frogeyedpeas

Chemistry and reactions would absolutely still be a thing. Reactions happen underwater all the time such as the complex decay of organic matter.

The fire meta get's postponed until trapping air inside bags happens (could be seaweed/skin based bags).

Then you need to make a habit of collecting a bunch of air and trapping it and then can begin exploring chemical reactions in the air.

ex: take dead but not decomposed organic matter, dry it out in hot air bag (maybe cover the bag in black squid ink and float the bag of air in the ocean out in the sun's rays for day to warm it up.

Then eventually you need to have the insight to do friction based experiments in the bag with dried materials and then one discovers fire in a massive breakthrough not dissimilar to when humans created Bose Einstein Condensates for the first time in highly specialized environments.

Nothing here says "impossible" to me. I bet if whales had fingers to easily manipulate matter they might've already done all this by now.

last time they did that people stuck with bitcoin classic instead of the larger block size variant of bitcoin which today is known as bitcoin-cash.

I agree.

Shareholders can vote and decide the direction of a company. They should also be held liable for any problems the company causes.

If the company is fined it should come out of company and then shareholder pockets. I might even add courts should be able to award damages by directly fining share holders.

If a company does something severely illegal then very large shareholders should risk jail time.

It’s your company after all as a shareholder. You own it.

It’s no different if your dog bites someone or child breaks the law. You have to pay the fines.

Sometimes low barriers result in better results.

If the rent in a city is too high you are not going to get the MOST interesting restaurants, bars, and clubs. You are going to get only the businesses that will DEFINITELY convince an investor to write a check to dump on such high rents; regardless of whether that is a good idea or not.

The PhD cohorts for R1 Universities hasn't really gotten any bigger than 50 years ago. The number of academic jobs hasn't really gotten any bigger either. The only people having success in the system are the types of people that seem low-risk to the system.

So of course we should expect a decline in innovative ideas as time rolls on. The only way to reverse this is to literally create more tenured jobs (or perhaps temporary tenure ex: 10 years you're guaranteed employment) and increase the size of PhD student cohorts so that they are large enough that iconoclasts can fit in again.

> Re: "this is not a counter example because exams aren't an end goal..." for any end goal with a set end time there are habits that need to be second nature and information that one needs to know in order to achieve that goal. If you lack those habits and don't know those facts it's going to be very hard to achieve that goal.

I used the example of a calculus test and not being able to do addition. But this really could be any example. It could have even been a Wide Receiver failing to read the play thats happening quickly enough despite being physically fit enough to execute the right play in hindsight.

>Re: they'd make a great (systems) architect...

But you wouldn't hire them as a programmer. My sentence was biased in the sense that "team" meant "team of software engineers". You would hire them for a different job sure.

Also good mental model here just means "Always knowing and being able to clearly articulate what I need to accomplish next to write my code". It doesn't even mean they are good at designing systems but lets go with that example anyways below:

The Architect version of this is that they perhaps have perfectly clear mental models of exactly how to code (memorizing very obscure language shortcuts and syntactic sugar and writing very clear code when they know what to build) but they cannot for the love of god think critically about what a design should be BEFORE they implement it far enough to reach a major issue.

And you would rightly say "well I would never hire that guy as an architect but I might have hired them as a programmer thats led by more senior folks". At the end of the day you are only hiring people for the parts of their mental models that are useful.

And the ability to clearly recall facts about that their domain is basically the fundamental detail here.

You absolutely would never hire a coder that needs to google "how to access an array by index" every-time they need to access an index of an array.

You can say a politically correct answer like "i don't care how they do it, as long as they get it done" but such a coder will DEFINITELY take months to finish what might take someone else hours.

Such a coder might still be able to suggest new methods to do something better and if there job description was "organizational optimizer" perhaps thats fine but as soon as you also expect software output out of this person you will quickly realize that you take for granted how valuable someone that has fully memorized a bunch of fundamentals up to and including some problem strategies truly is.

You absolutely can. I remember struggling with some problems on AOPS and then reading in a book "always consider smaller $n$ when dealing with a problem that is difficult because of large $n$" and ever since then that habit has stuck. Whenever I have a problem thats hard and involves numbers and i'm stuck I just remember to ask "what if the numbers were smaller? what do we do then?"

If that isn't memorizing something and making a new habit as a kid then I don't know what memorizing means.

Said another way, the ability to remember to "____" when dealing with a problem of type "___" is what I mean by "memorize".

I'd say if someone can't do calculus based statistics then a lot of high earning career paths (ex: machine learning, data science, actuary, quant) are not available to them.

That doesn't mean you won't be rich. It's just some of the lowest hanging fruit are not an option.

This comes down to the old saying "everything is memorization at the end of the day".

Some people literally memorize answers. Other folks memorize algorithms. Yet other folks memorize general collections of axioms/proofs and key ideas. And perhaps at the very top of this hierarchy is memorizing just generic problem solving strategies/learning strategies.

And while naively we might believe that "understanding is everything". It really isn't. Consider if you are in the middle of a calculus exam and need to evaluate $7 \times 8$ by calculating $7+7+7+7...$ and then proceed to count on your fingers up to 56 because even $7+7$ wasn't memorized. You're almost certainly not going to make it past the first problem on your exam even though you really do understand exactly whats going on .

Similar things are true for software engineering. If you have to stackoverflow every single line of code that you are attempting to write all the way down to each individual print statement and array access it doesn't fucking matter HOW well you understand whats going on/how clear your mental models are. You are simply not going to be a productive/useful person on a team.

At some point in order to be effective in any field you need to eventually just KNOW the field, meaning have memorized shortcuts and paths so that you only spend time working on the "real problem".

To really drive the point home. This is the difference between being "intelligent" versus "experienced".

if you can quickly outsource a solution of P=NP for me I'd love it. Surely that's as simple as balancing a checkbook.

I'm not saying everyone needs to know math but its hardly "vestigial knowledge".

Being too early is a privilege. Not everyone CAN invent things that are valuable but ahead of their time.

If you can then on the one hand don't expect tremendous accolade but also do continue working on what you're doing if it feels obvious to you that this is important. Today with the pace at which technology is advancing people tend to receive credit in their lifetime. In Grassman's day that was just NOT the case.

If more people took risks building out ideas they "felt" were the right thing to do the world would be a substantially better place.

is this madcow part 2?