ideas to try as a means to improve my musicianship (and perhaps even my own musical intelligence!) over simply being smart by reciting a score as written with a bone-dry, scholarly performance. Of course, this means my life is now made a hair more difficult, because the effort I put into performing something may be for nought if my idea turns out to be botched. But that's par for the course when you're doing something new that nobody else has done before. Are scholarly performances a bad thing? Not intrinsically, but I'd explicitly attach negative connotation to your musicianship if that's all you can do.
If I'm honest, I really want to go a step further and link creativity, ideas, etc. to some philosophical notion of being human, but it's certainly an argument beyond my caliber to make.
> "I'm smart, life is easy, and I'd like to keep it that way." How is this not complacency?
It's all about your perspective. "I have many ideas, I'm working hard to achieve them, and I'd like to keep it that way."
This could also be construed as static, self-satisfied, and "complacent" in it's own way. Complacency is ultimately a negative and derogatory word - using it to characterize an approach you don't agree with seems disingenuous.
You can lead a simple life and still be taking risks, and be comfortable with failure. There seems to be some hard intrinsic assumptions going on in this conversation that "having ideas and executing on them" is the only avenue in life worth pursuing, because failure, risk, fulfillment can't be defined along any other angles.
As you say: a "simple" lifestyle is completely compatible with originality, productivity, creativity, and personal growth. Denying that would be a crime against yourself.
You can lead a simple lifestyle, and still experiment with your passions. Creating new musical scores, taking risks, and putting yourself out in the world to fail - none of this is fundamentally incompatible with having a simple lifestyle.
I feel like we are both orbiting the same point but viewing things from two different perspectives. It may be as simple as us not fully agreeing on what a "simple lifestyle" actually entails. In the context of the original post, it's a dichotomy between "having ideas" and "being smart". As the grandparent alluded too, "having ideas" becomes a function on how you can impose yourself upon the world to influence it, "being smart" is a function of how you personally experience the world. I think that is really the heart of it, and for some, your personal experience is paramount to your short time on this planet you get to experience being alive - and compromising that just to have more ideas just seems antithetical to the entire enjoyment of life.
> It's all about your perspective. "I have many ideas, I'm working hard to achieve them, and I'd like to keep it that way."
> This could also be construed as static, self-satisfied, and "complacent" in it's own way. Complacency is ultimately a negative and derogatory word - using it to characterize an approach you don't agree with seems disingenuous.
This is a baffling. "Something that is always changing could be seen as not changing because it's never not changing." I'm having a hard time seeing that as a good-faith rebuttal.
> This is a baffling. "Something that is always changing could be seen as not changing because it's never not changing." I'm having a hard time seeing that as a good-faith rebuttal.
I think we are talking in abstract platitudes to such an extent that the forest might get missing for the trees.
In practical terms, a workaholic can fit the mold of "I have many ideas, I'm working hard to achieve them, and I'd like to keep it that way.". A workaholic can also have all the characteristics of a complacent individual - brimming with self-satisfaction, satisfied with their routine, self-smug attitude, no desire to change their ways.
Ironically, a workaholic could justify such an attitude to themselves by calling other people complacent.
And just for reference, the dictionary definition of the word complacent:
complacent: marked by self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies
Strongly agreed about "smart" not being just one thing. Somewhere there's someone who's normal at the things I'm good at, and excellent at the things I'm so-so or bad at (there are several of those), and they're probably glad they get to "play" life on easy mode, too. Somewhere there's someone who's as good as both of us at all those things, and they probably own an island and have a private jet and don't think it was particularly challenging to get to that position in life. Maybe—if there's, in fact, exactly one thing they're bad at—they even wonder why other people don't do it.
My sister and I were just talking about this. We'd been coming to realize independently how much faster we think than average people. We didn't realize it growing up, since we went to gifted schools our whole lives (public schools we tested into, not private) and everybody was bright there. Living life outside of the gifted bubble has given us perspective on how lucky we were to born this way.
Yup, but this always made school so fucking boring for me. Get it the 5 first minutes the teacher explains, spend 55 other minutes wandering in your mind about other stuff while the teacher proceeds to drill it into your peers memory repeating it ad-nauseaum until they sing it like fucking gospel.
That's the education I experienced at least, maybe someone else had better luck, but once you've to slowdown to the slowest of 30, and you're the fastest, things get pretty slow.
This messed me up so bad when I finally hit material I needed to work at even a little. Years and years and years of getting things instantly, with no effort whatsoever. Lecturing about the same thing again for the fifth day in a row, but I had it the first day? Cool, I'll draw cartoons and still answer any questions you ask me. Hand me a test? No problem. A-grade work in 5 minutes, read my book for the remainder of the hour. My stupid kid brain (this was... age 13 or so? Maybe 14?) was sure something horrible had happened to me over the Summer and I was now an idiot, when that stopped being how things worked. I wouldn't be surprised if I could have been diagnosed with actual depression, from then through my early 20s, mostly due to that and the follow-on effects.
I've since learned this is a super-common experience for gifted kids and one of the things really good gifted programs focus early on mitigating. I gather kids smarter than I was may still experience something similar, but not until they burn out hard and very suddenly, around Sophomore or Junior year of a challenging degree program.
If you had the choice understand the concept 10 times slower but in the end would come up with twice the amount of connections, would you consider it as something valuable?
Yes I see how it would make life easier, but is that really a meaningful goal?
And how do we know that the reasons behind that it makes life easier isn't just a bias society has towards its own traits? - E.g life is easier for right handed people aswell.
> If you had the choice understand the concept 10 times slower but in the end would come up with twice the amount of connections, would you consider it as something valuable?
But then they aren't just thinking slower, they are doing more processing. It isn't just "slow vs fast', it is "more processing vs less processing". Similarly if two people eat hamburgers as fast, but one of them eat twice as many hamburgers and therefore takes twice the time, it doesn't make him a "slow eater" it just means he eats a lot per meal.
I think the extent to which this actually occurs is overstated in discussions of intelligence because it makes people feel better, but maybe I'm just an asshole.
> Why do you think thinking fast is more important than thinking slowly?
I would say _that_ should be the definition of intelligence (as in, how 'smart' one is). If it takes someone a day to understand something, and it takes someone else 5 minutes to do the same, it's not just a matter of time spent. It completely shapes _how_ one thinks and how deep you can go in any given subject. There's only so much brainpower we can expend before getting tired and 'restarting' tasks is not easy.
Let's say if you are listening to a discussion with a topic you aren't very familiar with, but your peers are extremely familiar with. You'll see that the way the conversation flows is very different. They will rapid fire, exchange incomplete sentences (because the other person has inferred the rest) and overall have a much more rich and complex conversation. You'll be thinking about the next chess move, they will be thinking 10 steps ahead.
Then you'll say: "that's a bad example, this is about knowledge, not intelligence, they are doing it faster because they know more about the subject". Yes. I'll argue that a meaningful 'intelligence' delta doesn't really exist among healthy humans. It's all about how many patterns you have been exposed to. When we try to measure intelligence, we end up measuring knowledge, every single time.
Take the Mensa tests. Someone who went to good schools and did mentally challenging things will have most likely encountered similar questions before. Not exactly the same questions, but adapting something you have seen before to a new situation is much easier than doing this for the first time.
Perhaps we should question the assumption that some people are conciously thinking at all.
Being bored out of my mind in grade school and unable to read anything else during that time just led to a lot of day dreaming and not “productive” or directed thinking. What do people bored out their minds at work/life think about?
They think about the short term, an end result rather than how to get there. That's one constant that will persist through time with "less than smart" people.
LOL, dualism moment. There is no "you" outside of your genetics and the socialization you experienced. There is definitely some luck involved, but also you're the product of a lot more work and planning than you give yourself credit for.
Do you think you were “lucky” not to be a mosquito?
Do you think you were “lucky” not to be a 100kg mass of disconnected plasma inside the sun?
This doesn’t make any sense. There are different processes in our universe that produce different things, from plasma to rocks to mosquitos to unsuccessful people to successful people.
These processes are different, and their outputs are not fungible. There’s no luck. There’s no sense in which “you” could have been anything except what you are.
I mean. When folks use the term luck they often just use to express gratitude. Whether that’s to the void or to their god.
It’s weird to point out the usage here. Sure someone can say “I’m grateful the insane probabilities of every small detail that led to today collapsed on me living a good life”, but it’s easier to just say “I’m so lucky”.
> There’s no sense in which “you” could have been anything except what you are.
Perhaps yea, this feels tangential to the argument there is no free will and the universe is 100% deterministic. Maybe I’m reading too much into your comment, but for my lived experience. It certainly doesn’t feel that I was 100% destined to end up here. Im sure others feel the same way that their circumstances were never predetermined.
That isn't how people usually view luck. If someone says "My success was all luck!", people wouldn't assume that this guy was lucky to be born smart and hard working and therefore worked his ass off to achieve his results with no particularly lucky event happening past his birth. No, they'd assume something like, the guy next to him at a buss stop happened to be this rich businessman and just happened to need something right now, and then that lead to more similar events and now he is the CEO of a big multi national corporation.
I encounter this “luck” argument that implies dualism, of a self separate from biology and life experience that could have somehow existed in a different body, all the time.
And until I read this comment I felt like I was the only person who found that idea specious.
Dualism is a theory in philosophy of mind, not in personal identity. It doesn't have any opinion about who "you" are, so it doesn't have any opinion on the counterfactual "But for luck, I could have been less smart."
It sounds like what you really mean is something like a psychological continuity (identity is having psychological continuity) or animalist (identity is being the same human animal) view, which are both consistent with some mental characteristics (like intelligence) being accidental to who we are.
The propensity to work hard and be good at planning is just as heritable as IQ. The extent to which you can defer current pleasure for future gain is basically established by the time you're 6 years old, so reaping the benefits of it as an adult is luck.
In another way, yes hard work and good planning is vital to success. But you shouldn't pat yourself on the back too hard for it, and you shouldn't think of yourself morally better than anyone else for it.
(This isn't sour grapes from me. I'm successful and worked incredibly hard for years without much money.)
> Being even a little clever—and that's the best I can claim—is living life on easy mode
That is probably true about being a little clever, but being really smart is not easy in the general case. Really smart people often share few ideas and interests with others and spend much of their lives lonely and misunderstood.
Yes, that's true. If you project down to a linear relationship, more IQ is associated with more income.
Most of the data you see on that stop around an IQ of 125, which is about the average IQ of a PhD in the US.
But there's also a lot of research on people with very high iq and the links with depression, anxiety, loneliness etc.
If you want the easiest life possible, I don't think you want to maximize IQ. I think you want to go high enough that you're eligible for the high paying jobs, but not so smart that you feel like the other people in those jobs are idiots.
There are several studies that show that IQ correlates with income, at least at the extremes. However the studies I've seen found no correlations between IQ and overall happiness or contentment with how their life turned out.
"Happiness/contentment" is effectively a "balancing thermostat" of our motivation, a functional aspect that is used by our bodies to regulate our behavior and thus, if it functions properly (as opposed to certain diseases e.g. anhedonia in clinical depression) its long term average will be pretty much the same no matter how well you do, it's almost orthogonal to any metric of actual wellbeing. For example, studies show both winning excessive amounts of money in lotteries and sustaining major life-changing injuries (e.g. losing limbs or causing other disabilities) do not correlate with happiness in the long-term. Happiness effectively reflects (a) recent short-term changes to wellbeing; (b) momentary expectations or worries about future wellbeing; and (c) innate baseline happiness. It's not a reflection of how well someone is living; in essence, people living long-term in a literal gulag may easily have on average the same overall happiness/contentment as living in a nice first world upper-middle-class environment.
The word "happiness" refers both to the temporary emotion and a long-term state of being satisfied with your life. Nowadays the long term state is often called "life satisfaction" in research.
Someone in a gulag would have low life satisfaction.
That study isn't the final word though. Other studies have found that winning the lottery increases life satisfaction, while still others have found that they don't.
I would say I have the opposite experience on being only a bit clever.
Being not smart at all usually also means you are ignorant to what you don't know, that life has its merits, Repetitive jobs don't bore you, and happiness comes from simpler joys in life. I wouldn't mind living that way at all.
Being very smart means none of the stuff you mention is hard. Math comes naturally, Crazy smart people need to put no effort to understand complex topics, while their happiness is typically in esoteric goals or breakthrough research, most people don't understand anything of what they do, so either society is sympathetic to challenges or oblivious to what they do. Financially/Socially once they have a safe academic job, the difference of success/failure is not visible to most regular people, even if they win a field's medal or Noble prize most people hardly understand it.
Being a bit clever is the worst of the lot, you understand enough to know how much you don't really know. Constantly you are making decisions basis what you know is poor understanding. Math, subtext, knowledge is all hard, but doesn't look so hard you will completely give up or blissfully don't know it exists.
Social peer groups keep missing that intelligence can be pretty scaled, we can perceive that someone is smarter than us but not by how much. Everyone one assumes there is just one level above them, equivalent to crazy smart. We are therefore accorded with the praise, money and recommendations and also responsibilities of being perceived crazy smart.
I would happily trade to being exactly perceived as I am or less and forgo all the money and praise if I didn't also be saddled with expectations of coming up with solutions all the time.
>Being not smart at all usually also means you are ignorant to what you don't know, that life has its merits, Repetitive jobs don't bore you, and happiness comes from simpler joys in life. I wouldn't mind living that way at all.
You're mixing up all kinds of unrelated things here. As does PG. Whats smartness? Going by Joscha Bach, it's the ability to reach your goals, as opposed to intelligence, your ability to make models. Wether repetitive work bores you isn't a matter of intelligence or smartness, however it does correlate significantly with cognitive functions (Jung).
The then following paragraph seems projective to me, generalizations are just all over the place; thats just not how it works, neither from a neuro- nor from a psychological perspective. It doesn't matter wether you're intellectual middle or high brow, you will always be an idiot because you'll always be residing in a brain, being bound to its constraints of focus and attention. the notion of absolute intelligence that you imply when relating to "being a bit clever is the worst of the lot" seems off to me.
>I would happily trade to being exactly perceived as I am or less and forgo all the money and praise if I didn't also be saddled with expectations of coming up with solutions all the time.
You're contradicting yourself: first you say that the general population doesn't get what being smart implies, and then you say that the general population expects you to deliver on what being smart implies
Sorry if this came off hostile, it wasn't meant so in any way. I just can't relate to these absolute notions and would strongly suggest you to read into psychology and neuroscience
You lost me at the last sentence. (Jk, actually at Joscha Bach). The thing is, there is no consensus on what intelligence or smartness or any concept adjacent is. The layman notion is indeed wrong. But reading psychology and neuroscience will only put you deeper into this misery, as the theories proposed have shaky foundations and contradict each other.
