Fuck Your Miracle Year | Hacker News Reader

Fuck Your Miracle Year

rogersbacon.substack.com

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This is a really weird article. Of course VC people and bloggers are not going to have miracle years - the people with the potential to make amazing discoveries have much better things to do then talk about how to get other people to make amazing discoveries. The hope of an article like Miracle Years is that someone in power makes a change to a school policy or something like that and makes it more likely for someone else to have a miracle year.

> Delete the draft of that blog post you were writing. The post sucks and no one was going to read it anyways.

Blog posts for me but not for thee?

A big theme of this essay is the author knowingly raging against things that he is well aware that he is complicit in. I don't know exactly how to describe the tone, but that line makes total sense as part of the "bit."

Yeah I wasn't sure how I felt about the line at the bottom that read "This is a good time to announce I'll be deleting my blog - just kidding, please like/subscribe/share."

Please put the cherry back in it's context, or I'll have to ask you to leave the store.

> I agree with Dwarkesh that we should be doing more to help young people have miracle years

Optimizing any system for "geniuses" seems very silly to me.

> Look, no one talked about how we can engineer miracle years when miracle years were actually still happening. This modern obsession with progress is just a sign of our decadence, of our creative exhaustion and inability to innovate in any meaningful way.

I'm reading this mega-tome about the guilded age right now and I promise you this is not true.

I actually disagree. It’s kind of a power law distribution thing where 1% of the people make 99% of the real scientific breakthroughs. We should absolutely optimize for geniuses.

> 1% of the people make 99% of the real scientific breakthroughs

That is maybe the single most dubious statistic I've seen thrown out so offhandedly in my entire time on HN.

I mean it's bound to be true and actually more extreme than that if you're taking the entire population as your reference. If you take as reference the subset of people who are trying to get to scientific breakthroughs, then yeah, it's dubious.

I’m talking specifically about stuff like the discovery of gravity or electricity, not the very important and significant inventions that aren’t really a step change. The number of people who make these discoveries may even be hundreds or thousands but that is vanishingly small on a planet of billions of people.

Most academic discoveries come from the same kind of hand-me-down process as practical inventions. Newton's tutor was the one who encouraged him toward studying proto-calculus. He even wrote down the fundamental theorem of calculus himself once but not realizing its importance never publicized it.

Interesting! I'd appreciate any sources though.

Here's a nice example of the "contingency" of scientific success by Bol, de Vaan, and van de Rijt (2018). https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1719557115

Grants are reviewed and ranked by a panel of experts. While they often agree in the broad strokes, their scores also have random or subjective components: different reviewers might prefer different approaches; even the same reviewer might give slightly different scores if they re-reviewed a grant (e.g., due to their mood). However, someone eventually does need to set a payline, or threshold for funding.

As a result, you'd expect people who submitted the worst funded grants and the best unfunded grants, which have very similar scores, to have similar career trajectories. After all, their abilities--as measured by grant scores--are virtually indistinguishable. However, the winners go on to win nearly twice as much funding in the next eight years. This presumably reflects the fact that funding begets more funding (you can collect more and better data for subsequent work) and prestige begets more prestige (you've now got another thing to put in the "awards" category).

This gets even murkier when you consider that grant award and citation statistics are correlated only like 0.3 or something.

It's the Matthew effect multiplied by Goodhart's law.

For the specific anecdote I mentioned you can read more here

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Barrow

and here

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_calcu...

I really doubt that.

Being smart certainly helps, but you also need the right opportunities, environment, and colleagues to “produce” science. These all feed back onto each other in complicated ways: funding gives you time and space to work on tough problems, which attracts talented colleagues, who can make you yourself smarter and thus able to attract more funding and more colleagues…and so on. This works the other way too: a funding squeeze limits what you can work on (if anything), etc.

I can certainly believe that it looks like a power law, but I doubt “intrinsic ability”, insofar as that’s even a thing, has a similar distribution.

Sounds like a good way to create even more cults of personality and egotistical assholes who can't work in a team.

Breakthroughs aren't made by lone geniuses anymore. We just have that superhero fetish eg. picture of black hole where credit was practically given to that one woman in the picture.

Breakthroughs were rarely made by lone geniuses even before. Sure, there are some, but even Edison had a huge lab full of people doing the work.

Bell labs was extremely successful (at least on the innovation front) not due to lone geniuses, but due to a large collection of very smart people all collaborating together.

Not everyone who dislikes working in a team is an "egotistical asshole". Some of us are just neurodivergent and have social anxiety.

That seems worthless if they find their own way to knowledge outside of the schools.

I think the K12 system destroying potential geniuses is a seriously overblown concern, especially in the internet age.

