18 ms·
Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)
- tjoff 5y agoLove it, but for more context, when was this? How accomplished was he at that time?
- waihtis 5y agoThere is power in the startup/business world also in doing things that aren’t immediately sensible or predictable. Read Rory Sutherland’s ”Alchemy” for learning more.
- jmfldn 5y ago"The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate." This shows the extreme importance of blue sky thinking and allowing people to follow their whims sometimes rather than not starting something unless it fits into existing research goals and funding. This breakthrough all lead from an observation that had no apparent use beyond fulfilling a whim and to have fun with it. I try to live my life by the ludic principle of 'playing'. It's honestly been the lifeblood that's fueled me, kept me sane at work and allowed me to do OK in my career. All of my best ideas at work and in things like making music came from this spirit I'm convinced.
- oytis 5y agoWell, apart from being playful you also need to be a person who can figure out the equation for water funnel effortlessly as a high school kid. The rest of us can benefit from forcing oneself to intellectual effort
- Stevvo 5y agoYou also need tenure, more than anything else.
- jmfldn 5y ago"You also need tenure, more than anything else." Sadly yes. An argument that the current uni system should be changed to make this not so.
- Broken_Hippo 5y agoThat just can't happen, though. Part of tenure is having experience and being able to draw from that. It isn't just job experience, either: Life experience counts and can give your different ways to think outside of the box. The best example I can give is art related: Documentaries and other non-art learning puts a variety of concepts and ideas in your brain, making it easier to think of creative concepts for artwork. The process takes time, though, more time than can be reasonably stuffed into getting a degree.
- jacobmischka 5y agoI read (listened to, technically) this book a few weeks ago because I've always been inspired by the idea of Feynman and didn't know much about him. Honestly, I actually like him less after having read it. As I guess I should have expected, because its subtitle is "Adventures of a Curious Character", it's unfortunately for me filled with many more random personal anecdotes, often involving naked women, prostitutes, gambling, or topless bars. There are some rather more scientific and aspirational anecdotes like the one linked here, and certainly it's beneficial to learn about a man as a whole and not deify him as a scientific god. However I cracked it open hoping to read about nothing but neat ideas he had and what drove him, not read about some rather shameless guy's strange happenings. I guess I wouldn't say I recommend against reading it, but I wouldn't get your hopes up before doing so like I did.
- P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul 5y agoI like him more after reading it. All the stories had neat ideas, demonstrated his personality and showed what drove him. Of course it wasn't laid out directly in a boring technical book that no one is going to read. Also, what's up with people ignoring the fine line between crazy and genius, and thinking all these genius are supposed to be completely normal people?
- ip26 5y agoI don’t think people expect them to be normal. But we hold these people up as our heroes. People aspire to be more like their heroes. So it comes as a shock when they learn their hero was a notorious philanderer, or terrible father, or chronically depressed, or self-aggrandizing. Personally, I’m unsettled by how often the kids of our heroes seem to wind up unsuccessful, unhappy and poorly adjusted. I’ve kind of lost interest in the unstable genius. I want to learn about the also-rans who made quiet but notable contributions while remaining happy & raising equally happy kids.
- hungryforcodes 5y agoYou definitely inspired me to read it now. The clockwork of Feynman's human and non geeky character is one of the most interesting things about him.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bvsrinivasan 5y agoThe meta-principle is that in complex domains there is no straight line, well worn, "plannable" path to greatness. Kenneth Stanley calls it "The Myth of the objective" and has spent the last several years trying to formalize this idea (within AI as well) and get it more traction. Book -- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25670869-why-greatness-cannot-be-planned https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25670869-why-greatness-c... Talk -- https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI
- slx26 5y agoVery interesting talk, thanks for sharing, it really adds some weight to the intuitive idea showcased in Feynman's note.
- paulz_ 5y agoJust finished the talk. Plan on reading the book. This is one of the most interesting concepts I've come across in recent memory. Really appreciate you sharing.
