Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaesar14 | Hacker News Reader

Bardeen was an amazing guy. I love this quote from his Wikipedia article in particular:

"Bardeen was a scientist with a very unassuming personality. While he served as a professor for almost 40 years at the University of Illinois, he was best remembered by neighbors for hosting cookouts where he would prepare food for his friends, many of whom were unaware of his accomplishments at the university."

Something about a man whose accomplishments have given us computers and the MRI being a friendly neighborhood dad, whose neighbors weren't even aware their hamburgers were being cooked by a man who had changed the course of human civilization, is so appealing to me.

View on HN

I’m probably getting the exact details wrong, however: I once read that he had a golf partner for over 30 years, and this golf partner only learned that Bardeen had two Nobels after Bardeen had died.

IDK, his just seems normal to me. Why would your Nobels come up during golf unless you were trying to work it in. Which is pretty classless.

If I won a Nobel, let alone two I wouldn't make it through more than a month of knowing someone without mentioning it. That's...probably among the many things that separate me from Nobel candidates. Only the mediocre feel they have something to prove.

Maybe over ONE round of 18, but winning the world's most prestigious prize, twice, for your work never coming up in 30 years? Frankly, that's quite amazing.

I feel like it would take superhuman restraint to not work it in once during 30 years though. If it were me I'd never shut about it.

People would mention about getting a new job, new promotion, or graduating, let alone winning the biggest prize in science.

Where did he think those new golf clubs upgrades came from, twice?

This is very characteristic of Midwestern culture, at least in the parts I'm familiar with.

I think it is appealing because it is in such stark contrast to today's culture of constant self promotion and exaggeration of mediocre achievements.

> today's culture

Not a historian but I strongly suspect self-promotion is not something new.

Agreed, but also internet basically gave everyone a megaphone, so that they can shout their mediocre achievements.

The world has also become more top heavy than a few decades ago. Competition for the top x% of a field has likely become fiercer as the alternative has become less self-sustaining.

There is nothing wrong with being mediocre.

There is also nothing good with being mediocre.

There's a lot of good with being mediocre. normalcy, so long as you're not in some sort of barbarian culture. is a net positive.

I excel at mediocrity.

It's almost as if being mediocre is fairly mediocre

Just compare Bardeen to Shockley.

Yep. Newton tried to discredit Leibniz for example even though Leibniz was the first to publish calculus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz–Newton_calculus_contro...

Do you think shameless self-promotion has always been as culturally acceptable as it seems to be today (in American culture, let’s say)?

I used to be a much humbler person, especially in college, when I witnessed people much more capable than I.

Once I entered the workforce I became less humble and self-promoted a lot more. I think this is because how performance evaluation and job promotion works at my employer and similar employers: people doing a lot of great work but without self-promotion are given lower ratings and passed over for promotions.

Most people I know who fail at self promotion solve that issue by finding other jobs that value them. Obviously it depends on the job market you are in. But getting a better job is quite easy in competitive industries especially if you remove location-bias. A friend refused to move to SF from San Jose and despised the commute, and thus turned down a massive career (and money) opportunity.

Self-promotion and exaggeration of mediocre achievements as the path to success has been around since time immemorial. If you can't do, talk.

Julius Caesar didn't become dictator for life by doing a great job repressing the Gauls. He became dictator for life by doing a great job of talking about how bad-ass the Gauls were, and how hard he had to work to repress them.

Yup. Napoleon was also a terrific writer who carried a printing press with him as a (just another) General in Italy to be sure his first-hand heavily spun reports of his fighting prowess were the first French citizens would see. Of course, we see more of this now, in a mass civic rather than rural society.

Some to better effect than others.

“Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal says with a laugh. “Who’s that?”

“Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say: Bite Me?”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-runa...

I suppose in the case of Caesar, one must be able to talk and do - if we consider his narrative as mostly grounded in fact, which I do.

If you can do, also talk. I'd like to find out!

Comentarii de Bello Gallo is a masterwork in PR :)

IMO this is what causing this huge self-promotion trend.

1 - it's become so much easier and accessible, with twitter, blog, FB, IG, YT.

2 - your ability to promote yourself has great impact in your financial and career growth.

3 - EGO. Remember when you were the smartest kid in your high school and then went to university and realized, there are many smart people like you.

SV, is the next step above. Everyone thinks they're the next Steve Jobs, Musk, etc. until the start working with other smart peers.

You were once the smart kid in the family, high school, your university classes, etc. Then you come to SV and realize wow, so many other smart people here. I'm just another average guy/gal who was in my top 1% of my college or high school. Some of these peers are even more driven than me and they're great hustlers.

