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Fashionable Problems

paulgraham.com

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Re: Fashionable Problems

#151

Post by jacques_chester »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #144
jacques_chester wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the cost that you are likely to just spin your wheels retreading old ground. Examples to the contrary are notable, but notable because they are rare .

I made this assumption for many years, and yes, that cost would be high. I eventually discovered that, more often than not, everyone assumed that someone must have already investigated a particular hypothesis but if you tried to identify that "someone" it turned out that they didn't actually exist. After doing this exhaustive search a few times in a few different domains and coming up empty handed, it changed my pers…

I think you're arguing for doing surveys of literature, which I would also argue for. My argument was against the veneration of From First Principles, which is largely incompatible with Maybe Someone Already Did That, More Completely, More Correctly, A Long Time Ago, And It's Easy To Check First.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#152

Post by akr1 »

Funny, we've just launched EssayMash.com yesterday trying to accomplish what PG writes about: further exploration into essays. We host monthly essay competitions on an important topic with $300+ in cash prizes.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#153

Post by asah »

ddxxdd wrote: post #149
drchewbacca wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In mathematics I'd put forward the conjecture that "for every proven theorem you could ask at least 5 more similar questions which are unproven." For example it is proven there are infinitely many primes. Are there infinitely primes that differ by 2? By n for any n? Are there infinitely many palindromic primes? Are there infinitely many primes of form n^2 + 1? Is there always a prime between n^2 and (n+1)^2? If this…

>Are there infinitely primes that differ by 2? Pardon the digression, but the Twin Primes conjecture was proven by a Subway restaurant worker a few years ago.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Twin+Primes+conjecture+was+p...

Re: Fashionable Problems

#154

Post by _0ffh »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #144
jacques_chester wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the cost that you are likely to just spin your wheels retreading old ground. Examples to the contrary are notable, but notable because they are rare .

I made this assumption for many years, and yes, that cost would be high. I eventually discovered that, more often than not, everyone assumed that someone must have already investigated a particular hypothesis but if you tried to identify that "someone" it turned out that they didn't actually exist. After doing this exhaustive search a few times in a few different domains and coming up empty handed, it changed my pers…

>if I try to find concrete evidence that someone has done the work, there is no evidence that anyone actually has

Unfortunately, the fact that negative results tend to get little if any publicity works against you here. And it's probably worse outside, not inside of academia. How often would a project team in some big company, or a couple of guys in a garage try out some promising alternative approach to something, fail to realize an advantage over the conventional approach, and then go out of their way to publicize that failure? That would be extra work for no - or even negative - gain.

It might just be meant to be humorous, but even "If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence you even tried" sounds more likely than "If at first you don't succeed, put some extra effort into telling everyone".

Re: Fashionable Problems

#155

Post by pnako »

bsder wrote: post #134
chubot wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Many” is almost underselling it. It’s literally EVERY web browser that anyone uses. I don’t know where people get these ideas. OP has a shallow understanding of programming languages, software development, and their history.

> It’s literally EVERY web browser that anyone uses. And is a fine example of path dependence. No one can write a browser in any other language not because C++ is necessarily better but because the activation energy to bootstrap to a useful browser is so large (for example, one must provide a smoking fast Javascript engine before one even considers the web page rendering pipeline). It will be interesting to see how m…

Basically, C++ developers (like me) are stupid. We're like primitive species, stuck with C++ because we can't understand superior languages. The Lisp developers tried to bring us the light, but we chased them away by throwing rocks at them. Now the Rust evangelists are doing the same thing, but I'm afraid we might take a break from writing video games, stock exchange software, safety-critical software, CAD packages, web browsers, video codecs and the like, to throw rocks at them.

My point is: maybe C++ actually _is_ the superior language. It can't be a coincidence that all the best software projects tend to be written in C++, and not in Haskell or whatever.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#156

Post by pnako »

account73466 wrote: post #58
majos wrote: post #42

This post sorely lacks evidence for its big first claim: > I've seen a similar pattern in many different fields: even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they've all worked on similar things. Anyone want to step in with some examples? Without them, the thrust of the essay seems to be: "If only other people understood what…

I am wondering how far the essay would go if it were not from PG.

