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The Risk of Discovery

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Risk of Discovery

#201

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ajuc wrote: post #126
js8 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you agree there is a difference in behavior between startups and big companies, though? In the way they are willing to invest into something? If you agree, then how can you say both act rationally? Why wouldn't rational people who have labor to offer, instead of joining a startup, go work for a big company? The pay is usually better I hear. Addendum: I am sure you can explain the difference in behavior by invoking…

> If you agree, then how can you say both act rationally? Why should there be only 1 optimal way to play this game? Example of a game with 2 optimal ways to play - tossing a coin and betting on head or tail.

Surely the optimal way to proceed when faced with betting on a coin toss is to keep your stake and guarantee you walk away with some money.

Now it may be possible to evaluate the utility of engaging in a start-up and so act rationally in entering in to such an endeavour but I'd warrant that's not how it [ever] happens. Instead it's far more realistic to assume it follows the lottery model: that people's sense of hope, or wishful thinking, makes them choose to play [at lottery, or startups] despite the analysis indicating an alternate choice is most logical. We humans are not creatures of logic.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#202

Post by pbhjpbhj »

marcosdumay wrote: post #108
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.

Depends, is non-monetary benefit rational? Doing something that risks your food/shelter/comfort/family without guaranteed material return is probably always irrational; doing something for the thrill, or out of love, for friendship, to have the experience, etc.. All ultimately irrational wastes of energy.

There is no rational reason for you to live, you can - and hopefully do - want to, but that's not rationality. That's irrational humanity, or based on irrational axioms.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#203

Post by photojosh »

nostrademons wrote: post #175
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…

Makes you wonder what the "software industry" will look like in 300 years. Good ideas tend to split & bifurcate, until the original term is considered simply common sense and the parts people care about are individual subfields that were trivial when they started. Recall that "industry" used to refer to anything that was mass-produced in a factory, which, back in the 1820s, basically meant textiles. As the general te…

Good point. I do both embedded (well) and web (so-so) dev, and they are worlds apart in almost every aspect I can think of.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#204

Post by gizmo »

sirclueless wrote: post #184
gizmo wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting discussion, although I disagree with the conclusion. I don't think betting the house on a single event is "insane". Businesses make these all-in bets all the time and we're fine with it. Every Hollywood blockbuster is also a billion dollar all-in bet, but nobody bats an eye at that either. Individuals bet a huge percentage of their net worth when they buy a house. Yet when a person invests a large amount…

It's not necessarily as arbitrary as you're making it out. For businesses, the cost of failure is low and the potential upside is enormous. As a result, risk-seeking behavior makes sense, and people generally respect that. For humans, the cost of failure is very high, and the upside is only the productivity of one 2 meter bag of flesh with a brain inside. Taking existential risks as a human is foolish for reasons tha…

I'm not sure what to make of your response. Texting while driving, or simply driving inattentively, is an existential risk. Investing aggressively on the stock market is not. Yet one thing is considered normal, while the other thing is considered reckless. Businesses tend to take too many risks. After all, decisions are made with other people's money, and there are career benefits to taking a risk that works out but there is hardly a penalty for squandering the company's money. Individuals tend to to take the wrong kind of risks: too careless about getting seriously injured and too timid about financial and career risks.

I'm not claiming that all risks by society are judged incorrectly, just that it happens frequently enough that much is to be gained by being really skeptical towards the consensus views on risk.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#205

Post by blazespin »

Maybe alchemy and theology was just how he blew off steam. It seems like me did them a lot, but you know, we all like to have our hobbies.

Trying to describe the mindset of newton 100s of years after his death seems a bit reaching.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#206

Post by bloaf »

olavk wrote: post #191
woodandsteel wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between alchemy and modern chemistry is alchemy is based on a mystic, supernatural view of reality, whereas chemistry assumes reality is basically natural. That makes a huge difference, and chemistry would never have gotten very far if it had stuck with the old metaphysics.

Well it wasn't really "supernatural" at the time. It was literally a theory about the natural world. It just wasn't correct, and have since been replaced with different theories and models.

Yes and no.

I think of alchemy as early contact between mysticism and objectivity. People thought mysticism was a valid way to get info about the world. The failure of alchemy proved them wrong and may have partly led to a more skeptical "hypothesize and test" approach from the original "try to confirm religion" approach.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#207

Post by zenlikethat »

omarchowdhury wrote: post #160
gdubs wrote: post #100

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed." - Michael Jordan

Which basketball player has not missed a shot, has not lost a game, hasn't missed game winning shots? Did they all become like Michael Jordan? Failure may be on the path to success, but failure does not guarantee success.

Yeah, but you could also easily ask how many would-be Jordans stopped short because of all their failures. Point is Michael wouldn't be Michael without it.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#208

Post by Cogito »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #192
pc2g4d wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it matters what his particular theology was. What matters is that theology matters. It affects how people experience and interpret religion, which has a vast impact on the world. So the article's utter dismissal of theology as a waste of time seems misguided to me. Alchemy as well was not so ridiculous as people seem to think. Modern hatred for alchemy seems more like a way of patting ourselves on the b…

As you say dismissing alchemy is probably a bad thing too. Alchemy was the search for the ability to transform matter (particularly Pb->Au). I rather think that nuclear fusion/fission are still consider worthy fields and that creation/discovery of an alchemist's stone - a way to convert readily between different forms of matter - would still be considered a worthy development. I agree too with your synopsis. Physics…

> faith of atheism

I used to entertain this idea, that you need faith to believe there is no god just as much as you need it to believe there are 1000. Perhaps you do. What does not require faith, however, is observation - at least to the limits to which we can test and trust our observations.

Atheism isn't a belief that there is no god, it's an observation that we don't experience any supernatural forces interacting with this universe.

> naive assumption that we know the limits of knowledge

I think very few people claim to know the limits of knowledge, but that is not the same thing as saying we know nothing. Asimov's essay on the Relativity of Wrong [0] is some of the best reasoning along this line of thought.

[He] went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

[0] http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#209

Post by nocman »

olavk wrote: post #187
pc2g4d wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it matters what his particular theology was. What matters is that theology matters. It affects how people experience and interpret religion, which has a vast impact on the world. So the article's utter dismissal of theology as a waste of time seems misguided to me. Alchemy as well was not so ridiculous as people seem to think. Modern hatred for alchemy seems more like a way of patting ourselves on the b…

Newton was trying to predict the end of the world by studying the Bible. The people who wrote the Bible did not actually have any privileged information about the end of the world. Therefore his endeavor was a waste of time. As far as I know Newtons theology had absolutely no impact on anybody except himself.

"The people who wrote the Bible did not actually have any 'privileged information about the end of the world.'"

Well, you might believe they did not, but many people in the world believe they did.

If you do not accept the Bible as revelation from God (and I would guess from your response that you do not), then I can see why you would reach that conclusion.

If, however, you do accept the Bible as revelation from God, the book of, well, Revelation :-D is a huge chunk of "privileged information about the end of the world". Granted, dates of events are not given, and a lot of the book is prophecy, so there is figurative language, but there is a lot of information there.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#210

Post by bloaf »

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.

Do you know of any unambiguous breakthroughs in understanding that have come out of academic theology in the past, say, 200 years? By "unambiguous" I mean "accepted by the majority of other academic theologians."

I have nothing against theology as a hobby or religious pursuit, but at some point we have to say "the well is dry" and admit that there is no grounds for spending public funds on it. Specifically: the only payback we can expect lies in the student's personal religious experience.

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