[HN Gopher] Work Hard (2007)
___________________________________________________________________
Work Hard (2007)
Author : somerandomness
Score : 224 points
Date : 2021-08-26 18:53 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (terrytao.wordpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (terrytao.wordpress.com)
| unholiness wrote:
| Seems to have the hacker news hug of death. Cached version:
| https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Tr5R5J...
| jarenmf wrote:
| Reading alone would take some serious hard work. To make any
| meaningful contribution in any field you have to do some serious
| reading (and understanding) to bring yourself up to date with the
| field.
| bserge wrote:
| On a related note, this always trickles down to low level
| managers who then proceed to tell it to the floor workers.
|
| Trying to motivate a cleaner, assembly operative, driver,
| cashier, warehouse operative, packer and other low level workers
| with it is like telling them to go fuck themselves.
|
| It sounds like bullshit. It is bullshit. No one fucking loves
| these jobs. There's nothing to aspire to. Working hard means just
| killing yourself faster (but not fast enough).
| paulpauper wrote:
| what if you work hard and derive meaning from your work
| themacguffinman wrote:
| I can certainly understand how one can derive meaning from a
| trade or profession, but I would find it difficult to believe
| that anyone could really do that for menial jobs like a
| cashier or warehouse packer. These jobs are dead ends, they
| don't have a meaningful spectrum of quality and you're little
| more than a warm body.
|
| A comedian (David Mitchell) once joked that he's proud of the
| UK's terrible service reputation. It doesn't seem honest or
| appropriate for service staff to be so happy and
| enthusiastic, why would they be? There's very little to be
| happy about.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| You would think the average HN'er wouldn't fall for it, but
| they do.
|
| The rich have been telling the poor how to live their lives
| forever.
|
| Jesus being the exception. (He wasen't rich)
|
| I only get offended by wealthy boys giving their midlife, or
| old age, success speech
|
| Or, thinking they can advise on art, philosophy, or writing,
| because they have a mouthpiece.
|
| Every one of them leaves out the emphatic wealthy father who
| knows how difficult it is to make it big in a very
| competitstive system.
| brailsafe wrote:
| So if you are already a child prodigy, born into a family of
| prodigies, specifically within Mathematics, and you want that
| PHD, gotta keep grinding.
| david_allison wrote:
| (2007)
| [deleted]
| didibus wrote:
| I don't really know if I believe in hard work. I feel more
| inclined to see things from the motivation school of thought.
| When you're motivated, all work is easy. The "hard" feeling comes
| from pushing through doing something you are not motivated to do.
|
| And the thing is, I don't know if anyone is successful at that. I
| feel most success comes from people who had the motivation for
| it. Can you force yourself or others through work that they're
| not motivated to do and actually expect it to deliver on
| breakthroughs?
| themacguffinman wrote:
| I'm fairly confident that when the article says "hard work", it
| just means "a lot of work". The article later mentions that
| more motivation will help you work harder.
|
| The point is that motivated or not, high quality output
| requires a lot of work. Working a lot on a particular thing is
| still going to be easier for some and harder for others.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I actually believe the complete opposite. People who rely on
| motivation to get them through to the finish line in long term
| situations probably never make it there. Motivation is a very
| fleeting feeling unless you find something that utterly sets
| your soul on fire, and I would almost say it is a crutch for
| many. Sometimes you're going to get up in the morning and
| you're just going to have to push through. And there will
| almost always be small/medium/large pieces of work that are
| simply not fun(and you can't always delegate). The people who
| succeed will be the ones that have developed a mindset of
| resilience and just doing what needs to get done.
| cushychicken wrote:
| If there's anyone I'll listen respectfully to about the value of
| hard, diligent work, it's Terence Tao.
