Becoming a magician (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Becoming a magician (2018)

autotranslucence.wordpress.com

82 pointsrajlego14 comments

“There are two types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great things, but they leave you room to believe that you could do the same if only you worked hard enough. Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it. Feynman was a magician.“ — Hans Bethe (remembering that Bethe himself was a Nobel laureate.)

Great quote! Where's it from?

I’ve seen it multiple places, but the first time I saw it was in James Gleick’s biography of Feynman “Genius”.

I discovered this post from this Nielsen tweet: https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/10741501241697730...

Which I discovered from this post: https://blog.stephsmith.io/how-to-be-great/

I wasn't sure how to name this post well so if anyone has any ideas let me know (since it's not about literal magicians)

(can't see your reply for some reason directly but in response to above tweet author of post wrote this: https://twitter.com/utotranslucence/status/10745039697354629... which has context and some photos of pieces from author and the person they mentioned)

This reminds me of how I felt looking at the detailed realistic icons on the iPhone/iPod touch back in 2007/2008 (not to mention the entire device). Years later this article from Mike Rundle helped me deconstruct the magic and become a designer myself: http://flyosity.com/tutorial/crafting-subtle-realistic-user-...

This bit about seeking out magicians resonates with me. It is partly why I've gravitated towards technical things. Literally controlling electricity to do my bidding. Yeah, that's magic.

But finding those people who possess a skill you thought yourself competent at, but at a completely different level than you are is a humbling and exhilarating experience. It is addictive. The best is when they do what they do by tossing any generally recognized best practices out the window and reinvent the discipline from first principles in an entirely different way.

Have you met many people like that? For me, the person I think is most like that is Piotr Wozniak [1]. He's basically mastered everything: physiology, happiness, learning, creativity, communication. He's done it generally with global optima not local optima meaning he sacrifices things most people normally wouldn't (e.g. has no phone, only does barefoot running). Fortunately he has lots of writing on his lifestyle so I think I have a chance after a decade or two of approaching him but man, if he didn't exist there would be so many things I'd take for granted as unsolvable (enjoying exercise, being consistently happy every day, managing stress).

[1] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Piotr_Wozniak

Damn that blog is a gold mine. Thanks a lot for linking it.

This makes me want to make myself a wiki-type blog for keeping notes and developing ideas.

Sure. From talking to author of that blog, I've roughly taken away that threaded conversation (reddit/hn), email, voice chat, instant messaging are all just chat. If you want to extend the value of information over time, you need some sort of wikipedia.

I've been leaning towards using Obsidian since linking is wonderful but I haven't figured out good workflow for using it with SuperMemo (software made by author of above blog). I'm considering just going with mediawiki, same as supermemo.guru. Plus would be that it would be super easy to edit with friends. Also been looking at some tiddlywiki based solutions as well.

The person I immediately think of after reading this is Bret Victor and how I felt after watching his “Stop Drawing Dead Fish” presentation [1]. The presentation was so well thought out, and the concepts follow one another so clearly that you can’t help but think that you are the one having the insights as they are being presented. Plus, the tool be built to create the presentation seems to just feel like magic!

[1] http://worrydream.com/#!/StopDrawingDeadFish

The original article is at https://autotranslucence.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/becoming-a...

(2018)

unfortunately looks like like it's too late to edit the title

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