Before I read the article, I thought the “bus ticket” was referencing William Sidis, who in the early 20th century gave a mathematics lecture at MIT at 10, a Harvard student at 11, was expected to revolutionize math but then dropped out of the public eye to write strange books, one being an etymology of train and bus tickets across the US, collecting several thousand unique stubs. I bet that you could learn a lot about the flow of ideas and culture in the US from such a strange artifact, and while I agree with much of what PG says here, his definition of utility leans towards the economic sense.
Also of note, Knuth has a section on his website devoted to photos of traffic signs!
With that strong endorsement I began going through the whole back-catalog of The Memory Palace, and Episode 36, dated January 7, 2011, “six scenes from the life of william james sidis, wonderful boy”, talks about Sidis' obsession with bus tickets. Or maybe more precisely, streetcar transfers.
I think it said he figured out ways to traverse great distances on a single fare by connecting transfers. That kind of graph traversal thinking strikes me as ahead of its time for the age of streetcars, and could plausibly have led to some interesting places.
I've been fascinated by Sidis in the past, yet never really got his transfer ticket fascination. Maybe because I've been steeped in graph theory for the last couple of years but listening to that episode made me realize the beauty of what he saw.
If this written/possible (is it?) today, no doubt we'd have web pages and youtube channels devoted to "Transfer Surfing".
Glad to hear it. The Memory Palace is one of the most interesting podcasts on my (extensive) list. It's beautifully produced and wonderfully idiosyncratic in its choice of subjects.
The father of William was Boris Sidis. Wikipedia notes Boris:
“sought to provide insight into why people behave as they do, particularly in cases of a mob frenzy or religious mania. With the publication of his book Nervous Ills: Their Cause and Cure in 1922, he summarized much of his previous work in diagnosing, understanding and treating nervous disorders. He saw fear as an underlying cause of much human mental suffering and problematic behavior.”
> his definition of utility leans towards the economic sense.
I think his preference is probably closer to the generality and “interestingness” of the discovery.
Darwin’s theory is obviously very general and applicable in a multitude of domains in addition to the original one he worked on. Although Ramanujan’s series were not obviously general but they imply some deep mathematical patterns that are more general than specific forms. Neither had much economic utility during the discoverer’s lifetime.
Somewhat similar stories with eg Grothendieck and Kaczynski. As the article points out, one of the properties of genius is that it can’t really be deliberately focused.
I agree with his theory, but what I find particularly interesting is that I think most people do not have an obsessive interest in anything at all. And as someone who has obsessive interests in a lot of things (some “useful”, some not), that seems really odd to me: how can you just be satisfied to go to work, come home, watch TV, and go to bed each day? (Not saying that’s the wrong way to live, just saying it is surprising to someone who isn’t that way). But I guess the obsessive ones are really the weird ones in society, in terms of the fraction of the population they constitute.
My problem lately has been acquiring enough free time to be obsessive. I really miss the days of playing piano for 12 hours straight or tinkering around with reverse engineering the OS of some MP3 player. And my wife is pregnant for the first time, so like PG mentions, I wonder (but suspect) how that is going to change things. I have a very intense dread of losing myself in the necessary mundanity of life; I am more financially comfortable than ever, but I also feel less like myself than I ever have. Going to meetings, making dinner, creating to-do lists — these don’t fit my personality at all, but I have to do them because they need to be done.
Frankly most people obsess about things like finding a mate, playing video games, collecting comics, politics, reading books, watching & discussing TV shows & movies, social websites (such as this one), sex, porn, fashion, sports, the social politics of work (as opposed to the work itself -- e.g. "The Office") and, of course, their kids. But none of these sorts of obsessions are likely to lead to fame or fortune.
I think it is the rare person who literally has no obsessive interests at all. Sounds rather sad and boring.
Interests aren't necessarily obsessions or passions.
I think it's rare to be obsessed with any of those things, but common to be superficially interested. For instance many people will just watch a TV show and enjoy it, and maybe even rewatch it a few times, without knowing all of the actors or writers or how the production of the show worked, etc etc, while you would expect an obsessed person to know at least some of these things, because they are compelled to find out at much as they possibly can about the object of their obsession.
Many of my relatives seem to have no interests or hobbies. I mean sure, they watch TV and movies, but it's not like they are deeply interested in them, they serve more as pastimes. They don't have anything they are actually passionate about.
You’ve just listed off a dozen obsessive interests, and that’s the problem — you can’t have a dozen obsessive interests, there’s only enough room for one.
When I was twenty I could afford an obsessive interest in my studies. Now I’m in my late thirties I simply have too much going on.
On the upside, when I’m sixty (which is peak bus ticket collecting age) I can see how I will, finally free of the constraints of work and children, finally have time to obsess again. I hope I still have the mental agility to do it well, and that I don’t get sucked into some bus ticket vortex.
> I agree with his theory, but what I find particularly interesting is that I think most people do not have an obsessive interest in anything at all.
I am not convinced that this is true. I think a lot more people are really interested or passionate about something than you may realize, but not all of them talk about those things to everyone. Alternatively, their passion might be what they do for a living.
So for instance a case of the former might be someone that has a very niche interest, so they have learned that in most cases talking about that thing does not lead to any interesting conversations.
Another possibility is that they might not view themselves as being particularly good at their area of interest (which may or may not be the case), so they don’t like to talk about it.
So for whatever reason, including the above or other reasons, you end up not learning about these interests that those people have when you just talk casually with them.
And as for the people that do it for a living, it could be that they have no interests outside of work, because work fulfills their passion. For example someone who is a really passionate salesperson, if they already truly derive meaning and joy from doing what they do at work, maybe they don’t need anything outside of work other than to relax and recover.
Lastly, another group of people I can think of are those that have interests that are very costly and they don’t have a high paying job. So most of the year they spend a lot of time at work and on the spare time they sit in front of the TV, or the computer and it sounds like they have no passion for anything but really they are spending a lot of time dreaming about the next trip they can afford to go on in the Himalayas or whatever, and when they sit at home they watch programs about skiing, and they read about skiing online and discuss it with others online, and maybe read magazines about it as well.
I’m not saying that everyone has something that they are deeply interested in, but I believe that more people do than one might realize.
I can vouch for the "do it for a living" route. Spent almost ten years obsessively tinkering with electronics. Started a career in electronics. Pretty much abandoned hobby electronics; I do it all day at work, get my enjoyment, and pursue more casual interests for fun. Although life still gets empty if it's just work/eat/sleep.
I have a hard time agreeing with this. In my experience people's single most interesting thing to talk about is themselves. Once you notice that, you see it everywhere. It's such a lure, it's almost irresistible. I've made it a habit to ask them a couple of open questions and then just let them have at it. In a few situations folks lost business with me simply because they were too preoccupied with talking about themselves to simply ask "so... how about you? what do you do?"
It follows that whenever someone has an obsession, it comes up naturally while they talk about themselves.
You'll come up for air around 3 and minor hobbies will re-emerge around 5. I would recommend finding some deeply informed and interesting podcasts on subjects you expect to be helpful in order to educate yourself passively during the early years.
What separates piano and OS hscking from making dinner, for you? What is mundane versus interesting?
It seems to reduce the problem back to what might lead to a useful discovery versus what won't. But piano is likely in the latter category, given that its obsessed about so often over centuries. Maybe the time for OS hacking to lead to discoveries is on its way out, as well.
Obsessive cooking might be more likely to be fruitful, come to think of it. We have changing ideas about food production and nutrition; and more enabling technologies around for new ideas.
(I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with obsessing about things that won't lead to discoveries. They could be useful in a more mundane way, or be useless but still engaging.)
I think that's the whole point. It's not about what is interesting and what not, but what truly obsesses you. What OP means is that cooking is not something he feels obsessed about. It's great if you are obsessed about cooking and have 10 hours a day to practice your cooking. But most of us, wish we had more time to explore the topics we are deeply attracted to. If they make a difference, all the better.
I highly recommend going obsessive with cooking. It pays dividends when you can cook at home and eat like a king.
I found playing with Heston Blumenthal recipes and then diving into as many cook books as possible to be the best way to start.
Your fear is valid.
One way I solved it (partly) is to hire help. Use your financial comfort to buy back your own time by paying someone else to do chores like cleaning, dishes etc.
And the 1-2 hours per day that you'll save, now you can spend with your kid and/or on your interests.
> I have a very intense dread of losing myself in the necessary mundanity of life; I am more financially comfortable than ever, but I also feel less like myself than I ever have. Going to meetings, making dinner, creating to-do lists — these don’t fit my personality at all, but I have to do them because they need to be done.
You just articulated my worst fear, occasionally some aspect of it creeps into my life when society demands some "busy work" from me... each time it makes me feel like wanting to retreat into the wilderness to escape from society and enjoy nature and do things I actually find interesting.
I think it'd be more accurate to say that most people haven't yet found something to be obsessively interested in.
Although the child prodigy is a popular image, I don't actually know anyone who's ended up doing the same thing all their life since they were young. People bounce around a lot before they hit something that clicks. Sometimes it's at 15, sometimes it's at 50.
Even people who have obsessive interests today first went through their boring phases, too.
Work part-time? I get 1-2 days off per week for projects (and house stuff) then in the evenings/weekends I actually have time and energy for playing with my child.
Plus, it's better for the environment than more work, more consumption.
FWIW, making to-do list is often a way of coping with inability to focus and hold coherent thoughts for longer periods of time in one's head. At least that's how I do this - especially now that I have a kid. I jot down lots of random throwaway todo lists for the day or week; otherwise, between the job, family and unwinding on HN, I'd essentially never do anything other than daily chores and "firefighting".
