5 ms·

I'm all for egalitarianism in the public sphere, but in private I still believe that there's such a thing as natural born talent. Anyone can probably reach the

by tw1010 8y ago

I'm all for egalitarianism in the public sphere, but in private I still believe that there's such a thing as natural born talent. Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time. But if your goal is to maximize your output having already accepted that your time on earth is limited, then the wise thing is to probably steer in directions that have high impact but for you feel disproportionately easy (compared to the general population). Thus, I'm a big fan of Peter Theils advice to work on things that satisfy the property that: "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get solved".

nnd 8y ago
Then, of course, the challenge is to identify overlooked problems which actually are real problems and therefore worth solving. It's easy to succumb to a fallacy of thinking that if no one else is working on a problem it's not a real problem or is not worth solving.
worldsayshi 8y ago
Question to anyone reading this: What is your answer to "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get solved"?
- scrollaway 8y ago
  I'll skip over what I'm actively working on because I think this deserves a mention: I'm a hobbyist digital archivist. This is something where most people can likely make a meaningful and long-lasting impact, that nobody else could if they didn't. Archiving, for me, is a way of travelling forward in time. Think about "time capsules" and what not. Here's what I mean by this: If you write a message on a piece of paper, and read it the next day, your message has successfully traveled forward in time by a day. But as the days pass, the message's survival chances diminish greatly. The goal of archiving is to give information the highest chances possible to travel forward in time, as long as possible. It's hard to evaluate how good our chances are now, but 2000 years from now, if archaeologists find information on our current society, is it more likely to be the piece of paper you wrote, or an archive that was given the best chances of survival? It's extremely rewarding and it truly is meaningful. Archive anything. Sort and order it, index it, describe it, upload it. Do it for something you work on. The odds for you to archive something that was not done by anyone else are very high.
  - dhruvkar 8y ago
    I tend to do the same with all physical pieces of paper I receive, whether or not it feels useful at the time. Recently added OCR to the process, which makes retrieval a joy. I have no logical reason for doing this, it feels like a compulsion. Why do you do it and what tools do you use?
    - scrollaway 8y ago
      > Why do you do it To travel in time :) And also because I believe human knowledge is the sum of the past it can learn from. If information gets lost, it can't be part of that. It's the same beliefs that drive me to support open source & free software. > what tools do you use? I do a lot of data-mining as part of my day to day operations, in video games mainly. These are the main things I end up archiving, so I write my own tools.
      - marviel 8y ago
        On the flipside of this, thanks to archivists such as yourself, I've saved myself some time by developing a research perspective that first assumes ideas I've come up with may have been independently discovered in the past. This may be obvious to others, but for me it has been a game-changer for getting "to the meat" of problems, so to speak. Largely, this mindset stems from a group of characters in the book "Anathem"[1] named the Lorites, characters who believe that all knowledge which can be learned has already been discovered, and recorded. While this is obviously fiction, and I disagree with the stance as an absolute, the idea that much of what can be discovered may already have been explored has saved me significant time; no longer do I find myself working on a problem only to find it has been studied and solved. Occasionally I'll find problems which have been studied, but not yet solved, and in these situations I'm pleased to have the fruit of others' data-gathering labors at my disposal as a result of the search caused by my initial assumption. [1]: "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson, speculative fiction: http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Lorite http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Lorite
        selestify 8y ago
- MrsPeaches 8y ago
  Teaching kids in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) how to build their own electricity generation systems. Access to electricity is a massive problem and the number of people without access is actually projected to increase [1]. We need more people working on the problem and we especially need people from SSA working on it. We are working to inspire young people and to provide them with the tools and knowledge they need to go and solve the problem of access to electricity. [2] [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/561428/forecast-of-population-without-access-to-electricity-globally-by-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/561428/forecast-of-popul... [2] https://localelectricity.org/ https://localelectricity.org/