Disagree, but I'm concerned about the geniuses as a group of neglected children, not whether or not we're extracting maximum financial/scientific benefit from them. I always sigh whenever the discussion treats these kids/young people as tools.

The current system is terrible for genius kids' emotional and social development, and in some important ways it hobbles them. (Particularly when it comes to encouraging them to develop resiliency, accept that sometimes they need help, and develop their own sense of self-worth rather than derive it from the accolades of the adults around them).

Yes. The "geniuses" will be alright.

I feel like things are going to diverge further, between people floating around through the system and learning almost nothing vs. those self-learners who ignore that and learn on their own, not letting anything hold them back.

> Optimizing any system for "geniuses" seems very silly to me.

I think there is merit to this argument, but right now most US public education actively restrains geniuses via excessive busywork and limited to no access to accelerated programs.

Many/most of our geniuses are lost in the web of mediocrity that currently expends a ridiculous amount of resources on bringing the lowest performers up to a higher level of low (and imho still inadequate) performance.

Some folks don’t want to be educated. For anything beyond basic reading, writing, math, and civics knowledge and skills, that should be ok.

> mega-tome about the guilded age

What's the title? Sounds interesting.

The Republic for Which It Stands - The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

by Richard White

When I saw your initial comment I figured this was the tome. It's outstanding. I got onto it after hearing an interview with Richard White. He's opinionated and some of the opinions are very insightful.

In the interview he said that there's no such thing as cycles in history (pace Spengler). Instead there are unresolved issues that keep bubbling up over generations. That completely describes America's problems with racism, starting with the original sin of slavery. States rights is another example. The gilded age illustrates many others.

I was sold on the book based on that 30 seconds of the interview alone.

I am loving it. It's dryer due to its focus on economics but "The Rise and Fall of American Growth" covers a similar era and is worthwhile too.

Have you read the entire Oxford US History series? I have the entire series up to 1945, minus 1896-1929 as that hasn't been published yet. we homeschool our children and my plan is to read those over the next two years to base my teaching of US History to our children when they enter high school. Yes, I'm aware that only provides a one author perspective; multiple authors as each book has a different one. Though at 10,000 dense pages it seems sufficient.

I have not but they're ceetainly going on my reading list after this one. Considering that this is yet another history book which is de-programming me from my own awful public school/hollywood led history educatiom I would think it would make a very good basis for a realistic and practical understanding of American history.

What years does it cover?

Edit-looks like 1763 onward. Very much left out there.

Seven Years War (The Crucible of War, that is not actually an Oxford history book) - 1974. I don't have the volume from 1945-1974 yet. I have a few other history books covering that period to present. Penguin has a similar series on European history from the Romans to 2017; I currently have three volumes covering 1814-2017.

Do you have a link to the Penguin series? That seems interesting as well, especially given the time range.

Sorry for the delay in the answer, here is the link to the European History - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/PHE/the-penguin-hi....

Given the delay here is a bonus link to the Lost Civilizations Series by Chicago Press - https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/series/RB-LC.html

The miracle year will be when we will stop obsessing about success so much. Must be a perceived lack of love. So: Love your kids better, that's how you produce future miracle years.

I thought raising kids in dysfunctional households was how you imbue them with an insatiable thirst for validation that leads them to found companies and become billionaires.

Don’t forget creating great works of art!

Billionaires yes, amazing discoveries, no.

The claim that 'the miracle year' is some fundamental rule in scientific discovery and that people's best work is always done in some flurry of creativity in their younger years is the kind of claim that might sell magazine articles - it's simple to understand, you can cherry-pick a few examples, and that might get you some mass appeal.

However there are a very large number of counterexamples, starting with Einstein himself, who went on to spend 15 grueling years working out general relativity, an effort which relied heavily on previous mathematical development of non-Euclidean geometry by the likes of mathematicians like Riemann. Here's that story:

https://thewire.in/science/beyond-the-surface-of-einsteins-r...

Another counterexample is that of James C. Maxwell, probably the most important theoretical physicist of the 19th century, whose synthesis of previous work on electricity and magnetism into a coherent whole was a 20-year process at least, and the form we see Maxwell's equations in today is due to later efforts by others:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Maxwell%27s_equatio...

> "Later, Oliver Heaviside studied Maxwell's A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism and employed vector calculus to synthesize Maxwell's over 20 equations into the 4 recognizable ones which modern physicists use. Maxwell's equations also inspired Albert Einstein in developing the theory of special relativity. The experimental proof of Maxwell's equations was demonstrated by Heinrich Hertz in a series of experiments in the 1890s. After that, Maxwell's equations were fully accepted by scientists."

