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Comment by tw1010 | Hacker News Reader

I'm all for egalitarianism in the public sphere, but in private I still believe that there's such a thing as natural born talent.

Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time. But if your goal is to maximize your output having already accepted that your time on earth is limited, then the wise thing is to probably steer in directions that have high impact but for you feel disproportionately easy (compared to the general population).

Thus, I'm a big fan of Peter Theils advice to work on things that satisfy the property that: "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get solved".

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Question to anyone reading this: What is your answer to "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get solved"?

I'll skip over what I'm actively working on because I think this deserves a mention: I'm a hobbyist digital archivist. This is something where most people can likely make a meaningful and long-lasting impact, that nobody else could if they didn't.

Archiving, for me, is a way of travelling forward in time. Think about "time capsules" and what not.

Here's what I mean by this: If you write a message on a piece of paper, and read it the next day, your message has successfully traveled forward in time by a day. But as the days pass, the message's survival chances diminish greatly.

The goal of archiving is to give information the highest chances possible to travel forward in time, as long as possible. It's hard to evaluate how good our chances are now, but 2000 years from now, if archaeologists find information on our current society, is it more likely to be the piece of paper you wrote, or an archive that was given the best chances of survival?

It's extremely rewarding and it truly is meaningful. Archive anything. Sort and order it, index it, describe it, upload it. Do it for something you work on. The odds for you to archive something that was not done by anyone else are very high.

I tend to do the same with all physical pieces of paper I receive, whether or not it feels useful at the time.

Recently added OCR to the process, which makes retrieval a joy.

I have no logical reason for doing this, it feels like a compulsion.

Why do you do it and what tools do you use?

> Why do you do it

To travel in time :) And also because I believe human knowledge is the sum of the past it can learn from. If information gets lost, it can't be part of that. It's the same beliefs that drive me to support open source & free software.

> what tools do you use?

I do a lot of data-mining as part of my day to day operations, in video games mainly. These are the main things I end up archiving, so I write my own tools.

On the flipside of this, thanks to archivists such as yourself, I've saved myself some time by developing a research perspective that first assumes ideas I've come up with may have been independently discovered in the past. This may be obvious to others, but for me it has been a game-changer for getting "to the meat" of problems, so to speak.

Largely, this mindset stems from a group of characters in the book "Anathem"[1] named the Lorites, characters who believe that all knowledge which can be learned has already been discovered, and recorded. While this is obviously fiction, and I disagree with the stance as an absolute, the idea that much of what can be discovered may already have been explored has saved me significant time; no longer do I find myself working on a problem only to find it has been studied and solved. Occasionally I'll find problems which have been studied, but not yet solved, and in these situations I'm pleased to have the fruit of others' data-gathering labors at my disposal as a result of the search caused by my initial assumption.

[1]: "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson, speculative fiction: http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Lorite

How do you usually go about doing your searches for prior knowledge?

Which tools do you use to organize the digital artifacts you create? And how do you organize them?

Archive.org! I upload everything. I organize best I can within my own disks/google drive (and sometimes public S3 buckets), but that stuff is too likely to go away within my lifetime to even begin to make a difference long term.

Teaching kids in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) how to build their own electricity generation systems.

Access to electricity is a massive problem and the number of people without access is actually projected to increase [1].

We need more people working on the problem and we especially need people from SSA working on it.

We are working to inspire young people and to provide them with the tools and knowledge they need to go and solve the problem of access to electricity. [2]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/561428/forecast-of-popul...

[2] https://localelectricity.org/

This problem would remain a problem forever? I'm happy enough if I can help a problem be solved faster. If I can make it happen that some strategic technical solution happens ten years before it would have been without me, I'd be extremely satisfied. But there's no way to know.

I tend to work the other way.

Some day we will have smart homes. How would they look like and how can I work towards that vision? Or, what restricts ubiquity of wearables? In my opinion wireless charging over a considerable distance. Then I contemplate how I would do it. For example embedded in ceiling lights with infrared lasers and a positioning system. And I talk about it in case someone else also finds it an interesting idea, because I've so little time on this planet...

> Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time.

I seriously doubt that. People who have no aptitude in a field, even if they are dedicated, will be competing vs people who are also dedicated, but have the aptitude. I'd say maybe that "almost anyone can reach top 50% of most non-athletic fields", but definitely not top 5%.

Depends on what you base the percentage on. If it is the global population, then 5% of 7 billion is 350 million. So to be in the top 5% there must be at most 350 million people better than you.