I guess that the brain being a complex system there might not be one or multiple attributes of intelligence; just different behaviours.
> I guess that the brain being a complex system there might not be one or multiple attributes of intelligence; just different behaviours
I just ordered “Society of Mind” by Minsky. I spent some time this year working on multi agent simulations, then started wondering about the individual as really an apartment building of agents, and then started looking for the prior art, and found that book. This will probably be a dead end like so many before but that’s the current thread I’m on in my understanding of the complex system that is the brain.
I don't think anything you said is hostile. Perhaps I should have redrafted it better given that nature of of topic, I should have expected to be misunderstood a bit.
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Firstly Caveat Lector: Yes generalization is a natural hazard of this topic and I am guilty as everyone else on this thread, we(and PG) are drawing conclusions basis anecdotal personal experiences and generalizing that obviously may not hold. Perhaps I should have called out explicitly, I assumed that is already implicitly clear in this topic. Everything I say[1] in this kind of topic is almost always a opinion or a best a theory.
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The scale to me[2]: Not being smart[3] means everyone assumes you are their level or below them. A "little bit smart" means when some(many) people assume you know better than them. Crazy smart is people I cannot understand and are way smarter than I am.
I am not saying general population, I am saying it is difficult to comprehend how much smarter[2] anyone else for any person independent of their own personal levels that is by kind of basic limitation of not being as smart as them, if you could understand the gap you would probably as smart as well. It doesn't matter if the first person is super smart already and other person is even smarter. This has an effect that people inherently under or overestimate[4] what the other person is capable of, that is what am alluding to.
I don't have a knowledge on neuroscience to comment on that, however I absolutely do not have any interest in reading anymore psychology or debate with amateurs / professionals on it, my experience[5] interacting with the field : it is filled with pseudo-science (Yes including big names like Jung), every conventional term has always has different professional meaning which layman are expected to know fluently to discuss anything related, evidence/studies for many widely held theories is usually small sampled studies and typically math is at best basic linear regression models conflating correlation and causation .
Psychology and Economics are two fields I consider a lot of waste of time trying to study for non professionals [6], Metaphysics or philosophy at least is fully abstract( like Math?), this mixing of reality with pretty weak science[7] makes a pretty bad combination. I understand that may makes me ignorant in some eyes. Sadly a lot of economic and workplace policy is determined by influential schools of thought in both fields, as everybody is affected by policy everyone has(should have) a opinion .
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P.S. I didn't intend come across as aggressive/harsh or snide, but trying to be specific can come across has not being polite and snide, I am not that a gifted a writer(and English is not my first language) to write the same intent and make it sound better, apologies if it did not come out well.
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[1] For that matter anyone else says including professionals, I can only claim for myself though.
[2] This may not apply to others, I am not a professional to be able to generalize it, I am just sharing my anecdotal version.
[3] Smart here and all other terms I am using is common sense definitions, kind of similar to "I will know it when I see it" obscenity definition by Potter in the Roth test. I don't have any expertise or interest in framing in formal narrow terms
[4] In my experience
[5] I can only talk about my personal experience, all of these are generalizations, am sure will have dozens of exceptions or completely opposite view points backed with solid evidence. It is statement of opinion not fact.
[6] You( and the world) may a different opinion on this, I am not stating it as what everyone should also see it as, just how I see it, and I am fine not holding a consensus view
I'm one of eleven kids- I was the 'smart one' and what an absolute drag that title was and is. The title still sticks despite having a brother with multiple award winning plays, another brother being a successful serial entrepreneur, and sisters with published books.
I've watched them succeed while I didn't finish college due to ADHD driving me to distraction. Luckily I have the computer skills requisite to be a successful network architect- but I'm quite aware I could have been a surgeon, a constitutional lawyer, a good to great political commentator or a quant if I had that next bit of mental concentration and memory.
I'm very aware of that gap and it grinds in the gears pretty continually now that I'm older and firmly entrenched in a career- what a bit of ADHD meds at the right time in my life would have meant to allow that potential to be unlocked. To see those I was on the debate team with or in the same book clubs or Latin class being able to step up to the next level and build fairly continually rather than fighting against their mental shortcomings.
But really, in the end, I still have that bit more access to curiosity and the deeper things that come with that curiosity- I was commenting to my daughters in the car the other day that the acceleration they felt in the car pushing them back in their seats was functionally equivalent to gravity. That they are constantly accelerating towards the earth, which is what keeps them connected to the ground. That kind of thinking, though in many ways generic and obvious, is probably not a thing any of my siblings would say and an important part of how I think and approach the world- and not something I would trade to step down into for a bit more oblivious contentment.
> I've watched them succeed while I didn't finish college due to ADHD driving me to distraction. Luckily I have the computer skills requisite to be a successful network architect- but I'm quite aware I could have been a surgeon, a constitutional lawyer, a good to great political commentator or a quant if I had that next bit of mental concentration and memory.
Welcome to the party, pal :-)
I still think it's a hell of a lot better than being not smart and saddled with those problems, as guilty as I sometimes feel for not "living up to my potential". I'd probably be homeless or barely making ends meet while bouncing between minimum wage jobs, instead of living really well with shockingly little effort. My deficiencies are very frustrating and trigger lots of negative rumination when I think about what might have been if I'd had just the right person take notice early on and intervene in just the right ways—until I remind myself how much worse it could be, which is a whole damn lot worse.
> I'm one of eleven kids- I was the 'smart one' and what an absolute drag that title was and is. The title still sticks despite having a brother with multiple award winning plays, another brother being a successful serial entrepreneur, and sisters with published books.
Ah, a member of Salinger's Glass family, I see. ;-)
I have as many (or more) siblings as you, and adhd. I got meds somewhere not too far before my thirtieth birthday. That is now well above 10 years ago and yes, it has meant a lot.
And yes, being singled out for being smart, I know that too.
This is the first time I'm this specific about my background here but I thought you would like to know at least one other person here knows a little bit of what it feels like.
There's only a very small number of exceptional people who are so smart that they just understand everything without effort. Terry Tao comes to mind. Everybody else has to pick and choose what they understand, most "very smart" people are still only very smart within a certain domain.
This is more of a reflection of the richness of our world rather than the limitations of the human mind.
In Ancient Greece, it was possible for polymaths to exist, people who could contribute to the many disciplines that existed then. Then, Poincare has the title of "the last universalist" because of his contributions to many areas of mathematics. Now, no such generalist can exist, everything requires specialisation. But that is a good thing. It means that human knowledge is incredibly rich.
Yes you are right in sense that, in the ancient the number of educated people -> scholars -> professionals who could dedicate the life to research was small. It was far easier (easier than today not easy itself) to be able to dabble in many topics. [1] [2]
As you say much of what can be researched by a general philosopher who dabbles in many fields is already done, today to go further in any one field you will need to dedicate your life to it in mathematics or physics or other older fields of research.
That does not mean there are less generalists today. There are plenty of generalists in younger/newer fields like it was in math or physics back in those days .
Generalist scientists like Dr Lovelock was possible in the 60s. Generalist computer scientists was common till not that long ago. Generalist programmers were(are) there when I started in the industry, today to hire proper "full stack" developer is getting harder!
Point is generalists or specialization is always there, just the fields where it can happen keep changing.
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[1] We have to remember many of them were also institutions which they were only the head of, rather than only individual contributors, so attribution could be more to their school than them necessarily individually.
[2] A lot of the early work by ancient scholars was more documentation and formalization of somewhat known items than discovery or invention in the modern sense
> Shit no, because the whole rest of the time I'm not coming up with those handful of new ideas, I'm less-smart.
For lack of a better metric, how many IQ points would you be willing to trade per new idea? It feels likely that environmental factors and luck have a much higher impact on happiness and other outcomes for individuals within whatever defines the "high intelligence" or "slightly gifted range". I'd probably make the "less smart" trade for 1-2 novel/high quality ideas since you're basically guaranteeing one or two high rolls. I doubt a 1-2% bump in intelligence would outweigh the benefits.
I'm making lots of assumptions here around being able to successfully act on new ideas and that intelligence has marginal gains once you're locked into above-average-but-not-top quantiles.
> For lack of a better metric, how many IQ points would you be willing to trade per new idea? It feels likely that environmental factors and luck have a much higher impact on happiness and other outcomes for individuals within whatever defines the "high intelligence" or "slightly gifted range". I'd probably make the "less smart" trade for 1-2 novel/high quality ideas since you're basically guaranteeing one or two high rolls. I doubt a 1-2% bump in intelligence would outweigh the benefits.
For one that'd make me at least somewhat rich? Maybe one or two. But I have a feeling I'd end up regretting even that, worrying "would I have gotten this idea I'm not getting, if I hadn't made that trade?", or if a loss of interest in something is because I'm now slightly dumber, or whatever, every day, for the entire rest of my life. Aging-related brain changes are already terrifying, without helping them along.
> Being even a little clever—and that's the best I can claim—is living life on easy mode. It's so great. Once I realized that the other people in the room weren't not-saying the obvious thing because they'd already dismissed it for some reason I couldn't see, but because it wasn't obvious to them, it was like I unlocked a superpower.
The thing is - I don't agree with Paul Graham at all. Sure, there might be a genetic component to being 'smart', but I doubt it means that people are just born with a better "CPU". Maybe they are 0.1% better overall.
Rather, I don't think we can properly control variables(ethically). If your parents are 'smart', they will do 'smart' things. They will give you the attention you need. They will give you a balanced diet. They will buy you books. They will teach you difficult concepts. You'll see them studying or otherwise getting invested in their careers and, as kids, we mimic what you see. Over time, you develop 'smart' habits, and you exercise your brain.
You'll also accumulate all sorts of 'patterns', that let you quickly see those things that aren't 'obvious' to everyone else. They are obvious to you, probably because you have seen something similar before, even in a different context. The more 'patterns' you have, the quicker you can spot them, and you can tie things together faster if you are not focusing on learning entirely new things at the same time.
Even if you had nothing of the sort growing up, by just trying to engage your brain while doing most of your tasks, you are far ahead of most people. What people tend to do is, whenever they find something that worked, even if only once, they will stick with that solution, for every situation. They don't normally ask themselves if the resolution is still appropriate for the situation in hand. Keep this as a background process, and you do have a superpower.
Your proposing a testable hypotheses which has been disproven through studies of the adopted and especially twins. Intelligence and genetics are strongly linked, most obviously via negatives like Down syndrome but that’s far from the only influence.
Read up on working memory. A lot of people can't hold enough items in their head long enough to write a function. And that's if you don't believe in IQ, which is already very heavily correlated with success.
P.S. I am in the somewhat unique situation of being "smart enough", but far from the smartest person in the room, so I can struggle and am close enough to the "incompetent" line to see it clearly, and it's a scary place. On the other hand, I can do enough to understand how truly fast "hyper-intelligent" people think at work to understand the difference, and it's a stark difference.
intelligence being a highly genetic trait was known for a long while. Recently they even discovered the genes responsible for a large part of it https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104
Not being too smart can be a forcing function on the quality of ideas. Very frequently the idea that wins in the minds of others is the one that is easy to think about.
I am frequently caught in the trap where I am enjoying the puzzlebox complexity of a problem, and building an equally complicated solution. I then attempt to explain my complicated solution to someone else, and I fail on delivery.
I also have a coworker whos mantra is "if its hard to think about, I don't do it". We actually worked on similarly aligned solutions to the same problem. His version met with significantly more success than mine did, and I credit the fact that he ensured that it was all easy to think about (and thus talk about). I don't begrudge him at all though, he's one of my favs!
IMO if you are unwilling or unable to think about overly complicated ideas, it might force you to eliminate them and develop new ones that are easier to talk about and think about.
Agree. Whether a business (or solution to a problem) is interesting, ingenious and innovative is a completely different matter from its being a good business. iirc warren buffet once said, "if it takes a calculator to figure out if it's a good business, it's not". In a similar vein (but with a different moral to it) my boss used to say that (in a corporate context) all back-of-the-envelope analysis was by definition correct - because it would only ever be checked via back-of-the-envelope calculations.
It seems to me that someone's ability to generate new ideas is at least in part driven by one's ability to make links between things that are not linked or very distantly so. It is at that intersection that novel ideas emerges.
To make it more concrete here's an example of my own.
I was playing the game Zelda Breath of The Wild and was in awe of the beautiful landscapes you could visit. However, I had already finished the game and did not want to have to fire up my Wii U every time just to see them.
This is when a novel idea emerged. What if I made a Google Map's Street Viewer for Zelda Breath of The Wild.
You can see here that I subsconsiously made a link between two very distant things a video game and Google Map's street view.
The idea was well recieved and gathered the attention of many gaming journals just google zelda street view to see for yourself. Before making this project I also searched if someone had done the same but no one did. I therefore thought that I had something pretty novel so worth doing.
While my idea isn't groundbreaking in terms of science it demonstrate well the characteristics of a novel idea. (The intersection of different domains that seems to most distant.)
It seems that to be able to do those links you must have breadth of knowledge instead of depth however it's still a mystery how some people are able to do this more frequently then others.
Also here's a free idea : Make the same thing I did with Zelda but for other open world games.
I suspect there are a lot of us here in particular who have 'unpopular opinions' in this domain that are more difficult to just try out, because others have invested in the idea of different domains being special and thus not conducive to fusion as in your example, or borrowing ideas whole cloth.
I have, for instance, some opinions on how skills from personal finance cross a whole host of problem domains. Some are obvious, but performance analysis is not typically one of them and people look at me like I have horns on my head when I bring it up. They have few complaints about the outcomes of me applying those theories, as long as they don't have to hear about them. So I mostly just don't ask permission, and save theory crafting for talk over beers when people start pulling out their crackpot ideas to keep the conversation flowing.
It's really no wonder at all to me why so many of milestones in The Enlightenment started over coffee. Caffeine is not as good a social lubricant but it'll do in a pinch and has fewer negative side effects on cognition and - importantly - memory. Last night's epiphany is mostly inaccessible to the drunk.
The consensus among top physicists during the 'heroic era' was that Von Neumann was the smartest among them, higher IQ than Einstein's, but Einstein had something else.
Eugene P. Wigner:
> I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me. [...] But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jansci's brilliance, he never produced anything as original.