|
| Reminds me of Richard Hamming talking about his professional envy
| of John Tukey:
|
| _One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered
| that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a
| genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode 's
| office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John
| Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind
| his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised
| Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did
| that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!_
|
| From "You and Your Research":
| https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
| paulpauper wrote:
| Remidns me of the 'cheat code' of reading a chapter ahead
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| > _If there 's anyone I'll listen respectfully to about the
| value of hard, diligent work, it's Terence Tao._
|
| Why? He is a genius, and most of us aren't geniuses.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| TIL Bode, Hamming, Shannon, Tukey, et. al all worked at Bell
| Labs around the same time. Wonder what the culture must've been
| like, those are all household names in signal processing,
| control, information theory.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| Richard Hamming wrote a book, "The Art of Doing Science and
| Engineering", which - despite its name - is more or less a
| memoir of his own scientific career. It's a fun read if
| you're interested in that culture.
| breck wrote:
| Best book I've read in a long while. I hope to reread every
| few years.
| cushychicken wrote:
| I did a double take the first time I read that passage from
| YAYR because I'd never properly realized that:
|
| 1. Bode was a person
|
| 2. He was alive in the past 100 years
|
| Tukey was a legit fucking genius.
| [deleted]
| herodoturtle wrote:
| > there is an important distinction between "working hard" and
| "maximising the number of hours during which one works". In
| particular, forcing oneself to work even when one is tired,
| unmotivated, unprepared, or distracted with other tasks can end
| up being counterproductive to one's long-term work productivity,
| and there is a saturation point beyond which pushing oneself to
| work even longer will actually reduce the total amount of work
| you get done in the long run
|
| Worth highlighting, for those of you that are skipping through.
| ttul wrote:
| And of course most of us are skipping through reading about
| "working hard..."
| reidjs wrote:
| Because working hard can mean skimming articles or delegating
| it to someone else to get you the gist of it. I don't have
| time to read every single interesting sounding article I come
| across. Well maybe I do, but then I wouldn't have as much
| time for commenting :)
| [deleted]
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Great point. I like to compare work capacity to exercise
| capacity. Too much exercise will actually harm your fitness
| rather than improve it. However, reasonable exertions, combined
| with appropriate rest, will improve your fitness over time.
|
| Like exercise capacity, one's ability to work hard can also be
| improved through practice. This doesn't mean pulling all-
| nighters and chugging caffeine to override the sleepiness,
| though. It means setting incremental goals to try a little bit
| harder and then following up with proper rest and recovery.
|
| For example, if you install time tracking software and measure
| that you spend 3 hours in your code editor every day (a
| reasonable amount for someone working an 8-hour day, due to
| time spent reading documentation, in meetings, and other
| activities), it would be a mistake to set a goal to spend 6
| hours in your code editor. You'll get burned out and hate it.
|
| However, if you set a goal to spend 3.5 hours in your code
| editor every day, you can likely find low-impact ways to make
| that happen. Maybe you're more efficient with transitioning
| from meetings back to coding. Or maybe you cut down time spent
| reading articles on HN or Twitter by 30 minutes and apply it to
| coding instead.
|
| Over the course of a 5-day work week, that extra 30 minutes per
| day adds up to almost 3 hours extra work. If your starting
| point was 3 hours per day, you've basically added an extra work
| day to your week without giving up much.
| selestify wrote:
| Are there any such tracking software that you'd recommend?
| sankumsek wrote:
| Not OP, but I've found a reasonable amount of success with
| the free version of RescueTime.
| garrickvanburen wrote:
| Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is take a nap
| in the middle of the day.
|
| On a daily basis, I do so more often than not.
| tristanperry wrote:
| It's a great bit of advice.
|
| It does also apply to companies who demand that their workers
| have bums on seats in an office 8-9 hours a day...
|
| Companies often don't seem to understand that loading employees
| with meetings and bureaucracy, then wondering why productivity
| isn't higher, is fairly foolish.
| wvh wrote:
| > Worth highlighting, for those of you that are skipping
| through.
|
| Like my employer...
| pm90 wrote:
| I'm glad you posted this as it goes against the "hard work
| cult" that seems to have gripped popular imagination. Hard work
| isn't just time spent on completing a task; this interpretation
| is maybe the easiest to understand and benefits employers the
| most.
