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Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

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Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#531

Post by ISL »

1) There is no DC.

We do our scientific work at millihertz frequencies (one cycle every 1000 seconds or so). The age of the universe is ~13.6 billion years, which corresponds to ~10^-18 Hz. Thinking about the zero-frequency limit is a useful crutch, but all things are always changing. Materials creep, the Earth deforms, temperature changes, aging happens. There is no DC.

2) Small forces for long times yield great change

We study torques as small as 10^-18 N-m acting on ~100 g objects. A willingness to apply a very weak force for a long time can often yield measurable, often large results.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#532

Post by RobRivera »

I learned to think in terms of incentive structures and risk when communicating. Transmission of an idea that has real implications on a design or project on the roadmap will receive unscientific criticism due to internal office politik.

So word choice is as important as superiority in an idea for solving a problem

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#533

Post by underdeserver »

muzani wrote: post #484
jpg_converter wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree w you mostly but you extended this form of systemic analysis to "making a date happy" which I think is a fundamental misunderstanding of relationships. To everyone reading this: please don't go around treating other people as systems to be optimized! If you wish to think about relationships as systems, you really need to understand that you are a partial component in social systems and therefore a flawed obse…

Yup, it was oversimplified. Relationships are incredibly complicated, but they are still systems. I do believe you should optimize your relationships. Phone your parents. Praise your employees and your boss. Buy things for your spouse when it's not their birthday. Hug your kids and watch their favourite Saturday morning shows. Don't say things that trigger your uncle. A big part of being good in relationships is the…

The missing piece here is that you yourself are also a system.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#534

Post by abledon »

Waterluvian wrote: post #137

Life is fleeting. Most of us here are 1/3 or more of the way done. Divest yourself as much as possible from your job. Find other sources of identity. You don't need that fancy car or to buy a boat as much as you need that ejector seat savings account. And when you realise that conditions have evolved to a point where you're not having fun anymore (and they always eventually do), eject yourself and go spend far more t…

so i don't leave all my friends and family in my cozy town with secure, meaningful, low stress & low paying job to take that GOOGL job?

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#535

Post by glitcher »

muzani wrote: post #174
Waterluvian wrote: post #137

Life is fleeting. Most of us here are 1/3 or more of the way done. Divest yourself as much as possible from your job. Find other sources of identity. You don't need that fancy car or to buy a boat as much as you need that ejector seat savings account. And when you realise that conditions have evolved to a point where you're not having fun anymore (and they always eventually do), eject yourself and go spend far more t…

Ejector seat account (or financial freedom as some call it), might not be the solution. Flow is still everyone's main source of happiness. There's the "dark horse" path that few follow: https://lsi.gse.harvard.edu/dark-horse

That project page is really short on details. I'm left wondering when did it start, what the projected "long-term" target might be, how the results are going to be compiled, and if any of the data collected so far might be available.

Any idea if there is more info somewhere online without having to email the professor?

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#536

Post by ratacat »

muzani wrote: post #114

Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic. You don't need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don't need an app or data - your brain is a wonderful data processing machine. Don't be angry at the people who are ben…

Have you ever gotten to read The Systems Bible by John Gall? Take a look, I think you'd really dig it

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#537

Post by petra »

roenxi wrote: post #103
collyw wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked filling shelves in a supermarket, I disagree that it applies to every field.

People can master nearly anything and stand out; boring physical labour is actually one where there are obvious things to be amazing it. It may not earn people a pay raise, but there will be a noticeable and impressive difference between an expert shelf-stacker and someone killing time for money. That being said there are a lot of jobs where I have difficulty imagining what mastery looks like; say in an automated, lo…

>> People can master nearly anything and stand out;

But a lot of it is just for show. Not really that impact-full on the work done.

People do it because they get a sense of achievement out of it.

But isn't the psychological sense of achievement suppose to be a reward for completing meaningful goals ? Isn't this "empty calories" in a sense ?

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#538

Post by teucris »

solveit wrote: post #500
teucris wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think people who say this kind of thing have a fundamental misunderstanding of how a certain type of people think. I honestly can’t deduce from your comment what the misunderstanding is. Is it that certain people see optimizing systems as an empathetic action?

People who say such things seem to think that abstraction and reduction to components inherently carry a moral valence. They don't. People think that if you think of love as a chemical reaction it must mean that you think it has no value. I think that it only shows their narrowminded arrogance in thinking that chemical reactions can have no value. One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens and all that. We…

Interesting! I have seen that supervillain, but I had always interpreted the amorality as the flaw, not the justification they use.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#539

Post by m_fayer »

akeck wrote: post #452
m_fayer wrote: post #370

How we tend to overvalue and overinvest in reason and undervalue and underinvest in intuition. Intuition is powerful, mysterious, and a pleasure to wield. But developing and then trusting intuition is anathema to our metric-fixated process-consultant-ridden professional world, so we keep doing things the ugly hard way.

My experience from applied math: > Intuition is powerful, mysterious, and a pleasure to wield until it lies to you. Then you have to crack the whip and reign in the horses. So maybe the price of powerful intuition is eternal vigilance...

Luckily I think day-to-day corporate dynamics and complex LOB business apps, where I think most of us earn our daily bread, are less likely to confuse our intuitive powers than something like mathematics or physics or philosophy.

Re: Ask HN: What has your work taught you that other people don't realize?

#540

Post by ufmace »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #378
ufmace wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of ironically, pulling out 3 anecdotal examples of well-known system failures doesn't make a very high-quality argument that most things being done sloppily most of the time doesn't usually work out fine. The real argument is, that while those 3 things were happening - and the War on Drugs goes back ~100 years - roughly 3 billion other things were also sloppily done, and most of them worked out well enough. If i…

tpxl and you are using different definitions of "work out fine". Incarceration and systemic discrimination against an entire class of people does not count as "well enough", in my opinion. And it's specious reasoning to conclude that if a society made up of untrustworthy actors committing fraud isn't starving and dodging lions, then it's worked out fined. One can go live in a country with low societal trust to see wh…

> tpxl and you are using different definitions of "work out fine".

I suppose we are. I'd argue that mine corresponds to reality in every modern nation that currently exists on the planet. I think they're all doing pretty well indeed overall, compared to the historical record and the current conditions of some of the countries and places that aren't doing so well. Comparing current reality to an imaginary utopia is a whole different ballgame.

There's nothing wrong with recognizing the problems, mistakes, and injustices that we do have now and working to fix them. We just need to keep a little perspective - despite the problems, things are still going pretty well one the whole. Plans that talk of tearing the whole system down to fix a few small problems aren't a good idea, and have historically mostly led to things getting much, much worse.

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