I am writing a book about this topic. I started my career in 1978 at Bell Labs and worked in 3 different startups after that. After 45 years in R&D, I have recently retired. So many times, the inspiration for new inventions we worked on came from unexpected sources; the arts, culture, music, history and many other sources. And I said we on purpose because rarely did a new invention come from one person, it was almost always from collaboration on a team. My conclusion is that invention so often comes from a team of well rounded people with knowledge in many areas and the ability to work in a team. I wonder if the decline in the productivity in R&D comes from a decline in these attributes?
In research on creativity in the arts and sciences, the importance of a supportive community is seen to be so important that some researchers deny the validity of the idea of the creative genius working in isolation.
Interested in your project. Can you point to any similar books and how you are expanding on them?
> some researchers deny the validity of the idea of the creative genius working in isolation.
Is it that they deny the entire possibility of a creative genius working in isolation, or deny that a creative genius working in isolation, without a supporting community to spread the good word, will still see his work make it out into the world?
I think it's more that creative genius requires both the time invested to attain mastery, and time to push the boundaries on paths that may or may not work out.
Ramanujan would have still been Ramanujan had he not worked with Littlewood and Hardy (though the world might not have witnessed both his genius and his contributions), but by all accounts he invested an enormous amount of time and effort in mathematics, to the point that his family urged him to do other things. Einstein worked a job that was so trivial for him that he spent most of his time thinking about other things. Newton invented calculus while his classes were halted because everyone was isolating from the plague. Bukowski famously quipped that his choices were to earn a wage, or to write and starve, and he'd chosen to starve.
In the same way that you probably don't get garage startups in a society where no one has a garage, you probably don't get many creative geniuses without good family structures and some level of slack in the system.
Einstein, Ramanujan, and Newton were boosted by existing networks of review and promotion. A lot of core engineering math was invented by aristocrats and government functionaries around the French Academy. Germany developed its own equivalent scene somewhat later.
All of these followed the model of a relatively small number of smart people bouncing ideas off each other, reviewing them, building on them, and promoting the good ones.
The difference between that and modern R&D is that modern R&D tries to be industrial rather than academic. Academia is trapped in a bullshit job make-work cycle, where quantity gets more rewards than quality and creativity. There isn't room for mavericks like Einstein. Even if they're out there having great ideas, there's no way for them to be discovered and promoted.
Industry focuses more on fill-in developments than game changer mathematical insights, which are the real drivers of scientific progress.
So there's a lot of R&D-like activity in CS, and occasionally something interesting falls out, like LLMs. But fundamental physics has stagnated.
One of the biggest reasons is that the smartest people don't work in research. They work in finance, developing gambling algorithms.
I'm not discounting the benefit of having additional networks in place, I just think they're a facilitating factor rather than a causative one. They're important for educational development and spreading ideas, but they can also result in homogeneity. The biggest two factors to me are time and interest. You yourself point out that most modern math and engineering was invented by aristocrats; the main reason for this was that they were the only ones with the luxury of being able to think about such abstract topics. They had the time to spend, so those with the interest and aptitude pushed the boundaries. You occasionally saw members of the working class do the same (Heaviside, for example), but they had a more difficult road.
I disagree that the smartest people work in finance. Some very smart people do. From what I've seen, the ones at the very farthest edge of human ability typically aren't motivated by money.
If for example you knew someone who has great idea, but doesn't have time to check it with a prototype because he has a lot of "normal" work, but he doesn't want to give it for free to everyone (so that he can finally have some more money and check his other ideas), what would you suggest to that person, or how would you support such person?
As a lifetime experimenter myself, I'm going to play the cards I'm dealt and I sure like slack in the system, but mainly to make up for my other weaknesses :)
One person's idea can be good enough to be the most revolutionary thing in a field, but it still may not be as well thought-out as if more than one worked on it together from the beginning.
One person's physical efforts can almost always be dwarfed by a team of some kind, and that might be the only way for an idea to become reality, but it's not going to help if there's not a proper team to join or resources to build staff from scratch.
Since most teams do not contain an absolute genius, at least they come up with products because they have a team. Excellent products sometimes, but not often genius level.
In some fields they really think brains are the most important thing, but it's too rare and everybody knows it.
