What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years

Humans are basically awful at it. Even the smartest and best informed humans, as Philip Tetlock demonstrated pretty convincingly.

Some forms of knowledge are profoundly retrospective. You can deduce general principles, you can load up your squishy neural net with subtle patterns to match, but ultimately lots of things can only be guessed at with a great deal of innate fuzziness and uncertainty.

The process of forming such a system of judgement is called "wisdom". It's slow, inefficient and it's still absolutely crushed by simple statistical heuristics such as "40% of the time things stay about the same".

I think some differentiators between the two types of work under the umbrella term 'hobbies' is:

It's something where people are asking the question, "What can I do with this now, that I couldn't do before?" Hobbies like stamp collecting, or star wars trivia seem to fail this test.

It's something where other people can build upon the hobby to do other things. Hobbies like being a foodie and MUDs seem to fail this test.

As far as I can gather, it's people taking advantage of a new piece of knowledge or technology to try to figure out what new things it enables them to do.

The body of the post uses the word "hobby", though, and that's much better. Your hobby is the thing you do because you want to, whether or not anything comes of it and whether or not anyone thinks it's valuable. Hobbies are marginal, not one's main or proper thing (Woz was an engineer at HP). And they're often wild or eccentric. The main reason we wouldn't normally use the word "hobby" for important creative activity—that it seems too trivial—is actually a point in its favour. Incidentally, there's an earlier usage of the word "hobby" that was closer to what we now call "obsession" or "fixation". People would apologize for introducing their hobbies into polite conversation.

One must also insist on the fact that very often nothing does come of this quality. To imagine otherwise is to allow no room for randomness.

>And we on HN could do better than merely dismiss it.

What, embrace it? I'll take self-deprecation over rejection of self-deprecation.

>We could try to dig into the underlying forces ourselves. E.g. not all hobbies consist of making the Apple I. So which do, and why? Are the things called hobbies merely two different types of work that are conflated by clueless observers simply because they're not the worker's day job? Or is there some amount of crossover between inventing the future and merely playing around?

Maybe if the article did that it wouldn't be so fluffy. It's fluffy because its terminology is closer to "Rock Star" than "Guitar Lesson."

If you are still inclined to view jacques_chester's post as fluff, consider at least that _submission quality affects comment quality._

I know you're not likely to respond to my comment. I'm partially just wondering why you're wading into the field personally to address a meta point.

So it may be impossible to build a model of what projects will turn out like the Apple 1 and which ones will never be heard of because if technology works like evolution then it doesn't have to be a linear progression forward. It's just whatever tool solves the problem today.

From a personal perspective, I work on projects because I can't help myself. I see something that I would love to use and I need to build it. It's addictive. I'm not sure if there is much more to it than that.

He was busy slapping all nerds everywhere on the back with reflected glory.

You're just reading in what you wanted him to say and judging your desired reading, not the original.

(Edit: and I did the same, fixating on the self-congratulatory fluff and ignoring the selection-biased hypothesis about making predictions.)

> Instead the top comment is the forum analogue of a fluff post: a cynical dismissal based on some presumed bad intention on the writer's part.

You're basically imputing to me a motive to impute a motive to Chris that in my estimation neither of us had. I mentioned Naïve Realism a while back in one of the various pitchfork debates (the Tesla test drive, I think). I think it's happening here too.

But really, this post was self-congratulation. I've read similar fluff from marketers and advertisers who see themselves as the lever-pullers of capitalism, from student politicians about their destiny as masters of all creation, from lawyers about the utter indispensibility of their ancient craft, from engineers ditto ... ad infinitum. In all such cases they could have written the same stuff about how they were shaping The Future Of The World years ago.

I'd be more interested in seeing the base rate on all the garage projects that go absolutely nowhere, achieve nothing and have no meaningful impact on the world. That would be most of them.

Which is fine. But let's not pretend that since Woz was a genius, the rest of us are also in the same category.

I don't think jacq presumed bad intention or dismissed the post entirely. I appreciate someone calling out the combination of 'narrowness of vision' and a little self-righteousness. Chris' post was totally well-intentioned, but jacq's meta point adds value, as now there's the human component of self-importance in addition to the original point of the post

That is where the productive hobbies take you - to the point where to play some more you need to invent. At this point skills, available time all come to bear - but I now recognise this time - and refuse to waste the opportunities.

Not easy to spot for oneself - spotting it as investment - no idea :-)

which grain of sand, dropped onto the pile, caused the avalanche, and why? :)

Must've been the red one. Last three times it was green green yellow red. Well, if you don't count the time when most of the top was already red, that stands to reason.