| gfodor wrote:
| I think there's an important point here too that cuts against a
| lot of memes: it's important to keep working hard right up
| until this point. A lot of people presume that if they put in a
| solid day's work they're going to do just as well as someone
| who is a "work-a-holic." That's not a great mental model, if
| the work-a-holic is working _more_ but not _so much_ they are
| hitting these problems mentioned. There 's a fairly wide margin
| between underwork and overwork.
|
| edit: Lo and behold my sibling is taking on one of the memes I
| mentioned. :) If you're working less because you feel it's
| doing too much in the favor of your employer, and _not_ because
| you 're otherwise going to start becoming less productive
| because of it, you're probably underworking in the sense
| outlined here.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > it's important to keep working hard right up until this
| point
|
| As a pretty hard worker who is very far from workaholic, I
| strongly disagree. Work hard. It's super important. Put the
| time in or else you won't progress. But you don't need to go
| right up to the edge. If you put in solid work reliably for
| years, other factors will matter so much more than whether
| you go right up until that point.
| gopalv wrote:
| > A lot of people presume that if they put in a solid day's
| work they're going to do just as well as someone who is a
| "work-a-holic."
|
| There are two kinds of workaholics - the ones who enjoy work
| and those who suffer from their work.
|
| The article hits on the first kind in the passing
|
| >> Of course, to work hard, it really helps if you enjoy your
| work.
|
| Working hard when you enjoy your work is easier and might
| look like workaholism to someone who is definitely not. If
| work is play, you might play longer & that gets a lot done,
| because mistakes you throw away don't feel like wasted time.
|
| The workaholic that people knock are the ones who work
| because it gives them positive feedback they lack in the rest
| of their lives - from an inattentive parent, disrespectful
| spouse or demanding children.
|
| My work environment is extremely gamified and well designed
| to give me great feedback to improve, excellent rewards for
| performance and throw in some respect of my peers. The home
| life is Sisyphean in comparison - cook dinner today and it
| doesn't lie on a progression towards cooking less tomorrow.
|
| It's easy to get sucked into that and work on a death-march,
| because it feels like progress on a daily basis. That "How we
| built Internet Explorer" tweet felt very familiar to me,
| because I would definitely get sucked into a mission like
| that.
| didibus wrote:
| > >> Of course, to work hard, it really helps if you enjoy
| your work.
|
| > Working hard when you enjoy your work is easier and might
| look like workaholism to someone who is definitely not. If
| work is play, you might play longer & that gets a lot done,
| because mistakes you throw away don't feel like wasted
| time.
|
| Exactly, and it's a misnomer to call that hard work. When
| someone enjoys their work, the work is easy. They are not
| "hard workers". You falsely believe they are hard working
| because you personally would not enjoy doing that work and
| would therefore not be motivated to work as much. But that
| only means that the work is hard to you, it doesn't mean
| it's hard to them.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I would disagree with this. Many professional athletes
| love their work, but that doesn't make training,
| recovery, and competition a walk in the
| park...professional athletes are the pinnacle of hard
| work because many of them have to utilize the 24 hours in
| near perfection to stay at the top.
|
| Also, often the reason that someone enjoys their work is
| directly because it IS difficult. And the payoff from
| solving hard problems can be amazing and worth it.
| Alternatively, people who are pigeon holed into mundane
| or uninteresting work in their career will find
| dissatisfaction, even if the tasks are incredibly easy.
| alexashka wrote:
| It's interesting to see what qualified as worthy of a blog post
| not so long ago.
|
| It takes time and effort to do difficult tasks? You shouldn't
| overwork?
|
| What new insights, let me blog about it :)
|
| For those who don't know, the 8 hour work days and holidays were
| talked about by Adam Smith more than 200 years ago. The reason
| that system was put in place was because letting people work as
| much as they wanted led to over-exertion and injuries, lowering
| productivity.
