Shurik's Static

The opposite of a great truth is another great truth

6 min read

“The opposite of a simple truth is a lie. The opposite of a great truth is another great truth.” (1)

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  • Focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of…🔗

Everyday is a new opportunity to assign value to things, to decide what is important, what is beautiful, what is good, what is deserving. In this regard you are truly the Monarch of your life, first of your name, bla bla,

Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner. It’s common to procrastinate on thinking hard about these things because it might require you to acknowledge that you were very wrong about something in the past, and perhaps wasted a bunch of time based on that (e.g. dating the wrong person or praying to the wrong god). However, in most cases you have to either admit this eventually or, if you never admit it, lock yourself into a sub-optimal future life trajectory, so it’s best to be impatient and stare directly into the uncomfortable topic until you’ve figured out what to do.

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  • Ask: ” [What are the most important problems, and why aren’t you working on them?](My Answer to the Hamming Question) “…

    Let us go on to how to do great things. Among the important properties to have is the belief you can do important things. If you do not work on important problems, how can you expect to do important work? Yet direct observation and direct questioning of people show most scientists spend most of their time working on things they believe are not important and are not likely to lead to important things.

    As an example, after I had been eating for some years with the physics table at the Bell Telephone Laboratories restaurant, fame, promotion, and hiring by other companies ruined the average quality of the people, so I shifted to the chemistry table in another corner of the restaurant.

    I began by asking what the important problems were in chemistry, then later what important problems they were working on, and finally one day said, “If what you are working on is not important and not likely to lead to important things, then why are you working on it?” After that I was not welcome and had to shift to eating with the engineers!

    That was in the spring, and in the fall one of the chemists stopped me in the hall and said, “What you said caused me to think for the whole summer about what the important problems are in my field, and while I have not changed my research it was well worth the effort.” I thanked him and went on—and noticed in a few months he was made head of the group. About ten years ago I saw he became a member of the National Academy of Engineering. No other person at the table did I ever hear of, and no other person was capable of responding to the question I had asked: “Why are you not working on and thinking about the important problems in your area?” If you do not work on important problems, then it is obvious you have little chance of doing important things.

  • …But recognize that greatness cannot be planned.

    • https://paulgraham.com/genius.html
    • Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned

      For example, the very first computer was built with vacuum tubes, which are devices that channel electric current through a vacuum. However here’s the strange part: The history of vacuum tubes has nothing to do with computers. People like Thomas Edison who were originally interested in vacuum tubes were investigating electricity, not computing. Later, in 1904, physicist John Ambrose Fleming refined the technology to detect radio waves, still with no inkling of building a computer. It was only decades later that scientists first realized that vacuum tubes could help build computers, when the ENIAC was finally invented.

      So even though vacuum tubes are a key stepping stone on the road to computers, few if any could see it coming. In fact if you were alive in 1750 with the objective of building some kind of computer, you’d never think of inventing a vacuum tube first. Even after vacuum tubes were first discovered, no one would realize their application to computation for over 100 years. The problem is that the stepping stone does not resemble the final product.

(1) A quote from Niels Bohr introduced to me by Conor, one of the people I look up to. https://x.com/Conaw/status/1487595832895442949

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