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Just a self-delusion due to lack of research. It's all due to technology advances, all of it. Against increasing drought and heat. Sure corn grows in more places now. Because they warmed up - a concern of its own. They'll not stop warming up. Witness https://globalnews.ca/news/9761043/dry-spring-southern-alber...
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I am amazed how many people take their fortunes for granted and then preach about how they "worked harder than anyone else hence deserve much more than the others". You have to be incredibly lucky to get to that point. In case of chronic illness (like brain fog) you are pretty much destined to fail.
I’m also amazed how people will take a self-improvement article like this, and take it so personally. Like yes, pg was lucky to have a lot of things work out for them, but that doesn’t mean his advice here (which encompasses more than just “work hard”) is invalid for everyone just because it’s invalid for some people.
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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…
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…
As usual, this is both interesting but also so generalizing as to get frustrating in places. But it’s clearly well-meaning and earnest, which makes it easier to tolerate some of its annoyingly breezy certainty. Then there’s this: > Religions are collections of cherished but mistaken principles. So anything that can be described either literally or metaphorically as a religion will have valuable unexplored ideas in it…
> [18] The principles defining a religion have to be mistaken. Otherwise anyone might adopt them, and there would be nothing to distinguish the adherents of the religion from everyone else. I think what's going on here is the theory that the purpose of religion is to create a trusted in-group separated from the out-group, with rules that make it difficult to casually join. [1] If you start from that premise, PG's foo…
That does make what he’s saying there cohere better. Of course, what he’s saying turns entirely on the ambiguity he’s playing on (which I suspected): religion in the sense of concrete historical/social human practices and religion in the sense of identifying strongly with and thus not questioning your principles. Never a good idea to hang your hat on the coatrack of suggestive language games. Or, you know, outrageous bullshit.
I almost think it makes it worse, finding a coherent meaning—-which is so silly.
Another thing you need: patience. I'm 34, and just in the last year reached the point where I have: - enough experience and context to do great work, and - the right people to leverage that context and experience on meaningful applications It took a lot of waiting for that ideal blend of circumstances to come around. I wish I'd have been able to tell my 26 year old self that as he slogged through an entry level EE jo…
It always takes longer than you think, even if you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.