- humanistbot 5y agoReminds me of Suchman's "Plans and Situated Actions" --- an anthropological study of plans and planning, which also has a lot of implications for AI. Resonances to that famous Eisenhower quote "Plans are nothing, planning is everything" https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/342380.Plans_and_Situated_Actions https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/342380.Plans_and_Situate...
- ddoubleU 5y agoWoah, thanks for sharing this. I can see a connection with the way Feyman stopped trying to go for his objective yet he still achieved it
- bvsrinivasan 5y agoIn all probability, Youtube's algorithm will already suggest this to anyone who watches the talk, but there is a (very) long, ML Street Talk interview on this idea here https://youtu.be/lhYGXYeMq_E https://youtu.be/lhYGXYeMq_E Stanley addresses some strong and subtle criticisms here but I actually preferred the book the most. The book is a bit repetitive but has some very good ideas in the appendix.
- hungryforcodes 5y agoA couple of comments here focus on the ability to play -- which is important -- and on blue sky thinking, etc. All very important, true! But what really strikes me is how this situation Feynman was in is a perfect example of Deep Work. He could expore whatever his mind needed to explore, and do it for as long and in whatever way he needed. I'm pretty sure this is an often overlooked success factor for his Nobel win.
- thisismyswamp 5y agoWhy try to fit this story into some arbitrary modern concept that was invented in order to sell books?
- jmfldn 5y agoVery true. I guess in my original comment I meant to imply this in talking about blue sky thinking and following through on it. For me this is work which is original, out of leftfield, probably intrinsically motivated and which you have the time to follow through on deeply for a sustained period of time. I definitely agree on this being a factor in his, and likely several other, Nobel wins
- shinsheel 5y agoActually Feynman did an opposite of Deep Work for that case, he literally worked in strip-club on purpose. By today standard it's like working with reddit open, gamepad on your lap and pornhub on second laptop. If I had to make a fancy explanation I'd say "turn your work to a lifestyle so you naturally do it while entertaining".
- egberts1 5y agoApplying a real world observation toward something not related is called cross-domain technological transfer. I did the same with fishing at a lazy brook in 1983. I observed how the river get all bendy shape of the letter “S”, how the banks are shallow on inside curves, recalled a geostat photos over decades and finally noticed how these increasingly curvy S finally touch the other curve to a point of making a new waterway path, leaving behind a stagnant bend to dry up. Network modeling, and the many architectural variants of TCP flows came soon afterward, notably delay-tolerant TCP variant called Space Communication Protocol Specification (SCPS). TCP-SACK was instrumental precursor toward its delay-tolerant design.
- bradrn 5y ago> When I was in high school, I'd see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. Out of curiosity, does anyone know the solution to this problem? I wouldn’t even know how to approach it. (I’m an undergraduate physics major; I know nothing about fluid dynamics, but from Feynmann’s description I suspect that isn’t necessary…)
- Anon84 5y agoIt’s not. It’s just conservation of volume. Imagine a thing disk of water just as it comes out of the faucet (pi r^2 v*dt) as it falls, the speed increases so the same volume of what is now thinner and longer (r decreases to account for the increase in v).
- fastasucan 5y ago*volumetric flow
- robochat 5y agoI think that you mean pi.r*2.v.dt ?
- phonon 5y agoThe water is accelerating downward due to gravity...but the amount/s flowing out of the faucet is equal to the amount/s any distance below it...so the stream has to get thinner as it gets "faster".
- knolan 5y ago
- ArcMex 5y agoTo an extent, this is my attitude towards programming. At the very base, my motivation is genuine interest in the project and tinkering with it. Even when I build useful apps, straying has done more good than harm. By doing this for no reason at than fun curiosity, I've broken builds... But more importantly learned how to fix and document those scenarios.
- chris_j 5y agoThis is one of my favourite anecdotes from that book. In recent decades, we've learned how important intrinsic motivation is, and this is a great example of it. My father was a massive fan of Richard Feynman and also happened to be extremely cynical about formal education. He believed that if you wanted to learn something, you had to take the initiative and learn it for yourself, rather than waiting for the education system to suck the enthusiasm for the subject out of you. It was only after Dad died that I picked up his copy of Surely You're Joking Feynman and learned where he got a lot of his ideas from.