It’s not that bad. I just had twin girls and I’m still managing to draw for ~3 hours a day in between feeding and diaper changes. If you like your hobby enough you’ll find the energy and time somewhere ;P
I've got a new one too. My guitar follows me all around the house, and I've planted books in a bunch of different places for the in-between time. I'm curious to see how this evolves as the baby gets older.
I'm very new to having a kid but so far I've found it's helped focus my time more efficiently by getting better at multi-tasking, and then the remaining "interests" time is spent with a serious, no-time-to-waste approach.
Also, you might be surprised at what having a kid does to you, in a good way. Like PG mentions in his essay, once people have kids they tend to be their focus, and it's satisfying to guide them and see them grow.
Yeah, kid, family and relationships seems like the basic answer to "why aren't most people obsessed with obscure X".
The chances are your kid will take all your time when they're young and then probably won't share obsessive interest X when they get older.
Just as much with relationships - you can't be an appealing mate by being successful, well-balanced and well-adjusted. Or you can share interest X with you mate. But latter approach gives one 1/10000th as many people - not impossible but it's something to think about.
I think there are some portion of people who could find hobby X appealing but then, consciously or unconsciously think about these considerations and push themselves back to mainstream.
I would also like to say -- having a kid makes one realize how much time is wasted online reading reading reading. It's been a nice adjustment getting away from the internet.
Go look up what the average American or European media consumption is. It's difficult to see it as anything but an obsession. It's just that the obsession relates to things others are producing.
If you don't have time for your obsessive interest, then it's not really obsessive after all. A maximally obsessive person would have neglected distractions from his obsession.
I used to be obsessed with many different things during childhood, perhaps because I am an only child and had large chunks of time where I was in my own room, alone, as a child. I would do things like lay out a paper map of a city, and start tracing my fingers along the roads as if I was a bus driver, or pretending I had multiple estates. I would start documenting the statistics of my Pokemon card deck. Take apart my computer. Spend hours trying to create something significant from random Lego blocks. Make songs by humming into a cassette tape recorder. Even invented a language (very short-lived hobby).
Then puberty hit. I became more interested in making sure my hair and clothes were cool enough, so I could fit in, so I could attract my crush. I became much more addicted into the mainstream grooves of video games, such as League of Legends. I lost interest in random obsessions, and instead replaced it with a more artificial one governed by Riot Games or Blizzard, and the digital points/levels that I got in game.
Then I grew up. I am now working as a software developer, but don't even have much obsession for programming at all. I just don't see how someone can get excited about the intracacies of a programming language, because its so dry and boring. And I feel a bit ashamed for not being too interested in hacking together a MVP anymore, even though programming presents such a huge realm of possibility available to anyone at no barrier/cost to entry. Nowadays, whenever I have a slight interest in anything, the capitalistic worldview has polluted my thoughts by always triggering the thought: "but is this a viable business idea? Could I get recognition from others and provide value such that the market would compensate me?"
I would trade anything to get my childhood obsessions back, because I am living mostly like the repetitive 9-5er you describe.
Read about and in depth how to raise kids. There is a lot of good books how you can let kids become strong individuals instead of good at following instructions.
1) Your kid will determine how much free time you have. Some infants sleep 22 hours a day. Some sleep 4 hours a day. You can't know which you'll get.
2) Ruthless economizing & prioritizing of what's important to you. Combine activities, e.g. biking to work is commute, exercise, and possibly shower all-in-one.
That seemed an odd thing to include. Making food is a rewarding and intriguing pursuit. It combines aesthetics, science, social benefit and sensual rewards. It has a rich history and tons of controversies to poke at.
I never feel that making dinner is a waste of my time.
I think this is correct. The bad news is we are creating systems which minimise the number of geniuses entering each field.
In the past, science was an eccentric hobby, not particularly valued and certainly not a viable career option. Today it's all of these things - like becoming a doctor. Telling your mother you want to be a scientist is far better than saying you want to be a musician. A hundred years ago that wouldn't have been the case.
The consequence of this is that these fields are filled up with careerists - people who are socially driven rather than curiosity driven. I think this might go some way to explaining the slowdown in scientific progress, because people chase low-risk 'hot' fields to advance their careers, rather than splashing about in the unfashionable backwaters of science for the sheer enjoyment of it.
The 'problem' with modern science is that a large finite amount of stuff has been discovered, and new discoveries are most often built on that stuff. I splash around in the backwaters of machine learning, however I have to pick my targets carefully and maintain a very tight focus - the defined knowledge base has already grown to more than anyone can ingest in detail. Given the amount of knowledge that has to be absorbed to achieve mastery in a scientific discipline, and the fact that knowledge base keeps growing, it takes longer and longer to lay a foundation for just understanding what the hell people are talking about. Now, there are opportunities, for example the use of genetic algorithms as part of ML solutions, because for any 'real' researcher, GA's aren't the cool kid in the opinions of reviewers or funding agents. It's easier when you are the PI and the funding authority, even if the budget is quite a bit smaller
The problem with modern science is that there is no room for the unusual.
Faraday had no formal training, but his natural intuition, interest, and tenacity made him standout.
Newton was a brilliant, paranoid asshole.
Instead funding goes to credentialed career scientists whose greatest ability is self-promotion, fund raising, and stringing-along the public.
As an example: The next big particle accelerator sucks up billions; while alternative approaches to QM never get any attention because it’s a guaranteed way to kill a career and become a pariah.
So nobody is available to even try to create the theoretical framework at the investment of a few million.
It's worse than this. The careerists have taken control and use it to demand you work as they would like. They kill the creativity and passion and will not allow the real work to happen and make progress.
There is a formula you must fit into, 5 days a week, probably 50 hours, a specific attitude, and everything they can get from you. Try this: in your next offer negotiation, ask to cut your salary by 20% and get one day back.
Can't blame them. It is how Tesla and many other inventive minds have been made subject. It's not slavery but it doesn't honor the contributor acting in good faith.
> The consequence of this is that these fields are filled up with careerists - people who are socially driven rather than curiosity driven.
I think it's worse than this: school and academia is no longer the sole option for the ultra curious. Curiosity is better fed by the internet, which means we end up lacking a social institution which captures and unifies people like this.
There's a much more obvious difference between now and 100 years ago: 100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific research was largely a closed shop for European-descended upper middle class men. There are certainly many geniuses obsessively researching into areas that stimulate their intellectual interest today that wouldn't have had the opportunity to do so back then.
I'm not sure being a scientist was that unfashionable 100 years ago anyway: research labs were a thing, academic work was arguably more prestigious than it is today, fortunes were being made from inventions especially in fields where there were low hanging fruit, competitions and societies and exhibitions to celebrate scientific achievement had come into existence and the idea of inventiveness was even tied up in popular contemporaneous notions of national and racial superiority. There might be more subfields and more research to build on nowadays, but the stereotype of scientists being underpaid eccentrics certainly hasn't gone away and nor has the fact a mathematics prodigy can make a lot more money working in financial services than academic research.
I'm also unconvinced scientific progress has slowed because today's geniuses are working on interpreting our genetic code, modelling solutions to climate change and solving scaling problems in computation rather than drawing taxonomy diagrams, inventing new types of consumer electronics and breaking the land speed record.
> 100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific invention was largely a closed shop for European-descended upper middle class men.
i.e. exactly the people who were, by far, most likely to be living a comfortable, stress-free life back then. We should not underestimate the sheer amount of material progress and economic growth that has occurred since then. A lot more people can have the luxury of getting playfully obsessed about something than could back then.
100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific research by European-descended upper middle class men
was a thing.
50 years ago I wasn't expecting it to come back, it wouldn't have helped me anyway, overall scientific opportunities were far worse by then and the trend has continued. I wasn't waiting around for an uptick, I just started right away putting in the effort to try and compensate.
And I agree with this completely:
>There are certainly many geniuses obsessively researching into areas that stimulate their intellectual interest today that wouldn't have had the opportunity to do so back then.
There is so much brilliance in so many cultures through so many millennia, it can be seen that education and financial support are not even essential for genius, mainly for documenting, recognizing, and leveraging the influence of a very very small percentage of geniuses through history, only those few whose works were preserved and/or applied.
Surviving largely within a system of lesser thinkers whose works were better preserved and/or more stongly applied.
Which is why I think
>inventing new types of consumer electronics
can be a good thing if the consumer is given careful enough consideration.
Science has a level of technical difficulty and detail to not be obsessed about something in order to discover anything. Try one of those extract DNA from a strawberry kit for example. Even in big data science you find people who know a lot of math or applied math that have the technical insights. A lot of science today also requires collaborative cross discipline work to make progress as well. I don’t think careerism is an issue. We should encourage wacky ideas though through competitive grants.
The people driven by curiosity will still be in those unfashionable backwaters of any field. I would think true progress is made by those individuals, not ones that chase ‘hot’ fields.
Bingo. I would add that the movers tend to define their own fields, and by action and driven by need/practicality, not marketing. Those seeking to enter a career, generally have a different set of goals and priorities, reguardless of overlap.
> In the past, science was an eccentric hobby, not particularly valued and certainly not a viable career option. Today it's all of these things - like becoming a doctor.
Really! That's news to me. Are you aware of how much scientists are paid and their general career prospects?
The average tenured professor salary in the US is $141k. Star research directors with a proven record of bringing in grant money can easily earn two or three times that. In engineering, physics, med, and bio there are also lucrative consultancy opportunities.
The average scientist outside academia is probably doing grunt work and is paid badly - unless they're working in fintech, or something with an obvious financial upside.
