Focus on things that don't change
dsebastien.net
dsebastien.net
I think of the Admiral Chester Nimitz. All of his peers studied and worked on battleships because that's what the Navy had done for hundreds of years. But when WW2 entered the scene, Nimitz - the one guy studying the rapidly-changing area of submarines and aircraft carriers - was the one promoted to the highest command.
“I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”
When I go to Amazon I'd often prefer a smaller selection of items for common categories, with better price/quality tradeoff information, and an assurance that I wasn't going to get an inferior substitute.
Not that it's an EASY problem to solve, particularly at Amazon's scale, but it's also the thing where it's most likely that a customer will come up and say "Jeff, I just want to be able to order a USB key that has the capacity it claims without having to wade through thousands of shady vendors".
The title should've been: "Focus on things that don't change (initially)"
For example, very few customers have "new" problems. The problems of society have existed for decades or centuries.
Almost everything maps back to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, therefore, when looking at the new, it should be viewed in the impact it has on things that don't change.
The author's example of the internet being a Black Swan, I believe, is wrong. Sci-Fi had been writing about such a network for over a century. The thing that didn't change was our desire for knowledge. The internet was the new library initially, and the internet was able to expand into other needs that didn't change.
I feel like it is better to take both a macro view and a micro view.
We work in the neurotech and sleeptech space. From a macro perspective, sleep, and the health impacts have not changed, so we focus on solving that problem. The micro-details is that we now have the technology to serve that need, that is something that does change, and will continue to change.
This sort of thinking works. . . until it doesn't. It's how we get the vintage zeerust type of Sci-Fi works.
- Ebooks will, of course, be delivered to your TRS-80 after you dial a phone number to buy it from a print catalog.
- Daily news will never go out of fashion (there's always -something- happening!) but printing newspapers creates a bunch of waste. People will, instead, buy a single newspaper that they keep and exchange at a 'newsstand' where your old paper is erased and a new edition printed on top, for a small fee.
It should be mostly about "communication"
> televisions, news
Same, "entertainment", and "know about latest events"
Any long-term software, really. What you're building will, if it's big enough, essentially be a snapshot of a moment in tech.
From a western philosophical tradition, everything is in flux: in a continuous state of change, from actuality to potentiality. The goal of this philosophy is to find purpose, to become something more.
As with most things, the push and the pull go together. The answer is likely in recognizing the time and place for both philosophical points of view: being, and becoming.
This is simply not true of a subject like women's studies or even psychology. If your knowledge of these subjects froze in the 70's, at best your attempts to help a teenager with those subjects would result in eye rolls and at worst you being literally labelled as evil. Why invest time and effort into a subject where the reward over any gulf of time is so slight or is even negative?
re: the 70's, yeah a lot of people had bad opinions back then, but its also not hard to form evergreen good ones
And regarding lots of bad opinions in the 70's, that's partially my point. There was nothing in mainstream physics or computer science that is now looked back on as being as wrong as thinking trangendered people are insane. There's something fundamentally different (and you and I know what it is but I will here leave it unstated) that allows the humanities to veer more deeply into incorrect territory. To reiterate: this makes them a terrible educational investment.
Not exactly the same kind of "wrong", because, well, how could it be? But just a few days ago I was explaining in a comment here why nobody in academia teaches recursive descent parsers.
Surely one of the most unchanging aspects of life that affects us every day is human nature.
Until we can simulate the brain at the lowest level and have accurate quantitative symbolic theories of higher level structures of the brain derived from the low level simulations... our interpretations will remain largely bullshit and guesswork and thus subject to rapid and constant change.
Every study is the study of our interpretation of something.
> Interpretations change constantly.
Yes, that's what intellectual progress looks like.
> our interpretations will remain largely bullshit and guesswork and thus subject to rapid and constant change.
And, yet, because we are human and must interact with humans all the time, we have to do the best with the meager tools that we have to reach as much understanding as we can.
But there is a clear difference between quantitative results validated by the scientific method versus "interpretations" from philosophy and the humanities.
>Yes, that's what intellectual progress looks like.
Usually scientific results don't change as fast as they do in the humanities. Physical models like gravity, entropy, motion do not change much because of the scientific validation. However, in the humanities any new idea can replace the current idea much more quickly because neither idea has a high degree of verification, thus the humanities are subject to change much more rapidly then STEM.
>And, yet, because we are human and must interact with humans all the time, we have to do the best with the meager tools that we have to reach as much understanding as we can.
Ideally yes, practically speaking this is not exactly what's been going on in the humanities arena of academia. Much of what we're seeing involves heavy radical leftist politics getting embedded these groups.
Not all of the humanities are this way but much of it is. I would look to evolutionary biology and anthropology which are part of the "sciences" to study what it is to be "human" rather than "humanities".
Unfortunately given the nature of what is being studied the high bar of quantitative validation cannot be fully deployed in either of the previously mentioned fields. Instead the fields rely on a limited amount of statistics and logical deduction. This is still a significantly higher bar than most of the humanities.
True. But that presumes that the scientific method is a superior or perhaps only way to gain understanding. Deciding whether that's true can't be done using the scientific method itself. The humanities (in particular, the philosophy of science) is one framework for evaluating the scientific method itself.
> Physical models like gravity, entropy, motion do not change much because of the scientific validation.
Sure, because atoms are a hell of a lot simpler than brains and societies.
There are dividends outside of financial. If you can't see them then maybe you should study some psychology.
Edit to respond to your edit: And I'm most definitely considering non-financial gains and losses. Consider my example of a PhD in psychology from the 70's, do you think it's a net positive to believe transgendered people have a pathology? Or that we should destroy the frontal lobes of unhappy housewives with icepicks?
"What's old is new again." Your chosen examples were a brief spout of practice brought about by the brutality of a now waning but once unbridled materialistic industrial power—not the end of psychology (or the humanities at large) as a meaningful study.
If you study women's studies in the 70s then maybe you can't help someone with their homework today. Ok, so in a sense you're less well off because you can't do something that someone who studied physics can do?
But women's studies today is different because the field has moved on to much, so much has been exposed in the way that women are treated in our society, so much has been changed for the better, huge impacts have been made on people's lives etc. And people who have worked in the field have contributed to this. Have they really had a negative reward in your eyes?
And I can literally say that many who studied women's studies and related fields in the 70's have had a negative reward. There is simply no scientific analog to JK Rowling and the battle between "waves" of feminist in the sciences.
Gender studies is basically history + philosophy but focused on a particular topic.
So it's less important that people view Raymond, Jeffreys, or Greer as wrong on their treatise of transgender persons (because it wasn't as if they didn't face plenty of criticism in their day) because it's still important to the history of feminism and informs so much of modern discourse. I don't think you just throw away everything in response to new information because the before was wrong, but that the history becomes even more important because it's the key to understanding where we are now.
My takeaways from their writings isn't necessarily a right or wrong thing but that they very eloquently and with more detail and awareness than you could ever ask for explain their own feelings that reflect the understanding and attitudes toward trans people at time. Today I think people would recognize those feelings as transphobia (or I suppose wokeness if you're one of their descendants) but right or wrong the knowledge is still useful.
Your ability to play a guitar or piano will stay relevant far longer than any programming knowledge.
You may find it even more useful over the long term.
Things that will change are the other-side-of-the-coin for things that don’t.
I wrote it with kids and newcomers in mind, but I believe the advice is more generally applicable
...this is a skill that is difficult to develop, hard to teach, and impossible to test (if somebody can do it)