- _ph_ 5y agoI think you need both. Formal education is great for "basic skills". Most people won't invent calculus on their own. Most of us learn reading and writing in a formal way. But equally, formal education is only half of what is needed to be good in a field of work. Then there comes the experimentation, the practise. All the knowledge that can't really be taught by a book. Sometimes a good teacher or mentor can help on that side, but real excellence comes through your own tinkering. The anecdote of Feynman shows this actually well. He gained a lot of knowledge and inspiration for other problems solutions by working out the motion of the plate. But he did so by using the calculus and tools of theoretical mechanics. Those were what enabled him to do the theoretical description which then yielded the insights.
- chris_j 5y agoWise words. I'm sure most of us would never have learned all the of the basics of mathematics on our own. Though I do remember Feynman claiming in the book that he'd come up with certain trigonometric concepts on his own and then had to un-learn the names that he'd created for them and learn to call them sin, cos etc. That was pretty mind-blowing. I suppose the question for me is: how do you find the right balance between formal learning and the self-directed learning, experimentation and practice?
- Tyr42 5y agoI think he was fed up with the notations, and made his own, rather than coming up with trig from scratch.
- shannifin 5y agoLove that sort of infectious enthusiasm. I guess the question for me is how to balance that sort of explorational play with actually trying to accomplish something, like starting a start-up. The lure of playing with something constantly challenges the need to focus on finishing something that in the moment seems less interesting.
- Netcob 5y agoGoal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automatically deploy containers and so on. Big mistake. I don't want to spend my leisure time fighting with tools, debugging build processes that break all the time, make sense of docker's tagging system and so on. I don't mind programming all day, because I love programming, but I do mind working all day. So I let it go. I'll come up with my own tools. They won't be great, but I'll have fun making them. And then it'll feel nice using them. And then I'll work on whatever excites me. Once in a while someone will ask me "how do you know all these things?" and my answer has always been "I don't know that much, I just randomly got interested in this particular topic and decided to play around with it". Over the years/decades, that adds up!
- teraku 5y agoYour cognitive workload is too high. There are three forms of cognitive workload: Intrinsic, External and Germane. Intrinsic is things you just *know*. How to write a class in java, how to write a query in SQL, ... External is stuff you only need occasionally, and need to look up every time: How to deploy to X, how to set up CI/CD, ... Germane is context knowledge. Usually referred to as business knowledge. You want to keep external cognitive load a minimal as possible. You can really dig deployment and stuff, and then this becomes your intrinsic cognitive workload and coding becomes more or less external, but for somebody who just likes to code, it's best to once do a deep dive to deployment logics, write a scaffold and stick with an automated version forever.
- justinclift 5y ago> it's best to ... What are you basing this opinion on? :) --- As an aside, the blog in your profile link ( https://teraku.me https://teraku.me) has an invalid HTTPS cert. Seems to be for a different domain.
- alskdj21 5y agoIntrinsic motivation does lead you to better places. Programming was such a breeze before, I enjoyed it. But now, as I start to build a portfolio, anxiety creeps up. "Should it be like this or this? Man, this doesn't feel right." I admit my way of thinking is flawed, which I'm also working on. But it really is different when your goal is to enjoy the process than to please prospective employers.
- baremetal 5y agoJust chunk it out. Review and reflect. And then iterate. Doesn't have to be perfect the first time.
- jll29 5y agoInteresting how Feynman can be inspiring people long after his death. He sounds as if he likes to talk about himself rather too much, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a fair amount of exaggeration in his prose. That said, if I made a list of dead people I'd like to spend a day with if I could, he'd sure be on it (as an aside, who [else] would you add to such a list?). And he could be serious, too: despite being an outspoken atheist, he deeply loved his wife to the extent that he wrote a letter to her after she had passed away.
- ibrahimsow1 5y agoViktor E Frankl
- majewsky 5y ago> despite being an outspoken atheist, he deeply loved his wife to the extent that he wrote a letter to her after she had passed away. I honestly don't see how the first part of the sentence factors into the second part.
