5 ms·

Sorry, Newton didn't "make bets", he was not a Silicon Valley VC. He worked on problems that he found interesting and that he believed would reveal eternal trut

Sorry, Newton didn't "make bets", he was not a Silicon Valley VC. He worked on problems that he found interesting and that he believed would reveal eternal truths established and maintained by God.

rubidium 10y ago
Exactly. PG: Get your grubby money-first hands off the biographies of those who are driven by a genuine interest in understanding the world.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
cobbzilla 10y ago
Please don't get stuck on semantics. When you decide to take a longer route because you think there will be less traffic, you "make a bet". You "make a bet" by deciding to go to college instead of straight into the working world. Anywhere there is a decision to be made with uncertain outcomes, you "make a bet". It doesn't have to be about money, although it often is.
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  But none of that has to do with Newton. Was alchemy or physics the long route? Only Newton knows and he's dead. Not trying to be dense here, I just don't see the insight. How is what you are saying any different than "you don't know what's going to happen" without Newton attached to it?
  - cobbzilla 10y ago
    When you write "Was alchemy or physics the long bet?" it seems you concede that Newton made a bet, and that it didn't involve money. That was my only point: We all make decisions that involve some amount of guesswork on risk vs reward, and it's not always about money. For sake of argument, let's say Newton's reward was the advancement of human knowledge. He made some high-risk bets that didn't pay off (alchemy, theology), and some that did (physics, calculus). All PG is saying is that when we look at famous historical figures, after centuries of deification, we tend to focus only on the bets that paid off, and ignore all the failures. But those failures are crucially important to who these figures were as people, and it does them (and ourselves) a disservice to only focus on the successes.
- cfmcdonald 10y ago
  I didn't 'make a bet' by going to college, it was the assumed thing in my family, it was culturally ingrained that I would go to college. This way of looking at life as a series of 'bets' that one makes is it's own particular kind of culture, one that Newton did not belong to. Newton didn't investigate alchemy and theology because he was trying to diversify his fame investment portfolio. To see him this way is to do a disservice to him and to history.
  - eachro 10y ago
    Replace 'bet' with 'choice.' It's the same message.
  - cobbzilla 10y ago
    I'd say that asserting Newton had no choice does him a greater disservice. Call them bets, choices or decisions; there were opportunity costs involved, paths to choose, and he chose some that worked out and some that didn't.
- kordless 10y ago
  > Please don't get stuck on semantics. That's a blaming statement used to indicate someone is being pedantic, which can then be used to "prove" them wrong by the followup. All of your counter examples are based on the obtaining a better position, which is all about dealing with globalized suffering (money is stored work and work is a unit of causality and suffering is a result of causality). Newton presumably pursued understanding the unknown, which means he chose his own suffering/work that was different from any objective based on making bets to get ahead in life at the time. I think it's entirely fair to point out that Newton wasn't betting at the time. He was discovering purely for the sake of discovery.
  - cobbzilla 10y ago
    Are you denying he had any choice in what areas of discovery to pursue? And that there were no trade-offs involved? If not, then you are stuck on semantics.
    - kordless 10y ago
      I'm not stuck on semantics, so that's the truth of the matter, whether you attempt to rationalize I am or not. Make no mistake that semantics are always important. Without the English language, neither you or I could communicate concepts here. It also allows you to attempt to reword what others are saying, but I'm not going to allow that here. When you attempt to state someone is "stuck on semantics" and that person actually hasn't said as much, you are speaking for their intent. When that is backed up with the intent of proving them wrong on some topic, it only serves to indicate intent. The older I get, the more irritating this behavior becomes, especially when the person refuses to acknowledge what is being said and continues to rationalize from their point of view in order to frame a statement by someone else. You act as if language (and semantics) are logical. They aren't, and neither are humans. We'd do well to stop speaking for each other in aggregate in an attempt to make it more logical. This concept itself is counterintuitive. Newton had every choice to pursue interests. Not having prior knowledge of "areas of discovery", it would appear he pursued what was interesting to him. If you look at Faraday, he pursued things to find a single source force - I would expect Newton though along the same lines. In fact, even if he knew someone else was interested in an "area of discovery", he could have just been interested in that topic for purely knowing purposes. Wanting to know more about things, the nature of things if you will, is not something that can be considered a "bet". It's simply curiosity.
- Balgair 10y ago
