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The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

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Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

#291

Post by petra »

icelancer wrote: post #260
galfarragem wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society deify successful people when in reality they are nothing more than serial lottery winners. For every "Ronaldo" there are a myriad of people trying to get there that will end their life as losers because they made an high-stakes bet and lost. The truth in unconfortable and nobody wants to listen about it.

>> Society deify successful people when in reality they are nothing more than serial lottery winners This is absolutely false and a terrible thing to perpetuate. Work ethic has the highest controllable coefficient to success as an output. Luck exists and the universe is probabilistic, yes, but it is not non-deterministic. This self-lashing of our community and amongst the populist movement that is growing in populari…

>> it would be better to believe the myth that we have full control over our destiny rather than this ridiculous concept that luck controls ~100% of circumstance.

Why think in black and white ?

We have a lot impact on our lives, but there's also some luck involved, especially if we want to achieve extreme things.

Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

#293

Post by dr_dshiv »

If anyone wants a beautiful obsession that requires only kindle books and internet searches, allow me to suggest Western Esotericism. It's not what you think.

Try to reconstruct the role of Pythagoras on modern society-- and then realize that the first attested hypothesis-driven scientific research question still hasn't been answered.

Start with "Western Esotericism: a guide for the perplexed" or the incredible Shwep.net, the "secret history of Western Esotericism podcast".

Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

#294

Post by rdiddly »

The value judgments necessary to even construct the questions this essay tries to answer, kind of make the whole thing self-referential and self-fulfilling. Has "genius" been adequately defined before getting started? Has "great work?"

First we have the concept of an obsessive interest in something. But this apparently isn't "genius" unless the interest is in something that "matters." Matters to whom? The collecting of bus tickets matters to the bus ticket collector. People whose work a great number of people regard as great or genius, are by definition, working on things that a great number of people find important. Is it a voting thing, we need popularity? I thought our interest was disinterested.

Besides which, being obsessed with any single thing sounds suspiciously like the idea of a "calling," which I finally had to reject because I never had one. I had more like 6 things I was interested in. And I've pursued each, in turn, with a varying amounts of effort that in some cases could've been characterized as obsessive, but only for a time. I went deep but not long. And I got surprisingly far in each, in a shorter period of time than most people. In short, I suppose I'm a generalist, or you could uncharitably say, a dilettante. Am I not a "genius?" Have I not done "great work?" You can't answer, because I'm not popular, and you've never heard of me. I just want to point out in particular, that you can't answer "no." Genius and great work are all over the place out there, and they don't need to be acknowledged to be genius.

Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

#295

Post by robocat »

glofish wrote: post #92
abj wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't stop thinking about applied fun theory to card game mechanics. I'm building a card game where you never leave the flow state. (I know there's been a lot of cash grab card games recently. I just genuinely enjoy card games.) Specifically this question - Why is soccer more widely played than checkers? Physical Mastery - repetitive exploration of real world ball physics encourages a sense of mastery. Checkers doe…

I don't want to sound overly critical of your explanations but you seem to ignore the most important difference: We play soccer with our entire bodies, muscles, heart, legs, lungs get a workout. Not to insult the players but mind and thought processes are somewhat secondary, it is about the "lizard brain": attack and defend with instincts and reflexes. When you play checkers it is your mind that gets a workout. It is…

> It is the intellect that gets a workout. The exact opposite of the soccer.

I think you deeply underestimate how much thought and intellect go into playing soccer. It is a game, and applying intelligence to it is necessary to be good at it.

Disclaimer: I don't like football (US: soccer), but I know very smart people that play.

Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

#296

Post by milesvp »

yingw787 wrote: post #269
toasterlovin wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't relate to people. Nobody understands you. Your value structure is messed up. Parents point to you and tell their children to not be like you. Given that this is not an experience which is at all unique to intelligent people, why should the assumption be that, when this happens to someone intelligent, somehow it was caused by intelligence?

I once worked at a place where one interview question was, "Imagine you were digging a hole x by y by z and it look q minutes. How much dirt was in the hole at time r"? I instantly answered, "There's no dirt in the hole, because a hole is defined by there not being any dirt". They were like, "Wow, that was fast. Most people we interview take five to ten minutes to come to that conclusion". Me: "I have a really bad fe…

This interview question sounds disingenuous, if this was the only correct answer. It’s sort of a poorly worded question, and I’d only ask it if I wanted to see how the interviewer poked holes in it. Even then I’d be sort of an asshole for it. But the main reason it’s disingenuous is the same reason HN has the rule to always be generous with your interpretation of comments. Words are ambiguous, and people take lots of shortcuts to save time at the expense of precision. ‘Hole’ in the context of this question can very reasonably be generously be interpreted as ‘the space where the final hole will be at time q’. It sounds like a ‘gotcha question’, and these have no place in an interview.

