I am rich and have no idea what to do
I am rich and have no idea what to do
This is a twofer:
- The article itself
- HN's take on it
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Just the opening alone, doesn't know what to do with his life, but mentions 'NPC coworkers' (that is also so fucking weird, I don't think I have worked with much people who gave off an NPC vibe off at all, like people always seemed like people with lives and hobbies, social lives, families interests, stuff they cared about, etc.
It started to dawn on me that what I actually wanted was to look like Elon, and that is incredibly cringe. It hurts to even type this out.
My reactions to this 'ow come on, you call others NPCs?!' and 'at least he knows it is cringe'
When I got back home and regaled my friends with my mountain stories, one of my friends joked that I should work for Elon and Vivek at DOGE and help America get off its current crash to defaulting on its own debt. So I reached out to some people and got in.
This has got to be a parody.
So now I’m in Hawaii. I’m learning physics.
Ha, I recently watched, this video billionaires want you to know they could have done physics by actual Theoretical Physicist, Angela Collier. I'm quite sure he will not be getting an actual degree in physics.
I don't have the energy to read the orange site comments.
The orange site comments aren't all worthless:
His attention span won't be enough to stick with physics for longer than 4 weeks.
Physics was actually a dangerous sinkhole for my young undiagnosed adhd brain. There's always something else to learn, some new rabbit hole to dive into, some cool research testing the limits of yet another poorly understood frontier. It's like tvtropes but with the mysteries of the universe.
I was fascinated to learn everything, but could never hold a single subject long enough to comprehend it fully. I realized I would never hope to make a meaningful expansion or contribution to the science. You start out with ball bearing cannons and air hockey tables, and next thing you know you're reading about string theory and supersymmetry, dark matter mathematics, the effect of gravity on time, bosons and gluons and photons, Oh my! Then you get an advisor who's been studying the same formula on the same whiteboard for 60 years, trying to trisect an angle with naught but a compass, and if they are kind they tell you to run. If you're smart, you listen.
One thing that may not be visible from outside the profession is that there are a lot of steps in between air-hockey tables and the research frontier, especially for the part of the frontier that gets the most press — black holes, Large Hadron Collider stuff, quantum computing, etc. Wanting to understand any of those things at a level better than (bong rip) man, like, quantum mechanics, dude, requires systematic study. Doing that entirely on one's own might not be impossible, but it's damn hard.
Great no problem I'll just read through the sequences and be all caught up!
eyelid twitches
remember to carry the thumb drive with your personal frame of a blade of grass falling - you should all have been issued one in your welcome packs by cult greeter upon arrival
I keep it with me always, but never in plain sight in case a computer sees it through a webcam and starts getting ideas
I love that video because until I watched it, I didn't realise how much of a thing it was. Physics seems to be a magnet for the "iamverysmart" types; I feel sorry for actual physicists
It is a field that attracts a lot of cranks (who are pretty recognizable as being cranks via various patterns). Being a well known physicist must be hell.
Back when I was an undergrad I saw a letter addressed to the department from a German gentleman who claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine (this was the department of mechanics). I remember the letter being quite typographically florid and especially the author’s likeness in silhouette.
My advisor had fun finding the flaw in the proposal. Took a few minutes.
I often wondered if demolishing a PM suggestion would be a good extra credit question on an exam.
You don't even have to be well-known to get crank attention. Post anything with "quantum" in the title on the arXiv and they'll find your e-mail.
Source: this is one of the few times when I can say "trust me, bro" and be entirely sincere about it
Had no idea it was worse. Damn.
Remember that actual physicists can fall into the same trap, and believe themselves to be very smart too. Plenty suffer an irresistible urge to fix every other field that’s doing it wrong.
As an alternative to the various xkcds on the subject, have an smbc instead.
Yes, quite. As a scientist (biochemistry), I sometimes have to catch myself on this too.
A tension that I see within the sciences and beyond is not sufficiently factoring in how good communication is essential to good research. Some of my peers disagree with me vehemently here, arguing that good research is good research regardless of one's ability (or willingness) to dress up said research with pretty words, but I argue that the whole point of publishing papers or going to conferences is because science relies on communicating our research. I see a weird amount of hostility directed towards scientists who branch out into science communication. I speculate that an analogue of the "physicist instinct" is at the core of this — a disregard of the skill involved in interdisciplinary research, and an unwillingness to recognise how situated one's own knowledge is.
One time I tried explaining to a colleague that a particular paper using an ML model to determine sexual orientation based on selfies was stupid as shit. Sexual orientation is not something you can confirm (gender is a social construct and sexual orientation is self-reported), nor it it encoded in a person's face, so hello ontological error[1].
This colleague's response was "that's how science works." Assuming that he knew that computer science isn't really a science[2], I told him it suggested a fundamental misunderstanding of science, which resulted in the following exchange:
Colleague: Well, I have a PhD in Computer Science
Me: I basically do too[3] and Computer Science is not a science. You could argue that it's a branch of math
Colleague: OK, but my undergrad was in PhysicsIt's like these dorks saw this one amusing xckd comic, missed the point entirely, and then decided they wanted to be the physicist in the panel?
[1]: The model is also less accurate than
def sexual_orientation(person): return "straight"ignoring the ontological error.
[2]: I have never once heard a single part of the scientific method brought up since I started computer science. When I was hanging out with the pure mathematicians, they seemed to generally get this: A formal system alone is not fucking science, even if you're using it to model the real world.
[3]: I was at the "all but dissertation" stage of my PhD. Now I'm at the "starting from scratch" phase.
Funnily enough, Angela Collier also made some pretty good videos for "actually" studying physics. Spoiler: no need to go to Hawaii, or anywhere further than your own couch/desk!
sheesh i guess life sciences are too much of a dirty job [1] for billionaire megaminds. unless they want to pull a theranos, of course
[1] unlike with physics to some degree, or maths generally or CS specifically you won't get too far on blackboard only without lab work. like selected subfields of physics, biotech has that aura of place where all these old scifi tropes that sv wankers misunderstand and fawn over come to life, and also there's some crossover with startup/vc crowd