Bleh, there’s enough efficiency porn out there already. There is such a thing as balance and it’s important. To me the society we live in that’s all about optimization and the management of the world/life as some technical apparatus or system is quite empty and I think a big reason a lot of people who are extremely “successful” sometimes grapple with severe depression and dissatisfaction in spite of all their material success.
George Bataille had a theory that excess and pointless expenditure was actually integral to the well being of human societies (his explanation for why ancient societies participated in practices that were, from an economic standpoint, totally wasteful, such as extreme rituals of extravagance, sacrifice, etc.) humans need a release valve, and I think “wasted energy”, debauchery, etc. is precisely this mechanism—even in minor ways.
> 80% of every proof is garbage - it’s a series of mindless algebra, and doing the obvious thing. When my goal is to learn, I want to find that 20% that is insightful, the steps that I would struggle to come up with myself
Right, once we do something long enough, it’s easy to take all the bits that are the foundation for what we’re doing for granted—but not everything is about returns, there is such a thing as discipline, rigor, the traditions of the art—and while the steps are tedious, they subtly reinforce core tenants when you encounter them, and that’s important.
Thanks for the feedback, this prompted me to add an afterword to the piece about the dangers of optimising too hard.
To me there's a pretty important difference between 'it is systematically bad to do anything about inefficiency' and 'sometimes inefficiency is protecting something important'. I strongly agree with the second one, but strongly disagree with the first one. I think that, empirically, there often are free wins, such as making learning more efficient. And sometimes inefficiency and balance is important, but sometimes it's not, and the skill is telling the difference.
For example, I think leisure time is great, but this is because it's time to relax, take breaks and do what I enjoy. Not just because it's time that I spend not being productive. If I notice a bunch of time in my schedule not being productive, but also not enjoying myself, eg commuting to work, finding ways to swap that for more true leisure time is a good way to reduce wasted motion
You might enjoy a post I wrote on the importance of leaving Slack and spare capacity in your life: https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/38-slack - essentially on the importance of leaving some inefficiency, so you can be flexible and reactive, and seize new opportunities.
I came here, apparently, to agree with you strongly.
The ceiling in my house is, upstairs, roughly one meter above my head. Downstairs, I've got maybe two?
That is "wasted space". It takes more energy to heat, and uses more building materials. Efficiency dictates that I do not need that extra airspace above my noggin, and thus it should not exist.
But it feels better.
When I lived in Berlin, the doors and ceilings felt as if they were built for a race of giants -- much taller, and much wider, then they needed to be.
And it was wonderful. It took some getting used to, but I could feel the difference.
Japan is full of inefficiency. There are people, human beings in pressed shirts and white gloves, that manually clear trains for departure on crowded platforms. Even when things aren't crowded, there is almost always a person on every train platform in Tokyo.
And that feels better, too.
Yes, the automated systems -- which exist! -- probably do more for safety. But I really like knowing that I can scream out for help, and another human being has a job description that involves "hear me" and "send aid." Because I'm an engineer, and I know full well how often we miss edge cases.
And, yes, this is less efficient. And my ticket might be a little cheaper if we had robots doing all the work. But those people do an important job. I am glad they are there, doing that job. I really don't want to those jobs "efficiented" away by a bunch of management experts who are chauffeured about in cars with tinted windows, and never ride the trains anyway.
Games are inefficient. But they make us happy.
Love is inefficient. One could make he argument that it would be better for society if computers assigned relationships based genetic/personality/economic/whatever criteria. But I don't think any of us want that, either. Gattica was a dystopia.
I'm not sure how, but we need to capture the idea that human happiness requires that every system have, built-in, a certain amount of inefficiency.
I think that the reason those examples of purposeful inefficiency are comforting is that they subtly signal our brains that resources are relatively abundant. When things are perfectly optimized and scheduled even though you rationally know that there is leeway it somehow trains your brain to feel like you are always on the edge of deprivation.
