from Hacker News

Fuck Your Miracle Year

by ianwehba on 4/17/22, 12:47 PM with 160 comments

by elil17 on 4/17/22, 2:18 PM
This is a really weird article. Of course VC people and bloggers are not going to have miracle years - the people with the potential to make amazing discoveries have much better things to do then talk about how to get other people to make amazing discoveries. The hope of an article like Miracle Years is that someone in power makes a change to a school policy or something like that and makes it more likely for someone else to have a miracle year.
by devmunchies on 4/17/22, 3:17 PM
> Delete the draft of that blog post you were writing. The post sucks and no one was going to read it anyways.
Blog posts for me but not for thee?
by DubiousPusher on 4/17/22, 2:15 PM
> I agree with Dwarkesh that we should be doing more to help young people have miracle years
Optimizing any system for "geniuses" seems very silly to me.
> Look, no one talked about how we can engineer miracle years when miracle years were actually still happening. This modern obsession with progress is just a sign of our decadence, of our creative exhaustion and inability to innovate in any meaningful way.
I'm reading this mega-tome about the guilded age right now and I promise you this is not true.
by apples_oranges on 4/17/22, 2:49 PM
The miracle year will be when we will stop obsessing about success so much. Must be a perceived lack of love. So: Love your kids better, that's how you produce future miracle years.
by photochemsyn on 4/17/22, 3:17 PM
The claim that 'the miracle year' is some fundamental rule in scientific discovery and that people's best work is always done in some flurry of creativity in their younger years is the kind of claim that might sell magazine articles - it's simple to understand, you can cherry-pick a few examples, and that might get you some mass appeal.
However there are a very large number of counterexamples, starting with Einstein himself, who went on to spend 15 grueling years working out general relativity, an effort which relied heavily on previous mathematical development of non-Euclidean geometry by the likes of mathematicians like Riemann. Here's that story:
https://thewire.in/science/beyond-the-surface-of-einsteins-r...
Another counterexample is that of James C. Maxwell, probably the most important theoretical physicist of the 19th century, whose synthesis of previous work on electricity and magnetism into a coherent whole was a 20-year process at least, and the form we see Maxwell's equations in today is due to later efforts by others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Maxwell%27s_equatio...
> "Later, Oliver Heaviside studied Maxwell's A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism and employed vector calculus to synthesize Maxwell's over 20 equations into the 4 recognizable ones which modern physicists use. Maxwell's equations also inspired Albert Einstein in developing the theory of special relativity. The experimental proof of Maxwell's equations was demonstrated by Heinrich Hertz in a series of experiments in the 1890s. After that, Maxwell's equations were fully accepted by scientists."
Another counterexample: Erwin Schrodinger of quantum mechanical wave equation fame, who did his most important work in his late 30s, and again it was developed over a relatively long period of time, c. 1920-1926.
Maybe the story of the young genius with the brilliant idea is pleasing, and yes it may happen from time to time, but the actual history of scientific discovery generally doesn't fit this simple stereotype.
As far as why the American public education system is generally viewed as being of low quality, well, we might want to start by making teaching as economically lucrative and competitive a profession as say, doctoring or lawyering or software developing.
by spir on 4/17/22, 2:38 PM
> Because now people have to spend their 20s learning about the discoveries that others made during their miracle years (the so-called “burden of knowledge”).
Maybe now people have to spend their 20s learning about the discoveries because our modern pre-post-secondary education has become so watered down and unambitious.
Personally, I get the sense that could have learned 5x to 20x as much in my teenage years if I hadn't been in an excessively mediocre public education system. And I'm not a genius :)
by oldstrangers on 4/17/22, 3:29 PM
I don't understand either one of these articles to be honest. We're talking about Einstein and Newton as if their success is reproduceable if we just give people time to think? We don't have miracle years now because people like Einstein are impossibly rare. That's assuming Einstein was even human.
We also don't have "miracle years" because the term doesn't actually mean anything. It's not real. Maybe the pressures of life and society forced people long ago to prioritize their work in such a way that the bulk of it was done in a very short, timely manner.
Or perhaps much like an athlete, it's probably ideal to spend your prime doing your best work. Or even still, maybe like me, these people worked on waves of mania and maybe occasionally that manic episode lasted an entire year and they were extremely productive.
All of that said, literally what are we talking about? Don't spend your time on a PhD program, you might be the next Einstein! Einstein wasn't writing blog posts, he was grinding! Please go join the latest YC backed venture and we can disrupt the food delivery industry!
We're all obligated to go outside after participating in either one of these articles.
by slibhb on 4/17/22, 5:43 PM
The point of the university was to give 20-somethings in their intellectual prime a socially respectable position where they have few obligations. Higher education was for weirdos to pursue their obsessive interests and society benefited from this arrangement. We've drifted far away from this when we decided, over the years, that everyone needs a degree.
There are various monied interests trying to "disrupt higher education". "Progress studies," "Thiel Fellowships," "University of Austin," whatever. I give them low odds but they're trying to do the right thing.
by Barrin92 on 4/17/22, 3:01 PM
Lots of true stuff in this. Most important point is that this historical idea of individual genius is outdated in a world where scientific progress gets harder. If I know nothing about the world and I want to invent physics any model is better than the status quo. As we come up with better systems that explain more of what we see, improvement is harder, an entire new paradigm shift even more so.