Another counterexample: Erwin Schrodinger of quantum mechanical wave equation fame, who did his most important work in his late 30s, and again it was developed over a relatively long period of time, c. 1920-1926.

Maybe the story of the young genius with the brilliant idea is pleasing, and yes it may happen from time to time, but the actual history of scientific discovery generally doesn't fit this simple stereotype.

As far as why the American public education system is generally viewed as being of low quality, well, we might want to start by making teaching as economically lucrative and competitive a profession as say, doctoring or lawyering or software developing.

> Because now people have to spend their 20s learning about the discoveries that others made during their miracle years (the so-called “burden of knowledge”).

Maybe now people have to spend their 20s learning about the discoveries because our modern pre-post-secondary education has become so watered down and unambitious.

Personally, I get the sense that could have learned 5x to 20x as much in my teenage years if I hadn't been in an excessively mediocre public education system. And I'm not a genius :)

I remember how slowly high school math moved. How uninspired English class was. The poor curriculum and tools in programming class. imo, there is definitely a primary and secondary education problem vs. the early-life academic environments that helped to produce yesteryear's great thinkers.

https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einste...

I have become convinced that inadequate public schooling is the reason why America has come to rely so much on college to make people "ready for society".

Teachers are criminally underpaid, unsupported, and overworked, while parents are not engaged with their children's learning. It's a bad mix. Not to mention the politicization of teacher unions.

>Teachers are criminally underpaid, unsupported, and overworked

My impression is that public school teachers have been un-empowered to fail out kids, or punish them for bad behavior in class.

If they’re overworked, what is it they’re working so hard and so ineffectively at?

I notice that you have perverted the meaning by adding the word "ineffective" which was not in the statement you are replying to, though you imply it was and that teachers are.

As if the only way a person can be overworked is by not being effective at their job.

And thus it is the teacher's failing that they cannot keep up with the workload, not the people assigning the workload.

It seems you have had a very rare and fortunate life. I am happy for you, though I wish you had more respect for others.

OP didn’t say it but an overarching theme in the comments here is that traditional public education is ineffective. So if teachers are overworked, they’ve got energy to expend but they’re expending it ineffectively.

You took this a little far with the personal attack.

When you phrase it like this, you are implying that somehow the teachers directly are at fault for misdirecting their labor. So even if you are "technically correct" in some sense, you are phrasing it in an inflammatory way. Don't be a troll.

I didn’t mean to say it was their fault. I’m assuming they’re operating within the parameters required of them by their administrations.

Don’t know about the US but in Sweden teachers are plagued by mandatory administrative task, as well as a myriad of small tasks all unrelated to teaching.

I hear this a lot, but what exactly is administrative tasks they are being burdened with that is not part of being a teacher?

From what I’ve heard from acquaintances who work(ed) as teachers, there’s a lot of of documentation of the students’ progress that takes a lot of time to enter but usually is write-only.

If it's known to be write-only, then only they are to blame for wasting time. They could literally write anything, or nothing, and nobody would ever know, right? Otherwise, it's not write-only.

Or maybe it's write-only except for random audits.

They're ineffective precisely because they're overworked.

Accommodating students unwilling to learn or unprepared.

One of the things that is deeply ingrained in education curricula, yet which doesn’t seem remotely justified pedagogically, is the timetable. The idea of studying lots of subjects, all at once, via daily or weekly sub-hour-long bite-sized lessons.

If you threw out all the context switching and review and catch-up, you could probably teach most year-long high school subject curricula in a week.

I think you are on to something. At the same time I wonder about content sticking if you don't practice the subject for months. Doing math two months of the year (ignoring the math you might need in physics class) might mean you have to rehash a lot. That said, for many subjects this wouldn't even change anything. How often does learning something in history class currently rely on what you learned a few months ago? Rebec in my biology classes things rarely were connected. For a few weeks we talk about fungi and then for a few weeks about the cardiovascular system.

Year-round schooling has proven this point time and time again. Students in summers-off schedules spend months catching back up to where they left off.

I slightly disagree. It takes time and repetition for some things to sink in. IMO, moving to more college-like A/B days would be better. I would not expect history lessons to stick if you compressed 180 days of AP Euro into two weeks at eight hours a day. Likewise, math classes moving that fast would give students the feeling they learned a ton without any retention. That said, I feel like literature and writing could be subjects that fit into this model of intensive week-long workshops once each year.

It might not have been the teachers who decided on this schedule.

I hear some tech workers complain that their days are made ineffective by lots of pointless meetings.

I was shocked to (re)discover that high school algebra is a multiyear course. And trigonometry is a year long.

What?