The reality is that the entire research system is optimised for direct and indirect cash accumulation, not for genuine innovation or invention. There's some interest in blue sky funding, but if you're a fresh postgrad no grant body is going to give you a lot of money to go off and design a working warp drive unless you also have the bureaucratic skills to make your project sound like something they want to fund - probably for other reasons.
Researchers with good bureaucratic skills and genius-level scientific insights are exceptionally rare. And the publishing system isn't welcoming to talented semi-outsiders
Newton, Einstein, Darwin, and Ramanujan would really struggle in today's environment. Newton might be okay if he managed to get tenure, but the others not so much.
The big difference is that currently scientists are paid and their research equipment funded by someone else; contrasting to the earlier times where usually you could be a scientist if and only if had "passive income" (usually, inherited wealth), so that you would not need to work to earn money and could instead study (and pay for studies in a world without student loans) and research instead of that.
In 2016, American universities hired about 20,000 tenure-track faculty [1]. Adding up the major pro sports leagues, there are very very generously 10,000 American pro athletes, (i.e. people who don’t have day jobs).
I guess things change if you include all the minor league and farm teams, especially for the MLB.
The BIGGEST problem with research is this: it's HARD, not easy, to understand. Most papers written are absolute trash. Not because the content is. Because it's written in a shitty, overly braggy way (especially mathematics and physics), that's mostly shouting "I'm better than you and if you don't get it, you're an idiot". They are not written with any USER, let alone, READER, in mind. Anyone would immediately be fired by a remotely consumer-centric company.
Wikipedia was a huge step in the right direction: making everything easier to understand. With lots of proofs and examples.
I think you could easily become billionaire by improving Wikipedia and the "make science and knowledge easily absorbable" 10X easier
That's one very interesting observation. I've commented in that vein a short while ago where I noticed that once I finally understood what some paper was about my usual response (definitely not always) would be 'That's it?'.
Wikipedia has been a godsend for me, to be able to understand core principles without having to wade through what seems to be obfuscated English in order to hide something relatively trivial at the heart of the document.
You could not "easily" become a billionaire by improving Wikipedia, which is the result of millions of hours of writing and editing. The fact is most low-hanging fruit has already been plucked, thus every scientific discovery relies upon more and more background knowledge. Yes, we do make innovations in explaining/teaching science more quickly to successive generations, but I doubt if we'll ever see a Newton or Darwin who can single-handedly, obsessively write and observe and calculate, by themselves, and then push science forward by leaps and bounds. The best research today is all done by teams, with experts on statistics, study design, clinicians, hardware experts - there are just so many niche fields that we MUST collaborate on extremely advanced work.
I long for voice, for playful humor, for that je ne sais quoi of good writing! Robert Anton Wilson wrote a marvelous book called Quantum Psychology, where he uses the insights of quantum physics to upend the prevailing Aristotelian view of is / is not logic in psychology and in scientific thinking generally. It was a genuine pleasure to read, as I sensed the intelligent, interested, living being doing the writing all throughout. It felt intimate despite its serious nature. I just don't understand why writing about a scientific subject, even in an obscure and rarified field, gives you a pass on crafting a piece of writing someone might actually want to read, might actually connect with on an emotional level.
You may think there is some rational choice to be made about obsessive curiosity. Maybe not.
In 1960, my mom lived near a six year old who could fix electric stuff. Everyone in the neighborhood knew him and brought him things to fix. TV's were no problem; dead radios were great; telephones were cool. He was a super happy kid with a constant enthusiasm and a sparkle in his eye, running home from school every day to see what he could learn and what neighbors had brought for his help. He had thrown circuit breakers in the house many times. One day, there was a blackout and he came down from his room to apologize to this parents, again. They had an idea and they pointed out the window. "Well you really did it this time. Look, the entire city went down." And that was it. He stopped with electronics.
At first he was morose and anxious, but his parents figured he would get used to his new life. He left for college the same disconnected and subdued kid he became at six. My mom bumped into him again around 1990, when he was about 35, and he never did recover: still sad, puffy, disconnected from people, uninspired, hating his job, unhappy with friends.
That's a great contrast. Yes, Feynman had a thriving business fixing electronics as a kid. Difference: his parents didn't worry that he was going to grow up weird. They were happy with what might have become his bus ticket collecting
1. The difference between collecting bus tickets, working on mathematics, and figuring the crystallization patterns of snowflakes is virtually nothing. To the people obsessed with it, it is all-important; to outsiders, all three look indistinguishably pointless. Only in retrospect can anyone say whether the activity led to something society considers important. The truly obsessed don't care.
2. Genius is overrated. We like stories of great individuals changing the world with their genius because we like stories and we dislike chance. But for nearly every invention and idea, history shows that multiple people were working on it at the same time. Civilization's progress is more a sequence of ideas whose time had come, but we prefer stories of great unique geniuses.
A fantastic book by Vernon Vinge called “A Deepness in the Sky” toys around with this idea a lot actually.
There is a virus that can release neurotoxins and it is flipped in very specific parts of the brain with a MRI-like device. This can elicit a state of “Focus” where the person (victim more like) becomes totally obsessed with a particular idea or subject. They devote all energy towards this subject and can make stunning breakthroughs on difficult topics because they are utterly and completely _obssessed_ with whatever topic they are supposed to be.
They are held captives by their own fascination and work as slaves.
I know this is taking the idea a bit far from the point, but it’s an interesting extension of the idea.
Thank you so much. I read this book when it came out 20 years ago and have been trying to remember what it was called at odd times, On and Off, for roughly the last decade, specifically because of the plot point of the “Focus” virus.
> But for nearly every invention and idea, history shows that multiple people were working on it at the same time.
Agree and not to mention we don't have any data on people who loved and were obsessive and that did not lead to anything. I am actually surprised in how simplistic PG is when he writes some of what he does. For example he states that Darwin was obsessed (as he was) but ignores that just like the bus ticket collector he most likely did that simply because he was interested or curious for some reason. A hobby or a like is no better than anyone else's. Who is to say watching football matters (it doesn't) or collecting stamps matters (it doesn't) or by the same token if you obsess over mathematics (and it matters and leads to something) that that is why you even did it in the first place?
I would even say that often people are obsessive about what they do not even thinking it will lead to anything. I was an obsessive commenter on a site and most would say I was wasting my time. But that activity has led to over 7 figures of income. But I did it because I enjoyed it (and did it every day). Likewise the same happens here on HN. In one sense you might be wasting your time but if you enjoy it and it leads to something is not genuine to say you did it for another reason.
From time to time mathematicians discover something interesting, like the theoretical bases for elliptic-curve cryptography. I also remember some interesting work with applications to tomography, but it's mostly like a black box so it's more difficult to be sure how aplicable it was.
> But for nearly every invention and idea, history shows that multiple people were working on it at the same time.
Not just "people" - "geniuses". History shows multiple geniuses were working on it at the same time.
I do agree that we give too much credit to a single genius. Had Isaac Newton not lived, we'd still have calculus, physics, etc in some form or another. The same thing with Einstein, Turing, etc. But that doesn't mean genius is overrated. What's overrated is the hero worshiping narrative we build around a single genius due to racial or nationalistic reasons.
But I think we should have as many geniuses working on problems as possible rather than saying that genius is overrated.
For a long time, the Great Man theory dominated a lot of thinkers. Now there's a lot of pushback on the Great Man theory. I think I like both the theory and the pushback both. Reality's complicated.
You’re completely deluded into believing that genius is overrated. While it is never in isolation, and its fruits are the product of historical necessity, it takes a rare breed of sacrifice, which PG here is saying as obsession, to hit the targets no one else sees (paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer); and is constitutionally the personal, moral input of an individual on choosing how to cause themselves to be, unconcerned with the mediocre concerns of their contemporary society.
Shame on you and your ilk for suggesting Descartes, Newton, Kant etc. were just there picking low hanging fruit. They were doing work no one had the courage to do.
> You’re completely deluded [...] Shame on you and your ilk
Crossing into personal attack isn't allowed, and we ban accounts the keep doing it, so can you please not do it here? If you'd take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html you'll see how the intended spirit of this site points in the opposite direction. Note that it doesn't depend on how right you are.
I see the reasonings of both of your points. To me it seems in the old days, there was a lot of hindrance in reaching your potential therefore for those few to become geniuses, you truly had to be exceptional and since there was so few, your impact would be tremendous.
Now compare that to the modern day, where I'd say a lot higher percentage of people are hitting their potential as a genius. Therefore, a lot more people are coming up with new novel things, but since a lot of the easy major milestones in sciences have been attained, the impact of those single individual geniuses is much smaller.
Modern age Newton could be just a very good AI researcher from England. It's just impossible for humans to have devolved so much that the genius of the previous generations would be so much different than we have today.
> You’re completely deluded into believing that genius is overrated.
...
> Shame on you and your ilk for suggesting Descartes, Newton, Kant etc. were just there picking low hanging fruit. They were doing work no one had the courage to do.
There's a lot of passion in your comment, but it's also really antagonistic. The person you replied to was very respectful and cogent in expressing their point of view; you abandoned that civility quite quickly - and for what?
If you're as well read as your references imply, surely you can appreciate an argument which casts aspersion on the "lone hero" ideation of historical progress.
Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this. I followed most of the rise of Dota from trashy Warcraft 3 mod to Valve's multi-million-dollar-prize-pool juggernaut.
The first few crops of Dota millionaires all had the same backstory: "I played this game 14 hours a day. If there were tournaments at all they didn't really pay anything. My parents said I was wasting my life. I never had a girlfriend. Everyone thought I was a loser, but I just wanted to play and win... and now I know it was all worth it."