Efficiency is death of the soul because it tries to operationalize all aspects of life and when it can't it simply chooses to ignore it or undervalue it. It shouldn't be a big surprise that all things we enjoy are incredibly inefficient.
But even when you can operationalize it, it doesn't account for the chaos. If every car was made exactly so to be able to carry an exact amount of weight (max. passengers * median baggage) you would be in trouble when you went out to get some bags of cement for example.
The obsession with efficiency can become very inefficient very quickly.
Yes, the automated systems -- which exist! -- probably do more for safety. But I really like knowing that I can scream out for help, and another human being has a job description that involves "hear me" and "send aid." Because I'm an engineer, and I know full well how often we miss edge cases.
Uh, no? Maybe humans actually add in safety. Why do you think we have pilots in airplanes?
Humans are underrated.
I really don't want to those jobs "efficiented" away by a bunch of management experts who are chauffeured about in cars with tinted windows, and never ride the trains anyway.
I am sure if you listen to beancounters, you won't save money and actually drive the system to the ground and make people unhappy.
I'm not sure how, but we need to capture the idea that human happiness requires that every system have, built-in, a certain amount of inefficiency.
You exclude human happiness from the definition of efficiency.
Love is inefficient. One could make he argument that it would be better for society if computers assigned relationships based genetic/personality/economic/whatever criteria. But I don't think any of us want that, either. Gattica was a dystopia.
Why would anybody think this would be efficient or that it works at all?
For a number of reasons. First of all, to act as a backup, assistant, babysitter, and replacement for the autopilot in modern planes. Exactly what GP says: to cover up for missed edge cases and unimplemented features. Autopilots are great and can do much, but not everything (yet?)
Then, there's a thing called “culpability”. You can’t blame a machine but you can blame a person when an accident does happen. Accidents can be happily resolved as “pilot error” without having to call back the entire fleet of aircraft.
Also, human passengers usually feel much more safe and calm when they know that their potentially fatal transport is controlled by a fellow human, just like them, instead of some soulless machine that can murder you all without so much as a blink if it goes awry. Some time ago elevators were not that safe and had elevator attendants, now they are safe enough for passengers to be fine with a computer controlling them.
> Autopilots are great and can do much, but not everything (yet?)
Biggest issue with autopilots is that, well, they're part of the machine, the human comes in very important when the machine is partially crippled - we've already seen what happens to automation when critical sensors fail in the 737 Max.
> You can’t blame a machine but you can blame a person when an accident does happen. Accidents can be happily resolved as “pilot error” without having to call back the entire fleet of aircraft.
That's not really the case, air accident investigations won't blame the pilots just because they're there. They'll happily point out design defects, or maintenance failures, or pilot error, if it was actually a contributing cause.
Of course, plane manufacturers love being able to blame the pilots when their autopilot engages Kill All Humans mode.
> I am sure if you listen to beancounters, you won't save money and actually drive the system to the ground and make people unhappy.
Yes and no.
Economic realities are a thing. Organizations that stop producing enough income to cover their expenses soon stop being organizations.
The problem isn't necessarily the counting of beans, but rather how beans distribute over time.
There's a balance to strike there, and both the cultural and regulatory environments in the US push very strongly towards "acquire beans today, regardless as to what this does to tomorrow's bean-acquisition capabilities".
So, yes, the Counters of Beans get a say. Their input matters. But it's not the only thing that needs to be factored.
>When I lived in Berlin, the doors and ceilings felt as if they were built for a race of giants -- much taller, and much wider, then they needed to be.
>And it was wonderful. It took some getting used to, but I could feel the difference.
Fwiw I concur, this was my first impression of Berlin the first time I went there too, and it felt amazing. Compared to NYC or the SF Bay Area where space is more at a premium. Berlin has the ability to build outwards and use space generously, where the other two are horizontal space-constrained and can only build upwards (and SF chooses not to).
