Live data from Hacker News

The Risk of Discovery

paulgraham.com

311–320 of 344 posts

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#311
post #303
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't slip a piece of paper between Paul and Jesus. Jesus himself authenticates Paul as one of his apostles. What does this even mean? Jesus never mentioned Paul, and Jesus and Paul never even met.

"Jesus never mentioned Paul" According to Luke, in Acts 9:15 he did: "But the Lord said to him [Ananias], “Go, for he [Paul] is a chosen instrument of mine to carry my name before the Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel." Apart from that, Peter also understood that Paul had been authenticated by Jesus as his apostle, see 2 Peter 3: "Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear bro…

Then again, God told Mohammad that Jesus wasn't dead at all, so clearly Paul and therefore Ananias are unreliable. Which just goes to show that when you base your chain of reasoning on believing people claiming God spoke to them, you get into all kinds of contradictions. Because lots of people claim God have spoken to them, and He does not seem to be very consistent in his messages.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our species?

Yep, it's a reference to homosapiens. We have been talking to each other for a while now, spreading our knowledge. It's the stories we pass on, logic, math, physics and medicine that predicated inhabiting nearly everywhere and becoming so many. We are on a higher-order mutation now, many thoughts live and die in a generation. The advantageous ones stick around (eg. Newton's). We pass them on from generation to genera…

Will do

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#313
Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" goes into great detail about Isaac Newton's life, and his focus on alchemy and theology. It is of course fiction, but well researched and utterly fascinating. I recommend it!

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#314
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very interesting insight, but isn't it also true that Newton decidedly left theology out of calculus and mechanics? What distinguished his three laws was that he chose not to explain, for example, the motion of something by its "ferver" or "jubilance," as his predecessors did. People at the time may not have treated the fields so separately, but Newton did. Edit: I just ran the quote through Google Translate…

Um. No, he definitely didn't leave theology out of his mathematics. See, for instance: http://inters.org/Newton-Scholium-Principia-Mathematica "This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all: And on account of his dominion he is wont to be called Lord God Pantokrator,or Universal Ruler...." and, like, this stuff is all over the place in the Principia. You cannot separate Newton the…

Oops, I didn't know that!

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#315
post #280
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newton's theology was extremely heretical (to all major religious factions, as he was an anti-Trinitarian!) at a time when religious politics in England were brutal and could easily be fatal; being expelled from Cambridge for violating the religion oaths/tests would've only been the start. And, incidentally, alchemy was, besides being highly disreputable & associated with con artists, illegal in England for centuries…

Good points. His position must have been tenuous anyway as it was a requirement of Cambridge that all Fellows become ordained Anglican priests. Newton only avoided this by special exemption from Charles II and it is not likely that he could afford to be exposed as breaking other regulations. Maybe this is part of the reason he was so reluctant to publish, he may have wondered if his physical reasoning could be constr…

But you are actually making my point for me. Opportunity cost is a vacuous argument. Everything you do has an opportunity cost. That's not a risk, it's just a consequence of the laws of physics.

Maybe publishing would have counted as taking a risk for the reasons you cite, but Newton resisted publishing for a very long time, so he was actually avoiding that risk. So once again it really seems to me that Newton is not a good example of the merits of taking risks. (Quite the contrary in fact.)

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#316
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not also see a paradox in claiming to be able to observe the unobservable? As others have mentioned in the thread, scientists didn't just wake up one day and decide to ignore everything supposedly "unobservable". Science was once intertwined with theology. Over the centuries, the methods we now call science produced results, while other supposed "ways of knowing" did not. Scientific knowledge con verges over t…

The unobservable category includes a lot more than religion. It may be that scientific knowledge converges more easily simply because it limits itself to what is observable or maybe, more accurately, what is mechanistic and observable. Take ghosts, for example. Do they exist? Let's conduct an experiment and take cameras to a supposedly haunted house. The ghosts in question decide to hide from the cameras. See, no gho…

Here's another question: does decadence exist? The physicist would say that it's a meaningless question; the historian -- or politician -- would be well advised not to listen.

(Barzun, in From Dawn to Decadence, defined a decadent period as one which has an objective which it wants to reach, which it could reach if it made the sort of changes which it has made in the past, and which it fails to reach nonetheless. I forget where I heard it, but there's an idea that there's social technology as well as physical -- and social technology is easier to lose.)

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#317
post #140
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG wants to make startups/hackers surpass earth-shattering thinkers, by considering the differences in the existential risks taken by each. Newton was betting (in PG's interpretation) that he would not go crazy or be seen as crazy. The existential risk for thinkers. Now to make scummy => crazy, where "=>" can also mean "greater or equals to".

Usually I see "greater or equals to" written as >= Anyways, why shouldn't founders/hackers reach for such heights? But if I didn't know Paul Graham's background, I wouldn't assume that's what this essay infers. Rather, the essay doesn't say anything directly about startups. I'm curious what's scummy about them to you?

