for a long time I would say ive had a hard time answering that question, but at the moment I think I would pick Casey Neistat. His motivation and creativity is an inspiration for me. https://www.youtube.com/user/caseyneistat
I knew him at Caltech. He tutored me in Quantum Mechanics.
A few things I learned from him: you cannot bullshit a good scientist. If you can't explain it to an undergraduate you don't understand it yourself. Experiment rules - if experiment says it's not true then it isn't, despite what theory might say - and he was a theoretician!
Everyone who knew anything about him revered him as a god because he made it plainly apparent he regarded it as more important to teach Physics than to understand it himself. He must have come to that conclusion late in life, as I recently learned that as a young Cornell professor he was quite irresponsible towards his students.
Can't recommend these notebooks enough. They cover an incredible variety of statistics, physics, and other topics. They're lucidly written and well cited. He's definitely an inspiration to keep reading and understanding.
I dont have one. There are some people who have some good traits and habits that I would like to acquire, but I dont get the role model thing. To me it is about process rather than person. "This guy has a great way of doing X" rather than "I want to be like this specific person".
I have a huge admiration for people who, with a strong character, pushed the boundaries of their time and invented revolutionary things while no one believed in them and even when some tried to hamper their research. This may apply to most inventors and explorers but for me, personally, Galileo Galilei and Alan Turing stand out.
If a "role-model" means what I understand it is (Person who had a role in society that you dream of having), then yes, they are my role-models.
I greatly admire Donald Knuth. He's humble, dedicated to his work in a healthy way, and has fascinating outside interests in organ music, for example.
Most of all, I see in him the playful attitude about computer science that Alan Perlis referred to: "I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing."
His list of accomplishments is ridiculous-- Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla and those yet-to-be-realized like hyperloop. He's not a role model he's someone to be downright jealous about! (Sarcasm!)
Seriously though to be involved in that many successful ventures it has to be more than just luck.
I actually like to think that he is an alien lost on earth trying to build a spaceship to go back home. With Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX, he is just bootstrapping what he needs to build to go back home.
John Carmack. He's consistently at the edge of technology - whether it is game engines or avionics. His insights are excellent and can often be used in other areas of engineering / software development.
He's a great speaker too, he'll discuss topics I am not at all familiar with but the context he wraps them in makes them easy to intuit. He also has a very intense passion for his work and his ability to dissect problems into their primitives leads him to really elegant solutions (0x5f3759df! [1]).
If it weren't for John I would have absolutely no interest in VR... but with his involvement it's hard to not be at least a little curious.
But the Wikipedia page does not really attribute the derivation of that constant to Carmack. Rather "...he demurred and suggested it was written by Terje Mathisen".
Carmack is one of my role models as well, but 0x5f3759df while neat did not originate from him, as it states multiple times in the Wikipedia article you cite.
I didn't say he developed it. He used it 3-4 years before it became widely known and was responsible at least in part for its proliferation.
Finding your way to an elegant solution does not mean you created that solution. In 1999, Google had 8 employees. Not every algorithm was available at his fingertips. He had to care, seek, and find that solution to use it back then, which might not seem like much now. That's a manifestation of his caring about his craft; not inventing an algorithm.
I'd say my father is my role model, as hokey as that sounds. He's an intelligent man and has spent most of his life driving a truck. But, that's what he wants to be doing. I'd like to ensure that I spend my life doing what I want to do.
Fabrice Bellard [1,2] should be on this list. Author of QEMU and FFMPEG among other open source projects that have been useful to a lot of people. Also, author of jslinux [3].
I've come to realize Jean Luc Picard is. Not exclusively, but when coming to my approach managing people, he simply oozes through. Patrick Stewart more broadly, a greatly insightful person.
But again, not exclusively; I am not a huge Star Trek fan, yet am a huge fan, nor am I into the idea of replicating someone else, as you are you and not them. Perhaps it was formative years, watching the show as a young teenager, that left a seed there.
I find case studies and examples of situations are key. If you've not heard of it, and are managing people, I also hugely recommend a resource in our century: http://manager-tools.com a lot of good applicable examples to a wide range of potential people problems and opportunities there.
My dad. He came from a small background with lots of brothers and sisters. He got to university and earned a degree in EE (only engineer in his town at that point). Supported his family and did whatever he could for his family. He never showed me any weakness even when his own father died. He has led a very disciplined and amazing life. I just wish I could do/achieve 1/10th of his life.
There are several people who are very inspiring and important to me.
- Paul Graham and Eliezer Yudkowsky
The 2 most clever people that I am aware of. I admire the way they write and think, and want to learn to do that as well.
- Owen Cook(Tyler) from RSD
This is the perfect model of a man that I wish to be. Driven, charismatic, intelligent, just generally awesome. This is how I want to behave and be like.
- Louis CK, Dan Harmon(creator of the shows Community and Rick and Morty) and Randall Munroe(the author of xkcd)
I have enormous respect and love for comedy, just something about the way comedians think is incredibly attractive to me. It takes a lot to be as brilliantly creative as these guys, and I want to learn to think like that.
Others:
Richard Feynman, Kevin Mitnick, Frank Abagnale, Richard Branson - based on their autobiographies, these guys lived cool lives.
Elon Musk - I don't know what kind of person he is, but based on what he does - he is as cool as it gets.