Potential for genuine innovation seems to be in improving collective intelligence. Coordination between institutions, disciplines, communication, and so forth. There's not a day that passes without complaints about how academia, the private sector, the economy and the government don't get along. Fix that and you'll improve innovations.
This Randian hero worship of the VC industry is masturbation and I don't mind the tone of the article because I don't think the message is understood if you'd say it in any other way.
by DoreenMichele on 4/17/22, 4:12 PM
It has come to light that Einstein's first wife likely was co-author of his papers but got no credit due her gender.[1] I see no mention of that in either article.
Historically, it was sort of a given that a man's career was supported by the labor of a wife. This assumption is baked into how we design jobs and it's problematic in a world where that's less true than it once was.
If you don't count hidden contributions of that sort, you will never figure out some reproducible formula.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24964646
by mkl95 on 4/17/22, 3:07 PM
My miracle year was when I was 18 or 19 and I wrote my first large piece of software by myself. I'm approaching my late 20s now and I haven't had as much sustained fun ever since. Being a wage slave sucks.
by Comevius on 4/17/22, 4:10 PM
Dwarkesh Patel's essay did not make much sense to me, and I don't get either how people like Jeff Bezos have time for something like this. Apparently Mark Andreessen and Paul Graham are paid to tweet all day, and they are experts at everything. Do they hire ghost-writers? How does this work?
by burlesona on 4/17/22, 2:47 PM
Not sure why someone’s self-described envious rant after a peer got a bunch of attention deserves a spot at the top of HN.
by low_tech_love on 4/17/22, 3:09 PM
I really like the article for its tone, because it feels authentic and raw and is not begging me to take it seriously. I think most if not all blog posts should be like this: you read it, you smile and think a bit, maybe write a quick comment, then you move on. I agree with the author that this whole thing about wanting to be the next Big Blogger Who Wrote That Article is probably bullshit.
by jhartwig on 4/17/22, 2:31 PM
I read that as fuck your Miracle Ear.
by recursivedoubts on 4/17/22, 3:28 PM
Success will come, or it wont. If it does, it will be fleeting: you will die soon anyway. Let us not worry too much about it.
My general advice remains the same: raise good children.
by davedx on 4/17/22, 2:46 PM
What a load of drivel.
by glitchc on 4/17/22, 4:02 PM
K12 education used to be about teaching, but the No Child Left Behind policy changed goalposts. It’s now about maximizing the percentage of students that graduate. Since it’s unlikely students are getting smarter, the curriculum needs to be less intensive to lower the threshold for graduation. Net result is more students graduating per capita at the cost of a dumbed down curriculum.
by ironmagma on 4/17/22, 3:35 PM
> Also, stop meditation and trying to optimize your mental and physical performance. Has anyone who’s ever had a miracle year cared about any of this shit?
I’d say Lex Fridman is in his equivalent of a miracle year, or was last year anyway. Keeping the body tuned is important for mental ability which is important if you’re trying to be productive at all, much more to achieve a miracle year.
by dasil003 on 4/17/22, 3:31 PM
It's interesting how much truth, insight and self-awareness is in this article, and yet ultimately how vain the entire line of thinking is. The reality is, people who do great things (however you define great!), tend to achieve them through relentless focus within their field of expertise. When we start focusing on optics then we just become politicians.
by ineedasername on 4/17/22, 2:57 PM
TLDR: if your goal is to make your own innovations/progress/etc then probably don't waste your time playing armchair sociologist writing this sort of thing before you've actually done any of that. Or spend a lot of time reading this sort of thing.
by narrator on 4/17/22, 9:29 PM
If Einstein were around and publishing in today's environment would he not be widely considered a crank? What's a patent clerk doing disputing laws of physics that have been established for 100 years?
by flembat on 4/19/22, 6:24 AM
An article that explains why we should not have wasted the time to read it. And just gone for a walk instead.
by reggieband on 4/17/22, 5:29 PM
I'm reminded of an interview I saw with Ayn Rand a long time ago. I can't find the exact interview anymore but I did find an interview where she describes the general idea [1]. It is a central tenant of Objectivism that we should be doing more for gifted children based on the assumption that gifted adults contribute more to society.
We see echoes of this philosophy in our culture of belief in 10x engineers. I see it in Jeff Bezos' management philosophy of doubling down on success or in Google's philosophy of killing off under-performing projects. It is the mantra of VC capitalism where we'd rather kill middling projects that are limping along in the hopes or redirecting capital to the one 100x return behemoth.
I find Rand's ideas repugnant myself but I always admired that she plainly and unabashedly spoke them. Nowadays people who believe that kind of stuff are much more subtle.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1HD8KXn-kI
by zzzeek on 4/17/22, 3:21 PM
a free upmod to anyone who feels like summarizing whatever this is about.
by fatbird on 4/17/22, 4:16 PM
There’s a missed target here, I think, which is capitalism trying to turn observations into reproducible goods—-commoditising progress, in other words.
And like all things capitalism tries to commoditise, to the extent it succeeds it will degrade the thing it’s trying to reproduce and destroy whatever is unique and special and wonder-worthy about the original. A genius had a super productive year for discoveries? It should be self-evident that such a thing can’t be made routine or predictable, but the real story here is the paucity of vision of our entrepeneurs. They can’t even appreciate miracles without thinking about turning them out on a production line.
by ausbah on 4/17/22, 5:55 PM
this definitely has made me reconsider starting a blog
by thomasmarriott on 4/17/22, 4:49 PM
Benjamin Franklin.
by sheerun on 4/17/22, 3:14 PM
TLDR: The internet is making us all fucking idiots and the only way to have a miracle year is to unplug from it