231–240 of 500 posts
That’s what “something that matters” means.
Capital decides what matters. Bus tickets matter to the person collecting them. They don’t matter to an outside like Paul graham because they don’t result in capital.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The key ingredient in the obsession is that you're not seeking personal advantage. I wish there was a better word for this than pg's "disinterested" because it sounds strange to have an intense, all-consuming interest in which you're disinterested (see his footnote about choosing this word). Because you're not pursuing personal advantage, this kind of obsession is incompatible with competition. You're obsessively int…
Yeah, I'm not a fan of the word "disinterested" either. "dis-self-interested" might be more accurate, but also not good. Maybe "impersonal"? Still weirdly contradictory but closer to the meaning maybe. "detached" or "impartial"? The limitations of English are weird.
[2] I worried a little about using the word "disinterested," since some people mistakenly believe it means not interested. But anyone who expects to be a genius will have to know the meaning of such a basic word, so I figure they may as well start now.
From dictionary.com, the second definition of disinterested is "having no interest in something," but the first is, "not influenced by considerations of personal advantage."
Great people are almost never good people and I'd rather be good than great.
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The BIGGEST problem with research is this: it's HARD, not easy, to understand. Most papers written are absolute trash. Not because the content is. Because it's written in a shitty, overly braggy way (especially mathematics and physics), that's mostly shouting "I'm better than you and if you don't get it, you're an idiot". They are not written with any USER, let alone, READER, in mind. Anyone would immediately be fire…
I was actively discouraged from writing readable text in my thesis. That kind of behavior would erode the power of the guild.
The purpose of your thesis is to demonstrate to them (and perhaps the larger scientific community) that you can communicate to other scientist in the language of the field, that you possess the requisite knowledge, and that you are prepared to advance that field.
There is no guild, but there are gate keepers (reviewers of various sorts) and you must be prepared well enough to make convincing cases (for publication, funding, etc.) Your advisors were training you for this role.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could take this argument all the way down. Why did valve pick it up? I don't think they saw dota2 as a profit engine necessarily, though there is some argument for that. The company does tend to engage in bus ticket obsessions (VR, dota2). Sometimes it fails (artifact). But I strongly suspect that Gabe Newell bus tickets dota2. I would guess that like myself, he has no real skill at the game, but he just loves it…
When valve picked up dota, league of legends was the most played multiplayer pc game in the world. I think it’s more likely that valve was afraid of exodus of pc gamers from their platform.
Being born right, number one factor of success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which thought experiment?
What would it be like to ride on a beam of light? What would happen if you're on a motorcycle that's going the speed of light, that then has a headlight that's throwing light forward at the speed of light?
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…
I have a similar story. I dropped out of school at 16, and spent 14+ hours a day playing Stepmania Online, which was Dance Dance Revolution for your fingers. I was one of the best in the world! Then everyone stopped playing and nothing came of it. So for every DOTA millionaire or whatnot there’s likely thousands of people who are obsessed with something equally niche who haven’t realized any financial gains because of it.
Now I’m a software engineer, it’s working out way better than playing video games all day.
I agree with his theory, but what I find particularly interesting is that I think most people do not have an obsessive interest in anything at all. And as someone who has obsessive interests in a lot of things (some “useful”, some not), that seems really odd to me: how can you just be satisfied to go to work, come home, watch TV, and go to bed each day? (Not saying that’s the wrong way to live, just saying it is surp…
Although the child prodigy is a popular image, I don't actually know anyone who's ended up doing the same thing all their life since they were young. People bounce around a lot before they hit something that clicks. Sometimes it's at 15, sometimes it's at 50.
Even people who have obsessive interests today first went through their boring phases, too.
This is very close to some of my own observations about talent. Whenever I've had the info to compare, I tend to find a different degree of skill among coders who started as teens compared to those who came to it later. I put it down to interest. Obsessive teens end up spending huge amounts of time learning things. Teenagers know very little about what makes money, at least when I was a kid. The cat may well be out o…
The universality of compulsive teenage skill-building means that different cultures see it manifest in different ways. In ours, gaming is a big way it manifests, and when I was a teenager there was a skateboard subculture, perhaps there still is. In 14th century Mongolia all the boys learned horse archery, which is part of why they conquered the biggest land empire in world history. This is also where approximately all professional athletes come from—usually combined with extraordinary ego and competitiveness, though occasionally some (perhaps Messi) might have more of the obsession pg writes about.