4 ms·

"There was a risk that such a single-minded pursuit of so difficult a problem could hurt her academic career, but Späth dedicated all her time to it anyway." I

"There was a risk that such a single-minded pursuit of so difficult a problem could hurt her academic career, but Späth dedicated all her time to it anyway." I feel like this sentence is in every article for a reason. Thank goodness there are such obsessive people and here's a toast to those counter-factuals that never get mentioned.

Der_Einzige 2y ago
Unfortunately the average persons hatred of autistic or nerdy people implies that many believe the world would be a better place if “obsessive types” didn’t exist. Hans Asperger could only save his Austic children from nazi death camps by convincing the nazis that they had value to produce rockets and bombs. It’s quite remarkable that the USA is so advanced given how deep and ruthless our anti-intellectualism goes.
- egoism 2y ago
  re: Your Comments of Hegel elsewhere. your name is reference to Stirner is it not? Hegel's realm of ideality is just that, a realm of ideality. Hegel's totality as well, a spiritual abstraction upon the world, but a good one to deny the Abrahamics and other mental rots of the west. The irony of totality is also, that it resolves back to the self, the process of becoming, the unique. Dialectical analysis is a never ending, self-reflected, and interpenetrated spiral toward an asymptotic singularity.... but that is exactly what being is. Some X posited/constructed condition is always appearing, but X is not only X, the synthesized revelation of these arise in a new more real truth, along with a final truth that this process leads back, to some condition is always appearing.
  - mkzetta 2y ago
    How can you claim to know where it ends? This itself sounds like mental rot.
- veidr 2y ago
  Isn't it basically the same? Nazi Germany in 1934 was relatively advanced, too. I think the difference is^W was that USA celebrated it in a Homer Simpson kind of "Ha ha! NERDS!" way, while meth-Hitler was like "let's sterilize them but try to extract math from them to... (whatever batshit goal)" Anti-intellectualism seems to be a thing when the intellectual/moderately-competent people have already brought success. (Until then it's more like anti-witchcraft, or whatever...)
- Gud 2y ago
  I don't think the average person hate autistic or nerdy people.
  - throwpoaster 2y ago
    Yes, they do. They wouldn't say it, but look at how autistic people get treated by their peers, teachers, and bosses.
    - jonnybgood 2y ago
      How do you know their peers, teachers, and bosses aren’t autistic too? Autistic people can’t be peers, teachers, and bosses? Autistic people can be assholes too. Maybe that’s what it really is: some people are just assholes.
      - yifanl 2y ago
        Extreme category error, try again.
      - throwpoaster 2y ago
        Between 2 and 5 percent of people are autistic.
  - parineum 2y ago
    They absolutely don't. The average person is probably uncomfortable around autistic people because they don't know how to deal with them and, when you see someone like that, it's usually best to avoid interacting with them. Not because autistic people are dangerous but people acting out of the ordinary sometimes are. The lumping in of nerdy with autistic is ridiculous too. The average person just doesn't care about your interests unless they are in common. Nerdy typically just means having a niche interest or hobby. Your parent reeks of a persecution complex.
    - Der_Einzige 2y ago
      It's shocking that you can just bury your head in the sand about the colloquial usage of "autist" (often happening at the same time as "Incel") replacing "retard" in the lexicon of the average zoomer. It's not a persecution complex to identify the ways that hate gets used, deployed, and repackaged for a new generation. Putting your head in the sand about stuff like this is why Trump winning the election was SO shocking to some and extremely obvious to others.
- jonahx 2y ago
  "the average persons hatred of autistic or nerdy people" This is a wildly inaccurate picture of the average person. I don't even think this is true of 10% of people.
  - lanstin 2y ago
    Probably enough for 90% of such folks to be tormented quite effectively during childhood.
    - macbem 2y ago
      Anyone who's a bit different has a high chance of having been bullied at some point. It doesn't mean that society hates this specific group of people.
    - bear141 2y ago