|
| That was for physical labor by the way. In another 200 years, I
| expect people to finally realize that thinking is _harder_ than
| repetitive physical labor and one can 't do more than a few hours
| of it, per day.
|
| Until then we'll have 'burn out' blog posts and people reading
| and posting on HackerNews/reddit/twitter during work hours.
| beny23 wrote:
| Of course the same applies not just in the field of maths. The
| same could be said about software engineering just swap
| "projects" for tickets...
| snakeboy wrote:
| Off-topic, but why is it that Terry Tao's blog attracts such low-
| quality comments? When I look at SSC/ACX, Shtetl-Optimized,
| Marginal Revolution, etc. the comments are mostly constructive,
| engaged, and well-informed. With Tao, it's a huge proportion of
| random people asking for generic life advice, or fanboy-ism.
|
| This seems counter-intuitive, because Tao's blog is by far the
| least accessible of those above 3 blogs on a technical level.
| There's almost no reason to visit Tao's blog if you don't have a
| graduate maths degree.
| drenvuk wrote:
| You put etc. which leads me to believe you know of more good
| blogs. Can you please list them?
| paulpauper wrote:
| look at the blogrolls. they all link to each other. that's
| hwo to find related blogs. (or as Terrance Tao would probably
| call, a complete graph)
| drenvuk wrote:
| thanks.
| snakeboy wrote:
| I'd second what the other poster said - your best bet are
| recommendations of blogs you like already.
|
| Looking at my RSS feed, I'd also endorse Andrew Gelman's blog
| (applied stats), A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
| (history), and Applied Divinity Studies (rationalism a la
| ACX).
| john5smith wrote:
| Probably, prestige/celebrity. (And perhaps different levels of
| active moderation/pruning?)
|
| Tao is as certified as genius as they come. Fields Medalist.
| These attracts crackpots in a more significant amount or more
| mainstream/less sophisticated people wanting to engage with a
| celebrity.
|
| The others you have mentioned have less or much less prestige.
| The reward for engaging is much more intrinsic
| (curiosity/interest in the topic).
|
| They might also have more agressive moderation which perhaps is
| absent on Tao's blog (no idea if this is the case).
| jonas21 wrote:
| All blogs attract low-quality comments. Whether you see them is
| a function of how much effort is put into moderation. I'm just
| speculating, but Terry Tao probably has better things to do
| with his time.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > When I look at SSC/ACX, Shtetl-Optimized, Marginal
| Revolution, etc. the comments are mostly constructive, engaged,
| and well-informed.
|
| There _are_ constructive, well-informed comments on Marginal
| Revolution, but I wouldn 't call them the majority...
| fossuser wrote:
| Tao has gotten a lot more public media attention for the most
| part (Netflix, shows, TV, news, etc.) than any of the others
| which remain more niche. I'd guess as a result the audiences of
| the others are better selected to lean more high quality.
| sfsylvester wrote:
| There's a Netflix show about him?
|
| Also there's plenty of shows and news about MU, SSC etc. I'm
| also surprised that Tao's rather specifically niche blog
| attracts such comments. Is it possible that the other blogs
| are just better moderated and Professor Tao doesn't need or
| care to?
| roflc0ptic wrote:
| There really, really isn't that much news about SSC. Scott
| spent most of his blogging career being incredibly averse
| to publicity.
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Because Terry Tao is a celebrity. People find his blog after
| watching him on Youtube.
| paulpauper wrote:
| large foreign readership , so English is not a primary
| language. probably also a lot of spam comments that get
| through.
|
| Those other sides also tend to have a fair share of low quality
| comments as well. A lot of troll bait or off topic stuff. I
| just don't read the comments, often I find that I am not
| missing out on much by not doing so.
| categorynerd wrote:
| In which yet another Asian male from a Californian university
| lectures the rest of us on the importance of 'working hard', even
| as he draws a six figure salary from an institution that stands
| on land stolen from the Natives, while systematically
| marginalizing Blacks and Latinx. Math is indeed racist.
