10 ms·
Einstein went to his office just so he could walk home with Gödel
- 082349872349872 2y agoin the best tradition of "peripatetic scholarship"?
- resource_waste 2y agoConfidants, peer, another smart person. I might have 100 friends, but only ~10 people can change my thoughts and only on specific subjects. As I get older, the more those 100 friends are for enjoyment and happiness. Those 10 people are for growth. I think in my 20s, I took a bit more of a democratic approach. One of the best parts about money, I can pay smart people for consulting.
- bowsamic 2y agoCan you be one of the 10 who change my thoughts regarding your bio: “You can trust FOSS”. Why can I? EDIT: /u/dang banned me for this
- talldayo 2y agoBecause FOSS has readable code, companies don't.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago(a) You've misunderstood. It isn't "10 people ever": it's "10 people often". Unless you're requesting an ongoing relationship, the answer is "no". (b) What is trust? Examine the nature of trust, and you will see why "you can trust FOSS" is a truer statement than "you can trust Microsoft software". (Neither are true, in my opinion, but I have a higher standard for "trust".)
- dumbo-octopus 2y agoI happen to trust Microsoft software more than FOSS en-masse. I think Microsoft FOSS software is more trustworthy than either, for instance I have high confidence in VS Code as an editor. It helps that I've read through most of it's code and authored a good chunk of it as well.
- resource_waste 2y agoSeriously: lol Anyway, live a bit longer. I used to be a Microsoft fan too.
- dumbo-octopus 2y ago? You haven’t made any claims or presented any evidence. I don’t even really know what your position is, besides “I’m old and jaded”.
- boomskats 2y agoGratuitously off topic.
- bowsamic 2y agoThis is on topic
- dwaltrip 2y agoHey, I’m only saying this on the off chance that it is helpful. I’m not sure if you are aware, but your question comes off as a little aggressive. Partly because it’s such a diversion from the topic on hand. In my experience, such diversions are often made by people with more passionate or militantly-held opinions. Whenever I catch myself “needing” someome to change their view, I know I’ve gotten off track and should gently tend to whatever is going on under the hood. I don’t really want my well-being or peace of mind to depend on the miscellaneous viewpoints of others.
- fragmede 2y agoWhat sort of consulting and where do you find them?
- wslh 2y agoThat is a search problem. Finding people for consulting is not easy if it is about issues where only a few could know about and they can be living in a very distant place. For example, an unknown university in a country you never though about. Wise people recognize that the concept of smart is easy when you play in a competitive field like chess but the problem is when there is no specific field to benchmark. Could you recognize Steve Jobs capacity if it not were by Apple?
- yzydserd 2y agoWhy can only 10 people change some of your thoughts? I probably only have about 10 friends, but I’m open to any of many billions of people changing my thoughts in profound ways after even fleeting moments. It’s not just an openness but lived experience. (I’m not young).
- resource_waste 2y agoThose are more like lottery of ideas. These 10 people, I don't need to scrutinize as much. There is already enough common understanding, you don't need to filter as much.
- optimalsolver 2y agoSorry you invested in commercial real estate, but I'm not going back to the office.
- tpurves 2y agoOffices that are walking distance are a whole other story.
- leftcenterright 2y agothis is not so uncommon in West Europe. I have lived and worked in Belgium and had my workplace at walking distance from my apartment.
- ghotli 2y agoI agree. I'm not required at the office ever but it's two blocks away on foot. I utilize it, but sometimes when I want to stay in the zone (or just feel like it ngl) I just work from home all week. It's the only situation wherein I'd utilize an in-person office and I feel fortunate to have it.
- erik_seaberg 2y agoBuying a house in walking distance isn't crazy when you get a private office with a door, and can expect to keep it for life. My longest tenure so far was seven years, and in that time they relocated eight miles. Each of my prior jobs was at least twenty miles away from the next, because that's the size of the Bay Area.
- drozycki 2y agoAnd what is a walk? Gödel lives an hour north and Einstein needs to pick up the kids from school. Traffic is pretty bad, no time to talk.
- wussboy 2y agoBut car dependency is definitely not the root cause…
- PartiallyTyped 2y agoOne of my fondest memories is the moment I realized that I was walking and sitting in the same parks and benches that Heisenberg and Bohr did while they uncovered the secrets of the really small. Being in such an environment is ... quite special, it's different to the outside world. It doesn't quite match the experience those two had talking with each other, but it was quite the experience.
