51–60 of 219 posts
- distractions
- the plethora of (min)information
- the lack of proper books, guids and documentation
- the twisted fact that everybody needs to be rich and famous
- the constant chasing of revenue instead of science, art, philosophy
We're living in a fake bubble of bullshit, and everybody wants to be the polished turd.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think that 10x increase in cancer researchers would not help find the cure faster? Do you think there is one supergenius destined to find the solution and he is already working on it? 10x researches can try out 10x approaches or concentrate of specific types of cancer. From what I understand, most of actual research is done by hungry grad students and the higher your position get the more time you spend of…
If you have a team of programmers who always miss their deadlines, will increasing the headcount necessarily make them a team that always meets the deadlines? No, because other than having more people means more distractions and need for communication, there might be other problems, such as technical debt, or miscommunicated requirements, or inexperience, or outright unreasonable demands. The only variable that incre…
Google Books was the canary in the coal mine. Remember when Google was going to organize all the world's information and make it accessible and useful? Then the copyright lobby attacked, and over a decade later that project (which is so obviously a quantum leap in terms of what it could do for human productivity) remains on pause (or permanently abandoned? not sure).
People today have access to an endless supply of information noise. If you want quality signal, it's still a trickle.
All the best Internet ideas now are not getting built because of copyright law.
'Why aren't we far more productive?' sounds not too different from 'Why don't we have infinite growth on a finite planet?' - There is not enough meaningful democratizable work. Most work is either menial, or challenging. And I'm not even talking about the third kind of work [1]. - Menial work is getting more and more automated. - Challenging work doesn't necessarily scale with human resources beyond a certain point (…
Why do you think that 10x increase in cancer researchers would not help find the cure faster? Do you think there is one supergenius destined to find the solution and he is already working on it? 10x researches can try out 10x approaches or concentrate of specific types of cancer. From what I understand, most of actual research is done by hungry grad students and the higher your position get the more time you spend of…
1,000 people who agree on a paradigm which may be false is not helped by another 9,000 people who agree with that same paradigm. In the era of Einstein, how many physicists accepted the traditional view of space and time? throwing more physicists at the same problem probably doesn't mean getting more Einsteins.
Potential example for today (though IANAD nor Biologists), how many scientists and researchers agree upon removing plaques as a treatment for alzheimers? how long has that theory been the dominant narrative in spite of failed treatments at removing plaques? how many individuals wanted to try/research something different but all the other grants went to people pursuing the held narrative because the grantors also held that same narrative?
There's countless of companies where scaling up # of people just adds noise and bureaucracy and smaller companies with strong-minded individuals were able to break through.
[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/07/25/hitting-the-high-n...
> The Great Dissipation. Yeah I was consulting for about 5 years and this is something I saw inside a lot of companies, especially when they get sizable funding: they become simultaneously obsessed with hiring and process, and very little real work gets done. To be honest, I think it might be an inevitability of the productivity boom. Thanks to technology and automation, it's possible for a single individual to accom…
A lot of it just seems to be driven by strange attempts at optimization. For example, at my company, there was a lot of time spent on figuring out developer metrics (for all four of us on the team at its peak) and cost accountability.
On the cost accountability side, one thing that has happened three times is that the developers have been idled so the project will not go over budget in time tracking. We were still paid. We were still at work. But to keep an internal budget on track, we were told to drop our tools and sit there.
'Why aren't we far more productive?' sounds not too different from 'Why don't we have infinite growth on a finite planet?' - There is not enough meaningful democratizable work. Most work is either menial, or challenging. And I'm not even talking about the third kind of work [1]. - Menial work is getting more and more automated. - Challenging work doesn't necessarily scale with human resources beyond a certain point (…
In fact, with proper economic cost accounting like externalities as we try to deal with global warming, costs are going up.
Solar/wind are gradually starting to improve things in meaningful ways but they are a fundamentally different grid design.
Perhaps a modular LFTR reactor design can beat what Solar/Wind will settle at on an EROEI measure once solar/wind are out of their main economies of scale and techonological development curves.
But what we are entering for the next century is clearly one of resource limitations, and working much harder to more efficiently use them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a team of programmers who always miss their deadlines, will increasing the headcount necessarily make them a team that always meets the deadlines? No, because other than having more people means more distractions and need for communication, there might be other problems, such as technical debt, or miscommunicated requirements, or inexperience, or outright unreasonable demands. The only variable that incre…
No but increasing the number of teams who are all now competing with each other would probably allow us to see progress scaling with the number of teams, not necessarily putting everyone on the same team.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think that 10x increase in cancer researchers would not help find the cure faster? Do you think there is one supergenius destined to find the solution and he is already working on it? 10x researches can try out 10x approaches or concentrate of specific types of cancer. From what I understand, most of actual research is done by hungry grad students and the higher your position get the more time you spend of…
I think there are so only so many possible solutions, the first researcher will choose to researcher the possible solution with the highest probability or working. As you add more researchers they will research less probabil solutions. It is the law of diminishing returns.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you think that 10x increase in cancer researchers would not help find the cure faster? Do you think there is one supergenius destined to find the solution and he is already working on it? 10x researches can try out 10x approaches or concentrate of specific types of cancer. From what I understand, most of actual research is done by hungry grad students and the higher your position get the more time you spend of…
IMO Joel Spolsky kind of covers a possible answer to your question in his blog post "Hitting the High Notes"[0]. While I'm sure there's plenty of counter examples, it's important to note a wide ranging variety of discoveries and breakthroughs that have come from individuals and small teams that have. In many of these cases, that person or small team is uniquely breaking against an otherwise agreed upon convention or…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
TikTok, Clubhouse and Robinhood have touched the lives of orders of magnitudes more people than Tesla or SpaceX. Tesla sold half a million cars last year. TikTok provided entertainment for a billion people.
And was what TikTok did positive impact?