Who decides what kinds of inefficiency are admitted? Sounds utterly dystopian to me too if some (small) group gets to decide what inefficiencies the society should pay for to satisfy their personal vanities. I believe if you go down that rabbit hole, you will find that there is not a single inefficiency that would be appreciated by a majority (if they were asked if they are willing to pay more). So in my opinion it needs to be bottom up with all power to the customer and not centrally assigned
> Who decides what kinds of inefficiency are admitted? Sounds utterly dystopian to me too if some (small) group gets to decide what inefficiencies the society should pay for to satisfy their personal vanities.
Oh, absolutely. I would struggle to think of a worse way to do things. :)
"Acceptable inefficiency" is a coordination problem, which are nominally solved via protected markets.
To provide an example: let's say that you want all battery factories to operate cradle-to-grave with zero pollution. This is way more expensive than just dumping manufacturing byproducts into the nearest river.
No one manufacturer is going to do this on their own, because it'll put them at a substantial disadvantage compared to their peers.
However, if the market imposes that cost as an entry requirement -- to sell batteries, you must be certified pollution-free -- now you've leveled the playing field. Every player has the same requirements.
This isn't a trivial thing, of course.
You can't allow the shortcut of "move manufacturing to a place where we can fill the rivers with lithium and nobody in power is going to care".
This also introduces two new problems: regulatory capture and corruption.
If it's all-in cheaper to bribe, blackmail, or infiltrate the regulators, then that'll happen. And regulation is often used as a weapon against smaller or newer players.
It's not inefficient if you think of it as a larger gas reservoir, so the O2 and CO2 levels would stay stable for longer intervals without requiring circulation.
>When I lived in Berlin, the doors and ceilings felt as if they were built for a race of giants -- much taller, and much wider, then they needed to be. And it was wonderful.
As long as it doesn't give you an urge to invade Poland, it's fine!
Totally. Art and meaning doesn't come from "efficiency". And try stressing a totally "efficient" system - one which has no contingency. Take the uk school system, NHS or social care right now. These are systems that an "austerity" government has tried to make "efficient" by cutting down to bare bones. Add in a stressor like a pandemic? Things break very quickly. Same with individual mental health. We're here for a limited time. Enjoy it rather than optimising all the time. That doesn't mean sit on the sofa, it just means have balance.
Interestingly these cuts always affect social things that exist for the benefit of all: healthcare, education, environmental protection, art.
Meanwhile we truck our goods around while trains would be much more efficient. Trucks are only cheap because we subsidise them through the roads they are using. Few people are aware that road wear increases to the fourth (!) power with axle weight. That means cars or bicycles are even ignored in the calculation because they do so little damage, while trucks are responsible for nearly all of it. But they don't pay for nearly all of it – we do.
In the meantime trains have to maintain their own rail system.
That's a weird area to to want to de-socialise costs! If trucking costs go up to cover wear, urban end-users probably won't notice much cost difference (bit of change to last-mile infrastructure at most) while remote communities would be bled dry then cutoff (where the "last-mile" location is impractical for tracks). And probably the same fate for small and medium agricultural concerns who won't necessarily be able to privately link up to the network.
How comes 100yr ago it was practical to build narrow gauge everywhere (in the mountains nevertheless - in hungarian carpathians, to haul lumber and ore, but once built it was used for passengers too) but now suddenly it's a problem?
Similarly with electricity - long time ago it was possible to electrify remote communities but now pulling fiber there is such a problem that we view satellites as better alternative?
The physical and public safety requirements on railroad tracks demands different parameters. Also, there was significant community and government buy-in for lack of alternative. Cost-of-living adjusted, those tracks you mention would cost astronomical sums by todays standards.
Indeed. Efficiency for what purpose and by what metric? We all know that once a metric is applied things not covered by the metric get squeezed out.
Someone on here used the phrase "self-Taylorism" to cover this kind of activity, which I think is very apt. Taylorism was the beginning of manufacturing productivity research, but we've moved on from there.
It's also reminding me of the failures of high modernism and Corbusier's "the house is a machine for living"; the result of which was houses that were neat but inhospitable and inevitably customised in "inefficient" ways by those that actually lived in them to make them livable.