And the thing that I couldn't help thinking is: was it? I'm not sure that any rational person would make that decision. Even if you could somehow know that competitive gaming would get big enough, and that your particular game would be popular enough, and that you could become good enough to win – that's just table stakes. You then have to actually play the game obsessively for a decade. There are, frankly, far more comfortable ways to earn a million dollars in exchange for 20,000 to 50,000 hours of your life.
It's kind of hard to take a coherent message away from that. Should you become a competitive gamer for the millions? Certainly not then, and definitely not now. Should you hope that your fringe interest (bus tickets, say) becomes a million-dollar enterprise? No, that's probably even less likely.
Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests. A combination that is increasingly rare in an economic system designed to squeeze out the inefficient. Lest we forget the Bell monopoly; we may never see such inefficiency again.
I have a similar story. I dropped out of school at 16, and spent 14+ hours a day playing Stepmania Online, which was Dance Dance Revolution for your fingers. I was one of the best in the world! Then everyone stopped playing and nothing came of it. So for every DOTA millionaire or whatnot there’s likely thousands of people who are obsessed with something equally niche who haven’t realized any financial gains because of it.
Now I’m a software engineer, it’s working out way better than playing video games all day.
Ah, Stepmania Online...what a fun time that was. I remember putting in my 6-8 a day after school. I may not have been at the level you were at but I was roughly the same age and quite good. Then, I went to college and no longer had the same desire to play anymore.
Do you still crack open Stepmania every so often for old times sake? I have no idea if any kind of a community still exists around it.
> Competitive gaming is a particularly good example of this.
Anything competitive is emphatically not a good example of this. If you're in a competition, then by definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else. That's a guaranteed recipe for not accomplishing anything meaningful in life.
Competition can be great for cultivating positive character traits and developing certain skills, but at some point you need to move beyond it.
The key ingredient in the obsession is that you're not seeking personal advantage. I wish there was a better word for this than pg's "disinterested" because it sounds strange to have an intense, all-consuming interest in which you're disinterested (see his footnote about choosing this word).
Because you're not pursuing personal advantage, this kind of obsession is incompatible with competition. You're obsessively interested in collecting old bus tickets not because you want to get paid, not because you want to be famous, not because you want to change the world, and not because you want to win.
So it's a bit weird for pg to identify "heuristics you can use to guess whether an obsession might be one that matters". If you care about whether a thing matters, instead about the thing itself, then you're not really disinterested.
As soon as your obsession becomes influenced by thoughts of personal advantage, then it's about garden variety ambition and determination, not the magical property of disinterest that pg describes.
Disinterested obsession may be a powerful source of innovation and progress, but the instant you intentionally try to harness this power in pursuit of progress, you destroy the magic of disinterest.
You're eliminating a big category of things most people recognize as genius here. There's a long history of recognized genius in the development of chess and go over time for instance. You may not consider this as meaningful as breakthroughs in physics and biology for instance (and I may agree), but I think it leaves out a pretty big part of our history to discount this altogether.
I guess the rebuttal might go something like: Business is inherently competitive. Creating startups, you are usually competing not only with old line businesses but with other startups.
I guess the rebuttal to the rebuttal might sound something like Thiel's startup lectures: Startups should try to be anticompetitive, ideally carving out new niches. You don't want to engage in head-to-head competition.
The 3rd degree rebuttal might be something like: There are plenty of examples of successful startups that began as clones of other businesses (Facebook seems the canonical example).
But then as you say, they moved beyond being a clone of Friendster/Myspace/Tribe/etc... but isn't that the competitive process?
Competitive gaming was an extreme niche 20 years ago. Now its just a niche with lots of people. When these people started, the concept of competitive gaming didnt even really exist.
It might just be a matter of framing, but I do not understand: How could you ever do anything work related, void of competition for any significant stretch of time?
Even if you create or exploit something wildly new that is completely beyond reach for anyone else at that moment – let's say you made time travel viable tomorrow – as soon as you did and started commercialising it, competition would start forming later that day.
For everything else, you will right off the gate be competing with someone over something (at the very least time and money). Airbnb is competing with Hotels/Motels, Uber with Taxis, Facebook with MySpace. MySpace with more specialised communities and GeoCities. The internet was competing with telephones, mail, fax and the yellow pages.
What the above comment is about applies to so much in life, from education to careers because at their core, they are competitions.
> If you're in a competition, the. By definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else.
Not true.
There are people who play competitive, ranked, games 3 hrs a week and are happy with being in the top 50% of players
And there are people who spend 30hrs a week in a game and are profoundly unhappy they're only in the top 5% of players.
Those wind up being two very different paths, and it applies to way more than just gaming, like education, which I can speak from experience to that
From a young age I would spend hours upon hours on computers working on my games and random ideas. Even in school I would skip classes to work on my own projects in a computer lab.
My parents felt it was a complete waste of time (especially since it became a huge drain on my performance at school). I didn't have nearly as many close friends as I should have, didn't form a lot of the bonds people growing up do, it ruined my relationship with my parents.
At the end of the day through luck or something I scraped through high school with a .1 above failing GPA, dropped out of community college after failing 2 semesters and started a career in tech by freelancing.
Now 5 years later and the positions I've taken are consistently higher seniority than my friends who did CS in college, so it worked out, but at what cost?
Those years I lost, not even talking to one of my parents for over a year despite living in the same house, wasn't really worth it.
But it was an obsession, I didn't obsess over programming because I wanted to have a great career one day, it was because I couldn't help it. It was almost like an addiction that I got lucky enough to have double as a marketable skill.
It's crazy how much article really resonates with my experience, almost annoyingly so since I feel like a bus ticket collector sometimes, sure tech is a marketable skill, but you sure build a lot of unimportant stuff
> If you're in a competition, then by definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else. That's a guaranteed recipe for not accomplishing anything meaningful in life.
That's a mistaken conclusion because you didn't follow it properly to the narrowed end: if you're in a large field of competition at a thing and you're among the best in the world at it, then the exact opposite is more likely to be true (you will likely do something meaningful and have extreme success) and your supposed guaranteed recipe collapses.
This premise holds true in eg: business, acting, music, science, traditional sports, games like chess, and numerous other fields.
Right now, around the world, dozens (or hundreds) of scientists are competing to reach the same breakthrough. They may not know who all the competitors are and may not know they're all chasing the same thing, but they are. One or a small group of them will get there before the rest. It is competition and it doesn't exclude you from doing something meaningful: you need to win the competition.
See: Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Kurt Cobain, Whitney Houston, Craig Venter, Garry Kasparov, John Carmack, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos
All had to rise to the top of highly competitive fields with a large supply of competitors. How many other grunge bands were there next to Nirvana? How many other singers did Whitney Houston have to stand apart from? How many other women (frequently younger, a big deal in tennis) has Serena Williams had to competitively outlast over ~20 years to spend so much time on top of her sport and put together one of the greatest sports careers of all-time? It's a never ending supply of younger, highly talented competitors, and yet Williams did what she did.
Trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis is doing the same thing like everyone else. Competition might actually force you to come up with a different approach.
Society deify successful people when in reality they are nothing more than serial lottery winners. For every "Ronaldo" there are a myriad of people trying to get there that will end their life as losers because they made an high-stakes bet and lost. The truth in unconfortable and nobody wants to listen about it.
>> Society deify successful people when in reality they are nothing more than serial lottery winners
This is absolutely false and a terrible thing to perpetuate. Work ethic has the highest controllable coefficient to success as an output. Luck exists and the universe is probabilistic, yes, but it is not non-deterministic.
This self-lashing of our community and amongst the populist movement that is growing in popularity in the EU and US is ridiculous, reducing the sum total of human achievement into lucky chance rather than actually understanding the probabilistic universe and knowing that while our actions do not wholly determine our fate, they play the single largest role we have control over, and as such, it would be better to believe the myth that we have full control over our destiny rather than this ridiculous concept that luck controls ~100% of circumstance.
Probability theory needs to be taught in primary school, apparently, because for members of even this community, the fallacy of determinism and binary outcomes run rampant.
This is why having a social safety net is so important. If society can put a floor under how badly people can lose, they'll feel more free to try low-probability high-payoff endeavors.
> For every "Ronaldo" there are a myriad of people trying to get there that will end their life as losers because they made an high-stakes bet and lost.
For every "Ronaldo" there are a small amount of moderately successful players playing soccer for a good living.
The myriad is the group of people that are coasting their way through life trying to put in as little effort as possible and naturally they don't succeed.
Maybe the serial lottery winning is what society subconscious worships.. they know that even with insane amounts of dedications, the others failed when a few particular ones got "lucky".
You could take this argument all the way down. Why did valve pick it up? I don't think they saw dota2 as a profit engine necessarily, though there is some argument for that. The company does tend to engage in bus ticket obsessions (VR, dota2). Sometimes it fails (artifact). But I strongly suspect that Gabe Newell bus tickets dota2. I would guess that like myself, he has no real skill at the game, but he just loves it. And he hired the guy (icefrog) that bus tickets dota2 mechanics. The combination is an enormously entertaining (for us fans) wildly unlikely tournament that has a 30 million dollar purse.
When valve picked up dota, league of legends was the most played multiplayer pc game in the world. I think it’s more likely that valve was afraid of exodus of pc gamers from their platform.
I disagree of how you define rationality here. If someone feels it serves them fine to play 14 hours of a game, it seems perfectly rational for me. Especially in the case that you mentioned, where they were playing before any big money was on the table. It means they liked, despite a lot of people judging them with an air of superiority.
