Yes, the scientific method pre-dates the industrial revolution for a reason. You simply can't get cracking on rocket science without foundational science.[-3]
If I were to put myself in Archimedes' shoes (when he basically discovered calculus) motivation comes from "this is nuts but it could work" and meaning comes from "yep that works!"
Information is physical and part of the physical entropic universe, Landauer showed that.
When we imagine something in our brain we are physically testing or creating something even if ephemeral, these thoughts you make have meaning and are real just with low distribution.
They can be very complex thoughts, you can invent worlds and objects and play around with them in your mind for relatively low cost, this is the root of humanities power, the ability to create meaning, to create arbitrary coherence (even if it's just internal coherence)
You can distribute this meaning to others, as a written or spoken word.
You can investigate if your thought has correspondence to something that exists in the exterior world. This can be science and discovery.
But you can also create something that you know doesn't exist and then work to have it realized in the external world.
What's the casual path from Gene Rondenberry to the iPod? Hard to compute.
We create meaning. It's what we do.
The funny thing is this, we keep talking about people's search for meaning, but if we look at the observable facts, to speak poetically, if the universe was sentient (and I don't personally believe it is) it would be looking to us to see what meaning we create and new shit we discover and why it works the way it does.
Maybe all i'm suggesting is that AI can help us quickly check that what we humans are working on is indeed insane ( and switch to something else if it passes their sanity checks)
The causal path from Rodenderry to the ipod .. is.. easy to approximate compared to the causal path from Zen Monks to Darth Vader.. (though they are in roughly opposite directions)
There's this related phenom which seems paradoxical to me but maybe you can help figure:
Things that are built with money (& not by say, intrinsic motivation alone) seem to have a high ratio of (traction) to (resources invested). Not sure if marketing alone can explain that?
Obvious exceptions come to mind , eg the Linux kernel, but even that was massively boosted by commercial interests.
(One other class of exceptions could be tentatively named "winning the zeitgeist lottery")
If you would agree that this phenom exists in the short to mid time frame: without the likelihood of traction, how can intrinsic meaning alone provide motivation?
I would guess a lot of intrinsic motivation is driven a lot by hormones and things like dopamine release when you do something that is really interesting or exciting. I play tennis and absolutely love it, I will never make a dime from doing it, and that's totally okay with me.
Things that are built with money are often done so for scale. Successful things that are built with money often also have people who have some interest in the thing they are building.
Thanks for helping to refine the thinking. I guess the other side of the coin that would be make the paradox interesting is that, in the long term, it has to seem that most of the stuff built with money (but without intrinsically motivated managers) lose out to the stuff built on pure passion. After discounting for a heap of survival bias.
Yeah I guess it really depends on what the measure for success is. As with all things, the answer is probably that products that work really well or are beloved are often a combination of money and passion. Unfortunately, once the product/company reaches a certain threshold, it seems to get bought out and there is only money left, and thus it becomes crap.
This is, as I see it, the tension between wisdom and power.
Wealth, in the modern era, has been a vehicle to achieve power. It is certainly not the only path, but it is the most culturally universal path to influence the effort of others available today. When we set our ambitions towards lofty outcomes that require power to accomplish, we inevitably run into the capacity constraints involved with being a single person.
Money is a path to acquiring sufficient power to realize goals. Power itself is amoral, and the idealist with good intentions must inevitably conclude that power is a requirement to realize big dreams.
But, effort is also power. For our sanity, wisdom would have us focus on our efforts, with every moment we have, rather than whether or not we achieve the goal. I'll also add that AI is increasing the scope of what our efforts alone can accomplish, for good and bad.
To achieve large goals, pragmatism would require us to derive meaning and purpose from the effort put towards those ends, rather than the attainment of the goal. Think this is best described as an 'open purpose'.
Edit: if I were to put myself in Archimedes' shoes, motivation comes from "this is nuts but it could work" and meaning comes from "it works!"
>Money is a path to acquiring sufficient power
Power and money are almost interchangeable, and I'm taking a wild guess that better questions are hidden in that "almost" (as you say, "wisdom+effort", but I'd have to sleep on that for a few nights in order not to casually one-up that with "precience")
I'd tend to disagree they're interchangeable, although it may feel like it for many things. Our culture certainly wants people to equate the two, because if people believe in the myth that money = power, money has more power.