Completely agree. Excess is not actually pointless: it makes people feel very good and comfortable. People say it's pointless because they're looking at the big picture and thinking "this is wasteful since it does not advance the family/corporation/nation/species". It does advance the person's individual goals and desires though.
> There is such a thing as balance and it’s important.
That's ergonomics in a nutshell. Keep your head balanced on top of your shoulders, not tilted up or down, your shoulders relaxed, wrists supported and your torso and spine straight.
Take a step back. Let the time pass like sand through the hour glass. Don't try to savior it, don't try to appreciate it. Waste it, it's a luxury, you'll never have this time again. Don't feel anxious. Your anxiety is trying to pry the time out of your hands, trying to spin up your brain, let it burn some calories. Think of things to do, more better, faster. What you are doesn't matter, what you do does. Fight back, take some time for yourself. You can only ever be in the now, you are not what you've done, you are not what they tell you you are, you are not what you think you are. Nothing really matters. But there is you, and there is now. And you can observe. You need to breathe. Let it all go. You're going nowhere. You're secure in this moment. Dunes may shift and the wind will blow around you. Rain will fall on your head. Your value does not diminish. Not less or more. Feel it, you're close. It courses through you, time. Appreciate it for what it is, not for what can be done with it. Just a bit. Let go. You'll end up doing soon. Thinking. Parading some words into a line, beating them into submission for a service they don't care for. But for just one moment, utterly and completely waste time, know it's gone, you had it. It won't come back again. It's at it's most valuable in this passed form.
I do see the appeal of this sort of in-the-moment mindfulness - especially for people who are burnt out or don't otherwise get the dedicated rest time they need from the world. But this reads as awfully sad to me. I hope you're doing OK.
I had a a pretty long period of time where I consigned myself to rubber-banding between relentless, meaningless, profitable, and phoned-in productivity vs total solipsism under the guise of "self-care". I told myself things like this comment back then. I thought if I could savor and find meaning in the little things, then I could learn to accept the fact that I had sacrificed most of my agency as a human being in the quest for career progress and the appearance of success. It was really, really not healthy in the long-run, and I don't ever want to be stuck in my head like that again.
I'm fairly certain that I really am what I do and what I've done - and that's OK. I don't think I could tolerate existence otherwise. I still waste plenty of time (and recommend choosing to do so ), but I'm now more conscientious about whether the time I waste is manifesting into something physically observable at the very least. It's easier to keep the habit alive than it is to build it back once you've lost it.
I thought there was no substance from the title, but developing metacognition the article is pushing is a very useful skill to capture the "last mile" of value if it exists.
Beware that all of the actionable advice the author is proposing is part of an energy game for you to expend more and there is no free lunch (i.e. requiring beans of Java to be functional today), but since our brains are very efficient, you can probably do way with this without any lasting neurotoxicity. It will however be painful to your body.
Hey apologies! I was trying to say a few things jumbled in a few sentences:
1. A lot of what the author suggests to do takes additional energy, and energy is not free. We can either spend more time or amp up our heads so that our attention/processing is a bit better (possibly also compensatory against sleep deprivation for additional time).
2. For the latter, we can probably sustain this behavior for quite a while without adverse effects.
It is a light suggestion that doing with what the author suggests in the fashion of stimulants is humanly possible.
> One cause of wasted motion is being passive. Cultivate the identity of Doing Things, overcome the illusion of doing nothing and learn how to take the first step
Being passive is a way (best way?) of energy conservation: might not be the best but you know the outcome when you do nothing or just follow the flow. Trying things needs energy (time, resources etc) and the outcome is not guaranteed, but might lead you to a new optima.
And a corollary to that: it's better to make a decision and start moving, even if it's the wrong decision than to do nothing. Just make sure you reevaluate if it's still the right decision and have the ability to change course (iterate). I've heard both Jeff Bezos and Tom Bilyeu espouse this.