I had no time to write a full-fledged comment but people here took offense. Shrugs. I meant that the existential risk for founders is that of looking or being scummy. The precise, non-offensive definition of the sense of "scummy" that I intended, which unfortunately does not rhyme with "crazy", is, "profit from information asymmetry". Newton did not clearly "profit" --- though I had almost taken the 3 bets to mean the ones he placed on the South Sea --- even though he had a massive edge. (Pretty much people are arguing about scale here, in my opinion.) I do think PG wants a modern edge over Newton's methods, which concretely means pumping the applied intuitions/phronesis of the SV intellectual elite using software value capture or the VC network. By the way YC do employ heavy-duty "scum filters", e.g. the women interviewers. This is all consistent to the point of being trivial.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please don't get stuck on semantics. That's a blaming statement used to indicate someone is being pedantic, which can then be used to "prove" them wrong by the followup. All of your counter examples are based on the obtaining a better position, which is all about dealing with globalized suffering (money is stored work and work is a unit of causality and suffering is a result of causality). Newton presumably pursued…

Are you denying he had any choice in what areas of discovery to pursue? And that there were no trade-offs involved? If not, then you are stuck on semantics.

I'm not stuck on semantics, so that's the truth of the matter, whether you attempt to rationalize I am or not. Make no mistake that semantics are always important. Without the English language, neither you or I could communicate concepts here. It also allows you to attempt to reword what others are saying, but I'm not going to allow that here.

When you attempt to state someone is "stuck on semantics" and that person actually hasn't said as much, you are speaking for their intent. When that is backed up with the intent of proving them wrong on some topic, it only serves to indicate intent. The older I get, the more irritating this behavior becomes, especially when the person refuses to acknowledge what is being said and continues to rationalize from their point of view in order to frame a statement by someone else. You act as if language (and semantics) are logical. They aren't, and neither are humans. We'd do well to stop speaking for each other in aggregate in an attempt to make it more logical. This concept itself is counterintuitive.

Newton had every choice to pursue interests. Not having prior knowledge of "areas of discovery", it would appear he pursued what was interesting to him. If you look at Faraday, he pursued things to find a single source force - I would expect Newton though along the same lines. In fact, even if he knew someone else was interested in an "area of discovery", he could have just been interested in that topic for purely knowing purposes.

Wanting to know more about things, the nature of things if you will, is not something that can be considered a "bet". It's simply curiosity.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#319
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not also see a paradox in claiming to be able to observe the unobservable? As others have mentioned in the thread, scientists didn't just wake up one day and decide to ignore everything supposedly "unobservable". Science was once intertwined with theology. Over the centuries, the methods we now call science produced results, while other supposed "ways of knowing" did not. Scientific knowledge con verges over t…

The unobservable category includes a lot more than religion. It may be that scientific knowledge converges more easily simply because it limits itself to what is observable or maybe, more accurately, what is mechanistic and observable. Take ghosts, for example. Do they exist? Let's conduct an experiment and take cameras to a supposedly haunted house. The ghosts in question decide to hide from the cameras. See, no gho…

I think a lot of people mistake ghost hunting TV shows for actual science. The SciFi/SyFy channel is a shadow of its former self.

It seems also that you have a very caricatured understanding of scientists.

First of all, a claim of the existence of ghosts requires some evidence that cannot be explained by other, simpler means. The principle of parsimony (AKA Occam's Razor) is important because it works. So for our ghosts, we would need residents' observations of sounds, movement, or other unexpected events. They could keep a log of the time and place of every ghostly occurrence, and demonstrate that no other explanation (thermal expansion causing creaking floorboards, drafts moving the curtains, slightly asymmetrical mounting causing pictures to tilt, blood flow through the retina causing spurious visual patterns in the dark, etc.) explains the observations.

Then you bring in the scientists, and all of the observations cease as if by magic. There are still physical explanations. The scientists' movement may be masking subtler sounds. Their presence may have made the house warmer, so the joints are tighter and creak less. The lights may be on more of the time, so visual patterns caused by misfiring neurons aren't seen.

But even if you rule out all possible simpler explanations, you still have a way of fixing the ghost problem -- just sell the house to a family of scientists, or install cameras and microphones to scare the ghosts away.

--

Responding to the comment by clock_tower, that is the sort of platonic notion of "existence" that science avoids because it doesn't yield results. I'd say science doesn't really deal with "existence" in that sense, but "occurrence". So if you ask, "Does decadence occur?" The answer would quite obviously be yes. Using a more pragmatic definition of existence, you could say that any phenomenon you can define "exists", but you are likely to run into the problem of knowing which definition of a word someone is using.

Thus, I think you also may have a caricatured understanding of scientists, caused in part by the "fun-house mirror" effect from mechanically transliterating scientific jargon into a philosophical context.

Re: The Risk of Discovery

#320
post #88

For people who wonder why YC and pg are okay with some of Peter Thiel's more extreme behavior, this is why. It's pretty interesting that pg describes the possible outcomes of contrarian ideas as either positive for society or merely a waste of time. Even though the pursuit of risky and contrarian ideas can also be hugely harmful for society.

For people who wonder why YC and pg are okay with some of Peter Thiel's more extreme behavior, this is why. For his "weird" behavior, yeah, probably. For some of his "other" behavior -- his support for Trump, generally; and his (very recent, and very disturbing) attemps to soft-peddle, and normalize sexual violence -- more likely it's because they lack awareness of some basic political history.

You're getting downvotes. Could you explain some of the stuff you're describing? Maybe the thinking about normalizing sexual violence?
Post reply on HN