  Look at Newton's Early life (0) and we can see that he did not 'make a bet' with his life. Though he managed to get into Cambridge on a scholarship (an element of luck), he was considered 'undistinguished as a Cambridge student.' His 3 really big accomplishments (optics, gravitation, calculus) were generated when he was on break for 2 years from Cambridge due to plague. The question we then must ask is: what would he have done otherwise? It's a 'bet' if there is an element of risk, though it seems this discussion is more about what different English speakers use the word 'bet' to mean. What were the downsides to just poking about with math and lenses in your 'free' hours? Maybe he missed out on some farming/church duties or he traded this time to do Optics instead of gossiping. I don't know. What did young mid-17th century celibate Englishmen do in those days while hiding from the black death? Tennis? Point is, he wasn't really risking anything but a little bit of time spent in the mid 1600's English countryside that he had to spend out there anyways. A 'real bet' would have been staying at Cambridge despite the plague to work on Optics with the professors, as the risk there was quite clearly your life. (0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Isaac_Newton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Isaac_Newton
  - cobbzilla 10y ago
    He could have chosen to focus solely on theology. He could have chosen to focus on entirely different areas that were all dead-ends. People are really getting hung-up on the word "bet"; evaluating opportunity costs is part of life. To focus on one word and miss the forest for the trees speaks more about the critic than it does of Newton.
psyc 10y ago
Every decision you make with incomplete information is a bet.
- paganel 10y ago
  Judging that way each and every one of our actions (including me writing this comment) is a bet, because AFAIK we still live in a world where we do not have "complete information". From time to time I think about one of Mark Twain's short novels which I read as an adolescent, where a lady decides to take the left road instead of the one on the right (or vice-versa) when she reaches a road-junction, and because of that single decision her life changes dramatically.
  - cobbzilla 10y ago
    Indeed! And how about that classic Robert Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken" [1] Edit: WOW, after reading the commentary on the poem, I never realized how wrong I was. The poem is a joke, he's saying it didn't really matter which path he took. All these years I took it so seriously, which apparently is a common mistake dating back to the very first time the poem was read in front of an audience. [1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/44272 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poe...
    - svachalek 10y ago
      After reading the "poem guide" there I have to agree, WOW. My mind is blown. Despite destroying what it meant to me for 30 years, the older me appreciates the poem even more for its subtlety.
    - matt4077 10y ago
      There's an episode of The West Wing that brilliantly uses that misconception. Can't find it on youtube unfortunately.
1337p337 10y ago
There wasn't quite the sharp division of disciplines, either. Thinking about it that way comes from the public school system (which the author ought to know, because if I'm not mistaken, he mentioned that in a previous essay). Mathematics (which didn't warrant a mention as a bet that paid off in a blurb about the guy that invented calculus), metaphysics, and the natural sciences were all areas of study, but they weren't different bets: they were interrelated components of our understanding of the universe.
- rwj 10y ago
  guy that co-invented calculus...
  - fao_ 10y ago
    no, guy that invented calculus independently, but around the same time as someone else did
  - FreeFull 10y ago
    I'd say co-invented would apply more if he worked together with Leibniz on it. Instead, they both invented it independently, around the same time (with differing notation, but both gave the means to reach the same results).
- dongslol 10y ago
  I think you are agreeing with the author, who is trying here to refute the misconception that Newton was simultaneously a brilliant, grounded, impartial truth seeker who discovered physics and a batshit conspiracist who dabbled in alchemy and theology.
  - 1337p337 10y ago
    Well, PG presents them as different bets, one of which paid off. They were the same essential bet from Newton's perspective. For example, books on physics at the time referred to religion heavily, sometimes as a cornerstone of an argument. Even Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica says "Collocavit igitur Deus Planetas in diversas distantiis à Sole, ut quilibet pro gradu densitatis calore Solis majore vel minore fruatur."
balsam 10y ago
Existential risk of goingg/being-seen-as crazy.
dsugarman 10y ago
your time is finite and your most valuable resource (usually), betting your time is the biggest bet you can make
imgabe 10y ago
He wagered his time. Everything you choose to work on means you're not working on something else. So by choosing to work on something, you're necessarily "betting" that it's going to be more fruitful than the infinitely many other things you could be doing. Expending resources, whether time or money, on something with an uncertain outcome is a bet. I'm not sure what the objection is to using that term. Nobody said Newton was a Silicon Valley VC.

