7 ms·

This feels like the sort of advice that increases the variance of outcomes more than the mean, if that makes any sense. It'll help some people, but also really

• lallysingh 7y ago
  No. Pay attention to what other people do that help what you're doing. That raises the mean by reducing drag.
• pavas 7y ago
  I think it would be very desirable to increase the variance of outcomes without significantly decreasing the mean. The way research funding is structured now, researchers are incentivized towards taking small publishable steps without too much risk. This is needed of course, but it isn't going to bring about another Newton. I think we desperately need a few more Newtons if we're to prosper in the next hundred years.
  • DuskStar 7y ago
    A research infrastructure that could support improving the variance of results without significantly impacting the mean would be an enormous boon to the world.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • jjeaff 7y ago
    That is probably what is desirable for the field as a whole. But as an individual, not a good idea to shoot for high variance.
    • throwaway2048 7y ago
      Part of the issue is that scientific fields are very punishing if you deliver negative results, thus the incentive to "shoot for the moon" is greatly lessened.
    • scottlocklin 7y ago
      Anyone who wants high mean low variance career should become an accountant or a dentist: the payoff is vastly better, and it takes a comparable amount of intelligence. This low variance attitude is why we can't have nice things. We have more "scientists" alive now than at any time in human history, and it is boring and useless with virtually no downstream results.
  • urOwn-lilNewton 7y ago
    Hey, I'd love to be your little pet Newton. Trouble is, I can't get anyone to pay me to sit at home and navel gaze to my heart's content. Quite the contrary, the only thing people really pay me for is to get my ideas steamrolled into flattened pancakes, set on fire and tossed in the garbage, while they implement their own ideas, steal all the fun parts, then when play time is done, they dump these brittle kiln-baked balls of mud in my lap to spit shine and praise in front on non-technical product/project managers. Every manager, without fail, steals the fun parts, coding up "the cool projects" that stimulate their curiosity. And (THIS IS NOT A LIE), every single time I have witnessed a subordinate present an idea for some kind of concept that improves upon existing process, a manager will go out of their way to prevent that idea from happening, and instead do something else. If it were a suggestion to mass produce highly profitable peanut butter sandwiches, boss will find a way to eradicate the idea, and substitute a contradiction to reduce the subordinate's relevance. "Peanut butter? Certainly not. We shall make hot dogs instead and top them with beluga caviar and BBQ mayonnaise." This is every boss. All of them. One build a real time javascript animated 3D spinning globe that connected cities with glowing, streaming comet trajectories, each time a real user completed a sale. Another hand rolled an XML web service because he wanted to teach himself how. Yet another would rewrite any and all JS AND clojure code in like 90 minutes, simply because it was faster for him to apply his superficial implementation than bother considering a subordinates version worth reasoning, learning and understanding work someone else invested. Every job. Never mattered which.
  • dfeliej 7y ago
    I came to suggest something similar. I often wonder how much this applies today. Academic science is currently heavily driven by funding of popular, low-risk research. Also, without meaning any disrespect to Feynman or the advice, it's easy enough to say something like "disregard what others are doing" when you've won a Nobel. It's another thing to say this to people in just about any other inequivalent scenario, which is nearly everyone.
• lacampbell 7y ago
  The more experienced I get at programming, the more I find that disregarding others is the correct choice. I have a background and intuition informed by 'common wisdom', but enough confidence to go against it when it seems to make sense without second guessing myself. Well, at least sometimes. I am getting better at it. For a master of his domain like Feynman that affect would surely have been amplified. He can back himself to go on a tangent, against the backdrop of the backdrop of the fundamentals of his field.
  • watwut 7y ago
    I had opposite development. At first, those who disregarded others looked like geniuses and heroes. Over time, I started to see damage they caused. Well timed doing your thing is indeed good thing, but those who routinely disregard others slow overall speed of the whole team down.
    • tehlike 7y ago
      That depends on how the team compares to the mean of (larger) teams. Teams that are grown by weak engineers who never tried to improve their skills through cross polination are examples. You cant fix the whole situation, but you can find a few very smart ones to go against "common" wisdom Because common wisdom may be common to your small team, and not at all to a more skilled set of engineers.
• watwut 7y ago
  I don't think this was about disregarding everyone around all the time. This was something that helped Feynman to move in that particular situation when he was weighted down by other peoples expectations and what not. The story is at the point where he is already honored, known and has "outstanding popular touch". That is when he read a book and calls the wife in the middle of the night to say: "I think I’ve figured it out. Now I’ll be able to work again!" This does not mean that people should disregard others all the time routinely. It means that there are situations where you have to disregard others expectations, advice and what not.
  • denzil_correa 7y ago
    > It means that there are situations where you have to disregard others expectations, advice and what not. And that’s the tricky part. In order to understand, which situation to disregard and which not.
    • mbeex 7y ago
      In fact, the distinguishing characteristic is to act, not utterly understanding.
    • watwut 7y ago
      That is where expertise, experience and actual knowledge comes to play. Which Feynman at that moment possessed. It is also relative, you can be both too much accommodating and too much disregarding. One person can move between the two extremes over his own life.