> Instead the top comment is the forum analogue of a fluff post: a cynical dismissal based on some presumed bad intention on the writer's part.

Personally I think, cynical as it may have been, the article does require a counterpoint to its "brief"-ness.

I really disagree with these question/statements implying how surely there must be underlying causes why one hobby results in "inventing the future", and another does not, as if these causes have any validity outside our monkey brain's 20/20 hindsight.

By that I mean, creative hobbies are great. And they should be encouraged, for people that like that sort of thing (which is probably 99.9% of the HN crowd, but believe it or not, not all people everywhere). A tiny few of those hobbies will turn out "inventing the future" (like the term btw).

But there's two ways of going about that and there is no reason to believe that one has higher odds of being successful than the other (except for a very deep and very human desire to believe): You can either chase the dragon, imprint order onto the chaos that the future grows from, believing you can bend it to your will. Or you can just have some fun.

Can't you do both? Why yes, you can. Buying lottery tickets, some people seem to greatly enjoy imagining they can apply their will to a random process. I don't know if they have creative hobbies, though (but I'm not judging). Or maybe interpretation of Tarot cards, that's both creative, and applying your will to a random process. ... come to think of it, it is also "inventing the future", in a different sense :)

He somewhat, and you more so, get to a point that has been bothering me a fair bit recently. How much should I care about meaning in what I do in my spare time. Possibly due to my upbringing, until recently I felt that if I had spare time I should be doing things that could ultimately lead to a new career, or that at least would produce things that are important. IOW, not just play games but program them. Go out on hikes, and take photography in a way designed to allow the experience to be shared for possibly publication.

However, the last couple of weekends I have forced myself (harder the first weekend than the last couple) to just veg and to play the two games I actually enjoy playing.

In part because the critical reception to most of my "serious" stuff has been lacking, and in part because I'm wondering if trying to do "important" stuff is keeping me from refreshing like I am supposed to do on the days I'm not at my main job.

To your point specifically, I would be curious to know whether the best use of our limited time (at least until we hit the singularity and then time becomes a different medium) is to be working on different aspects of ourself - or to try and fine ways to have fun devoid of any intended meaning?

My law lecturers were variously keen observers of politics, literature, art, human nature and economics. One of the people I most admire as an essayist and thinker has three (three!) law degrees.

However, putting aside the exchange of anecdotes at twenty paces: you're absolutely right. In every profession there are people whose vision never rises above their own blinkered view of the universe.

I guess my point is that being intellectually parochial is ... well, it has drawbacks. Especially if you set out to explain why your profession is amazing and you have nothing whatever to compare it with except ... your profession.

Every time I wander out of my own field I first of all make a total arse of myself. But I always come back clutching something very useful. I never thought Olympic weightlifting would have given me useful life insights, it has. I never thought that learning muscular physiology would help me better understand software architecture, it has. I didn't think systems dynamics or fuzzy logic would upend my view of the world. They have. I didn't think that learning the basics of accounting would change the way I think about how to pick startup ideas, it definitely has.

And studying law, even though I dropped out because it made me unhappy compared to cutting code, gave me training in a model of thought that I still find tremendously useful.

For example, regulatory laws must take into account political restrictions, economic theory and realities, and the goals and pragmatic realities and of the specific industry or industries being regulated. Criminal laws must do all that and take into account various socioeconomic factors. Tax law is a balance of economic theory, revenue generation, political restrictions, and pragmatic realities of accounting across thousands of industries.

Where is the evidence for that? Where are the broad data that looks at what has been done over, say, the last 20 years and examines what has been recognized by the market and what has not?

You can't just look at things that we now know to be successful, you have to (some how, if even possible) look at what was done and never became more than a hobby.

Debatable. Usenet is decentralized as opposed to being dependent on a single bank of computers and beholden to a single group of owners.

It's because the mainstream is a sewer, and you should learn to swim.

And indeed, with regards to radio, an operating radio station was built merely a year after the inventor received a patent for the first successful method of radio transmission (and within a decade of the first successful radio transmission). The first television station was built within 3 years after the first working TV (capable of showing moving images) was built.

Search was not considered non-monetizable; it simply was not as monetizable as a portal based on the technology prevalent when Yahoo--or even Google--launched. Google did not invent the business of bidding for search terms--it licensed the Overture's keyword bidding technology and later bought Applied Semantics (which developed and commercialized the technology that is now known as Adsense), which is what allowed it to monetize search. (If Yahoo hadn't granted Google that license, Google wouldn't be here today.)

MUDs were definitely part of the inspiration for MMORPGs, but the success behind MMORPGs has a lot to do with commercial internet, the development of GUIs, etc...