Years and years ago I read Einstein's biography (the one by Isaacson). One anecdote that remains bright in my memory after all these years is about Einstein and sailing. Einstein liked sailing, and because of where he was living he mostly did lake sailing. One thing about lake sailing is that you can often end up becalmed. What Einstein did was to take a notebook with him when he went sailing; a notebook with notes about what he was working on at the time. Whenever the wind died down he would take out his notebook and start working on his current research. When the wind picked up he would put his notebook away and resume sailing.
There is no doubt that Einstein was brilliant. I believe he was as successful as he was because he was also exceptionally self disciplined.
I read that too, and I got the impression being forced to work alone at the patent office was crucial for his 1905 Annus mirabilis papers. Lots of other great ideas (e.g. Mendel, Darwin) have come about from intellectual isolation.
I wonder how Graham would respond to that given he's so intertwined in Silicon Valley.
And Bill James did a lot of his Sabermetric writing while working night shifts as a security guard.[0]
He's not Einstein, but he was way ahead of his time in a particular area and it's fair to say he's been hugely influential in the baseball community for nearly 40 years.
> I believe he was as successful as he was because he was also exceptionally self disciplined.
Well, that's one way to put it. These were the rules he wrote out for his wife. [0]
You will make sure:
- that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;
- that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;
- that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.
You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons. Specifically, You will forego:
- my sitting at home with you;
- my going out or travelling with you.
You will obey the following points in your relations with me:
- you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way;
- you will stop talking to me if I request it;
- you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it.
You will undertake not to belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behaviour.
Charitably, the context of the time, this sounds like a man with a broken marriage who wants to continue providing for his wife who likely didn't work and their children.
I think asking to be left alone in his private spaces, to not have drama, to do really basic chores like cooking and cleaning (in the context of the era) if you're not working or bringing in income seems really reasonable.
He's a bigger man than me - I'd never live with an essentially ex wife.
I couldn't imagine writing something like that to someone who I shared a life with for over a decade, and the mother of my children. But maybe thing were different back then...
If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he had important new ideas. Even the ones who tried to give you a more sophisticated-sounding answer would probably think this first. Till a few years ago I would have given the same answer myself. But that wasn't what was special about Einstein. What was special about him was that he was really smart. Having important new ideas was a necessary precondition for properly utilizing that intelligence, but the two are not identical.
It may seem a hair-splitting distinction to point out that inspiration and its consequences are not identical, but it isn't. There's a big gap between them. Anyone who's spent time around crackpot scientific theorists knows how big. There are a lot of genuinely original people who don't achieve very much.
Just having the good new ideas isn't really enough, though. You have to be really persistent about figuring out all the details and making them work. This is related to, but definitely not the same as, being fascinated/obsessed by the topic.
Of course Einstein had great ideas. But he also spent many years working out the consequences of, eg, his first ideas about the fixed speed of light in vacuum and its consequences in physics, initially during downtime at his patent office job. Nearly all of the impact of the theory is in that working-out.
Work ethic is super important. The ability to grind on your ideas. And I think having some extrovert nature really helps in getting your ideas out there.
I was Paul's definition of smart, w/o good ideas. I loved to learn things. But I didn't really have the work ethic to build new things. I feel like I've done fine in life, but had you asked my middle school and high school teachers -- and even university... I've probably underperformed.
In contrast my son is bright, but not the academic star I was. But he has crazy work ethic in ideas he cares about. I've really nurtured his work ethic and played down the "smart" academic angle. If wants to finish a personal project and not study for that French quiz -- I'm fine with that. He gets an A-/B+ for the year, rather than an A. So what. The passion he pours into his ideas though is great and I think will serve him better over the course of his life.
I do compliment it. But probably more than that I emphasize that things worth doing are often hard and hard things often take time. So I taught him that setting short term goals along the way to long-term goals will help him stay on track. So he's becoming really good at showing me various intermediate states to his work, and I'm really excited when I see it. Whether its a game that he's writing or a business that he's creating.
As a younger kid he loved Legos. I think that contributed. He'd just do progressively larger and larger sets. As a kid I never could do a large Lego set. I had them, but they all remained unfinished.
PG making a case for the "idea guy"! It's interesting to see how often that trope is shot down in SV culture.
I appreciate that he is qualifying or preconditioning the value of the idea guy as having intelligence along with other "mundane ingredients" like grit, sleep, stress, network, and passion. I very much agree with the approach and only wish for a framework to score these ingredients in the context of an entrepreneur's problem domain. I guess that's what VC's are supposed to do.
Recently I’ve been a bit disillusioned as all the cleverness of my youth had gone wasted. Albeit the ideas were low hanging fruits but had I had the skills to implement them I think I would have been better off. Now that I do have the skills, they’d long been executed by others.
Now the world has gotten a lot more sophisticated and I don’t know what to sophisticate myself on. They all seem a bit boring or stupid on one hand, or another monumental climb where I’ll have to start over from the beginning.
A lot of the biggest Web-related tech money-makers and success stories are things it wouldn't have occurred to me to try, because I'd have assumed they were illegal or otherwise so awful that people'd tar and feather me if I proposed them. Sometimes, they were/are illegal, in fact, but it somehow worked out OK for the founders anyway (business might eventually fall apart, but who cares, they made millions, if not billions)
Spying on what people do on web pages, down to their mouse movements, sometimes. Tracking all that across sites. Then using that to target ads at them.
AirBnB and Uber... just, all of what they do.
Crypto exchanges. It's crazy to me that these managed to go long enough to gain a toehold before facing any sort of banking or securities regulations.
Addictive mechanics on social media and in pay-to-play games.
Mint and other go-betweens with banks that just store and re-use credentials, including answers to "security questions". Seems like a really dangerous idea, probably involves encouraging a bunch of people to violate terms of service on a massive scale, and if you're presenting connections to banks that you know have those terms, seems like you'd be hella liable for that. And my god, if there's a breach that involves your systems and you've been hoovering up people's banking credentials? I'd fully expect to be facing extremely scary and probably-going-to-go-poorly-for-my-company lawsuits from a dozen enormous banks. How do these companies get insured in any way whatsoever? I don't get it. Inexplicably (to me), instead of crashing and burning and being laughed out of the room at any and all fundraising meetings, these made a few people very, very rich instead.
And so on.
Plenty of things not in those categories, of course. Stripe was a great idea, just a hard problem—I'd have had no clue how to seek terms from CC companies to get such a thing off the ground, to pick what's just step #1 of even starting to try at that.
Some are great ideas that I might have come up with, but I haven't a clue about how to even begin to fundraise (I'm not past barely-an-acquaintance territory with any rich people, for even small values of "rich", so that doesn't help), and they're the kind of thing that pretty much requires a pile of cash to even make an attempt—actually, Stripe again seems like a good example. I couldn't feasibly have done even an MVP of that solo, or even with a very small team "in a garage"; the fundraising is another necessary hurdle to even credibly trying.
Some stuff's smart people doing smart things that are eventually very lucrative. Those I (theoretically) could have done, I guess. Redis, for instance. Still, the really big money seems to be in convincing people to finance things that feel like they ought to be illegal (and might actually be), and how that all works continues to elude me. How do you spot a law you can break long enough to get traction against the "dinosaurs" who are bound to follow the law, versus one that will land you on the losing end of a ruinous lawsuit and make your name mud, or in prison? Do people actually know how to spot those, or are the successful ones just lucky? Is that in fact almost all laws once you have some rich people backing you? I haven't a clue.
(Nb this is not intended as sour-grapes complaining, but rather an exploration of the ways in which "having an idea" is a really, really long way from even making a meaningful attempt at implementation for a variety of prominent tech products, including such hurdles as not understanding when doing illegal or horribly unethical stuff is actually a very good idea, if you're just trying to launch a product and get rich—these are deficiencies in my understanding of the world, clearly)
All monumental climbs start with a single step. It's easy to get lost thinking about what could have been or what will be and forget about what can be, right now at this very moment.
It's not enjoyable to think about wasted opportunities in your past, so don't let your future self suffer the same fate.
Do at least part of one of the ideas you find boring or stupid to get back into the mindset of being someone who is able to create. Armed with that, you'll spend less time thinking about whether you can do it and more time about what you want to do.
Obviously for people who are depressed or suffer from ADHD you often can't "just do it" but in general I think it's worth trying to shift the way we think about the things we can accomplish.
Lots of fun points in here. I would add that willing to be wrong 100% of the time and being open to constantly fucking things up will get you very far all on its own. As long as your intentions are good and you can limit the blast radius, these efforts are usually rewarded in time. Ablity to disregard shame and the scorn of others is the superpower in this context.
In a similar vein, being good at fixing things after you've broken them. Gives you a little more confidence in trying new things without all of the work involved in first making sure they'll work.
Buried toward the end of the essay is a suggestion to become a better writer. Wondering if anyone has learned to become a better writer, and if so, what was your approach?
Just like working out improves your range of movement and manipulating your own body and weights in space, writing does the same with ideas and expression.
I feel pg’s point is similar to musicians. As an example, Glenn Gould was a classical pianist and renowned Bach interpreter. He had awesome technical ability at the piano, and a fantastic memory. But lots of incredible pianists have these abilities. Go to any university or observe any competition and you’ll plainly see awesome talent. These qualities are analogous to “being smart”.
However, what set Gould apart from his colleagues was his innovative and iconoclastic interpretations of well-known works with “standard” prescriptions. He had fundamentally different, but wholly consistent, ideas about musical interpretation, recording technology, presentation of music to audiences, and so on. He’s remembered as a pianist not because his fingers were quick and sensitive, but instead because he pushed boundaries in completely original ways.
Leonard Bernstein—a noted conductor and pianist—quips about this when he conducted the Brahms Concerto in D minor, with Gould at the piano [1]. I recommend listening but I’ll copy his words (from [2]) for posterity.
> Don't be frightened. Mr. Gould is here. He will appear in a moment. I'm not, um, as you know, in the habit of speaking on any concert except the Thursday night previews, but a curious situation has arisen, which merits, I think, a word or two. You are about to hear a rather, shall we say, unorthodox performance of the Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance distinctly different from any I've ever heard, or even dreamt of for that matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures from Brahms' dynamic indications. I cannot say I am in total agreement with Mr. Gould's conception and this raises the interesting question: "What am I doing conducting it?" I'm conducting it because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist that I must take seriously anything he conceives in good faith and his conception is interesting enough so that I feel you should hear it, too.
> But the age old question still remains: "In a concerto, who is the boss; the soloist or the conductor?" The answer is, of course, sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending on the people involved. But almost always, the two manage to get together by persuasion or charm or even threats to achieve a unified performance. I have only once before in my life had to submit to a soloist's wholly new and incompatible concept and that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould. (The audience roared with laughter at this.) But, but this time the discrepancies between our views are so great that I feel I must make this small disclaimer. Then why, to repeat the question, am I conducting it? Why do I not make a minor scandal — get a substitute soloist, or let an assistant conduct? Because I am fascinated, glad to have the chance for a new look at this much-played work; Because, what's more, there are moments in Mr. Gould's performance that emerge with astonishing freshness and conviction. Thirdly, because we can all learn something from this extraordinary artist, who is a thinking performer, and finally because there is in music what Dimitri Mitropoulos used to call "the sportive element", that factor of curiosity, adventure, experiment, and I can assure you that it has been an adventure this week collaborating with Mr. Gould on this Brahms concerto and it's in this spirit of adventure that we now present it to you.
Because some took this as an attack on Gould, Bernstein followed up with the remark:
> Any discovery of Glenn's was welcomed by me because I worshiped the way he played: I admired his intellectual approach, his "guts" approach, his complete dedication to whatever he was doing.
Anyway, it’s an interesting parallel in the arts world. Jacob Collier is a musician of today that has similar qualities of “being smart with good ideas”.
Jacob Collier is an interesting example because the general response I've seen to his music from music fans is that it is too "smart". It's impressive and novel to music academics (and apparently the Grammys) but hardly interesting to fans of the genres he favors (soul, pop, R&B). Common complaints being lack of emotion, lack of taste, poor songwriting, over production. But any negative review will also acknowledge that he's immensely talented and has massive potential.
That was my immediate impression of his music. It feels strangely cold and extremely "produced", especially when he has made stabs at jazz, a genre that is in many cases "music for musicians". For a genre that prizes free flowing interpretation and individual creativity alongside instrumental virtuosity, his jazz music comes out utterly sterile compared to other modern jazz musicians. The same goes for his soul music. Everything he does feels like an exercise in a genre rather than playing in it.
Compare his stuff to the work of Kamasi Washington, Mary Halvorson's groups, or Shabaka Hutchings, or Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, and you hear an enormous difference in the sheer craft of songwriting, emotional dynamics, and storytelling through their instruments.
He's clearly a virtuoso at a kind of playing the instrument, and he's extremely good at explaining music theory and concepts, which is a rather archaic and unique language all its own, but I don't think he's quite there yet for songwriting.
Some of the words in music theory are just straight latin, or directly descendant from latin and old. A lot of people struggle with music theory until you "translate" it to using modern language (though you do lose some specificity in some cases). Like "ritardando", which is just "slow down", or accelerando, which is, you guessed it, "speed up".
Italian, not Latin. Italian is the language of music. Italy used to be the capital of European music. That's where it comes from. I also wouldn't classify it as mere "theory". It's basic notation that appears in notes. Calling it "theory" is like calling control flow constructs in Pascal (the language) "theory".
I don't disagree with you, but I'd like to make one small addendum that may go to explain why people might consider his music to feel overproduced. I believe that reason is his use of non-equal-temperament tuning.
For those unaccustomed to hearing pure intervals it can sound like a high-gloss "sheen" that gives an unreal quality to the music. In a way it becomes "too perfect" and unnatural to those who are used to hearing the equal temperament that most western music is recorded in. I hear it a lot in some acapella vocal groups and I often find the sound off-putting and it somehow feels a little corny to me.
Still, his virtuosity allows him to do things that very few people are capable of conceiving, attempting, and doing. We're lucky to have him in the mix.
I think that his use of Logic in particular is very relevant in this discussion, because not only it has excellent support for different temperaments, it also has Hermut tuning, which dynamically alters temperament of all the instruments played based on actual chords to reach perfect intervals regardless of the key you're in.
> That was my immediate impression of his music. It feels strangely cold and extremely "produced",
Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins is an example of someone who has both the talent and the taste for making great music in my opinion. There's a really old video of him shredding like a madman [1] completely off the dome which shows he has very good command of his guitar. He's not in the same sphere as Jacob Collier mind you but here me out. If you compare that video with the music he wrote in the pumpkins, it is very restrained. He knew when to exercise the full range of his skills and when to dial it back. Having learned a lot of pumpkins songs on guitar, it is clear to me that he favoured what sounded better and was more impactful over what appeared skillful.
