Getting on the train that's physically in front of you, no matter how crowded, is the rational decision basically everywhere outside Japan, where you can have metaphysical certitude that the next train will show up as scheduled.
An exponential curve looks locally the same at all points in time. For a very long period of time, computers were always vastly better than they were a year ago, and that wasn't because the computer you'd bought the year before was junk.
Consider that what you're reacting to is a symptom of genuine, rapid progress.
> An exponential curve looks locally the same at all points in time
This is true for any curve...
If your curve is continuous, it is locally linear.
There's no use in talking about the curve being locally similar without the context of your window. Without the window you can't differentiate an exponential from a sigmoid from a linear function.
Let's be careful with naive approximations. We don't know which direction things are going and we definitely shouldn't assume "best case scenario"
There may have been a discontinuity at the beginning of time... but there was nobody there to observe it. More seriously, the parent is saying that it always looks continuous linear when you're observing the last short period of time, whereas the OP (and many others) are constantly implying that there are recent discontinuities.
I think they read curve and didn't read continuous.
Which ends up making some beautiful irony. One small seemingly trivial point fucked everything up. Even a single word can drastically change everything. The importance of subtlety being my entire point ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For a function to be locally linear at a point, it needs to be differentiable at that point... |x| isn't differentiable at 0, so it isn't locally linear at 0... that's the entirety of what I'm saying. :-)
Nor does local flatness imply direction, the curve could be descending for all that "looks locally flat" matters. It also isn't on the skeptics to disprove that "AI" is a transformative, exponentially growing miracle, it's on the people selling it.
Paul Graham is a good writer. He's not an elite-tier writer's writer like "the dead guy" who's not actually dead, but he's still better than 99% of business executives, and he's better in the skills that businessmen want.
For me the beauty of idlewords's own blog (https://idlewords.com/) is that it's so good it makes me want to write.
Similarly, I find Graham's writing so bad that it also makes me want to write.
(note: idlewords, if you see this, your blog is misbehaving at the moment. For example, PHP is complaining bitterly on this page right now: https://idlewords.com/2018/10/ )
It's really the self-confidence of a successful person. He doesn't need to prove anything to anyone at this point, so he's unafraid of criticism. There was another submission here recently ("Find Your People") that touched on that: be immune to rejection.
> ... he writes mostly to justify his luck in amassing capital as something of intellectual consequence.
Strange take, given PG made his billions from actually building something of immense consequence (YC) & provably codifying a blueprint on building fast-growing companies in SV.
If PG was a prof at HBS, it is likely he'd be considered in the same bracket as Clayton Christensen.
Of course, this video is just stupid accent comedy, but we should be careful not to draw too much from it. (Let's also set aside the specifics of making fried rice.) The implication of the section of the clip you linked is that the presenter (Hersha Patel) does not know how to make rice properly, and this is evidenced by her cooking it in too much water and draining it.
But this is not correct.
There are, in fact, many different varieties of rice, different cuisines that incorporate rice as a major component, and different styles of cooking rice. Cooking (certain varieties of long-grained? rice) in an open vessel, cooking with an excess of water, and draining the water afterwards is an extremely common and popular way to prepare it for use in some cuisines: e.g.,
https://youtu.be/TARO_R4cE24?t=420
When this video first made the rounds some years ago, it was surprising to see how confidently people would weigh-in on this topic, despite demonstrating very little background or knowledge. (There's a big difference between saying “that's not the appropriate way to do this in this circumstance” and “that's completely wrong,” and the former creates space to derive knowledge. After all, the dish in the video is a popular one, even in cultures that predominantly eat jasmine or basmati rice, and there are interesting variations in technique and flavour that arise as a consequence!)
I similarly do not understand why these kind of reaction videos are popular. There are slightly better versions of this format (e.g., https://youtu.be/DsyfYJ5Ou3g?t=182) but they are drowned out by this kind of fluff. What does one really gain from interacting with such criticism?
Perhaps there is something to be learnt from these situations: ones where, equipped with just a little bit of knowledge, we derive unearned confidence, and use this confidence not to venture forth more boldly in search of knowledge, but to convince ourselves of our own superiority.