      This is a great point. If a small percentage of the population is openly and aggressively negative towards another part of the population, it makes sense that they would both artificially appear as if they are a larger part of the population, to each other. I think it goes both ways.
    - LPisGood 2y ago
      I _highly_ doubt 90% of nerdy people were tormented during childhood. Have you spent time in/around academia? These people are massive nerds and horrendous childhood torment is pretty rare.
      - ted_dunning 2y ago
        It was 100% in my personal experience.
        LPisGood 2y ago
        I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. I’m not even saying it doesn’t happen at all higher rate than the general population. But 90% is just too much to be feasible.
- tim333 2y ago
  US intellectualism is patchy. Sure a lot of people are not into it but on the other hand you probably have more well paid academic posts than any other country.
- manoweb 2y ago
  What are you talking about, why do you think that autistics are treated better in Europe, Africa, Asia? Also, people do not "hate" them, people in general hate everybody, don't play the victim
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  Probably the most powerful man in the world right now openly self-identifies as autistic. Obviously there are very many autistic people who get treated very badly, but I don't think it's reasonable to say that the average person "hates" autistic people.
  - harrison_clarke 2y ago
    that guy is arguably causing branding problems for less powerful autistic people
    - BobaFloutist 2y ago
      Yeah I wouldn't want to be an autistic person that doesn't suck right now. I imagine it's a lot like my experience of having ADHD and being trapped between wanting leeway and support but also wanting to be held accountable and considered capable of improving and watching the Tiktokification of my disorder force me to argue that actually people with ADHD can do things and no having it doesn't fully excuse you from ever meeting commitments or doing the fucking dishes, especially if you're rejecting all and any treatment or strategy.
- fullshark 2y ago
  If anything autistic/nerdy people are lionized these days with tons of people larping as them online, claiming they are autistic because they sometimes feel awkward at a social event.
  - annzabelle 2y ago
    I think the claim of being autistic is lionized but actually having detrimental symptoms of autism is still very stigmatized.
manoweb 2y ago
There are tens of millions of people doing a repetitive work every day, instead of being entrepreneurs. Just let them be, not everybody needs to dedicate their existence to maximizing their career opportunities, at any level.
- chowells 2y ago
  This isn't being an entrepreneur. This is solving a problem. The two almost never overlap.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    I can't tell if that's a good insult or a great insult.
- godelski 2y ago
  > Just let them be As someone who's research goes against the grain, I just request the same. I have no problem with people maintaining the course and doing the same thing. In fact /most/ people should probably be doing this. BUT the system discourages going of course, exploring "out of bounds." The requests of these people have always been "let me do my thing." Just make sure "let them be" applies in both directions
tomcam 2y ago
I worked at a pro audio company where one guy spent 5 years on a power supply. It succeeded, and I always appreciated the management for supporting him.
- lemonberry 2y ago
  Do recall the specific problem he was trying to solve? It's amazing to me how much thought and work has gone into the seemingly trivial things we encounter on a daily basis. I think of this every time I see a blue LED. Or a rice cooker!! So easy to take for granted.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    Haha the blue led story is literally people going against the grain, a great example. Worked on it after being ordered not to. The original owner of the company believed in the inventor, too, which probably helps. Is the nifty part about the rice cooker the temperature cutoff at 105C? Induction? That my cats turn on my zojirushi three times a day and open the lid and it doesn't harm it because it knows there's nothing in the pot? One of these days I need to track down who actually got the patent for using IR LED in a ring around a camera lens to see in the dark. If it was at&t I am gunna be pissed.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - tomcam 2y ago
    Decreased weight and dimensions
yujzgzc 2y ago
And you can thank this guy for the LEDs that made it possible for you to even read about it on a screen https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M