| Fk_ttao wrote:
| Does he still hate gays?
| adem wrote:
| Look at the username, probably a troll.
| kenjackson wrote:
| This is off-topic, although I am curious -- what source do you
| have for this?
| categorynerd wrote:
| As a highly paid employee of UCLA, his salary information is
| publicly known: https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/20
| 18/university-o...
|
| White supremacists in California banned affirmative action in
| 1996 by ballot measure, and that has resulted in near
| extermination of Black and Latinx students:
| https://www.npr.org/2013/06/23/194656555/what-happens-
| withou...
|
| We don't need Whites who ask what our sources are; we need
| reparations.
| [deleted]
| OtomotO wrote:
| I will always work smart, rather than working hard.
|
| I don't define myself or my self worth solely via the work I do.
|
| Always. But then again, in my culture it's not as extreme as in
| other parts of the world.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I've held for a long time that you must know the rules quite well
| before you're "allowed" to break them, and I think this
| reinforces my opinion on that.
|
| Additionally, I think the obsession over "intelligence" and
| "natural ability" is vastly overstated, in general. It
| _absolutely_ helps, and it compounds, to be smart, but a person
| who "works hard" is _infinitely_ more valuable to their
| colleagues than a smart person who doesn 't, and tries to rely on
| raw intellect.
|
| My problem, and I wonder if others have this issue as well, is
| how hard it is to know these things intellectually, and also
| apply them to my life. I just cannot, for the life of me,
| maintain a "work hard" mindset. I'm still trying, but I very
| often fail at this, and its frustrating because I know how
| valuable it is to being good at what I do.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| It really depends on what you define as natural abilities. The
| ability to work hard for 12 hours without break every day IMHO
| is as "natural" as having a good IQ.
| zqna wrote:
| One attribute of having "high IQ" is being able to understand
| the vanity of working "hard".
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| There is a line between IQ and wisdom, and wisdom is
| learned through experience and time.
| albatross13 wrote:
| It's kind of a double edged sword- I've worked with a few
| people that "work hard" and "get things done", only to find out
| once they leave (or go on vacation) that now we have to
| untangle a 600 line bash script that's integral to production.
|
| I'm being a bit hyperbolic here, but the gist of my point is:
| not everyone who works hard is worth keeping around, especially
| if their hard work leads to an un-managable mess in the future.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| I used to think like this too, but now-a-days, it's more like
| "What a luxury to be in a position where you get paid to
| untangle a 600 line bash script"
|
| That is, usually these few hard workers are typically the
| ones responsible for getting a company to profitability
| precisely because of their GSD attitude. Now that the company
| has some runway, the architecture and refactoring can
| proceed.
| albatross13 wrote:
| I can assure you, when shit is broken in production and
| customers are knocking at the door threatening to cancel it
| is not a luxury to find out these types of things...let
| alone start untangling the web.
| reidjs wrote:
| He means that those customers wouldn't exist in the first
| place if it weren't for the messy code.
| srean wrote:
| When things eventually break, its possible that those
| customers and more would leave also because of that same
| code.
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| Anything is possible. Better to focus on what is likely.
| Did you stop using google over any of their outages? Most
| people didn't. These things matter, but people in
| software overstate them.
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| The obvious question is why this wasn't caught and rectified
| in code review? This seems to be as much a failure due to
| lack of oversight as opposed to the failure of the person who
| created the mess.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Why not rotate their assignments as a matter of policy. They
| might do a deep dive and fix something no one bothers to fix
| on a similar assignment. But then it is due dilligence to
| have another look at _their_ work. I know this sounds
| theoretical compared to practice, but it seems to be on the
| level of separating conceptual or design breakthoughs from
| production-izing code.
| bobfromsweden wrote:
| Yeah, this is probably a different kind of "hard work" than
| what the author is talking about. There's some people who
| work hard for the sake of results (hitting certain numbers,
| clearing tickets/stories, etc).