Fictional:
- Walter White, Gregory House
Brilliant person willing to do whatever it takes to achieve his goal, not giving up in desperate situations, acting rationally despite the emotions.
- Barney Stinson
Haha this dude is awesome.
- Hank Rearden
Basically a definition of a badass person, created to be the role model for people like me.
- Harry from HPMOR
Not much to explain here, he is also basically a definition of a cool person.
Others: Harvey Specter, Frank Underwood, Ari Gold, Hank Moody. And Tony Stark I guess =)
You might be interested in su3su2u1's teardowns of HPMOR [1] or at least his review of the finished story [2]. The main takeaway is that MOR!Harry does not, in fact, employ any "Methods of Rationality", usually leaping to "obvious" conclusions without any experimental evidence whatsoever. The author then opts to make the fictional universe fit these conclusions instead of the other way around. Not only that, but most of the science/rationality references are either wrong, incomplete or not applicable to the situation. So despite having entertained me most of the time, HPMOR is not what I would call a praiseworthy piece of writing.
Leonardo da Vinci - An independent self learner who was accomplished in art and engineering. I'd say Renaissance Men in general are pretty high up on my list of admiration. I like the idea of not focusing on one discipline, learning as many ideas and specialties as I can, then combining them in new ways. To always be curious.
61 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadI knew him at Caltech. He tutored me in Quantum Mechanics.
A few things I learned from him: you cannot bullshit a good scientist. If you can't explain it to an undergraduate you don't understand it yourself. Experiment rules - if experiment says it's not true then it isn't, despite what theory might say - and he was a theoretician!
Everyone who knew anything about him revered him as a god because he made it plainly apparent he regarded it as more important to teach Physics than to understand it himself. He must have come to that conclusion late in life, as I recently learned that as a young Cornell professor he was quite irresponsible towards his students.
Honorable mentions:
- Nathan Stott (worked with me early in my career and taught me to love Javascript)
- Michael Lopp (aka Rands in Repose)
- Gary Bernhardt
- José Valim
- Joe Armstrong
- Yehuda Katz
- My dad (who taught me patience and the value of hard work)
- Harvey Specter
- Thomas Ptacek (whose consulting wisdom I cannot appreciate enough)
If a "role-model" means what I understand it is (Person who had a role in society that you dream of having), then yes, they are my role-models.
Most of all, I see in him the playful attitude about computer science that Alan Perlis referred to: "I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing."
His list of accomplishments is ridiculous-- Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla and those yet-to-be-realized like hyperloop. He's not a role model he's someone to be downright jealous about! (Sarcasm!)
Seriously though to be involved in that many successful ventures it has to be more than just luck.
W H A T .
If it weren't for John I would have absolutely no interest in VR... but with his involvement it's hard to not be at least a little curious.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
> John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, is commonly associated with the code, though he actually did not write it.
Finding your way to an elegant solution does not mean you created that solution. In 1999, Google had 8 employees. Not every algorithm was available at his fingertips. He had to care, seek, and find that solution to use it back then, which might not seem like much now. That's a manifestation of his caring about his craft; not inventing an algorithm.
From a business perspective - Elon Musk
From a humanities perspective - Gandhi
[1] http://bellard.org/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard
[3] http://bellard.org/jslinux/
But again, not exclusively; I am not a huge Star Trek fan, yet am a huge fan, nor am I into the idea of replicating someone else, as you are you and not them. Perhaps it was formative years, watching the show as a young teenager, that left a seed there.
I find case studies and examples of situations are key. If you've not heard of it, and are managing people, I also hugely recommend a resource in our century: http://manager-tools.com a lot of good applicable examples to a wide range of potential people problems and opportunities there.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Make-So-Leadership-Lessons-Generatio...
- Paul Graham and Eliezer Yudkowsky
The 2 most clever people that I am aware of. I admire the way they write and think, and want to learn to do that as well.
- Owen Cook(Tyler) from RSD
This is the perfect model of a man that I wish to be. Driven, charismatic, intelligent, just generally awesome. This is how I want to behave and be like.
- Louis CK, Dan Harmon(creator of the shows Community and Rick and Morty) and Randall Munroe(the author of xkcd)
I have enormous respect and love for comedy, just something about the way comedians think is incredibly attractive to me. It takes a lot to be as brilliantly creative as these guys, and I want to learn to think like that.
Others:
Richard Feynman, Kevin Mitnick, Frank Abagnale, Richard Branson - based on their autobiographies, these guys lived cool lives.
Elon Musk - I don't know what kind of person he is, but based on what he does - he is as cool as it gets.
Fictional:
- Walter White, Gregory House
Brilliant person willing to do whatever it takes to achieve his goal, not giving up in desperate situations, acting rationally despite the emotions.
- Barney Stinson
Haha this dude is awesome.
- Hank Rearden
Basically a definition of a badass person, created to be the role model for people like me.
- Harry from HPMOR
Not much to explain here, he is also basically a definition of a cool person.
Others: Harvey Specter, Frank Underwood, Ari Gold, Hank Moody. And Tony Stark I guess =)
[1] http://su3su2u1.tumblr.com/tagged/Hariezer-Yudotter/chrono [2] http://su3su2u1.tumblr.com/post/113649628443/hpmor-full-revi...