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Exit the Cave

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Re: Exit the Cave

#71

Post by fc417fc802 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #50
Ostatnigrosh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small correction though. Because of AI I'd argue that execution is cheap while the best ideas are valuable.

No, ideas are still cheap. Now implementation is cheap. So, software will be worth less than ever.

It's a bit more complicated than that isn't it? Every time you remove a bottleneck things advance until a new one appears, right? Previously ideas were cheap, good ideas were hard to come by, accurately distinguishing between good and bad without an implementations was an incredibly rare skill that many people wrongly believed themselves to have (the same as how everyone naturally thinks that their preferred language is the most powerful, etc, etc), and implementation was expensive.

Now you can distinguish sufficiently simple ideas by means of slop, but accurately determining what will eventually mesh well with the wider world is still extremely difficult.

There's also a complexity ceiling. It's been raised but it's still there. For example it will presumably be a while yet before a feature complete project on the scale of LLVM can be quickly slopped together.

It's also cheaper than ever to clone a piece of software once someone else has done the hard work of figuring out the general shape it should take. So I'm not sure how viable services without strong network effects will be going forward.

Re: Exit the Cave

#72

Post by itsamario »

jondlm wrote: post #37

A couple weeks ago I went by myself for a hike through an old lava tunnel cave. I needed a flashlight because it was pitch black. I found a small nook in the wall about a mile in that I could wedge myself in to. I sat down, turned off my light, and let myself feel the enveloping darkness for a long time. I cried. The only sounds were of small droplets of cold water hitting the floor and my body. I let myself settle i…

Jesus and Mohammed supposedly did this for 40 days. They figured it was where an outcast should die.

They got sent back. The "Celestial Mechanics" art was a similar era but instead of a new religion, that era was a Renaissance.

We're at a similar point in history where an industrial revolution quietly changed a way of life between living generations

Re: Exit the Cave

#73

Post by ang_cire »

juliansimioni wrote: post #67
ang_cire wrote: post #28

> A writer needs readers. An entrepreneur needs customers. An athlete needs competition. A lover needs someone free to reject him. Any worthy pursuit needs a mat. Nah. I judge myself by how I progressed from yesterday, not by whether what I am or what I built is useful to others. Is keeping a diary pointless if you're not planning to make it a memoir? Is staying healthy pointless if you aren't using that health to co…

I think the warning in the article is a little more subtle. The author isn’t placing a moral judgement on certain goals or whether the result of reaching that goal has a large enough audience. They are warning against doing things that work against achieving our goals in ways that are hard for us to notice by ourselves.

I think they needn't be so subtle in that case.

If the take away is supposed to be only other people can set meaningful metrics for you, then their wrestling history had nothing to do with said lesson, because the author offers no evidence that an external metric-setter would have made them more successful.

Ironically, the author deciding on their own that an external mentor/ reviewer is what they needed to succeed (without evidence proving the difference), is the exact same thing as them deciding that they needed technique or conditioning.

Re: Exit the Cave

#74

Post by Terr_ »

> I find Paramore playing in my head.

> > “See, it’s easy to ignore trouble, when you’re living in a bubble.”

With respect to the problem of trouble in bubbles, my mind goes to a very different song...

    If you're livin' in a bubble and you haven't got a care
    Well, you're gonna be in trouble 'cause we're gonna steal your air
    'Cause what you got is what we need 
    and all we do is dirty deeds
    We're the Spaceballs! 
    Watch out, 'cause we're the Spaceballs
Looking forward to the sequel. Moving on...

> But I had made the comfortable mistake of believing that because I could measure and control them, they must determine the outcome.

This seems related to the McNamara Fallacy [0], although not so specifically quantitative.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

Re: Exit the Cave

#75

Post by bodegajed »

jondlm wrote: post #37

A couple weeks ago I went by myself for a hike through an old lava tunnel cave. I needed a flashlight because it was pitch black. I found a small nook in the wall about a mile in that I could wedge myself in to. I sat down, turned off my light, and let myself feel the enveloping darkness for a long time. I cried. The only sounds were of small droplets of cold water hitting the floor and my body. I let myself settle i…

> birds that visited me

are you a disney princess?

Re: Exit the Cave

#76

Post by gffrd »

bodegajed wrote: post #75
jondlm wrote: post #37

A couple weeks ago I went by myself for a hike through an old lava tunnel cave. I needed a flashlight because it was pitch black. I found a small nook in the wall about a mile in that I could wedge myself in to. I sat down, turned off my light, and let myself feel the enveloping darkness for a long time. I cried. The only sounds were of small droplets of cold water hitting the floor and my body. I let myself settle i…

> birds that visited me are you a disney princess?

Why, are you looking for one?

Re: Exit the Cave

#77

Post by jimbokun »

ang_cire wrote: post #28

> A writer needs readers. An entrepreneur needs customers. An athlete needs competition. A lover needs someone free to reject him. Any worthy pursuit needs a mat. Nah. I judge myself by how I progressed from yesterday, not by whether what I am or what I built is useful to others. Is keeping a diary pointless if you're not planning to make it a memoir? Is staying healthy pointless if you aren't using that health to co…

What activities are you engaging in where you can make progress with no interaction with other people?

Re: Exit the Cave

#78

Post by jimbokun »

SoftTalker wrote: post #57
eutropia wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mat is the objective (or at least distinct from your own personal judgement) measure of your goal. If your goal is important to you, an objective measure of your progress towards it is more valuable than your own flawed and biased opinion. The mat for the diary might be the times you consulted back to it for useful introspection and came out better for it, the mat for your health goal could be your blood test fro…

So, one thing I do that might be directly relevant to this analogy is to lift weights. My goal when I started was to get stronger. I measure that by whether I can lift more weight today than I did yesterday. The barbell doesn't lie. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. Sometimes I even regress a bit. But over time, I have gotten stronger. Some people at my gym urge me to "compete" but I can't see a reason to do this.…

For you the barbell itself is the mat.

Re: Exit the Cave

#79

Post by jimbokun »

asphodele wrote: post #58
idiotsecant wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another word for 'cave' is 'echo chamber'. If you don't care much about whether what you believe is true or not, there's no need to test it, but in that case what's the point of believing things?

Another word for 'going outside the cave' is 'seeking external validation'. If you need other people to tell you if what you believe is true or not, do you actually believe anything?

You need to go out and observe the world to test your theories and hypotheses.

Re: Exit the Cave

#80

Post by jimbokun »

sp1nningaway wrote: post #66

Frighteningly, I've also found that you can be in the cave together with a group of people. I went to an MMA gym for a long time, and it was very common to see overconfident 'experienced' new members start sparring and get their ass handed to them. It was always someone from a small town or a gym that didn't participate in the larger MMA community. Those smaller gyms followed the same ruleset, but are made up of indi…

But that’s the exact opposite.

By your own story, they did just leave their cave and experience the wider world by getting their ass kicked.

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