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Talent

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Re: Talent

#91

Post by chrisweekly »

pickdig wrote: post #90

its much easier to learn math now. it's good we have chromebooks + various llms for a low price / for free for poor kids. but i guess being poor means you dont have time to learn math or something. doing math is way easier nowadays though i mean there's discord, stack exchange, various llms that help you, etc. erdos & ramanujan have amazing mathematica intuition which is kinda the 'heart' of math imho. btw...

also https://betterexplained.com - an extraordinary resource for gaining intuition about math

Re: Talent

#92

Post by chrisweekly »

Exoristos wrote: post #2

I'd caution against equating talent with drugs-enhanced mania, especially today when illnesses such as bipolar are on the rise and do shorten lives.

Fair point. OTOH, amphetamines are effective medication for ADHD.

Re: Talent

#93

Post by chrisweekly »

Vetch wrote: post #15
noelwelsh wrote: post #8

Two things: * Don't work in power-law / winner-take-all industries, unless you are truly remarkable (and even then, you need a lot of luck). Entertainment is the most obvious example of such an industry. * No shit talent exists. Just look at basketball players. Presumably nobody thinks Wemby is 7'5" because he just trained harder at growing tall than anyone else? Why would any other characteristic be different?

Being tall doesn't automatically make you good or dominant at basketball, you can even be too tall. Wemby might just be at that threshold, but the unusual thing about him is his dexterity despite his height; such maneuverability and flexibility is trainable. I hear he also spent the summer training, likely harder than most.

Dennis Rodman is a famous counterexample (tall, no particular talent, became an All-Star for rebounding and shot-blocking)

Re: Talent

#94

Post by datadrivenangel »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #70
geerlingguy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very, very few of the people who do those things make enough money to earn an income (proportional to how many try). But the streaming platforms and game developers love that so many people do try.

Luck is a big factor but still... Rolling the dice does not present much of an opportunity cost. I've seen people make a hobby out of gaming these platforms and algorithms with the most random things imaginable until they found something that sticked. They had nothing, then suddenly they had significant amounts of money. It doesn't matter what it is, it just needs to grab attention for long enough for the advertisers…

To really take a swing at it requires basically full time commitment. It's like starting a small media corporation actually.

Re: Talent

#95

Post by kaladin-jasnah »

Jensson wrote: post #87
kaladin-jasnah wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I think it's about exposure, though. You can find your interests, talents, and such more easily if you have the luck to have the smörgåsbord of cool things in life presented to you at a young age.

> You can find your interests, talents, and such more easily if you have the luck to have the smörgåsbord of cool things in life presented to you at a young age. That is called school, everyone goes there. Before school was mandatory and most kids didn't go there was little opportunity to discover your talents, but today most kids gets to try crafting stuff and reading about a wide range of subjects and doing a wide…

I'd contend that you can develop interest and talent but struggle to grow without extra exposure. I became interested in computers literally because of Scratch in middle school!

But I wouldn't have progressed without having a parent who was a Java programmer at some point and local libraries with deeply technical books. I had to explore out of class to find my niche and develop my interests.

Re: Talent

#96

Post by senthil_rajasek »

Animats wrote: post #60

I've known some people with serious artistic talent. Even if they didn't like it. It seems to be inherited. A friend who was a good graphics artist (drawings in Smithsonian) has a son and a daughter. The daughter can draw well, but doesn't use the skill much. The son grew up drawing cars, and now he draws car designs for a major car company. For both of them, it wasn't all that hard. One unusual skill is the military…

"coup d'œil" reminded me of this book, Napoleon's Glance: The Secret of Strategy by William R Duggan

It discusses ideas similar to the ideas in the link you posted.

Re: Talent

#97

Post by datadrivenangel »

abhaynayar wrote: post #35

Everything's luck, or lack thereof. Free will does not exist, but I suppose it's handy for society at large to pretend that it does. I don't know why, but I let myself believe for so long that I was the captain of my ship. Now that I embody the fact that everything's out of my control, I have become so much more relaxed and content with life. I do not compare myself with people that are better (or worse) off than me.…

Paradoxically, we can still make meaningful choices even without free will.

Also the hard deterministic view of the universe gets incomplete at the quantum level, so maybe our brains do have some spark of pure chaos that gives us non-deterministic freedom.

Re: Talent

#98

Post by connectsnk »

I have always questioned, are the guys making pizza's, working minimum wage jobs wasting their talent or do they simply have no talent? Then I came across this short video : https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4HnGbQ-vi8s

The line that stuck with me was how you do something is how you do everything.

I follow an indian mystic named Sadhguru who had the same advice. He said if you do not know yet what to get involved in, then do everything with absolute involvement.

This I think was also the core message of the movie Soul from Pixar.

We all might earn different amounts of money in our lives but all of us have the same ability to create a meaningful life for ourselves.

Re: Talent

#99

Post by datadrivenangel »

vivalahn wrote: post #39

I think as part of my 2026 goals I’ve got to learn how to shitpost half as good as some of the people that make the HN front page. These blog posts have a solid self-fellating energy to them replete with quotes from brand names that’s just too good to pass up on. A complete lack of experience talking about talent with nothing to show for it? Shit sign me up I’m all about that. I’ll have to put a twist on it. Maybe I’…

You should check out the register and lucidity's blog for satirically serious posts.

https://www.theregister.com https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/get-me-out-of-data-hell/

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