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How to Think for Yourself

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Think for Yourself

#401

Post by meheleventyone »

nobinstok wrote: post #372
meheleventyone wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With games its been ubiquitous culture for a couple of decades now. It frankly staggers me that stereotype is something people actually still think is a thing.

Just for context this was about a decade ago. Games were definitely more popular than in that past, but I remember it was well before the time I first remember seeing League of Legends on ESPN and being like "ok nerds are unequivocally mainstream now." But yeah it was pretty silly even by the standards of then.

I'm on the cusp of 40 and even in my youth (in the UK) videogames were ubiquitous. LoL appearing on ESPN is basically that ubiquity catching up with people no longer watching ESPN.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#402

Post by dfranke »

lisper wrote: post #256

> There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. As someone who once made their living as a scientist, I can tell you from firsthand experience that while this is technically correct, the conclusion PG wishes to draw from this: > One of the mos…

There are certain classes of creative work that especially turn this essay on its head: writing a textbook, typesetting a page, creating a film as an homage to a particular time period or genre. To do these things exceptionally well means noticing and meticulously following conventions that nobody realized existed before you did.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#403

Post by matwood »

nobinstok wrote: post #270
fractionalhare wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This essay is an object lesson in how this leads to profoundly conventional thinking. This entire thing reads like it was torn from the journal of a clever middle-schooler who thinks he's so much more clever then the world. You've hit upon something that's always bothered me with this characterization of nerds. It's like if someone framed adult life by superimposing stereotypical high school nerd vs jock social dyn…

This reminds me of one of the more embarrassing episodes of my life. My friends and I (pretty nerdy types) were at a bar with an amateur MMA fighter. Guy was like 6'10", covered in huge muscles and tattoos. One of the nicest guys I've ever met, but you definitely wouldn't want to get on his bad side. Anyway we didn't know the guy too well, lots of getting-to-know you type stuff. The MMA fighter after a few hours ment…

People are complex. For example, Carmack is a high level Judoka. Half the people in my BJJ classes work as programmers, and would be considered ‘nerds’.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#404

Post by x87678r »

Some of my biggest regrets are doing what I thought was best when I should have done what everyone else was doing. This ranges from from not buying an overpriced house 20 years ago, to not partying at college, to following some interesting but unpopular technology. Its not all bad doing things your own way but you have to be careful about straying too much.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#405

Post by hodgesrm »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #131

PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity. It's clear in all of his writing that he's perpetually beating around the bush about some current itch he has, I wish he would just come out and say it with out pretending to be a deep thinker: > Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else? I mean, taken outsi…

> PG sure has been on a kick about how brilliant of an independent thinker he is in a sea of conformity.

For somebody praising non-conformity the idea of the superiority of the "independent thinker" is a pretty conventional idea. It dates in written form at least back to Plato's philosopher king [1]. You can guess the idea is a lot older than that. There does not seem to be a lot of evidence it leads to better overall outcomes than other, more inclusive approaches. Big successes in human affairs tend to involve getting a lot of people aligned around specific goals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosopher_king

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#406

Post by pontus »

I really appreciate the message in this article. I think another way to partition the world is into zero-sum and non-zero sum situations. In non-zero sum situations it's more important to be correct than novel, but in zero-sum situations it's important to be both correct and novel.

One example I like to think about is the following: imagine having two boxes (A and B), one on each side of a football field. Exactly one of the two boxes contains a million dollars: box A contains the prize with 99% probability and box B contains the prize with 1% probability.

Suppose you're standing at the center of the field together with n other people and are told to race to get the million dollars (first person who finds it wins). You have to decide whether to run for box A or box B since they're in opposite directions. If n = 0, it's clearly in your best interest to go for box A, but as n grows, the probability of you getting to box A first drops since you're competing with other people, meaning that at some point you ought to actually go for box B.

This is a toy example of where it's not sufficient to be right, but it's also important to be novel. If each person was awarded its contents (rather than just the first person to get there), there'd be no rush and you ought to go for box A. In other words: in zero-sum situations you need to be both right and novel, but in non-zero sum situations it's sufficient to just be right.

I think the example of academia in the article is not quite right for two reasons. As pointed out elsewhere, the incentives in academia are actually quite twisted which means that there's actually more incentive to just be verbose than to be novel, but additionally I don't think it's really zero-sum. It's true that if you're working in a crowded space, it starts approaching zero-sum and then becomes a game of novelty. However, if you're not in a crowded space (e.g. interdisciplinary stuff) you can actually be quite successful by discovering rather mundane things (you might say that this is just being novel on a different axis, which I think is reasonably accurate, but the point made in the article was that the discoveries have to be surprising).

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#407

Post by ryan-duve »

x87678r wrote: post #404

Some of my biggest regrets are doing what I thought was best when I should have done what everyone else was doing. This ranges from from not buying an overpriced house 20 years ago, to not partying at college, to following some interesting but unpopular technology. Its not all bad doing things your own way but you have to be careful about straying too much.

When I catch myself with thoughts like these I remind myself of the lesson from https://xkcd.com/584/

One thing that helps is keeping in touch with friends that made such decisions and hearing their regrets today.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#408

Post by psyc »

> I'm not suggesting that you impose on everyone who talks to you the burden of proving what they say, but rather that you take upon yourself the burden of evaluating what they say.

Oh how I wish this were in the site guidelines.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#409

Post by whateveracct »

x87678r wrote: post #404

Some of my biggest regrets are doing what I thought was best when I should have done what everyone else was doing. This ranges from from not buying an overpriced house 20 years ago, to not partying at college, to following some interesting but unpopular technology. Its not all bad doing things your own way but you have to be careful about straying too much.

> I wish in the past I had tried more things 'cause now I know that being in trouble is a fake idea

http://achewood.com/?date=01272005

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#410

Post by mcguire »

"Ditto for essayists. An essay that told people things they already knew would be boring. You have to tell them something new."

How come I know exactly where this essay is going? It is yet another "start-up founders are genetically, intellectually, and emotionally superior; the rest of the muggles are so envious."

Does Paul think everyone except startup founders works on an assembly line?

"You see this especially among political extremists. They think themselves nonconformists, but actually they're niche conformists. Their opinions may be different from the average person's, but they are often more influenced by their peers' opinions than the average person's are."

Oooh. So close.

Anyway, don't pop your shoulder out while you're patting yourself on the back.

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