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What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

paulgraham.com

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Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#281

Post by shostack »

dxbydt wrote: post #38

This excerpt - "what he really liked was solving problems. The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook he'd immediately work out all the problems—to the slight annoyance of his teacher, since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually." is literally me. I did that. Every year at my school I did exactly that. Once I actually turned in m…

I failed algebra one year in high school.

I thought I was absolutely the worst person in the world at math. Turns out, crappy teachers and a teaching methodology that is diametrically opposed to one's optimal learning style count for a lot in school.

However what was amazing to me was how I went from zero confidence in my math skills to actually being excited about math when I took geometry. I never studied once in that class--just absorbed and immediately internalized what the teacher said. I could look at a proof and it just sort of visually made sense to me and clicked and I could step through it because of the pattern recognition. To this date I've never experienced anything intuitive in that fundamentally primal manner.

What has been great lately is Khan Academy and a growing interest in teaching myself software development has rekindled my interest in math. I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to Kalid @ BetterExplained.com (he frequents HN) for getting me past my fear that higher-level maths were beyond my capabilities. They weren't--I just needed to find a way of applying them in an intuitive manner that I could easily internalize vs. staring at equations and their definitions.

I wouldn't be surprised if I would have ended up as an engineer if I hadn't had such a poor experience with math when I was younger. I am pretty resentful of it. Fortunately I can take steps to change that, and I am.

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#282

Post by tomasien »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #278
tomasien wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if that's the case holistically, that what you like to do that other people think is "work" literally can not be monetized in the current economy, then that's just a tragedy. If the economy hasn't developed a model for what you uniquely like to do then I think that's just a very unfortunate reality. However, I wonder if perhaps you're taking it too literally. It's quite possible that what you like to do has m…

It is a tragedy, and that's why I find this essay naive, arrogant, and simply dishonest. Passions don't all have the same economic viability. "Do what you love" is trite and useless advice. I think part of it was growing up with a thesbian mother and painter father and seeing first hand how doing what you love isn't enough to feed yourself. It stings a little for other people to claim that you don't need to "work" if…

Interestingly enough, PG also loves painting almost more than anything. He wrote a book about it called "Hackers and Painters". Extrapolate whatever you'd like from that fact.

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#283

Post by q845712 »

bshimmin wrote: post #232
q845712 wrote: post #35

i enjoy chopping vegetables much more than most people, and i'm told i'm quite good at e.g. making sauerkraut - an activity i truly enjoy. but i get paid a lot more to write software, which is also reasonably fun. to be honest i think i only enjoy writing software about as much as the next person! can we be honest that it's an absurdly good job currently? https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/

Would you enjoy chopping vegetables if you had to do it for 40 hours a week? Would it become a little less pleasurable, perhaps, if someone were sending you emails asking why you haven't updated the carrots ticket with your current progress, or moved the potatoes card on the Kanban board? (I have a bit of a thing for grating cheese - I find it strangely therapeutic.)

agreed!

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#284

Post by gregfjohnson »

I am 60 and still cannot believe that people will actually pay you to play with computers and robots all day long! The robots I play with know how to breathe air, which involves a lot of interesting fluid dynamics in addition to all of the other interesting things that go into building and playing with robots. (The technical term for these robots is "intensive care unit ventilator".) I love and am probably addicted to programming. RE debugging: while the rush of relief and victory is satisfying when a problem is found and fixed, I find these days that it is more fun to do technical things differently. Consider a Venn diagram with two overlapping circles to describe a given technical problem. Circle A is "have something working happily, but may be overly simplistic." Circle B is "covers the real problem domain adequately, but may be buggy." The intersection is where you want to be. The question is, from which direction do you approach the intersection? I used to start from Circle B and debug to the intersection. Now, I start from Circle A and stay happy/working, expanding that state until it gets to the intersection. Especially in pair programming I find this to be the best way to go. If two pairing partners are "lost in the woods" trying to debug a problem, they can start stepping on each others' toes and get really unhappy. On the other hand, if they are collaboratively growing an ever-expanding "working/happy" program, things usually go an awful lot better. Related topic: I've come to realize that I am good at "really easy" mathematics, and bad at "really hard" mathematics. So, in struggling with a math problem or new area, my instinct is to massage and massage until the problem magically transforms from "really hard" to "really easy". Just last week I had that huge sweet "AHA" rush. In lambda calculus, there is a cute trick called Church numerals that allows you to encode the non-negative integers as functions. The functions to add, multiply, exponentiate, etc. are all easy, but the function to take the predecessor of a Church numeral is really tricky. I knew the predecessor formula and could mechanically apply it, but did not have any clear insight at all as to how or why it worked. Finally, KAPOW! Came up with a beautifully straightforward, satisfying, and intuitive way to derive the predecessor function of Church numerals.

