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- Hacker News
- >Claude Shannon once told me that as a kid, he remembered being stuck on a jigsaw puzzle. His brother, who was passing by, said to him: “You know: I could tell you something.”
>That’s all his brother said.
>Yet that was enough hint to help Claude solve the puzzle. The great thing about this hint… is that you can always give it to yourself.
When I've been stuck on a problem that I know there's a solution to, sometimes I've been able to get unstuck by imagining myself in the future after having solved the problem looking back and kicking myself for how obvious it was.
Maybe that only works for problems that have solutions so obvious you'd kick yourself for not seeing them, but it does put me in a frame of mind of looking back from the solution and seeing the path out of being stuck.
My other trick is that when I've been working hard to solve a difficult problem, and then at the last moment something horribly discouraging happens and everything falls apart, I realize that there is no God, but if there were, he's a huge asshole and a bully who loves to throw things in your path just before you're about to succeed, to discourage you and make you give up right as you're on the edge of success, sabotoging yourself by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Because he loves to laugh at you for being the cause of your own defeat.
Now I recognize that pattern of everything falling apart after it was going so well as a sign that I was just about to succeed, and God's just being a dick, so I refuse to give up, and interpret it as an encouraging sign, just to spite him. Even though he doesn't exist, it really annoys him when I do that.
It may sound crazy, but it's not as crazy as believing in God! Maybe it's not internally consistent, because God can't be an asshole and a bully if he doesn't exist, but it's certainly consistent with how the fictional Bible depicts him, and how the vast majority of his followers and the leaders they elect act in the real world.
I recorded this several days ago: Alan Kay was performing an AV test before giving a talk for Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration, and God threw a monkey wrench into the loop, which Alan broke out of with amazing ideas from Claud Shannon that he thinks about every day.
Alan Kay: Shannon Gave Us a Way of Dealing with Noisy Channels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjntrqhn8pk
Alan Kay performs an improvisational avant garde layered audio feedback loop about Claude Shannon, live online during Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration.
Alan was scheduled to talk about how encountering Simula sparked his early thoughts about objects. During setup, somebody had the live stream playing out loud near an open Zoom mic, so his own voice kept arriving back in his ears about 21 seconds late, over and over.
What he said was not random: "Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels." And: "I think about that almost every day. I realize what the fuck is going on and it's just so amazing." Shannon's noisy channel coding theorem is the math for exactly the kind of channel that was garbling him as he praised it.
Alan joked it was "being rerouted to Mars and back." At the speed of light, a 21 second round trip is about 3 million km one way -- eight trips to the Moon and back, not even a twentieth of the way to Mars at closest approach.
This is an accidental Zoom performance of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" (1969), where Lucier re-recorded his own voice in a room until only the room's resonance remained. Here what remains is the network: delay, compression, dropouts.
Bonus noise: YouTube's auto-transcript bleeps Alan's enthusiasm into [ __ ]. So the full chain is: Alan's voice, Zoom, stream, room, Zoom again times three, my screen recording, YouTube's speech recognizer, a censored transcript.
The fix: "Just turn off the audio at your end on Zoom."
I Am Sitting in a Room:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room
Alvin Lucier on "I am sitting in a room":
by DonHopkins - Your view of God is internally consistent. It's exactly why I refuse to believe in God. He can be an asdhole and a bully, but as long as I don't believe in Him, I've maintained my consistency. You could just as easily go the other way on that, but if I did acknowledge God then I'd have to do whatever my religion told me God wanted every day. And I'm not about to do that for some entity that's left the world in this state. However, it would be highly hypocritical to yo acknowledge God and at the same time not to follow some of those rules. As long as I don't acknowledge He exists, the agreement is I'm not a hypocrite and He can be an asshole.
My trick to solving those things, by the way, is to talk to myself out loud until I fall asleep, then have a metaphorical dream that I have to analyze, and then the answer is suddenly clear. I never doubt that I will get to the answer, but it can take days or weeks... you have to trust that your mind will get there.
by noduerme - This same thing happens with sports records too. Gwern is a treasure of the internet.
- Interesting article to share on the eve of yesterday's debacle about the Navier-Stokes problem.
Maybe another quote to add to the list is about Bob Widlar (from https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/bob-widlar-silicon-val...):
> In 1965, Widlar left Fairchild to work at National Semiconductor. While there, he released his design for the industry’s first high-power voltage regulator, the LM109. This finding came at a time when engineers hotly debated whether it was possible to develop a high-power regulator on a single chip.
