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What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

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Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#61

Post by jacques_chester »

pg wrote: post #45
jacques_chester wrote: post #28

Let's all pat ourselves on the back with a fluffy blog post about how jolly wonderful we are. In about 10 years everyone else will be doing the same. Just kidding. Every profession I have even a passing familiarity with is absolutely chockers with self-congratulatory fluff. And it's usually hilarious to the outsiders who can see the narrowness of a profession's vision. Out of the professions I've seen, who have been…

This post is brief, but not fluffy. I wish he had dug more into the forces at work here. But it is an important point nonetheless. And we on HN could do better than merely dismiss it. We could try to dig into the underlying forces ourselves. E.g. not all hobbies consist of making the Apple I. So which do, and why? Are the things called hobbies two different types of work that are conflated by clueless observers simpl…

> I wish he had dug more into the forces at work here. But it is an important point nonetheless.

He was busy slapping all nerds everywhere on the back with reflected glory.

You're just reading in what you wanted him to say and judging your desired reading, not the original.

(Edit: and I did the same, fixating on the self-congratulatory fluff and ignoring the selection-biased hypothesis about making predictions.)

> Instead the top comment is the forum analogue of a fluff post: a cynical dismissal based on some presumed bad intention on the writer's part.

You're basically imputing to me a motive to impute a motive to Chris that in my estimation neither of us had. I mentioned Naïve Realism a while back in one of the various pitchfork debates (the Tesla test drive, I think). I think it's happening here too.

But really, this post was self-congratulation. I've read similar fluff from marketers and advertisers who see themselves as the lever-pullers of capitalism, from student politicians about their destiny as masters of all creation, from lawyers about the utter indispensibility of their ancient craft, from engineers ditto ... ad infinitum. In all such cases they could have written the same stuff about how they were shaping The Future Of The World years ago.

I'd be more interested in seeing the base rate on all the garage projects that go absolutely nowhere, achieve nothing and have no meaningful impact on the world. That would be most of them.

Which is fine. But let's not pretend that since Woz was a genius, the rest of us are also in the same category.

Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#63

Post by [deleted] »

mijustin wrote: post #22

What smart hobbyists are doing now is part of the picture. There are other elements that are needed for a "thing" to become a "big thing" that the whole world uses. Tech hobby trends need to conspire with other trends in business and society (and also have the right timing) to become a future industry and a widely adopted technology. Two counterexamples off the top of my head: MUDs and ham radio. I think the original…

[deleted]

Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#64

Post by jacques_chester »

DannyBee wrote: post #47
jacques_chester wrote: post #28

Let's all pat ourselves on the back with a fluffy blog post about how jolly wonderful we are. In about 10 years everyone else will be doing the same. Just kidding. Every profession I have even a passing familiarity with is absolutely chockers with self-congratulatory fluff. And it's usually hilarious to the outsiders who can see the narrowness of a profession's vision. Out of the professions I've seen, who have been…

That's funny because most i've met are narrow minded about their own field. At least when I went chatting with lawyers and interviewing after I first got out of law school, every non-academic lawyer I met in the field of IP law was fairly narrow minded. Even asking them things that their businesses depended on, like "What do you think will happen as patents on computer implemented inventions become significantly more…

My current lawyer is a technology entrepreneur on the side.

My law lecturers were variously keen observers of politics, literature, art, human nature and economics. One of the people I most admire as an essayist and thinker has three (three!) law degrees.

However, putting aside the exchange of anecdotes at twenty paces: you're absolutely right. In every profession there are people whose vision never rises above their own blinkered view of the universe.

I guess my point is that being intellectually parochial is ... well, it has drawbacks. Especially if you set out to explain why your profession is amazing and you have nothing whatever to compare it with except ... your profession.

Every time I wander out of my own field I first of all make a total arse of myself. But I always come back clutching something very useful. I never thought Olympic weightlifting would have given me useful life insights, it has. I never thought that learning muscular physiology would help me better understand software architecture, it has. I didn't think systems dynamics or fuzzy logic would upend my view of the world. They have. I didn't think that learning the basics of accounting would change the way I think about how to pick startup ideas, it definitely has.

