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Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

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Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#451

Post by mattnewport »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #237
mattnewport wrote: post #43

Working in VR, the state of the art is closer to Pong than to the Holodeck or the Matrix. That doesn't mean there aren't useful applications for the technology but we won't see anything that passes for reality in my lifetime, or perhaps ever.

> but we won't see anything that passes for reality in my lifetime, or perhaps ever maybe not that passes for reality, but VR already has a powerful "reality feeling" even with the crappy resolution we have now Get someone to load a VR game and try to walk off a cliff - they'll find it very difficult to do. Even someone that's played a lot of VR will have to override their instincts to not step off.

Presence is possible, although my experience is that things like the cliff effect get less potent the more you use VR. You have to be a willing participant though to buy into the alternate reality and agree to play within the rules. True interactivity is what's really lacking and the thing we're furthest from being able to simulate. Reality just has an astounding amount of detail when you can interact with it rather than just look at it.

None of this is to say that VR can't be useful, valuable or entertaining (I still work in the field and believe in its potential) but we're nowhere near the Matrix and maybe that's not a bad thing.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#452

Post by akeck »

m_fayer wrote: post #370

How we tend to overvalue and overinvest in reason and undervalue and underinvest in intuition. Intuition is powerful, mysterious, and a pleasure to wield. But developing and then trusting intuition is anathema to our metric-fixated process-consultant-ridden professional world, so we keep doing things the ugly hard way.

My experience from applied math:

> Intuition is powerful, mysterious, and a pleasure to wield

until it lies to you. Then you have to crack the whip and reign in the horses. So maybe the price of powerful intuition is eternal vigilance...

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#453

Post by tatar »

hans1729 wrote: post #299
tatar wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well put. What I noticed is that every discipline invents their own lingo to describe the systems in play at the ethos of their discipline and they often manifest as some sort of law, principle or concept. What I'm really curious about learning is to see if there's some sort of overarching discipline that focuses on these sort of systems as a meta and finds improvement points or market opportunities based on a g…

I've thought about this a lot, it's my goto "one day I'll write a book about this". I frame the problem slightly different (heh): Different disciplines, branching out, will (or so says my hypothesis) discover the same topologies, but express them differently due to different scopes (perspective, dimensionality, DSLs [...]). What I'm thinking about is: how can we parametrize the manifestations of these scopes, and, ub…

> What I'm thinking about is: how can we parametrize the manifestations of these scopes, and, ubiquitously, reverse-engineer them, thus linking all the systems?

> Then: which systems are topologically identical? If there are classes, how many? How do they differ? Are they (the systems OR the classes of systems) related?

> If so, is there a hierarchy (or are there multiple hierarchies)?

To what end though? How would you even begin measuring success in such a vast context?

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the art for arts sake, just curious to hear more.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#454

Post by timerol »

tatar wrote: post #278
muzani wrote: post #114

Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine. Don't be angry at the people who are ben…

Very well put. What I noticed is that every discipline invents their own lingo to describe the systems in play at the ethos of their discipline and they often manifest as some sort of law, principle or concept. What I'm really curious about learning is to see if there's some sort of overarching discipline that focuses on these sort of systems as a meta and finds improvement points or market opportunities based on a g…

Moore's law is a specific example of a manufacturing learning curve, which can be described here: http://www.strategosinc.com/articles/strategy/learning_curve....

This is generally what people mean when they talk about "economies of scale": The more of a thing you make, the faster and cheaper you can make it. Moore's law (indirectly) names the constants on this curve for a integrated electronics, which is a field where the exponential relationship is more pronounced and continues over many more orders of magnitude than in most disciplines.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#455

Post by earlyadopter2 »

joseph2342 wrote: post #97
timeattack wrote: post #67

Kind of obvious one, but I wish more people knew that — critical thinking. On the one side it helps to avoid bad/stupid things in life: quackery medicine, scammers, bad investments, etc. On the other side it allows to peep deeper into things and see more choices even in ordinary life. After some practice you gain nearly magical ability to peel couple of additional layers from reality and to see non-obvious things eve…

Any Book recommendations ?

Rationality: from AI to Zombies is largely based on Daniel Kahneman’s work, with a bit more influence from Judea Pearl’s causality work. The rationalist subculture has a writing style and trends that might be a bit polarizing, but I found it enjoyable. A good bit of it is about how to quantify uncertainty in real problems, and that this uncertainty only exists in the observer, not the universe. It also considers controversial examples like cryonics, race and politics.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#456

Post by JackFr »

jpg_converter wrote: post #442
muzani wrote: post #114

Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine. Don't be angry at the people who are ben…

I agree w you mostly but you extended this form of systemic analysis to "making a date happy" which I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. To everyone reading this: please don't go around treating other people as systems to be optimized! If you wish to think about relationships as systems, you really need to understand that you are a partial component in social systems and therefore a flawed obse…

> To everyone reading this: please don't go around treating other people as systems to be optimized!

This. Treating other people as systems to be optimized plus with narcissism equals sociopathy.

People should be treated with empathy and dignity.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#457

Post by anywherenotes »

fxtentacle wrote: post #146

How much feel good and drinking relationships matter in upper management. And on the downside, how little facts weight in when compared to a manager's gut feeling. Enthusiastically presenting a (factually wrong) solution can be a winning strategy. In high school, I thought I was a math genius because all of my solutions were judged as correct. Turns out, I was just a good presenter and nobody made any effort to check…

Customer support is super important when the product is immature. It keeps customers paying, and it produces a list of issues, clients can even help you prioritize them (at least if your clients are other businesses).

Yes, once that program has been working for 10 years, it's likely that any bugs are easily worked around, but while the software is in development, it's likely there are no work arounds and customer support can take a beating from the customer and try to make the customer feel better, this stretches out the timeline for fixing the issues.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#458

Post by pkalinowski »

solveit wrote: post #450
jpg_converter wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree w you mostly but you extended this form of systemic analysis to "making a date happy" which I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. To everyone reading this: please don't go around treating other people as systems to be optimized! If you wish to think about relationships as systems, you really need to understand that you are a partial component in social systems and therefore a flawed obse…

> I agree w you mostly but you extended this form of systemic analysis to "making a date happy" which I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. To everyone reading this: please don't go around treating other people as systems to be optimized! I think people who say this kind of thing have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a certain type of people think. Of course people are systems to be optimiz…

People will straight reject reality if it doesn't fit their worldview. Go tell your wife love is just chemistry. Your words will haunt you for years :)

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#459

Post by prometheus76 »

jaggederest wrote: post #31

People have a tremendously distorted view of reality due to their own biases. Myself definitely included. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair More concretely in the field of software engineering: Accurate, precise estimates are more expensive than the actual task itself. If someone asks you "how long until it is done", the onl…

The other problem with estimates of time with regard to certain tasks is the pareto principle. Specifically, if I give it to this developer, it will take two days. If I give it to that developer, it will take two weeks. So, how long will it take?

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#460

Post by trevyn »

muzani wrote: post #114

Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine. Don't be angry at the people who are ben…

>Don't be angry at the people who are benefiting from a system, or at the system itself.

But understand the impulse to be angry, and hear what it’s trying to tell you.

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