> Widlar, established as an engineering genius in 1969, wrote a paper settling the debate, claiming temperature swings and packaging limitations made the device impossible. The industry took his word for it and stopped all efforts to build such a device. However, in 1970, Widlar shocked his contemporaries with the 20-W LM109, the industry’s first high-power voltage regulator. The device included all of the features Widlar had claimed were impossible just one year prior.
by v9v - This holds true across so many fields. I believe parts of this is in play in physical space as well. When breaking the World deadlift record. 500kgs seemed impossible until someone broke the barrier. Then suddenly others follow. Sub 10 seconds 100 meter was out of reach at some point. Bolts 9.58 seems almost impossible to beat and maybe that is why it isn't. There are of course barriers to physical performance, but I would agree that the general sentiment on where they are play a larger role in placing them than the actual limitations.by q-base
- I do remember when hearing about Simón Bolívar's crossing of the Andes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju7nJjprbQg) "I wish I had this guy's energy and drive". Some people just seem to be on another level. It kind of would make sense if this was bipolar disorder?by Kotlopou
- Mania is a hell of a performance enhancer.by henryaj
- When I was a child I trained Athletics. In a training session the older kids pranked us or whatever, they measured our long jump and everyone jumped crazy lenghts. We could not believe it! I jumped one meter over my personal best. But they assured us, it was correct. As a naive and autistic kid I didn't question it, it's now as an adult I think back and analyze (i have good memory) it must have been the case... Anyway two days later there was a meet and I first jumped my ordinary length, but I now believed I could jump longer, I just needed to use more force, so I did, a bit longer, added even more force and speed, until I got the same result as the training session two days prior.by z3t4
- Two quotes I love about this:
"I was in the top 100 in tennis. Then I asked myself: 'what if I started training like Andy (Roddick). So I did and next thing I know I'm in the top 8 in the world"
- Mardy Fish [0]
"Kobe told me if I made a 1,000 shots every practice then I would be an All Star. So I started doing that and then became an All Star"
- Dwight Howard [1]
0 - https://www.netflix.com/title/81026434
1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/j1hjb5/charania_dwight...
by alexpotato - Strangely reading about high achievers having had a difficult childhood and how it might have actually "enabled" them to achieve what they did, is soothing in a way. It's nice to think of your own scars as a thing that helps you sometimes instead of only a burden.by zshn
- cults always utilize this kind of fanservice for initiation
- https://www.schematherapy.com/id73.htm
About two thirds of these can make great fuel, depending on your temperament and coping style (i.e. overcompensation style seen most commonly among our billionaires).
Though "unrelenting standards" is probably the most obvious one. I've noticed this in several men who are getting a lot of attention recently. Their fathers taught them that anything less than absolute victory was unacceptable.
by andai - I'm from a family that believed strongly in what some might call "useful child abuse", but that doesn't imply any actual abuse as it would have been defined even 20 years ago, and it isn't without love. Every one of my brothers will admit that our parents loved us deeply, but that our upbringing was extremely stringent and intellectually rigorous, with seemingly unjust punishments for poor grades or for words spoken disrespectfully. Many immigrant children or people from cultures that prioritize education will understand this. But never was it abusive in a physical sense (if you have to get physical, you've failed. You're missing the point of educating the child and doing damage to future generations instead).
I still believe in this, because it produces self-reliant, ultra-high-performing people, and if your goal is e.g. to have your lineage survive and thrive, then that's what you would want. So we're all lawyers, doctors and engineers, and we talk to our children like they're adults and have high expectations of them and are gravely, mortally disappointed if they let us down somehow.
Really, the only thing I'd like from low-pressure and low-performing people with too much time on their hands is for them to leave people like us alone, and go back to maxing out their credit cards, taking drugs, watching reality shows and crashing their cars, without thinking they're capable of judging people they'll never understand. But hey, that's the world we live in, and it's all sour grapes from them, so the main thing is to make sure they never get an upper hand no matter how many ill-behaved children they have.
That's the perspective from this side of that.
I expect to be downvoted for this, but before you click that arrow, remember the good news is that our kids will be smart and self-reliant and yours will be helplessly reduced to voting on social platforms, if they can even read ;)
by noduerme - It's a delicate balance like the Ballmer Peak. Too much or too little problems in childhood and you don't get the incredible drive of these types.
With my own 'difficult' childhood all I got was, according to Gabor Maté, a hard time focusing on stuff that I actually care about and a whole load of mediocre attempts.
by sph - I've worked at an ayahuasca retreat center the last few years and have worked with several of what I'd consider very successful people. What I've noticed is that there are a couple types- those who are successful despite their traumas and those who are successful because of their traumas. The people I've seen successful because of their traumas tend to have difficulty making real progress (which sometimes comes off has actually having wonderful experiences...possibly all projections or other forms of dissociation/resistance). I think with them there is a subconscious fear that if they heal, they will lose the drive that made them "successful". It's a tough pill to swallow. (The other camp tends to do really well, continues to be successful with even more appreciation and compassion, despite difficult experiences if they decide to face their traumas).by temp0826