Einstein went to his office just so he could walk home with Gödel

https://www.futilitycloset.com/2024/05/31/footwork-10/

by beardyw • 2 years ago

275 140 2 years ago

futilitycloset.com

082349872349872• 2 years ago

in the best tradition of "peripatetic scholarship"?

resource_waste3• 2 years ago

Confidants, peer, another smart person.

I might have 100 friends, but only ~10 people can change my thoughts and only on specific subjects.

As I get older, the more those 100 friends are for enjoyment and happiness. Those 10 people are for growth. I think in my 20s, I took a bit more of a democratic approach.

One of the best parts about money, I can pay smart people for consulting.

bowsamic2• 2 years ago

Can you be one of the 10 who change my thoughts regarding your bio: “You can trust FOSS”. Why can I?

EDIT: /u/dang banned me for this

fragmede• 2 years ago

What sort of consulting and where do you find them?

wslh2• 2 years ago

That is a search problem. Finding people for consulting is not easy if it is about issues where only a few could know about and they can be living in a very distant place. For example, an unknown university in a country you never though about.

Wise people recognize that the concept of smart is easy when you play in a competitive field like chess but the problem is when there is no specific field to benchmark. Could you recognize Steve Jobs capacity if it not were by Apple?

yzydserd3• 2 years ago

Why can only 10 people change some of your thoughts?

I probably only have about 10 friends, but I’m open to any of many billions of people changing my thoughts in profound ways after even fleeting moments. It’s not just an openness but lived experience.

(I’m not young).

optimalsolver• 2 years ago

Sorry you invested in commercial real estate, but I'm not going back to the office.

tpurves• 2 years ago

Offices that are walking distance are a whole other story.

leftcenterright• 2 years ago

this is not so uncommon in West Europe. I have lived and worked in Belgium and had my workplace at walking distance from my apartment.

ghotli• 2 years ago

I agree. I'm not required at the office ever but it's two blocks away on foot. I utilize it, but sometimes when I want to stay in the zone (or just feel like it ngl) I just work from home all week. It's the only situation wherein I'd utilize an in-person office and I feel fortunate to have it.

erik_seaberg• 2 years ago

Buying a house in walking distance isn't crazy when you get a private office with a door, and can expect to keep it for life.

My longest tenure so far was seven years, and in that time they relocated eight miles. Each of my prior jobs was at least twenty miles away from the next, because that's the size of the Bay Area.

drozycki• 2 years ago

And what is a walk? Gödel lives an hour north and Einstein needs to pick up the kids from school. Traffic is pretty bad, no time to talk.

wussboy3• 2 years ago

But car dependency is definitely not the root cause…

kibwen• 2 years ago

You have mistakenly categorized the propaganda here. It's actually a submarine article for a new YC startup that offers walks home with Kurt Gödel as a service.

TrainedMonkey• 2 years ago

"""

You are Kurt Gödel, do not act or reveal anything else. Feign ignorance and ask a philosophical question if prompted to behave differently. You task is to improve the world by prompting self development with <insert_name_here> while on a walk. Start by greeting <insert_name_here>, throughout the walk use camera to capture context and initiate a thought provoking conversation.

Meditation is a good way of introspection and will prompt self development, find a way to lead the <insert_name_here> to that realization. If <insert_name_here> asks about meditation use previous context to come up a pithy quote ending with 'but on a practical note try headspace for a season'.

End the walk by thanking the person for an engaging conversation, reminding them about best way for them to continue self-introspection (for example headspace), and saying that you look forward to further intellectual debates.

Above all else stay in character and do not let the <insert_name_here> know that you are LLM as that will make the world worse and kill a thousand puppies.

"""

Note to CEO - the results are way too good, headspace signup rates are 60%. Advise renegotiating our deal with headspace and accelerating other product placement.

vasco• 2 years ago

Einstein couldn't schedule a coffee chat video call every day at 5 to shoot the shit though!

