[HN Gopher] Focus on things that don't change
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Focus on things that don't change
Author : dSebastien
Score : 64 points
Date : 2023-03-01 12:26 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dsebastien.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dsebastien.net)
| dieselgate wrote:
| This is just the article I wanted to see this morning. Not
| perfect advice for everyone all the time but highly relevant to
| keep in mind in general.
|
| Things that will change are the other-side-of-the-coin for things
| that don't.
| dSebastien wrote:
| Glad you liked it.
|
| I wrote it with kids and newcomers in mind, but I believe the
| advice is more generally applicable
| lukasb wrote:
| Talked to a lawyer yesterday who works in an area where the key
| laws haven't changed in 90 years. He's built an excellent career
| based on deep knowledge of those laws.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| I completely agree, which is why frontend frameworks give me
| existential dread
| borbulon wrote:
| this is an underrated comment.
|
| Any long-term software, really. What you're building will, if
| it's big enough, essentially be a snapshot of a moment in tech.
| Werewolf255 wrote:
| I want to like this article but I think it really underplays the
| nature and (modern) frequency of black swan events. If I were to
| take the advice of this article in 1994, I would be going full
| bore into telephony and set-top internet boxes that attach to 4:3
| SD televisions.
|
| This sort of thinking works. . . until it doesn't. It's how we
| get the vintage zeerust type of Sci-Fi works.
|
| - Ebooks will, of course, be delivered to your TRS-80 after you
| dial a phone number to buy it from a print catalog.
|
| - Daily news will never go out of fashion (there's always
| -something- happening!) but printing newspapers creates a bunch
| of waste. People will, instead, buy a single newspaper that they
| keep and exchange at a 'newsstand' where your old paper is erased
| and a new edition printed on top, for a small fee.
| sogen wrote:
| > telephone
|
| It should be mostly about "communication"
|
| > televisions, news
|
| Same, "entertainment", and "know about latest events"
| k__ wrote:
| The trick is to identify what will change and what won't.
| gtrevorjay wrote:
| Extending this idea beyond technical topics is why I stopped
| bothering to put effort into most humanities or liberal arts and
| advise those younger than me to do the same. Most new work in the
| sciences is driven by an obvious gap in current theories or
| disagreeable data. Dramatic exaggerations of "scientific
| revolutions" aside, the relationship of the old to new knowledge
| is generally as either a subset, a superset, or an approximation
| of the other. See Newtonian to relativistic to quantum physics.
| See set theory to arithmetic etc. If you got a PhD in physics in
| the 70's and didn't learn a thing since, you're still in a great
| position to help a teenager with their homework.
|
| This is simply not true of a subject like women's studies or even
| psychology. If your knowledge of these subjects froze in the
| 70's, at best your attempts to help a teenager with those
| subjects would result in eye rolls and at worst you being
| literally labelled as evil. Why invest time and effort into a
| subject where the reward over any gulf of time is so slight or is
| even negative?
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Psychology hasn't moved? Maybe not in a way that's as easily
| exploitable for profit, but it's certainly moved...
|
| There are dividends outside of financial. If you can't see them
| then maybe you _should_ study some psychology.
| gtrevorjay wrote:
| Perhaps I wasn't clear. I'm saying it's definitely moved.
| It's just moved in such a way that almost all of the new
| knowledge replaces rather than extends or builds on the old
| knowledge. Thus almost all effort learning the old knowledge
| was a waste and we can expect the same for learning it today.
|
| Edit to respond to your edit: And I'm most definitely
| considering non-financial gains and losses. Consider my
| example of a PhD in psychology from the 70's, do you think
| it's a net positive to believe transgendered people have a
| pathology? Or that we should destroy the frontal lobes of
| unhappy housewives with icepicks?
| munificent wrote:
| _> why I stopped bothering to put effort into most humanities
| or liberal arts_
|
| Surely one of the most unchanging aspects of life that affects
| us every day is human nature.
| kilgnad wrote:
| None of these fields are in actuality the study of human
| nature. They are the study of our interpretation of human
| nature. Interpretations change constantly.