We send some of our worst thinkers to educate children. Trigonometry didn’t make sense to me as a kid because I was learning from someone who didn’t understand it. They could memorize a lot of rules, but they didn’t understand it. In the face of this, what makes the most sense is fostering curiosity.

Your teachers not understanding material doesn’t matter if their role is prompting you to ask the right questions and find areas of interest.

I highly recommend that anyone else who feels the same way look into Acton Academy. The model is based on project based work, self guided learning, and Socratic discussions. There are locations all throughout the U.S. My six year old may not recognize all the material for a standardized test, but he’s fascinated by laws of physics, engineering for space, growing plants, and conservation. At home he wanted to start a project on simulating landing a Mars rover with a small programmable robot. He’s playing around with the idea of cushioning the landing versus building a parachute. And all of this is something we can tie back together to make interesting for him — because he has interests! How could we collect a plant seed after landing for example.

His approach to his other interests is similarly curious. He doesn’t want to be told how to fish by an authority, he wants to experiment with different techniques and think about how he can improve iteratively.

We stomp curiosity out of children in public schools. We need to stop.

> We send some of our worst thinkers to educate children.

I wonder if this is the sort of thing that could be fixed by paying teachers more. Why would a smart person become a teacher if a professional industry job will pay $300-500k and a teaching job will pay $100k? Is paying teachers so much even palatable to the general public?

You'd be lucky to find a teaching job paying 100K. According to this: https://study.com/academy/popular/teacher-salary-by-state.ht...

salaries top out around 70K. That's ending salary, not starting salary.

And yes, this could be fixed by paying teachers more. And treating the profession with some respect.

The difference is starker than that. Principals make close to the amount that you’re estimating for teachers, and by structure most teachers will never be principals.

I wanted to go into teaching but stopped after I realized what that would mean for my long term earnings. Even with time taken off as a stay at home parent and time spent working in the developing world, I’m getting close to the lifetime earnings for teachers who progress in their careers. In less than a decade of working.

It's not just pay. Teachers will willingly take pay cuts to teach at private schools. Why?

1. Students with chronic behavior problems are easier to throw out

2. Parents are less likely to go on idiotic crusades about the content of the curriculum

3. The school board (or, more likely, the state legislature) isn't going to make irrelevant changes to appease voters

Private schools are more likely to treat their teachers as independent professionals rather than glorified babysitters or McEducation employees.

I don't think pay would necessarily solve the problem though either (edit: I do support paying teachers quite a bit more just don't think that is a magical solution). I'm not a teacher, don't pretend to understand the nuances but there seems to be a nasty conflagration of political barriers to holding some combination of children/teachers accountable for outcomes. Probably something related to withholding finding or other perverse incentives. I'm sure I'm not the only person on HN who has left a very high paying job for a different one because of bad culture factors.

I learned algebra in middle school, in one year. What is this insanity of which you speak?

“Algebra” by itself is meaninglessly broad. You could certainly teach “solve [some simple kinds of] equations for an unknown” in a few months; you could also have a whole mathematical career as an algebraist.

The term is not meaninglessly broad here in the US. We use the term "abstract algebra" to describe the more general subject, usually taught in college-level courses in groups, fields, and so on. Mere 'algebra' does indeed mostly mean "solving for an unknown", although I'd argue there's an important, more general concept of 'equation' introduced. From what I've read the concept of 'variable' is tricky for a lot of kids.

https://www.fcps.edu/academics/graduation-requirements-and-c...

Here's the HS math sequence options from my local school district in VA. Can't speak to many other places but this is what my above comment is based on.

Only one of those options will even leave you remotely prepared for college level mathematics. The fact it stops at Algebra 2 or Part 2 for most of those options is criminal.

The thing that makes public schooling so frustrating is how they lump everyone together and then teach to the lowest common level. If you're in a school system that can afford to offer AP courses, some students have a chance of not being bored. The rest of the students have to deal with that fact that some of the students are only there because they haven't dropped out yet and the state requires their presence.

That's amusing, you are doing exactly what the article talks about. But really though, I've relied very little on education institutions for much of my learning. Saying they held you back is just an excuse, it's likely you held yourself back. I know that in my case any failings are definitely largely my own.

One thing that the current education system has not managed to grasp yet is the paradigm shift in its role: until recently (maybe 15-20 years ago) the role of the school was to give you as much information as possible; now, it is exactly the opposite: to filter away the noise as much as possible and help you focus on what matters the most for you. But we are still information hoarders and it will take a while for this shift to sink in.