Sorry, Newton didn't "make bets", he was not a Silicon Valley VC. He worked on problems that he found interesting and that he believed would reveal eternal truths established and maintained by God.

rubidium 10y ago

Exactly. PG: Get your grubby money-first hands off the biographies of those who are driven by a genuine interest in understanding the world.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

cobbzilla 10y ago

Please don't get stuck on semantics. When you decide to take a longer route because you think there will be less traffic, you "make a bet". You "make a bet" by deciding to go to college instead of straight into the working world. Anywhere there is a decision to be made with uncertain outcomes, you "make a bet". It doesn't have to be about money, although it often is.

aaron-lebo 10y ago
But none of that has to do with Newton. Was alchemy or physics the long route? Only Newton knows and he's dead. Not trying to be dense here, I just don't see the insight. How is what you are saying any different than "you don't know what's going to happen" without Newton attached to it?
- cobbzilla 10y ago
  When you write "Was alchemy or physics the long bet?" it seems you concede that Newton made a bet, and that it didn't involve money. That was my only point: We all make decisions that involve some amount of guesswork on risk vs reward, and it's not always about money. For sake of argument, let's say Newton's reward was the advancement of human knowledge. He made some high-risk bets that didn't pay off (alchemy, theology), and some that did (physics, calculus). All PG is saying is that when we look at famous historical figures, after centuries of deification, we tend to focus only on the bets that paid off, and ignore all the failures. But those failures are crucially important to who these figures were as people, and it does them (and ourselves) a disservice to only focus on the successes.
cfmcdonald 10y ago
I didn't 'make a bet' by going to college, it was the assumed thing in my family, it was culturally ingrained that I would go to college. This way of looking at life as a series of 'bets' that one makes is it's own particular kind of culture, one that Newton did not belong to. Newton didn't investigate alchemy and theology because he was trying to diversify his fame investment portfolio. To see him this way is to do a disservice to him and to history.
- eachro 10y ago
  Replace 'bet' with 'choice.' It's the same message.
- cobbzilla 10y ago
  I'd say that asserting Newton had no choice does him a greater disservice. Call them bets, choices or decisions; there were opportunity costs involved, paths to choose, and he chose some that worked out and some that didn't.
kordless 10y ago
> Please don't get stuck on semantics. That's a blaming statement used to indicate someone is being pedantic, which can then be used to "prove" them wrong by the followup. All of your counter examples are based on the obtaining a better position, which is all about dealing with globalized suffering (money is stored work and work is a unit of causality and suffering is a result of causality). Newton presumably pursued understanding the unknown, which means he chose his own suffering/work that was different from any objective based on making bets to get ahead in life at the time. I think it's entirely fair to point out that Newton wasn't betting at the time. He was discovering purely for the sake of discovery.
- cobbzilla 10y ago
  Are you denying he had any choice in what areas of discovery to pursue? And that there were no trade-offs involved? If not, then you are stuck on semantics.
  - kordless 10y ago
    I'm not stuck on semantics, so that's the truth of the matter, whether you attempt to rationalize I am or not. Make no mistake that semantics are always important. Without the English language, neither you or I could communicate concepts here. It also allows you to attempt to reword what others are saying, but I'm not going to allow that here. When you attempt to state someone is "stuck on semantics" and that person actually hasn't said as much, you are speaking for their intent. When that is backed up with the intent of proving them wrong on some topic, it only serves to indicate intent. The older I get, the more irritating this behavior becomes, especially when the person refuses to acknowledge what is being said and continues to rationalize from their point of view in order to frame a statement by someone else. You act as if language (and semantics) are logical. They aren't, and neither are humans. We'd do well to stop speaking for each other in aggregate in an attempt to make it more logical. This concept itself is counterintuitive. Newton had every choice to pursue interests. Not having prior knowledge of "areas of discovery", it would appear he pursued what was interesting to him. If you look at Faraday, he pursued things to find a single source force - I would expect Newton though along the same lines. In fact, even if he knew someone else was interested in an "area of discovery", he could have just been interested in that topic for purely knowing purposes. Wanting to know more about things, the nature of things if you will, is not something that can be considered a "bet". It's simply curiosity.
Balgair 10y ago
Look at Newton's Early life (0) and we can see that he did not 'make a bet' with his life. Though he managed to get into Cambridge on a scholarship (an element of luck), he was considered 'undistinguished as a Cambridge student.' His 3 really big accomplishments (optics, gravitation, calculus) were generated when he was on break for 2 years from Cambridge due to plague. The question we then must ask is: what would he have done otherwise? It's a 'bet' if there is an element of risk, though it seems this discussion is more about what different English speakers use the word 'bet' to mean. What were the downsides to just poking about with math and lenses in your 'free' hours? Maybe he missed out on some farming/church duties or he traded this time to do Optics instead of gossiping. I don't know. What did young mid-17th century celibate Englishmen do in those days while hiding from the black death? Tennis? Point is, he wasn't really risking anything but a little bit of time spent in the mid 1600's English countryside that he had to spend out there anyways. A 'real bet' would have been staying at Cambridge despite the plague to work on Optics with the professors, as the risk there was quite clearly your life. (0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Isaac_Newton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Isaac_Newton
- cobbzilla 10y ago
  He could have chosen to focus solely on theology. He could have chosen to focus on entirely different areas that were all dead-ends. People are really getting hung-up on the word "bet"; evaluating opportunity costs is part of life. To focus on one word and miss the forest for the trees speaks more about the critic than it does of Newton.