- rvense 2y agoThere's a story that when Bohr came to pick up Einstein at Copenhagen Central station, they took the tram (line 1) to Bohr's institute in Østerbro, but they became so engrossed in their conversation that they went all the way to the end in Hellerup and back again. Line 1 was later replaced by a bus, and until the metro opened a few years ago (when most of the busses were changed), you could still go the same route from the central station to the Niels Bohr institute. Or Hellerup, if you had someone interesting to talk to.
- wrp 2y agoSo, they walked to campus together, spent about two hours there, then walked home together. It sounds more like just sharing a long daily walk with a stopover at the office.
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- eterevsky 2y agoAround that time Oppenheimer became the director of the Institute of Advanced Studies where this took place. His idea was to invite there various talented people, giving them grants to work on whatever they wish. Most of them were in science, but he also managed to get T. S. Eliot.
- OldGuyInTheClub 2y agoThat was the idea behind the IAS even before Oppenheimer's directorship.
- anjel 2y agoAll of it thanks to the Heir-less Mr and Mrs Bamberger of Department store fame and fortune...
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- from-nibly 2y agoForget the 4 day work week. When can we have the 10 hour work week.
- jeremyt 2y agoAnytime you want. You just have to live modestly.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- darth_avocado 2y ago10 hour work weeks are 520 work hours in a year. Even if you get paid $100 per hour, you’d have to heavily rely on govt benefits to support your family. (Avg. non subsidized health insurance costs for a family of 4 are $24000/year)
- stocknoob 2y agoOr, save and live off investments: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/ https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
- phreack 2y agoBut then it's not "anytime you want"
- mulderc 2y agoWho said anything about supporting a family?
- brevhtff 2y agoExactly. It’s a choice. I had a family instead, but anyone can do it.
- 120bits 2y agoDuring my early days in my tech career. I joined a small tech firm that did linux kernel programming and embedded stuff. It was my first job out of college and I was really excited. My mentor was a 50+ guy whom I walked everyday from work to back my home. It didn't started out like that, we would leave work around different times and one day it was raining, so we waited and then it became sort of habit. I learned so much about programming and life in general. Made me a better programmer for sure. I'm always grateful!
- influx 2y agoWhat would be the top 1 or two you could share?
- pineaux 2y agoThese kind of things aren't really summarizable into a quick bite is my experience. It's because of the subtle nuances, the way an experienced person approaches a problem.
- CodeCompost 2y agoThings like this is the reason I don't work from home. Those little moments of contact.
- Rinzler89 2y agoThat's more like good mentoring, which doesn't always depend on being in the office, it can work remote as well if the mentors are good at it and want to do it. A year ago I left a shitty toxic office job where there was no such thing as mentoring either way, least of all remote. Feels like quality mentoring is a lost art these days, especially amongst the SW industry of today of younger generation of workers and companies, where the average life of a piece of code is measured in months, and tenure in the company is around 2-3 years, nobody bothered with training since the code would be obsolete, you'd be gone soon anyway or they'd loose the only guy who still loved teaching others. Everything now is "just look it up on the (outdated) Wiki or figure it out on your own".
- WalterBright 2y agoI'd go to the office just to walk home with Einstein!
- OldGuyInTheClub 2y agoSo would I but would he come to the office to talk to me?
- ocschwar 2y agoI had something like that going with Gian Carlo Rota at Los Alamos for a while. His afternoon walk always involved the Subway and the Baskin Robbins.
- pcthrowaway 2y agoThis RTO propaganda is really getting out of hand.
- calf 2y agoArticle adds that they walked to office at 10-11, walked home FROM office at 1-2 (so they spent at most 3 hours at the institute) and in effect this took up 30% of Einstein's workday. If anything, it's subtle "do what you love" propaganda.
- Rinzler89 2y ago99% of working population doesn't have Albert Einstein's brilliance in order to provide the same kind of value with 3h of "office work" per day. Plus I think Albert Einstein and other scientists like him were constantly working in their heads anyway, constantly thinking about how to solve that problem, regardless of how much time they spent in an office. So trying to deduct some kind of productivity metric between his office time and results would be pointless (it's pointless for most knowledge jobs, but especially for his.)
- pvaldes 2y agoCounting the number of hours in science does not really matter. This work is full of incredibly productive eureka minutes in the middle of unlucky boring days or weeks of stunted progress. Scientists don't stop thinking on the problems when they go home. Some significant advances happened even by scientists while dreaming. In some cases sleeping time definitely should count as hours on office, having in mind the results. If we could remove the bureaucracy load from them, scientists could work even less hours without losing productivity or even increasing it (See: Stephen Hawking).
- calf 2y agoI initially lived for 2 years a mere 200 m. from Einstein's house as all Princeton PhD students are required, so I know what you're trying to convey, but the broader problem is in the interpretation of this anecdotes for nonacademic work and how it gets exploited to tell tertiary industry / knowledge workers to find what they love so that it doesn't count as labor.