It is objectively irrational. The ones who made a lot of money are 1%. The rest wasted their youth pursuing an impossible dream. They sacrificed their social development and their future job prospects.
> Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests.
Where do you see that message? No luck was involved in your example, just hard work on behalf of the good players and of the Dota developers, and pursuing a hobby with passion is perfectly rational.
The luck comes in that they opted to play Dota at just the right time. If someone had instead opted into becoming a really good Heroes of the Storm player (only to have the developer stop work on it) they would be in a really different position.
> ...pursuing a hobby with passion is perfectly rational.
To a point, yes. Though we may disagree on the threshold where it crosses over from rational to unhealthy obsession. And there is certainly luck involved when there are tens who found fortune out of millions participating.
> There are, frankly, far more comfortable ways to earn a million dollars in exchange for 20,000 to 50,000 hours of your life.
Not everything is about ROI, I'm also not saying playing Dota for your entire life is going to be particularly fulfilling in many other ways thought - after all they are playing out their lives within the very finite confines of someone else's creation.
The author does point this out as a suggested heuristic, if you are obsessed with someone elses creation, it's probably not going to be very fruitful (whether fruitful means money, scientific discovery, or fulfillment ones curiosity etc).
>It's kind of hard to take a coherent message away from that. Should you become a competitive gamer for the millions?
If you told these guys to be a competitive gamer for the millions, they probably would have stuck to competitive fishing or whatever they were doing anyway. Taking a message or leadership from it is kind of the antithesis of the point. The point is that some social pursuits are the birthplace of the next big thing and some people who are focused on socializing need to make the choice on pursuits that have a potential and pursuits that don't like. Dance class is pretty dead as a career, but we're going to need people who can sort quality from quantity in a few years, the people focused on a qualitative pursuit socially need to pick a field where it's obvious that's needed like journalism or the swath of video games sure to flood the market.
It doesn't have much to do with rational decision making in detail and is instead a generalized story about the different directions in life you can choose.
>And the thing that I couldn't help thinking is: was it? I'm not sure that any rational person would make that decision.
You have to weigh your current abilities and their earning potential vs. the costs of venturing into a new field.
Being at the top of Dota is easier than being at the top of Math or Chess or Go, since Dota is a newer field. They aren't really comparable, but you still compare them if you are trying to figure out what you want to put your time into.
Some people just get lucky and find the thing they are good at on the first try. Then they can maximize their hours available for that thing.
Other people (probably the majority) have to try different fields and start later, and ultimately have less time overall to spend.
So it actually seems rational (if maximizing hours-spent is your goal) to go all-in on the first thing that grabs your interest, which could be Dota.
> Being at the top of Dota is easier than being at the top of Math or Chess or Go
I slightly disagree - neither Chess nor Go have nearly the millions of new players playing it obsessively as they come of age. Math is a bit different, but often times “good at math” isn’t very rewarding except as it pertains to an ancillary job, or if you’re one of the relative few who become a math major.
There’s also a major drop off over time with MOBA players - the average age is 22 or something for professionals. Eventually the reflexes get worse.
Don't get hung up on the term genius, focus on the chance discovery part that is the actual topic of the article. Those first wave gaming professionals discovered a personal product market fit without trying, by being obsessed with an absurdly unprofitable pastime.
Yeah, for reference, even mid-level people at FAANG in basically any field can make $1M in 2-3 years. I think most people have no idea how much some laborers can make in the US.
Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to be a genius to work in FAANG. It's a lot of luck. You just have to give yourself as many good chances in the interview pipeline as possible.
> Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests
Nah, millions are delivered to those who already have millions, everything else is noise that is overemphasized to distract the bottom 80+%.
It might be worthwhile to remind ourselves here that making lots of money, acquiring status, and gaining power are obsessive interests that some people have.
Newton was not just a physicist who dabbled with occult. He turned occult into physics.
Before Newton scientists and natural philosophers like Descartes believed that movements were caused by physical contact.
Newton started traditionally and proposed the existence of ether that transmits forces. When he became interested in alchemy, he replaced ether with occult forces that repel and attract each other. Newton received criticism for his theory that gravity was worked through "action at a distance", because that is occult quality. His theory was not seen as physical theory at first, because 'physical theories' at the time were physical in the intuitive common sense meaning. Action at a distance, across a vacuum, was occultism.
Keynes called Newton the last magician. He was able to make similar leap as Einstein did.
Here's something I'd love for someone to explain about "magicians". I've read that Einstein was a great physicist for his work on relativity. I still don't know what he actually did.
Did he have some mountain of experimental data, to which he found a model which fit? Did he have sub-models which he unified, or simplified? What exactly were his inputs and outputs?
In school we're taught that the scientific method involves hypothesis, and experimentation, and confirmation or rejection, but in Einstein's case all I hear about are fully-formed theories -- and then confirmation by others, years after his death. Did he eliminate other possible theories through experimentation, or did he happen to get it right from the start? Was relativity the only possible solution, or was there also some luck involved?
Einstein's inputs were a bunch of scattered theories about electromagnetism and thermodynamics -- particularly, Maxwell's equations for the electromagnetic field, and the empirical description of the photoelectric effect, and Planck's description of blackbody radiation.
His outputs were deducing models that elegantly explained these phenomena: that a constant speed of light in all reference frames, as unintuitive as that is, would lead to the equations of relativity, and that energy being transmitted only in discrete quanta would lead to the photoelectric effect and blackbody radiation effects that were observed by others.
This was largely not a feat of producing theories on data. It was coming up with a simpler explanation for phenomena which had already been known, but for which existing explanations were far too complex.
For one, Mercury's orbit was pretty confusing, and needed a fudge factor when calculated with existing Newtonian methods. This is why some were so convinced that there had to be a tiny planet Vulcan between it and the sun. When you use Relativistic equations rather than Newtonian, the math just works out clean without a fudge factor.
I'm always amazed when I'm reminded of the genesis of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. Whether you think it sprung solely from his mind or not, the thought experiment is so simple a young child can understand but look at the ramifications which follow. Just remarkable.
Not a physicist, but my understanding (from having glanced at one of Einstein's 1905 papers a long time ago) was that the genesis of SR has a context. Specifically, the following observations bothered Einstein (below are my words, don't think anyone from 1905 would say it this way):
1. Maxwell's equations did not permit information to propagate faster than some finite velocity c, which (for many good reasons) can be identified with the speed of light in vaccuum.
2. Closely related mathemaical fact: Maxwell's equations were Lorentz invariant.
3. On the other hand if one envisioned a charged particle moving in a field, then Newtonian theory says the particle dynamics were galilean invariant.
But the particle and the field really are part of one system, and it would be odd for the two parts to have different symmetry properties, as this would mean for example that when one changes between two coordinate systems their equations of motion would transform in different ways.
I know lots of you know way more physics & history of physics than I. Please jump in!
I love that he chose bus tickets, because I used to collect UK bus tickets. I started because I used to repair bus ticket machines (made by Almex Control Systems ltd) in the early 1990s.
I was putting a few examples on Instagram, but I don't really understand how Instagram chooses to crop images so I stopped until I have time to work it out. https://www.instagram.com/p/B1JpyfXHLRG/?utm_source=ig_web_c... If you're interested in classifying things you can sort tickets out in several ways -- by bus company operator, by year, by colour, by machine. If you're interested in social history you can use tickets to illustrate some small points - here's a "workman return" which would probably have a different name today: https://www.instagram.com/p/B1Lpy4kHKWR/?utm_source=ig_web_c...
Through this I met other transport ticket collectors, and other transport enthusiasts ("bus spotters", railway enthusiasts).
Paul starts his essay by mentioning natural ability. He then describes this obsessive interest as a third requirement, which implies to me that obsessive interest is not necessarily part of natural ability.
I'd be interested to know whether obsessive interest is something that can be learnt, or whether it's a feature of neuro-diversity and thus part of natural ability. One of the diagnostic criteria for autism is "fixed and repetitive interests".
I'm also interested to know whether people think their interests are obsessive. I stopped collecting transport tickets in the late 1990s, but I only found out a few years ago that the amount I know about UK bus tickets and ticket machines is unusual.
Readit News
A recent episode of Radiolab, dated August 27, 2019, introduced a large audience (including me) to another podcast, The Memory Palace:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/memor...
With that strong endorsement I began going through the whole back-catalog of The Memory Palace, and Episode 36, dated January 7, 2011, “six scenes from the life of william james sidis, wonderful boy”, talks about Sidis' obsession with bus tickets. Or maybe more precisely, streetcar transfers.
http://thememorypalace.us/2011/01/six-scenes-in-the-life-of-...
I think it said he figured out ways to traverse great distances on a single fare by connecting transfers. That kind of graph traversal thinking strikes me as ahead of its time for the age of streetcars, and could plausibly have led to some interesting places.
If this written/possible (is it?) today, no doubt we'd have web pages and youtube channels devoted to "Transfer Surfing".
And I've got a new podcast to listen to!
“sought to provide insight into why people behave as they do, particularly in cases of a mob frenzy or religious mania. With the publication of his book Nervous Ills: Their Cause and Cure in 1922, he summarized much of his previous work in diagnosing, understanding and treating nervous disorders. He saw fear as an underlying cause of much human mental suffering and problematic behavior.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Sidis
https://www.sidis.net/TransfersContents.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis
I think his preference is probably closer to the generality and “interestingness” of the discovery.
