101–108 of 108 posts
Paul Erdös once stopped using amphetamines for a single month, and couldn't manage to maintain his interest in math _at all_. and this writer claims that it must have been his talent and natural interest? lol "lean into your strengths" is a great adage, but what if my interests are mainly "watching cartoons" and "playing video games" instead of "writing lengthy blog posts about talent"? i dispute that there exists a…
Paul Erdös once stopped using amphetamines for a single month, and couldn't manage to maintain his interest in math _at all_. and this writer claims that it must have been his talent and natural interest? lol "lean into your strengths" is a great adage, but what if my interests are mainly "watching cartoons" and "playing video games" instead of "writing lengthy blog posts about talent"? i dispute that there exists a…
it's isn't just a lenghthy blog post, it's a great article
I've known some people with serious artistic talent. Even if they didn't like it. It seems to be inherited. A friend who was a good graphics artist (drawings in Smithsonian) has a son and a daughter. The daughter can draw well, but doesn't use the skill much. The son grew up drawing cars, and now he draws car designs for a major car company. For both of them, it wasn't all that hard. One unusual skill is the military…
"coup d'œil" reminded me of this book, Napoleon's Glance: The Secret of Strategy by William R Duggan It discusses ideas similar to the ideas in the link you posted.
for a lot of people its possible to become the best plumber in bemdiji. however close to impossible to become the #1 world's tennis player or golfer.
when we play on the internet we are competing globally instead of locally. choose wisely.
I think it has to do with the Brain’s favorite sources of dopamine. If you steer clear of the hedonistic approaches and focus on finding constructive ways to get your dopamine, those constructive ways may give you a living you enjoy. Physics, math, trading, coding, writing are all self-feedback fields you can iterate on in your own to get as good as you want to be. The fact that you don’t depend on others to make pro…
It's like hacking your own reward system
Paul Erdös once stopped using amphetamines for a single month, and couldn't manage to maintain his interest in math _at all_. and this writer claims that it must have been his talent and natural interest? lol "lean into your strengths" is a great adage, but what if my interests are mainly "watching cartoons" and "playing video games" instead of "writing lengthy blog posts about talent"? i dispute that there exists a…
Playing video games apparently prints money these days. People stream it to audiences and get paid ad money. Some random anime facts YouTube channel can also print money if enough people watch it. Cartoons? Make some Tom and Jerry memes and enjoy. People print money by making videos reacting to stuff , basically professional HN commentators posting hot takes in video form. Totally absurd if you ask me but that's the…
Paying video games alone doesn't print money [0], it's being a great entertainer that does, and it's not easy and usually requires quite a bit of talent and the right personality.
And as others have said, just go into Twitch pick a category and check how many channels are streaming that have 0 viewers... it's staggering, I would argue that perhaps only 2% or so of Twitch channels have more than 1 viewer.
Making bank streaming requires not only grueling work of putting video after video, empty streams, etc. for years but also probably being quite lucky, we only see a tiny fraction of people making content out there.
I agree though that this didn't exist 15 years ago, so it's definitively a possibility when before it wasn't!
[0]: Okay you can be a pro-gamer but I think that's even more niche and harder than making content.
I was impressed by the writer and glad about reading the article until I found out he works for Palantir
Everything's luck, or lack thereof. Free will does not exist, but I suppose it's handy for society at large to pretend that it does. I don't know why, but I let myself believe for so long that I was the captain of my ship. Now that I embody the fact that everything's out of my control, I have become so much more relaxed and content with life. I do not compare myself with people that are better (or worse) off than me.…
Paradoxically, we can still make meaningful choices even without free will. Also the hard deterministic view of the universe gets incomplete at the quantum level, so maybe our brains do have some spark of pure chaos that gives us non-deterministic freedom.
Consider thermodynamics: even without quantum weirdness, we can't compute/predict the micro interactions of atoms in a gas. But most average out, and we can make a lot of meaningful predictions on a macro scale.
Back to brains: even if there is some underlying quantum process that might free us from full determinism, on a macro level, it might not matter - you're still gonna value what you value, and make the same "choices".
And if in some cases a "decision" is actually impacted by some quantum effect... is it "agency"? Or just yet another external process affecting us?