There's another video of him in 2012 [2] where he talks about influential music coming from the internet and people in their desktop studios, not from guys with guitars trying to make it big. Beyond his talent he had a very keen eye for how music was evolving. Having talent is one thing, being able to contextualise your work, and others work accurately in the arena of the world is a quality that very few people possess and in my opinion is required for producing truly influential and impactful work.
> he talks about influential music coming from the internet and people in their desktop studios, not from guys with guitars trying to make it big
That's a great clip. You might enjoy some of what people have been doing with their desktop studios and guitars in the last few years. Two that immediately come to mind are Tim Henson [1] (already pretty well-known in the guitar world as part of Polyphia) and Manuel Gardner-Fernandes [2].
I cannot leave a comment of bedroom producers go without a mention of judd madden.
Probably quite out there (doom/drone/stoner) for most people but his music has always struck me as incredibly from the heart and not some noodling to impress others.
PG dismisses creativity, but IMO that's a mistake in an otherwise interesting essay. Creativity is the difference between someone who is merely smart and someone who originates ideas.
Collier is merely smart. He's very, very smart indeed. But in the domain of music, expressive originality is far more important.
And it can be created by people who aren't technically music-smart at all. It's a different skill to the kind of grammatical/technical smartness that someone like Collier has.
That's not a distraction at all. It's exactly the point - creativity is orthogonal to smartness, and it's poorly understood and even more poorly supported.
One of the interesting thing that happened in English pop (until it stopped being possible a decade or two ago) was that successful pop artists were more likely to have been through art school than music school.
The exemplar is Eno - who studied with Roy Ascott, who is probably one of the most unknown influential pioneers of computer art.
Eno has taste and a willingness to experiment across multiple domains. The rest almost falls into place.
IMO the combination of openness to experimentation and instinctual feel for rightness/wrongness to guide that experimentation is the foundation of useful creativity.
Art school - more than anywhere else - gives people permission to experiment. Taste can be partially taught, but you need an instinctive feel for it, and that's probably innate.
Someone like Collier doesn't score highly on either experimentation or taste. He scores very highly on musical competence and technical skill. But both are a kind of conformity - which is the opposite of real originality.
I assume where PG is going with this is the suggestion that some people can originate incredibly successful business ideas, and most people can't.
Which might be nice if it were true. But in a startup sense the opposite is more likely. You need a baseline of conformity to be in business at all. Truly creative types don't find the business world open enough to be interesting.
Success in business relies on having ideas that are original enough to be different, but not so original they're incomprehensibly challenging and difficult.
Market fit mostly happens near the middle of the bell curve - for whatever metric you're measuring - and that's not where the most creative people like to live.
>> IMO the combination of openness to experimentation and instinctual feel for rightness/wrongness to guide that experimentation is the foundation of useful creativity.
This statement strongly resonated with me, thank you for this.
This is mostly a personal stance validated by the talking of some other artists and musicians, and only a weak rebuttal/addendum to your point: But I've long understood creativity as literally just creating. A lot. And publishing only what you deem worthy.
I'm friends with a clique of techno producers and they grind their music 24/7, they have an endless supply of ideas that they've produced,they're also heavily immersed in the music etc. They will publish some tracks twice a year, to the outside it obviously seems like they've had a moment of genius, but it's probably just 5% of their actual production. Another example is the documentary on marina abramovich, where she has a consultant telling her what art to actually publish. The artist Jonathan Meese has outlined a similar stance on a Tracks documentary where he just rambles for 5min to the effect of "create create create".
Obviously doing something a lot develops skill, but choosing what to publish is probably more a question of taste.
Jazz soloing is probably a good counterexample, but a lot of jazz solos aren't that remarkable and these people are at the top of their game so their worst is likely most peoples best?
Ok, I hadn't really explored Collier's music until I read so many people panning his work on this thread.
One youtube rabbit hole later, and I have to strongly disagree. These threads are littered with Phrases like 'Doesn't score highly on either experimentation or taste', 'lack of emotion'. 'Seems overly clever but not nice sounding'.
Sorry, I'm not sure whether this is people hating on someone outside of your camp or what, but I think they're missing the point.
The way Collier brings ideas from Jazz, Classical, Synth culture, EDM, R&B into a modern a cappella multimedia collage is experimental, creative and I find quite emotional.
Granted it's not the emotion in traditional, analogue music forms coming from the voicing of the instrument - it's from the arrangement, the sampling, even the ebb and flow of precision.
And where most of the modern Glee-style a cappella are sanitized, overly produced and pretty pap (I'm not a fan of the genre, but my kids are), he's really pushing the boundaries of that genre. In ways that, from the handful of examples I've listened to, sound quite successful.
In particular I really enjoyed his arrangements of Stevie Wonder.
The music gate-keepers have always levelled these same criticisms electronic compositions, especially if the the composers are young and popular.
I don't like criticizing anyone or trying to talk about "objective" qualities of art, but I don't agree with your portrayal.
I love electronic composers; I almost exclusively listen to avant-garde/experimental electronic compositions, personally. Most of the artists are quite young. I agree Collier is definitely very experimental.
I do not think he's very artistic or emotional and agree with the above comments that he's in the "intelligent/skilled but not creative" camp. I think he has a lot of potential, but his work just doesn't seem very musical to me, and I have absolutely no biases against experimental, "weird", electronic, or new stuff.
Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather listen to James Blake or Moreno Veloso than Collier.
I'm not saying you have to like his music. I am saying that anyone maintaining that his compositions are not artistic, creative or musical... well, perhaps someone's definitions of these words are being biased by their preferences.
I mean, to take one example, he's rearranged a classic R&B song in 9-part jazz harmonies rarely heard in the pop genre. He layers in samples from household sounds. He put all this together in an entertaining media format without losing the sensibilities of his genre nor letting it collapse into noise.
You could argue that this is not entirely novel, and this kind of composition has been happening in less popular genres for decades. I can see arguments against his taste. I do agree with an earlier comment that this might be too sophisticated for his pop audience.
But not creative? Not musical? Not artistic? You don't have to like his music to recognise that these words absolutely apply.
When I was a teen, I hated certain genres of music - for example 'new country' and the popular dance music styles of the late 80s. My disdain for whole categories of music was part of my identity.
This made it near impossible for teen me to recognise (or more to the truth, admit) that any of the artists labelled as part of those genres had any talent at all.
This lead to all sorts of silliness, like asserting that MJ had no talent, or insisting that Neil Young doesn't play country. Or just plain missing out on some of the brilliant moments of Willie Nelson's career.
You're right that art is subjective, and I'm quibbling over words that have no quantitative meaning. But seriously, credit where credit is due.
Yeah, I would compare Jacob Collier to Snarky Puppey or Tigran Hamasayan.
All of them are virtuosic and are branching away from classical ideas of jazz, and Collier might even be the smartest of the group, but he can't write a song to save a life.
Snarky Puppey and Tigram have on the other hand, found a fresh niche for themselves that is similarly creative, but has the humility of adding the necessary sugar and milk to make their supremely creative and bitter music drink palatable to a listening audience.
>He’s remembered as a pianist not because his fingers were quick and sensitive, but instead because he pushed boundaries in completely original ways.
Or because a lot of this (even classical music) is pop culture, so he was quirky enough to establish a brand name, whereas others equally competent or even better didn't come with an assosicated story to sell them...
I think the quirkiness perhaps helped propel him to greater fame, and made his name "stick" more easily, but it's certainly not the reason he is famous or remembered. There are countless quirky no-names. He was of note more so because of his technical capacity and strong convictions for his unorthodox approach, which he voluminously described in writing, interviews, etc.
Do you have any personal favorite interviews? I frequently find that folks discussing their craft at a high level often illuminates opportunities for cross-disciplinary knowledge transfer.
Yes! I love his discussion about Bach and appropriate use of instruments here [1]. He also gets into why he chooses some tempos, what’s arbitrary and what’s not, where to seek consistency in interpretative choices, and so on. I adore this interview!
I also love his slightly hyperbolic hot take on why Mozart isn’t that good [2]. It’s hilarious, to me at least, hearing him roast Mozart then proceed to play his music beautifully.
which is the same song as the one Judy Garland made famous, but Alpert's version is heavenly.
Before the intertoobs and CDs, I searched everywhere for that album (Herb Alpert's Ninth) for years, and finally found a brand new mint one in the cutout bin with the slot sliced in it. For $1. I couldn't believe my prize!
P.S. The yootoob version has poor sound quality. To hear how good Herb is with the trumpet, ya gotta get the CD.
> Before the intertoobs and CDs, I searched everywhere for that album (Herb Alpert's Ninth) for years, and finally found a brand new mint one in the cutout bin with the slot sliced in it. For $1. I couldn't believe my prize!
This cut-out practice is new to me, but a related one in the publishing/bookselling industry rang true. I learn a lot just by reading and reflecting on your comments. Thanks for posting this personal story.
I think we've lost a lot with the transition to digital, these kinds of bargain bins included, which is part of the reason I too love all kinds of secondhand stores and swap meets, etc.
I regularly troll pawn shops and thrift stores, you never know what you'll find there. For example, they usually have a bin full of vinyl. The staff pulls out any that are valuable, but what is valuable on the market has no relation to what I consider valuable. Jackie Gleason, for example, made many records that aren't available on CD. His stuff is great if you enjoy easy listening, old style.
A couple months back, the pawn shop had acquired what looked like an old DJ's 12 inch single collection from the 70s and 80s. $.50 per disk. I grabbed them all.
I’ve found that archive.org also has a large number of out of print vinyl.
What the market finds valuable is partially a signaling problem, as it is only loosely connected to any individual’s taste, and more connected to quick sales for record companies. The market as a whole can’t discover prices for products that individuals aren’t aware of and seeking out in the small window of first-sale. It’s not too different from the traditional VC investment strategy, now that I consider it.
You'll hear Herb Alpert's "Rise" live on today sampled (not trumpet, guitar) in Notorious B.I.G.'s "Hypnotize," with enduring appeal. I went to dig up the connection and it's a lot more interesting than I first suspected. "Rise" was actually composed by Herb's nephew, and the article goes into why the Alperts rejected many sampling requests before accepting Notorious.
The lady who cleans Willie Nelson's tour bus finds scraps of paper with lyrics which have more potential than most of what is actually published in Nashville by other artists over the same period of time.
And this is what he's throwing away.
It can be amazing what one individual can do sometimes.
>the trouble with intelligence, they say, is that it's mostly inborn. The evidence for this seems fairly convincing, especially considering that most of us don't want it to be true, and the evidence thus has to face a pretty stiff headwind.
I think this is very well put.
Could be even more trouble with bright illumination if it turns out to be inborn to different degrees too.
Then if you need both in excess the odds get pretty slim for a dual strike between such outliers.
I should also note that Bernstein was widely known to be a complete asshole.
I think this is partial confirmation of pg's observation that independence of thought is important for creativity: if you are both arrogant and independent, you have all the ingredients to be an asshole.
If arrogance is orthogonal to creativity, as I suspect, but independence of thought is not, then we would see a disproportionate number of assholes among those with new ideas.
> "What am I doing conducting it?" I'm conducting it because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist that I must take seriously anything he conceives in good faith and his conception is interesting enough so that I feel you should hear it, too.
That is a VERY respectful point of view. I admire that so much.
Nice posting, thanks for that. I still cant really understand the hype around Gould and its goldberg interpretations. Yes, they are good. But no, they are far from the best I know. If you ever get the time and a recording, listen to Ragna Schirmer playing Goldberg. Her interpretation blows Gould's out of the water, IMO :-)
Gould is a sort of package deal. I like his Goldbergs but to see his “authentic self” I’d look at something a little kookier of his like his Alla Turca [1]. It will not be what you expect.
This reminded me of Sergiu Celibidache, a revered and criticized conductor who had a different opinion about tempo on major classical works.
He viewed his performances more as "experiences" and certainly pushed the boundaries of the conventional style of playing classical music.
I really like his renditions of Bruckner, and the ending for Symphony N4 probably best describes why [1]. He does not rush, letting the music sync in, undoubtedly different from the "right" version.
Not being afraid of criticism is an essential quality of people who discover new things. Smart people often get dragged into the "correct", "proper" way of thinking, doing science, playing music, drawing, or doing other creative work. This is the best way to learn, but unfortunately, you need to go on an unbeaten path that is often criticized and even ostracized to discover new things. The life of Van Gogh and many others is quite an example of that.
There are people who are challenged , in their writing ability, but come up with new ideas. I can't name one off the top of my head, but I think the capitalistic world of startup companies could yield many examples of inventions.
To me tying the writing skill to that ability seems questionable.
I'd add systematic exploration of new ideas, one good example is Thomas Edison with his "idea factory".
Masayoshi Son used to set aside some time during his week where he would "summon" invention, quite literally, until having a "hit" that actually worked and became his first business
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa2_VBu0d7k&t=470s
I always thought of IQ tests as the artistic equivalent of "how well can you draw a line?" You need a good foundation for artistic expression but many, many people have that and still don't create art worth remembering.
Intelligence (the capacity to process) combined with knowledge can give you that strong intellectual foundation -- but that's all it is.
Alan Kay was wrong; a change of perspective is not worth 80 IQ points. The opposite is true. A decent IQ gives you the chance to have a change of perspective.
No. It's qualitative not quantitative. You measure quantities; you can only measure aspects of qualities (and that's not advised as it's incredibly dangerous).
But as Paul says here, creativity is probably not the best word. I would describe it as "understanding".
Hamming (of Hamming codes) has a famous Bell Labs talk "You and Your Research", describing how to have a large impact. It covers a lot of the same ground, but in more detail:
How about having lots of `brains?' It sounds good. But great work is something else than mere brains.
The people who do great work with less ability but who are committed to it, get more done that those who have great skill and dabble in it.
The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not.
One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it including great scientists, is that usually when they were young they had independent thoughts and had the courage to pursue them.
Hamming is great in general. Some years ago, I picked up a copy of "Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers" for like $2 at a used book store. I had no idea who Hamming was, but it was cheap so I bought it.
After the first chapter I thought, "this guy is pretty sharp let's see what else he's written." That is when I found "You and Your Research".
One of the relatively younger Bell Labs guys who experienced Hamming (in my memory it was either Ken Thompson or Kernighan) described in a public talk the way Hamming would approach young scientists and engineers in the cafeteria and harangue them if he deemed their current area of research non-world shaking, and therefore unworthy of their attention. It was a hilarious story because Hamming was described after a brief pause as a "curmudgeon" but one got the distinct impression Hamming's younger associates had other, more colorful words to describe him.