I learned most of it in libraries and later the Internet. Car repairs (to work in an auto service), audio technology (for building custom speakers and amps), computer hardware (for myself), programming (still shit at it), marketing (was fun), psychology (was kinda useless), English (very useful), lots of stuff. So kids these days have it easy :D

I probably could've specialized better if I had done that in school, but who knows. My attention was trash and still getting worse.

Of course you're learning about others' crown achievements, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. And things got way more complicated, there's so much to know that it's hard to remember. Especially if you use social media, always some shit there that you'll shove in your memory instead of useful things heh.

Most new things are a spin on the old, it might've been easier to discover/stumble upon something genuinely new 100+ years ago.

Public education is a baseline. Literacy, civics, a bit of math and biology are things that can help no matter what vocation people end up with.

Without it folks might end up pigeonholed into whatever their family does or a narrow selection of trades within the local community.

> Public education is a baseline. Literacy, civics, a bit of math and biology are things that can help no matter what vocation people end up with.

All of which is usually covered by 8th grade in the US.

HS is a waste for most people attending.

This common way of thinking is flawed in several ways.

1) The baseline is extremely low, and getting lower by the year

I will take math as an example. High school, at the best possible setting, leaves you knowing single variable calculus.

Is this enough? no, it's nearly zero. To be able to understand anything about math in the modern age, you have to know :

- Formal logic

- Linear Algebra and Differential Equations at 4x courses or more level

- Probability and statistics, 2 or 3 courses.

So all in all, in order to even think intelligently about a field like math, in order to have any chance at all of even comprehending the slightest inkling of what all those scientists and engineers and ML practitioners who impact your life massively even do, you have to know easily 10x of what high school, in the best possible scenario, teaches you.

Then one year passes, science, math and engineering get more complex, and high school curriculum and budgets get lower and lower, and the race to the bottom continues.

You can repeat this exercise for any subject : Ask a specialist what's the bare, absolute minimum for anyone to think or reason effectively about their subject, compare their answer to the K12 curricula for that subject, and laugh at the sheer mismatch of the two.

2) The baseline is redundant and wasteful

The sheer waste is mind boggling, all of my K12 education could be easily compressed in 6 years of study. Lessons are repeated over and over again each year, irrelevant subjects like the agricultural policy of Brazil and Nigeria are stuffed in overweight geography curriculums for no apparent reason (my country is neither of those 2), the English language's way of annotating verbs with tenses is rehashed for the 7th time this year.

There is no concept of opportunity cost, there is no awareness of a notion of "What could I teach this kid this year instead of yet another rehashing of the names of the world's most popular rivers and mountains?".

3) The baseline is low quality, low relevance and low impact

Programming is memorizing visual basic's or php's basic syntax, math is learning a formula and repeatedly applying it over and over again to questions with parameters varied, biology is memorizing the reasons of why various phenomena happen.

It's not only that what gets teached is a pathetically small subset of what needs to be teached, and not only that it's teached in 2x the time needed with metric tons of mindless repetition and rehashing. It's that even this small subset that is teached and re-teached, is teached in the most boring, unmemorable, uninspiring, useless and actively harmful way possible.

It's not a good baseline, people leave it not knowing a single worthwhile thing about anything or - even worse - actively thinking those subjects are useless pontifications and navel-gazing. It does an awful lot of harm and virtually 0 good, when you divide by the time and resources it consume .

The baseline is meant to serve the greatest number of people possible. Diff. Eq. is far beyond the average person and less useful for them to know for their lives than basic statistics and critical thinking.

I'm not saying US K12 is perfect. Rather that it isn't trying to cater to 90th percentile, independent learners. For those hopefully the parents will recognize greatness and seek a more fitting alternative.

K12 education is a crime against humanity. I want this institution to violently die.

Agree. Society basically introduces its newest members to society through something closer to a penal system than knowledge transfer.

Granted, children are not necessarily trustable to figure it all out on their own. It’s more the bullying, anti-intellectualism, and generally not considering their needs that needs checking.

Author here, see heresy 12 - https://rogersbacon.substack.com/p/20-modern-heresies?s=w

I don't understand either one of these articles to be honest. We're talking about Einstein and Newton as if their success is reproduceable if we just give people time to think? We don't have miracle years now because people like Einstein are impossibly rare. That's assuming Einstein was even human.

We also don't have "miracle years" because the term doesn't actually mean anything. It's not real. Maybe the pressures of life and society forced people long ago to prioritize their work in such a way that the bulk of it was done in a very short, timely manner.

Or perhaps much like an athlete, it's probably ideal to spend your prime doing your best work. Or even still, maybe like me, these people worked on waves of mania and maybe occasionally that manic episode lasted an entire year and they were extremely productive.