To start with, it would be called a tweet and not an essay.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#157

Post by stereolambda »

mannykannot wrote: post #64
bawolff wrote: post #52

Seems like a lot of weirdly defensive people in this thread. But the essay doesnt really seem that revolutionary more common sense. If you want to make an impact, dont work in an oversaturated field. The low hanging fruit is probably already picked and other people will probably get there before you do. But you also dont want to work in a field nobody cares about as noone will care. Working on a problem with proven d…

The advice to not work in an oversaturated field, if you want to make an impact, looks to me a bit like the reverse of looking for one's keys under the lamp post, because that is where the light is. We should give some credence to the proposition that saturation is the wisdom of the crowd at work, figuring out where a breakthrough is likely, and it is usually only with hindsight that over-saturation is apparent.

There is a difference here without the society preference and what you should do as an individual. As you are saying, in crowded fields breakthroughs may be likely (or not, due to overexploitation, rampant fashion instead of principles thinking and people digging themselves too deep into one paradigm), but in any case, you are not likely to be participating in them if you're not already a strong player. Thus, if you are doing something like research or development of new things, your marginal impact will be probably tiny.

I would put two caveats on this. First, if you are globally in a good position (world's top university, good connections to get into places) you may be positioned to meaningfully get even into a mature field. Second, if you don't want to do much research and exploration, it's reasonable to reap benefits from specialist knowledge of already proven fields. Just keep an eye on other options to transition to if everything eventually crashes.

Even in crowded areas you should benefit from wide knowledge of horizons and fundamentals beyond what is now fashionable. It may mean just more ideas and perspective. I work in NLP with an interest in AI, and I've dived fairly deep into currently out-of-scope things like rules-based NLP, symbolic AI and biological neurons, their physics and simulations etc. I hope this gives me more viability that your average deep learning guy from a moderate background.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#158

Post by ahartmetz »

pnako wrote: post #155
bsder wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s literally EVERY web browser that anyone uses. And is a fine example of path dependence. No one can write a browser in any other language not because C++ is necessarily better but because the activation energy to bootstrap to a useful browser is so large (for example, one must provide a smoking fast Javascript engine before one even considers the web page rendering pipeline). It will be interesting to see how m…

Basically, C++ developers (like me) are stupid. We're like primitive species, stuck with C++ because we can't understand superior languages. The Lisp developers tried to bring us the light, but we chased them away by throwing rocks at them. Now the Rust evangelists are doing the same thing, but I'm afraid we might take a break from writing video games, stock exchange software, safety-critical software, CAD packages,…

Dunno. As a mainly C++ developer I think Rust is a real alternative because it tries to solve the same problems better. Lisp and Haskell do not solve the same problems. Huge Lisp codebases probably become hard to understand quickly, and both Lisp and Haskell don't produce very efficient code (or make it hard to produce efficient code).

Re: Fashionable Problems

#159

Post by pnako »

ahartmetz wrote: post #158
pnako wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, C++ developers (like me) are stupid. We're like primitive species, stuck with C++ because we can't understand superior languages. The Lisp developers tried to bring us the light, but we chased them away by throwing rocks at them. Now the Rust evangelists are doing the same thing, but I'm afraid we might take a break from writing video games, stock exchange software, safety-critical software, CAD packages,…

Dunno. As a mainly C++ developer I think Rust is a real alternative because it tries to solve the same problems better. Lisp and Haskell do not solve the same problems. Huge Lisp codebases probably become hard to understand quickly, and both Lisp and Haskell don't produce very efficient code (or make it hard to produce efficient code).

Time will tell. At the moment I'm not convinced. Rust is a marginal improvement which is not worth the trade-offs in terms of immaturity, lack of libraries, books, standardization, etc. It might end up just like D. Or it might actually find itself a viable niche.

Re: Fashionable Problems

#160

Post by bartread »

bartread wrote: post #50
est31 wrote: post #44

> Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who would never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems. This makes no sense. The concepts of "conservative" and "fashionable" are almost polar opposites. Becoming a musician or an actor is fashionable and the dream of many. But it won't bring any money t…

> It's conservative to be a cobol coder or a DOS expert... For most people entering a career in tech over the last 20 years those haven't been a consideration, never mind a choice (conservative or otherwise). Nowadays the conservative choices in the sense that PG is talking about here are Java, .NET, Python, C++, C, and possibly AWS and Amazon. But these are also what the market demands. You will get paid, and probab…

EDIT: AWS and Azure.
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