- MrQuincle 8y ago
  This problem would remain a problem forever? I'm happy enough if I can help a problem be solved faster. If I can make it happen that some strategic technical solution happens ten years before it would have been without me, I'd be extremely satisfied. But there's no way to know. I tend to work the other way. Some day we will have smart homes. How would they look like and how can I work towards that vision? Or, what restricts ubiquity of wearables? In my opinion wireless charging over a considerable distance. Then I contemplate how I would do it. For example embedded in ceiling lights with infrared lasers and a positioning system. And I talk about it in case someone else also finds it an interesting idea, because I've so little time on this planet...
badpun 8y ago
> Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time. I seriously doubt that. People who have no aptitude in a field, even if they are dedicated, will be competing vs people who are also dedicated, but have the aptitude. I'd say maybe that "almost anyone can reach top 50% of most non-athletic fields", but definitely not top 5%.
- qznc 8y ago
  Depends on what you base the percentage on. If it is the global population, then 5% of 7 billion is 350 million. So to be in the top 5% there must be at most 350 million people better than you. Now consider a niche sport, say Ultimate Frisbee. I would guess that much less than 350 million people even know the rules. So invest an hour to learn the rules and play it a little with your friends. Voila, you are in the top 5%. And that is for an athletic sport. You are probably talking about 5% of the people actively doing it like being registered in an association. In this case, 50% sounds more realistic to me.
  - mcbits 8y ago
    Assuming the potential performance of actively engaged people is roughly normally distributed (even if, as a group, they come from the upper end of the general population on that axis), then I think 50% is too conservative. Nobody can perform above their potential by definition, but lots and lots of people will fail to live up to their potential, making room for their below-average colleagues to outperform them with enough work.
- curuinor 8y ago
  there's about 20 million people who know programming to the level that they can fizzbuzz, according to the rough idc estimates. if you know fizzbuzz, you know programming better than all the rest. (the rest don't know how to program at all)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
coldtea 8y ago
>Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time. At any given time, only the 5% of the population can reach the top 5% in any area. If anybody could do it and e.g. just 10% did it, then there would be a new 5% (the top 50% of that 10%), and the rest 50% wouldn't be in. >Thus, I'm a big fan of Peter Theils advice to work on things that satisfy the property that: "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get solved". Which is a self-aggrandising way for Theils to say that he helped solve some problems that wouldn't have been solved otherwise. Unless you have tons of means to contribute (e.g. billions) to some cause, the idea starting out as some e.g. college student that "this problem wont be solved without my help" is 99.9999% BS.
- notsofastbuddy 8y ago
  There aren't very many axes along which >5% of the population actively try to improve themselves. This makes it easy to reach the top 5% if one is trying.
- tw1010 8y ago
  Just because something is social signaling (which it undoubtedly is in Theils case), doesn't mean it isn't true, and that you shouldn't follow the advice.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    Just because a "virtue signaling" statement can also be true, doesn't in any way infer that his advice is good. If anything, it gives him a motive to say it (virtue signal) which is not "to tell the truth". So, the advice might very well be true and we should very well follow it. But thus far we have absolutely no arguments as to if that's the case.
    - tw1010 8y ago
      You're prematurely moving the debate one abstraction layer up, making the issue about the whether a general virtue signal can ever contain truth. (That's an interesting discussion and I agree with you that it's definitely likely that virtue signaling statements are less truthful in general than "honest" statements.) Had you looked down on the concrete statement we're discussing, clearly no argument would be needed. Clearly it's good advice to "do things which wouldn't be done if you wouldn't be there to solve it", what's there even to argue about.

