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Comment by hathawsh | Hacker News Reader

While this passage is inspiring, it boils down to:

  1. Get good at something
  2. Get paid for doing it
  3. Get burned out by doing it
  4. Return to the fun way of doing it
  5. ???
  6. Win a Nobel prize or similar

How repeatable is that pattern? Is that one of the patterns we want to teach the next generation? Serious question. I don't know the answer. Feynman is obviously rather exceptional. Should we encourage people to follow a path like his?

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When I read the OP link, #4 is both the eureka moment of your list AND the last item on the list.

There is no #5 and #6. You can't predict what happens next.

The lesson is to let go of your ego and self-imposed, prescriptive ideas of 'importance' and realize that while important things do matter, they also simultaneously often don't matter at all (in the grand scheme of things)

This is a function of time; in the moment, stuff that feels intractable and overwhelming often can be seen in hindsight with enough clarity to realize that what you were feeling at the time and what was objective reality were two completely different things.

Anyways, not trying to get all "The Dude" about it, but in my experience, as long as you continue to show up, and be patient, present and available for opportunities, things you weren't even looking for have a way of finding you and lead to stuff that you could never have forced into existence through sheer willpower alone. If you can find a way to let all the baggage go and reboot to a place of genuine curiosity, you might be surprised where you eventually find yourself.

YMMV of course.

(and no, I'm not preaching "manifestation" / "law of attraction" bullshit -- just advocating for people who hit a wall creatively to consider stepping off the treadmill, releasing the pressure valve, and seeing where they end up)

Seems similar to Feynman's classic problem solving technique:

    1. Write down the problem
    2. Think very hard
    3. Write down the solution

https://wiki.c2.com/?FeynmanAlgorithm

Pattern like that isn't repeatable, but idea of letting go of expectations to recover the joy of doing whatever you are doing is.

I heavily agree. I got in to security and programming by doing fund video game hacking stuff. Then I got paid to do it, lost the joy and got fired, then started to do it recreationally again and the dopamine rush/addiction is back.

I we replace the Nobel prize part with some sort of accomplishment, this is largely the pattern that lead up to my own building an internet search engine.

Though I think it's pretty dodgy career advice. Existential crises are harrowing. It's a dark pit you fumble through for years. 1/5 stars on trip advisor.

Marginalia is great! Super cool tool

I think the takeaway from the anecdote is that you should have fun with the simple things if you have "writers block" or are tired. Try to get a new perspective on something.

Most people aren’t Feynman and won’t get a Nobel prize whatever strategy they follow.

Finding a fun way to do things does seem like it produces better solutions, though. I mean, if you dread reading about your solution, what do you expect from people who don’t even want to devote their life to it?

Or, act as if you're excited about it, how visionary you are.

I guess it depends on the audience you are looking for. If you want to specifically target the gullible or you are really good at lying, this might be a great strategy.

I often tell people that science is the rigurous version of "fuck around and find out." (Similar to Adam Savage's quote about science)

The point is to understand things, but it is easy to get trapped in needing to prove the value of that understanding. Sometimes this takes decades! I am not aware of how having a deeper understanding of any system has not been a net gain for humans in the long run. So many things overlap (I mean all physics uses the same laws) that it probably shouldn't be surprising that there ends up being a relationship to how plates spin and electrons orbit. But finding that connection is far easier said than done and far more obvious post hoc than a priori.

So why not encourage these people to play? Because it's clear that "fuck around and find out" is a very successful model. It's hard to measure and noisy, but I'm not convinced it's more noisy than the current system we use.

My takeaway is a bit different. My takeaway is that the system has been killing researchers' passion for research for decades (I think it's only gotten worse) and turns them into less effective researchers. That the solution here is to make a system that encourages the things that got people so passionate in their field in the first place. At some point, nearly everyone that does a PhD is doing it out of passion (I say nearly because money, jobs, and immigration are certainly other important influences). Those big advancements often come out of that love and play. Which should make sense that when you're trying to create or discover something that no one else has ever done before that you have to... explore. You have to play, you have to question, you have to push the bounds and reject established beliefs and do things that might not even make sense. Because if you did do the status quo, then we'd have figured out those things previously. Clearly to advance we have to do something different. But I think very few people want to be open about the absurdity of the system that we have. I think part of this is due to the fact that it is easier to place blame for lack of success on yourself when you see others succeeding around you (I certainly know I do. I just don't think that I'm the only thing that is a failure).

My literal solution is to just say fuck it to the journal/publishing system and to the publish or perish paradigm. Papers are simply a means to communicate to other researchers, and we already know how to find one another on arxiv, semantic/google scholar, and so many other platforms. Research is ambiguous and you never know where leaps and bounds are going to come out of, even if you know the general direction. The devil is in the details because nuance is the essence of what makes things work, especially as we've advanced. We have all these admins at universities, why are they not doing all the bureaucratic bullshit that is draining to researchers and let the researchers focus on what they love and do best?

What Feynman is saying is that researchers are the other side of "fuck around and find out." So you want effective researchers? Let them fuck around and they will find things out.

Not sure how Nobel prize got on your list.

I read it that way:

- Things become taxing when they stop being fun

- Doing fun things and playing around whatever interests you is the way to make things less taxing

- Sometimes things you play with are also useful to others

Although I am not sure if it is always possible to match what you are getting paid for to what you consider being fun. Feynman gives no answer for this.

To clarify, the Nobel prize comment is a reference to the last sentence of the passage: "The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."

I understand. I just wanted to point out that pattern does not seem to have Nobel/etc reward built into it, neither it is a strategy to achieve something other than having fun and discovering random things that interest you. Everything else is coincidental.

You might easily end up living on the street by applying that strategy.

On the other hand, some of the best results I ever got professionally were coming from that exact state of play that Feynman describes.

That would seem to be why they asked how repeatable the pattern was, in a tone heavily implying the answer was "not very".

I don't think that's the point of the text.

You can just as easily read it as stating that you should allow yourself to be led by what inspires you or interests you in your field of work, and not to try to produce notable results directly, but rather allow notable results follow from just passionately exploring.

on 4, the fun way of doing it is teaching / helping others doing it. coincidentally, that's the most common path to escape the toxic loop.

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