Darwin’s theory is obviously very general and applicable in a multitude of domains in addition to the original one he worked on. Although Ramanujan’s series were not obviously general but they imply some deep mathematical patterns that are more general than specific forms. Neither had much economic utility during the discoverer’s lifetime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis#Politics_a...
Seems to have opted out of society for the most part afterward.
My problem lately has been acquiring enough free time to be obsessive. I really miss the days of playing piano for 12 hours straight or tinkering around with reverse engineering the OS of some MP3 player. And my wife is pregnant for the first time, so like PG mentions, I wonder (but suspect) how that is going to change things. I have a very intense dread of losing myself in the necessary mundanity of life; I am more financially comfortable than ever, but I also feel less like myself than I ever have. Going to meetings, making dinner, creating to-do lists — these don’t fit my personality at all, but I have to do them because they need to be done.
I think it is the rare person who literally has no obsessive interests at all. Sounds rather sad and boring.
I think it's rare to be obsessed with any of those things, but common to be superficially interested. For instance many people will just watch a TV show and enjoy it, and maybe even rewatch it a few times, without knowing all of the actors or writers or how the production of the show worked, etc etc, while you would expect an obsessed person to know at least some of these things, because they are compelled to find out at much as they possibly can about the object of their obsession.
When I was twenty I could afford an obsessive interest in my studies. Now I’m in my late thirties I simply have too much going on.
On the upside, when I’m sixty (which is peak bus ticket collecting age) I can see how I will, finally free of the constraints of work and children, finally have time to obsess again. I hope I still have the mental agility to do it well, and that I don’t get sucked into some bus ticket vortex.
I am not convinced that this is true. I think a lot more people are really interested or passionate about something than you may realize, but not all of them talk about those things to everyone. Alternatively, their passion might be what they do for a living.
So for instance a case of the former might be someone that has a very niche interest, so they have learned that in most cases talking about that thing does not lead to any interesting conversations.
Another possibility is that they might not view themselves as being particularly good at their area of interest (which may or may not be the case), so they don’t like to talk about it.
So for whatever reason, including the above or other reasons, you end up not learning about these interests that those people have when you just talk casually with them.
And as for the people that do it for a living, it could be that they have no interests outside of work, because work fulfills their passion. For example someone who is a really passionate salesperson, if they already truly derive meaning and joy from doing what they do at work, maybe they don’t need anything outside of work other than to relax and recover.
Lastly, another group of people I can think of are those that have interests that are very costly and they don’t have a high paying job. So most of the year they spend a lot of time at work and on the spare time they sit in front of the TV, or the computer and it sounds like they have no passion for anything but really they are spending a lot of time dreaming about the next trip they can afford to go on in the Himalayas or whatever, and when they sit at home they watch programs about skiing, and they read about skiing online and discuss it with others online, and maybe read magazines about it as well.
I’m not saying that everyone has something that they are deeply interested in, but I believe that more people do than one might realize.
It follows that whenever someone has an obsession, it comes up naturally while they talk about themselves.
It seems to reduce the problem back to what might lead to a useful discovery versus what won't. But piano is likely in the latter category, given that its obsessed about so often over centuries. Maybe the time for OS hacking to lead to discoveries is on its way out, as well.
Obsessive cooking might be more likely to be fruitful, come to think of it. We have changing ideas about food production and nutrition; and more enabling technologies around for new ideas.
(I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with obsessing about things that won't lead to discoveries. They could be useful in a more mundane way, or be useless but still engaging.)
You just articulated my worst fear, occasionally some aspect of it creeps into my life when society demands some "busy work" from me... each time it makes me feel like wanting to retreat into the wilderness to escape from society and enjoy nature and do things I actually find interesting.
Although the child prodigy is a popular image, I don't actually know anyone who's ended up doing the same thing all their life since they were young. People bounce around a lot before they hit something that clicks. Sometimes it's at 15, sometimes it's at 50.
Even people who have obsessive interests today first went through their boring phases, too.
Work part-time? I get 1-2 days off per week for projects (and house stuff) then in the evenings/weekends I actually have time and energy for playing with my child.
Plus, it's better for the environment than more work, more consumption.
Have you ever tried not doing things, and seeing what happens? A lot of things are quite frankly unnecessary in life.
Also, you might be surprised at what having a kid does to you, in a good way. Like PG mentions in his essay, once people have kids they tend to be their focus, and it's satisfying to guide them and see them grow.
The chances are your kid will take all your time when they're young and then probably won't share obsessive interest X when they get older.
Just as much with relationships - you can't be an appealing mate by being successful, well-balanced and well-adjusted. Or you can share interest X with you mate. But latter approach gives one 1/10000th as many people - not impossible but it's something to think about.
I think there are some portion of people who could find hobby X appealing but then, consciously or unconsciously think about these considerations and push themselves back to mainstream.
Then puberty hit. I became more interested in making sure my hair and clothes were cool enough, so I could fit in, so I could attract my crush. I became much more addicted into the mainstream grooves of video games, such as League of Legends. I lost interest in random obsessions, and instead replaced it with a more artificial one governed by Riot Games or Blizzard, and the digital points/levels that I got in game.
Then I grew up. I am now working as a software developer, but don't even have much obsession for programming at all. I just don't see how someone can get excited about the intracacies of a programming language, because its so dry and boring. And I feel a bit ashamed for not being too interested in hacking together a MVP anymore, even though programming presents such a huge realm of possibility available to anyone at no barrier/cost to entry. Nowadays, whenever I have a slight interest in anything, the capitalistic worldview has polluted my thoughts by always triggering the thought: "but is this a viable business idea? Could I get recognition from others and provide value such that the market would compensate me?"
I would trade anything to get my childhood obsessions back, because I am living mostly like the repetitive 9-5er you describe.
You will never be bored :p
2) Ruthless economizing & prioritizing of what's important to you. Combine activities, e.g. biking to work is commute, exercise, and possibly shower all-in-one.
That seemed an odd thing to include. Making food is a rewarding and intriguing pursuit. It combines aesthetics, science, social benefit and sensual rewards. It has a rich history and tons of controversies to poke at.
I never feel that making dinner is a waste of my time.
Here’s a benchmark question: is it better to be right or be popular?
Dead Comment
In the past, science was an eccentric hobby, not particularly valued and certainly not a viable career option. Today it's all of these things - like becoming a doctor. Telling your mother you want to be a scientist is far better than saying you want to be a musician. A hundred years ago that wouldn't have been the case.
The consequence of this is that these fields are filled up with careerists - people who are socially driven rather than curiosity driven. I think this might go some way to explaining the slowdown in scientific progress, because people chase low-risk 'hot' fields to advance their careers, rather than splashing about in the unfashionable backwaters of science for the sheer enjoyment of it.
Faraday had no formal training, but his natural intuition, interest, and tenacity made him standout.
Newton was a brilliant, paranoid asshole.
Instead funding goes to credentialed career scientists whose greatest ability is self-promotion, fund raising, and stringing-along the public.
As an example: The next big particle accelerator sucks up billions; while alternative approaches to QM never get any attention because it’s a guaranteed way to kill a career and become a pariah.
So nobody is available to even try to create the theoretical framework at the investment of a few million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_unsolved_problems
There is a formula you must fit into, 5 days a week, probably 50 hours, a specific attitude, and everything they can get from you. Try this: in your next offer negotiation, ask to cut your salary by 20% and get one day back.
Can't blame them. It is how Tesla and many other inventive minds have been made subject. It's not slavery but it doesn't honor the contributor acting in good faith.
I think it's worse than this: school and academia is no longer the sole option for the ultra curious. Curiosity is better fed by the internet, which means we end up lacking a social institution which captures and unifies people like this.
I'm not sure being a scientist was that unfashionable 100 years ago anyway: research labs were a thing, academic work was arguably more prestigious than it is today, fortunes were being made from inventions especially in fields where there were low hanging fruit, competitions and societies and exhibitions to celebrate scientific achievement had come into existence and the idea of inventiveness was even tied up in popular contemporaneous notions of national and racial superiority. There might be more subfields and more research to build on nowadays, but the stereotype of scientists being underpaid eccentrics certainly hasn't gone away and nor has the fact a mathematics prodigy can make a lot more money working in financial services than academic research.
I'm also unconvinced scientific progress has slowed because today's geniuses are working on interpreting our genetic code, modelling solutions to climate change and solving scaling problems in computation rather than drawing taxonomy diagrams, inventing new types of consumer electronics and breaking the land speed record.
i.e. exactly the people who were, by far, most likely to be living a comfortable, stress-free life back then. We should not underestimate the sheer amount of material progress and economic growth that has occurred since then. A lot more people can have the luxury of getting playfully obsessed about something than could back then.
100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific research by European-descended upper middle class men
was a thing.
50 years ago I wasn't expecting it to come back, it wouldn't have helped me anyway, overall scientific opportunities were far worse by then and the trend has continued. I wasn't waiting around for an uptick, I just started right away putting in the effort to try and compensate.
And I agree with this completely:
>There are certainly many geniuses obsessively researching into areas that stimulate their intellectual interest today that wouldn't have had the opportunity to do so back then.
There is so much brilliance in so many cultures through so many millennia, it can be seen that education and financial support are not even essential for genius, mainly for documenting, recognizing, and leveraging the influence of a very very small percentage of geniuses through history, only those few whose works were preserved and/or applied.
Surviving largely within a system of lesser thinkers whose works were better preserved and/or more stongly applied.
Which is why I think
>inventing new types of consumer electronics
can be a good thing if the consumer is given careful enough consideration.
Really! That's news to me. Are you aware of how much scientists are paid and their general career prospects?