Being smart and having new ideas isn't that great either. You still need people to believe in the idea and/or resources to pursue it.
I have various ideas and I'm not even that smart. They wont go anywhere because I dont have the time or money to pursue them. Plus, it's hard to come up with something truly new. Even if the item doesn't exist, it's probably patented (ran into that recently).
"So what are the other ingredients in having new ideas?"
The willingness to think about how and why things work or are broken, coupled with sufficient cross-domain knowledge to synthesize new ideas.
I think those with high IQs who don't accomplish much are like 2000-HP drag racers. Those things rip, but they don't necessarily get you anywhere useful.
>Some would attribute the difference between intelligence and having new ideas to "creativity," but this doesn't seem a very useful term. As well as being pretty vague, it's shifted half a frame sideways from what we care about: it's neither separable from intelligence, nor responsible for all the difference between intelligence and having new ideas.
I find this dismissiveness of creativity to be somewhat strange. It's by definition, what he should be looking for. I can't help but think he's got a paradigm in mind for finding 'new ideas' and feels like creativity is too outside the box for it.
This might be a bit of a hot take, but I feel creativity is more about being “untethered” and about synthesis of different ideas, techniques, etc. in novel ways. Unfortunately, one can be as creative as can be and still never come up with something “good”. (Who is to decide what’s good? It’s almost surely in large part a social or cultural thing, much like “genius” is.) I mentioned musicians elsewhere so I will again: A lot of creative musicians are great at noodling around, making neat new melodies, but aren’t coming up with any coherent or consistent ideas that “lead” to anywhere. Creativity just seems like a “raw ingredient” for ideas in this view.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 359 ms ] threadAlso, with my minimal knowledge of programming, I have no idea what's going on with that website's HTML markup. There's also a document type not mentioned error so that might be what's causing this.
I wonder why @pg doesn't change this? I presume it'll only stand to benefit him with a higher SEO ranking.
It's what we in the business call "old"
That's just how we made websites before CSS was a thing. It still works, it's just horribly user unfriendly. Presumably Paul either doesn't care or likes the retro look.
"Once in a while we get a giant that makes huge strides in many fields. What is left for the rest of us is to walk in their wake and clean up and tighten up the theory based on the ideas that they provided".
Graham's point about how being intelligent and having new ideas are two different things is interesting, but I'm not convinced that one is better than the other. I'm not sure a world full of giants is better - you need people who spend time tightening and working on the existing theory as well.
[+] not that there's something wrong with any of them
In terms of my own work, tarsnap is absolutely a work of engineering -- I very deliberately avoided doing anything new, instead using established and well-tested concepts. The exception to this is scrypt, which I designed -- and proved the security of -- because there was no existing password based key derivation function which met my standards for security. On that one occasion I crossed the line from engineering into science.
Science is great, but there's nothing to be ashamed about in doing engineering work. The world needs good engineers who can take basic scientific discoveries and make useful products out of them!
So I need more reliable equipment and then I still need to make them at a lower price than the luxury model I'm copying.
I don't think anyone who has entirely avoided skilled manual labor in their lives quite comprehends how big a difference there is being able to do something well, and being able to do it at scale. It's almost not the same problem domain.
I don't think of the YC structure as discovering anything inherently new but taking an approach that was not being done in the VC industry and trying to scientifically iterate on it.
Bayesian spam filtering seemed a discovery to him, but it wasn't for science: someone else had already published a paper even. However, the results of previous attempts weren't good enough until PG focused on the problem and used a large enough corpus of data.
This is a page of links.
Not really. You just, correctly, described the relationship between science and engineering as a feedback loop. But that also means there is no first and last.
A step in engineering reveals a problem that scientists can focus on. A scientific discovery makes new engineering possible. Progress of engineering enables building tools that make new kinds of observations possible, enabling scientific research that was previously not possible. Rinse, repeat. There's no separating one from another - they run in lockstep.
There is the debate about pursuing everettian quantum mechanics vs traditional quantum mechanics
The thing is, no one outside of science notices all the non-discovery stuff, because it doesn't make it into the textbooks or histories of science. But, it's most of what goes on in science. Also, in engineering, much of the most innovative stuff requires too much prior knowledge to even understand what it is, so not many people find out about it.
I don't consider myself smart. I certainly don't claim to discover new ideas. But through my work of explaining and polishing existing ideas, it seems I found a niche and an audience.
cultivating this ability is fairly well understood in a lot of domains, i think. two examples that are top-of-mind are improv and jazz.
IQ is the artistic equivalent of "how well can you draw a line?" You need a good foundation for artistic expression but many, many people have that and still don't create art worth remembering.
Intelligence (the capacity to process) combined with knowledge can give you that strong intellectual foundation -- but that's all it is. The rest is finding that change of perspective.
Imagine a test called Artistic Quotient which gives you a numeric value for how correctly you draw lines, circles, etc. An average artist might have an AQ of 100 and a very good artist an AQ of 120.
Now, imagine looking at a Van Gogh and saying, that the artistic expression he achieved is worth 80 AQ points, putting him on the level of someone who can free hand a perfect circle! It would sound ridiculous, right? Who cares if you can free hand a perfect circle? What does that give you? What's the value of that?
Instead you would tell an aspiring artist, get to an AQ 120 or so as your foundation and then it's all about making something out of it.
> I grew up thinking that being smart was the thing most to be desired. Perhaps you did too. But I bet it's not what you really want. Imagine you had a choice between being really smart but discovering nothing new, and being less smart but discovering lots of new ideas. Surely you'd take the latter.
Shit no, because the whole rest of the time I'm not coming up with those handful of new ideas, I'm less-smart. Reading is harder. Math is harder. Learning anything new is harder. Following complex conversations is harder. Picking out subtext, allusions, et c., in all media, is harder. Keeping up with, let alone constructively challenging, my smarter-than-me kids is harder. I'd hesitate to take that deal even if the ideas themselves made me rich enough I wouldn't need to work again. I might take it, but I'd have to give it a good think. It'd radically change the entire way I relate to the world.
I'd argue we should strive for a society where the suffering you're exposed to if you're unlucky enough to be in the bottom quartile is bounded, while still allowing for the top to be unbounded in pushing humanity forward. Accepting there's natural variance here is part of that.
We're not all the same, things aren't fair. We shouldn't ignore that or pretend otherwise, but we also shouldn't think that means those dealt a bad genetic hand need to be totally screwed in our society (imo) and it doesn't mean you need to handicap the outliers on the other side in some Bergeron like pursuit of 'fairness' [0].
[0]: http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
Also related on the prettiness bit, this short story is good: https://waldyrious.neocities.org/ted_chiang/liking-what-you-...
Though what you’re touching on is why misaligned AGI is an e-risk.
FWIW, being unbounded in pushing humanity forward is different from being unbounded in pushing your individual wealth up, so those aren't really two sides of the same topic.
Or perhaps you really meant something different from what you wrote, because what you really meant doesn't sound so nice.
I'll second the recommendation of the Ted Chiang short story, it's well worth a read.
Allowing the incentives of unbounded wealth creation at the top is desirable imo.
Practically, we all have to pretend we have free will. Hard work, diligence and deferment of the present for the future should be encouraged.
Morally, we shouldn't judge people who struggle with the above. "There but for the grace of god go I", etc etc. Society should try to be kind to all, resources permitting.
I try to do the same. :)
I love this sentiment, and it's one of a few I try to keep at the ready. I think it's underrated, as simple lanes to guide one's thinking go. I'm all-around much better, including more content, FWIW, when successfully holding that lane in-place.
I mean, yeah, it's basically just one of the key heuristics of practicing Stoicism, plus a hundred other practical ethical frameworks and religions, but I think the particular framing & phrasing is especially apt.
Exceptionalism in this world is indeed luck, especially when you consider that there are almost 7 billion other people on this planet besides us, and limited world resources to share amongst us all...
To think that any one individual reached a point of higher talent or intelligence than everyone else is a total consumerism-driven lie. Movies and TV create celebrities because it drives profit and merchandise, not because they really feel the actors they back are unique and worthy. We find out often the people branded as "exceptional" suffer greatly for it very often because they gain popularity and consequently can't live up to the standards portrayed of them.
The biggest lie we can tell ourselves is that we're exceptional beyond everyone or anyone else, physically, spiritually, mentally, or in any other way. Somehow there's an ever present ideal pushed by Gyms, Churches, Psychologists, News Media, TV, and Movies that exceptionalism can exist, but it's simply not sustainable for any individual, and there's a pile of discarded celebrities down the hill by the river in Hollywood to prove it...
Once we're humble in life, and we realize that opportunity, paying attention, learning things, proper positioning, luck, and circumstance are what grant us the most potential for success -- It's the actions that we take to seize opportunities, THOSE ACTIONS WE TAKE are what set us apart from others who may be hesitant, not ready for, and/or unaware of and to the present opportunity.
When we reach points of success, it's important to remind ourselves of others and their situations and to not look down upon them, and to help others to succeed as much as possible in order to not feel isolated in ego and self praise.
I may sound like the Dali Lama here, but fighting against our own internal ego in a world like this one is a constant battle, so I work hard every day to keep everything in this kind of context in my own life, and I'm not perfect just like everyone else. Whenever I'm driving my car out in public though, everyone's a "frickin' idiot", that will never change... :P
I have spent the last couple of years teaching adults whose backgrounds are filled with shocking adversity to think like programmers, build new careers and improve their lives. I am constantly amazed.
Modern medicine is miraculous. There is no doubt a vast amount of human potential has been saved from oblivion.
This really depends how you frame 'accomplishment', which is very much up to you. I think that successfully raising children who can successfully raise children is in and of itself an accomplishment; forming a family and keeping it intact through your inevitable troubles, working the land and producing enough excess food to earn everything else you need... our culture would be better if we actually viewed such people as 'accomplished' instead of pretending that being a C-suite officer of some SaaS b2b griftware is inherently of more value to anyone, anywhere.
For better or worse, I am such a person: good at generating ideas and product vision, merely competent at technical execution. Put another way, my verbal iq and empathy (if that can be measured) are much stronger than my analytical iq, as confirmed by essentially every standardized test I’ve ever taken. As a result, I function and process information differently than a lot of my engineer peers. Some things are obviously harder for me, which can be painful and embarrassing, but as a rule I’m involved in lots of interesting discussions and design sessions and tend to be a de facto product manager. It’s just different, a trade off in mental styles.
smarts can't be summed up into a single all-encompassing quality that you have or you don't. you can be socially savvy and not be good at math, or great at basketball and be socially awkward. this is a 'not smart' observation that undermines your whole humble-brag.
from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_%28psychometrics%29
Reminds me of genius programmers, who can easily coast through interviews or jobs, but who’ve otherwise got nothing of their own to write or show of it. That’s not bad, it just means their smarts are in service to someone else’s ideas—which is OK!
Not if everyone becomes an Idea Person like pg proposes!
There's more to "do" than just "discover new things". What's the point of discovering new things if we don't use them for anything?
I also didn’t mean to suggest I’d rather “just have ideas”, I meant “I’d rather have ideas and a difficult time executing on them” as opposed to “being smart with no ideas at all.”
"Being smart" benefits me and shapes my very identity by affecting my perceptions and experience of everything, every waking second; having some very good ideas might make me money and make me known as "the guy who came up with X, Y and Z". Having both would be great, obviously! But if PG's presenting some weird "pick one" choice between the two, then claiming it's obvious which one a person would pick, yeah, I'm leaning toward, "no, your assertion and assumptions on which you're couching this entire line of argument are far too broad, it's 'be smart' by a mile and I doubt I'm alone in that choice".
It's Achilles' choice, as I see it (though, again, it's a weird pair of things to ask people to choose between) and as much as I like reading about him, and as impressive as it is that we still know his name and what he did (taking the stories as true, and the character as real, for the sake of lending what he opted for the most possible appeal), thanks but no thanks.
It seems to be going over peoples heads that being personally smarter has the potential to enrich your own life in ways that being rich/being the "idea guy" don't. If you "aren't smart", it doesn't matter how much immense wealth you have, your personal relationships will be affected in some pretty fundamental ways.
I think there is a philosophy at the heart of Y Combinator and their philosophy that "ideas and execution are everything" - you need to start from a creative place and can fill in smart people as tools to enable your vision later. A corollary to this attitude is that they look for passionate younger people and foster an approach which is work very hard during your younger years building on your idea.
I find it relevant to share the Parable of the Fisherman from the 4 day workweek:
An American investment banker was taking a much-needed vacation in a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. The boat had several large, fresh fish in it.
The investment banker was impressed by the quality of the fish and asked the Mexican how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied, “Only a little while.” The banker then asked why he didn’t stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican fisherman replied he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs.
The American then asked, “But what do you do with the rest of your time?”
The Mexican fisherman replied, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos: I have a full and busy life, señor.”
The investment banker scoffed, “I am an Ivy League MBA, and I could help you. You could spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat, and with the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats until eventually, you would have a whole fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to the middleman you could sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You could control the product, processing and distribution.” Then he added, “Of course, you would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City where you would run your growing enterprise.”
The Mexican fisherman asked, “But señor, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15–20 years.”
“But what then?” asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich. You could make millions.”
“Millions, señor? Then what?”
To which the investment banker replied, “Then you would retire. You could move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”
Yes, I think in this forum, sometimes there are hyperbolic takes on working hard, grinding, etc., but I think that's an orthogonal concern about work, startups, and the like.
These negative connotations that you mention come from obvious places. "I'm smart, life is easy, and I'd like to keep it that way." How is this not complacency? It's the epitome of self-satisfaction and a desire to remain static. What on earth grows, evolves, or improves without difficulty, self-imposed or otherwise? This angle works whether it be biological, social, intellectual, artistic, or technical. The very nature of improvement necessarily involves failure, and I contend a desire for comfort—especially that which is stood up from some natural intelligence—is equally a desire to not fail.
Having ideas is one manifestation of an avenue for failure. Most ideas are bad and don't work. Again, "ideas" here transcend business proposals, as we might assume here on HN. For instance, I'm an amateur classical musician, and sometimes when I'm playing a piece, I will try different things not marked in the score. Maybe they'll be good, maybe not. But I'd rather have ideas to try as a means to improve my musicianship (and perhaps even my own musical intelligence!) over simply being smart by reciting a score as written with a bone-dry, scholarly performance. Of course, this means my life is now made a hair more difficult, because the effort I put into performing something may be for nought if my idea turns out to be botched. But that's par for the course when you're doing something new that nobody else has done before. Are scholarly performances a bad thing? Not intrinsically, but I'd explicitly attach negative connotation to your musicianship if that's all you can do.
