You don't need to work on hard problems (2020)

So much is bad about it:

> After two weeks, I come up with some of my own tweaks that make the algorithm work a bit better. I happily add “built a state-of-the-art library for numerical integration, with novel improvements on the best techniques in the academic literature” to my resume.

Ok so he's a liar. He made something "work a bit better" and then claimed to build the whole thing. Two weeks of work. Talk about resume padding.

> After declaring, I finally get assigned an adviser who doesn’t tell me to take easier courses.

Where I went, you barely got any such advice. P R I V I L E G E.

> Math classes haven’t saved me from getting bored of college.

Links to an another article "Why I left Harvard early" oh FFS

> directly trying to improve the world, at Wave.

As opposed to those lesser folks who aren't "directly" trying to improve the world, or just not improving the world at all. Just trying to get by and live a decent life.

> For some reason, a lot of smart college students end up with the idea that “solving hard technical problems” is the best thing they can do with their life

Well it's better than fucking up the world at least.

> most graduates of elite schools—including me—

Yes mr elite.

> my root goal was to use my skills to get the most possible leverage on improving the world.

I'm reminded of the great "Make the World a better place" skit from Silicon Valley.

> Thanks to Eve Bigaj, Alexey Guzey, Jeff Kaufman, Dan Luu, Lincoln Quirk, and Yuri Vishnevsky for reading a draft of this post.

Someone actually didn't catch the lameness of the post.

> The older I get, the more I blame the internet for most of our current societal ills. I am a Millennial, but a digital native no more.

Similar to the conclusion I got to in the past 5 years, I'm in my mid-30s by now and been steadily removing myself from being a "digital native" back into the real world.

It was immensely enlightening to grow up on the internet, see it appear and flourish, being taught by so many anonymous people on IRC chats, forums, blogs, etc. but now I can also see it's been transformed into something that's not helping me, it's not making me more fulfilled or happier. The information available online is still my bread and butter for learning hobbies, new skills, etc., but the "internet scene" as a whole is definitely something I've been slowly waning myself away from.

Being part of the real world, part of the life of locals around me, helping others to set up events and gatherings for real people (even when they're small for about 10-20 others) is much, much more fulfilling than being yet another voice shouting into the void of the internet.

The internet was always a bit of a cold place but there was some character, the communities' interactions were between some hundreds to thousands of people gathering at a place, nowadays most of it is an incessant feed of bullshit pushed to millions at a time, no sense of community, just bland posts and snippets that you don't care about. Curating that has become such a massive job that I stopped caring, I found the places I like and stuck to them.

Maybe I'm just getting old...

My favorite example of this is Hadley Wickham's work on tidy data [1, 2].

Before Hadley, tools for streamlining data manipulation workflows had largely fallen stagnant. Even the best languages and tools were a chore to use. People's data prep processes tended to be idiosyncratic and hard to understand, even though there was nothing essentially new or deep about what they were doing. Data prep was an ugly chore best left to interns and grad students. It was kept out of sight so the big wigs could focus their slide decks on more interesting things.

Traditional academic statisticians and computer scientists had a blind spot for this issue. They didn't consider it a hard problem, which is what academics are supposed to work on, and discouraged Hadley from working on it early in his academic career. But Hadley persisted because he knew it was an important problem. Streamlining time-consuming chores liberates an enormous amount of human capital for the most meaningful work. (Which in some cases can be improving the data still further, opening up new vistas of insight the big wigs otherwise never would have even been aware of!)

Hadley's approach has not only revolutionized R programming, but has also quietly influenced the whole modern analytics ecosystem. It's become too good to ignore. Even for those who do most of their work in another language, with tools like pandas that don't follow the tidy philosophy, some end up trying to structure their workflows like Hadley's tools do, because it's so intuitive and compelling [3].

[1] http://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.pdf

[2] https://imstat.org/2014/09/04/data-science-how-is-it-differe...

[3] https://stmorse.github.io/journal/tidyverse-style-pandas.htm...

I went to university and I'm not mute yet… should I be worried? :D

A perspective that might help: social media failed catastrophically at some point in the distant past. Society shunned it to ensure it would never be repeated, to the point where it was baked into future technological development and not even a point of discussion.

Yeah, still a stretch. But it could work...