The average scientist outside academia is probably doing grunt work and is paid badly - unless they're working in fintech, or something with an obvious financial upside.
The reality is that the entire research system is optimised for direct and indirect cash accumulation, not for genuine innovation or invention. There's some interest in blue sky funding, but if you're a fresh postgrad no grant body is going to give you a lot of money to go off and design a working warp drive unless you also have the bureaucratic skills to make your project sound like something they want to fund - probably for other reasons.
Researchers with good bureaucratic skills and genius-level scientific insights are exceptionally rare. And the publishing system isn't welcoming to talented semi-outsiders
Newton, Einstein, Darwin, and Ramanujan would really struggle in today's environment. Newton might be okay if he managed to get tenure, but the others not so much.
Are you joking? A small child literally has a better chance of growing up to become a professional athlete than a tenured research professor!
In 2016, American universities hired about 20,000 tenure-track faculty [1]. Adding up the major pro sports leagues, there are very very generously 10,000 American pro athletes, (i.e. people who don’t have day jobs).
I guess things change if you include all the minor league and farm teams, especially for the MLB.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/10/12/about-three-q...
I agree but I think it is driven by academia's incentive structure which promotes and rewards such behavior.
Wikipedia was a huge step in the right direction: making everything easier to understand. With lots of proofs and examples.
I think you could easily become billionaire by improving Wikipedia and the "make science and knowledge easily absorbable" 10X easier
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Wikipedia has been a godsend for me, to be able to understand core principles without having to wade through what seems to be obfuscated English in order to hide something relatively trivial at the heart of the document.
1. The difference between collecting bus tickets, working on mathematics, and figuring the crystallization patterns of snowflakes is virtually nothing. To the people obsessed with it, it is all-important; to outsiders, all three look indistinguishably pointless. Only in retrospect can anyone say whether the activity led to something society considers important. The truly obsessed don't care.
2. Genius is overrated. We like stories of great individuals changing the world with their genius because we like stories and we dislike chance. But for nearly every invention and idea, history shows that multiple people were working on it at the same time. Civilization's progress is more a sequence of ideas whose time had come, but we prefer stories of great unique geniuses.
There is a virus that can release neurotoxins and it is flipped in very specific parts of the brain with a MRI-like device. This can elicit a state of “Focus” where the person (victim more like) becomes totally obsessed with a particular idea or subject. They devote all energy towards this subject and can make stunning breakthroughs on difficult topics because they are utterly and completely _obssessed_ with whatever topic they are supposed to be.
They are held captives by their own fascination and work as slaves.
I know this is taking the idea a bit far from the point, but it’s an interesting extension of the idea.
Agree and not to mention we don't have any data on people who loved and were obsessive and that did not lead to anything. I am actually surprised in how simplistic PG is when he writes some of what he does. For example he states that Darwin was obsessed (as he was) but ignores that just like the bus ticket collector he most likely did that simply because he was interested or curious for some reason. A hobby or a like is no better than anyone else's. Who is to say watching football matters (it doesn't) or collecting stamps matters (it doesn't) or by the same token if you obsess over mathematics (and it matters and leads to something) that that is why you even did it in the first place?
I would even say that often people are obsessive about what they do not even thinking it will lead to anything. I was an obsessive commenter on a site and most would say I was wasting my time. But that activity has led to over 7 figures of income. But I did it because I enjoyed it (and did it every day). Likewise the same happens here on HN. In one sense you might be wasting your time but if you enjoy it and it leads to something is not genuine to say you did it for another reason.
That's amazing! Can you tell us more?
What?
> But for nearly every invention and idea, history shows that multiple people were working on it at the same time.
Not just "people" - "geniuses". History shows multiple geniuses were working on it at the same time.
I do agree that we give too much credit to a single genius. Had Isaac Newton not lived, we'd still have calculus, physics, etc in some form or another. The same thing with Einstein, Turing, etc. But that doesn't mean genius is overrated. What's overrated is the hero worshiping narrative we build around a single genius due to racial or nationalistic reasons.
But I think we should have as many geniuses working on problems as possible rather than saying that genius is overrated.
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Shame on you and your ilk for suggesting Descartes, Newton, Kant etc. were just there picking low hanging fruit. They were doing work no one had the courage to do.
Crossing into personal attack isn't allowed, and we ban accounts the keep doing it, so can you please not do it here? If you'd take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html you'll see how the intended spirit of this site points in the opposite direction. Note that it doesn't depend on how right you are.
Now compare that to the modern day, where I'd say a lot higher percentage of people are hitting their potential as a genius. Therefore, a lot more people are coming up with new novel things, but since a lot of the easy major milestones in sciences have been attained, the impact of those single individual geniuses is much smaller.
Modern age Newton could be just a very good AI researcher from England. It's just impossible for humans to have devolved so much that the genius of the previous generations would be so much different than we have today.
...
> Shame on you and your ilk for suggesting Descartes, Newton, Kant etc. were just there picking low hanging fruit. They were doing work no one had the courage to do.
There's a lot of passion in your comment, but it's also really antagonistic. The person you replied to was very respectful and cogent in expressing their point of view; you abandoned that civility quite quickly - and for what?
If you're as well read as your references imply, surely you can appreciate an argument which casts aspersion on the "lone hero" ideation of historical progress.
The first few crops of Dota millionaires all had the same backstory: "I played this game 14 hours a day. If there were tournaments at all they didn't really pay anything. My parents said I was wasting my life. I never had a girlfriend. Everyone thought I was a loser, but I just wanted to play and win... and now I know it was all worth it."
And the thing that I couldn't help thinking is: was it? I'm not sure that any rational person would make that decision. Even if you could somehow know that competitive gaming would get big enough, and that your particular game would be popular enough, and that you could become good enough to win – that's just table stakes. You then have to actually play the game obsessively for a decade. There are, frankly, far more comfortable ways to earn a million dollars in exchange for 20,000 to 50,000 hours of your life.
It's kind of hard to take a coherent message away from that. Should you become a competitive gamer for the millions? Certainly not then, and definitely not now. Should you hope that your fringe interest (bus tickets, say) becomes a million-dollar enterprise? No, that's probably even less likely.
Perhaps the message is just that millions are delivered to those with a combination of luck and the freedom to pursue rationally unjustifiable interests. A combination that is increasingly rare in an economic system designed to squeeze out the inefficient. Lest we forget the Bell monopoly; we may never see such inefficiency again.
I have a similar story. I dropped out of school at 16, and spent 14+ hours a day playing Stepmania Online, which was Dance Dance Revolution for your fingers. I was one of the best in the world! Then everyone stopped playing and nothing came of it. So for every DOTA millionaire or whatnot there’s likely thousands of people who are obsessed with something equally niche who haven’t realized any financial gains because of it.
Now I’m a software engineer, it’s working out way better than playing video games all day.
Do you still crack open Stepmania every so often for old times sake? I have no idea if any kind of a community still exists around it.
Anything competitive is emphatically not a good example of this. If you're in a competition, then by definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else. That's a guaranteed recipe for not accomplishing anything meaningful in life.
Competition can be great for cultivating positive character traits and developing certain skills, but at some point you need to move beyond it.
Because you're not pursuing personal advantage, this kind of obsession is incompatible with competition. You're obsessively interested in collecting old bus tickets not because you want to get paid, not because you want to be famous, not because you want to change the world, and not because you want to win.
So it's a bit weird for pg to identify "heuristics you can use to guess whether an obsession might be one that matters". If you care about whether a thing matters, instead about the thing itself, then you're not really disinterested.
As soon as your obsession becomes influenced by thoughts of personal advantage, then it's about garden variety ambition and determination, not the magical property of disinterest that pg describes.
Disinterested obsession may be a powerful source of innovation and progress, but the instant you intentionally try to harness this power in pursuit of progress, you destroy the magic of disinterest.
I guess the rebuttal might go something like: Business is inherently competitive. Creating startups, you are usually competing not only with old line businesses but with other startups.
I guess the rebuttal to the rebuttal might sound something like Thiel's startup lectures: Startups should try to be anticompetitive, ideally carving out new niches. You don't want to engage in head-to-head competition.
The 3rd degree rebuttal might be something like: There are plenty of examples of successful startups that began as clones of other businesses (Facebook seems the canonical example).
But then as you say, they moved beyond being a clone of Friendster/Myspace/Tribe/etc... but isn't that the competitive process?
Even if you create or exploit something wildly new that is completely beyond reach for anyone else at that moment – let's say you made time travel viable tomorrow – as soon as you did and started commercialising it, competition would start forming later that day.
For everything else, you will right off the gate be competing with someone over something (at the very least time and money). Airbnb is competing with Hotels/Motels, Uber with Taxis, Facebook with MySpace. MySpace with more specialised communities and GeoCities. The internet was competing with telephones, mail, fax and the yellow pages.
Can you elaborate?
What the above comment is about applies to so much in life, from education to careers because at their core, they are competitions.
> If you're in a competition, the. By definition you're doing the exact same thing as everyone else.
Not true.
There are people who play competitive, ranked, games 3 hrs a week and are happy with being in the top 50% of players
And there are people who spend 30hrs a week in a game and are profoundly unhappy they're only in the top 5% of players.
Those wind up being two very different paths, and it applies to way more than just gaming, like education, which I can speak from experience to that
From a young age I would spend hours upon hours on computers working on my games and random ideas. Even in school I would skip classes to work on my own projects in a computer lab.
My parents felt it was a complete waste of time (especially since it became a huge drain on my performance at school). I didn't have nearly as many close friends as I should have, didn't form a lot of the bonds people growing up do, it ruined my relationship with my parents.
