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What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

paulgraham.com

201–210 of 332 posts

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#201
post #117

What if the idea of work itself is what you dislike? There are plenty of activities I can enjoy, and some, quite a few of them in fact, are profitable. Once you shoe-horn them into the power dynamic situation of a traditional job (with the bureaucracy that entails unless you're dealing with Actual People as opposed to corporations), suddenly a lot of the luster disappears. As a ridiculous example - I enjoy reading. I…

> What if the idea of work itself is what you dislike? In one of the economic courses I took, the Professor posed this very question. Apparently Karl Marx had also opined along these lines - how would a society incentivize someone who only likes to build sand castles ? He can't monetize the sandcastle because the waves wash them out, so he just builds another one & another one & so on. Sometimes I think programming i…

You have achieved wisdom! Everything in this "contingent world" is sandcastles.

What will endure?

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fields, rings, groups, and all sorts of things. Each of those is just a definition and a handful (literally like 5 or 6) of axioms. If I memorized the axioms and a few key theorems I could usually derive everything else in the homework and on the exams. Most mathematical objects have very similar structure and the rest is just maps (morphisms) between them. > Oh and those greek letters. That's actually a very valid…

> Most mathematical objects have very similar structure and the rest is just maps (morphisms) between them. Is there a book covering this topic that you can recommend?

W. Keith Nicholson's Introduction to Abstract Algebra covers a lot of different topics in mathematics from an algebraic perspective.

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#203
post #38

This excerpt - "what he really liked was solving problems. The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook he'd immediately work out all the problems—to the slight annoyance of his teacher, since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually." is literally me. I did that. Every year at my school I did exactly that. Once I actually turned in m…

What's with all the bad teachers in these anecdotes? I can't imagine any teacher I've ever met getting upset because of something like that. Quite on the contrary.

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#205
post #38

This excerpt - "what he really liked was solving problems. The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them. He said that as soon as he got a new textbook he'd immediately work out all the problems—to the slight annoyance of his teacher, since the class was supposed to work through the book gradually." is literally me. I did that. Every year at my school I did exactly that. Once I actually turned in m…

At my elementary school this was actually encouraged for students excelling in maths[1]. It was offered - but not stressed as important whatsoever - that if you completed the official book of problems ahead of time, you could begin working on the extra book(s) named "Mathimagination". If my memory serves me, there was no extra credit afforded for taking this route; rather, it was purely to keep students interested in and progressing with a subject they enjoyed and in which they excelled. I credit my teacher that year for getting me excited about mathematics, which carried on for many years.

On a related note, my high school had an Advanced Placement English class offered to students selected by previous semesters' English teachers. This option came with an unfortunate snag for all students enrolled in the French immersion track: both the AP English class and a required French class occupied the same period. We were frankly offered the choice to stick with the French immersion we'd been part of for more than 10 years (having started in kindergarten), or to convert to the English track by dropping all French-language classes entirely.

Yeah, the AP class that year was quite small with not a single person dropping the French track. It turns out that people enrolled in the French track are much more likely to land placement in AP English, as being fluent in more than one language steers a person into understanding and appreciating languages more than someone immersed in a single language. Such a ridiculous scheduling blunder by the administration; just the memory of not being part of that class more than 10 years ago makes me sad.

[1] Having grown up in North America where it is common to refer to mathematics as the singular "math", it is still weird to type "maths" even after having picked up the habit a few years ago.

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#207
post #69
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As (failed) physics major, it sounds so strange to hear someone claim to be good at math but not physics. To me physics is 98% math. It's a few empirical facts from experiments and then bucketloads of math.

True, but a lot of chemistry is mostly math too, and I flunked organic chemistry the first time. I think its because there is some domain knowledge involved in these subjects, which you have to actually care about. I don't particularly care which element has how many isotopes and what the valency is and how many other elements it can bond with, though I did memorize the atomic weights of all the elements in the perio…

>> I forgot what it was in the exam. So I just derived it from definitions.

Hah, I did the same :-) ... unfortunately I also forgot the conventional names, and just used 's' (for speed) instead of 'v', and 'd' (for distance) instead of 's'. My teacher did not object the derivation at all, but told me that the results are wrong, because of the letters used ...

Well, point taken - now, I try to pay extra attention and memorize idiosyncrasies like naming conventions ... it saves time when communicating with others.

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#208
I have always had the image that debugging is like this thing that one has to do when one has fucked up.

But thinking of it after reading the last part of the article i realized that i actually find that debugging is quite fun, i have never really thought of it until now.

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#209
post #69
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As (failed) physics major, it sounds so strange to hear someone claim to be good at math but not physics. To me physics is 98% math. It's a few empirical facts from experiments and then bucketloads of math.

True, but a lot of chemistry is mostly math too, and I flunked organic chemistry the first time. I think its because there is some domain knowledge involved in these subjects, which you have to actually care about. I don't particularly care which element has how many isotopes and what the valency is and how many other elements it can bond with, though I did memorize the atomic weights of all the elements in the perio…

Organic chemistry is the least or one of the least math-intensive chemistry subjects at the undergraduate level.

Re: What Doesn't Seem Like Work?

#210
So if I absolutely hate debugging, it means I'm not meant to be a programmer after all (even if I otherwise love everything about programming)?!

I hate debugging (and more generally "diagnostic reasoning" in general... also went through med school long time ago), that I've actually become a "language geek", researching language after language and programming pattern after pattern in order to find strategies to reduce as much as possible the debugging work that I have to do. I've learned Lisp. I've started learning Haskell. Rust is on my "to learn" list now too. And my absolute hate for debugging work makes me research new things every day in the search for that nirvana where code that compiles always works and where you don't have to work 5x as hard to please the compiler either...

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