[HN Gopher] How to Make Yourself into a Learning Machine
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       How to Make Yourself into a Learning Machine
        
       Author : gozzoo
       Score  : 16 points
       Date   : 2023-01-16 21:16 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
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       | belval wrote:
       | I think this blog falls into a common issue of conflating natural
       | talent/skills with what the person does to cultivate that talent.
       | 
       | In other words, Simon is an anomaly and it's not clear that what
       | he does makes him exceptional so much as he is exceptional AND he
       | does all that stuff. You don't end up principal infrastructure
       | engineer at Shopify at 26 years old after immigrating at 18 years
       | old without being something special. He's probably fun to be
       | around, but take the average human and put him through what he
       | described and I'm pretty sure you just get an exhausted person
       | without the amazing part.
        
         | drowsspa wrote:
         | I'm tired just by reading what those super productive people
         | do. I can't imagine having the energy and motivation to just
         | sit down and do all those stuff.
         | 
         | Must be a nice brain to live in, though. I'd give an arm and a
         | kidney for that.
        
         | angarg12 wrote:
         | I called this "survivorship bias" in my comment but I think you
         | are right, and it's probably more of a fundamental attribution
         | error [1]. Just like how media fetishizes the weird habits of
         | billionaires, ignoring that a) each billionaire will have their
         | own weird habits, and b) tons of people have weird habits
         | without being substantially wealthy.
         | 
         | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
        
       | angarg12 wrote:
       | > You're an 18 year old with just a high school degree. You
       | immigrate to a new country that speaks a different language, and
       | start work with some of the brightest engineers in the world.
       | Soon after, you're thrust into management. Now, you're leading
       | teams of people who are 10 or 20 years older than you, working on
       | one of the fastest growing internet companies of the last decade.
       | 
       | I stopped reading after this. This is so unrelatable that I could
       | be reading about an alien life form.
       | 
       | Actually I skimmed through the rest of the article. There are a
       | couple of good points there, but being the very atypical
       | experience of a single person, I can't help but feel it has a
       | good dose of survivorship bias. Someone became successful and
       | attribute it to "this one weird trick".
        
         | glasss wrote:
         | This was my gut reaction as well. I'm sure it's a nicely
         | written blog, but I really doubt I'll get any value from it.
         | 
         | Perhaps I'm just sour grapes that I wasn't lucky enough to work
         | at Shopify at age 18 when they were smaller, but blogs in this
         | genre generally all have the same effect on me.
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-16 23:00 UTC)