- surfingdino 2y agoHis office was not a multi-storey air-conditioned open plan aquarium where 30-something idiots commuting from the leafy counties of Kent want to discuss how they got pissed last night and who feel compelled to bond with software devs by showing them the latest "take a selfie and see it mapped onto a baboon arse" app. I would love to have the opportunity to go on walks with a mentor, but the only available ones are frustrated, scared managers who think of themselves as thought leaders or aloof top managers/founders who think of themselves as geniuses when they are a) well-connected public school crowd keeping the riffraff out of their lives, b) clever, but not genius operators happy to ride their teams to the ground to cover up lack of planning. The best I could get out of them is beers on a Thursday night. Thanks.
- Rinzler89 2y agoFound the Brit.
- cangeroo 2y agoIndeed! I wonder what caused all this madness. Doesn't it degrade productivity? And thereby hurt profitability? And thereby the attractiveness of such strategies? It sometimes seem to me like profit motive has been replaced by a power motive, like money isn't real anymore, but the legitimacy of private ownership is. Basically aristocracy 2.0. I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this, and why there aren't competitive alternatives in an otherwise free market.
- surfingdino 2y agoTrust fund kids do not need to work, they just choose to do so and they like to watch lower management jump up trying to catch the carrot dangled in front of them. Aristocracy never disappeared only it took them a while to learn how to use modern inventions. Look at who's working as a "trustee" for a lot of projects and watch how everyone is trying to lick their arse in the most imaginative ways.
- udev4096 2y agoA little off-topic but there's this amazing documentary on Einstein: Genius. It has three seasons and the first one is all about Einstein. It's a really accurate description of all the important events in his professional as well as personal life
- byt3h3ad 2y agobonding over walks is actually one of the best ways of communicating your thoughts with the other person. ofc I don't have any research or anything to back it up, but whenever i hit a blocker in life, i take a walk with my bestfriend in and around the college campus. 99% of the problem is solved by the end of it. however if i do the same thing elsewhere, like our room or some place to eat, the flow of thoughts isn't that coherent or fruitful. maybe the active work of walking stimulates our brains to think out stuff properly.
- semitones 2y agoThere is science that supports the cognitive benefits of walking, that much is true
- Paul-Craft 2y agoI probably wouldn't mind spending 30% of my workday walking home with either Gödel or Einstein, even if it meant I was only getting paid 70% of my normal salary.
- Sporktacular 2y agoTwo 30 minute "walks consumed 30 percent of Einstein’s workday"? Cushy job.
- H8crilA 2y agoConsider that they were both German speaking, and Einstein had never fully switched to English. For example he would only publish his research in German.
- gtsnexp 2y agoImagine if every conversation these two had while on their back home would have been recorded and published as blog posts.
- qnleigh 2y agoIf only these conversations were recorded somewhere. They would be wonderful to read.
- KineticLensman 2y agoWhen I worked last the lunchtime walk was a daily ritual - through heathland next to the site. When I became a line manager to my peers, it was also where we had the unofficial chats - where I was ‘me’ rather than corporate. That walk is the thing I miss most about working, as a retiree
- teleforce 2y agoSuccessful people's currency is not money but networking and working with great people is one of the best part in life as the last point of Sam Altman's list is probably the most wise of advice from the list [1]. >17. Working with great people is one of the best parts of life I think this is why teleworking proponents are missing the important point. Meeting in person for example having lunch with co-workers can create eureka moment that online discussions hard or impossible to replicate. The game changing Transformer early concept was discussed and proposed in Google cafeteria. The legendary AT&T cafeteria environment as mentioned by Hamming was a prime example where many of inventors and Nobel Prizes recipients gathered, is now very difficult or nearly impossible to replicate in the industry [2]. [1] What I wish someone had told me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38728172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38728172 [2] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engineering https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...
- barfbagginus 2y agoThis article has convinced us to RTO. /s Hear me out! We will return to the office: 1) For not more than an hour a day 2) To talk to Kurt Godel, and nothing else Sadly, Kurt died some 46 years ago. Our grief cannot be approximated, even by Godel Numbers. Therefore, we will not return to the office. --------------- Ps: Assuming Bankruptcy Risk Prevents the Sale of Your Office Sell the office anyways. Write the loss off, file for bankruptcy protections if needed, and try to bounce back on good will. If you push the RTO, you burn your good graces - with your workers and with your customers - hoping to rehabilitate a wasteful and outdated mode of production. You might easily run out of good will while finding yourself nipped to death by more up to date and worker friendly organizations.