All of that said, literally what are we talking about? Don't spend your time on a PhD program, you might be the next Einstein! Einstein wasn't writing blog posts, he was grinding! Please go join the latest YC backed venture and we can disrupt the food delivery industry!

We're all obligated to go outside after participating in either one of these articles.

I'm confused... Are you suggesting Einstein was not human, e.g., an alien?

I'm surprised that I'm having to explain this to multiple people but yes, it's just a joke.

Well, I enjoyed seeing the ridiculous responses you got… so thank you :D

Weirdest 30 minutes of my life. Wow.

Einstein aside, the jury is still out on a few Martians: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)

People without rare skills often rationalize the skills of others as superhuman. It’s an illusion, but a powerful one.

I don’t have any particularly rare skills either, and I made peace with that long ago. It helps you like yourself for what you do have.

Notice how cynical the tone is of the parent comment. It’s usually a sign that something is wrong.

It's... a joke. Yikes.

What’s the punchline?

You're projecting a lot of weird insecurities onto a throwaway joke about Einstein being an alien because his achievements were Out Of This World. Clearly no one thinks Einstein was an actual alien. It's remarkable that I'm actually having to type this out.

Relax stranger, there's no weird Freudian argument to be found here.

I wasn’t talking about your Einstein portion. Your whole comment was cynical.

If you don’t want to discuss it, that’s fine. But it’s not up to everyone else.

I think joining a YC startup to disrupt the food industry is a pretty interesting thing. Most people spend their lives not disrupting anything at all. It doesn’t make them worse people, but it would be nice if they’d not snipe at people who do those things.

MY cynical comment is your point of contention? In response to the absurdly cynical article we're discussing in the first place? The one literally called 'Fuck Your Miracle Year'?

You have nothing to discuss which is why there isn't a discussion to be had here. You attacked me with an incredibly weird reaction to joking about Einstein being an alien, then doubled down and demanded I explain humor to you.

Both articles are devoid of any actual substance, I'm sorry to have brought this to your attention.

“This article is pretty bad. I’ll make it worse by acting equally poorly in the comments.” Is that your logic?

I do have things to discuss — your behavior, and why you’re so aggressive.

You remember when you attacked a stranger and suggested there was something fundamentally wrong with that person as a human because you didn't like their comment?

You might want to work on that. Self-awareness can be your next project!

I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith as “out of this world” did not appear until this comment.

This would be similar to calling Einstein a cow, then waiting an hour to say it’s because he’s outstanding in his field.

So in your mind it makes more sense that I was genuinely calling Einstein an alien? That the hyperbole of calling someone an alien didn't possibly register as being in jest?

Do you wait for the comedian to explain the joke before you're able to clarify their position?

I don't think you're commenting in good faith because none of the alternatives for what I could've meant make any sense.

Good comedians don’t need to explain their jokes. Good jokes don’t need to be explained. Yet here we are.

The joke police are ruthless today. Just let me pay the fine, surely it's easier than having to convince people I don't actually think Einstein was an alien.

Tesla? Actually an alien.

(I'm kidding please stop).

I suspect these are people who think you're an actor for a nation state who accidentally let slip something s/he knows about Einstein being an alien.

I was basically accused of being a Russian agent on here once for using the word "Boomer" while referring to a model of car that only that generation would have remembered.

There's a smattering of extra crispy ESR-style hackers on here that occasionally trips over something you might not expect them to.

The fact is that this person did not use the word alien in their original "joke" - they wrote "That's assuming Einstein was even human." They then proceeded to act like a bully or abuser would act - "Oh, it was a joke! I meant it as a joke and I forgot to drop the punchline until almost an hour later! You are so dumb for thinking otherwise!" As an older sibling, this is something straight out of older sibling 101 and I picked up on it immediately when I saw the interaction between sillysaurusx and oldstrangers.

There is no weird conspiracy here, there was just someone acting in an uncivil manner who was called out on it and who then kept things going.

I was actually expecting the joke to fall back on the fact that he was indeed a completely legal alien. Because he was, and that is humor.

"That's assuming Einstein was even human."

If English is your native language and you interpret that literally, then yeah, I don't know what to tell you.

The downvotes for you and the rest of the people that took that literally should also probably indicate that the majority of people thought you were being ridiculous. Yet... you continue on.

;)

That's pretty impressive. I wish I knew if Einstein was actually an alien.

Also I forget that a lot of engineer types take a very rigid approach to language.

"Get eggs while you're at the store!"

He's still there to this day...

This thread just keeps getting weirder. Am I on HN?

That's what they want you to believe.

The moth went in because "the light was on", which is vernacular for "open for business", but it has a double meaning because moths are attracted to light at night. The punchline itself is admittedly weak -- the humor comes from the fact that you listened to a lengthy story that turned out to be a really bad joke.

