About 20 years ago I was having a quiet pint with a friend and he casually says "I wish I was passionate about something". It always stuck with me, still haven't found anything I'd consider I'm passionate about, still looking though!
The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
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Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#12Can you make yourself intentionally interested in a topic?
You can if you fancy a peaceful domestic arrangement.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#13What's the topic that just doesn't leave you alone? For me it's an interest in animal consciousness and communication, even though I am a physicist by training.
I really enjoyed this article. For me, I have two main ones. Professionally, it is four freedoms computing and ways to empower people with it. Privately though, since I got out of the military, has been an obsession with geopolitics and geostrategy. You might be surprised how interrelated I increasingly think the two are.
What's it about geopolitics that makes it so interesting to you? It has always seemed like politicized BS to me. I think history shows quite well that once individuals and polities alike start on the path of pursuing/promoting some variety of economic freedom and classical liberal values (often including but not limited to what's known as liberal democracy), safety and stable cooperation become enough of a common interest to make most 'geopolitics' considerations quite irrelevant, and often misleading.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#14Can you make yourself intentionally interested in a topic?
I was thinking the same thing. Being obsessively interested sounds neat when you watch others spend their entire lives, eg. collecting stamps and coins. According to this wisdom, when they find the rare gem that makes them a fortune they're geniuses. However, who can will themselves into becoming obsessive with something. Wouldn't it be kind of self-defeating if it is to take something out of it (ie. opposite of karma-yoga)?
What you can do:
- stop drinking, using drugs and passively consuming shit
- swim/exercise the body
- study what you're passionate about
- cultivate interest further, by iterating on building stuff, meeting peers who share similar interests, followup on your ideas and dreams
- long walks in nature to think about it deeper, periods where you remove yourself away from people
- balance your interests with sustainable living, because you're not doing it just to score big!
Not so sure people can will themselves to change that much.
You can enjoy life, cultivate what works and hedge your bets, in that order. By following your core life-theme and ideas, you should become more of what you already are.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#15What I find useful about going deep is not usually what I find at the bottom. It's the tools that I employed on the way that prove useful later. And that's not only if I'm the first to invent them! Even if they are a well-known pattern: I have now experienced them in ways that instruction cannot provide.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#16I think this is correct. The bad news is we are creating systems which minimise the number of geniuses entering each field.
In the past, science was an eccentric hobby, not particularly valued and certainly not a viable career option. Today it's all of these things - like becoming a doctor. Telling your mother you want to be a scientist is far better than saying you want to be a musician. A hundred years ago that wouldn't have been the case.
The consequence of this is that these fields are filled up with careerists - people who are socially driven rather than curiosity driven. I think this might go some way to explaining the slowdown in scientific progress, because people chase low-risk 'hot' fields to advance their careers, rather than splashing about in the unfashionable backwaters of science for the sheer enjoyment of it.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#17Imagine being the guy that got obsessively interested in bitcoin when only a few people were mining it.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#18Imagine being the guy that got obsessively interested in bitcoin when only a few people were mining it.
...and then sold it all for $5 each or so. Plenty of folks have been there. The best case scenario at this point is finding your old HD/backup somewhere with that early-mined bitcoin wallet you had totally forgotten about.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#19This is why basic research is so hard to manage. If a company is no longer interested in researching area X and instead wants to shift focus to area Y, there is no real alternative to outplacing the area X researchers and hiring new for area Y.
Trying to shift the interest of area X researchers only results in their coming up with rationalizations about how what they have been doing all along is somehow related to Y.
Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
#20Can you make yourself intentionally interested in a topic?
I was thinking the same thing. Being obsessively interested sounds neat when you watch others spend their entire lives, eg. collecting stamps and coins. According to this wisdom, when they find the rare gem that makes them a fortune they're geniuses. However, who can will themselves into becoming obsessive with something. Wouldn't it be kind of self-defeating if it is to take something out of it (ie. opposite of karm…
I agree with this. One thing I’d add from personal observation: things get more interesting the more time you spend with them. I’ve done ‘total immersion’ kinds of things with both math and the boardgame Go, with pretty good results in both cases. I pretty much just kept the topic around all the time for a sustained period. Sometimes that meant reading about history or philosophy of the subject, consuming related media, etc.
Didn’t take long before I could look at a Go board and get sucked in, or at least have a fairly profound aesthetic experience if it was a nice configuration.
Took a lot longer with math, and there what I get is generally like reading about a nice idea from a sci-for short story.
I don’t think this would work without some genuine interest/curiosity in the subject to begin with though. And there were times with both where I was intimidated or there were tasks I needed to do in order to improve that I didn’t want to do, which seems fine as long as there’s a larger portion of gratifying experience.