- agumonkey 5y agoShannon also had a peculiar way of working, very scattered, I think he prioritized bursts of inspiration above everything.
- 55555 5y ago> I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate - two to one [Note: Feynman mis-remembers here---the factor of 2 is the other way]. To me it's even more inspirational that Feynman misremembered basic things about physics he understood better than almost anyone. He achieved so much, and yet fundamentally was human and imperfect. Any curious smart mind can achieve something great.
- bloopy123 5y agoThis is a good example of how you can escape from procrastination too. And I think also a reason why so many side projects go unfinished. It’s also an interesting phenomenon i realized whereby when you are working full time you long for time to work full time on a clever idea you have. But when you have time to work on this idea full time you don’t want to do it. But then the feeling returns when you again don’t have time to work on it. I realized that working on something for fun can help you segue back into what you should be working on. But it seems it only works as long as you don’t have grand plans for it becoming a business or a great industry-changing discovery. You must maintain that it’s only for fun. To see what can be done. I like the word “play” vs “work on”.
- Trex_Egg 5y ago>> It’s also an interesting phenomenon i realized whereby when you are working full time you long for time to work full time on a clever idea you have. But when you have time to work on this idea full time you don’t want to do it. But then the feeling returns when you again don’t have time to work on it. --I totally get this feel(of procrastination on things) in all of my endeavors. I will try to work only for fun to get on with it. Is there any element that might sustain fun for the very end or any other secret sauce to it?
- morelandjs 5y agoJust a shoutout to Greg Kilcup whose page this is posted on, and who’s another incredible physicist and fascinating personality.
- noisy_boy 5y agoMost of the stuff I have learned well were a combination of them fitting into the need for automation and sufficient time/lack of pressure/deadlines. I personally find deadlines suffocating but sadly that is how most things are.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- decasteve 5y ago> And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was ``playing'' - working, really - with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things. Given the circumstances of the time, post-war, and his circumstances, the loss of his wife and stress of the Manhattan project, I might argue a guess that he was grieving. So it's not just that he found playfulness with physics, it's that he was ready to find it. What I'm trying to say is don't force it if you're grieving or suffering from some traumatic event. Feynman could play with physics again because he was ready to do so.
- shoto_io 5y ago> Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. When I was at uni other grad students often referred to us studying physics as “Spielkinder”, play children. No one could say to what end they really wanted to study physics for. Mostly it was just fun understanding how things worked. It was a lot of fun. The downside of this was that when I was finished I really didn’t know a lot about the real world.
- Dumblydorr 5y agoI love those moments when you're warming up, getting into the work, you may hit that first snag or obstacle, but you reflexively enter play mode. Now you're practicing creatively, now you're finding out new features of your tools and packages and data. You're hacking in a new script, you're trying new ideas. You find the answer,bring it back in, integrate it. You click run, and it just works!! Yess!!
- dqpb 5y agoI think this roughly boils down to information theory and the exploration / exploitation tradeoff. Play is fun because it’s information-rich. It’s personally rewarding because exploration opens new doors. Exploitation is boring because it mostly discovers nothing new. It’s information-poor, and its reward is mostly fixed, and doesn’t open any new doors.
- cannabis_sam 5y agoYou get a couple of lines in, and it’s painfully familiar, since it’s sadly so incredibly similar to my waning love of programming... It’s wildly destructive for society to have these completely devoid of ethics, fascist-style assholes with capital/power, that can dictate what what more useful people than can spend their time thinking about, yet no-one even thinks it’s a problem. Although to be fair it’s just a sub-problem of how humanity has forced itself into self-destructive patterns, by ignoring reality and following fanatical ideologies about “unrestricted capitalism” and “the free market” as if that is some sort of divine power... Imagine spending your short life developing ads for Google or Facebook. It would have been objective better for all of humanity if all these naive assholes people had become alcoholic bums living on the street... that would at least have curbed their ability to fuck with the rest of humanity.
