> I recently read The Secrets of Alchemy by Lawrence Principe, which I loved, especially because he tries to replicate ancient alchemical recipes in his own lab. And sometimes he succeeds! For instance, he attempts to make the “sulfur of antimony” by following the instructions in The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony (Der Triumph-Wagen Antimonii), written by an alchemist named Basil Valentine sometime around the year 1600. At first, all Principe gets is a “dirty gray lump”. Then he realizes the recipe calls for “Hungarian antimony,” so instead of using pure lab-grade antimony, he literally orders some raw Eastern European ore, and suddenly the reaction works! It turns out the Hungarian dirt is special because it contains a bit of silicon dioxide, something Basil Valentine couldn’t have known.
> No wonder alchemists thought they were dealing with mysterious forces beyond the realm of human understanding. To them, that’s exactly what they were doing! If you don’t realize that your ore is lacking silicon dioxide—because you don’t even have the concept of silicon dioxide—then a reaction that worked one time might not work a second time, you’ll have no idea why that happened, and you’ll go nuts looking for explanations. Maybe Venus was in the wrong position? Maybe I didn’t approach my work with a pure enough heart? Or maybe my antimony was poisoned by a demon!
> An alchemist working in the year 1600 would have been justified in thinking that the physical world was too hopelessly complex to ever be understood—random, even. One day you get the sulfur of antimony, the next day you get a dirty gray lump, nobody knows why, and nobody will ever know why. And yet everything they did turned out to be governed by laws—laws that were discovered by humans, laws that are now taught in high school chemistry. Things seem random until you understand ‘em.
Well, this example doesn't just fail to support the argument, but undercuts it. Basil successfully identified the kind of antimony that would work, -despite- having no concept of sulfur dioxide. He did not write down something like "not all kinds of antimony work for this recipe, so get a bunch of different kinds and try them all" -- that, or a stronger version ("sometimes the recipe fails, we don't know why"), would support the author's point.
So we're left with the author trying to argue that this alchemist thought the world was "too hopelessly complex to ever be understood" on the basis of ... the alchemist correctly identifying the ingredient that would make the recipe work.
Yes, agree 100% with the "practice over and over" approach (I'm reminded of the "50 pounds of pots" story, shared by Derek Sivers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6097663 ). I already do that, I'm just looking for sources to supplement it.
> Brutalism is an architectural style of the 20th century that mainly uses concrete as a building material. The term "brutalism" comes from the French expression "béton brut", which means "raw concrete".
This is very, very long, and I've read about the first third while skimming the rest. (In general, Venkatesh's essays tend to be enormously padded with a very low signal-to-noise ratio, so this isn't too surprising.) That said, my impression is that you could condense this essay to, roughly, the following:
"It's always optimal to leave some energy aside rather than use it to increase performance in areas where you want higher performance, since your environment is more unpredictable than you think, no matter how unpredictable you already think it is."
Stated this way, it feels relatively trite for anyone who's already spent some time thinking about this sort of thing, and also largely unobjectionable (you could argue for some caveats, e.g. in situations when you're putting energy into increasing your energy capacity, foom-style).
Would anyone here disagree? If you think I've missed something important or I'm not giving the essay enough credit, I'd be really curious to hear your points.
"Shortly after my book was in print, I began to reread Gibbon, ... and after I started it occurred to me to count the errors that his expert editor, J. B. Bury, recorded in the footnotes. I do not mean misstatements due to later research, but Gibbon's errors in using his own sources – wrong names, taking a town for a man, saying the opposite of what the cited source plainly says. I found 20 such in volume 1, forty in vol. 2, 20 again in 3, at which halfway point I stopped. And the curious thing is that the text with these blemishes is of Gibbon's own revised edition. But even so, there is nothing like Gibbon, Burckhardt, and others whose work is or was thus pockmarked."
I do think it's a major issue that academia is increasingly bureaucratic and corporate, but I don't quite agree with the article. It's not that very smart, truth-motivated people have bad people skills (e.g., off the top of my head - von Neumann, Feynman, and Newton were all pretty good with people when they needed to be), it's that they are motivated largely by discovery and not by status and money. But academia today is essentially a machine for amassing status and money at the expense of creating genuine new knowledge, which drives away those who want to create knowledge.
"Earning" doesn't necessarily come with a truly elite status job, because you're not relying on a salary to live. Having to live off a salary is lower status.
If my daddy makes 7 digits per year and set me up in a trust then I don't have to work to live upper middle class. Therefore an "elite" aka prestige only position that pays pennies may be more elite because i don't depend on the pay like the plebians.
A different way to become a low paying professor is to research and earn 7digits+ from patents
I'm not disputing your point about prestige, and I'm sure that people whose 'daddies make 7 digits per year' would be interested in more prestigious roles and less interested in pay. But I really doubt that most professors are trust fund kids who don't have to work.
The comment above mine said "Academia pays absolutely terribly for an elite job". But earning doesn't really come into a truly elite (status-wise) job, because the person doing it doesn't need to earn to live.
Yes, good point, thanks. I was thinking of the high end of disciplines with strong ties to industry, mainly STEM and business, but that's actually just a very small, although prominent, part of academia.
The very high end of academia--especially in areas where consulting gigs are readily available--is pretty nice from what I've seen. But, as you say, it's pretty rare and still probably not that lucrative overall especially if you're in some expensive living area.
The shift in the US from the 1980s to banning forced retirement age has only added to the trend toward accruing and maintaining status through navigating an established, and increasingly sclerotic, hierarchy. The quest for lifelong tenure has become increasingly and necessarily political as the length of future job security has extended into one's 80s.
> No wonder alchemists thought they were dealing with mysterious forces beyond the realm of human understanding. To them, that’s exactly what they were doing! If you don’t realize that your ore is lacking silicon dioxide—because you don’t even have the concept of silicon dioxide—then a reaction that worked one time might not work a second time, you’ll have no idea why that happened, and you’ll go nuts looking for explanations. Maybe Venus was in the wrong position? Maybe I didn’t approach my work with a pure enough heart? Or maybe my antimony was poisoned by a demon!
> An alchemist working in the year 1600 would have been justified in thinking that the physical world was too hopelessly complex to ever be understood—random, even. One day you get the sulfur of antimony, the next day you get a dirty gray lump, nobody knows why, and nobody will ever know why. And yet everything they did turned out to be governed by laws—laws that were discovered by humans, laws that are now taught in high school chemistry. Things seem random until you understand ‘em.
Well, this example doesn't just fail to support the argument, but undercuts it. Basil successfully identified the kind of antimony that would work, -despite- having no concept of sulfur dioxide. He did not write down something like "not all kinds of antimony work for this recipe, so get a bunch of different kinds and try them all" -- that, or a stronger version ("sometimes the recipe fails, we don't know why"), would support the author's point.
So we're left with the author trying to argue that this alchemist thought the world was "too hopelessly complex to ever be understood" on the basis of ... the alchemist correctly identifying the ingredient that would make the recipe work.