by tw1010 8y ago

nnd 8y ago

Then, of course, the challenge is to identify overlooked problems which actually are real problems and therefore worth solving. It's easy to succumb to a fallacy of thinking that if no one else is working on a problem it's not a real problem or is not worth solving.

worldsayshi 8y ago

Question to anyone reading this: What is your answer to "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get solved"?

scrollaway 8y ago
I'll skip over what I'm actively working on because I think this deserves a mention: I'm a hobbyist digital archivist. This is something where most people can likely make a meaningful and long-lasting impact, that nobody else could if they didn't. Archiving, for me, is a way of travelling forward in time. Think about "time capsules" and what not. Here's what I mean by this: If you write a message on a piece of paper, and read it the next day, your message has successfully traveled forward in time by a day. But as the days pass, the message's survival chances diminish greatly. The goal of archiving is to give information the highest chances possible to travel forward in time, as long as possible. It's hard to evaluate how good our chances are now, but 2000 years from now, if archaeologists find information on our current society, is it more likely to be the piece of paper you wrote, or an archive that was given the best chances of survival? It's extremely rewarding and it truly is meaningful. Archive anything. Sort and order it, index it, describe it, upload it. Do it for something you work on. The odds for you to archive something that was not done by anyone else are very high.
- dhruvkar 8y ago
  I tend to do the same with all physical pieces of paper I receive, whether or not it feels useful at the time. Recently added OCR to the process, which makes retrieval a joy. I have no logical reason for doing this, it feels like a compulsion. Why do you do it and what tools do you use?
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    > Why do you do it To travel in time :) And also because I believe human knowledge is the sum of the past it can learn from. If information gets lost, it can't be part of that. It's the same beliefs that drive me to support open source & free software. > what tools do you use? I do a lot of data-mining as part of my day to day operations, in video games mainly. These are the main things I end up archiving, so I write my own tools.
    - marviel 8y ago
      On the flipside of this, thanks to archivists such as yourself, I've saved myself some time by developing a research perspective that first assumes ideas I've come up with may have been independently discovered in the past. This may be obvious to others, but for me it has been a game-changer for getting "to the meat" of problems, so to speak. Largely, this mindset stems from a group of characters in the book "Anathem"[1] named the Lorites, characters who believe that all knowledge which can be learned has already been discovered, and recorded. While this is obviously fiction, and I disagree with the stance as an absolute, the idea that much of what can be discovered may already have been explored has saved me significant time; no longer do I find myself working on a problem only to find it has been studied and solved. Occasionally I'll find problems which have been studied, but not yet solved, and in these situations I'm pleased to have the fruit of others' data-gathering labors at my disposal as a result of the search caused by my initial assumption. [1]: "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson, speculative fiction: http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Lorite http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Lorite
      - selestify 8y ago
MrsPeaches 8y ago
Teaching kids in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) how to build their own electricity generation systems. Access to electricity is a massive problem and the number of people without access is actually projected to increase [1]. We need more people working on the problem and we especially need people from SSA working on it. We are working to inspire young people and to provide them with the tools and knowledge they need to go and solve the problem of access to electricity. [2] [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/561428/forecast-of-population-without-access-to-electricity-globally-by-region/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/561428/forecast-of-popul... [2] https://localelectricity.org/ https://localelectricity.org/
MrQuincle 8y ago
This problem would remain a problem forever? I'm happy enough if I can help a problem be solved faster. If I can make it happen that some strategic technical solution happens ten years before it would have been without me, I'd be extremely satisfied. But there's no way to know. I tend to work the other way. Some day we will have smart homes. How would they look like and how can I work towards that vision? Or, what restricts ubiquity of wearables? In my opinion wireless charging over a considerable distance. Then I contemplate how I would do it. For example embedded in ceiling lights with infrared lasers and a positioning system. And I talk about it in case someone else also finds it an interesting idea, because I've so little time on this planet...

badpun 8y ago

> Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time. I seriously doubt that. People who have no aptitude in a field, even if they are dedicated, will be competing vs people who are also dedicated, but have the aptitude. I'd say maybe that "almost anyone can reach top 50% of most non-athletic fields", but definitely not top 5%.

qznc 8y ago
Depends on what you base the percentage on. If it is the global population, then 5% of 7 billion is 350 million. So to be in the top 5% there must be at most 350 million people better than you. Now consider a niche sport, say Ultimate Frisbee. I would guess that much less than 350 million people even know the rules. So invest an hour to learn the rules and play it a little with your friends. Voila, you are in the top 5%. And that is for an athletic sport. You are probably talking about 5% of the people actively doing it like being registered in an association. In this case, 50% sounds more realistic to me.
- mcbits 8y ago
  Assuming the potential performance of actively engaged people is roughly normally distributed (even if, as a group, they come from the upper end of the general population on that axis), then I think 50% is too conservative. Nobody can perform above their potential by definition, but lots and lots of people will fail to live up to their potential, making room for their below-average colleagues to outperform them with enough work.
curuinor 8y ago
there's about 20 million people who know programming to the level that they can fizzbuzz, according to the rough idc estimates. if you know fizzbuzz, you know programming better than all the rest. (the rest don't know how to program at all)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

coldtea 8y ago

>Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time. At any given time, only the 5% of the population can reach the top 5% in any area. If anybody could do it and e.g. just 10% did it, then there would be a new 5% (the top 50% of that 10%), and the rest 50% wouldn't be in. >Thus, I'm a big fan of Peter Theils advice to work on things that satisfy the property that: "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get solved". Which is a self-aggrandising way for Theils to say that he helped solve some problems that wouldn't have been solved otherwise. Unless you have tons of means to contribute (e.g. billions) to some cause, the idea starting out as some e.g. college student that "this problem wont be solved without my help" is 99.9999% BS.

notsofastbuddy 8y ago
There aren't very many axes along which >5% of the population actively try to improve themselves. This makes it easy to reach the top 5% if one is trying.
tw1010 8y ago
Just because something is social signaling (which it undoubtedly is in Theils case), doesn't mean it isn't true, and that you shouldn't follow the advice.
- coldtea 8y ago
  Just because a "virtue signaling" statement can also be true, doesn't in any way infer that his advice is good. If anything, it gives him a motive to say it (virtue signal) which is not "to tell the truth". So, the advice might very well be true and we should very well follow it. But thus far we have absolutely no arguments as to if that's the case.
  - tw1010 8y ago
    You're prematurely moving the debate one abstraction layer up, making the issue about the whether a general virtue signal can ever contain truth. (That's an interesting discussion and I agree with you that it's definitely likely that virtue signaling statements are less truthful in general than "honest" statements.) Had you looked down on the concrete statement we're discussing, clearly no argument would be needed. Clearly it's good advice to "do things which wouldn't be done if you wouldn't be there to solve it", what's there even to argue about.