- dumpHero2 2y ago
  Love this video!
Xcelerate 2y ago
I want financial independence for the sole reason that I can work on interesting problems like this without any outside nagging or funding issues from anyone else (there might still be some judgment, but I can ignore that). Personally I think governments should fund more moonshot solo or small team efforts because high risk / high reward pays off when you reduce the variance by spreading it out over so many people. But it looks like we’re going headstrong the other direction in terms of funding in the U.S. right now, so I’m not optimistic.
- godelski 2y ago
  > I want financial independence for the sole reason that I can work on interesting problems like this without any outside nagging or funding issues from anyone else Ditto. This is literally the only desire I have to be wealthy. It is not about having nice things, a nice house, or any of that. It is about letting me do my own research.
  - jereees 2y ago
    I bet there’s a good number of us. How do we make this a reality? :)
    - drivebyhooting 2y ago
      Last decades? Work in ad tech. Now? Work on LLMs.
    - godelski 2y ago
      I bet there is too! But I think it is also hard to form this community. Given the increased friction from the general community I think it might be time to put serious effort in determining how to make this a reality. I don't have a great idea for it tbh. I'll pitch a bad one at least to put something out there. Maybe we can convince some billionaire to perform a post scarcity experiment? To buy large chunk of land, gather people who have both high passion and expertise in domains, and let them run wild. Less like Star Trek and more like Eureka[0]. I don't think it is a realistic expectation to get billionaire funding, but I think the idea of looking at something like Eureka (or this category of groups you see in many Sci-Fi stories) is worth drawing inspiration from: effectively post scarce (possible on small scale?), high levels of freedom (very doable), high levels of creativity and expressiveness (this is the experiment, to see if it is decreased/maintained/increased). [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0796264/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0796264/
godelski 2y ago
> I feel like this sentence is in every article for a reason. Breakthroughs, BY DEFINITION, come from people going against the grain. Breakthroughs are paradigm shifts. You don't shift the paradigm by following the paradigm. I think we do a lot of disservice by dismissing the role of the dark horses. They are necessary. Like you suggest, there are many that fail, probably most do. But considering the impact, even just a small percentage succeeding warrants significant encouragement. Yet we often act in reverse, we discourage going against the grain. Often with reasons about fear of failure. In research, most things fail. But the only real failure is the ones you don't learn from (currently it is very hard to publish negative results. Resulting it not even being attempted. The system encourages "safe" research, which by its nature, can only be incremental. Fine, we want this, but it's ironic considering how many works get rejected due to "lack of novelty")
- globnomulous 2y ago
  > Breakthroughs, BY DEFINITION, come from people going against the grain. Breakthroughs are paradigm shifts. This is wrong. It's not inherent in the meaning of the word "breakthrough" that a breakthrough can occur only when someone has gone against the grain, and there are countless breakthroughs that have not gone against the grain. See: the four-minute mile; the Manhattan Project; the sequencing of the human genome; the decipherment of Linear B; research into protein folding. These breakthroughs have largely been the result of being first to find the solution to the problem or cross the theshold. That's it. That doesn't mean the people who managed to do that were working against the grain. > Yet we often act in reverse, we discourage going against the grain. Often with reasons about fear of failure. I don't know which "we" you're referring to, but just about everybody would agree with the statement that it's good to think creatively, experiment, and pursue either new lines of inquiry or old lines in new ways, so, again, your claim seems clearly wrong. If you're discussing just scientific research, though, sure, there are plenty of incentives that encourage labs and PIs to make the safe choice rather than the bold or innovative choice.
  - pinoy420 2y ago
    Yea but this is HN where everyone is a disruptor and doesn’t play by the rules

