471–480 of 874 posts
"To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet." Oof, first paragraph and he's entirely wrong. That's rough. One of the most worrisome aspects of the world's take on science lately is that reproduction of published results…
It's bad that when those students grow up, they believe science is the absolute truth and they're hostile to people who doubt about it. They become the new priests. And probably today's biggest "scientific doctrine" is big data-people unquestionably believe whatever data tells them without caring about nuance or bothering to think what it implies. Interestingly, it seems most of those people don't have a strong background in science while most trained scientists rarely hold the same view that science is superior and we know everything.
There are only two types of contrarian views. 1. Taking a position that is so novel that your peers neither agree nor disagree with it. Example from 15 years ago: believing that people should live on floating cities. Most people probably would disagree with this if they thought about it some (or understood the ideology behind the desire to seasted), but the position was so strange that it wouldn't stimulate immediate…
Pre-web, individual conspirasists used to be mute. They were either smart enough to keep quiet or afraid to speak up because they thought their views were unique. Now, everyone can let their freak flag fly without much consequence.
There just isn’t enough danger or personal risk anymore to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand pg This isnt the defense of pg you think it to be.
It's not a defense of pg. That comment is paraphrasing a well-known meme about the Rick & Morty cartoon [1]. Someone wrote something very similar about Rick & Morty (though it's likely that it was itself a joke parodying R&M's toxic fandom). So I'd say it's an attack on pg's fandom. [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/to-be-fair-you-have-to-have-a...
Fun observation that everybody in this community consider it positive to be "independent minded". But the author seem to fall into the same trap at the end: When I wrote "The Four Quadrants of Conformism" I expected a firestorm of rage from the aggressively conventional-minded, but in fact it was quite muted. They sensed that there was something about the essay that they disliked intensely, but they had a hard time f…
Or perhaps they just rolled their eyes so hard that they strained their eye muscles and then couldn't see to type.
"[7] 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."
So close. Just a little farther. Almost got it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Being skeptical of the conventional wisdom can be useful, but keeping yourself intentionally ignorant of it is generally a bad plan. I can vouch for that. I write software, but my original training was as an EE. My software development methodology was almost entirely self-taught. This has been both good and bad. I will sometimes come up with some really interesting orthogonal approaches, but I will also sometimes "…
I think ordering of exposure makes a difference. Being submersed in prior art and then trying to come up with something novel is much harder or less likely than having conviction around a novel idea/experience and then digging into prior art to strengthen your offering.
This is the exact opposite of my experience. My independent-mindedness happens the most as a reaction to being surrounded by too much groupthink. On the other hand, when I'm surrounded by people who are already having plenty of crazy ideas, they begin to feel a bit tiresome to me, and I don't feel the need to have any of my own.
I find reading this article a very uncomfortable experience. It's just assertion after assertion without evidence to back them up. Do people believe this guy because he's rich?
http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
That said, the way the article dehumanizes a group of people feels like listening to the radio in Rwanda in 1994.
"To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet." Oof, first paragraph and he's entirely wrong. That's rough. One of the most worrisome aspects of the world's take on science lately is that reproduction of published results…
In fairness, PG's statement there is correct if you consider it descriptively rather than prescriptively, for exactly the reason you outlined in your comment. As a positive statement of fact about the current ethos of science it's correct. Less so if you interpret it as a normative imperative.