So you either accept that you're not so special, or you try to out hustle others for recognition.

> [self promotion has] become so much easier and accessible

True. But why has it become acceptable? We choose to use micro-publishing to brag. It's just as easy and accessible to publish your own bowel movements, but we haven't normalized that.

It's not the tech doing it by itself.

There are even some in SV who are clearly a step-function smarter than most other intelligent folk. Balaji Srinivasan, Marc Andreesen, Larry Page, Eric Yuan, Peter Thiel, Taher Elgamal and Naval Ravikant are amongst them in the famous league. Eric Yuan is also hilarious in real life despite English being his second language.

Self-esteem movement of phony over-confidence, crumbling under pressure, and no depth of knowledge.

When Bill Gates had his neighbors over for breakfast, I wonder if they were aware that their pancakes were being sorted by a man who had changed the course of human civilization.

A reference to the famous result of Papadimitriou and Gates, of course.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070610154429/http://www.cs.ber...

Gates did not change the course of anything.

The personal computer revolution was inevitable, and operating systems were plentiful and doable, and we see the same market concentration, product bundling, and monopoly patterns emerge in every industry, so if not Gates, it just would have been somebody else.

If you want to claim he was a more talented monopolist, then I'd point out that monopolies stifle innovation, so a less talented monopolist would have changed the course of civilization much more, i.e. his kind of changing is not the type we need to applaud. Yawl don't remember, but before the dot com era came along and opened things up, Microsoft had more or less completely stifled the computer software industry, there was hardly anything going on in terms of attracting investment and creating jobs, everyone was too fearful of getting stomped.

also, while he's no doubt a very smart guy, he's hardly ever said an intellectually interesting thing. Go ahead and challenge that statement, if he has, I'd love to hear it. Strikes me as a complete dullard.

> a man who had changed the course of human civilization.

He learned how to do self-promotion from his friend Steve Jobs.

> is so appealing to me.

So what is so appealing? Isn't it shows that people are so indifferent and ignorant that they couldn't even spot a Nobel prize winner just because they did not care enough to ask?

What if his success or life would be dependent on their recognition? He would probably die unnoticed ... It's very sad story I would say.

Reading this actually should convince even the most modest person in the world to promote himself like hell ...

Actually I think I also should promote myself from now on because people would simply not notice any of my talents and thus many opportunities to do great things can be lost. I think it was a great mistake every time I was modest about own talents and abilities.

Do you go around asking people if they've won a Nobel Prize?

Really, what's appealing here is living modestly in a time before it was so easy to find out who someone was by typing their name into a search bar. Bardeen did his work out of a genuine drive for scientific discovery, not the pursuit of wealth or fame. That's what that anecdote shows me and what appeals to me about him.

I'm sure Bardeen was not sweating about his "legacy" after winning a Nobel Prize, lol.

>Do you go around asking people if they've won a Nobel Prize?

When some person came to me to take an argentinian tango lesson I've managed somehow to find out that he has been working on a eu collider project. So actually I think I do. When I meet a person I am curious to ask a person about his interests and I watch his body movements to understand his way of looking at the world. You can tell that to some degree by how people move you see.

>Really, what's appealing here is living modestly in a time before it was so easy to find out who someone was by typing their name into a search bar.

So what is so good about it? Some people can't find out about this and some opportunities has been lost. What is the benefit of it? I do not like when people promote themselves for the sake of it without anything valuable to offer but when it's not the case what good this 'modesty' can do? Letting win to those who do not deserve it? what is particulary good about it? Now I tend to think about it as being irresponsible in a way.

>Bardeen did his work out of a genuine drive for scientific discovery, not the pursuit of wealth or fame. That's what that anecdote shows me and what appeals to me about him.

Since when 'wealth or fame' considered to be something negative? If a person offers something valueable and worthy I see no reason for such person to be in a shadow and poor without enough money. What would be good about it except perhaps to please some 'socialists/communists' and I've seen what those guys "can" "build" in the ussr so I do not want them to thrive.

Uh I think this depends on the context. In your work you must absolutely self promote. You have to bluntly tell your boss the work you accomplished especially if it's work that's getting attention. But that's because this is a big part of work. We're trying to give more responsibility to people who are achieving things in the work place. It's relevant.

But bringing those things up at a BBQ or while golfing just seems like an attempt to agrandize yourself. Those are supposed to be egalitarian social situations. Your work accomplishments have little value there. Unless you want to live in the god awful world of that HBO show "Succession".

>We're trying to give more responsibility to people who are achieving things in the work place.

It depends on the context as you say of course but what I've seen is that people who where screaming more were giving more responsibility instead of people who were actually achieving something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com