[HN Gopher] In Obscurity
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In Obscurity
Author : droctothorpe
Score : 79 points
Date : 2022-05-27 13:28 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (droctothorpe.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (droctothorpe.github.io)
| jnovek wrote:
| "... in an era in which people can't eat a sandwich, let alone
| invent Calculus, without tweeting about it. I tweet, therefore I
| am."
|
| This is just a bias towards people who make themselves visible. I
| suspect that self-promoters have existed throughout history and
| that people laboring on interesting ideas in obscurity exist
| today.
| roenxi wrote:
| Indeed. Stopping and reflecting on the perspective reveals it
| to be nonsensical.
|
| Obviously if someone is toiling away in obscurity for 25 year
| stretches then they aren't going to be visible on Twitter. Most
| people aren't on Twitter, and the people who get airplay on
| Twitter tend not to be the thoughtful types.
| mikewarot wrote:
| With the internet, it is now possible for people to find
| audiences that were effectively unreachable in prior eras. Also
| note that in many of these cases, the author's self doubt
| (because of such a lack of audience?) was responsible for the
| obscurity.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/make-your-soul-grow
|
| _Here's an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will
| flunk you if you don't do it: Write a six line poem, about
| anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as
| good as you possibly can. But don't tell anybody what you're
| doing. Don't show it or recite it to anybody, not even your
| girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?
|
| Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely
| separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already
| been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced
| becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you
| have made your soul grow._
| herbertl wrote:
| Obscurity, in some ways, is more valuable to the creator than
| fame (although I loved this piece and I'm glad the author shared
| it here). Guessing what the audience expects, or seeking external
| validation, can slowly (or quickly) suck the joy out of the
| creative process. I interviewed author Michelle Kuo about
| creativity, and her advice:
|
| _"The most important thing I can tell you is to relish writing
| in obscurity. I feel that I was the happiest as a writer when I
| was in hiding, when I was invisible, when I was secretly writing,
| stealing away portions of time at work, or writing on scraps of
| paper, or forming sentences in my head on the commute. That was a
| time before I had published really anything and before I even
| thought my writing would become a book, I was just trying to
| organize or to create order in my emotional life."_
|
| I wrote a book on creativity with Holloway, and I wanted to share
| two of my favorite prompts:
|
| Ignore the stats: https://www.holloway.com/g/creative-
| doing/sections/ignore-th...
|
| Make something you won't ever show anyone else:
| https://www.holloway.com/g/creative-doing/sections/make-some...
| neilk wrote:
| Side note, Max Brod claims to have told Kafka while he was alive
| that he had no intention of carrying out his instructions. Kafka
| did not make alternate arrangements.
|
| I interpret Kafka's statement as a kind of performative self-
| abnegation.
|
| > Although Kafka stipulated that all of his unpublished works
| were to be burned, Brod refused. He justified this move by
| stating that when Kafka personally told him to burn his
| unpublished work, Brod replied that he would outright refuse, and
| that "Franz should have appointed another executor if he had been
| absolutely and finally determined that his instructions should
| stand."
|
| - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Brod
| starkd wrote:
| If he truly wanted them destroyed, there was also no reason it
| had to wait until after his death. Kafka could have easily done
| it himself. No need for another executor. It always seemed to
| me to be something of a legend.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _easily done it himself_
|
| No need to dispose of your property until the last moment -
| when you will probably be impeded.
| aaron695 wrote:
| Ologn wrote:
| On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was not published
| until a month before Copernicus died.
|
| On the Origin of Species was not published until 1859 - Darwin
| had the basic ideas down in 1839, but did not start thinking to
| publish until Alfred Russel Wallace started to publish in the
| mid/late 1850s, which is probably what pushed him into finally
| publishing. Also, Darwin only alluded to humans in the work, and
| didn't publish the Descent of Man until 1871.
| longrod wrote:
| In those days the channels of discovery were so few and
| privileged that a common man couldn't even imagine something like
| publishing. You didn't have social networks with huge number of
| followers. You didn't have blogs or dedicated platforms where you
| could go and broadcast your discoveries. Whatever there was
| required genuine struggle for years and years.
|
| This changed the important & value of time. Nowadays, we are
| running after things and very few here could say they worked over
| a thing for years and years. For us things are fleeting, our
| attention spans are ridiculous, and we don't have patience.
|
| Moreover, getting fame and recognition is relatively easier in
| today's world that we can't even imagine doing something just for
| the sake of doing something because it is so easy to be
| materialistic about everything, and measure it on the money-made-
| fame-earned scale.
|
| Even when we are working on that secret project, in our minds we
| can't help but think about it's materialistic value. I wonder how
| many of us will leave this world with truly groundbreaking
| projects behind...
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > In those days the channels of discovery were so few and
| privileged that a common man couldn't even imagine something
| like publishing.
|
| Isaac Newton was a fellow at Trinity (which required a special
| exemption by King Charles II concerning legal religious
| restrictions) and a fellow of the Royal Society for several
| decades before he published his work. He was not a "common
| man".
| gtsnexp wrote:
| "What would you create even if no one ever saw it?" Deeply
| meditative question.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> What would you create even if no one ever saw it?_
|
| I pretty much do that, every day. I write stuff that _I_ want;
| whether or not anyone else does, and I don 't really bother to
| don a sandwich board.
|
| The one thing that I did for other folks, has taken off, but it
| took ten years. One reason was that I didn't spend a whole lot of
| time, tubthumping.
