12 ms·

In ‘Elastic,’ a Physicist Argues That the Mind Needs Time to Play

91 points by Semirhage 8y ago

comboy 8y ago
Very nice of the author (of the article) to mention Kahneman who has done so much research around this stuff (if you haven't yet read Thinking Fast and Slow I highly recommend it) Regarding the title, I'd say choose your profession in a way that you don't have to choose between work and play. You are reading HN so you're likely in a position to have many options. Life's too short to be doing things that don't feel like playing. Especially given that everything is playing whether you realize it or not because the universe, entropy and purpose but that's a whole another story. But even from purely financial point of view, it's likely that you will be better off by becoming master at what you consider to be a fun game.
- eloff 8y ago
  Sometimes I marvel how much people are willing to pay for me to write and debug code. I can and would do it without pay - if I could choose the problem. The trouble is a lot of what I work on is mind-numbingly boring and definitely feels like work, not play. But I think it's an acceptable tradeoff to achieve financial independence and get the freedom to pick my problems.
  - comboy 8y ago
    Based on your first comment you may already have a chance to give some problems picked by you a try. And as far as I understand it, you will never achieve financial independence by amassing some fixed of money. You need a cash flow and it won't just magically appear after working hard for some time. You need to focus your interest on this specific goal, research it and work towards it. Oops, I meant play towards it ;)
    - eloff 8y ago
      If you amass some fixed amount of money and buy a house with it, or keep it in the bank - yeah it won't help you. If you amass some fixed amounts of investments, that gives you cash flow. Once that reaches a certain point depending on what your expenses are and your lifestyle choices are, you're free. "Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants." - Epictetus If I (or more importantly my wife) had fewer wants, I'd already be financially independent.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - swsieber 8y ago
      There is, in fact, an entire sub-reddit dedicated to turning amassed money into a fixed income, with the specific goal of financial independence: https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/ https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/ So while amassing money alone won't get you there, it can definitely facilitate it.
    - hyperpallium 8y ago
      Then you have to manage your investments. If that's fun for you, great. All it really does is leverage your time, effort and attention.
      - eloff 8y ago
        If you're doing that right it should be pretty low maintenance. I spend more time taking out the garbage in a given year than I do on my investments.
        hyperpallium 8y ago
        Ideally. But if you're living on your investments, you tend to attend to them more. The solution to that is to have such a substantial investment income that you don't need to worry about it, at all - which means that much more effort in getting there.
        eloff 8y ago
        Or a large cash position to smooth out the rough patches, but that also means more effort in getting there.
        hyperpallium 8y ago
        "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
  - Bekwnn 8y ago
    It takes some work to be able to work on things you enjoy and get paid for them. But it's more possible in this line of work than many others. People have jobs at places like pixar, blizzard entertainment, and robotics labs. Tons of people manage to convert passion projects into real work. I personally work in AAA games. I wouldn't work on CRUD without at least a 20k raise. You spend 40+ hours a week at work. A job you like is worth a lot.
    - matte_black 8y ago
      I wouldn’t work in AAA games without a 30k raise.
- hyperpallium 8y ago
  Do what you love, and you'll never need to work another day in life. Make your hobby your job, and you lose a hobby and gain a job. It's trial by cliché, choose your champion.
jmount 8y ago
If you find this sort of thinking interesting, definitely also check out "The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field" by Jacques Hadamard.
sharkweek 8y ago
Oh wow, I 100% agree with this. I absolutely need at least a few hours a week of creative outlet (Right now it's writing. In the past it has been painting, or woodworking or... to my wife's dismay, a long list of forgotten hobbies). It sometimes feels like I have a small child in my head, one that wants to play, be free, and just burn off excess energy through creativity. And if I don't do that, he throws a temper tantrum, anxieties and restlessness start kicking up.
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
The idea that selection pressures would result in the apex-predator (humans) spending 1/3 of it's life in a completely defenseless state, must tell us a lot about the importance of sleep to intelligence and creativity. After both personally experiencing and learning clinically more about how sleep - or lack thereof - impacts cognitive, physical, creative and immune capability I think it's a hugely important piece of the intelligence puzzle. My hypothesis is that sleep amounts to a nightly scrimmage for the rest of our lives. So it's where we go to practice the things that we're planning on doing or could possibly encounter. We take the inputs from the previous days etc... into simulating future events/outcomes. In reinforcement learning terms sleep is where we do "exploration" in our own personal simulation of the experienced world and real life is where we do "exploitation."