- iamgopal 5y agoSo the solution is ... ?
- cannabis_sam 5y agoPrimarily to redistribute capital from clueless geriatrics that can’t separate Ivanhoe from an iPhone... The bigger problem is of course how we as a society legitimizes destroying young people’s future, just to fund exorbitant pensions for clueless old people who still think 1968 was a “leftist” moment, instead of actually being the starting point of the fanatically far-right fantasy world we live in today. (The next step is of course to dismantle this fantasy world) (Edit: tldr: let’s stop letting pension funds kill children, okay..?)
- LordHumungous 5y agoA while back I realized that I don't care about my career anymore: Promotions, politics, etc. I'm just going to work on what I enjoy. So far I'm a lot happier this way.
- tryauuum 5y agoSo what do you do for a living nowadays?
- LordHumungous 5y agoSoftware development
- debrice 5y agoYou’ve got one and only life, do what you love. Life has a fun way to reward the bolds
- bradmcgo 5y agoCouldn’t agree more. It can be scary at times, but at least you’ll feel intrinsically at ease.
- kjrose 5y agoI love reading this when I was in university. I remember thinking to myself, may I be burned out enough one day that I can play with Mathematics and not have to worry about how to pay rent or support my family.
- ibic 5y agoThe last sentence "There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate." reminds me of Steve Jobs' speech at Stanford - "Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later."
- oceliker 5y agoThis is very nice, but I'm more curious about why there is a "repostindays=413" parameter in the URL :)
- zackbloom 5y agoI wish that in each generation we got to choose 100 people to keep alive just a bit longer. Feynman would be on my list.
- paulpauper 5y agoThis guy was so smart he could observe a physical phenomena and then quickly derive the equation that underlies is. damn
- hprotagonist 5y agoIf you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it. -- Attributed to J. J. Thompson by Lord Rayleigh, c. 1940
- Zelphyr 5y agoI've been thinking about this a lot since I first heard this story about Feynman. I've been in this industry now for 25 years and there have been three times when I wanted to quit. During the first two, in the back of my mind I still knew I wasn't going to and shouldn't. I'm working in an industry doing what I wanted to do since I was ten years old. The third came this time last year. I had lost a parent (not to due to COVID), my business had failed (also not due to COVID), and then COVID hit so my prospects seemed low for employment. I found a contract with someone who turned out to be easily one of the most unethical people I had ever worked with. Little of this had to do with technology but, compounded, I found myself in such a deep state of burnout that the thought of picking up my computer made me sick. I genuinely didn't want to work in technology anymore once that contract had ended. I was trying to decide whether I wanted to go back to school for something else or try to get on at Costco. The problem with going back to school is, I couldn't really pinpoint anything I wanted to study so I had all but made my mind up that when things opened back up I was going to put my application in at Costco. Hard work for lower pay but I have more respect for Costco than I do for a lot of companies in my industry. At least Costco solves a real problem and is beloved by their customers. They're not pretending to be innocent to fomenting sedition while making a buck off of abusing peoples privacy. Fast-forward to around December and I had found employment back in tech. This company provides a quality service that directly benefits real people. I had quite earnestly tried to avoid it, though. It will go down as the oddest interview I've ever had because I was basically trying to talk them out of hiring me but to their great credit, they did anyway. Due to the nature of the job, I have a lot of leeway in deciding how to solve problems since I'm responsible for all of the code. I needed a simple log server for the various scripts that were running. I looked at all the Open Source options and found they offered way more than I needed so I decided to write my own. Almost all of the code I work with is PHP so I started writing it in that. One Friday night after work I thought, "Hm, I wonder how hard it would be to port this to Clojure?" I had a little experience with Clojure from a contract I worked on a year prior while trying to bring some much needed cash into my business at the time. I could see the power and beauty in it but, still, coming from languages that descended from C, the syntax was foreign enough that it was tough going at first. I suspect that contract ended because they didn't think I was picking it up fast enough for their needs. I don't blame them. Anyway, I found that I had actually picked up enough Clojure during that contract that my fingers started flying across the keyboard porting my log server. It was... so - much - fun! I was playing with programming again! I was exploring and learning and, importantly, being productive and solving a real problem. Now, let's not kid ourselves, this log server isn't some sexy blockchain-containerized-whatever. It isn't a product that is ever going to be sold for millions of dollars. It isn't going to change the world or disrupt any industries. It is very simple and pretty much only helps me and one other person at the company. You know what? That's really great to me. I've learned a lot over the years about burnout but they were really reinforced in a big way last year. It's important to step away from the computer and you need to do so frequently. We get weekends and vacations for a reason. Use them! Get outside when you can. Get some exercise in whatever ways you enjoy most. Eat good, healthy food with people you enjoy being around. (social distancing notwithstanding) Have a hobby that is not related to your job. I love technology and playing with it can be fun like a hobby but the fact is that it's not because my livelihood depends on it. So far, 4-5 months later, that log server written in Clojure is still cranking away dutifully. I get a little smile each day when I check the latest logs to see if anything needs my attention.