And studying law, even though I dropped out because it made me unhappy compared to cutting code, gave me training in a model of thought that I still find tremendously useful.

Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#65

Post by forwardslash »

iamwil wrote: post #59
_delirium wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the idea is just that some things that now seem serious didn't seem serious in the past, sure, I buy that. But does anybody not buy that? I feel like that's the plotline of a dozen Discovery Channel shows. And it's also the justification behind many of the "why pure math/science should actually be funded" arguments, to take it in a different direction.

People always buy that looking backwards, but almost never going forward. In fact, most people are outright dismissive of new ideas yet unproven. If you do a search on HN about the viability of the currently unproven techs, like google glasses, 3D printers, you'll see plenty of evidence of that. I'm not sure why this is, exactly. Perhaps it's just more fun to be cynical and shoot down the weird things that other peop…

I think there's mostly a lot of knee-jerk contrarianism, especially in the HN community. You can see the worst of that here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3466925 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3469453.

Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#66

Post by stevewilhelm »

The smartest people I know are cooking family style meals using locally sourced ingredients, brewing beer, raising chickens and bees, and turning their lawns into fruit and vegetable gardens.

I sure hope everyone else will be doing this in ten years.

Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#67

Post by eri »

pg wrote: post #45
jacques_chester wrote: post #28

Let's all pat ourselves on the back with a fluffy blog post about how jolly wonderful we are. In about 10 years everyone else will be doing the same. Just kidding. Every profession I have even a passing familiarity with is absolutely chockers with self-congratulatory fluff. And it's usually hilarious to the outsiders who can see the narrowness of a profession's vision. Out of the professions I've seen, who have been…

This post is brief, but not fluffy. I wish he had dug more into the forces at work here. But it is an important point nonetheless. And we on HN could do better than merely dismiss it. We could try to dig into the underlying forces ourselves. E.g. not all hobbies consist of making the Apple I. So which do, and why? Are the things called hobbies two different types of work that are conflated by clueless observers simpl…

>a cynical dismissal based on some presumed bad intention on the writer's part

I don't think jacq presumed bad intention or dismissed the post entirely. I appreciate someone calling out the combination of 'narrowness of vision' and a little self-righteousness. Chris' post was totally well-intentioned, but jacq's meta point adds value, as now there's the human component of self-importance in addition to the original point of the post

Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#68

Post by jacques_chester »

charlieflowers wrote: post #40
jacques_chester wrote: post #28

Let's all pat ourselves on the back with a fluffy blog post about how jolly wonderful we are. In about 10 years everyone else will be doing the same. Just kidding. Every profession I have even a passing familiarity with is absolutely chockers with self-congratulatory fluff. And it's usually hilarious to the outsiders who can see the narrowness of a profession's vision. Out of the professions I've seen, who have been…

I see your point, but the original article is a interesting take on "how to see the future", which is a powerful thing to do if you're trying to found a startup that succeeds big. So it's worth the read to me. Just a little mind-stretcher, but one of the things I come to Hacker News for.

Predicting the future is, as the saying goes, hard.

Humans are basically awful at it. Even the smartest and best informed humans, as Philip Tetlock demonstrated pretty convincingly.

Some forms of knowledge are profoundly retrospective. You can deduce general principles, you can load up your squishy neural net with subtle patterns to match, but ultimately lots of things can only be guessed at with a great deal of innate fuzziness and uncertainty.

The process of forming such a system of judgement is called "wisdom". It's slow, inefficient and it's still absolutely crushed by simple statistical heuristics such as "40% of the time things stay about the same".

Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#69

Post by jacques_chester »

jedc wrote: post #62

I love Tim O'Reilly's quote on this phenomenon: "The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed"

I believe it was actually William Gibson (of Neuromancer fame) who said it: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/

Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

#70

Post by [deleted] »

jacques_chester wrote: post #28

Let's all pat ourselves on the back with a fluffy blog post about how jolly wonderful we are. In about 10 years everyone else will be doing the same. Just kidding. Every profession I have even a passing familiarity with is absolutely chockers with self-congratulatory fluff. And it's usually hilarious to the outsiders who can see the narrowness of a profession's vision. Out of the professions I've seen, who have been…

[deleted]
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