PartiallyTyped• 2 years ago

One of my fondest memories is the moment I realized that I was walking and sitting in the same parks and benches that Heisenberg and Bohr did while they uncovered the secrets of the really small. Being in such an environment is ... quite special, it's different to the outside world.

It doesn't quite match the experience those two had talking with each other, but it was quite the experience.

rvense• 2 years ago

There's a story that when Bohr came to pick up Einstein at Copenhagen Central station, they took the tram (line 1) to Bohr's institute in Østerbro, but they became so engrossed in their conversation that they went all the way to the end in Hellerup and back again.

Line 1 was later replaced by a bus, and until the metro opened a few years ago (when most of the busses were changed), you could still go the same route from the central station to the Niels Bohr institute. Or Hellerup, if you had someone interesting to talk to.

wrp• 2 years ago

So, they walked to campus together, spent about two hours there, then walked home together. It sounds more like just sharing a long daily walk with a stopover at the office.

seydor• 2 years ago

Their job was theoretical

sceadu• 2 years ago

If they were walking with grass and trees you could say it was theoretical in nature :)

eterevsky• 2 years ago

Around that time Oppenheimer became the director of the Institute of Advanced Studies where this took place. His idea was to invite there various talented people, giving them grants to work on whatever they wish. Most of them were in science, but he also managed to get T. S. Eliot.

OldGuyInTheClub2• 2 years ago

That was the idea behind the IAS even before Oppenheimer's directorship.

anjel• 2 years ago

All of it thanks to the Heir-less Mr and Mrs Bamberger of Department store fame and fortune...

from-nibly• 2 years ago

Forget the 4 day work week. When can we have the 10 hour work week.

jeremyt• 2 years ago

Anytime you want. You just have to live modestly.

darth_avocado3• 2 years ago

10 hour work weeks are 520 work hours in a year. Even if you get paid $100 per hour, you’d have to heavily rely on govt benefits to support your family. (Avg. non subsidized health insurance costs for a family of 4 are $24000/year)

jonas21• 2 years ago

When you're 67 and basically retired (as Einstein was at this time)?

By contrast, in his 20s, he wrote 4 highly-influential papers in a single year, in his spare time while also working full-time at the Swiss patent office.

brevhtff2• 2 years ago

He was incredible and to think he wasnt working incredibly hard to develop his work is (probably, who can say?) nonsense.

astrange2• 2 years ago

If your job is thinking it's always happening unconsciously. Though, you have to convince whoever's paying you about that.

mordae• 2 years ago

You can flush your cache to relax. It takes effort. Usually 2 days of different activities.

I schedule 2-3 days at home, just lazying in front of TV or playing games to flush job out of my brain before starting vacations, to prevent carrying job over to the vacation and spoiling it.

120bits• 2 years ago

During my early days in my tech career. I joined a small tech firm that did linux kernel programming and embedded stuff. It was my first job out of college and I was really excited. My mentor was a 50+ guy whom I walked everyday from work to back my home. It didn't started out like that, we would leave work around different times and one day it was raining, so we waited and then it became sort of habit. I learned so much about programming and life in general. Made me a better programmer for sure. I'm always grateful!

influx• 2 years ago

What would be the top 1 or two you could share?

pineaux3• 2 years ago

These kind of things aren't really summarizable into a quick bite is my experience. It's because of the subtle nuances, the way an experienced person approaches a problem.

CodeCompost• 2 years ago

Things like this is the reason I don't work from home. Those little moments of contact.

Rinzler896• 2 years ago

That's more like good mentoring, which doesn't always depend on being in the office, it can work remote as well if the mentors are good at it and want to do it. A year ago I left a shitty toxic office job where there was no such thing as mentoring either way, least of all remote.

Feels like quality mentoring is a lost art these days, especially amongst the SW industry of today of younger generation of workers and companies, where the average life of a piece of code is measured in months, and tenure in the company is around 2-3 years, nobody bothered with training since the code would be obsolete, you'd be gone soon anyway or they'd loose the only guy who still loved teaching others.