• kragen 7y ago
  In fields like art, programming, and physics, you'd better be doing something weird. If you're doing something mainstream, the same thing thirty other people around the world are doing, you're all competing to make the same thing — paint the same painting, write the same text editor, prove the same theorem about black holes. Twenty-nine of you are going to get scooped by whoever is the hardest-working, the smartest, the best-supported institutionally, or whatever combination of those turns out to be the deciding factor. Your chance of being in that 97% who have totally wasted their efforts? 97%. And if you're doing something really mainstream, like writing the next big client-side JavaScript framework, the one that will replace React, watch out! Your chances are a lot worse than that, because there are hundreds of thousands of people who fight with React every day and are frustrated with its shortcomings. Your chances are literally millions to one, unless you work at Microsoft or Google and have management support to beat those Facebook fuckers. But if you're doing something offbeat, working on a problem† that's mainstream enough to be interesting if you're successful but not mainstream enough that dozens of people are already spending their weekends trying to solve it, you have a much better chance of finding a niche for your project. Maybe it's non-mainstream because people take for granted that it can't be solved (in which case they might be right, as with the reactionless drive — the objective here is to be weird in your project goal, not your epistemology); maybe because they don't understand why it would be important to solve it ("Where's the market?"), and you do; maybe, as with OpenSSL, it's an important problem, but there's no way to get paid for solving it. A thousand hackers writing a thousand versions of the same library in the same way are only epsilon more productive than one hacker. A thousand hackers writing a thousand different libraries are almost a thousand times as productive. Winning the lottery? Well, that's pretty much out of your control — but if you do decide to waste your money on the lottery, don't pick a number lots of other people are picking. Then you'll have to split the already-improbable winnings N ways. But what if you're determined to solve a mainstream problem anyway, one where a thousand people are also trying to solve it? Then you need all the outcome variance you can get! If, of those thousand hackers, 500 are using a very conservative approach that is guaranteed to solve the problem with some quality metric 10 ±1 in 26 weeks ±2 weeks (these being the standard deviations, not some kind of 95% confidence interval), while the other 500 are using all kinds of wild approaches that give them quality metric exp(ln(4)±ln(4)) in time exp(ln(52)±ln(4)) weeks, it's pretty much guaranteed that the "winner" is going to be someone with a totally insane approach that hacked together a library with quality 49 in only 14 weeks. It's not going to be one of the 26-week plodders, because 14 weeks is 12 standard deviations out on their distribution (vs. 0.95 out on the crazy hackers' distribution), and quality 49 is 39 standard deviations out (vs. 1.3 out on the crazy hackers' distribution). In fact, it's even worthwhile to sacrifice expectation to get higher variance in these situations. If your only hope of winning is to beat everyone else in a single round, you should do whatever will increase your minuscule chance of a home run, regardless of how it affects your chances of striking out. It's still not socially optimal for people to behave this way — note that here you have 1000 hackers whose aggregate productivity is only about 20× the productivity of an average plodder — but if you've gotten suckered into competing for a mainstream niche, that's the way to play the game. All of the above is for the simplified situation where you're working on a project by yourself. In a teamwork situation, the relevant actor is your team, not you individually. Do not write your code in Clojure if the rest of the team is working in Ruby. Do not try to solve only problems that nobody else on the team thinks are important. And this advice definitely does not apply to a situation where doing the same thing someone else already did is valuable. If you're making a sandwich, there's no reason it needs to be different from the sandwich someone else is making across the street. They're two different sandwiches. If someone eats the sandwich across the street, it's gone and it can't feed your customer. They're going to be happy if you make them a sandwich they like, even if it's a little worse than the sandwich across the stret; even if there are many just like it, this sandwich is theirs. This is very different from the situation in software, where one sandwich feeds everybody in the world at once, except people with celiac disease. Nobody is going to be happy that you wrote a web browser from scratch for them instead of just installing Firefox. † I recognize that a painting is not "solving" a "problem", but many of the same principles apply.
• nkozyra 7y ago
  Or, more tersely: We're not all brilliant enough to disregard others, but we all still inherently wish to disregard others.
• asdfman123 7y ago
  I think the advice here is "get as good as you can, get as smart as you can, and then, when you decide to set off on embarking on a calculated risk, try to forget all the noise around you and stay the course." I feel like the problem is there's a lot of wannabes who skip the steps of actually gaining competence and then disregard the advice of others. That's not going to work. The first step is years of hard work. For instance, crank physicists who don't really understand graduate level physicists are not going to accomplish anything by disregarding the advice of others. However, if you know what you're doing, don't second guess yourself when embarking down a risky path. It's probably not as dangerous as it may seem.
• golergka 7y ago
  > increases the variance of outcomes more than the mean So, it makes sense to apply it in circumstances where worse outcomes cost you the same as just bad ones, but best outcomes bring in much more than ordinary good ones.
• nine_k 7y ago
  An approach that increases variance + survivor bias = a number of exalted recommendations: "for that brilliant person it worked like a charm, despite everyone's doubts!" Obviously when the same approach went someone to a spectacular ruin, that someone is an obvious crackpot who insisted on a wrong thing despite everyone's opinion. It's not worth a story, so nobody mentions these losers.