Meanwhile, keep your head up. You can sort of learn to turn down the literal interpretation impulses of your brain, if that’s something causing you pain. It’s something I’ve gotten better at over the last 30 years (though its still really hard when I’m tired or stressed). It makes casual encounters easier, and more enjoyable when I do.

Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

#297

Post by adventured »

Alex3917 wrote: post #150
sgentle wrote: post #72

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…

> Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this. Anything competitive is emphatically not a good example of this. If you're in a competition, then by definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else. That's a guaranteed recipe for not accomplishing anything meaningful in life. Competition can be great for cultivating positive character traits and developing certain skills, but at some point y…

> If you're in a competition, then by definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else. That's a guaranteed recipe for not accomplishing anything meaningful in life.

That's a mistaken conclusion because you didn't follow it properly to the narrowed end: if you're in a large field of competition at a thing and you're among the best in the world at it, then the exact opposite is more likely to be true (you will likely do something meaningful and have extreme success) and your supposed guaranteed recipe collapses.

This premise holds true in eg: business, acting, music, science, traditional sports, games like chess, and numerous other fields.

Right now, around the world, dozens (or hundreds) of scientists are competing to reach the same breakthrough. They may not know who all the competitors are and may not know they're all chasing the same thing, but they are. One or a small group of them will get there before the rest. It is competition and it doesn't exclude you from doing something meaningful: you need to win the competition.

See: Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Kurt Cobain, Whitney Houston, Craig Venter, Garry Kasparov, John Carmack, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos

All had to rise to the top of highly competitive fields with a large supply of competitors. How many other grunge bands were there next to Nirvana? How many other singers did Whitney Houston have to stand apart from? How many other women (frequently younger, a big deal in tennis) has Serena Williams had to competitively outlast over ~20 years to spend so much time on top of her sport and put together one of the greatest sports careers of all-time? It's a never ending supply of younger, highly talented competitors, and yet Williams did what she did.

Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

#298

Post by narag »

ramphastidae wrote: post #275
yingw787 wrote: post #243

My take on genius is that it's akin to insanity, and for some of us, insanity doesn't seem to be so insane (which itself is an insane thing to say). Nikola Tesla ended his life alone, with a box of scrap parts as collateral for his rent ( https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-about... ). Friedrich Nietzsche wrote "The Parable of the Madman" ( http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html ), and apocryph…

I am convinced that this idea of people who are just too smart for society is way overblown and quite damaging. I see it so often in tech — the “10x” engineer who is just too smart for social norms like polite communication or hygiene. They are not held to them same social standards as others because they are “just different.” In reality, these folks just use the fact that no one else knows how their code works as an…

I see it so often in tech — the “10x” engineer who is just too smart for social norms like polite communication or hygiene.

I have met a number of programmers that could be very well defined as 10x and not a single one of them were unpolite or lacking hygiene.

I have met a number of programmers that were rude and lacked hygiene and they were more like fractional or negative.

Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

#299

Post by corporateslave5 »

ramphastidae wrote: post #275
yingw787 wrote: post #243

My take on genius is that it's akin to insanity, and for some of us, insanity doesn't seem to be so insane (which itself is an insane thing to say). Nikola Tesla ended his life alone, with a box of scrap parts as collateral for his rent ( https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-about... ). Friedrich Nietzsche wrote "The Parable of the Madman" ( http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html ), and apocryph…

I am convinced that this idea of people who are just too smart for society is way overblown and quite damaging. I see it so often in tech — the “10x” engineer who is just too smart for social norms like polite communication or hygiene. They are not held to them same social standards as others because they are “just different.” In reality, these folks just use the fact that no one else knows how their code works as an…

These 10x engineers are smart, but they aren’t geniuses. Genius is more rare

Re: The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

#300

Post by eVoLInTHRo »

knzhou wrote: post #268
dasil003 wrote: post #172

I like the thesis, but peeling the onion back, there's an implicit assumption that one is always optimizing for world-changing impact. Looking back at Newton and sorting his work into useful/worthless buckets after a few hundred years tells us nothing about how he actually valued these pursuits, and what motivated him at the time. As silicon valley culture goes mainstream, salaries at big tech soar, and increasing nu…

I thought the point of the essay is that the obsessed will be obsessed, with possibly great results, regardless of whatever the lucrative career path of the moment is. It's not about anybody "optimizing" anything.

The first half of the essay aligns with your takeaway. But the second half does start to delve into how to identify useful obsessions, starting with "But there are some heuristics you can use to guess whether an obsession might be one that matters." Which sounds like an optimization, and which seems at least somewhat at odds with a major starting premise that you mentioned ("They're not doing it to impress us or to make themselves rich, but for its own sake.").

I agree with OP, the thesis makes sense assuming the primary goal of one's life is discovering world-changing ideas (what he's calling "genius"). That's understandable from a VC perspective since that's basically what VCs do. But most of us here aren't VCs, and while idea discovery is a great goal to have even if you're not a VC, it doesn't have to be the primary one.

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