|
| There's a different sort of hard work involved in achieving
| deep mastery over something. Reading, researching, building
| and testing ideas... it takes hard work to become an expert
| at something, but I guess you're far more likely to see the
| former type of hard work than this.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I've been learning to draw lately. It's amazing how much of
| what we presume to be natural ability is "just" the product of
| endless work. During my day job, I do math and it's the same.
| People say "I'm not a math person," but that's as stupid as "I
| can't draw." It's self fulfilling.
|
| Personally, I prefer "work diligently" over "work hard" because
| the most useful mental model for me is that it's a marathon,
| not a sprint. The idea is to go far, not fast.
| paulpauper wrote:
| _Additionally, I think the obsession over "intelligence" and
| "natural ability" is vastly overstated, in general. It
| absolutely helps, and it compounds, to be smart, but a person
| who "works hard" is infinitely more valuable to their
| colleagues than a smart person who doesn't, and tries to rely
| on raw intellect._
|
| That may be true for something like digging a ditch, but IQ is
| needed to make those necessary logical leaps for more abstract
| matters. Only hard work is like adding 1+2+3....n. Having a
| high IQ is knowing the shortcut to sum it instantly.
| 542458 wrote:
| So, so little of most people's work is deep abstract thought
| like that. I used to have this research assistant - she was
| from an entirely unrelated arts major, and was a bit... well,
| let's say not terribly book-smart (which she was very upfront
| about). We ended up with her due to some last minute issues
| with other candidates. But holy smokes could she ever focus.
| She could sit down for hours and hours and process way more
| material (reviewing data, publications, participant
| communications) than anybody else because she didn't get
| sidetracked. What she didn't know she knew to ask and get
| clarification on. She would work circles around many
| "smarter" RAs because of her amazing work ethic. And this
| isn't digging ditches, this is honest-to-goodness academic
| research.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Outlier strengths in one area can make up for weaknesses in
| others. She had extreme focus, which pushed her past where
| her intelligence would normally go. Imagine if she had
| great focus and great intelligence.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| Having high IQ is not knowing the shortcuts but being able to
| identify them.
|
| Fact of the matter is that we make progress when collective
| effort is put onto something. Not everyone of us is a Terry
| Tao, or John von Neumann, but we can at least exploit our
| comparable advantage and help those better than us. Sucking
| your ego sucks but coming to terms with our inherent limits
| is freeing.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| The whole point of the submission is that even when high IQ
| is required, you _also_ need to "work hard" to do anything
| substantial.
|
| The common thread is "work hard", not "be smart", but people
| obsess over intelligence/natural gifts, and consistently
| underestimate the "ditch diggers".
|
| Jobs was a ditch digger.
|
| Gates was a ditch digger.
|
| Musk is a ditch digger.
|
| PG is a ditch digger.
|
| Tao is a ditch digger.
|
| Jordan was a ditch digger.
|
| Woods was a ditch digger.
|
| Carlsen is a ditch digger.
|
| Some (all) of them also are naturally gifted, but their
| success is due to their ability to "work hard", or at least
| that's what I've read them say over and over again. Maybe I
| and they are all wrong about it, I'm open to that
| possibility, but theres a consistent theme that every
| successful person I can think of repeats when asked, and it's
| some variation on "work hard".
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| You do need both, and therein lies the problem.
|
| If you don't have the IQ, your hard work is meaningless.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Yes, you need both to be the best in the world in a given
| field, but why is that a problem?
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| That's absurd. Discoveries are rarely made by sole
| scientists, progress is made by tens or hundreds of
| people, each exploiting their comparable advantage, even
| if that is digging ditches.
