I think the list of examples could do with adding hobbyist unmanned drones and high altitude balloon and rocket launches.
What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
81–90 of 124 posts
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#82Let'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…
Several times in my career I have found myself learning and reading and suddenly finding that what I want to do next has no blog posts, or third party frameworks - I have reached the state of the art in one (tiny) direction.
That is where the productive hobbies take you - to the point where to play some more you need to invent. At this point skills, available time all come to bear - but I now recognise this time - and refuse to waste the opportunities.
Not easy to spot for oneself - spotting it as investment - no idea :-)
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
You suffer exactly what you criticize. You preach cross discipline, yet make an absurd generalization that people from a single domain are the best at not being in a single domain. Do you have evidence to back this up? Something more then anecdote? You cannot know everything about every domain. There are people better than you at everything. The balance between specializing and diversifying depends on so many variabl…
> You suffer exactly what you criticize.
Oh absolutely. No contest.
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#84Let'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 isn't fluff. It's saying that what you love doing (if you're not getting paid) might be the future. If the activity has enough value on its own to be worthwhile without immediate monetary reward, then it's a good bet there's something valuable about your activity that will ultimately be recognized by the market.
It's not much different from investing. If we see company X investing in space mining even though it's not even paying off right now, there's good chance they Know it's worth the investment (or are at least confident enough to gamble on it).
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#85YMMV, but I found this poisonous. At least mildly so.
My hobbies are what I do for fun. I don't give one whit if they're ultimately "successful". I engage in them because I find them intrinsically interesting.
After reading this, I feel like there is a peer pressure, however slight, to have hobbies that have "momentum" which will ultimately make them "the future". (Like, oh no, maybe I'm engaging in the "wrong" hobbies, because I'm pretty sure than in 10 years, still not everyone will be building ships in a bottle.)
This sort of pressure completely defeats the point of having a hobby, sucks all the fun out of it, and will leave me personally feeling discouraged and apathetic (for this morning at least -- until I can flush this mild poison from my system.)
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
He coined a nice epigram I will remember. That is enough for the article to be interesting. What is the problem with being self-congratulatory? What is wrong with focusing on the positive and thinking that your hobby and life's work is worthwhile? Would anything be created if people were constantly doubting themselves and their creations? Would anything be better then? What harm would there be in people hoping to be…
> What is the problem with being self-congratulory? I'd like to say here that having some perspective can prevent certain kinds of mistake. I think that's correct. I'd be on surer ground if I point out that a person entirely satisfied with their professional perspective isn't going to improve past a certain asymptote that they themselves are unable to perceive. But honestly? I just find self-congratulation tremendous…
Well, ideas are constantly being heavily pruned and cut to the ground on hacker news.
And some of that pruning is good and necessary. Otherwise, bad ideas would proliferate and take air and light from the good ideas. But often when I read HN's comments, the field just looks like scorched earth. A complete, overpowering negativity everywhere. And I think then the pruning has lost its purpose, and is a bad thing.
I suppose, I would like that whenever an idea was dismissed it would be by pointing to a better idea in the vicinity which could then be thought about or worked on instead. That way the true purpose of criticism and pruning would be clear: To not let the bad ideas take resources from the good ones.
With regards to self-congratulatory behavior in general: well I suppose I understand you. I've been brought up that way too, as has perhaps most people. Still, I recall Russel's own adage:
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts.”
I don't know the author of the OP, but I do certainly think that negative attitudes create even more doubts in the wise, while fools and fanatics likely are innately immune. Therefore, I don't think that unreserved dismissals usually will do anything to people's character, except for strengthening those traits you really want to see less of, in the wise.
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#87Let'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…
> not all hobbies consist of making the Apple I. So which do, and why?
which grain of sand, dropped onto the pile, caused the avalanche, and why? :)
Must've been the red one. Last three times it was green green yellow red. Well, if you don't count the time when most of the top was already red, that stands to reason.
> 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.
Personally I think, cynical as it may have been, the article does require a counterpoint to its "brief"-ness.
I really disagree with these question/statements implying how surely there must be underlying causes why one hobby results in "inventing the future", and another does not, as if these causes have any validity outside our monkey brain's 20/20 hindsight.
By that I mean, creative hobbies are great. And they should be encouraged, for people that like that sort of thing (which is probably 99.9% of the HN crowd, but believe it or not, not all people everywhere). A tiny few of those hobbies will turn out "inventing the future" (like the term btw).
But there's two ways of going about that and there is no reason to believe that one has higher odds of being successful than the other (except for a very deep and very human desire to believe): You can either chase the dragon, imprint order onto the chaos that the future grows from, believing you can bend it to your will. Or you can just have some fun.
Can't you do both? Why yes, you can. Buying lottery tickets, some people seem to greatly enjoy imagining they can apply their will to a random process. I don't know if they have creative hobbies, though (but I'm not judging). Or maybe interpretation of Tarot cards, that's both creative, and applying your will to a random process. ... come to think of it, it is also "inventing the future", in a different sense :)
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The word "smartest" in the title misses the mark slightly in a way that exposes the idea to too-easy dismissal. The way people commonly use "smart" (high IQ, basically) isn't super-correlated with what Chris is talking about. Many high-IQ people are too locked-in to Achievement to bother with disinterested play. You can redefine "smartest" to mean "those who turn out to have been most ahead of their time", but that's…
These two bits hit the nail right on the head:
> You can redefine "smartest" to mean "those who turn out to have been most ahead of their time", but that's circular and doesn't help identify the quality.
> One must also insist on the fact that very often nothing does come of this quality. To imagine otherwise is to allow no room for randomness.
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#89Which hobbyist invented the web? Blogs? It isn't at all obvious to me who he is citing, if these people are hobbyists. Also, was "most" open source software a hobby, or a professional scratching an itch? And the first pc? Is Chris trying to say that's woz, and he was a hobbyist? The whole blog post is a little too pat.
It's confirmation bias of the highest order. What things have hobbyists been working on for years that we're not using? There are so many smart people doing so many different things, and most of them stay far out of the mainstream. Hell I have a friend who's incredibly smart. He spends his weekend meticulously crafting civil war uniforms for his re-enacments. Should I be watching out for a big-time re-enactment craze…
> There are so many smart people doing so many different things, and most of them stay far out of the mainstream.
It's because the mainstream is a sewer, and you should learn to swim.
Re: What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is usenet not the precursor to Reddit? Debatable. Usenet is decentralized as opposed to being dependent on a single bank of computers and beholden to a single group of owners.
Tchnologically true, but I think the larger point is that there has been a long evolution based on the fundamental human desire to look at funny cat pictures.
There were these people that said "meow" a lot, on Usenet ...