- deepzn 5y agoone in a quadrillion, but really he's in every one of us. We just need to learn to let that inner child come out.
- mrobot 5y agoI found an article which points out some negative things Feynman's did that i was not aware of. It is an interesting take by a woman who was essentially driven away from her natural direction in science by bad behavior of men in academia, and i sympathize with it. I really liked the original article posted here, though, and respect the way Feynman looked at the world. https://caltechletters.org/viewpoints/feynman-harassment-science https://caltechletters.org/viewpoints/feynman-harassment-sci...
- zeeshanqureshi 5y ago"Blocked by Intention" is what the mystics (eastern, sufi, hindu etc.) call this. John Cleese's book[1] and lecture[2] on creativity also have some thoughts on this. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50719532-creativity https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50719532-creativity [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
- juancn 5y agoI makes me think about how I approach really difficult problems. I use a strategy that I call: "obsess and let go" that has worked wonders for me. Essentially it has two parts: - obsession: look at the problem intently, poke it, prod it, think about experiments, talk to other people until you're completely blocked and making absolutely no progress. - letting go: forget about it, go do something else, exercise, take a vacation, paint, attack a different problem, go to a bar, whatever makes you let go (truly let go). Eventually, as if by magic, at some unknowable time later (could be days or years), while doing something else the beginning of solution pops into consciousness, like a thread that needs to be pulled and as if by magic the whole problem untangles. I have no clue why this works (I assume the subconscious part of the brain never really lets go after a good obsessive phase), but it does work more often than not. The hard part is dealing with outside expectations.
- robocat 5y agoSimilar to “You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large, they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your 12 problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit and people will say “How did he do it. He must be a genius.” - Richard Feynman
- SavantIdiot 5y agoThis reminds me of my first year out of college in 198x at my first job when I really really enjoyed learning and playing and growing. Fast forward 20 years into my career I was burned out and forced higher and higher up, to the point where every misunderstanding or new idea was a chance for me to stumble and be overcome by interdepartmental competition. Constant joy turned into constant fear in just two decades.
- tdhz77 5y agoNot all passions, pursuits and energy return Nobel Prizes. Something to be mindful of when reading too far into this. Still, I learn things that are interesting to me and sometimes I get lucky and people want to pay me and other times a new technology comes out and I wasted a few good years. Since I’m making my decisions on what to learn, it doesn’t seem like wasted time, but rather a shit ton of fun.
- dang 5y agoSome past threads: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10585890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10585890 - Nov 2015 (22 comments) Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874875 - April 2012 (66 comments) Feynman's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291773 - March 2011 (22 comments)
- kkylin 5y agoFor anyone interested: the physical phenomenon is spin-orbit coupling. Here's a somewhat technical discussion of the classical version: https://mitpress-request.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/sicm/book-Z-H-31.html#%_sec_2.11 https://mitpress-request.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/... and the quantum analog: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin%E2%80%93orbit_interaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin%E2%80%93orbit_interaction
- throwaway823882 5y agoMy favorite problems to solve are the ones I don't need to.