asiniongnoi 8y ago
I'm not keen on reading a book that's in any way affiliated with Deepak Chopra. He represents one of the most intellectually bankrupt and destructive forces on the planet. Is he just mentioned offhand or is he given real focus? I find it baffling that a physicist who is respectable enough to write a book with Stephen Hawking would be able to stomach writing a book with a man who claims that quantum mechanics proves that meditation can affect one's "quantum-mechanical body" and prevent aging. EDIT: It seems I've misunderstood the book he wrote with Chopra. It's structured as a debate. I still that giving Chopra anything less than open hostility is a mistake, but it seems Mlodinow is not some new-age woo peddler.
- simsla 8y ago
  The article seems to claim exactly that: that the interviews with Deepak et al are anecdotal at best, and don't add much substance to the author's claims. Seems like this is one of those countless self improvement books: built around a premise that makes intuitive sense (here: having an outlet apart from work improves your performance at work) and listing tons of anecdotes to ingrain the idea further. Basically, a blog post padded with stories to make a sellable book. I'm not the biggest fan.
- somethingElsa 8y ago
  Instead of citing relevant research, he devotes multiple pages to famous people and their original ideas, among them Stephen Hawking and Deepak Chopra (his collaborators on previous books) and Seth MacFarlane, of “Family Guy” fame. His discussion of the novelist Isabel Allende’s mixed success with ayahuasca as a cure for writer’s block is an eye-opener, but on the whole these celebrity testimonials are too weak to provide much insight into the value of elastic thinking. Something of a mild distraction, no? Seems like an addendum to the rest of the cavalcade of characters in a spread-spectrum mass appeal attempt at name dropping. Seems petty to ding someone on the merit of their associations, rather than let their own principles and qualities stand on their own. I'm not saying I'm a fan of this guy. I'm saying I'm not of fan of such trivial mud slinging.
spodek 8y ago
I find David Allen's work most helpful here. He points out that more valuable than time is mental freedom. You can schedule all the time in the world to solve a problem. If something else occupies your mind, progress may never come. On the other hand, if your mind is not preoccupied, finding the solution may take very little time. His practice in his book Getting Things Done helped me practice this, not just abstractly know it.
gnicholas 8y ago
> Most of us have to make a concerted effort to be mindful and open to the unfamiliar Growing up, I came to believe that the word "concerted" means something like "effortful" or "work hard to do something". I later learned that it actually refers to a group of people working together (in concert) to accomplish something [1]. So technically, a person cannot make a concerted effort to do something alone. Seeing the word used here in this technically incorrect way leads me to wonder how uncommon my experience is. Are we on our way to redefining this word with a more relaxed definition? 1: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/concerted https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/concerted
- AlecSchueler 8y ago
  I've had the same experience with the word as yourself. It's interesting to note that the word "concert" itself has seen a similar shift: it wouldn't be at all strange to refer to someone performing a "solo concert."
- caio1982 8y ago
  You think it's technically incorrect usage because you didn't know other uses of it nor its root. Technically the quoted sentence is 100% correct, concerted also means something you tried hard, struggled with, strived to get done. The musical concert actually derives its meaning from that, but done by a group put together: https://www.etymonline.com/word/concert https://www.etymonline.com/word/concert
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    I have looked for but never found a definition of "concerted" like the one you described. Can you provide one?
    - caio1982 8y ago
      Have you actually clicked on the link I put at the end of my comment?
      - 8y ago
hyperpallium 8y ago
The clever part of the wheel is the axle. Seeing a stone rolling down a hill might lead to rolling a load on logs for transport. Funfact: the first wheels were potter's wheels. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-salute-to-the-wheel-31805121/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-salute-to-th... My favourite early invention is cloth. Fire's not really an "invention" in the same sense, more like taming wolves and horses.
smilliken 8y ago
A relevant classic: "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge" https://library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf https://library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf

91 points by Semirhage 8y ago

Very nice of the author (of the article) to mention Kahneman who has done so much research around this stuff (if you haven't yet read Thinking Fast and Slow I highly recommend it) Regarding the title, I'd say choose your profession in a way that you don't have to choose between work and play. You are reading HN so you're likely in a position to have many options. Life's too short to be doing things that don't feel like playing. Especially given that everything is playing whether you realize it or not because the universe, entropy and purpose but that's a whole another story. But even from purely financial point of view, it's likely that you will be better off by becoming master at what you consider to be a fun game.

eloff 8y ago
Sometimes I marvel how much people are willing to pay for me to write and debug code. I can and would do it without pay - if I could choose the problem. The trouble is a lot of what I work on is mind-numbingly boring and definitely feels like work, not play. But I think it's an acceptable tradeoff to achieve financial independence and get the freedom to pick my problems.
- comboy 8y ago
  Based on your first comment you may already have a chance to give some problems picked by you a try. And as far as I understand it, you will never achieve financial independence by amassing some fixed of money. You need a cash flow and it won't just magically appear after working hard for some time. You need to focus your interest on this specific goal, research it and work towards it. Oops, I meant play towards it ;)
  - eloff 8y ago
    If you amass some fixed amount of money and buy a house with it, or keep it in the bank - yeah it won't help you. If you amass some fixed amounts of investments, that gives you cash flow. Once that reaches a certain point depending on what your expenses are and your lifestyle choices are, you're free. "Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants." - Epictetus If I (or more importantly my wife) had fewer wants, I'd already be financially independent.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - swsieber 8y ago
    There is, in fact, an entire sub-reddit dedicated to turning amassed money into a fixed income, with the specific goal of financial independence: https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/ https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/ So while amassing money alone won't get you there, it can definitely facilitate it.
  - hyperpallium 8y ago
    Then you have to manage your investments. If that's fun for you, great. All it really does is leverage your time, effort and attention.
    - eloff 8y ago
      If you're doing that right it should be pretty low maintenance. I spend more time taking out the garbage in a given year than I do on my investments.
      - hyperpallium 8y ago
        Ideally. But if you're living on your investments, you tend to attend to them more. The solution to that is to have such a substantial investment income that you don't need to worry about it, at all - which means that much more effort in getting there.
        eloff 8y ago
        Or a large cash position to smooth out the rough patches, but that also means more effort in getting there.
        hyperpallium 8y ago
        "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
- Bekwnn 8y ago
  It takes some work to be able to work on things you enjoy and get paid for them. But it's more possible in this line of work than many others. People have jobs at places like pixar, blizzard entertainment, and robotics labs. Tons of people manage to convert passion projects into real work. I personally work in AAA games. I wouldn't work on CRUD without at least a 20k raise. You spend 40+ hours a week at work. A job you like is worth a lot.
  - matte_black 8y ago
    I wouldn’t work in AAA games without a 30k raise.
hyperpallium 8y ago
Do what you love, and you'll never need to work another day in life. Make your hobby your job, and you lose a hobby and gain a job. It's trial by cliché, choose your champion.

jmount 8y ago

If you find this sort of thinking interesting, definitely also check out "The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field" by Jacques Hadamard.

sharkweek 8y ago

Oh wow, I 100% agree with this. I absolutely need at least a few hours a week of creative outlet (Right now it's writing. In the past it has been painting, or woodworking or... to my wife's dismay, a long list of forgotten hobbies). It sometimes feels like I have a small child in my head, one that wants to play, be free, and just burn off excess energy through creativity. And if I don't do that, he throws a temper tantrum, anxieties and restlessness start kicking up.