Now consider a niche sport, say Ultimate Frisbee. I would guess that much less than 350 million people even know the rules. So invest an hour to learn the rules and play it a little with your friends. Voila, you are in the top 5%. And that is for an athletic sport.

You are probably talking about 5% of the people actively doing it like being registered in an association. In this case, 50% sounds more realistic to me.

Assuming the potential performance of actively engaged people is roughly normally distributed (even if, as a group, they come from the upper end of the general population on that axis), then I think 50% is too conservative. Nobody can perform above their potential by definition, but lots and lots of people will fail to live up to their potential, making room for their below-average colleagues to outperform them with enough work.

there's about 20 million people who know programming to the level that they can fizzbuzz, according to the rough idc estimates. if you know fizzbuzz, you know programming better than all the rest. (the rest don't know how to program at all)

Then, of course, the challenge is to identify overlooked problems which actually are real problems and therefore worth solving. It's easy to succumb to a fallacy of thinking that if no one else is working on a problem it's not a real problem or is not worth solving.

>Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time.

At any given time, only the 5% of the population can reach the top 5% in any area.

If anybody could do it and e.g. just 10% did it, then there would be a new 5% (the top 50% of that 10%), and the rest 50% wouldn't be in.

>Thus, I'm a big fan of Peter Theils advice to work on things that satisfy the property that: "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get solved".

Which is a self-aggrandising way for Theils to say that he helped solve some problems that wouldn't have been solved otherwise.

Unless you have tons of means to contribute (e.g. billions) to some cause, the idea starting out as some e.g. college student that "this problem wont be solved without my help" is 99.9999% BS.

There aren't very many axes along which >5% of the population actively try to improve themselves. This makes it easy to reach the top 5% if one is trying.

Just because something is social signaling (which it undoubtedly is in Theils case), doesn't mean it isn't true, and that you shouldn't follow the advice.

Just because a "virtue signaling" statement can also be true, doesn't in any way infer that his advice is good.

If anything, it gives him a motive to say it (virtue signal) which is not "to tell the truth".

So, the advice might very well be true and we should very well follow it. But thus far we have absolutely no arguments as to if that's the case.

You're prematurely moving the debate one abstraction layer up, making the issue about the whether a general virtue signal can ever contain truth. (That's an interesting discussion and I agree with you that it's definitely likely that virtue signaling statements are less truthful in general than "honest" statements.) Had you looked down on the concrete statement we're discussing, clearly no argument would be needed. Clearly it's good advice to "do things which wouldn't be done if you wouldn't be there to solve it", what's there even to argue about.

> Which is a self-aggrandising way for Theils to say that he helped solve some problems that wouldn't have been solved otherwise.

Exactly, I started reading his book Zero to One and quickly dropped it into trash-bin after scanning randomly. I am not sure why it got rated so high. In my view entire advise boils down to create businesses in uncharted territories and create a monopolies around them.

I don’t think it matters much whether or not it’s actually true. What matters is that you believe it.

Also, there’s a ton of fairly specific problems that haven’t been solved yet, so chances of someone working on it are small.

The ratio between goals and people is not 1:1.

With enough specialization, everybody can become the best in one specific topic. That's the game most phd students play.

That’s reasonable. Also, solved goals entice new goals to be created for others.

>With enough specialization, everybody can become the best in one specific topic. That's the game most phd students play.

Given the rapid devaluation of Phds (never mind the big debts), it doesn't serve them very well in most areas of science...

>> Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time.

> At any given time, only the 5% of the population can reach the top 5% in any area.

I believe the GP is saying you can be in the top 5% of a chosen field, if you try, because other people are pursuing other things. So 100% of the population could be in the top 5% of something.

I strongly agree with this. So much antagonism in society, however, arises when people aim for the wrong 5%, e.g. a 5’6 basketball player aiming to make the NBA. Now, such a baller is more directly confronted with his low outcome, but most of the world is not so apparent with people’s preconceived objectives which are often ego-emergent.

This is where I find deep meaning in the Cervantes quote, “The road is always better than the inn.” Accepting the outcome of the admixture of own’s controllable action and the infinitely greater uncontrollable action of the world as positive can go a long way to a kind of stoic peace and ultimately happiness with one’s worldly produce.

I don't think it's about money. One example I immediately think of is the various free software projects that are short on people who care and have time to work on it. Often I find something that seems interesting to me but hasn't been worked on in months. I can't yet program, but I always think "if I had the skills, I could just work on this myself right now". It's not that I'm special in this, except that I care and not everyone does.

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