7 ms·
The Top Idea in Your Mind (2010)
- 0xCMP 7y agoThere’s an https error. Here is the archive https://archive.is/NgXhA https://archive.is/NgXhA
- coder1001 7y ago"I've found there are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding... One I've already mentioned: thoughts about money. The other is disputes. So avoid disputes if you want to get real work done."
- baxtr 7y ago“[3] Corollary: Avoid becoming an administrator, or your job will consist of dealing with money and disputes.“
- nickthemagicman 7y agoIs that why lawyers do so well? They just get paid to handle this stuff?
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- gridspy 7y agoI'm really suffering from Covid on the brain lately. I have had to just stop reading about global news beyond a skim. Stay safe out there!
- fierarul 7y agoJust do what everybody else does: try to make Covid charts, or Python models or whatever. Seems to me half the people I follow are somehow coding something related to Covid. I'm updating http://covid.410go.net/ http://covid.410go.net/ mostly for myself because I want to track the current dimension of Covid (ie. infectious people, not total cases) and at least it's been an interesting exercise in dealing with the somewhat messy data Johns Hopkins kindly provides.
- gumby 7y agoThe phrase is "top of mind"
- harish_yadav 7y agoThis where I would like people to consider the Psychological concepts of Focussed Mind and Diffused mode of thinking. Barbara Oakley's course on Coursera named, "Learning how to learn" talks a lot about it. It is an interesting read and would totally recommend it. So a parallel to the Top Idea in your mind would be a diffused mode of thinking stuck on a single problem. The course touches a lot on this.
- ege_erdogan 7y agoAn addition to money and disputes could be 'things beyond your control.' If something is bothering your mind, yet there is nothing nothing you can, or will be able to, do about it, then there is no reason to bother with it.
- knzhou 7y agoThis essay really gets better with age. When I first read it I was a kid who thought the advice was pointless -- I already spent all my time thinking about physics problems, what else was there to do? But focus on the good stuff got harder with age.
- baxtr 7y agoAbsolutely. For me it’s because of two reasons. When you’re young, you feel like you have unlimited time. When you’re old you know that's not so true anymore. Also, when you’re young you have much more time at your disposal. The older you get, the more your job and your family will take a toll on your time, until you realize one day that the only time you have for yourself is when you take a shower.
- iamwil 7y agosometimes not even.
- bonjourmr 7y agoNo https PG?
- presiozo 7y agoIt would appear that this applies to politicians pretty much all the time.
- martijn_himself 7y agoPG's best writings are the ones where he writes about what he knows. He obviously knows a lot about ideas, how to execute on them, raising money, disputes that come with it. This is a very good example. It's when he writes about things he doesn't know much about that his essays become incoherent and confused.
- downshun 7y agoI fail to understand how your comment is substantive
- capableweb 7y agoI don't think this is specific to PG, it's accurate for any article you read where you have more knowledge about the subject than the author. PGs knowledge about ideas is so high, that probably just a few people look at it as confused, while other articles have a lower limit for when people thinks it's confusing.
- amelius 7y agoThat's not why. From now on PG should only write about things he thought about in the shower.
- 7y ago
- zuhayeer 7y ago"Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else" Uncanny how much this happens, I'll be playing Smash or eating cereal when I have sudden moments of clarity on problems I've been at for days
- amelius 7y agoYes it makes me wonder if there's another consciousness in my brain, with its own thoughts and feelings.
- Infinitesimus 7y agoThe most compelling reasons I've seen all come back to the Default Mode Network ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network ). I'm no neuroscientist but I think there's a lot to uncover about how that influences our creativity and maybe that can influence how we design intelligent systems down the line.
- yati 7y agoSee the talk "Hammock driven development" by Rich Hickey on the topic: https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc
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- TuringTest 7y agoThere's a problem in classic combinatoric artificial intelligence, where an automated reasoning program (such as the General Problem Solver)[1] gets easily lost among the huge volume of all possible logical paths. To avoid that pitfall and reach some conclusions, the programmer needs to provide some guiding heuristic that limits the problem subspace where solutions are being searched. But if the provided heuristic is the wrong one, the logic-based solver will still get lost. I make no claim that the rational brain works in any way similar to an automated solver, but I find it plausible that, when you withdraw your conscious attention, the brain keeps working on the problem using multiple parallel, non-inference-based brain processes that continue to do pattern matching on the problem, without being limited to intermediate consistent steps. Such non-focused strategy could very well expand the search space considered, and find potential solution matches that weren't near the focus of the previous conscious thinking. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Problem_Solver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Problem_Solver
- bassdigit 7y ago"So avoid disputes if you want to get real work done." There is an exception: When a dispute forces you to view a topic from a different angle, like in rubber duck debugging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
- hypertexthero 7y agoThis is one reason why we need a universal basic income for all human beings. See also: https://www.economicsecurityproject.org/guaranteedincome/ https://www.economicsecurityproject.org/guaranteedincome/
- monkin 7y agoI like PG for his personal brand building skills he is like Trump[1], but on smaller scale. He can write about anything, and people will call it gold which opens up gigantic possibilities. It's true master level, not like junior PR copycats from Medium trying to make noise with rewritten articles. [1] Yes, Trump! You can dislike him as much as you want, but his personal brand building is also on master level.
- tabtab 7y agoPG doesn't brag incessantly. Both produce a large stream of consciousness that may have nice tidbits and sayings. But the real test is to see if such ideas can be turned into a consistent algorithm or formulas that one can test via historical scenarios or in practice. Just because you have a cool-sounding idea doesn't mean it will usually fly in practice. T has made some interesting claims about success in business, but they conflict with works such as Dale Carnegie's classic HTWFAIP, which better matches life as I have observed it. But some trolls and demagogues do gain success as counted in money and power. There is more to one strategy in life, but HTWFAIP is probably easier for the average person to use effectively. Plus, trolls and demagogues tend to generate new regulations that prevent later T&D's from pulling the same tricks. There's kind of a first-mover-advantage to jerk-hood, like people selling Purell at huge markups.