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What I Worked On

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I Worked On

#231

Post by gvb »

mdorazio wrote: post #170

This is a well-written essay even if it's a bit long and somewhat navel-gazing (it is, after all, written for pg himself). However, I was continuously struck by just how ridiculously privileged and serendipitous pg's early life was to the point where I just can't even relate to it. He basically meandered his way from an expensive (today) college to an even more expensive (today) grad school, then to art school becaus…

"Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner, and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through the newspaper determined to find certain job advertisements and, as a result, miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there, rather than just what they are looking for."

— Richard Wiseman

Re: What I Worked On

#232

Post by dang »

DC1350 wrote: post #225
dang wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The question is whether they were above or below the financial threshold where kids know they'll be fine no matter what they do, and so are freer to take risks and pursue their interests. That's a popular argument to make about entrepreneurship being a class privilege, for example showing up in many comments in this thread. I don't know where that line is, but my impression is that people making this argumen…

What do you think about the idea that it's a generational mindset? What motivates me more than anything else is the fear that I'll never own property, and I'll have to live with roommates or a have a very long commute for the rest of my life. It's hard for me to get over this because it looks like that's just mathematical reality. There's not many careers that provide a decent lifestyle anymore so I don't have the op…

My guess is no better than yours, but FWIW I doubt that it's generational. I think people tend to overestimate that factor, plus the current generation also has some advantages over earlier ones, not only disadvantages. I think the causality arrow more likely goes in the other direction: i.e. not that you have this fear because of the generation you were born in, but rather that the fear is influencing you to see things in these terms. I hope that doesn't sound overly psychologizing! It's actually good news if so, because you can't change when you were born, but it's possible to work with fear.

Re: What I Worked On

#233

Post by cdelsolar »

guytv wrote: post #146

I started reading it, and could not stop. Very well written. I hope the sub-text I picked up is all in my head, and that everything is fine. May PG live long and prosper :)

yeah I also thought some terrible announcement was coming at the end, but I think he's ok

Re: What I Worked On

#234

Post by totemandtoken »

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #83

This comment really resonated with me, I found myself in this exact situation at 25, in a "very prestigious and selective place" for AI nonetheless. It took me a couple years to realize the smart people are just playing the game, the unsuspecting losers are "playing it straight" and getting endlessly frustrated. I found my balance by, frankly, taking advantage of a system that is FUBAR. Incidentally, I also took some…

I fear I'm one of these unsuspecting losers...except I guess that comment makes me suspecting.

IDK, I don't want to play the game but it only gets worse in the corporate world. I wish there was a good solution, where someone could play it straight and get rewarded justly.

Your art work is beautiful by the way.

Re: What I Worked On

#235

Post by wglb »

alberth wrote: post #38

How does PG recall so much about college. I was a computer science major as well. I made good grades. I went to university similar to PGs. I’m younger than PG and it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve forgotten that I even took a particular class, let alone recall the professor and certainly don’t recall the small details described by PG. Just curious if I’m the only person who can’t recall as vividly courses as PG can.

Many of my courses are deeply etched in my memories. Static Fields followed by Dynamic Fields in the EE department. A survey course covering Lisp, Snobol, and Prolog. A C99 class covering engineering traffic flow. My first Fortran course where I figured out how to get the compiler to spit assembly language. A course in General Semantics which vastly influenced my thinking. Linear Algebra course, which was the only college math course that I aced. The beginning circuits course learning about Kirchhoff's law. A control system theory class. And working with my eventual advisor who was studying control feed back systems that caused the Bonneville Power Administration network to oscillate in frequency.

And there was a lot of non-class stuff that you seem to get just hanging around, like the Marshall McLuhan medium talk, Larry Atkins who wrote the champion chess program that ran on the CDC 6600 (No, he would insist, it is not Artificial Intelligence--just good engineering). Reading Dijkstra's paper "GOTO considered harmful" which was absolutely true in spades for Fortran II. Keypunching jobs for running in the batch processing mode of the CDC 6600. And seriously fun co-op jobs.

Re: What I Worked On

#236

Post by 0898 »

I don’t have much to add to this discussion except to note that PG has impeccable punctuation but doesn’t capitalise the days of the week. Odd.

Re: What I Worked On

#237

Post by quacked »

desireco42 wrote: post #130

So a weird thing is happening today. When I was a kid, like Paul, I had to beg my parents to get me a computer ie. spend money on it. Once I got it, I couldn't stop using it and hacking and figuring things out. Kids these days... :) have everything, I made sure my kids have all good equipment, they have good instruction but they are kind of not interested it all. If they do something, this is more to please me, as th…

Another commenter already identified the meat of the problem; you were restricted access to computers, whereas your children are not. Here is an article about that exact conundrum, on the concept of "antagonistic learning": https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/educ-103-antagonistic-learnin...

If you DM me, I will be happy to send you a list of similar essays that explore the concept of learning and teaching and why it's done poorly these days. I suggest you start with the essays and writing of John Taylor Gatto; his writings were ludicrously inspirational to me. Here is the first article I ever read that made me realize that I was a deficient learner and had never truly engaged in learning: https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

Consider that Roblox and Youtube are essentially slot machines for dopamine. If you want to engage with your children as creative, disciplined learning machines, they must be weaned off of addictive superstimulus-coded platforms, which is damn near impossible given the tech demands of modern school. I don't have any advice for you on that front, except that the more time you can spend with them the better. Perhaps you can start by playing Roblox and watching YouTube videos with them (taking care to only offer them positive and genuinely interested feedback on what they choose to do), and after they've built you into their habits, begin steering them towards more productive activities.

Re: What I Worked On

#238

Post by fttx_ »

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #83

This comment really resonated with me, I found myself in this exact situation at 25, in a "very prestigious and selective place" for AI nonetheless. It took me a couple years to realize the smart people are just playing the game, the unsuspecting losers are "playing it straight" and getting endlessly frustrated. I found my balance by, frankly, taking advantage of a system that is FUBAR. Incidentally, I also took some…

Your art is beautiful, thanks for sharing.

Re: What I Worked On

#239

Post by ssamkough »

This essay almost made me cry. Beautifully written and just explaining what he worked on and his reasoning behind it step by step. It really feels like he just followed that youthful, gut feeling every step of the way. Crazy.

Re: What I Worked On

#240

Post by burntoutfire »

To me his story of going into painting in his twenties, while having never been interested in visual arts before, spending on and off time on it for years and eventually abandoning it in his forties sounds like a story of internal vs external motivation. He WANTED to like painting, because "he could create something eternal", "he wouldn't have a boss", he made himself interested in it, but in the the end his natural proclivity for conceptual/abstract (and not visual) thinking won over and computers and writing completely dominated his creative efforts. They must have been just intrinsically rewarding for him, as opposed to being "good on paper" like painting was.
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