prioritization

something about feeding your 353mb gpt chat history to claude will cause you to stare hard at how you spent 2025 and reprioritize

also, america

what do people do in this world? they ally themselves to a cause;

there have always been four uncapped-upside paths:

1. research & scientific discovery

   1. bringing discoveries forward

   2. changing the order in which discoveries are made

   3. changing the way people think about things

2. startups & entrepreneurship — ‘leadership’

   1. uniting lots of people behind an underrated vision

   2. raising cathedrals from the ground

   3. elon musk (tesla, spacex, neuralink)

3. politics / policy — ‘leadership’

   1. changing the legislation that gets passed

   2. at highest impact, founding fathers

   3. includes religious leaders

4. the arts / entertainment-influence

   1. music, literature, poetry, composition, performance

5. moral/religious influence combines 3 and 4

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have i been throwing my mind away? it’s so clear to me now. tsvi’s characterization would have you think i’ve avoided that fate by staying close to academe / intellectual toys & tricks & puzzles. your mind wants to play — but, notably, demis hassabis walked away from chess boards!

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it is very non-obvious what’s not priced in. no wonder cvs turned to history of science.

i can always enumerate candidate things i could be doing.

i don’t really think training models to predict how they’ll change after being fine-tuned on various datasets matters that much, because labs will have to figure this out anyway

“if everyone thinks this way, no one does the work”

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dewey — if you had a fixed budget and had to pay for the answer to each research question — which questions would you pay for the answers to

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it’s not actually that hard to figure out what’s the right distance away on the tech tree — between the most immediately commercializable, gobble-able low-hanging-fruit and the distant moonshot deeptech that won’t transpire

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if you are even in the position to be agonizing about whether to join the priestly class, or whether to be a forgotten engineer or a remembered philosopher, you should note very sharply that most people do not perceive that dilemma

we have our forgotten engineers now. unlimited

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https://paulgraham.com/mit.html

But really what work experience refers to is not some specific expertise, but the elimination of certain habits left over from childhood.

The way you get taught programming in college would be like teaching writing as grammar, without mentioning that its purpose is to communicate something to an audience. Fortunately an audience for software is now only an http request away.

[3 options: job, grad school, startup]

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weisser@julianweisser

The maker/manager divide collapses with AI.

10:56 PM · Dec 27, 2025 · 1.19K Views

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4 Replies · 26 Likes

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https://paulgraham.com/pypar.html

(python was esoteric in aug 2004)

https://paulgraham.com/college.html

So what less ambitious professors do is turn out a series of papers whose conclusions are novel because no one else cares about them. You're better off avoiding these.

math is very much worth studying for its own sake. It's a valuable source of metaphors for almost any kind of work. I wish I'd studied more math in college for that reason.

And if you want to start your own company, which I think will be more and more common, master the most powerful tools you can find, because you're going to be in a race against your competitors, and they'll be your horse.

In workouts a football player may bench press 300 pounds, even though he may never have to exert anything like that much force in the course of a game. Likewise, if your professors try to make you learn stuff that's more advanced than you'll need in a job, it may not just be because they're academics, detached from the real world. They may be trying to make you lift weights with your brain.

Apparently only recommendations really matter at the best schools. Standardized tests count for nothing, and grades for little. The essay is mostly an opportunity to disqualify yourself by saying something stupid. The only thing professors trust is recommendations, preferably from people they know.

[…]

So the best thing you can do in college, whether you want to get into grad school or just be good at hacking, is figure out what you truly like. It's hard to trick professors into letting you into grad school, and impossible to trick problems into letting you solve them. College is where faking stops working. From this point, unless you want to go work for a big company, which is like reverting to high school, the only way forward is through doing what you love.

https://paulgraham.com/love.html

So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, is reading books. Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive.

I think the best test is one Gino Lee taught me: to try to do things that would make your friends say wow. But it probably wouldn’t start to work properly till about age 22, because most people haven’t had a big enough sample to pick friends from before then.

Don't decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it's wrong.

A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell "Don't do it!" (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way — including, unfortunately, not liking it.

Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.