If the decision is irrevocable (e.g. getting married), then obviously more care is warranted and doing nothing might be better until you're more certain.
I disagree. The world would be bereft of many of its greatest intellects without the fruits of passivity.
Yes there are plenty of situations in which it is better to act, but I firmly believe the ancients were right that leisure is prerequisite to deep, radically novel thought.
I think we have more leisure in modern times than ancient times - you're probably romanticizing the past here. But apart from that I don't see what leisure has to do with being passive - I think you're conflating things that aren't actually tied together.
I disagree. We do have more “free-time” but what we decide to fill it with is not what I’d call leisure. What we think of as leisure today is not leisurely in any way. We browse on reddit, watch netflix, listen to spotify. And if we “take a break”, we’re just anxiously awaiting the next bit of entertainment. Leisure is walking slow and going nowhere, laying on the bed and letting the mind wander. True leisure is rare and should be refreshing and comforting, but when was the last time it felt like that?
In some ways, it is. For somebody who changed their name, it's tons of paperwork, at least, to undo that. If they've published papers in the meantime, that name change likely cannot be fully undone. Depending on finances, there may be years of alimony involved. As others note, if children resulted from the marriage, there's no undo. People save money on auto insurance while married, and often, "divorced" is more expensive than "single". If the divorce is amicable, it may be easy to execute -- if not, thousands of dollars and perhaps years of legal battles will be involved. Depends what you call "easy", I guess
Marriage is not that easily reversible. You lose 50% of your assets in the process (+legal fees, alimony, and maybe child support - can be more like 70% with ongoing costs), have to deal with all of the fallout and stigma in your family and social circles.
That's not saying you can't course correct - but the cost is very high compared to most things.
High earning women face the same "problem". The fact that men are more likely to be high earners then women are is a whole separate issue. Divorce law is supposed to be gender neutral, per the Supreme Court ruling (though it might be imperfectly enforced).
Since men make more than women generally, if the nth percentile earning woman marries the nth percentile earning man, then the man will make more money, yes. That also means that if they divorce, the woman may take out more dollars than she put in. In the less common scenario where then woman makes more, though, she will take out fewer dollars and may have to pay spousal support going forward.
Meanwhile, custody of children in most jurisdictions is in fact gender neutral, and based on the best interests of the child. However, since more often the mother is the primary caregiver (whether stay-at-home or working full time), courts more often grant custody to the mother.
The first problem would be solved by eliminating gender wage disparities. The second problem would be solved by men providing more of the childcare during the marriage.
Ironically both problems have the same cause. Women do more of the child rearing and household chores. The wage gap is actually mostly a motherhood gap, if you look at the statistics.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find 1 in 10 divorces that "benefit" the man more than the woman. Just my intuition, I don't have any statistics on that. I have a really hard time calling that gender neutral.
I'd say the laws themselves are neutral, but situations vary. Also, 50/50 is just the default split; nothing prevents a couple from agreeing on a different split in a prenuptial agreement, which would then carry the force of law.
Yes, I remember reading a paper that showed we naturally offset activity with passivity. So you might go for a long run in the morning and then spend the evening on the sofa. It seems our brains try and keep a balance without us being consciously aware of it.
I'm guessing this is why exercise isn't a successful route to weight loss for most people.
Another corollary to the pareto principle is that young fields in which a very small advantage in output results in disproportionate returns are places that you can win just by putting in 5x the effort.
(Old fields that generate value in this will usually have people already asymptotically approaching 100% of the value).
"Minimize your therbligs until it becomes automatic; this doubles your effective lifetime–and thereby gives time to enjoy butterflies and kittens and rainbows." - Robert A. Heinlein "
> The default state of the world is wasted motion. This means that there is a constant fight against entropy...
