231–240 of 344 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scientists can become very selective when dealing with alternatives to their world view. No, they just remember people for their contributions rather than their mistakes.
Pretty arrogant and ignorant statement considering some of our best scientific discoveries were mistakes.
Could you give a few examples?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"> 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. ..." "Atheism isn't a belief that there is no god" ^ actually it is: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/atheism?s=t noun 1. the doctrine or belief that there is no God. 2. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings. I think perhaps part of the problem is t…
Hopefully it's clear that I know the dictionary meaning of 'atheist'. I'll expand the point I was trying to make slightly and address your use of 'faith'. In a very strict sense of the word, atheism is an assertion that there is no god/supernatural being. It is clear that this assertion is impossible to prove, only possible to prove wrong. For any god you prove does not exist it is trivial to imagine one that does an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Except it was three Maybe he's referring to the bets Newton (somewhat implicitly) made by dedicating time to physics/science as well as alchemy and theology.
I think alchemy at the time was just another domain of science than anything else. To them it was like today's dark matter and dark energy or figuring out cold fusion or reaction-less drives. These are not really bets, it's all what Newton was, a man's passion, life and legacy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Startups are not much risk, though. You start out without, you try to make something, if it doesn't work out just having the experience as long as it wasn't a total catastrophe makes you hirable anywhere you want or you try again. The most you might lose is the support of friends and family if your dreams aren't fully realized. Which can be a lot, but that is why the people who have the most to lose don't try startup…
Founding a failed startup does not "make you hireable anywhere you want."
The point is that if you go through a decent period [2] of running a start-up you will acquire experience and skills that will make you much more attractive for hire compared to yourself without that experience. What's more, the quality of this real world experience will most likely far surpass anything you would gain in a classic university in the same amount of time [3].
--
[1] Depending on how literal we want to be with these word games, there are some tricks that can be done with the "you want" part of the phrase to adjust how much it applies.
[2] Let's say 6 months full-time minimum.
[3] There's no way to give a universal estimate here for everyone. However for people who are capable of self-teaching, the startup experience can be orders of magnitude more useful than university time.
For people who wonder why YC and pg are okay with some of Peter Thiel's more extreme behavior, this is why. It's pretty interesting that pg describes the possible outcomes of contrarian ideas as either positive for society or merely a waste of time. Even though the pursuit of risky and contrarian ideas can also be hugely harmful for society.
Or maybe its because Thiel is a useful person to associate with and enough money is on the line that pg's claim that he'd be the "first to bring about the resistance" doesn't apply because Thiel, like Andreessen, is too important to be stood up to. I've lot so much respect for YC wrt Thiel. Trump is such an obvious villain that if you're not against him you're an enabler. I don't care that he's become normalized in t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe its because Thiel is a useful person to associate with and enough money is on the line that pg's claim that he'd be the "first to bring about the resistance" doesn't apply because Thiel, like Andreessen, is too important to be stood up to. I've lot so much respect for YC wrt Thiel. Trump is such an obvious villain that if you're not against him you're an enabler. I don't care that he's become normalized in t…
Roughly half the country voted Trump so it's a bit excessive to shun all of them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe they just believe in Thiel's free speech rights.
Peter Thiel isn't a regular guy with an imaginative twitter stream. He's an influential and highly connected billionaire. This has nothing to do with free speech.
Which makes him totally different from the Member of Parliament for Cambridge, Master of the Mint, intellectual grandfather of the enlightenment, etc.
By the way, Isaac Newton MP did have a somewhat lasting influence on theology: he got to vote in 1688.
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…
It goes even deeper than that. At the time at Cambridge there was only one subject to study, called the Tripos, which included all these things. Overtime they've gradually stripped parts of the course into their own separate subjects. The only thing left is mathematics, which leads to a curious ceremony when you graduate with a maths degree which none of the other subjects have. So to Newton Theology and Maths were t…
I love this insight. I have often experienced in my life seeing someone come up with something really useful in the midst of spouting complete rubbish. Oddly it is about 50/50 internal and external, where half the time they stop in the middle of what they are saying and realize they have a really good idea, and half the time someone else stops them and says "hey, that could really work." or something like that. The c…
Well darn it, that's how we were taught in engineering school.