[nanolith]

We need more people in this world willing to do their own thing, even if others might find it intimidating or silly. The important thing is to have fun and learn things. Compiler hacking is just as good as any other hobby, even if it's done in good jest.

Sometimes, these things become real businesses. Not that this should be the intent of this, but it shows that what some consider silly, others will pay good money for.

Example: Cards Against Humanity started as a bit of a gag game between a small group of friends and eventually became something that has pop culture relevance.

Example: The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade. I like to think that he did this out of spite, and that Christmas letters to his old professor must've been fun.

[godelski]

You can't have paradigm shifts by following the paradigm.

How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal).

Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They're probably the "most productive".

Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it's incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for this). But there aren't leaps and bounds. Critically it keeps pushing things forward, refining and improving.

But then there's those in the long tail. They fail most of the time and are the "least productive". Sometimes never doing anything of note their entire lives. But these are also the people that change the world in much bigger ways. And sometimes those that appeared to do nothing have their value found decades or centuries later.

Not everyone needs to be Newton/Leibniz. Not everyone should be. But that kind of work is critical to advancing our knowledge and wealth as a species. The problem is it is often indistinguishable from wasting time. But I'm willing to bet that the work of Newton alone has created more value to all of human civilization than every failed long tail person has cost us.

In any investment strategy you benefit from having high risk investments. Most lose you money but the ones that win reward you with much more than you lost. I'm not sure why this is so well known in the investment world but controversial in the research/academic/innovation world.

[cassonmars]

You would likely enjoy Isaac Asimov's "Profession": https://www.abelard.org/asimov.php

[flir]

Hah. I think of it as a slime mold. There's the main body (bodies?), but it's always shooting out little bits of itself that try weird stuff - founding underwater communes, or climbing mountains in Crocs or something. Most of these offshoots don't have that much of an impact, but occasionally one lucks out and discovers America or peanut butter and the main body saunters off that way.

[fragmede]

What is the expected value, of some dude at university spinning dinner plates in the cafeteria? What a silly pointless thing to do! Of course, if you're physics Professor Feynman, you get a Nobel out of it, so do the silly pointless things after all!

[satvikpendem]

I don't understand how this is a power law and not normal. The "long tail" is usually mentioned in a normal distribution being the right-most end of it.

[globalnode]

nice observation.

[xxr]

> The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade.

Was the paper given a low grade because it was a bad idea or because Fred Smith wrote a bad paper? If his pitch didn’t work, did feedback from the professor help Smith sharpen his idea so he was in a better position to make FedEx a success?

[nanolith]

Allegedly, it was given a lower grade due to it not being a feasible business plan, in the professor's estimation. Of course, this forms part of the legend behind Fred Smith and FedEx, so that should be taken with a grain of salt.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fred-smith-told-yale-professo...

[johnnyanmac]

Hard to have hobbies when you're spending your time doordashing and struggling to pay rent.

[ericmcer]

That still feels a bit off, as you are "having fun" because it ultimately is the road to success.

There is a deeper hurt in the tech world, which is that we have all been conditioned to crave greatness. Every employer tries to sell us on how important what they do is, or how rich everyone will become. We can't even vacation without thinking how much better we will perform once we get back. That struggle with greatness is something every human grapples with, but for workers in tech it is particularly difficult to let it go. The entire industry wants us to hold onto it until we are completely drained.

Anyway the result is sentiments like this, where having fun, exploring and learning can't just exist for the inherent rewards.

[nanolith]

As per my original comment, these examples are only indicative that profitable endeavors can come out of these things in unexpected ways, but that's not the point of doing these things. I'm never going to profit from, nor recoup the costs I've sunk into most of the mad science I do. That's not the point. I do it because it's fun and because I like building cool things.

These examples are one justification for why we should embrace these kinds of hobbies, and not the desirable outcome for these kinds of hobbies.

[ant6n]

It’s all fun and games, until the funding runs out.

[citbl]

It wouldn't hurt if they could capitalise their sentences every now and then.

[lo_zamoyski]

Josef Pieper wrote a book called "Leisure: the Basis of Culture"[0] - published in 1948 - in which he discusses the meaning of leisure, which is not what we mean by it today, and criticizes the "bourgeois world of total labor" as a spiritually, intellectually, and culturally destructive force.

Today, we think of "leisure" as merely free time from work or recreation, something largely done to "recharge" so that we can go back to work (in other words: modern "leisure" is for the sake of work). This is not the original meaning. Indeed, etymologically, the word "school" comes from σχολή ("skholē"), which means "leisure", but with the understanding that it involves something like learned discussion or whatever. (Difficult to imagine, given how hostile modern schooling is, resembling more of a factory than a place of learning.) The purpose of work was to enable leisure. We labored in order to have leisure.

What's also interesting is that unlike us, who think of "leisure" in terms of work (that is, we think of it as a negation of work, "not-working"), the Greeks viewed it in exactly the opposite way. The word for "work" is ἀσχολίᾱ ("askholíā"), which is the absence of leisure. The understanding held for most of history and explains why we call the liberal arts liberal: it freed a man to be able to pursue truth effectively, and was contrasted with the servile arts, that is, everything with a practical aim like a trade or a craft.

This difference demonstrates an important shift and betrays the vulgar or nihilistic underbelly of our modern culture. Work is never for its own sake. It is always aimed at something other than itself (praxis and associated poiesis). This distinguishes it from something like theory (theoria) which is concerned with truth for its own sake.

So what do we work for? Work for its own sake is nihilistic, a kind of passing of the metaphysical buck, an activity pursued to avoid facing the question of what we live for. Work pursued merely to pay for sustenance - full stop - is vulgar and lacks meaning. Sustenance is important, but is that all you are, a beast that slurps food from a trough? Even here, only in human beings is food elevated into feast, into meal, a celebration and a social practice that incorporates food; it is not merely nutritive. Are you merely a consumerist who works to buy more crap, foolishly believing that ultimate joy will be found in the pointless chase for them?

Ask yourself: whom or what do you serve? Everyone aims at something. What are the choices of your life aiming at?

[0] https://a.co/d/eCd0cJX

[nanolith]

That is an excellent way of considering both leisure and work, and certainly, a testament to the importance of studying the humanities.

Aristotle famously developed the Greek concept of εὐδαιμονία (eudaimonia), which dovetails into what you wrote. Roughly, the concept translates into "human flourishing" or "living well". While Aristotle's conception of what best constitutes this differed a bit from more ancient Greek concepts passed down through their oral tradition, and definitely differs from what we may consider today, it bears investigation. I definitely think that education and personal research fits into my conception of it, but tastes differ. Nietzsche gave what I considered some excellent responses to Aristotle, especially when it comes to finding / making meaning in our lives with respect to the modern world. The Transcendentalist school, in particular Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, also provided some interesting flavor.

I think that your questions should be asked continuously. We should all adjust our life trajectories based on our own flourishing, in ways that challenge us and lead to growth. There aren't clear answers to these questions. In fact, they should lead to a bit of discomfort, like sand in one's clam shell. Much as this sand will eventually form a pearl, these questions should drive us to better ourselves, little by little.