That's an interesting way of phrasing things, and in this context, it reveals a sort of innate natural paradox that I find really fascinating. The author here uses "motion" both to describe natural, universal entropy ("wasted motion"), and the more productive or meaningful sort motion that is the result of deliberate, intentional human action. The thing which I find so interesting here, is that the "useful motion" which goes into building the clever hacks that the author talks about - that motion can only be judged as effective by the evaluating the degree to which it reduces the wasteful motion/ natural entropy that was present previously. Ie, meaningful and "useful" motion can only exist in opposition to the more common natural, wasted motion.
It reminds me of one the logions from an early gnostic text[1], that I had always found a bit confusing due to it's apparent insistence that "motion and rest" is key to what makes human beings special. I had mentally wrote off that saying, thinking it was either a relic of old school dualistic / karmic morality or that it was a simple "obey the sabbath" type of thing - but I'm now seeing the connection between human intellect and this sort of paradoxical type of "motion-which-reduces-motion" the author describes - and in that context "rest" could mean the the time spent introspecting, evaluating, and pivoting based on results.
To give another example that I picked up from reading "The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch, our human intellect is surprisingly unique and powerful exactly because it allows us to force the universe into states that would not otherwise arise on their own, even to the extent that we can build states which are otherwise impossible to arise in environments controlled by unchecked natural entropy. One example he gave to support this is the fact that absolute coldest place that we know of in the universe, is not in some far off galaxy - it's in a university lab that was designed and built specifically to maintain incredibly low temperatures for quantum computing research purposes.
Great article. The author uses the principle to learn more efficiently, but I've actually applied it in a different way. I have a broad interest, like many here do as demonstrated by the constantly interesting frontpage, and I like to know everything.
Since it's such a vague principle, this is a bit handwavy, but imagine peoples perception of a skilled person. Someone who has mastered 50% of a skill can be said to be able to do it, but not be very good, someone who has mastered 100% of a skill, can be said to be the legendary kind of master that's spent 10.000 hours honing it.
No one really expects someone they meet to be a master. Anyone you meet in your life, when they say they can do something because it's their work, or their hobby, you expect them to be good at it, having spent perhaps the first half of their 10.000 hours, and getting to 90%. They might have spent 10.000 hours, but it wasn't 10.000 hours of hard practice, the kind that starts out fun, but ends up being a hard grind towards the end. Imagine your surprise if you met someone and they were a professional of international renown, not just good at their jobs.
In the time it takes to become that kind of a master (about 5 years if you work at it 8 hours a day 5 days a week (remember, hard practice! not just applying things you already know)) you could have learned 5 things to 80%. That means you could have easily become a decent programmer, an enjoyable guitar player, an excellent home cook, an adept sportsman and a poet.
Note that besides taking the same amount of time, it was a lot more enjoyable and required less discipline, because it's the last 20% of mastery that takes 80% of the time, that's also where the drudgery is. Definitely not saying the drudgery isn't enjoyable, obviously it can be quite rewarding to push the boundaries of what a person can achieve, and be lauded for it. But if you seek diversity in the way you spend your time, you could be great at many things and be very satisfied as well.
I think the exposition of this piece lets down what's otherwise a pretty useful idea.
Here's how I'd phrase it: anything worth doing is a grind. It's exhausting, physically and mentally, and it's really easy to procrastinate on it or avoid it, but all that does is defer it. Rather than trying to avoid the grind, try to get the most out of it that you can -- try to get a little bit better at the thing you're grinding through each day because consistency is king.
And then one day, you wake up and the thing you are trying to do is all of a sudden very close to completion. It didn't just happen that one day, it was in process on so many days before that point. But on that day, you notice it.
I personally believe that 75% or more of what we do is not based on any thinking at all but rather comes from subconsciously copying other people. Its what we all do naturally.
So you don't really need to do deep introspection to find something more efficient. You just need to be willing to question what you are doing and do something that you know other people aren't necessarily going to like because they aren't used to it.
I believe in the Pareto Principle but I believe it's inescapable. And the author says so himself, just not in these words:
> Run experiments and try new things
Most if the things you will try will not produce desired effects. Sure, the more you try the more you will succeed, but that's still 20%, just of a larger overall expended energy.