So if they want to get to market any time soon they have to settle for what they have to work with until such a rare genius comes along.
Which may be never so no time to wait, but by the time some miracle-working wizard shows up it's too late because the team has no drop-in task for them to perform, and has not naturally been formed with the necessary structure to leverage anybody's wizardry by then. So never mind, they can't recognize it anyway.
There are at least three definitions of creativity in circulation. One, you are the first person in history to have that idea. (rare, but I've seen it) Two, you came up with an idea that was new to you. (most common) Three, you have a new idea that gains social acceptance. (Teresa Amabile argues for this one in Creativity in Context (1996))
I wasn't referring to that last definition, but to the view that intellectual environment is so important for supporting the exploration of ideas that true solitary creativity doesn't happen. For books arguing this view, try Robert Weisberg, Dean Keith Simonton, and Keith Sawyer. Study specifically on creativity in lab research was done by Kevin Dunbar, who also found the social aspect essential.
Simple hack for Sam. Hire a bunch of people for some nominal amount. They do not have to do anything and they know nothing about AI. Then let Zuck waste his wad paying out signing bonuses to fake employees.
Can a human who is a sociopath express heartfelt condolences? Perhaps they can mimic words and phrases they know are the appropriate words for the occasion but lack the true emotion.
Sperm whales have the largest brains on earth but they have not invented fire, the wheel or internal combustion engine or nuclear weapons... Oh wait. Hmmm.
Nor did the human race for most of the few tens of millions of years we've been on this planet. It's only in the last few thousand years that wheels became a thing. The capacity to invent and reason about these things was there long before they happened.
I recently retired after 45 years in tech. I started out in 1978 at Bell Labs. I have had great jobs and terrible jobs. Great bosses and horrific bosses. And all the things in between. I did not just survive, I thrived and beyond and worked at 3 start ups and a bunch of other companies large and small. What I learned is to not to be afraid. Regardless of what is happening around you. Fear is the enemy. Don't be afraid to be weird or crazy or whatever is causing you to be timid.
This seems supremely irrelevant to the topic of the article. I doubt very much the Wayfair bed assemblyperson is being held back from fear. But hopefully they read your inspiring comment and can, I guess, stop being timid.
> What I learned is to not to be afraid. Regardless of what is happening around you.
Were you perhaps financially secure enough not to have to fear anything? Or tenured (Bell Labs!) that unemployment wasn't actually a threat to you? YMMV.
I long for the day when someone can give advice based on their own personal experience without someone else being like “well that won’t work for literally everyone”
What's the _point_ of the anecdote, though? You're taking up everybody's time to tell a story, do us a favor to have a relevant point.
"Have no fear" doesn't apply to the article, at all. You might as well write "what I learned was to not stick legos up my nostril". Also good advice. Also not applicable.
It's fine if it doesn't work for everyone, it's annoying if it isn't relevant to anyone.
It's obnoxious behavior. For example, I decided when I was young to live in my car and be homeless. I saved a bunch of money, and I've been frugal most my life. I was also super focused at my work and climbed the ladder making real money.
I believe most people don't have discipline to endure less than and the discipline to really listen to what power asks of them. There is a lot of great advice for people to do well in a job, but they just... don't apply it.
I was watching a trial the other day and the prosecutor asks "And did you often see your nephews at your mothers house when you video called her?", and the defendant, a dentists, says "Yep, watching TV, brushing their teeth.[5 second silence] Don't forget to brush your teeth. Really important." The prosecutor smiles, laughs, and says "A little dull humor never hurt, eh?"
I'm not sure your average adult would find "don't be afraid" to be "advice", or some deeply meaningful advice that only a cynic would think was anything less than excellent.
People acclimate to their circumstances. Do you think people in developing countries live in a constant state of panic because they don't have a seven figure retirement account?
While YMMV, a fear response is a choice. You can have all the rational reasons to be afraid (like the bottom of your hierarchy of needs being unmet) and choose to act out of cold rationality rather than fear. Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you can act without fear even when there is justified reason to be afraid, you will be able to easily do so when it isn't justified.
