171–180 of 500 posts
What's the topic that just doesn't leave you alone? For me it's an interest in animal consciousness and communication, even though I am a physicist by training.
If you use Instagram I would encourage you to look at this profile: https://instagram.com/hunger4words It’s a lady who is a speech therapist who has taught her dog to communicate with pre-programmed push buttons.
"The story of radiology in war offers a striking example of the unsuspected amplitude that the application of purely scientific discoveries can take under certain conditions.
X rays had had only a limited usefulness up to the time of the war. The great catastrophe which was let loose upon humanity, accumulating its victims in terrifying numbers, brought up by reaction the ardent desire to save everything that could be saved and to exploit every means of sparing and protecting human life.
At once there appeared an effort to make the X ray yield its maximum of service. What had seemed difficult became easy and received an immediate solution. The material and the personnel were multiplied as if by enchantment. All those who did not understand gave in or accepted; those who did not know learned; those who had been indifferent became devoted. Thus the scientific discovery achieved the conquest of its natural field of action. A similar evolution took place in radium therapy, or the medical application of radiations emitted by the radio elements.
What are we to conclude from this unhoped-for development shared between the new radiations revealed to us by science at the end of the nineteenth century? It seems that they must make our confidence in disinterested research more alive and increase our reverence and admiration for it."
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> "pursue rationally unjustifiable interests" I disagree of how you define rationality here. If someone feels it serves them fine to play 14 hours of a game, it seems perfectly rational for me. Especially in the case that you mentioned, where they were playing before any big money was on the table. It means they liked, despite a lot of people judging them with an air of superiority.
It is objectively irrational. The ones who made a lot of money are 1%. The rest wasted their youth pursuing an impossible dream. They sacrificed their social development and their future job prospects.
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That's kinda the point. Work ethic and obsession are not enough: you have to also win a series of lotteries -- genetic and environmental -- to succeed in his field.
Yes, but work ethic and obsession are the absolute baseline you need.
Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this. I followed most of the rise of Dota from trashy Warcraft 3 mod to Valve's multi-million-dollar-prize-pool juggernaut. The first few crops of Dota millionaires all had the same backstory: "I played this game 14 hours a day. If there were tournaments at all they didn't really pay anything. My parents said I was wasting my life. I never had a girlfriend. Everyon…
> Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this. Anything competitive is emphatically not a good example of this. If you're in a competition, then by definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else. That's a guaranteed recipe for not accomplishing anything meaningful in life. Competition can be great for cultivating positive character traits and developing certain skills, but at some point y…
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No it is not. If someone is playing 14 hours of a game that is not even giving a lot of money (not even to any 1%, which is the initial situation mentioned before DOTA was big), then obviously they are not doing that for the money.
You'd be suprised. It's not uncommon to see players that only play that much because they want to become a pro player, but in the end they never make it, or qualify to 1-2 tournaments. The lucky ones end up making money from streaming, but a lot depend on their parents or girlfriend's for a place to live since they don't make enough money to live off of.
edit: I re-read my previous comment and I am not sure I could make it more clear.
if a game does not gives money prizes at all, the ones who are playing it are not playing for the money.
That heuristic leads to bikeshedding. Try talking to an old white person for whom rap "doesn't sound like music to me." Inevitably they'll bring out the big guns-- that rap "just" takes the music that someone else wrote and talks over it.
Besides, there's no cost to dropping that heuristic. Nobody who scrolls through cat pics is in danger of thinking they are Vincent van Gogh. And if some "cat pic scroller" makes a real breakthrough in the artform I'd really prefer to talk about it without a bunch of grumpy, anti-intellectual gate-keepers whining, "how is that art?"
Paul seems to write about obsession as something that can be cultivated. In my personal experience, this has been either a personality trait or extreme focus and hard work because of some expected reward. For me this article feels more like a motivational speech rather than an actual theory. Anyway - my question is this: Is that an elitist thought or is obsession also one of those things anyone can do if only...?
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Which highly competitive endeavours, that millions of young people spend many hours per week on, aren't?
Tons of other games didn't become big esports, and most of the people who dedicated years to those games ended up wasting their time.
So, did they play these games in the hope to make millions, or because they liked them?