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#285

Post by nbouscal »

allenguo wrote: post #275
andrzejsz wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I am not expert on these things but it seems to me that Idris has better support for so called dependent types http://ejenk.com/blog/why-dependently-typed-programming-will...

This was an interesting read. Thanks for sharing! > This means that whenever I call this function, I need to provide together with a and b a proof that b isn’t zero. What might such a proof look like? And is this supposed to work at compile-time?

Yes, it happens at compile time. To understand how proofs work here, you want to look at the Curry-Howard correspondence. Basically, there's a correspondence between types and propositions, and between the values inhabiting those types and proofs of the corresponding propositions. So a proof looks like a value of a certain type.

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#286

Post by nbouscal »

swatow wrote: post #224
takemikazuchi wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit of tangent, but I looked up Idris since I'd never heard of it. I'm currently learning Haskell and they look really similar. What differentiates the two? What can you do in one that you can't do in the other?

As practical matter, Idris is a new experimental language while Haskell is a mature, stable language with a useful standard library. But fundamentally Idris is theoretically more advanced than Haskell. The core differences are 1. Idris functions can be proven to terminate (if you choose). 2. In Idris, types are first class values, and you can have dependent functions: functions whose return type depends on their inpu…

Yeah, you can definitely do that example in Haskell – if by Haskell you mean GHC. GHC has been slowly but surely adding dependently-typed features for quite some time now, which will culminate in a proper DependentTypes pragma sometime soon (for some meaning of soon, anyway).

There are a lot of other differences between Haskell and Idris, though. Totality is a pretty big thing, and Idris is also strict by default. It also has support for proof tactics, which I don't see Haskell getting anytime soon.

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#287

Post by heurist »

delian66 wrote: post #213
heurist wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think AI will be the solution to the problem. Each human is given an AI which competes on their behalf in an open market, and the human consumes the AI's profit as needed. If all the AI's are the same then everyone should be around equal and money ceases to be a concern for anyone and you can use your time any way you wish! That's my dream, anyway. I don't think 100 years is too far out for AGI. A robust utopian ec…

>>I think AI will be the solution to the problem. No, it will not. Sufficiently smart AIs will be sentient beings just like you, and it will be immoral for you to keep them as slaves.

We don't know enough about cognition to make ethical arguments for or against the use of AI yet. Maybe the systems behind AI will prove that it's as unethical for humans to be forced to work by society as it would be for an AI. Then who do we let be free?

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#288

Post by allendoerfer »

jnbiche wrote: post #227
allendoerfer wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for letting me feel represented. For me it always was about getting how the system works not the actual lesson. From that angle it is hard to be bad at anything at high-school level. Either you got it how school works and were good or you did not and were bad. For me there was no in-between and all the "people have different talents"-stuff. For me it was about a combination of people skills, short-term memo…

>Math always sounds mildly interesting to me and I get the concepts quickly, but i lack the discipline to really internalize it for a few months, especially bottom-up. For me it is easier to come from the other side, for example digging through scikit-learn and learning the math after I already got the big picture. You probably already know this, but that just means you're an inductive learner, not a deductive learne…

Also the abstract concept of "being useful in the future" is not enough to motivate me. "Getting better at a concrete task" is.

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#289

Post by robotresearcher »

mmagin wrote: post #263
robotresearcher wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will make them so they don't mind working for us. It would be cruel to make them "free". Like domestic dogs. They will be our partners in life and not autonomous creatures. I don't see any a priori reason that being smart would require resenting servitude.

As a thought experiment, consider if we developed a drug that makes humans enjoy slavery. Would slavery then be morally acceptable, provided that drug was furnished to the enslaved humans?

It's not directly relevant. If we don't build unhappy robots there will not be any unhappy robots and no potential for any extant robot to be unhappy.

Not two classes (with or without pill), nor a history of previously unhappy robots (pre-pill), and not even potentially unhappy robots (pills run out). Only happy, working robots.

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#290

Post by thisjustin2015 »

returnofdjedi wrote: post #165
thisjustin2015 wrote: post #145

This just in: do what you love

Read the full article by pg to understand the intricacies of it :) One of the best articles for understanding how loving your work is possible. http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

Thanks, I appreciate the link. Unfortunately none of this is all that deep.

As others have pointed out, the advice is trite and often short sighted. There are many things that one may love to do that simply aren't rewarded monetarily by our current economic system.

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