If I'm honest, I really want to go a step further and link creativity, ideas, etc. to some philosophical notion of being human, but it's certainly an argument beyond my caliber to make.
It's all about your perspective. "I have many ideas, I'm working hard to achieve them, and I'd like to keep it that way."
This could also be construed as static, self-satisfied, and "complacent" in it's own way. Complacency is ultimately a negative and derogatory word - using it to characterize an approach you don't agree with seems disingenuous.
You can lead a simple life and still be taking risks, and be comfortable with failure. There seems to be some hard intrinsic assumptions going on in this conversation that "having ideas and executing on them" is the only avenue in life worth pursuing, because failure, risk, fulfillment can't be defined along any other angles.
As you say: a "simple" lifestyle is completely compatible with originality, productivity, creativity, and personal growth. Denying that would be a crime against yourself.
You can lead a simple lifestyle, and still experiment with your passions. Creating new musical scores, taking risks, and putting yourself out in the world to fail - none of this is fundamentally incompatible with having a simple lifestyle.
I feel like we are both orbiting the same point but viewing things from two different perspectives. It may be as simple as us not fully agreeing on what a "simple lifestyle" actually entails. In the context of the original post, it's a dichotomy between "having ideas" and "being smart". As the grandparent alluded too, "having ideas" becomes a function on how you can impose yourself upon the world to influence it, "being smart" is a function of how you personally experience the world. I think that is really the heart of it, and for some, your personal experience is paramount to your short time on this planet you get to experience being alive - and compromising that just to have more ideas just seems antithetical to the entire enjoyment of life.
> This could also be construed as static, self-satisfied, and "complacent" in it's own way. Complacency is ultimately a negative and derogatory word - using it to characterize an approach you don't agree with seems disingenuous.
This is a baffling. "Something that is always changing could be seen as not changing because it's never not changing." I'm having a hard time seeing that as a good-faith rebuttal.
The rest, I'm mostly on-board with.
I think we are talking in abstract platitudes to such an extent that the forest might get missing for the trees.
In practical terms, a workaholic can fit the mold of "I have many ideas, I'm working hard to achieve them, and I'd like to keep it that way.". A workaholic can also have all the characteristics of a complacent individual - brimming with self-satisfaction, satisfied with their routine, self-smug attitude, no desire to change their ways.
Ironically, a workaholic could justify such an attitude to themselves by calling other people complacent.
And just for reference, the dictionary definition of the word complacent:
complacent: marked by self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies
A bit unrelated but this reminded me of Slavoj Žižek's "Why be happy when you could be interesting?".
https://bigthink.com/articles/why-be-happy-when-you-could-be...
Strongly agreed about "smart" not being just one thing. Somewhere there's someone who's normal at the things I'm good at, and excellent at the things I'm so-so or bad at (there are several of those), and they're probably glad they get to "play" life on easy mode, too. Somewhere there's someone who's as good as both of us at all those things, and they probably own an island and have a private jet and don't think it was particularly challenging to get to that position in life. Maybe—if there's, in fact, exactly one thing they're bad at—they even wonder why other people don't do it.
- Someone is explaining a concept.
- We get it in a few seconds, can come up connections, next steps, implications, etc.
- Other people need to have it explained longer, or miss the main point, or don't see how it connects to other pertinent things.
You can see how that would make life easier, and make you more effective at a variety of real time tasks.
That's the education I experienced at least, maybe someone else had better luck, but once you've to slowdown to the slowest of 30, and you're the fastest, things get pretty slow.
I've since learned this is a super-common experience for gifted kids and one of the things really good gifted programs focus early on mitigating. I gather kids smarter than I was may still experience something similar, but not until they burn out hard and very suddenly, around Sophomore or Junior year of a challenging degree program.
Yes I see how it would make life easier, but is that really a meaningful goal?
And how do we know that the reasons behind that it makes life easier isn't just a bias society has towards its own traits? - E.g life is easier for right handed people aswell.
But then they aren't just thinking slower, they are doing more processing. It isn't just "slow vs fast', it is "more processing vs less processing". Similarly if two people eat hamburgers as fast, but one of them eat twice as many hamburgers and therefore takes twice the time, it doesn't make him a "slow eater" it just means he eats a lot per meal.
Then the question becomes: when is something fully processed - and to which degree is a person inclined to explore the depths of a concept?
What is the limit that decides when depth is no longer valuable?
I would say _that_ should be the definition of intelligence (as in, how 'smart' one is). If it takes someone a day to understand something, and it takes someone else 5 minutes to do the same, it's not just a matter of time spent. It completely shapes _how_ one thinks and how deep you can go in any given subject. There's only so much brainpower we can expend before getting tired and 'restarting' tasks is not easy.
Let's say if you are listening to a discussion with a topic you aren't very familiar with, but your peers are extremely familiar with. You'll see that the way the conversation flows is very different. They will rapid fire, exchange incomplete sentences (because the other person has inferred the rest) and overall have a much more rich and complex conversation. You'll be thinking about the next chess move, they will be thinking 10 steps ahead.
Then you'll say: "that's a bad example, this is about knowledge, not intelligence, they are doing it faster because they know more about the subject". Yes. I'll argue that a meaningful 'intelligence' delta doesn't really exist among healthy humans. It's all about how many patterns you have been exposed to. When we try to measure intelligence, we end up measuring knowledge, every single time.
Take the Mensa tests. Someone who went to good schools and did mentally challenging things will have most likely encountered similar questions before. Not exactly the same questions, but adapting something you have seen before to a new situation is much easier than doing this for the first time.
Being bored out of my mind in grade school and unable to read anything else during that time just led to a lot of day dreaming and not “productive” or directed thinking. What do people bored out their minds at work/life think about?
Host: What's the most complex thing you do in your kitchen?
David Mitchel: thinks for a fraction of a second Worry about death.
LOL, dualism moment. There is no "you" outside of your genetics and the socialization you experienced. There is definitely some luck involved, but also you're the product of a lot more work and planning than you give yourself credit for.
Some people are lucky enough to have parents/family that handle this planning for us at young ages, knowing we will benefit in the future.
Do you think you were “lucky” not to be a 100kg mass of disconnected plasma inside the sun?
This doesn’t make any sense. There are different processes in our universe that produce different things, from plasma to rocks to mosquitos to unsuccessful people to successful people.
These processes are different, and their outputs are not fungible. There’s no luck. There’s no sense in which “you” could have been anything except what you are.
It’s weird to point out the usage here. Sure someone can say “I’m grateful the insane probabilities of every small detail that led to today collapsed on me living a good life”, but it’s easier to just say “I’m so lucky”.
> There’s no sense in which “you” could have been anything except what you are.
Perhaps yea, this feels tangential to the argument there is no free will and the universe is 100% deterministic. Maybe I’m reading too much into your comment, but for my lived experience. It certainly doesn’t feel that I was 100% destined to end up here. Im sure others feel the same way that their circumstances were never predetermined.
Luck = fate
I encounter this “luck” argument that implies dualism, of a self separate from biology and life experience that could have somehow existed in a different body, all the time.
And until I read this comment I felt like I was the only person who found that idea specious.
It sounds like what you really mean is something like a psychological continuity (identity is having psychological continuity) or animalist (identity is being the same human animal) view, which are both consistent with some mental characteristics (like intelligence) being accidental to who we are.
In another way, yes hard work and good planning is vital to success. But you shouldn't pat yourself on the back too hard for it, and you shouldn't think of yourself morally better than anyone else for it.
(This isn't sour grapes from me. I'm successful and worked incredibly hard for years without much money.)
That is probably true about being a little clever, but being really smart is not easy in the general case. Really smart people often share few ideas and interests with others and spend much of their lives lonely and misunderstood.
Most of the data you see on that stop around an IQ of 125, which is about the average IQ of a PhD in the US.
But there's also a lot of research on people with very high iq and the links with depression, anxiety, loneliness etc.
If you want the easiest life possible, I don't think you want to maximize IQ. I think you want to go high enough that you're eligible for the high paying jobs, but not so smart that you feel like the other people in those jobs are idiots.
Someone in a gulag would have low life satisfaction.
The original lottery winners vs accident victim study attempted to measure the long term state: https://www.talenteck.com/academic/Brickman-Coates-Janoff-19...
That study isn't the final word though. Other studies have found that winning the lottery increases life satisfaction, while still others have found that they don't.
Being not smart at all usually also means you are ignorant to what you don't know, that life has its merits, Repetitive jobs don't bore you, and happiness comes from simpler joys in life. I wouldn't mind living that way at all.
Being very smart means none of the stuff you mention is hard. Math comes naturally, Crazy smart people need to put no effort to understand complex topics, while their happiness is typically in esoteric goals or breakthrough research, most people don't understand anything of what they do, so either society is sympathetic to challenges or oblivious to what they do. Financially/Socially once they have a safe academic job, the difference of success/failure is not visible to most regular people, even if they win a field's medal or Noble prize most people hardly understand it.
Being a bit clever is the worst of the lot, you understand enough to know how much you don't really know. Constantly you are making decisions basis what you know is poor understanding. Math, subtext, knowledge is all hard, but doesn't look so hard you will completely give up or blissfully don't know it exists.
Social peer groups keep missing that intelligence can be pretty scaled, we can perceive that someone is smarter than us but not by how much. Everyone one assumes there is just one level above them, equivalent to crazy smart. We are therefore accorded with the praise, money and recommendations and also responsibilities of being perceived crazy smart.
I would happily trade to being exactly perceived as I am or less and forgo all the money and praise if I didn't also be saddled with expectations of coming up with solutions all the time.
You're mixing up all kinds of unrelated things here. As does PG. Whats smartness? Going by Joscha Bach, it's the ability to reach your goals, as opposed to intelligence, your ability to make models. Wether repetitive work bores you isn't a matter of intelligence or smartness, however it does correlate significantly with cognitive functions (Jung).
The then following paragraph seems projective to me, generalizations are just all over the place; thats just not how it works, neither from a neuro- nor from a psychological perspective. It doesn't matter wether you're intellectual middle or high brow, you will always be an idiot because you'll always be residing in a brain, being bound to its constraints of focus and attention. the notion of absolute intelligence that you imply when relating to "being a bit clever is the worst of the lot" seems off to me.
>I would happily trade to being exactly perceived as I am or less and forgo all the money and praise if I didn't also be saddled with expectations of coming up with solutions all the time.
You're contradicting yourself: first you say that the general population doesn't get what being smart implies, and then you say that the general population expects you to deliver on what being smart implies
Sorry if this came off hostile, it wasn't meant so in any way. I just can't relate to these absolute notions and would strongly suggest you to read into psychology and neuroscience
I guess that the brain being a complex system there might not be one or multiple attributes of intelligence; just different behaviours.
I just ordered “Society of Mind” by Minsky. I spent some time this year working on multi agent simulations, then started wondering about the individual as really an apartment building of agents, and then started looking for the prior art, and found that book. This will probably be a dead end like so many before but that’s the current thread I’m on in my understanding of the complex system that is the brain.
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Firstly Caveat Lector: Yes generalization is a natural hazard of this topic and I am guilty as everyone else on this thread, we(and PG) are drawing conclusions basis anecdotal personal experiences and generalizing that obviously may not hold. Perhaps I should have called out explicitly, I assumed that is already implicitly clear in this topic. Everything I say[1] in this kind of topic is almost always a opinion or a best a theory.
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The scale to me[2]: Not being smart[3] means everyone assumes you are their level or below them. A "little bit smart" means when some(many) people assume you know better than them. Crazy smart is people I cannot understand and are way smarter than I am.
I am not saying general population, I am saying it is difficult to comprehend how much smarter[2] anyone else for any person independent of their own personal levels that is by kind of basic limitation of not being as smart as them, if you could understand the gap you would probably as smart as well. It doesn't matter if the first person is super smart already and other person is even smarter. This has an effect that people inherently under or overestimate[4] what the other person is capable of, that is what am alluding to.
I don't have a knowledge on neuroscience to comment on that, however I absolutely do not have any interest in reading anymore psychology or debate with amateurs / professionals on it, my experience[5] interacting with the field : it is filled with pseudo-science (Yes including big names like Jung), every conventional term has always has different professional meaning which layman are expected to know fluently to discuss anything related, evidence/studies for many widely held theories is usually small sampled studies and typically math is at best basic linear regression models conflating correlation and causation .
Psychology and Economics are two fields I consider a lot of waste of time trying to study for non professionals [6], Metaphysics or philosophy at least is fully abstract( like Math?), this mixing of reality with pretty weak science[7] makes a pretty bad combination. I understand that may makes me ignorant in some eyes. Sadly a lot of economic and workplace policy is determined by influential schools of thought in both fields, as everybody is affected by policy everyone has(should have) a opinion .
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P.S. I didn't intend come across as aggressive/harsh or snide, but trying to be specific can come across has not being polite and snide, I am not that a gifted a writer(and English is not my first language) to write the same intent and make it sound better, apologies if it did not come out well.
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[1] For that matter anyone else says including professionals, I can only claim for myself though.
[2] This may not apply to others, I am not a professional to be able to generalize it, I am just sharing my anecdotal version.
[3] Smart here and all other terms I am using is common sense definitions, kind of similar to "I will know it when I see it" obscenity definition by Potter in the Roth test. I don't have any expertise or interest in framing in formal narrow terms [4] In my experience
[5] I can only talk about my personal experience, all of these are generalizations, am sure will have dozens of exceptions or completely opposite view points backed with solid evidence. It is statement of opinion not fact.
[6] You( and the world) may a different opinion on this, I am not stating it as what everyone should also see it as, just how I see it, and I am fine not holding a consensus view
[7] In my view
As much as I sometime would want to be the cat that I owned, I enjoy much more about actually understanding the world around me (physically).
Still bound to flesh and dopamine for happiness, but it's about the best deal we have on Earth right now.
I'm one of eleven kids- I was the 'smart one' and what an absolute drag that title was and is. The title still sticks despite having a brother with multiple award winning plays, another brother being a successful serial entrepreneur, and sisters with published books.
I've watched them succeed while I didn't finish college due to ADHD driving me to distraction. Luckily I have the computer skills requisite to be a successful network architect- but I'm quite aware I could have been a surgeon, a constitutional lawyer, a good to great political commentator or a quant if I had that next bit of mental concentration and memory.