Einstein wasn’t that special, he wasn’t superhuman, if you transported the same person in time significantly he would have likely been entirely unremarkable. He had many contemporaries just as capable with complements equally as impressive.

He got famous which was a result of a few of his accomplishments being of topics and characters which got the attention of popular culture.

He was also simply primed with being a person of the right kind of potential being in the right place in the right time.

In short, it was very much luck that enabled him. He also worked hard, he was also quite capable, but the hero exceptional human narrative was overdone.

Einstein: "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious."

But to be fair: he was smarter than most people.

Anybody very successful has had a lot of luck, that's a given.

But since it's about science, and revolutioning it on too of that, claiming there was nothing special about Einstein make little sense.

The point of the university was to give 20-somethings in their intellectual prime a socially respectable position where they have few obligations. Higher education was for weirdos to pursue their obsessive interests and society benefited from this arrangement. We've drifted far away from this when we decided, over the years, that everyone needs a degree.

There are various monied interests trying to "disrupt higher education". "Progress studies," "Thiel Fellowships," "University of Austin," whatever. I give them low odds but they're trying to do the right thing.

Lots of true stuff in this. Most important point is that this historical idea of individual genius is outdated in a world where scientific progress gets harder. If I know nothing about the world and I want to invent physics any model is better than the status quo. As we come up with better systems that explain more of what we see, improvement is harder, an entire new paradigm shift even more so.

Potential for genuine innovation seems to be in improving collective intelligence. Coordination between institutions, disciplines, communication, and so forth. There's not a day that passes without complaints about how academia, the private sector, the economy and the government don't get along. Fix that and you'll improve innovations.

This Randian hero worship of the VC industry is masturbation and I don't mind the tone of the article because I don't think the message is understood if you'd say it in any other way.

It has come to light that Einstein's first wife likely was co-author of his papers but got no credit due her gender.[1] I see no mention of that in either article.

Historically, it was sort of a given that a man's career was supported by the labor of a wife. This assumption is baked into how we design jobs and it's problematic in a world where that's less true than it once was.

If you don't count hidden contributions of that sort, you will never figure out some reproducible formula.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24964646

> Einstein's first wife likely was co-author of his papers

What’s the source for that claim? This just links to another of your own comments, which is also unsourced.

This just links to another of your own comments, which is also unsourced.

No, it doesn't link to a comment by me at all. It links to an HN discussion of the article about that very topic. It just so happens my comment is the top comment there which I didn't remember when I went looking for it.

My miracle year was when I was 18 or 19 and I wrote my first large piece of software by myself. I'm approaching my late 20s now and I haven't had as much sustained fun ever since. Being a wage slave sucks.

Sounds more like a gap year than a miracle year.

I was able to do that while I was still studying, which mostly involved memorizing a bunch of stuff. The software industry and its endless meetings drain my energy way more

Studying feels like hard work when you are a kid, but it's kind of a joke how easy and non-draining it is in retrospect. Doing actual work is just so much more taxing.

I think it's due to how linear studying is. Actual work on the other hand can be quite unpredictable, it's a bit like a monster of the week show where monsters are incidents, bugs, and unreliable leaders. And there's also linear work on top of it.

Are there any other pieces of software you want to write? Depending on your financial situation, see if you can quit or take off your job for a year and write it. The years aren't going to come back to you, and you don't want to die having pushed off your dream until it was too late...

The number of side projects I have had to leave aside in the last few years is close to a dozen. I was able to implement some of my smaller ideas and I open sourced them, which boosted my career. But I don't want them to be a means to an end, I want to actually have the time to build them properly and make a living off one of them some day.

Unfortunately my country has infamously low salaries while having a relatively high cost of living. I have some savings, but I would burn them at a pretty fast rate if I quit my job. My best chance at having another "miracle year" is getting fired, which would immediately provide me with some more liquid cash plus monthly unemployment benefits for a while. At that point I could move to one of the cheaper areas and be financially independent for years.

Maybe the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

I have an idea.

Stop working at work and code what you want.

I wish

Dwarkesh Patel's essay did not make much sense to me, and I don't get either how people like Jeff Bezos have time for something like this. Apparently Mark Andreessen and Paul Graham are paid to tweet all day, and they are experts at everything. Do they hire ghost-writers? How does this work?

you get big at one thing like founding a company, then use the money and reputation that follows to spend your days tweeting takes on subjects you don't really have a deep understanding of - but people still listen because you have that-one-successful-thing which translates to intelligence in all areas to the average reader

a good rule of thumb I like is to downplay the opinions of famous people who tweet more than 3 times a day

Not sure why someone’s self-described envious rant after a peer got a bunch of attention deserves a spot at the top of HN.

