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How to Do What You Love
fnord_ix writes "Paul Graham has another interesting essay talking about How to Do What You Love. He talks about the lies that adults tell kids about what work is, and how work is equal to pain." From the article: "I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. They may have to be made to work on certain things. But if we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later. "
Here's a related article, The Puritan Work Ethic at Anxiety Culture.
What does the education system expose your kids to today?
STDs mostly. I'm not kidding, 25% of Americans age 15-39 have genital herpes. An uncurable, lifelong disease. And they can't add.
I am seriously fretting for my homeland's future at this point, but what can be done?
Monstar L
They would tend to suggest the figures are closer to 1.4% in males and 2.2% in females. But if there's any conflicting data on this, I'm more than happy to accept it!
PS The Pubmed ID of the article is 16026639. You can get the abstract here
If you have primary sources for this statement, you should correct Wikipedia's entry on the First World
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
It's easy to preach about how to do what you love when you're independently wealthy.
Allow me to latch onto that first line. I agree with the rest, but for now, I choose to ignore it.
Wealth creates options. When a person has real options in life (where to live, what to drive, what to eat, and all the bills are covered), the stress of living is dramatically reduced. Ever notice that when you quit a job you hate, your last two weeks are suddenly much easier? Or if you finally decide to break off a relationship with someone, suddenly they become so much easier to deal with? It's because you're exercising your options, and verifying that you're not trapped in the situation.
Think of how enjoyable just about everything would be if you didn't have to feel trapped by having to scrape together money for rent, food, car payment, insurance, clothes - and god forbid medical bills. When you're living paycheck to paycheck, you are trapped, regardless of how big or small those paychecks are.
Maybe not trapped. You can always spend less money. I'm going to guess that if you're reading this, there are a lot of people with way less money than you, and they get by. If you were to live as though you had less money, it would suddenly become easier to make ends meet, and the stress of being trapped by life would diminish, thereby allowing you to enjoy it more, and save for retirement while you're at it.
Now, if only I could follow my own advice, and tell Consumerism that we should see other people.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Many of those were trivial. IIRC most demo coders used look-up tables to produce sine scrollers or lissajous figures, which was wasteful since simple school maths would have shown them that differentiating a sine wave twice gets the same (ok the negative) value. So by keeping track of position and velocity in fixed point numbers and making acceleration proportional to -displacement they could have done some nice smooth moves without using tables. OTOH I admired the artistry of the 8 bit demo scene and wished I could have drawn something half as nice as some of those demos (e.g. super swap sweden demos). And yes I did buy the mind candy DVD :-)
Perhaps the author of "Dabblers and Blowhards" should follow irony in his own title. From near the beginning of his own essay:
"But the emailed links continued, and over the next two years Paul Graham steadily ramped up his output while moving definitively away from subjects he had expertise in (like Lisp) to topics like education, essay writing, history, and of course painting. Sometime last year I noticed he had started making bank from an actual print book of collected essays, titled (of course) "Hackers and Painters". I felt it was time for me to step up.
So let me say it simply - hackers are nothing like painters."
From the wiki on Paul Graham:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham
"Graham has an A.B. from Cornell and a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard, and studied painting at Rhode Island School of Design and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence."
Text is a lot easier to read in relatively narrow columns. Ever wonder why newspapers are laid out like that?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Yes, the French have figured out how to create and maintain a 10% unemployment rate!
Bollocks: If text is easy to read in narrow columns, why aren't all hardcopy books published that way?
... about 10 words per line.
... wait, they have exactly the same number of words on a page with two columns. Maybe even fewer. What was your argument, again?
They are.
A random selection of the 6 closest books to me (which vary in physical width from 5 to almost 8 inches) all have about 10 words per line, despite differences in page size, font size, and margin size. Paul Graham's pages have
Making it go all the way across a window (more words per line) would be the equivalent of a normal-sized book where a line of text started on the left page and continued onto the right page. Or a book which was read normally but over 12 inches wide when closed.
Newspapers use column format to get more leads on each page.
Encyclopedias, dictionaries, and other books with very-wide pages or very-small print often use two or three columns per page. Surely you aren't suggesting that Webster thinks they can sell more copies if they have more words in the