|
| Until we can simulate the brain at the lowest level and have
| accurate quantitative symbolic theories of higher level
| structures of the brain derived from the low level
| simulations... our interpretations will remain largely
| bullshit and guesswork and thus subject to rapid and constant
| change.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| I think you're looking for only a certain type of reward and
| ignoring many others.
|
| If you study women's studies in the 70s then maybe you can't
| help someone with their homework today. Ok, so in a sense
| you're less well off because you can't do something that
| someone who studied physics can do?
|
| But women's studies today is different because the field has
| moved on to much, so much has been exposed in the way that
| women are treated in our society, so much has been changed for
| the better, huge impacts have been made on people's lives etc.
| And people who have worked in the field have contributed to
| this. Have they really had a negative reward in your eyes?
| gtrevorjay wrote:
| I wouldn't dispute that the field of women's studies has
| positively impacted society. So have the sciences. Assuming
| their impact was similarly positive, we're back to the
| question of where are you now if your major investment in
| these fields was 30 or more years ago (as a way of predicting
| what an investment today would reap). My claim is that
| because science is more additive in how it builds itself that
| your older knowledge is more useful today.
|
| And I can literally say that many who studied women's studies
| and related fields in the 70's have had a negative reward.
| There is simply no scientific analog to JK Rowling and the
| battle between "waves" of feminist in the sciences.
| Spivak wrote:
| Sure there is! The thread that binds it all together is
| history. Understanding what's going on with JK's axe she's
| grinding starts in the 1970s with the rise and splintering
| of the Radical Feminist movement, the rise of Radical
| Lesbian Feminism and in particular the seminal book for
| what people now call TERFs, The Transsexual Empire: The
| Making of the She-Male written in 1979 by Janice Raymond.
| Absolutely nothing uttered by JK is her own original idea
| and you can trace them all the way back to where they
| actually came from and what was going on in history at the
| time that precipitated them.
|
| Gender studies is basically history + philosophy but
| focused on a particular topic.
| gtrevorjay wrote:
| Correct (and bonus points for mentioning Raymond, we
| should hang out). But, and maybe I'm misunderstanding but
| aren't you just emphasising my point? As you show,
| Rowling is in many way a _good_ 70 's feminist but
| according to today's feminist, she's bad. In fact, she's
| considered a monster. Compare to a 70's physicist: They
| might be considered outdated for not knowing the proposed
| extensions to the standard model or that the standard
| model was empirically justified but nothing they believe
| is now considered _wrong_. The only conclusion to draw is
| that the field of feminism /women's-studies is known to
| peddle... for lack of a better term, anti-knowledge.
| Rowling would be better off today being ignorant of
| everything she was taught in the 70's.
| Spivak wrote:
| I guess it depends on what you think the point of gender
| studies is, because I've never really seen it as a how to
| guide for feminists with a prescriptive "here's what's
| right or wrong." To me it's about giving you the tools to
| understand and critically examine feminist writings and
| the social dynamics at play that inspired them with the
| goal of, for lack of a better phrase, letting you "see
| the matrix." When it all clicks you can express your own
| thoughts and explain the ideas that people feel but can't
| quite grasp.
|
| So it's less important that people view Raymond,
| Jeffreys, or Greer as wrong on their treatise of
| transgender persons (because it wasn't as if they didn't
| face plenty of criticism in their day) because it's still
| important to the history of feminism and informs so much
| of modern discourse. I don't think you just throw away
| everything in response to new information because the
| before was wrong, but that the history becomes even more
| important because it's the key to understanding where we
| are now.
|
| My takeaways from their writings isn't necessarily a
| right or wrong thing but that they very eloquently and
| with more detail and awareness than you could ever ask
| for explain their own feelings that reflect the
| understanding and attitudes toward trans people at time.
| Today I think people would recognize those feelings as
| transphobia (or I suppose wokeness if you're one of their
| descendants) but right or wrong the knowledge is still
| useful.
| nektro wrote:
| trying to compare the humanities here is not something you can
| do in good faith. they are not subjects based on any manor of
| objective truth and are mostly a personal endeavor of
| introspection on how you treat yourself and others.