Der_Einzige 2y ago

Unfortunately the average persons hatred of autistic or nerdy people implies that many believe the world would be a better place if “obsessive types” didn’t exist. Hans Asperger could only save his Austic children from nazi death camps by convincing the nazis that they had value to produce rockets and bombs. It’s quite remarkable that the USA is so advanced given how deep and ruthless our anti-intellectualism goes.

egoism 2y ago
re: Your Comments of Hegel elsewhere. your name is reference to Stirner is it not? Hegel's realm of ideality is just that, a realm of ideality. Hegel's totality as well, a spiritual abstraction upon the world, but a good one to deny the Abrahamics and other mental rots of the west. The irony of totality is also, that it resolves back to the self, the process of becoming, the unique. Dialectical analysis is a never ending, self-reflected, and interpenetrated spiral toward an asymptotic singularity.... but that is exactly what being is. Some X posited/constructed condition is always appearing, but X is not only X, the synthesized revelation of these arise in a new more real truth, along with a final truth that this process leads back, to some condition is always appearing.
- mkzetta 2y ago
  How can you claim to know where it ends? This itself sounds like mental rot.
veidr 2y ago
Isn't it basically the same? Nazi Germany in 1934 was relatively advanced, too. I think the difference is^W was that USA celebrated it in a Homer Simpson kind of "Ha ha! NERDS!" way, while meth-Hitler was like "let's sterilize them but try to extract math from them to... (whatever batshit goal)" Anti-intellectualism seems to be a thing when the intellectual/moderately-competent people have already brought success. (Until then it's more like anti-witchcraft, or whatever...)
Gud 2y ago
I don't think the average person hate autistic or nerdy people.
- throwpoaster 2y ago
  Yes, they do. They wouldn't say it, but look at how autistic people get treated by their peers, teachers, and bosses.
  - jonnybgood 2y ago
    How do you know their peers, teachers, and bosses aren’t autistic too? Autistic people can’t be peers, teachers, and bosses? Autistic people can be assholes too. Maybe that’s what it really is: some people are just assholes.
    - yifanl 2y ago
      Extreme category error, try again.
    - throwpoaster 2y ago
      Between 2 and 5 percent of people are autistic.
- parineum 2y ago
  They absolutely don't. The average person is probably uncomfortable around autistic people because they don't know how to deal with them and, when you see someone like that, it's usually best to avoid interacting with them. Not because autistic people are dangerous but people acting out of the ordinary sometimes are. The lumping in of nerdy with autistic is ridiculous too. The average person just doesn't care about your interests unless they are in common. Nerdy typically just means having a niche interest or hobby. Your parent reeks of a persecution complex.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    It's shocking that you can just bury your head in the sand about the colloquial usage of "autist" (often happening at the same time as "Incel") replacing "retard" in the lexicon of the average zoomer. It's not a persecution complex to identify the ways that hate gets used, deployed, and repackaged for a new generation. Putting your head in the sand about stuff like this is why Trump winning the election was SO shocking to some and extremely obvious to others.
jonahx 2y ago
"the average persons hatred of autistic or nerdy people" This is a wildly inaccurate picture of the average person. I don't even think this is true of 10% of people.
- lanstin 2y ago
  Probably enough for 90% of such folks to be tormented quite effectively during childhood.
  - macbem 2y ago
    Anyone who's a bit different has a high chance of having been bullied at some point. It doesn't mean that society hates this specific group of people.
  - bear141 2y ago
    This is a great point. If a small percentage of the population is openly and aggressively negative towards another part of the population, it makes sense that they would both artificially appear as if they are a larger part of the population, to each other. I think it goes both ways.
  - LPisGood 2y ago
    I _highly_ doubt 90% of nerdy people were tormented during childhood. Have you spent time in/around academia? These people are massive nerds and horrendous childhood torment is pretty rare.
    - ted_dunning 2y ago
      It was 100% in my personal experience.
      - LPisGood 2y ago
        I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. I’m not even saying it doesn’t happen at all higher rate than the general population. But 90% is just too much to be feasible.
tim333 2y ago
US intellectualism is patchy. Sure a lot of people are not into it but on the other hand you probably have more well paid academic posts than any other country.
manoweb 2y ago
What are you talking about, why do you think that autistics are treated better in Europe, Africa, Asia? Also, people do not "hate" them, people in general hate everybody, don't play the victim
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
BobaFloutist 2y ago
Probably the most powerful man in the world right now openly self-identifies as autistic. Obviously there are very many autistic people who get treated very badly, but I don't think it's reasonable to say that the average person "hates" autistic people.
- harrison_clarke 2y ago
  that guy is arguably causing branding problems for less powerful autistic people
  - BobaFloutist 2y ago
    Yeah I wouldn't want to be an autistic person that doesn't suck right now. I imagine it's a lot like my experience of having ADHD and being trapped between wanting leeway and support but also wanting to be held accountable and considered capable of improving and watching the Tiktokification of my disorder force me to argue that actually people with ADHD can do things and no having it doesn't fully excuse you from ever meeting commitments or doing the fucking dishes, especially if you're rejecting all and any treatment or strategy.
fullshark 2y ago
If anything autistic/nerdy people are lionized these days with tons of people larping as them online, claiming they are autistic because they sometimes feel awkward at a social event.
- annzabelle 2y ago
  I think the claim of being autistic is lionized but actually having detrimental symptoms of autism is still very stigmatized.

manoweb 2y ago

There are tens of millions of people doing a repetitive work every day, instead of being entrepreneurs. Just let them be, not everybody needs to dedicate their existence to maximizing their career opportunities, at any level.

chowells 2y ago
This isn't being an entrepreneur. This is solving a problem. The two almost never overlap.
- genewitch 2y ago
  I can't tell if that's a good insult or a great insult.
godelski 2y ago
> Just let them be As someone who's research goes against the grain, I just request the same. I have no problem with people maintaining the course and doing the same thing. In fact /most/ people should probably be doing this. BUT the system discourages going of course, exploring "out of bounds." The requests of these people have always been "let me do my thing." Just make sure "let them be" applies in both directions

tomcam 2y ago

I worked at a pro audio company where one guy spent 5 years on a power supply. It succeeded, and I always appreciated the management for supporting him.