I somewhat disagree, I think experiments are a great way to overcome wasted motion. Sure, only 20% will succeed. But there's a major asymmetry with trying new things - you can drop the failures after trying it once, but can keep doing the successes again and again.
For example, if I want to find a new hobby, I should try lots of things. 80% will be boring and I can drop it after one session, but 20% could be incredibly fun, and worth doing for the rest of my life.
If you dedicate all your time to the 20% you found - at one time in some context - to be fun it means you don't have any more time for experimenting. And the world changes and your data is no longer relevant.
There is no escaping the trial and error loop. If you could then science for example would go uninterrupted from one success to another. Or organizations would achieve 100% efficiency after some experimenting.
You can see in history people, organizations, societies, etc that have tried to stick to what they found efficient at some point. But that led to rigidity and gradual loss of touch with the evolving reality, the exact opposite of what was desired.
I would actually go one step further and say 80-20 is more like 95-5. Spend enough time in corporate environment and this will become so clear. That’s the downside of service/information economy.
OK, I shared this article one day ago, and there was zero traction. Now, it says it was posted 3 hours ago, and it is on the homepage. Could someone shed some light :)?
I get that it might feel a little unfair but it's probably just bad luck/timing. My sincere advice for your own sake: don't worry about it, content aggregation rankings are fickle. Try not to get invested in those capricious judgements.
If I may speculate a bit: HN has a different ranking algorithm to reddit, but I suspect they both share similarities in the way they are influenced by early upvotes which build momentum towards a top ranking. If your post was unlucky and missed a bunch of people who would have been interested at the time, then it'll probably fade away.
No, I think I didn't explain the situation clearly. The post is still submitted by my user. It's not like someone else posted in a different moment etc. I'm pretty much aware about the luck/timing factor.
It's more like, there's is some hidden functionality I'm not aware of or there is a moderator what manually bumped the popularity of the post and changed the post date ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
p.s. I don't get the downvoting of my comment. Could someone shed some light on that too :D?
Yes, IIRC dang mentioned once that a 'second chance' feature exists where a mod can give it a second shot if they decide it's interesting. I think it's essentially discretionary and it doesn't edit the votes, it just makes the submit 'new' again, like resetting the clock, so the submission has another shot.
I suspect you were getting downvotes for your first comment because it sounds like you're complaining about submitting the same thing and not getting traction, and then somebody else's submission getting it later on.
Only 20% of the submissions get 80% of the views ;)
edit: oops, didn't notice you mean it's still your submission but the timestamp has changed. That is strange, I guess this is a change in the HN system. Maybe now when someone resubmits your link it'll be counted as a new submission, but with the original submitter as the author?
Roger Penrose's answer to that is that there is nothing to experience time, and with no time there is no way to measure speed and no concept of frequency and so no concept of distance. Without all that, the enormouse heat-death decayed universe still contains all the energy it ever did (because it can't be destroyed), and if there's no distance then the heat-death universe is identical to the pre-big-bang universe, and so there is no need for a big crunch and it can still be a cyclic thing where it explodes again, leaving the cosmic microwave background radiation as a remnant of the boundary between the previous aeon and the current one.
George Bataille had a theory that excess and pointless expenditure was actually integral to the well being of human societies (his explanation for why ancient societies participated in practices that were, from an economic standpoint, totally wasteful, such as extreme rituals of extravagance, sacrifice, etc.) humans need a release valve, and I think “wasted energy”, debauchery, etc. is precisely this mechanism—even in minor ways.
> 80% of every proof is garbage - it’s a series of mindless algebra, and doing the obvious thing. When my goal is to learn, I want to find that 20% that is insightful, the steps that I would struggle to come up with myself
Right, once we do something long enough, it’s easy to take all the bits that are the foundation for what we’re doing for granted—but not everything is about returns, there is such a thing as discipline, rigor, the traditions of the art—and while the steps are tedious, they subtly reinforce core tenants when you encounter them, and that’s important.