How to Do Great Work

Post by htss2013 » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 8:51 PM UTC

rosecross wrote: post #191

htss2013 wrote: post #186

"What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for." I'm trying to make sense of this question. Usually people think about boredom as a matter of kind, not degree. X subject is either boring or not to most people, to any degree, small or large. Conceiving of boredom as a matter of degree is counter intuitive. Is this meant to be an insightfu…

Everyone likes movies, but that doesn’t mean they want to discuss cinematography all night.

Post by quacked » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 8:57 PM UTC

anonyme-honteux wrote: post #198

ftxbro wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fourth type is when someone else does the great work and you get the credit

That's so true, why bother doing great work, which is a lot of work, when you can get the credit of many people doing it? That's what Elon Musk has done since the start of his career and it has worked pretty well for him. For that you need to be a really good hype man because it's objectively true that great work that nobody knows about is pure waste. You need to be rich because in the US it's assumed that this means…

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 8:59 PM UTC

MichaelRo wrote: post #137

Well put. But what the article (and others like it) lacks is the fallback, the plan B, the exception handling, what to do if things don't work out as planned. There's a Gauss curve. Simple stuff can be done by any idiot so there's going to be a lot of competition on that. Like picking strawberries, for any position there's 100 Mexicans (in the US) or Eastern European guys (in the EU) willing to do that for cheap. So…

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 9:00 PM UTC

jsunderland323 wrote: post #190

Blahah wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I didn't think it was well put at all. A vast number of words for very little content, and what content can be distilled is useful to approximately nobody. I've never known a person who needed this advice. If you're exceptional in some niche you don't need the advice (if it can be called that). If you aren't, you can be your best and thrive if you are motivated, in which case this is similarly unhelpful. In…

I think part of the point of it is to assure people working on niche problems that embody some of the qualities of what pg is describing as great work. It’s easy to look at the shiny zeitgeist and feel a lot of self doubt if you’re off working on something few outside the niche seem to understand. I’m not sure if this an advice piece as much as an encouragement piece to those readers going through those trenches.

Post by lairv » Sat, Jul 01, 2023, 9:02 PM UTC

cdelsolar wrote: post #199

My problem is that I’ve already chosen what to work on long ago - Scrabble. I’ve built a popular (within the community) study tool, I’ve also been working on an open source AI that I believe is finally better than the state of the art one - I’m going to set up a match between them sometime soon (but need a bot interface, etc). This is without ML, too, which I fully intend to explore soon. And finally I’ve been workin…