At the end of the day through luck or something I scraped through high school with a .1 above failing GPA, dropped out of community college after failing 2 semesters and started a career in tech by freelancing.
Now 5 years later and the positions I've taken are consistently higher seniority than my friends who did CS in college, so it worked out, but at what cost?
Those years I lost, not even talking to one of my parents for over a year despite living in the same house, wasn't really worth it.
But it was an obsession, I didn't obsess over programming because I wanted to have a great career one day, it was because I couldn't help it. It was almost like an addiction that I got lucky enough to have double as a marketable skill.
It's crazy how much article really resonates with my experience, almost annoyingly so since I feel like a bus ticket collector sometimes, sure tech is a marketable skill, but you sure build a lot of unimportant stuff
That's a mistaken conclusion because you didn't follow it properly to the narrowed end: if you're in a large field of competition at a thing and you're among the best in the world at it, then the exact opposite is more likely to be true (you will likely do something meaningful and have extreme success) and your supposed guaranteed recipe collapses.
This premise holds true in eg: business, acting, music, science, traditional sports, games like chess, and numerous other fields.
Right now, around the world, dozens (or hundreds) of scientists are competing to reach the same breakthrough. They may not know who all the competitors are and may not know they're all chasing the same thing, but they are. One or a small group of them will get there before the rest. It is competition and it doesn't exclude you from doing something meaningful: you need to win the competition.
See: Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Kurt Cobain, Whitney Houston, Craig Venter, Garry Kasparov, John Carmack, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos
All had to rise to the top of highly competitive fields with a large supply of competitors. How many other grunge bands were there next to Nirvana? How many other singers did Whitney Houston have to stand apart from? How many other women (frequently younger, a big deal in tennis) has Serena Williams had to competitively outlast over ~20 years to spend so much time on top of her sport and put together one of the greatest sports careers of all-time? It's a never ending supply of younger, highly talented competitors, and yet Williams did what she did.
This is absolutely false and a terrible thing to perpetuate. Work ethic has the highest controllable coefficient to success as an output. Luck exists and the universe is probabilistic, yes, but it is not non-deterministic.
This self-lashing of our community and amongst the populist movement that is growing in popularity in the EU and US is ridiculous, reducing the sum total of human achievement into lucky chance rather than actually understanding the probabilistic universe and knowing that while our actions do not wholly determine our fate, they play the single largest role we have control over, and as such, it would be better to believe the myth that we have full control over our destiny rather than this ridiculous concept that luck controls ~100% of circumstance.
Probability theory needs to be taught in primary school, apparently, because for members of even this community, the fallacy of determinism and binary outcomes run rampant.
For every "Ronaldo" there are a small amount of moderately successful players playing soccer for a good living.
The myriad is the group of people that are coasting their way through life trying to put in as little effort as possible and naturally they don't succeed.
Tarn and Zach Adams are also bus ticketers.
I disagree of how you define rationality here. If someone feels it serves them fine to play 14 hours of a game, it seems perfectly rational for me. Especially in the case that you mentioned, where they were playing before any big money was on the table. It means they liked, despite a lot of people judging them with an air of superiority.
They played the game they loved and they loved to win at it
When money arrived into e-games they were most prepared
I don’t like competitive gaming so even if you tell me there are millions to be made I still won’t do it, it seems something so unattainable
Where do you see that message? No luck was involved in your example, just hard work on behalf of the good players and of the Dota developers, and pursuing a hobby with passion is perfectly rational.
To a point, yes. Though we may disagree on the threshold where it crosses over from rational to unhealthy obsession. And there is certainly luck involved when there are tens who found fortune out of millions participating.
Frankly, back 20 years ago I would have never thought that watching someone play a game would become a form of entertainment.
Not everything is about ROI, I'm also not saying playing Dota for your entire life is going to be particularly fulfilling in many other ways thought - after all they are playing out their lives within the very finite confines of someone else's creation.
The author does point this out as a suggested heuristic, if you are obsessed with someone elses creation, it's probably not going to be very fruitful (whether fruitful means money, scientific discovery, or fulfillment ones curiosity etc).
If you told these guys to be a competitive gamer for the millions, they probably would have stuck to competitive fishing or whatever they were doing anyway. Taking a message or leadership from it is kind of the antithesis of the point. The point is that some social pursuits are the birthplace of the next big thing and some people who are focused on socializing need to make the choice on pursuits that have a potential and pursuits that don't like. Dance class is pretty dead as a career, but we're going to need people who can sort quality from quantity in a few years, the people focused on a qualitative pursuit socially need to pick a field where it's obvious that's needed like journalism or the swath of video games sure to flood the market.
It doesn't have much to do with rational decision making in detail and is instead a generalized story about the different directions in life you can choose.
>> it's more promising if you're creating something, rather than just consuming something someone else creates
Gaming consumes the creative efforts of others. It's fun, invigorating and a healthy pass-time. But it's not good ground for growing genius.
You have to weigh your current abilities and their earning potential vs. the costs of venturing into a new field.
Being at the top of Dota is easier than being at the top of Math or Chess or Go, since Dota is a newer field. They aren't really comparable, but you still compare them if you are trying to figure out what you want to put your time into.
Some people just get lucky and find the thing they are good at on the first try. Then they can maximize their hours available for that thing.
Other people (probably the majority) have to try different fields and start later, and ultimately have less time overall to spend.
So it actually seems rational (if maximizing hours-spent is your goal) to go all-in on the first thing that grabs your interest, which could be Dota.
I slightly disagree - neither Chess nor Go have nearly the millions of new players playing it obsessively as they come of age. Math is a bit different, but often times “good at math” isn’t very rewarding except as it pertains to an ancillary job, or if you’re one of the relative few who become a math major.
There’s also a major drop off over time with MOBA players - the average age is 22 or something for professionals. Eventually the reflexes get worse.
As a result, more and more areas of science and technology get stuck near local maxima. The same happened in all ancient civilisations.
I think you are confusing financial success with contributing to artistic/scientific/intellectual progress.
Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to be a genius to work in FAANG. It's a lot of luck. You just have to give yourself as many good chances in the interview pipeline as possible.
Nah, millions are delivered to those who already have millions, everything else is noise that is overemphasized to distract the bottom 80+%.
Newton was not just a physicist who dabbled with occult. He turned occult into physics.
Before Newton scientists and natural philosophers like Descartes believed that movements were caused by physical contact.
Newton started traditionally and proposed the existence of ether that transmits forces. When he became interested in alchemy, he replaced ether with occult forces that repel and attract each other. Newton received criticism for his theory that gravity was worked through "action at a distance", because that is occult quality. His theory was not seen as physical theory at first, because 'physical theories' at the time were physical in the intuitive common sense meaning. Action at a distance, across a vacuum, was occultism.
Keynes called Newton the last magician. He was able to make similar leap as Einstein did.
Did he have some mountain of experimental data, to which he found a model which fit? Did he have sub-models which he unified, or simplified? What exactly were his inputs and outputs?
In school we're taught that the scientific method involves hypothesis, and experimentation, and confirmation or rejection, but in Einstein's case all I hear about are fully-formed theories -- and then confirmation by others, years after his death. Did he eliminate other possible theories through experimentation, or did he happen to get it right from the start? Was relativity the only possible solution, or was there also some luck involved?
His outputs were deducing models that elegantly explained these phenomena: that a constant speed of light in all reference frames, as unintuitive as that is, would lead to the equations of relativity, and that energy being transmitted only in discrete quanta would lead to the photoelectric effect and blackbody radiation effects that were observed by others.
This was largely not a feat of producing theories on data. It was coming up with a simpler explanation for phenomena which had already been known, but for which existing explanations were far too complex.
The amazing part is that he did this four times in one year (1905): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers
1. Maxwell's equations did not permit information to propagate faster than some finite velocity c, which (for many good reasons) can be identified with the speed of light in vaccuum.
2. Closely related mathemaical fact: Maxwell's equations were Lorentz invariant.
3. On the other hand if one envisioned a charged particle moving in a field, then Newtonian theory says the particle dynamics were galilean invariant.
But the particle and the field really are part of one system, and it would be odd for the two parts to have different symmetry properties, as this would mean for example that when one changes between two coordinate systems their equations of motion would transform in different ways.
I know lots of you know way more physics & history of physics than I. Please jump in!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17098.Isaac_Newton
It doesn't shy away from what later hagiographies deride as "religious superstition", but what according to Gleick was integral to Newton's worldview.
I was putting a few examples on Instagram, but I don't really understand how Instagram chooses to crop images so I stopped until I have time to work it out. https://www.instagram.com/p/B1JpyfXHLRG/?utm_source=ig_web_c... If you're interested in classifying things you can sort tickets out in several ways -- by bus company operator, by year, by colour, by machine. If you're interested in social history you can use tickets to illustrate some small points - here's a "workman return" which would probably have a different name today: https://www.instagram.com/p/B1Lpy4kHKWR/?utm_source=ig_web_c...
Through this I met other transport ticket collectors, and other transport enthusiasts ("bus spotters", railway enthusiasts).
Paul starts his essay by mentioning natural ability. He then describes this obsessive interest as a third requirement, which implies to me that obsessive interest is not necessarily part of natural ability.
I'd be interested to know whether obsessive interest is something that can be learnt, or whether it's a feature of neuro-diversity and thus part of natural ability. One of the diagnostic criteria for autism is "fixed and repetitive interests".
I'm also interested to know whether people think their interests are obsessive. I stopped collecting transport tickets in the late 1990s, but I only found out a few years ago that the amount I know about UK bus tickets and ticket machines is unusual.