Just about anyone can do just about anything, eventually.
Too many people prevent possibility by discounting others because they fail to distinguish between the words "eventually" and "never".
Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
61–70 of 85 posts
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#62Selfish Gene, social dynamics, sexual attraction, status.
It took me a few months of reading and thinking about all this stuff to comprehend it and put any of it into action. When I did, and saw the results, it broke my brain and forced me to re-evaluate pretty much everything I understood about the world... not just human behaviour and relationships but business, economics, politics, the lot.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#63Parenting is harder than it looks - and much more rewarding than you might expect.
I didn't have an appreciation for how amazing my parents were until I had children.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#64Complex and emergent systems. Certain systems can have only local interactions but have global effects. Some effects in nature are not the result of a single cause, but from the interactions of many local parts. One can design robust behavior (though not necessarily optimal) in the global system through only defining local interactions. Many biological systems have this architecture, such as ant colonies, immune syst…
"Understanding continuations are functions that don't return." I've never heard a clearer explanation of continuations!
I remember when I first read a similarly short explanation of Lisp. Suddenly it clicked. It was something like: "All code can be represented as an AST. S-expressions are just serialized ASTs." Only it was better. Lost the source.
PS: I love everyone's comments, keep them coming!
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#65Euler's equation. That conservation laws follow from deeper symmetry principles (Noether's theorem). Symmetry under translation corresponds to conservation of momentum, symmetry under rotation to conservation of angular momentum, symmetry in time to conservation of energy! http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NoethersSymmetryTheorem.html
This has to do with the context where I learned Euler's Equation, but I can never separate it from Fourier and (later) Laplace transforms. Those are all so beautiful and mind blowing.
Addendum after the edit period:
Wavelet transforms also go on this list.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#66"We can implant entirely false memories"[1] I also remember being really suprised when I first learned the Central Limit Theorem[2] a long time ago. That said, Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach"[3] probably had the biggest impact on me. [1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/dec/04/science.resear... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach
I don't know that I was surprised by the CLT itself. What surprised me about it was how nice it made everything else. In some sense there are whole books full of theorems which go from tedious and complex to 12-year-old simple in just 3 letters.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#67The simplicity and difficulty of Bayes' Law.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#68Complex and emergent systems. Certain systems can have only local interactions but have global effects. Some effects in nature are not the result of a single cause, but from the interactions of many local parts. One can design robust behavior (though not necessarily optimal) in the global system through only defining local interactions. Many biological systems have this architecture, such as ant colonies, immune syst…
Emergent phenomena were a big one for me, too. One of my favorite pieces on the topic of economics is Hayek’s:
http://www.econlib.org/Library/Essays/hykKnw1.html
Dawkin’s “The Ancestor’s Tale” showed me this pattern in biology, too, and drastically rewrote the way I see the world.
Being able to follow and understand mathematical proofs for the first time was also enlightening. I prefer the simple, clever ones, such as Cantor’s diagonal proof of the uncountability of the real numbers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor's_diagonal_argument
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#69The most influential thing I’ve learned is that people act by their individual set of incentives. Apply choice aspects of psychology and economics – then you got something big. Think game theory.
Also, I'm waiting for the Human Genome Project to help elucidate more on the placebo effect.
I think it has a major correlation with the phenotypic vs. genotypic expression of faith - something all humans display toward an institution, ideology, themselves, and/or another person.
This will be immensely powerful information.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#70That an interpreter or compiler is just another program.
Metaprogramming and higher-order functions.
Squeak the IDE.
That there is no magic in computers or programming.