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some people would honestly rather be thinking about advancing the sum of human knowledge. for those people, an academic career is an outlet. > (The most bizzar
by munin 14y ago
some people would honestly rather be thinking about advancing the sum of human knowledge. for those people, an academic career is an outlet.
> (The most bizzare thing is when it happens in education. Come on, children are supposed to play and read books and play computer games and just slack off. They are not supposed to work long hours. Who set this up?)
I'm sure you want to hire the people who spent all their time slacking off?
Some things just take a lot of work. Almost no one is born into the world with an intuitive understanding of everything. If you want someone to have this understanding, those people are going to work their asses off. If they enjoy it, why are you judging?
- guard-of-terra 14y agoI don't hire children. Neither should you. Children should be playing and reading and slacking off. That's what they are supposed to do. You'll never get the intuitive understanding by working your ass off. It doesn't work that way. Working your ass off is like writing code by copy-paste. You save some time, and then boom!
- munin 14y ago> You'll never get the intuitive understanding by working your ass off Maybe this is true if you're a savant. I'm not a savant. Everything that I really understand has thousands to tens of thousands of hours of practice and study behind it.
- eli_gottlieb 14y agoI'm not sure if I'm a savant/genius or if I just disagree. I've never managed to really grasp anything except by getting an intuitive grip on it, and all my research comes from that level. Yes, there's a lot of hard work involved, but there's also a diminishing returns curve where you slope off to the pub and try to just casually think about what X really is underneath all the math and abstractions.
- munin 14y agoyou might be a genius! usually with me, there is an afternoon of "oh, okay, that's the idea I get it" followed by a day of happy implementation. then, a sad day of "wait, what's going on, what's wrong with my intuition" followed by perhaps a month of slog. sort of like when I'm learning from a textbook. you read a section, say "oh huh cool okay", do one or two of the sample problems at the end of the section and say "neat". then, you flip to the chapter exercises and spend the next few days asking "oh god why".
- eli_gottlieb 14y agoI still have to put in all the hard work, but I actually manage to get an intuition from it.
- superuser2 14y ago>If they enjoy it That's a big "if." I take issue with the position that leisure time should not be part of people's lives. Especially the notion that school should be set up such that students cannot have leisure time and be successful. If someone wants to make that sacrifice, more power to them. But it shouldn't be required or expected just to achieve/maintain a comfortable life.
- munin 14y agoI'm not saying that leisure time should not be part of people's lives. Do you want leisure time? Take it! Do whatever you want. Many people don't want it though. They would rather be working. Don't be angry when they have more success than you! They work more than you do.
- guard-of-terra 14y agoI consider the "run the treadmill by choice", "want leisure time - take it, loser" attitude is actively poisonous to quality of your life in the long run. The median result - you'll end up alone and not very much successful.