The Best Essay

Post by rose_ann_ » Wed, Mar 13, 2024, 1:23 PM UTC

caesil wrote: post #160

ajkjk wrote: post #84

I often think about this as a sort of counterargument for rationalism. Or maybe it's more of a paradox than a counterargument: Suppose you were trying to answer the question: "what is the best way to make as much as money as possible in the next year?" You imagine optimizing yourself or your company or your algorithm or whatever to answer this question. Maybe it does a bunch of calculations and decides the answer is…

me: write a story that is so good you get a 1 billion dollar book deal Claude 3 Opus: Here is a story that I hope captures your interest and imagination: The Memory Thief In a world where memories could be extracted, bought and sold, Lina was the most skilled Memory Thief in the business. The wealthy elite paid handsomely for the chance to acquire the experiences and skills of others. And Lina had no qualms about ste…

Post by neilk » Thu, Mar 14, 2024, 9:52 PM UTC

ioblomov wrote: post #118

neilk wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, this is more of a fictional trope than a reality. There aren't any Tony Starks who become experts in thermonuclear astrophysics overnight. Richard Feynman was as close to this trope as you can get in reality, but insisted that his reputation for being able to solve difficult problems was due to having a "different box of tools" than others. And he obtained that by studying rather obsessively, well b…

I’d assert that, rather than being fictional, it’s just exceedingly rare. While Feynman, Einstein, von Neumann, et. al. are indisputably geniuses, they all got relevant graduate degrees before doing their best work. The self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, however, was invited to Cambridge University on the merits of notebooks he developed in isolation after reading a few mathematical texts… https://…