Thanks for the post. It is exactly what I need right now.
Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
51–60 of 88 posts
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#52This trick may work much, much better for people who are massively engaged in their fields and need a new perspective. I don't think either Feynman or Crick started disregarding everything when they were noobs.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fields like art, programming, and physics, you'd better be doing something weird . If you're doing something mainstream , the same thing thirty other people around the world are doing, you're all competing to make the same thing — paint the same painting, write the same text editor, prove the same theorem about black holes. Twenty-nine of you are going to get scooped by whoever is the hardest-working, the smartest…
Iterate a few times and expectation and mean start to matter
It depends. If you're hacking on free software, as you should be, then after the first iteration, everyone can start using the clearly-much-better thing that is already working, rather than wasting months finishing their own inferior versions. And the person who wins the race that time around may not be the same one who won the first time.
The other thing is that there are distributions like the Cauchy distribution that are so heavy-tailed that they don't even have a mean†, or even a variance. The Law of Large Numbers doesn't apply to them at all! And even for more ordinary heavy-tailed distributions that do have means, like the lognormal distribution (relevant here since it's empirically the distribution of how much we misestimate tasks by) the Law of Large Numbers takes a lot more than "a few times" to start making the distribution of the sum look normal. Try it! Pop open Jupyter and convolve the lognormal distribution with itself a few times! How long does it take before it even starts to look Gaussian? How long does it take before it still looks Gaussian in a log-linear plot?
†In your comment you said "mean and expectation", but those are the same thing. Possibly you don't know anything about statistics yet? If so, welcome! You're one of today's lucky ten thousand!
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fields like art, programming, and physics, you'd better be doing something weird . If you're doing something mainstream , the same thing thirty other people around the world are doing, you're all competing to make the same thing — paint the same painting, write the same text editor, prove the same theorem about black holes. Twenty-nine of you are going to get scooped by whoever is the hardest-working, the smartest…
When does weird become too weird? I’m building a non-instant messenger, for example.
I don't know! That sounds like a worthwhile project to me; I'm on one email mailing list which only comes out in a nightly digest in order to remove the incentive for instant responses and promote thoughtful response instead. Harvard's Rotisserie system (http://h2oproject.law.harvard.edu/) was another effort in that direction. And I was also on Slashdot starting around 1997, and I observed the incentive structure of its commenting system pushing discussions in the opposite direction — with commenters racing to make the first comment in a new comment thread, even if it was just "First post", before the voting system was introduced.
The biggest difficulty I've had with such things is a sort of Gresham's Law of attention: because Twatter and Fecebutt (and IRC) offer the possibility of instant reactions, I have a strong temptation to spend time on them instead of in more thoughtful, slower forms of interaction. The wild success of Fecebutt and, even more so, Zynga, suggests I'm not the only one.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#55> At a certain point, I looked up and said, “Dick, [James Watson] must be either very smart or very lucky.
He ignores the third option: very dishonest. Which is what applied in this case.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#56> At a certain point, I looked up and said, “Dick, [James Watson] must be either very smart or very lucky. He ignores the third option: very dishonest. Which is what applied in this case.
Care to elaborate? Specifically, is there any doubt about Watson's contribution to the discovery of the double helix structure?
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#57This feels like the sort of advice that increases the variance of outcomes more than the mean , if that makes any sense. It'll help some people, but also really won't help others. It's like... You'd need some serious disregard for the rest of the physics community to think you can figure out a reactionless drive. This is great if you actually can, but otherwise it's going to lead you to failure. In a lot of ways, get…
Or, more tersely: We're not all brilliant enough to disregard others, but we all still inherently wish to disregard others.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it would be very desirable to increase the variance of outcomes without significantly decreasing the mean. The way research funding is structured now, researchers are incentivized towards taking small publishable steps without too much risk. This is needed of course, but it isn't going to bring about another Newton. I think we desperately need a few more Newtons if we're to prosper in the next hundred years.
That is probably what is desirable for the field as a whole. But as an individual, not a good idea to shoot for high variance.
Anyone who wants high mean low variance career should become an accountant or a dentist: the payoff is vastly better, and it takes a comparable amount of intelligence.
This low variance attitude is why we can't have nice things. We have more "scientists" alive now than at any time in human history, and it is boring and useless with virtually no downstream results.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#59> At a certain point, I looked up and said, “Dick, [James Watson] must be either very smart or very lucky. He ignores the third option: very dishonest. Which is what applied in this case.
Care to elaborate? Specifically, is there any doubt about Watson's contribution to the discovery of the double helix structure?
Well since Rosalind Franklin did the majority of the work, yes.
Re: Feynman’s Breakthrough, Disregard Others (2017)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it would be very desirable to increase the variance of outcomes without significantly decreasing the mean. The way research funding is structured now, researchers are incentivized towards taking small publishable steps without too much risk. This is needed of course, but it isn't going to bring about another Newton. I think we desperately need a few more Newtons if we're to prosper in the next hundred years.
A research infrastructure that could support improving the variance of results without significantly impacting the mean would be an enormous boon to the world.
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