I'm very aware of that gap and it grinds in the gears pretty continually now that I'm older and firmly entrenched in a career- what a bit of ADHD meds at the right time in my life would have meant to allow that potential to be unlocked. To see those I was on the debate team with or in the same book clubs or Latin class being able to step up to the next level and build fairly continually rather than fighting against their mental shortcomings.
But really, in the end, I still have that bit more access to curiosity and the deeper things that come with that curiosity- I was commenting to my daughters in the car the other day that the acceleration they felt in the car pushing them back in their seats was functionally equivalent to gravity. That they are constantly accelerating towards the earth, which is what keeps them connected to the ground. That kind of thinking, though in many ways generic and obvious, is probably not a thing any of my siblings would say and an important part of how I think and approach the world- and not something I would trade to step down into for a bit more oblivious contentment.
Welcome to the party, pal :-)
I still think it's a hell of a lot better than being not smart and saddled with those problems, as guilty as I sometimes feel for not "living up to my potential". I'd probably be homeless or barely making ends meet while bouncing between minimum wage jobs, instead of living really well with shockingly little effort. My deficiencies are very frustrating and trigger lots of negative rumination when I think about what might have been if I'd had just the right person take notice early on and intervene in just the right ways—until I remind myself how much worse it could be, which is a whole damn lot worse.
> I'm one of eleven kids- I was the 'smart one' and what an absolute drag that title was and is. The title still sticks despite having a brother with multiple award winning plays, another brother being a successful serial entrepreneur, and sisters with published books.
Ah, a member of Salinger's Glass family, I see. ;-)
And yes, being singled out for being smart, I know that too.
This is the first time I'm this specific about my background here but I thought you would like to know at least one other person here knows a little bit of what it feels like.
Good luck going forward!
This is more of a reflection of the richness of our world rather than the limitations of the human mind.
In Ancient Greece, it was possible for polymaths to exist, people who could contribute to the many disciplines that existed then. Then, Poincare has the title of "the last universalist" because of his contributions to many areas of mathematics. Now, no such generalist can exist, everything requires specialisation. But that is a good thing. It means that human knowledge is incredibly rich.
Yes you are right in sense that, in the ancient the number of educated people -> scholars -> professionals who could dedicate the life to research was small. It was far easier (easier than today not easy itself) to be able to dabble in many topics. [1] [2]
As you say much of what can be researched by a general philosopher who dabbles in many fields is already done, today to go further in any one field you will need to dedicate your life to it in mathematics or physics or other older fields of research.
That does not mean there are less generalists today. There are plenty of generalists in younger/newer fields like it was in math or physics back in those days .
Generalist scientists like Dr Lovelock was possible in the 60s. Generalist computer scientists was common till not that long ago. Generalist programmers were(are) there when I started in the industry, today to hire proper "full stack" developer is getting harder!
Point is generalists or specialization is always there, just the fields where it can happen keep changing.
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[1] We have to remember many of them were also institutions which they were only the head of, rather than only individual contributors, so attribution could be more to their school than them necessarily individually.
[2] A lot of the early work by ancient scholars was more documentation and formalization of somewhat known items than discovery or invention in the modern sense
Doesn't even compare to being tall and good looking.
> Shit no, because the whole rest of the time I'm not coming up with those handful of new ideas, I'm less-smart.
For lack of a better metric, how many IQ points would you be willing to trade per new idea? It feels likely that environmental factors and luck have a much higher impact on happiness and other outcomes for individuals within whatever defines the "high intelligence" or "slightly gifted range". I'd probably make the "less smart" trade for 1-2 novel/high quality ideas since you're basically guaranteeing one or two high rolls. I doubt a 1-2% bump in intelligence would outweigh the benefits.
I'm making lots of assumptions here around being able to successfully act on new ideas and that intelligence has marginal gains once you're locked into above-average-but-not-top quantiles.
For one that'd make me at least somewhat rich? Maybe one or two. But I have a feeling I'd end up regretting even that, worrying "would I have gotten this idea I'm not getting, if I hadn't made that trade?", or if a loss of interest in something is because I'm now slightly dumber, or whatever, every day, for the entire rest of my life. Aging-related brain changes are already terrifying, without helping them along.
The thing is - I don't agree with Paul Graham at all. Sure, there might be a genetic component to being 'smart', but I doubt it means that people are just born with a better "CPU". Maybe they are 0.1% better overall.
Rather, I don't think we can properly control variables(ethically). If your parents are 'smart', they will do 'smart' things. They will give you the attention you need. They will give you a balanced diet. They will buy you books. They will teach you difficult concepts. You'll see them studying or otherwise getting invested in their careers and, as kids, we mimic what you see. Over time, you develop 'smart' habits, and you exercise your brain.
You'll also accumulate all sorts of 'patterns', that let you quickly see those things that aren't 'obvious' to everyone else. They are obvious to you, probably because you have seen something similar before, even in a different context. The more 'patterns' you have, the quicker you can spot them, and you can tie things together faster if you are not focusing on learning entirely new things at the same time.
Even if you had nothing of the sort growing up, by just trying to engage your brain while doing most of your tasks, you are far ahead of most people. What people tend to do is, whenever they find something that worked, even if only once, they will stick with that solution, for every situation. They don't normally ask themselves if the resolution is still appropriate for the situation in hand. Keep this as a background process, and you do have a superpower.
One of many examples: https://resources.corwin.com/sites/default/files/handout_18....
I am frequently caught in the trap where I am enjoying the puzzlebox complexity of a problem, and building an equally complicated solution. I then attempt to explain my complicated solution to someone else, and I fail on delivery.
I also have a coworker whos mantra is "if its hard to think about, I don't do it". We actually worked on similarly aligned solutions to the same problem. His version met with significantly more success than mine did, and I credit the fact that he ensured that it was all easy to think about (and thus talk about). I don't begrudge him at all though, he's one of my favs!
IMO if you are unwilling or unable to think about overly complicated ideas, it might force you to eliminate them and develop new ones that are easier to talk about and think about.
Thanks for sharing BTW.
To make it more concrete here's an example of my own.
I was playing the game Zelda Breath of The Wild and was in awe of the beautiful landscapes you could visit. However, I had already finished the game and did not want to have to fire up my Wii U every time just to see them.
This is when a novel idea emerged. What if I made a Google Map's Street Viewer for Zelda Breath of The Wild.
You can see here that I subsconsiously made a link between two very distant things a video game and Google Map's street view.
You can try it out for yourself here : https://nassimsoftware.github.io/zeldabotwstreetview (Do not use it if you're using cellular data because the panoramas are quite heavy)
The idea was well recieved and gathered the attention of many gaming journals just google zelda street view to see for yourself. Before making this project I also searched if someone had done the same but no one did. I therefore thought that I had something pretty novel so worth doing.
While my idea isn't groundbreaking in terms of science it demonstrate well the characteristics of a novel idea. (The intersection of different domains that seems to most distant.)
It seems that to be able to do those links you must have breadth of knowledge instead of depth however it's still a mystery how some people are able to do this more frequently then others.
Also here's a free idea : Make the same thing I did with Zelda but for other open world games.
I suspect there are a lot of us here in particular who have 'unpopular opinions' in this domain that are more difficult to just try out, because others have invested in the idea of different domains being special and thus not conducive to fusion as in your example, or borrowing ideas whole cloth.
I have, for instance, some opinions on how skills from personal finance cross a whole host of problem domains. Some are obvious, but performance analysis is not typically one of them and people look at me like I have horns on my head when I bring it up. They have few complaints about the outcomes of me applying those theories, as long as they don't have to hear about them. So I mostly just don't ask permission, and save theory crafting for talk over beers when people start pulling out their crackpot ideas to keep the conversation flowing.
It's really no wonder at all to me why so many of milestones in The Enlightenment started over coffee. Caffeine is not as good a social lubricant but it'll do in a pinch and has fewer negative side effects on cognition and - importantly - memory. Last night's epiphany is mostly inaccessible to the drunk.
The one I worked out was "Agile is just budgeting, but for time instead of money".
Eugene P. Wigner:
> I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed me. [...] But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jansci's brilliance, he never produced anything as original.
There is no doubt that Einstein was brilliant. I believe he was as successful as he was because he was also exceptionally self disciplined.
I wonder how Graham would respond to that given he's so intertwined in Silicon Valley.
He's not Einstein, but he was way ahead of his time in a particular area and it's fair to say he's been hugely influential in the baseball community for nearly 40 years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_James
Well, that's one way to put it. These were the rules he wrote out for his wife. [0]
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2133922/Was-Einst...I think asking to be left alone in his private spaces, to not have drama, to do really basic chores like cooking and cleaning (in the context of the era) if you're not working or bringing in income seems really reasonable.
He's a bigger man than me - I'd never live with an essentially ex wife.
He didn't like being bored. Working on his research while becalmed likely kept him from tearing his hair out while being productive.
Win/win.
It may seem a hair-splitting distinction to point out that inspiration and its consequences are not identical, but it isn't. There's a big gap between them. Anyone who's spent time around crackpot scientific theorists knows how big. There are a lot of genuinely original people who don't achieve very much.
And so on...
Of course Einstein had great ideas. But he also spent many years working out the consequences of, eg, his first ideas about the fixed speed of light in vacuum and its consequences in physics, initially during downtime at his patent office job. Nearly all of the impact of the theory is in that working-out.
Work ethic is super important. The ability to grind on your ideas. And I think having some extrovert nature really helps in getting your ideas out there.
I was Paul's definition of smart, w/o good ideas. I loved to learn things. But I didn't really have the work ethic to build new things. I feel like I've done fine in life, but had you asked my middle school and high school teachers -- and even university... I've probably underperformed.
In contrast my son is bright, but not the academic star I was. But he has crazy work ethic in ideas he cares about. I've really nurtured his work ethic and played down the "smart" academic angle. If wants to finish a personal project and not study for that French quiz -- I'm fine with that. He gets an A-/B+ for the year, rather than an A. So what. The passion he pours into his ideas though is great and I think will serve him better over the course of his life.
As a younger kid he loved Legos. I think that contributed. He'd just do progressively larger and larger sets. As a kid I never could do a large Lego set. I had them, but they all remained unfinished.
I appreciate that he is qualifying or preconditioning the value of the idea guy as having intelligence along with other "mundane ingredients" like grit, sleep, stress, network, and passion. I very much agree with the approach and only wish for a framework to score these ingredients in the context of an entrepreneur's problem domain. I guess that's what VC's are supposed to do.
Now the world has gotten a lot more sophisticated and I don’t know what to sophisticate myself on. They all seem a bit boring or stupid on one hand, or another monumental climb where I’ll have to start over from the beginning.
Spying on what people do on web pages, down to their mouse movements, sometimes. Tracking all that across sites. Then using that to target ads at them.
AirBnB and Uber... just, all of what they do.
Crypto exchanges. It's crazy to me that these managed to go long enough to gain a toehold before facing any sort of banking or securities regulations.
Addictive mechanics on social media and in pay-to-play games.
Mint and other go-betweens with banks that just store and re-use credentials, including answers to "security questions". Seems like a really dangerous idea, probably involves encouraging a bunch of people to violate terms of service on a massive scale, and if you're presenting connections to banks that you know have those terms, seems like you'd be hella liable for that. And my god, if there's a breach that involves your systems and you've been hoovering up people's banking credentials? I'd fully expect to be facing extremely scary and probably-going-to-go-poorly-for-my-company lawsuits from a dozen enormous banks. How do these companies get insured in any way whatsoever? I don't get it. Inexplicably (to me), instead of crashing and burning and being laughed out of the room at any and all fundraising meetings, these made a few people very, very rich instead.
And so on.
Plenty of things not in those categories, of course. Stripe was a great idea, just a hard problem—I'd have had no clue how to seek terms from CC companies to get such a thing off the ground, to pick what's just step #1 of even starting to try at that.
Some are great ideas that I might have come up with, but I haven't a clue about how to even begin to fundraise (I'm not past barely-an-acquaintance territory with any rich people, for even small values of "rich", so that doesn't help), and they're the kind of thing that pretty much requires a pile of cash to even make an attempt—actually, Stripe again seems like a good example. I couldn't feasibly have done even an MVP of that solo, or even with a very small team "in a garage"; the fundraising is another necessary hurdle to even credibly trying.
Some stuff's smart people doing smart things that are eventually very lucrative. Those I (theoretically) could have done, I guess. Redis, for instance. Still, the really big money seems to be in convincing people to finance things that feel like they ought to be illegal (and might actually be), and how that all works continues to elude me. How do you spot a law you can break long enough to get traction against the "dinosaurs" who are bound to follow the law, versus one that will land you on the losing end of a ruinous lawsuit and make your name mud, or in prison? Do people actually know how to spot those, or are the successful ones just lucky? Is that in fact almost all laws once you have some rich people backing you? I haven't a clue.
(Nb this is not intended as sour-grapes complaining, but rather an exploration of the ways in which "having an idea" is a really, really long way from even making a meaningful attempt at implementation for a variety of prominent tech products, including such hurdles as not understanding when doing illegal or horribly unethical stuff is actually a very good idea, if you're just trying to launch a product and get rich—these are deficiencies in my understanding of the world, clearly)
It's not enjoyable to think about wasted opportunities in your past, so don't let your future self suffer the same fate.
Do at least part of one of the ideas you find boring or stupid to get back into the mindset of being someone who is able to create. Armed with that, you'll spend less time thinking about whether you can do it and more time about what you want to do.
Obviously for people who are depressed or suffer from ADHD you often can't "just do it" but in general I think it's worth trying to shift the way we think about the things we can accomplish.
There is no shortcut.
Just like working out improves your range of movement and manipulating your own body and weights in space, writing does the same with ideas and expression.
However, what set Gould apart from his colleagues was his innovative and iconoclastic interpretations of well-known works with “standard” prescriptions. He had fundamentally different, but wholly consistent, ideas about musical interpretation, recording technology, presentation of music to audiences, and so on. He’s remembered as a pianist not because his fingers were quick and sensitive, but instead because he pushed boundaries in completely original ways.
Leonard Bernstein—a noted conductor and pianist—quips about this when he conducted the Brahms Concerto in D minor, with Gould at the piano [1]. I recommend listening but I’ll copy his words (from [2]) for posterity.
> Don't be frightened. Mr. Gould is here. He will appear in a moment. I'm not, um, as you know, in the habit of speaking on any concert except the Thursday night previews, but a curious situation has arisen, which merits, I think, a word or two. You are about to hear a rather, shall we say, unorthodox performance of the Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance distinctly different from any I've ever heard, or even dreamt of for that matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures from Brahms' dynamic indications. I cannot say I am in total agreement with Mr. Gould's conception and this raises the interesting question: "What am I doing conducting it?" I'm conducting it because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist that I must take seriously anything he conceives in good faith and his conception is interesting enough so that I feel you should hear it, too.