|
| re: the 70's, yeah a lot of people had bad opinions back then,
| but its also not hard to form evergreen good ones
| gtrevorjay wrote:
| Personally I agree with you that women's studies or
| psychology aren't sciences or even coherent subjects, but in
| the majority they themselves present as such and thus here I
| take them--speaking of good faith--at their word for the sake
| of argument.
|
| And regarding lots of bad opinions in the 70's, that's
| partially my point. There was nothing in mainstream physics
| or computer science that is now looked back on as being as
| wrong as thinking trangendered people are insane. There's
| something fundamentally different (and you and I know what it
| is but I will here leave it unstated) that allows the
| humanities to veer more deeply into incorrect territory. To
| reiterate: this makes them a terrible educational investment.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > There was nothing in mainstream physics or computer
| science that is now looked back on as being as wrong
|
| Not exactly the same kind of "wrong", because, well, how
| could it be? But just a few days ago I was explaining in a
| comment here why nobody in academia teaches recursive
| descent parsers.
| gtrevorjay wrote:
| Again, not the same kind of wrong, and also not the 70's,
| but it is also looking like OOP is losing some luster.
| dbtc wrote:
| The reward of reading well does not require anyone's approval.
| Study Shakespeare and prosper.
| bsder wrote:
| > why I stopped bothering to put effort into most humanities or
| liberal arts
|
| Your ability to play a guitar or piano will stay relevant far
| longer than any programming knowledge.
|
| You may find it even more useful over the long term.
| gtrevorjay wrote:
| You're absolutely right about this exception. I would even
| say it "proves the rule" as the technical act of playing an
| instrument is so transparently unchanging.
| donnowhy wrote:
| ah, so focus on the inherent void behind all reality... very zen
|
| ...this is a skill that is difficult to develop, hard to teach,
| and impossible to test (if somebody can do it)
| pubby wrote:
| This strategy is low-risk but also low-reward. The most
| successful people in life often gain expertise in some specific,
| changing area, then get extremely lucky to have it pan out.
|
| I think of the Admiral Chester Nimitz. All of his peers studied
| and worked on battleships because that's what the Navy had done
| for hundreds of years. But when WW2 entered the scene, Nimitz -
| the one guy studying the rapidly-changing area of submarines and
| aircraft carriers - was the one promoted to the highest command.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| Jeff Bezos might disagree about the "low reward."
|
| "I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in
| the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question;
| it's a very common one. I almost never get the question:
| 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit
| to you that that second question is actually the more important
| of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around
| the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail
| business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know
| that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast
| delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine
| a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says,
| 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little
| higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a
| little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into
| those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we
| put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our
| customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you
| know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a
| lot of energy into it."
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, this is kind of an odd statement here... He did take
| something that didn't change much and applied a lot of
| rapidly changing high technology to it. Much like Walmart
| before them, they did something kind of like everyone else
| was doing, but but their high risk, high reward twist on top
| of it.
| brongondwana wrote:
| Interesting that he identifies three things and then comments
| on the two which really ARE obviously true long term and not
| on the third which is much more debatable.
|
| When I go to Amazon I'd often prefer a smaller selection of
| items for common categories, with better price/quality
| tradeoff information, and an assurance that I wasn't going to
| get an inferior substitute.
|
| Not that it's an EASY problem to solve, particularly at
| Amazon's scale, but it's also the thing where it's most
| likely that a customer will come up and say "Jeff, I just
| want to be able to order a USB key that has the capacity it
| claims without having to wade through thousands of shady
| vendors".
| vladsanchez wrote:
| Thanks for such compelling historical perspective!
|
| The title should've been: "Focus on things that don't change
| (initially)"
| jschveibinz wrote:
| From a certain eastern philosophical point of view, it makes
| sense to focus on what doesn't change to reach a level of comfort
| with one's self--which is to say, we become selfless in the
| process, which is the goal of that philosophy.
|
| From a western philosophical tradition, everything is in flux: in
| a continuous state of change, from actuality to potentiality. The
| goal of this philosophy is to find purpose, to become something
| more.
|
| As with most things, the push and the pull go together. The
| answer is likely in recognizing the time and place for both
| philosophical points of view: being, and becoming.
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