> Delete the draft of that blog post you were writing. The post sucks and no one was going to read it anyways. Blog posts for me but not for thee?
Please put the cherry back in it's context, or I'll have to ask you to leave the store.
Fuck Your Miracle Year
121–130 of 169 posts
Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year
#122It has come to light that Einstein's first wife likely was co-author of his papers but got no credit due her gender.[1] I see no mention of that in either article. Historically, it was sort of a given that a man's career was supported by the labor of a wife. This assumption is baked into how we design jobs and it's problematic in a world where that's less true than it once was. If you don't count hidden contributions…
> Einstein's first wife likely was co-author of his papers
What’s the source for that claim? This just links to another of your own comments, which is also unsourced.
Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was able to do that while I was still studying, which mostly involved memorizing a bunch of stuff. The software industry and its endless meetings drain my energy way more
Studying feels like hard work when you are a kid, but it's kind of a joke how easy and non-draining it is in retrospect. Doing actual work is just so much more taxing.
I think it's due to how linear studying is. Actual work on the other hand can be quite unpredictable, it's a bit like a monster of the week show where monsters are incidents, bugs, and unreliable leaders. And there's also linear work on top of it.
Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year
#124I don't understand either one of these articles to be honest. We're talking about Einstein and Newton as if their success is reproduceable if we just give people time to think? We don't have miracle years now because people like Einstein are impossibly rare. That's assuming Einstein was even human. We also don't have "miracle years" because the term doesn't actually mean anything. It's not real. Maybe the pressures o…
Einstein wasn’t that special, he wasn’t superhuman, if you transported the same person in time significantly he would have likely been entirely unremarkable. He had many contemporaries just as capable with complements equally as impressive. He got famous which was a result of a few of his accomplishments being of topics and characters which got the attention of popular culture. He was also simply primed with being a…
Anybody very successful has had a lot of luck, that's a given.
But since it's about science, and revolutioning it on too of that, claiming there was nothing special about Einstein make little sense.
Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year
#125It has come to light that Einstein's first wife likely was co-author of his papers but got no credit due her gender.[1] I see no mention of that in either article. Historically, it was sort of a given that a man's career was supported by the labor of a wife. This assumption is baked into how we design jobs and it's problematic in a world where that's less true than it once was. If you don't count hidden contributions…
> Einstein's first wife likely was co-author of his papers What’s the source for that claim? This just links to another of your own comments, which is also unsourced.
This just links to another of your own comments, which is also unsourced.
No, it doesn't link to a comment by me at all. It links to an HN discussion of the article about that very topic. It just so happens my comment is the top comment there which I didn't remember when I went looking for it.
Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith as “out of this world” did not appear until this comment. This would be similar to calling Einstein a cow, then waiting an hour to say it’s because he’s outstanding in his field.
This thread just keeps getting weirder. Am I on HN?
That's what they want you to believe.
Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most academic discoveries come from the same kind of hand-me-down process as practical inventions. Newton's tutor was the one who encouraged him toward studying proto-calculus. He even wrote down the fundamental theorem of calculus himself once but not realizing its importance never publicized it.
Interesting! I'd appreciate any sources though.
Here's a nice example of the "contingency" of scientific success by Bol, de Vaan, and van de Rijt (2018). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1719557115
Grants are reviewed and ranked by a panel of experts. While they often agree in the broad strokes, their scores also have random or subjective components: different reviewers might prefer different approaches; even the same reviewer might give slightly different scores if they re-reviewed a grant (e.g., due to their mood). However, someone eventually does need to set a payline, or threshold for funding.
As a result, you'd expect people who submitted the worst funded grants and the best unfunded grants, which have very similar scores, to have similar career trajectories. After all, their abilities--as measured by grant scores--are virtually indistinguishable. However, the winners go on to win nearly twice as much funding in the next eight years. This presumably reflects the fact that funding begets more funding (you can collect more and better data for subsequent work) and prestige begets more prestige (you've now got another thing to put in the "awards" category).
Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year
#128I'm reminded of an interview I saw with Ayn Rand a long time ago. I can't find the exact interview anymore but I did find an interview where she describes the general idea [1]. It is a central tenant of Objectivism that we should be doing more for gifted children based on the assumption that gifted adults contribute more to society.
We see echoes of this philosophy in our culture of belief in 10x engineers. I see it in Jeff Bezos' management philosophy of doubling down on success or in Google's philosophy of killing off under-performing projects. It is the mantra of VC capitalism where we'd rather kill middling projects that are limping along in the hopes or redirecting capital to the one 100x return behemoth.
I find Rand's ideas repugnant myself but I always admired that she plainly and unabashedly spoke them. Nowadays people who believe that kind of stuff are much more subtle.
Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually disagree. It’s kind of a power law distribution thing where 1% of the people make 99% of the real scientific breakthroughs. We should absolutely optimize for geniuses.
Sounds like a good way to create even more cults of personality and egotistical assholes who can't work in a team. Breakthroughs aren't made by lone geniuses anymore. We just have that superhero fetish eg. picture of black hole where credit was practically given to that one woman in the picture.
Breakthroughs were rarely made by lone geniuses even before. Sure, there are some, but even Edison had a huge lab full of people doing the work.
Bell labs was extremely successful (at least on the innovation front) not due to lone geniuses, but due to a large collection of very smart people all collaborating together.
Re: Fuck Your Miracle Year
#130> Also, stop meditation and trying to optimize your mental and physical performance. Has anyone who’s ever had a miracle year cared about any of this shit? I’d say Lex Fridman is in his equivalent of a miracle year, or was last year anyway. Keeping the body tuned is important for mental ability which is important if you’re trying to be productive at all, much more to achieve a miracle year.
What miracles did he do? I’m genuinely confused. Seems like he’s just doing podcast interviews these days. And he moved to Austin? Hardly a Newtonian miracle year. I think he’s just getting mentored by Rogan which is why he’s doing a bit better