"... is called a delusion". What I am suggesting is not delusion, it is mindfulness and cutting through delusion. When one is presented with something that elicits a fear response (whether the stimulus is rational or not) the goal is to quiet all of the "lizard brain" reactions, and instead formulate a well reasoned response. "Fear is the mind-killer" - while from fiction, still rings true to me - if you react out of fear you will short-circuit internal processes that are far better at long-term reasoning even when at the expense of short-term comfort.
It's really just about giving yourself enough time to think before you respond. That's the entire difference between a reaction and a response. You can use dialectical and cognitive behavioral therapies to help develop the tolerance to do that. Mindfulness and meditative practices like those in zen buddhism have proven helpful to me as well.
Perhaps you're taking an extreme interpretation of my using the word "logic" and instead you could use "wise mind" or even just "considered thought" as the response in lieu of an emotional one.
As someone who is more in the middle of my career rather than the end of it, I would like to echo your sentiment. I have had plenty of roles where I was tasked with things that were out of my depth, and the answer is to just not let it be. There is always a path to get the answers/skills you need to do what is asked of you, you just might not know the path yet, so the core skill (and where I think fear comes into the process) is accepting that not knowing something now is never a hinderance so long as once can do self-directed learning. The rest is reality testing if what you just learned is actually able to solve your problem. If it isn't, then repeat ad infinitum until it is.
More than a decade ago I was hired as an intern at Colgate-Palmolive as a software developer. Turns out they were(are?) one of the largest SAP deployments in the US. The entire company revolved around SAP. Due to lack of college graduates knowing SAP, they took great pains to treat me extremely well and train me (a CS major) in ABAP using SAP Netweaver.
My project was more ambitious than the rest of the group because I had enough courage and bravado to be assigned a project like that. In fact I made it a point to be 'brave' and make myself look really good in front of the upper level managers. I tried to know everyones name, even in other departments and to be super polite and humble around any sort of manager there. When I finally got some tasks to do, I was so miserable that I finished multiple days without getting anything done. I felt so depressed thinking that I slogged through four years of CS for this?
In the end I managed to finish last in the cohort and Colgate took the rare(at the time)decision to not extend me a full time offer. I felt like a complete failure because I didn't put in 100% and I felt like I let my mentor down.
At the same time I know that I truly hated it. To this day seeing pictures of SAP GUI gives me anxiety and makes my stomach turn. How do you overcome something like that and push on? It does not always seem like a sure thing. I sometimes think what if I had pushed through and gotten the offer? I'd probably still be at Colgate like my mentor was.
With the benefit of hindsight I have learned to be super appreciative and thankful for them treating me so well but im glad circumstances led me to not ending up there. But really who knows if it would have been better in the long run? Whenever I see Colgate it actually evokes positive memories of that time. But the biggest thing I learned was to not bite off more than you can chew and if you don't truly love what you are doing there is another path out there.
"How do you slog through something you truly hate?" - I don't.
When signals that a role is not aligned with my needs start cropping up, I begin searching for a new role passively, and as the situation develops I speed up my search.
"I felt like a complete failure because I didn't put in 100% and I felt like I let my mentor down" - to thine own self be true. I have failed to put in 100% at some jobs, and sometimes i regret it more than others. I have narratives that legitimize my laziness or lack of commitment based on some previous slight from the company, or a missed promise on their part, but I hold myself accountable.
"How do you overcome something like that and push on? It does not always seem like a sure thing"
Resilience is a wildly varying trait of folks, and depends on your emotional and mental state. "First world problems" are a great example, one when is socialized at a certain comfort level, missing that causes distress. Some working conditions are truly untenable, in which case do what you have to do, but otherwise do the best with the situation you're given.
Same here. I've worked really hard to not end up in miserable position. I also realize there are things not in my control. If work changes, you can either change work or just leave. Leaving is often the much better option.
This reminds me of the Zen Koan where the teacher holds a stick.
The teacher says to the student, “If you tell me this stick is real, “I will hit you with it. “If you tell me it is not real, I will hit you with it. If you say nothing, I will hit you with it.”
And so, the student reaches out, grabs the stick, and breaks it.
I have a similar tale. A semester before college ended, I got a professor who worked for a large company in the poultry business. I was one of the few people who was doing well in the Java 101 class and I was also going out of my way to help a few people struggling with it. Because of my tenacity, he decided to give me a
short internship in IT.