psyc 10y ago

Every decision you make with incomplete information is a bet.

paganel 10y ago
Judging that way each and every one of our actions (including me writing this comment) is a bet, because AFAIK we still live in a world where we do not have "complete information". From time to time I think about one of Mark Twain's short novels which I read as an adolescent, where a lady decides to take the left road instead of the one on the right (or vice-versa) when she reaches a road-junction, and because of that single decision her life changes dramatically.
- cobbzilla 10y ago
  Indeed! And how about that classic Robert Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken" [1] Edit: WOW, after reading the commentary on the poem, I never realized how wrong I was. The poem is a joke, he's saying it didn't really matter which path he took. All these years I took it so seriously, which apparently is a common mistake dating back to the very first time the poem was read in front of an audience. [1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/44272 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poe...
  - svachalek 10y ago
    After reading the "poem guide" there I have to agree, WOW. My mind is blown. Despite destroying what it meant to me for 30 years, the older me appreciates the poem even more for its subtlety.
  - matt4077 10y ago
    There's an episode of The West Wing that brilliantly uses that misconception. Can't find it on youtube unfortunately.

1337p337 10y ago

There wasn't quite the sharp division of disciplines, either. Thinking about it that way comes from the public school system (which the author ought to know, because if I'm not mistaken, he mentioned that in a previous essay). Mathematics (which didn't warrant a mention as a bet that paid off in a blurb about the guy that invented calculus), metaphysics, and the natural sciences were all areas of study, but they weren't different bets: they were interrelated components of our understanding of the universe.

rwj 10y ago
guy that co-invented calculus...
- fao_ 10y ago
  no, guy that invented calculus independently, but around the same time as someone else did
- FreeFull 10y ago
  I'd say co-invented would apply more if he worked together with Leibniz on it. Instead, they both invented it independently, around the same time (with differing notation, but both gave the means to reach the same results).
dongslol 10y ago
I think you are agreeing with the author, who is trying here to refute the misconception that Newton was simultaneously a brilliant, grounded, impartial truth seeker who discovered physics and a batshit conspiracist who dabbled in alchemy and theology.
- 1337p337 10y ago
  Well, PG presents them as different bets, one of which paid off. They were the same essential bet from Newton's perspective. For example, books on physics at the time referred to religion heavily, sometimes as a cornerstone of an argument. Even Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica says "Collocavit igitur Deus Planetas in diversas distantiis à Sole, ut quilibet pro gradu densitatis calore Solis majore vel minore fruatur."

balsam 10y ago

Existential risk of goingg/being-seen-as crazy.

dsugarman 10y ago

your time is finite and your most valuable resource (usually), betting your time is the biggest bet you can make

imgabe 10y ago

He wagered his time. Everything you choose to work on means you're not working on something else. So by choosing to work on something, you're necessarily "betting" that it's going to be more fruitful than the infinitely many other things you could be doing. Expending resources, whether time or money, on something with an uncertain outcome is a bet. I'm not sure what the objection is to using that term. Nobody said Newton was a Silicon Valley VC.