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| That's just having access to the right resources (school
| and.. time and lack of obstacles) as I'm sure you did not
| just pull Gauss summation out of thin air.
| oso2k wrote:
| Knowing a preemptive shortcut is also "working hard".
|
| 1) Knowing when to apply previous experience is a skill that
| requires work and practice. 2) Someone else knowing a
| shortcut that I don't know means they worked hard when I was
| not observing them.
| paulpauper wrote:
| i doubt it. he was winning math competitions at a young
| age. I doubt he knew all the shortcuts in advance but just
| intuited them. He was probably smart enough to be given a
| hard problem and upon pondering for a minutes figure out
| the shortcut.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Do you mean discovering the formula independently (i.e. as
| Gauss did as a child) or simply knowing that the formula
| exists?
| paulpauper wrote:
| independently
| [deleted]
| chrisweekly wrote:
| See also the classic book "The Hacker Ethic" by Pikka Himanen
| (foreword by Linus Torvalds).
|
| https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/4690
| giantg2 wrote:
| It's probably good advice, and maybe my dissent is just due to my
| burn out, but...
|
| I'm tired of hearing "work hard". Very often, working hard does
| not lead to success. It sure as shit didn't work out that way for
| me. There are many people who do not work hard and make tons of
| money in things like NFT, crypto, securities, office politics,
| scams, etc. It seems like luck is the shared variable... of which
| I have none.
| spoonjim wrote:
| His advice isn't for how to get rich in crypto, it's for how to
| succeed in academic mathematics. I can't imagine that anyone
| has ever "lucked" their way into that.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It's not luck alone. You can still work hard in math and
| fail. Didn't get the grant you needed - tough luck. Want
| tenure? Better be ready to play politics. Etc
| [deleted]
| paulpauper wrote:
| same principle applies. a lot of people vying for something
| in which few can succeed
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Hard work is necessary but not sufficient.
|
| Picking the right problems to work on is also necessary, and
| difficult to get right. Worming in on a hard unsolved problem
| that is eventually incredibly important is the scientific
| equivalent of winning the lottery, and we know lots of
| examples of this. Recently, mRNA vaccines, neural networks,
| and the twin primes conjecture come to mind. But there are
| doubtless many, many other examples of people working on a
| possibly-fundamental problem which never actually break
| through, and we never hear about it.
|
| But I would argue it's still worth making a concerted effort
| to identify good problems to solve, and specifically thinking
| about what makes a good 'hard problem.' It's much easier to
| make progress in an under-studied area, simply because the
| low hanging fruit haven't been eaten yet. The danger, of
| course, is that understudied things may be understudied for a
| reason: they're not actually relevant to anything else, or
| there's some secret impediment and many others have already
| failed.
|
| By contrast, cracking away at ridiculous subproblems from the
| last generation of academics is almost always a dead end,
| imo; you're competing with people who already know the field
| extremely well, the low hanging fruit has been picked, and
| the obvious roads to relevance have probably already been
| well-explored. Unsolved problems in a long-standing
| discipline are often unsolved because the right tools are
| missing or it's impossible within the existing paradigm... Or
| the problem is just irrelevant, relative to the amount of
| effort needed to solve it.
|
| _ramble ramble ramble_
| didibus wrote:
| Nowadays people extend luck to include:
|
| - Your genetics - Your intrinsic abilities - Your intrinsic
| tastes - Your parents - The teachers you had - The time you
| were born in - The environment you were born in - Etc.
|
| So for example for mathematics you'd assume you need some
| predisposed genetics, you need some good education towards
| it, access to books and material, you need to be someone who
| loves doing math, you need to be in a position to have the
| time to dedicate to math (so access to food, shelter, etc.)
|
| Since all these things are out of your control, the question
| becomes, what if you bad lucked in all of them, can you
| still, through sheer hard work, make a valuable contributions
| to the field of mathematics (and not by luck of hitting your
| head, or stumbling randomly on a key fact), but simply from
| your constant effort towards it?
|
| But I'd say I think the author presupposes you've been mostly
| lucky already, and is talking about how to go beyond that
| luck, and achieve even more gains with what you do have
| control over.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Well if you take that all as "luck" then certainly your
| predisposition to hard work is also "luck," at which point
| you've denied free will, which might actually be true but
| isn't very actionable.