Because he says a lot of true things.

Read the article, wanting to hate it, found it to be a pleasant surprise. I didn’t love the style at first, but eventually I was able to look beyond that.

Because sometimes angry, bitter, jealous people also say something true as they demonstrate their own hypocrisy.

You need to account that it's Sunday, takes less votes to get a top post.

Also rants trigger reactions easily.

I really like the article for its tone, because it feels authentic and raw and is not begging me to take it seriously. I think most if not all blog posts should be like this: you read it, you smile and think a bit, maybe write a quick comment, then you move on. I agree with the author that this whole thing about wanting to be the next Big Blogger Who Wrote That Article is probably bullshit.

Author here - well said, in complete agreement. This is one of the best compliments I've gotten.

I read that as fuck your Miracle Ear.

Honestly that’s why I clicked through.

Rule 34 likely applies. I'm not going to google it to confirm though.

Success will come, or it wont. If it does, it will be fleeting: you will die soon anyway. Let us not worry too much about it.

My general advice remains the same: raise good children.

What a load of drivel.

K12 education used to be about teaching, but the No Child Left Behind policy changed goalposts. It’s now about maximizing the percentage of students that graduate. Since it’s unlikely students are getting smarter, the curriculum needs to be less intensive to lower the threshold for graduation. Net result is more students graduating per capita at the cost of a dumbed down curriculum.

> Also, stop meditation and trying to optimize your mental and physical performance. Has anyone who’s ever had a miracle year cared about any of this shit?

I’d say Lex Fridman is in his equivalent of a miracle year, or was last year anyway. Keeping the body tuned is important for mental ability which is important if you’re trying to be productive at all, much more to achieve a miracle year.

What miracles did he do? I’m genuinely confused. Seems like he’s just doing podcast interviews these days. And he moved to Austin? Hardly a Newtonian miracle year. I think he’s just getting mentored by Rogan which is why he’s doing a bit better

What miracles did Einstein do? We all know miracles aren’t possible, all you can have is a breakthrough / absurdly productive year. That’s what I meant.

Lex presents as one of the biggest self absorbed pseudo-intellectuals of the 21st century. Perhaps a miracle year in being a joke of a philosopher I guess.

> Please don't fulminate.

Here’s an HN rule you seem to have broken.

> Eschew flamebait.

There’s one I’ll be following.

It's interesting how much truth, insight and self-awareness is in this article, and yet ultimately how vain the entire line of thinking is. The reality is, people who do great things (however you define great!), tend to achieve them through relentless focus within their field of expertise. When we start focusing on optics then we just become politicians.

TLDR: if your goal is to make your own innovations/progress/etc then probably don't waste your time playing armchair sociologist writing this sort of thing before you've actually done any of that. Or spend a lot of time reading this sort of thing.

If Einstein were around and publishing in today's environment would he not be widely considered a crank? What's a patent clerk doing disputing laws of physics that have been established for 100 years?

An article that explains why we should not have wasted the time to read it. And just gone for a walk instead.

I'm reminded of an interview I saw with Ayn Rand a long time ago. I can't find the exact interview anymore but I did find an interview where she describes the general idea [1]. It is a central tenant of Objectivism that we should be doing more for gifted children based on the assumption that gifted adults contribute more to society.

We see echoes of this philosophy in our culture of belief in 10x engineers. I see it in Jeff Bezos' management philosophy of doubling down on success or in Google's philosophy of killing off under-performing projects. It is the mantra of VC capitalism where we'd rather kill middling projects that are limping along in the hopes or redirecting capital to the one 100x return behemoth.

I find Rand's ideas repugnant myself but I always admired that she plainly and unabashedly spoke them. Nowadays people who believe that kind of stuff are much more subtle.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1HD8KXn-kI

a free upmod to anyone who feels like summarizing whatever this is about.

There’s a missed target here, I think, which is capitalism trying to turn observations into reproducible goods—-commoditising progress, in other words.

And like all things capitalism tries to commoditise, to the extent it succeeds it will degrade the thing it’s trying to reproduce and destroy whatever is unique and special and wonder-worthy about the original. A genius had a super productive year for discoveries? It should be self-evident that such a thing can’t be made routine or predictable, but the real story here is the paucity of vision of our entrepeneurs. They can’t even appreciate miracles without thinking about turning them out on a production line.

this definitely has made me reconsider starting a blog

Benjamin Franklin.

TLDR: The internet is making us all fucking idiots and the only way to have a miracle year is to unplug from it

Hehe :)

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