This reminds me of my all-time-favourite HN comment[0] (and a life lesson too):
This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote:
"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
No. This works if you are able to tell a work of fiction and don't have to provide evidence.
And it works because we all know that repetition and practice are, in fact, important. So it feels believable that having people just repeat something over and over is the answer.
Similarly, people can be swayed by the master coming in and producing a single artifact that blows away everyone. You see this archetype story as often as the student that learns by just repeating a motion over and over. (Indeed.... this is literally the Karate Kid plot...)
The truth is far more mundane. Yes, you have to repeat things. But also yes, you have to give thought to what you are doing. This is why actual art classes aren't just "lets build things", but also "lets learn how to critique things that you build."
False. SpaceX development of Starship is much cheaper then SLS despite using more test vehicles. The claim that building hardware rich is more expensive is not really shown in the data.
NASA has done some analysis on early SpaceX and shown that their methods produced a 10x improvement in cost. And that was with the method NASA uses that often turn out to be wrong.
The parent's anecdote claimed that quantity led to quality, when objectively speaking it does not in the real world. I could have alternatively used Ali Baba as an example of what quantity gets you.
I would think that it's just as likely that the quantity group would sit around philosophizing about what constitutes a "pot" so that they could get away with doing the least amount of work and still earning an A.
If I was being graded solely on quantity, why would I bother caring at all to make anything good? Make the minimum quality necessary to be counted as a pot and move on with your life. That was basically my real world approach to ceramics back in HS, and I still feel good about my B+.
# Catch-22 (by Joseph Heller) - had been seeing it mentioned on HN (and other sites) for years, I finally read it and it was one the best novels I've ever read.
# The Universe and Dr. Einstein (by Lincoln Barnett) - recommended for anyone who is interested about Einstein's thought process that gave birth to two great theories.
# What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (by Haruki Murakami) - it's my first book from H. M. and I really liked it. It's kind of a memoir and made me like Murakami and now I plan to read his novels too.
# How to Build a Car (by Adrian Newey) - that famous F1 car designer... Great read. Gives readers a chance to glimpse into both (technical) thought process behind designing a race car and human side of it.
# Basic Mathematics (by Serge Lang) - not *reading* exactly, working through it (to brush the rust off of my math fundamentals).
Someone recommend H.M. To me a few weeks back. Started w/ Kafka by the Shore and then finished Norwegian Wood a few days after that. Couldn’t put them down, both were terrific.
Murakami’s fiction novels are extremely different from “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”. If you want to try another non-fiction book of his check-out “Underground : The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche”, I loved it. If you go the fiction route “Kafka on the Shore” and “A Wild Sheep Chase” are a good starting point. Avoid some of his longer works unless you enjoy his style.
Thank you for your recommendations.
I am aware that his novels will be different. The (memoir) I mentioned just made me like the guy, so his other writings interest me now.
Looked up for "jeeves and wooster", so, you're British then. This makes this little conversation interesting for me, because I'm not American, not even European and so our exposure/approach to this novel is very different then, I guess. Even the language was a little over my head, since English is not my native tongue. However, I really enjoyed it. I liked Heller's style (prose?) and wit.
About Yossarian...yes, he's not a "perfect hero", but he is very human with all his earthly desires (I would say) and his struggles for staying righteous at the same time.
The chapter about thoughts crossed his mind & feelings he experienced while he was wandering in the cold, damp streets at night was peak for me. I might re-read that very chapter nowadays.
I think the thing that trips me up is that it feels like a collection of unrelated short stories mashed together. Worse (for me) is that those stories contradict each other.
I use Okular for that. It's open-source and present on three major platforms. I really got surprised to find out how feature-rich it is. It has a lot of basic/important features - like highlighting, underlining, strike through, inline notes, pop-up notes, freehand line drawing, inserting shapes (like arrow, rectangle, polygon) etc.
Tip: you actually don't need to install kde toolkit to be able to run Okular on Windows and macOS. Search for nightly builds - I'm on a nightly build and it's pretty solid.
>The professional therefore acts in the face of fear, when the amateur fears a big creative endeavor he waits for the fear to disappear, the professional knows this will never happen and starts anyway."
It sounds like the most fundamental and precise definition of (the reason of) procrastination.
Jane Austen was the first author to came to my mind as I saw this thread. I've read two of her books (Sense and Sensibility & Pride and Prejudice) ~2 years ago. What they made me realise was that people are not absolutely good or absolutely bad. Human character consists of so many gray areas (as americans or... I don't know... english-speaking world puts it), it's not like black/white.
The second one is Science and Method by Henri Poincare. I'm not in a position to fully understand and appreciate this book, but I just want to share a few quotes[0] that stood out for me when I read it:
"The subliminal ego is in no way inferior to the conscious ego; it is not purely automatic; it is capable of discernment; it has tact and lightness of touch; it can select, and it can divine. More than that, it can divine better than the conscious ego, since it succeeds where the latter fails. In a word, is not the subliminal ego superior to the conscious ego?"
"Under this second aspect, all the combinations are formed as a result of the automatic action of the subliminal ego, but those only which are interesting find their way into the field of consciousness. This, too, is most mysterious. How can we explain the fact that, of the thousand products of our unconscious activity, some are invited to cross the threshold, while others remain outside? Is it mere chance that gives them this privilege? Evidently not."
"All the difficulties, however, have not disappeared. The conscious ego is strictly limited, but as regards the subliminal ego, we do not know its limitations, and that is why we are not too loth to suppose that in a brief space of time it can form more different combinations than could be comprised in the whole life of a conscient being."
It refers to the human's cybersecurity technique of banning inter-computer communication. The ship Galactica survives the initial cylon attack because it's too old to have networked devices onboard.
This idea is captured nicely in the book "Art and Fear" with the following anecdote: "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105478