Long story short, it didn't go well. I struggled to fit in, they threw me straight into the fire, and the people around me did not want to help. After 90 days, the manager called me into the office and told me I didn't make the cut. It was the first time I had been fired from a job and I felt terrible.
Looking back this was the lesson I learned. Things happen for a reason and sometimes, things that look bad are actually a blessing in disguise.
The company I was interning at had an awful culture where no one help anyone else. People were constantly getting fired and due to that there was a dog eat dog mentality there. The software was old stuff, SAP and other stuff like that. In retrospect, I'm really glad that I was fired; I dodged a major bullet.
I ended up finding another job quickly right after I graduated with an amazing company in a more amazing city.
Which Bell Labs? Are you still in the area? I’m minutes away from Murray Hill and a lot of what you’re saying resonates with me (~10 years into my career and starting to lean into what I previously thought was weird).
Fear is one thing but how do you deal with regret? Regret for taking the leap as well as regret for not taking the leap? There can be regret in both paths.
You have to accept that life is single threaded and you’re not always going to choose the most optimal path.
It’s easy to overthink, but without omniscient info, execute the plan you have.
Regret is tough because it piles up as you age. It’s easy to look back and think “dang, I did a lot of bad moves” while ignoring all the upsides and limited info you had at the time.
In many ways our easy access to info makes you think “just one more search” will make my decision 10x better when in reality it’s a huge super power you should use to drive execution, not the other way around. Think of what an advantage it is to have that much context on the scale of human existence. At least for me, this makes me more optimistic: I make less mistakes than ages before me because I’m relatively better informed. Note: this doesn’t mean the choices are always good, just that I understand them more completely.
What if someone takes their license plates off and makes a fake temporary paper one, the kind you put in the back window when you get a new car? Not permanently but if you wanted to go do something illegal and not be tracked.
Can the LPR pick those up?
OK, but query me this batman. Lately, I have been inundated by ads for anything to do with Kayaks. I do not own a Kayak. I do not want to own a Kayak and have never even spoken the word as far as I can remember. But for some reason, I am seeing ads for a Kayak carrier, a Kayak launcher, roof rack, you name it. It is so weird. I cannot figure out why suddenly these idiots think I am remotely interested in Kayaking. Kayaking, it is just so random. But way back in the 2000s, a friend of mine worked for a web site dev company. Her job was to visit with clients and take pictures of whatever they were hawking, write some copy and the dudes back in her office would turn it into a web page. She would occasionally ask me to come along and stare at whatever crap they were selling and act like I cared about it while she snapped some photos. I joked that meant technically I was a model. But then one time she was doing a web page for a marketing company that did focus groups. That was back before we had smart phones tracking your every move. I posed in a fake focus group with some other people and after that, the dude that ran the place asked me if I wanted to be in real focus group and I agreed. They seemed to think there were certain connections that made no sense. For example, they were sure that they could market adult diapers to nerds that play video games who were to absorbed in their game to get off their ass to take a simple dump. Apparently that is actually a thing? Then I went to this one focus group where they were asking if you own a dog and buy a lot of peanut butter. Read between the lines. So gross. So, I am guessing, some marketing weirdo thinks there is some weird connection between something else in my life an Kayaks. It would be interesting to know what that is. But, I think, a lot of times, they might be right about those weird connections that make you feel like they are reading your mind. Just in this case, whatever it is, maybe that I watch a lot of documentaries and that means I like Kayaking? I guess they only have to be right some percentage of the time. Just not in this case.
Depending on your age and if you have any vaguely outdoorsy interests, you probably are due for a kayak interest. A bunch of guys I know in the late 30s early 40s are into kayaks right now. Kayaks and smoking meat.
Hmmm, I live alone and in a pretty remote area (on an island). I keep my wifi pretty secure, so, that seems pretty unlikely. But who knows, anything is possible I suppose. Maybe because I live on an island.
You live on an island, see ads for kayaks and the first thing you went with was: "somebody is listening to all my conversations even though my phone battery wouldn't be able to handle a slightly long phone call"?
That's what people mean when they say there is a lot of data points that can explain things very easily without having to resort to a convoluted explanation.