| didibus wrote:
| Bingo!
|
| It's been a while since I looked into it, but last time I
| checked, I couldn't find any evidence behind "hard work".
|
| This article kind of sums it up:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-success-come...
|
| > If you wake up in the morning full of vim and vigor, bounding
| out the door and into the world to take your shot, you didn't
| choose to be that way
|
| Your coworkers that come into work early ready to crush through
| the workload in anticipation, and when the day is over, can't
| find the will to stop working, because frankly there is nothing
| outside their work that they are more passionate and excited
| about so they keep working. Well they are not finding it hard
| to do so, it's the opposite in fact, they'll find it hard to
| not work and do other things.
|
| In your case, I think the conclusion is important as well:
|
| > What if you've been unlucky in life? There should be
| consolation in the fact that studies show that what is
| important in the long run is not success so much as living a
| meaningful life. And that is the result of having family and
| friends, setting long-range goals, meeting challenges with
| courage and conviction, and being true to yourself.
|
| Success is overated, and I've known people where success
| actually hid a deeper loss of enjoying life without self-
| judgement and constant comparison to others.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Bezos and Elon Musk derived much more mileage from their hard
| work in their 20s and 30s than someone who works at McDonald's.
| Such is life.
| mattnewton wrote:
| The way I look at it, luck is a very important variable, but
| it's one outside your control almost by definition, so it's not
| worth writing about how to change it.
|
| So if you can't load the dice what can you do to get those high
| rolls? Well, maybe you can roll the dice more often (try more
| avenues, work harder), maybe the dice aren't all equal and you
| can observe many dice and pick the ones that happen to be
| paying out higher than you would expect if they were truly fair
| (market research), or something else.. I think people write
| about all those things not to claim that the dice rolls don't
| matter but because there are things that are both controllable
| and matter.
|
| I agree with the burnout though, it can be hard to keep playing
| when you feel like a high roll is "due" but can't get one. I
| feel like some part of this is how we are wired, to solve the
| multi-armed bandit problems that life present us.
|
| But what do I know, my rolls haven't been very high. I wish you
| luck in beating the burnout.
| golemiprague wrote:
| It is luck but also having high IQ or high level of
| conscientiousness. Those people usually have other
| capabilities, ability to act fast, good social skills, risk
| taking or whatever else that cause them to succeed. Some of
| those factors can be learned and improved.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| He also mentions setting realistic expectations. So, not "work
| hard to get rich" or "work hard to have a breakthrough
| scientific finding" (as there's too much involved there) but
| perhaps "work hard to be appreciated enough to make very good
| money" or "work hard so that I can make an non-trivial addition
| to my field of study" etc.
|
| Also, if you're not really motivated by anything working hard
| can get you, then there's no point in hard work. Most people
| hate hard work and it's not worth it for them, hence they coast
| doing the minimum that doesn't get them fired. It's a perfectly
| valid life strategy, although the American religion of
| workoholism treats it as heresy (while millions of people
| practice it, feeling unnecessary guilt doing it).
| giantg2 wrote:
| I would love hard work if it actually resulted in something.
| I'm not making very good money. I'm not making meaningful
| contributions to my field. I'm not even in a position to do
| either. The problem is, hard work is rarely rewarded beyond
| some words. If it's not rewarded and I'm not in a position to
| make an impact, then there's no point.
| GDC7 wrote:
| Have you ever considered that in the worst case scenario
| you could move to Colombia or South Africa or Thailand and
| have an immediate boost in your social relevancy?
| giantg2 wrote:
| My wife would leave me if I tried to move us anywhere out
| of our current _county_ , let alone country.
|
| "... and have an immediate boost in your social
| relevancy?"
|
| I'm not sure I believe this. You have to become a
| trusted/respected member of the community, which takes
| time.
| m0zg wrote:
| Same thing in a lot fewer words, for "visual thinkers" among us:
| https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
|
| This holds up really well, in any STEM field, not just
| mathematics.
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