lemonberry 2y ago
Do recall the specific problem he was trying to solve? It's amazing to me how much thought and work has gone into the seemingly trivial things we encounter on a daily basis. I think of this every time I see a blue LED. Or a rice cooker!! So easy to take for granted.
- genewitch 2y ago
  Haha the blue led story is literally people going against the grain, a great example. Worked on it after being ordered not to. The original owner of the company believed in the inventor, too, which probably helps. Is the nifty part about the rice cooker the temperature cutoff at 105C? Induction? That my cats turn on my zojirushi three times a day and open the lid and it doesn't harm it because it knows there's nothing in the pot? One of these days I need to track down who actually got the patent for using IR LED in a ring around a camera lens to see in the dark. If it was at&t I am gunna be pissed.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- tomcam 2y ago
  Decreased weight and dimensions

yujzgzc 2y ago

And you can thank this guy for the LEDs that made it possible for you to even read about it on a screen https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M https://youtu.be/AF8d72mA41M

dumpHero2 2y ago
Love this video!

Xcelerate 2y ago

I want financial independence for the sole reason that I can work on interesting problems like this without any outside nagging or funding issues from anyone else (there might still be some judgment, but I can ignore that). Personally I think governments should fund more moonshot solo or small team efforts because high risk / high reward pays off when you reduce the variance by spreading it out over so many people. But it looks like we’re going headstrong the other direction in terms of funding in the U.S. right now, so I’m not optimistic.

godelski 2y ago
> I want financial independence for the sole reason that I can work on interesting problems like this without any outside nagging or funding issues from anyone else Ditto. This is literally the only desire I have to be wealthy. It is not about having nice things, a nice house, or any of that. It is about letting me do my own research.
- jereees 2y ago
  I bet there’s a good number of us. How do we make this a reality? :)
  - drivebyhooting 2y ago
    Last decades? Work in ad tech. Now? Work on LLMs.
  - godelski 2y ago
    I bet there is too! But I think it is also hard to form this community. Given the increased friction from the general community I think it might be time to put serious effort in determining how to make this a reality. I don't have a great idea for it tbh. I'll pitch a bad one at least to put something out there. Maybe we can convince some billionaire to perform a post scarcity experiment? To buy large chunk of land, gather people who have both high passion and expertise in domains, and let them run wild. Less like Star Trek and more like Eureka[0]. I don't think it is a realistic expectation to get billionaire funding, but I think the idea of looking at something like Eureka (or this category of groups you see in many Sci-Fi stories) is worth drawing inspiration from: effectively post scarce (possible on small scale?), high levels of freedom (very doable), high levels of creativity and expressiveness (this is the experiment, to see if it is decreased/maintained/increased). [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0796264/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0796264/

godelski 2y ago

> I feel like this sentence is in every article for a reason. Breakthroughs, BY DEFINITION, come from people going against the grain. Breakthroughs are paradigm shifts. You don't shift the paradigm by following the paradigm. I think we do a lot of disservice by dismissing the role of the dark horses. They are necessary. Like you suggest, there are many that fail, probably most do. But considering the impact, even just a small percentage succeeding warrants significant encouragement. Yet we often act in reverse, we discourage going against the grain. Often with reasons about fear of failure. In research, most things fail. But the only real failure is the ones you don't learn from (currently it is very hard to publish negative results. Resulting it not even being attempted. The system encourages "safe" research, which by its nature, can only be incremental. Fine, we want this, but it's ironic considering how many works get rejected due to "lack of novelty")

globnomulous 2y ago
> Breakthroughs, BY DEFINITION, come from people going against the grain. Breakthroughs are paradigm shifts. This is wrong. It's not inherent in the meaning of the word "breakthrough" that a breakthrough can occur only when someone has gone against the grain, and there are countless breakthroughs that have not gone against the grain. See: the four-minute mile; the Manhattan Project; the sequencing of the human genome; the decipherment of Linear B; research into protein folding. These breakthroughs have largely been the result of being first to find the solution to the problem or cross the theshold. That's it. That doesn't mean the people who managed to do that were working against the grain. > Yet we often act in reverse, we discourage going against the grain. Often with reasons about fear of failure. I don't know which "we" you're referring to, but just about everybody would agree with the statement that it's good to think creatively, experiment, and pursue either new lines of inquiry or old lines in new ways, so, again, your claim seems clearly wrong. If you're discussing just scientific research, though, sure, there are plenty of incentives that encourage labs and PIs to make the safe choice rather than the bold or innovative choice.
- pinoy420 2y ago
  Yea but this is HN where everyone is a disruptor and doesn’t play by the rules