Yeah, if ad targeting networks know you live on an island (easily done, location data is the most common type they get their hands on) it's pretty sensible for them to try and sell you a kayak.
Weird it just popped up. Probably they cranked up a new algo that said, if they live near water, hit 'em with kayak ads. Why not paddle boards or boats too? Whatever.
What has the highest margin and therefore the most ad spend? Probably fancy folding kayaks. Kayaks are also popular with fishing in a way paddle boards aren’t. And either that person or his neighbors or friends are into fishing and Google knows this
The Tower of Babel was a library that contained every possible combination of letters to form a 400 page book. Or something like that. It made me wonder, what if you made a content honey pot full of just random text and a chatbot vacuumed that up? Does it's data vacuum have a garbage detector?
The very worst that would happen is that you make someone's training run slightly less efficient. If your data is truly random garbage, the model won't be able to make any predictions about it and thus it will not distort performance. All training data is noisy to an extent, and you've just fed it pure noise.
However, it has become clear that effective LLM training is in large matter a matter of careful curation of high quality training data. Random gibberish is trivially detectable, by LLMs themselves if nothing else, so it's unlikely that your "honeypot" will ever make it into someone's training run.
Even if you carefully crafted some more subtle poison data, it would still form only a small amount of the training set. The worst case scenario is most likely that the LLM learns to recognize your particular style of poison, and will happily recreate it if prompted appropriately (while otherwise remaining unaffected); more likely, your poison data is simply swamped.
So.. I think it already has been happening ( people attempting to poison some sources for a variety of reasons ). I was doing a mini fun project on HN aliases ( attempting to derive/guess their user's age based on nothing but that alias ) and I came across some number of profiles that have bios clearly intended to mess with bots one way or another. Some have fun instructions. Some have contradictory information. Some are the length of a small night story. I am not judging. I just find it interesting. Has vibes of a certain book about a rainbow.
The idea itself is kinda simple, but kinda hard, because it relies on how the language we use, gives us away.
For example, references we put ( simpsons, star trek, you name it ), language we use ( gee whiz, yeet, gyatt) and that is used to generate an online persona tends to be something of note to our image of self - one can determine to some extent the likely generation from those
The reference itself may not automatically mean much, but it is likely that if it is present in an alias, it had an impact on a younger person ( how many of the new generation jump on an old show? so mr robot would have the exposure range of 2015 to 2019 ). If that hypothesis is true, then one can attempt to guess age if the individual given that work work, because 1) we know what year is now 2) we know when it was made, which allows for some minor inference there.
Naturally, some aliases are more elaborate than others. Some are written backwards and/or reference a popular show or popular sci-fi author. Some are anagrams ( and - I discovered today - require additional datasets to tag properly so that is another thing I will need to dig up from somewhere ). And to complicate things further, some aliases use references that are ambiguous and/or belong in more than one category ( Tesla being one of them ).
The original approach was to just throw everything into LLM and see what it comes up with, but the results were somewhat uneven so I decided to start from scratch and do normal analysis ( language, references, how digits are used and so on - it is still amazing how well that one seems to work ).
Sadly, it is still a work in progress ( I was hoping for a quick project, but I am kinda getting into it ) and I probably won't touch until next weekend since the coming week promises to be challenging.
Unfortunately, this means in your particular alias ended up as:
Alias category is_random length is_anagram generic_signal
Loughla Mixed Case 0 7 FALSE FALSE
( remaining fields were empty, basically couldn't put a finger on you:D). If you can provide me with an approximate age, it would help with my testing though:D
edit: This being HN. Vast majority of references are technology related.
I have a separate - not fully implemented - section for more semi-random aliases, but it revolves around our tendency to use default settings and commonly used tools for generating them. Thus far the only thing I was able to show with it is that it is not uncommon, but no clear proxy for age.. so seems like a dead end.
I am so sorry to see this. The absolute last thing we need is yet another fossil guzzling vehicle. Please stop what you are doing immediately and go back to the drawing board and help save our planet by inventing a craft that uses solar power to charge batteries to fly. I am sure I will get down voted to hell for this. But tough shit. The planet is chocking and we simply do not need more people burning fossil fuel for fun and pleasure. Stop. Please. Stop and rethink this.