AndrewKemendo 8y ago

The idea that selection pressures would result in the apex-predator (humans) spending 1/3 of it's life in a completely defenseless state, must tell us a lot about the importance of sleep to intelligence and creativity. After both personally experiencing and learning clinically more about how sleep - or lack thereof - impacts cognitive, physical, creative and immune capability I think it's a hugely important piece of the intelligence puzzle. My hypothesis is that sleep amounts to a nightly scrimmage for the rest of our lives. So it's where we go to practice the things that we're planning on doing or could possibly encounter. We take the inputs from the previous days etc... into simulating future events/outcomes. In reinforcement learning terms sleep is where we do "exploration" in our own personal simulation of the experienced world and real life is where we do "exploitation."

asiniongnoi 8y ago

I'm not keen on reading a book that's in any way affiliated with Deepak Chopra. He represents one of the most intellectually bankrupt and destructive forces on the planet. Is he just mentioned offhand or is he given real focus? I find it baffling that a physicist who is respectable enough to write a book with Stephen Hawking would be able to stomach writing a book with a man who claims that quantum mechanics proves that meditation can affect one's "quantum-mechanical body" and prevent aging. EDIT: It seems I've misunderstood the book he wrote with Chopra. It's structured as a debate. I still that giving Chopra anything less than open hostility is a mistake, but it seems Mlodinow is not some new-age woo peddler.

simsla 8y ago
The article seems to claim exactly that: that the interviews with Deepak et al are anecdotal at best, and don't add much substance to the author's claims. Seems like this is one of those countless self improvement books: built around a premise that makes intuitive sense (here: having an outlet apart from work improves your performance at work) and listing tons of anecdotes to ingrain the idea further. Basically, a blog post padded with stories to make a sellable book. I'm not the biggest fan.
somethingElsa 8y ago
Instead of citing relevant research, he devotes multiple pages to famous people and their original ideas, among them Stephen Hawking and Deepak Chopra (his collaborators on previous books) and Seth MacFarlane, of “Family Guy” fame. His discussion of the novelist Isabel Allende’s mixed success with ayahuasca as a cure for writer’s block is an eye-opener, but on the whole these celebrity testimonials are too weak to provide much insight into the value of elastic thinking. Something of a mild distraction, no? Seems like an addendum to the rest of the cavalcade of characters in a spread-spectrum mass appeal attempt at name dropping. Seems petty to ding someone on the merit of their associations, rather than let their own principles and qualities stand on their own. I'm not saying I'm a fan of this guy. I'm saying I'm not of fan of such trivial mud slinging.

spodek 8y ago

I find David Allen's work most helpful here. He points out that more valuable than time is mental freedom. You can schedule all the time in the world to solve a problem. If something else occupies your mind, progress may never come. On the other hand, if your mind is not preoccupied, finding the solution may take very little time. His practice in his book Getting Things Done helped me practice this, not just abstractly know it.

gnicholas 8y ago

> Most of us have to make a concerted effort to be mindful and open to the unfamiliar Growing up, I came to believe that the word "concerted" means something like "effortful" or "work hard to do something". I later learned that it actually refers to a group of people working together (in concert) to accomplish something [1]. So technically, a person cannot make a concerted effort to do something alone. Seeing the word used here in this technically incorrect way leads me to wonder how uncommon my experience is. Are we on our way to redefining this word with a more relaxed definition? 1: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/concerted https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/concerted

AlecSchueler 8y ago
I've had the same experience with the word as yourself. It's interesting to note that the word "concert" itself has seen a similar shift: it wouldn't be at all strange to refer to someone performing a "solo concert."
caio1982 8y ago
You think it's technically incorrect usage because you didn't know other uses of it nor its root. Technically the quoted sentence is 100% correct, concerted also means something you tried hard, struggled with, strived to get done. The musical concert actually derives its meaning from that, but done by a group put together: https://www.etymonline.com/word/concert https://www.etymonline.com/word/concert
- gnicholas 8y ago
  I have looked for but never found a definition of "concerted" like the one you described. Can you provide one?
  - caio1982 8y ago
    Have you actually clicked on the link I put at the end of my comment?
    - 8y ago

hyperpallium 8y ago

The clever part of the wheel is the axle. Seeing a stone rolling down a hill might lead to rolling a load on logs for transport. Funfact: the first wheels were potter's wheels. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-salute-to-the-wheel-31805121/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-salute-to-th... My favourite early invention is cloth. Fire's not really an "invention" in the same sense, more like taming wolves and horses.

smilliken 8y ago

A relevant classic: "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge" https://library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf https://library.ias.edu/files/UsefulnessHarpers.pdf