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The Risk of Discovery

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Risk of Discovery

#101

Post by js8 »

thefalcon wrote: post #52
js8 wrote: post #48

I find it funny that capitalism requires what is essentially an irrational behavior. It seems to me that big public corporations, which avoid risk, and only buy startups once they have been established, are the rational actors. On the other hands, three guys in the garage doing a startup often do it not because they calculate expected profits, but because they want to do it for other than monetary reasons - typically…

Similar in some ways to how evolution depends mutation?

This is actually on the mark. Evolution doesn't care about individual outcomes, it concerns with survival of the genes, or species.

So even if those guys in the garage act irrationally as individuals, someone has to take those risks, otherwise the society as a whole would be out-competed.

And that's why some people have evolved (not me :-)) to take more risks, at the personal expense.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#102

Post by callmeed »

kukx wrote: post #75

I don't think that studing chemistry (I like to think about alchemy as a precursor of chemistry) or theology should be stigmatized. I understand that it was just an example to support the core idea of the article, but it still leaves a bad taste.

I got that too. The essay definitely had an anti-religious undertone to me.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#103

Post by darkerside »

swalsh wrote: post #94

I urge anyone to play a bit of 'why' with a young child, mixed with the Socrates method. If you can get them to try and answer beyond "I don't know"... you'll be taken to some crazy mental places no adult can take you.

I would love to hear more about this

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#104

Post by oh_sigh »

lisper wrote: post #76

What exactly was Newton risking? An entrepreneur who quits her job and takes out a mortgage to start a business is risking her livelihood. If she fails, she and her family could end up on the street. Newton came from a wealthy family. If he failed in his intellectual endeavors the "risk" for him was to live out his life as an ordinary rich person and only ending up in the more obscure history books. I think Fredrick…

Newton's family was not well off. His father, a yeoman, died before he was born, his mother remarried a reverend, who also died before Newton came of age. His mother wanted him to be a farmer, which is not lucrative unless you have huge tracts of land(which he did not).

When he was first admitted to Trinity, he was a subsizar - that is, he had to perform valet duties in order to pay for his education. He only stopped doing those duties when he was awarded a scholarship.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#105

Post by pesenti »

oskarth wrote: post #57
lmkg wrote: post #32

I'm not sure that those lines of study were actually considered separate at the time. A century earlier than Newton's time, math and geometry were considered subfields of astronomy; and astronomy was considered the observation of the realm of the divine. Not only was there not a divide between physics and theology, people actually thought that math was a tool for studying theology (one of Copernicus' sources of incom…

Thank you for reading and commenting with good faith and a, as far as I can tell, correct historical frame in mind. As opposed to with some literalist naive and/or hostile, contemporary-navel-gazing nonsense that is completely missing the point of the essay. For more thinking in a similar direction, see Nassim Taleb's excerpt on the Lindy effect ( https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146e... ), whe…

It is a filtering, nonsense expurgating mechanism. I have no sympathy for professional researchers. I for my part spent the first twenty three years of activity in a full-time highly demanding extremely stressful profession while studying, researching, and writing my first three books at night; it lowered (in fact, eliminated) my tolerance for fake research.

I wonder if that explains why his first 3 books where so much better than what he has written since....

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#106

Post by wfo »

skolos wrote: post #8
aaron-lebo wrote: post #3

I'm not seeing what the risk was. He was taking a chance that he was wrong, yes, but that was just science. Risk suggests a danger. But what was it?

Here "risk" is opportunity cost. You can spend all you life in theology and die unknown. Newton is famous only because of physics, the other fields were waste of his time. There are countless people who spend their life perusing projects that do not produce anything valuable. And then there are few that win Nobel.

Sure, but I'm not sure it's clear that working in e.g. theology didn't help him in his more technical work.

Have a broad and well-rounded view tends to help. I don't know a good mathematician who doesn't read, write, play music, explore other fields with passion and vigor. You get fresh ideas and it keeps your mind limber and flexible.

I'm not sure you could say a Newton who knew nothing but physics and physics only would have made the same breakthroughs.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#107

Post by matt4077 »

It's either ignorant or insulting to name theology in the same breath as alchemy. Theology is still an academic discipline and it doesn't even require a believe in the supernatural. Unless this is pg's attempt to insert himself into fight about "theology" vs. "religious studies".

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#108

Post by marcosdumay »

js8 wrote: post #48

I find it funny that capitalism requires what is essentially an irrational behavior. It seems to me that big public corporations, which avoid risk, and only buy startups once they have been established, are the rational actors. On the other hands, three guys in the garage doing a startup often do it not because they calculate expected profits, but because they want to do it for other than monetary reasons - typically…

About the people on the garage, I don't think you can say it is irrational if they get a big non-monetary benefit from doing it.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#109

Post by adamzerner »

The core idea of this article is that high reward is usually accompanied by high risk. To exemplify this, pg gave a great example of Newton pursuing physics, alchemy and theology.

However, this was just one example. I think the article could be greatly improved by giving, like, 50 examples (in an abbreviated form, like "Newton: physics, alchemy, theology"). With one example it's sorta easy to think, "eh that might just be an exception". With 50 example, it's easy to think, "wow, look at all of that; the core idea definitely does seem to be true".

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#110

Post by whack »

oskarth wrote: post #57
lmkg wrote: post #32

I'm not sure that those lines of study were actually considered separate at the time. A century earlier than Newton's time, math and geometry were considered subfields of astronomy; and astronomy was considered the observation of the realm of the divine. Not only was there not a divide between physics and theology, people actually thought that math was a tool for studying theology (one of Copernicus' sources of incom…

Thank you for reading and commenting with good faith and a, as far as I can tell, correct historical frame in mind. As opposed to with some literalist naive and/or hostile, contemporary-navel-gazing nonsense that is completely missing the point of the essay. For more thinking in a similar direction, see Nassim Taleb's excerpt on the Lindy effect ( https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146e... ), whe…

"If you hear advice from a grandmother or elders, odds are that it works at ninety percent. On the other hand, in part because of scientism and academic prostitution, in part because the world is hard, if you read anything by psychologists and behavioral scientists, odds are it works at less than ten percent"

Some of my favorite books of all time were Taleb's, but I have to say, his writing is the perfect demonstration of power law. 10℅ of his content is remarkably insightful and the remaining 90℅ is unadulterated bullshit.

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