> But the age old question still remains: "In a concerto, who is the boss; the soloist or the conductor?" The answer is, of course, sometimes one, sometimes the other, depending on the people involved. But almost always, the two manage to get together by persuasion or charm or even threats to achieve a unified performance. I have only once before in my life had to submit to a soloist's wholly new and incompatible concept and that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould. (The audience roared with laughter at this.) But, but this time the discrepancies between our views are so great that I feel I must make this small disclaimer. Then why, to repeat the question, am I conducting it? Why do I not make a minor scandal — get a substitute soloist, or let an assistant conduct? Because I am fascinated, glad to have the chance for a new look at this much-played work; Because, what's more, there are moments in Mr. Gould's performance that emerge with astonishing freshness and conviction. Thirdly, because we can all learn something from this extraordinary artist, who is a thinking performer, and finally because there is in music what Dimitri Mitropoulos used to call "the sportive element", that factor of curiosity, adventure, experiment, and I can assure you that it has been an adventure this week collaborating with Mr. Gould on this Brahms concerto and it's in this spirit of adventure that we now present it to you.
Because some took this as an attack on Gould, Bernstein followed up with the remark:
> Any discovery of Glenn's was welcomed by me because I worshiped the way he played: I admired his intellectual approach, his "guts" approach, his complete dedication to whatever he was doing.
Anyway, it’s an interesting parallel in the arts world. Jacob Collier is a musician of today that has similar qualities of “being smart with good ideas”.
[1] https://youtu.be/SvWPM783TOE
[...
Compare his stuff to the work of Kamasi Washington, Mary Halvorson's groups, or Shabaka Hutchings, or Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, and you hear an enormous difference in the sheer craft of songwriting, emotional dynamics, and storytelling through their instruments.
He's clearly a virtuoso at a kind of playing the instrument, and he's extremely good at explaining music theory and concepts, which is a rather archaic and unique language all its own, but I don't think he's quite there yet for songwriting.
archaic or arcane?
You can also use arcane.
For those unaccustomed to hearing pure intervals it can sound like a high-gloss "sheen" that gives an unreal quality to the music. In a way it becomes "too perfect" and unnatural to those who are used to hearing the equal temperament that most western music is recorded in. I hear it a lot in some acapella vocal groups and I often find the sound off-putting and it somehow feels a little corny to me.
https://twitter.com/trndytrndy/status/1395944850911080459
Still, his virtuosity allows him to do things that very few people are capable of conceiving, attempting, and doing. We're lucky to have him in the mix.
Billy Corgan of The Smashing Pumpkins is an example of someone who has both the talent and the taste for making great music in my opinion. There's a really old video of him shredding like a madman [1] completely off the dome which shows he has very good command of his guitar. He's not in the same sphere as Jacob Collier mind you but here me out. If you compare that video with the music he wrote in the pumpkins, it is very restrained. He knew when to exercise the full range of his skills and when to dial it back. Having learned a lot of pumpkins songs on guitar, it is clear to me that he favoured what sounded better and was more impactful over what appeared skillful.
There's another video of him in 2012 [2] where he talks about influential music coming from the internet and people in their desktop studios, not from guys with guitars trying to make it big. Beyond his talent he had a very keen eye for how music was evolving. Having talent is one thing, being able to contextualise your work, and others work accurately in the arena of the world is a quality that very few people possess and in my opinion is required for producing truly influential and impactful work.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hYPo2py77A
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C7NCpfUC90
That's a great clip. You might enjoy some of what people have been doing with their desktop studios and guitars in the last few years. Two that immediately come to mind are Tim Henson [1] (already pretty well-known in the guitar world as part of Polyphia) and Manuel Gardner-Fernandes [2].
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkHD4OVjS4E
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLCtH0KAY8Q
Probably quite out there (doom/drone/stoner) for most people but his music has always struck me as incredibly from the heart and not some noodling to impress others.
https://juddmadden.bandcamp.com/album/float
https://juddmadden.bandcamp.com/album/artesian
Collier is merely smart. He's very, very smart indeed. But in the domain of music, expressive originality is far more important.
And it can be created by people who aren't technically music-smart at all. It's a different skill to the kind of grammatical/technical smartness that someone like Collier has.
That's not a distraction at all. It's exactly the point - creativity is orthogonal to smartness, and it's poorly understood and even more poorly supported.
One of the interesting thing that happened in English pop (until it stopped being possible a decade or two ago) was that successful pop artists were more likely to have been through art school than music school.
The exemplar is Eno - who studied with Roy Ascott, who is probably one of the most unknown influential pioneers of computer art.
Eno has taste and a willingness to experiment across multiple domains. The rest almost falls into place.
IMO the combination of openness to experimentation and instinctual feel for rightness/wrongness to guide that experimentation is the foundation of useful creativity.
Art school - more than anywhere else - gives people permission to experiment. Taste can be partially taught, but you need an instinctive feel for it, and that's probably innate.
Someone like Collier doesn't score highly on either experimentation or taste. He scores very highly on musical competence and technical skill. But both are a kind of conformity - which is the opposite of real originality.
I assume where PG is going with this is the suggestion that some people can originate incredibly successful business ideas, and most people can't.
Which might be nice if it were true. But in a startup sense the opposite is more likely. You need a baseline of conformity to be in business at all. Truly creative types don't find the business world open enough to be interesting.
Success in business relies on having ideas that are original enough to be different, but not so original they're incomprehensibly challenging and difficult.
Market fit mostly happens near the middle of the bell curve - for whatever metric you're measuring - and that's not where the most creative people like to live.
This statement strongly resonated with me, thank you for this.
I'm friends with a clique of techno producers and they grind their music 24/7, they have an endless supply of ideas that they've produced,they're also heavily immersed in the music etc. They will publish some tracks twice a year, to the outside it obviously seems like they've had a moment of genius, but it's probably just 5% of their actual production. Another example is the documentary on marina abramovich, where she has a consultant telling her what art to actually publish. The artist Jonathan Meese has outlined a similar stance on a Tracks documentary where he just rambles for 5min to the effect of "create create create".
Obviously doing something a lot develops skill, but choosing what to publish is probably more a question of taste.
Jazz soloing is probably a good counterexample, but a lot of jazz solos aren't that remarkable and these people are at the top of their game so their worst is likely most peoples best?
One youtube rabbit hole later, and I have to strongly disagree. These threads are littered with Phrases like 'Doesn't score highly on either experimentation or taste', 'lack of emotion'. 'Seems overly clever but not nice sounding'.
Sorry, I'm not sure whether this is people hating on someone outside of your camp or what, but I think they're missing the point.
The way Collier brings ideas from Jazz, Classical, Synth culture, EDM, R&B into a modern a cappella multimedia collage is experimental, creative and I find quite emotional.
Granted it's not the emotion in traditional, analogue music forms coming from the voicing of the instrument - it's from the arrangement, the sampling, even the ebb and flow of precision.
And where most of the modern Glee-style a cappella are sanitized, overly produced and pretty pap (I'm not a fan of the genre, but my kids are), he's really pushing the boundaries of that genre. In ways that, from the handful of examples I've listened to, sound quite successful.
In particular I really enjoyed his arrangements of Stevie Wonder.
The music gate-keepers have always levelled these same criticisms electronic compositions, especially if the the composers are young and popular.
I love electronic composers; I almost exclusively listen to avant-garde/experimental electronic compositions, personally. Most of the artists are quite young. I agree Collier is definitely very experimental.
I do not think he's very artistic or emotional and agree with the above comments that he's in the "intelligent/skilled but not creative" camp. I think he has a lot of potential, but his work just doesn't seem very musical to me, and I have absolutely no biases against experimental, "weird", electronic, or new stuff.
I'm not saying you have to like his music. I am saying that anyone maintaining that his compositions are not artistic, creative or musical... well, perhaps someone's definitions of these words are being biased by their preferences.
I mean, to take one example, he's rearranged a classic R&B song in 9-part jazz harmonies rarely heard in the pop genre. He layers in samples from household sounds. He put all this together in an entertaining media format without losing the sensibilities of his genre nor letting it collapse into noise.
You could argue that this is not entirely novel, and this kind of composition has been happening in less popular genres for decades. I can see arguments against his taste. I do agree with an earlier comment that this might be too sophisticated for his pop audience.
But not creative? Not musical? Not artistic? You don't have to like his music to recognise that these words absolutely apply.
When I was a teen, I hated certain genres of music - for example 'new country' and the popular dance music styles of the late 80s. My disdain for whole categories of music was part of my identity.
This made it near impossible for teen me to recognise (or more to the truth, admit) that any of the artists labelled as part of those genres had any talent at all.
This lead to all sorts of silliness, like asserting that MJ had no talent, or insisting that Neil Young doesn't play country. Or just plain missing out on some of the brilliant moments of Willie Nelson's career.
You're right that art is subjective, and I'm quibbling over words that have no quantitative meaning. But seriously, credit where credit is due.
All of them are virtuosic and are branching away from classical ideas of jazz, and Collier might even be the smartest of the group, but he can't write a song to save a life.
Snarky Puppey and Tigram have on the other hand, found a fresh niche for themselves that is similarly creative, but has the humility of adding the necessary sugar and milk to make their supremely creative and bitter music drink palatable to a listening audience.
Or because a lot of this (even classical music) is pop culture, so he was quirky enough to establish a brand name, whereas others equally competent or even better didn't come with an assosicated story to sell them...
I also love his slightly hyperbolic hot take on why Mozart isn’t that good [2]. It’s hilarious, to me at least, hearing him roast Mozart then proceed to play his music beautifully.
[1] https://youtu.be/38VMAfSmL8Q
[2] https://youtu.be/1pR74rorRxs
I've bought all of his albums. The man is a genius in his trumpet arrangements.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6U1JB7z-I8
A personal favorite of mine is The Trolley Song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_pCM8jzvtw
which is the same song as the one Judy Garland made famous, but Alpert's version is heavenly.
Before the intertoobs and CDs, I searched everywhere for that album (Herb Alpert's Ninth) for years, and finally found a brand new mint one in the cutout bin with the slot sliced in it. For $1. I couldn't believe my prize!
P.S. The yootoob version has poor sound quality. To hear how good Herb is with the trumpet, ya gotta get the CD.
This cut-out practice is new to me, but a related one in the publishing/bookselling industry rang true. I learn a lot just by reading and reflecting on your comments. Thanks for posting this personal story.
I think we've lost a lot with the transition to digital, these kinds of bargain bins included, which is part of the reason I too love all kinds of secondhand stores and swap meets, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripped_book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remaindered_book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-out_(recording_industry)
A couple months back, the pawn shop had acquired what looked like an old DJ's 12 inch single collection from the 70s and 80s. $.50 per disk. I grabbed them all.
What the market finds valuable is partially a signaling problem, as it is only loosely connected to any individual’s taste, and more connected to quick sales for record companies. The market as a whole can’t discover prices for products that individuals aren’t aware of and seeking out in the small window of first-sale. It’s not too different from the traditional VC investment strategy, now that I consider it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)
https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip-hop/7709057/n...
And this is what he's throwing away.
It can be amazing what one individual can do sometimes.
>the trouble with intelligence, they say, is that it's mostly inborn. The evidence for this seems fairly convincing, especially considering that most of us don't want it to be true, and the evidence thus has to face a pretty stiff headwind.
I think this is very well put.
Could be even more trouble with bright illumination if it turns out to be inborn to different degrees too.
Then if you need both in excess the odds get pretty slim for a dual strike between such outliers.
I think this is partial confirmation of pg's observation that independence of thought is important for creativity: if you are both arrogant and independent, you have all the ingredients to be an asshole.
If arrogance is orthogonal to creativity, as I suspect, but independence of thought is not, then we would see a disproportionate number of assholes among those with new ideas.
That is a VERY respectful point of view. I admire that so much.
[1] https://youtu.be/eTZ33EVK3Ug
He viewed his performances more as "experiences" and certainly pushed the boundaries of the conventional style of playing classical music. I really like his renditions of Bruckner, and the ending for Symphony N4 probably best describes why [1]. He does not rush, letting the music sync in, undoubtedly different from the "right" version.
Not being afraid of criticism is an essential quality of people who discover new things. Smart people often get dragged into the "correct", "proper" way of thinking, doing science, playing music, drawing, or doing other creative work. This is the best way to learn, but unfortunately, you need to go on an unbeaten path that is often criticized and even ostracized to discover new things. The life of Van Gogh and many others is quite an example of that.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YVdTI21rZQ
To me tying the writing skill to that ability seems questionable.
Masayoshi Son used to set aside some time during his week where he would "summon" invention, quite literally, until having a "hit" that actually worked and became his first business https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa2_VBu0d7k&t=470s
Intelligence (the capacity to process) combined with knowledge can give you that strong intellectual foundation -- but that's all it is.
Alan Kay was wrong; a change of perspective is not worth 80 IQ points. The opposite is true. A decent IQ gives you the chance to have a change of perspective.
But as Paul says here, creativity is probably not the best word. I would describe it as "understanding".
https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
A few points from it:
You've got to work on important problems.
How about having lots of `brains?' It sounds good. But great work is something else than mere brains.
The people who do great work with less ability but who are committed to it, get more done that those who have great skill and dabble in it.
The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. So yes, it is luck. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not.
One of the characteristics you see, and many people have it including great scientists, is that usually when they were young they had independent thoughts and had the courage to pursue them.
After the first chapter I thought, "this guy is pretty sharp let's see what else he's written." That is when I found "You and Your Research".
* Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics.
* The Art of Probability.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html
You and Your Research (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28322153 - Aug 2021 (35 comments)
with links to the rest here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28323486
I have various ideas and I'm not even that smart. They wont go anywhere because I dont have the time or money to pursue them. Plus, it's hard to come up with something truly new. Even if the item doesn't exist, it's probably patented (ran into that recently).
"So what are the other ingredients in having new ideas?"
The willingness to think about how and why things work or are broken, coupled with sufficient cross-domain knowledge to synthesize new ideas.
I think those with high IQs who don't accomplish much are like 2000-HP drag racers. Those things rip, but they don't necessarily get you anywhere useful.
It's much better to be a Jeep.
I find this dismissiveness of creativity to be somewhat strange. It's by definition, what he should be looking for. I can't help but think he's got a paradigm in mind for finding 'new ideas' and feels like creativity is too outside the box for it.