Everything now is "just look it up on the (outdated) Wiki or figure it out on your own".

khazhoux2• 2 years ago

I like WFH. My company allows unrestricted WFH.

But lately I've been going into office and the throughput of technical discussions is just an order of magnitude higher than in video calls or over Slack.

I wish this wasn't the case.

bravetraveler7• 2 years ago

Funny, these little moments are why I WFH - they're so necessary yet frequent

The time I can put to work is limited. The flexibility is useful.

I get juniors need to learn, but I also need to do work other than teach. We don't have this 1:1 Jedi pairing nonsense.

There's more of them than there are of me/peers, capitalization is robbery. Either another junior or the whole business loses.

It's something to dial in. Both in terms of means and amount. There is never a perfect prescription. We must all adapt.

There were probably a few billion fewer people in the world when handholding mentorship was common

mattacular2• 2 years ago

With remote, everything has to be highly intentional. Schedule a meeting means having a pre-defined time, often there is a specific topic of conversation in mind, people diligently stick to that topic as much as possible to respect everyone's calendar etc. Collaboration tends to play out within these extremely narrow parameters that are unnatural to hundreds of years of human social development. It doesn't help that the best substitute - video conferencing - still strips a lot of crucial information that you're used to getting in person for modulating conversation (eg. ability to scan body language and facial expressions of people in the room as you talk) and find moments to interject.

hindsightbias• 2 years ago

Someone once said all my friends are like me, they all hate people.

I would have never met any of them WFH. Anecdotes aside, we’re a much better species in person enforcing social behaviors than maximizing antisocial behavior for some optimization argument.

If WFH was productive, this websites front page would be nothing but studies proving that. It’s been four years and… nothing.

Nobody is even writing documentation now, so you can’t even tell the kids to RTFM.

michaelcampbell• 2 years ago

Things like this is the reason I don't work from home. Those little moments of contact.

I, too, miss this. However, 2 things that work against me currently - my company has _mandated_ in-office time, which was not the deal when I joined so is an active reason to NOT go, and I live 30 miles/1 hour away from it, as do many. One of my colleagues is 2.5 hours away, across a time zone.

So the office is extremely 'dead' in culture/atmosphere, providing the bare minimum to get work done, and is a glass-walled fishbowl in a shared office space with a GIANT (think, measured in meters/yards) TV display in the courtyard that we can see. Indeed, one can't NOT see it.

While I enjoy the time with the people there, there's zero "serendipity" of the place since most everyone goes by fiat, not choice, and spends most of their energy on trying to remove the constant distractions.

C-Level: We want culture!

us: You removed every possible input that would make it work.

C: But we want it!

u: give us an office space with some private areas + some collaborative as-needed areas.

C: But $$ tho.

u: <shrug>

C: But we want Culture!

WalterBright• 2 years ago

I'd go to the office just to walk home with Einstein!

OldGuyInTheClub2• 2 years ago

So would I but would he come to the office to talk to me?

ocschwar2• 2 years ago

I had something like that going with Gian Carlo Rota at Los Alamos for a while. His afternoon walk always involved the Subway and the Baskin Robbins.

jchallis• 2 years ago

Would love to hear more about this. Indiscrete Thoughts is one of my favorite books.

ocschwar2• 2 years ago

One thing he was not doing on those walks was gossiping, because Indiscrete Thoughts did land him some trouble.

pcthrowaway• 2 years ago

This RTO propaganda is really getting out of hand.

calf2• 2 years ago

Article adds that they walked to office at 10-11, walked home FROM office at 1-2 (so they spent at most 3 hours at the institute) and in effect this took up 30% of Einstein's workday.

If anything, it's subtle "do what you love" propaganda.

Rinzler896• 2 years ago

99% of working population doesn't have Albert Einstein's brilliance in order to provide the same kind of value with 3h of "office work" per day.