| olvy0 wrote:
| I too create, but very small things and not very often. Things
| I never show to anyone else, except, sometimes, to my SO. I'm
| not on any social media platform except here on HN.
|
| Short poems which I write on my phone, once in a month or two.
| A small utility that does something new and novel once in a
| couple of months, which is kept on my hard disk and never
| uploaded anywhere.
|
| These are not enough for me to feel very creative. I try to
| limit my passive consumption of HN/tv/movies/dev news/games and
| keep my FOMO in check, but it's difficult.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I stay off of Twitter, LinkedIN, and Facebook, but need to
| keep accounts. I'll make a post, every now and then. I don't
| doomscroll.
|
| HN is pretty much my only e-interaction with others (besides
| some Slack, Zoom, and messaging, for the project I'm
| implementing), which explains my rather voluminous activity,
| hereabouts.
| samsquire wrote:
| I write ideas for computers down. See my profile. I am obscure
| but everytime I have an idea I write it down.
|
| It's a muscle, the more you use it the more you get of them. If
| you want more ideas you have to tease them out.
| DarylZero wrote:
| If you are really creating things no one sees, how come I never
| see you doing it?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| You're not looking?
| DarylZero wrote:
| Was just trying to make a joke about confirmation bias.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I know. I was joking, too. Someone downvoted you, and I
| upvoted.
|
| It's all good.
| drieddust wrote:
| I will get down voted for saying it. But Newton most likely
| didn't invent Calculus. Circumstantial evidence suggest that
| Kerala School of mathematics passed the knowledge to the Jesuit
| missionaries who in turn might have passed it on to the Newton.
| Link to the research on this topic[0].
|
| [0] https://www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/indians-
| predated-...
| r00tanon wrote:
| In Newton's case, even if there were hints in existing
| literature available to him at the time of concepts like limit
| and derivative, which is arguable, he would still have had to
| connect all the dots and create a workable new mathematics
| largely on his own, which he did. What's also clear through the
| examples in his Principia, he was using his Calculus to solve
| problems no one had solved before.
|
| So, no downvote here, but what's the point? Even if someone had
| previously invented the Calculus at some point in ancient
| history, they didn't do anything noteworthy with it, and/or,
| some catastrophe erased the evidence of their work. Does this
| in any way diminish Newton's invention?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| gjm11 wrote:
| I was going to say: "I'm torn, because usually I have a policy
| of downvoting every HN comment I see that says 'I'm going to
| get downvoted for this', but this looks really interesting".
|
| But then I checked your link, and in fact it doesn't at all say
| that Newton's work on calculus wasn't original. The thing it
| claims Keralan mathematicians might have done first was
| _infinite series_. So I can downvote you for pre-emptive
| complaining about downvotes with a clear conscience :-).
|
| But then I checked (so far as I easily could using Amazon's
| "look inside" feature) the book referenced there, and in fact
| it does mention that a guy called Bhaskaracharya had _something
| like_ the notion of derivative a couple of centuries before
| Newton and Leibniz. (It looks to me as if what he had was a
| special case rather than the general concept, though; if I 'm
| right about that, it's an important distinction.) So now I'm
| conflicted again.
|
| [EDITED to add:] The book in question is called "The crest of
| the peacock: Non-European roots of mathematics".
|
| Well, it seems to me that the _most_ that can credibly be true
| here is that Newton 's discovery of calculus was _influenced_
| by closely related prior work by the likes of Bhaskaracharya. I
| don 't think this is enough grounds for saying that "Newton
| most likely didn't invent Calculus". So, downvote it is. (For
| complaining about getting downvoted, not for the hyperbole
| about Newton.)
| ogurechny wrote:
| It's only a curiosity if you believe in stereotypical and
| enormously simplified model of "history" as "progress", some
| machine-like movement that has a goal. If you exclude this from
| your model, no wonder that it is seen as some kind of
| malfunction, something that shouldn't happen.
|
| In other words, status quo, the world we have around us now, is
| retroactively set as a meaningful target for everything that has
| happened before.
|
| A lot of people who are not at all as notable as Newton should be
| able to look back at their histories, and see how many random
| turns have happened, how many random things they've read set the
| direction of their thoughts, and so on.
| h2odragon wrote:
| What miracles and wonders have been worked out by lone wolves,
| and never recognized by their survivors?
|
| What miracles of computation have been bought and buried by
| bigger companies who didn't care to compete with smaller fry?
|
| Ultimately it's not relevant until it's realized. Newton may have
| been 500 years late to the party; but we'll never know and it
| doesn't matter what others knew the things he explained before
| him.
| derbOac wrote:
| This is a topic that fascinates me. Some of it is maybe me
| wrestling with some of my own frustrations, but this general
| issue of the pressures of popular demand versus going your own
| way, and how society attributes credit and value to ideas and
| discoveries is fascinating to me. Issues like unacknowledged
| contributions, discoverers, people who withdraw from society and
| produce contributions that go unknown for a long time, people and
| institutions ahead of their time, lost books, and so forth.
|
| I think the model western society often collectively adopts for
| intellectual contributions, credit, how it should all work, and
| how it actually currently does is fundamentally flawed. Then
| there's the issue of what motives, incentives, and so forth might
| be best or most healthy, whether that varies across people and
| what we might do about it.
|
| The Z List Dead List podcast (https://zlistdeadlist.libsyn.com/)
| doesn't always focus on the same form of obscurity mentioned by
| the targeted article but deals with overlapping and similar
| themes.
|
| Then there's Stigler's Law
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy) which
| is important to keep in mind, among others.
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(page generated 2022-05-28 23:01 UTC)