However, I'd encourage you to contemplate all the things that money can't "buy."
I categorize power not as the sum total of capability to dominate, or purchase, but influence belief, shape motivation, and inspire action.
Our body can develop power over the physical world. Our mind can develop power over the world of myths and information. Our ability to communicate can develop motivation in others through belief, inspiration, and hope.
Money can out-source, to acquire the power and resources of others.
There are many ways to power - Money is a centrally dominant one, today, but is predicated on a certain order to the world and is not universal.
So "traction", as in, many people using your creation, is the only form of worthwhile meaning? Sounds like you believe external validation is the only form of worthwhile meaning?
Edit: if I were to put myself in Archimedes' shoes, motivation comes from "this is nuts but it could work" and meaning comes from "it works!"
More like survival. I think of Archimedes' letters to the librarian of Alexandria, describing his secret technique of infinitessimals. It seems clear that he knew his work was meaningful but he wasnt going to die without telling anybody about it. He wasn't looking for validation, he didn't need it
It's the LinkedIn version of the challenge to tell people they can prove P=NP without te ...
As far as Jane Jacobs (not a professional) is concerned, this is the hardest problem for any tribe of humans: how to survive as a culture?
On values (some say fumes) or on money. Values vs value. Academia back in the days of Athena was a "solution" on the values end of the spectrum. Religion, too, until they figured out they could appeal to the "charity" of the spiritually hungry rich (& later, everyone)
(I appreciate the Benedictine orders for limiting their offer of spiritual goods to some devilish brews )
>Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention
--EAB, Why I Write
(The trick could be for some of us amateurs to preferentially attend to the preternaturally funny babies)
That may be what I was thinking of. An AI-assisted search suggests I may have conflated that passage with this one from Keep the Aspidistra flying:
> Over and over again he tried, quite vainly, to explain to them why he would not yield himself to the servitude of a ‘good’ job. ‘But what are you going to live on? What are you going to live on?’ was what they all wailed at him. He refused to think seriously about it. Of course, he still harboured the notion that he could make a living of sorts by ‘writing’ ... The next seven months were devastating. They scared him and almost broke his spirit. He learned what it means to live for weeks on end on bread and margarine, to try to ‘write’ when you are half starved
And there's also this other passage from Why I Write:
> The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.
>Andersen suggests that a tradeoff exists in predictive processing, where giving higher weight to prediction errors prevents the detection of false patterns (i.e. apophenia) at the cost of being unable to detect higher level patterns, and giving lower weight to prediction errors allows for the detection of higher level patterns at the cost of occasionally detecting patterns that don't exist, as in delusions and hallucinations that occur in schizotypy.
Personally: I focus on the anhedonia because ime the other schizotypists* (&, less commonly, diagnosed autists) seem to have it, and, as I might have mentioned before, negative affect in combo with some other traits tends to attract bullies/certain sadists/karens/well just friggin identarians and not fellow autists/schizos whatever :)
(*As far as I'm concerned the founding stoics were simply rationalizing their anhedonia, so they needed rich and powerful patrons to take that practice to the masses. Former-day VC and unis, as it were)
I was amused that higher quality quartz from Spruce Pines NC (Sibelco) doesn't go into the chips themselves, but the silicon crucibles (makes sense in retrospect because you need your tools to be finer than the product, but as a chip-user..) and display glass
>One surprising thing I learned is that ChatGPT can solve the word segmentation problem quite well, and it can even add punctuation and capitalization back into the message. While LLMs are far too slow to participate in the performance-intensive crack (we can use simpler heuristics like trigrams for that,) their ability to make semantic sense of partially mangled text might still be useful in automating the “sense of rightness” which hitherto has been left to human
cryptographers.
As someone who has worked in adjacent areas, I guessed that one might find it in random matrix pedagogy, but only after reading Sam (B) Hopkin's comment was I able to get google to give a source for something close to that formula:
https://youtu.be/h0gPomI3h8o
that's not from hesitation. And one can only call the Syracuse invasion an inefficiency in hindsight.
The immediate opportunity of a ~million Roman lives compared to other hypothetical opportunities
(One might guess that opportunities of the win-win type weren't covered by Munger's model)