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How to Think for Yourself

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Think for Yourself

#871

Post by cratermoon »

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #773
cratermoon wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is self-contradictory. The premise of the article is that you have to be unconventional and do things others aren't do to be successful. And then the author "proves" the premise by saying, "just like all these other successful people did!" The formulae are all driven by survivorship bias anyway.

It can simultaneously be true that to be successful in your field, you need to be unconventional relative to that field, and also that the means and methods for being usefully unconventional transfer across fields. "This article is self-contradictory. The article says good programmers write code in a way that doesn't cause surprises for the reader. But the only way for a program to be totally unsurprising is if it's…

Perhaps I'm misusing the term or using the wrong term. Could by hindsight bias. I'm talking about when a person a group accomplishes something, looks back at what they did, and they tries to decide post hoc which of the things they did contributed to their success.

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#873

Post by yellowapple »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #869
yellowapple wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the water tanks in the world don't add up to a trillion km³. Not by many orders of magnitude. You're missing my point: that hoarding water is at the expense of anyone else who needs water. One milliliter, one gigaliter, doesn't matter; that's still less for everyone else unless and until it is released, and during that time the mere storage of that water externalizes an opportunity cost on everyone else needing…

> You're missing my point: that hoarding water is at the expense of anyone else who needs water. Someone with a water tank in (say) Seattle, Washington is not "hoarding water" "at the expense" of someone in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, because there is no practical way of getting the "hoarded" water from Washington State to Ethiopia. If the Seattleite doesn't "hoard" that water, it's going to run straight into Puget Sound.…

> Someone with a water tank in (say) Seattle, Washington is not "hoarding water" "at the expense" of someone in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,

Well it sure ain't contributing to the "hydrologic cycle" if it's in a water tank. That's a tankful less water in that cycle. And multiply that by everyone else storing water, and before you know it that's a noticeable impact globally, including both for Addis Ababa and the rest of Seattle.

This is, mind you, precisely why a lot of municipalities don't take kindly to people collecting rainfall, or to people damming up streams or rivers without doing the necessary due diligence on ecological impact assessment. There are downstream impacts to these seemingly-innocuous things.

> I think fundamentally you're just wedded to the the idea that water gets "used up" in the same sense that, say, oil, gets used up.

Nowhere have I even suggested that to be the case, and yet somehow you think I'm the one strawmanning here. If you're going to deliberately ignore my point and substitute it for one that's obviously false, then why even bother to respond?

Re: How to Think for Yourself

#874

Post by psysharp »

glitchc wrote: post #865
psysharp wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you reference it to the world and its inherent chaos it is an invention. If you reference it to a structure with labels and a finite number of alterations it is a discovery of a part of that structure

Evolution is inherently chaotic, yet new species are "discovered," not "invented." Coming back to songs, most chart hits are cobbled together from samples and prior works. It's unclear whether we can all these new creations that occurred in isolation.

You are right, species are discovered when in reference to our defined concept of what it means to be a spiece, that is a structure with all other spiecies. However it's name is an invention, as all definitions are invented.

Yes the song example can be put on a scale, but even the most plagerised of works can call it an invention to an extent when referencing a newly created title.

On a side note, since we all share the most primitive source of information, all behaviours are indirectly stolen on one level or another. But that idea doesn't contribute alot of practicality

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