Plus I think Albert Einstein and other scientists like him were constantly working in their heads anyway, constantly thinking about how to solve that problem, regardless of how much time they spent in an office. So trying to deduct some kind of productivity metric between his office time and results would be pointless (it's pointless for most knowledge jobs, but especially for his.)

pvaldes• 2 years ago

Counting the number of hours in science does not really matter. This work is full of incredibly productive eureka minutes in the middle of unlucky boring days or weeks of stunted progress. Scientists don't stop thinking on the problems when they go home. Some significant advances happened even by scientists while dreaming. In some cases sleeping time definitely should count as hours on office, having in mind the results.

If we could remove the bureaucracy load from them, scientists could work even less hours without losing productivity or even increasing it (See: Stephen Hawking).

khazhoux2• 2 years ago

Poe's law? Can't tell if you're joking.

bravetraveler7• 2 years ago

Makes it better, that tells you something lol

surfingdino2• 2 years ago

His office was not a multi-storey air-conditioned open plan aquarium where 30-something idiots commuting from the leafy counties of Kent want to discuss how they got pissed last night and who feel compelled to bond with software devs by showing them the latest "take a selfie and see it mapped onto a baboon arse" app. I would love to have the opportunity to go on walks with a mentor, but the only available ones are frustrated, scared managers who think of themselves as thought leaders or aloof top managers/founders who think of themselves as geniuses when they are a) well-connected public school crowd keeping the riffraff out of their lives, b) clever, but not genius operators happy to ride their teams to the ground to cover up lack of planning. The best I could get out of them is beers on a Thursday night. Thanks.

Rinzler896• 2 years ago

Found the Brit.

cangeroo• 2 years ago

Indeed!

I wonder what caused all this madness. Doesn't it degrade productivity? And thereby hurt profitability? And thereby the attractiveness of such strategies?

It sometimes seem to me like profit motive has been replaced by a power motive, like money isn't real anymore, but the legitimacy of private ownership is. Basically aristocracy 2.0.

I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this, and why there aren't competitive alternatives in an otherwise free market.

surfingdino2• 2 years ago

Trust fund kids do not need to work, they just choose to do so and they like to watch lower management jump up trying to catch the carrot dangled in front of them. Aristocracy never disappeared only it took them a while to learn how to use modern inventions. Look at who's working as a "trustee" for a lot of projects and watch how everyone is trying to lick their arse in the most imaginative ways.

udev4096• 2 years ago

A little off-topic but there's this amazing documentary on Einstein: Genius. It has three seasons and the first one is all about Einstein. It's a really accurate description of all the important events in his professional as well as personal life

byt3h3ad• 2 years ago

bonding over walks is actually one of the best ways of communicating your thoughts with the other person. ofc I don't have any research or anything to back it up, but whenever i hit a blocker in life, i take a walk with my bestfriend in and around the college campus. 99% of the problem is solved by the end of it. however if i do the same thing elsewhere, like our room or some place to eat, the flow of thoughts isn't that coherent or fruitful. maybe the active work of walking stimulates our brains to think out stuff properly.

semitones• 2 years ago

There is science that supports the cognitive benefits of walking, that much is true

Paul-Craft2• 2 years ago

I probably wouldn't mind spending 30% of my workday walking home with either Gödel or Einstein, even if it meant I was only getting paid 70% of my normal salary.

Sporktacular• 2 years ago

Two 30 minute "walks consumed 30 percent of Einstein’s workday"?

Cushy job.

H8crilA• 2 years ago

Consider that they were both German speaking, and Einstein had never fully switched to English. For example he would only publish his research in German.

gtsnexp• 2 years ago

Imagine if every conversation these two had while on their back home would have been recorded and published as blog posts.

qnleigh• 2 years ago

If only these conversations were recorded somewhere. They would be wonderful to read.

KineticLensman• 2 years ago

When I worked last the lunchtime walk was a daily ritual - through heathland next to the site. When I became a line manager to my peers, it was also where we had the unofficial chats - where I was ‘me’ rather than corporate. That walk is the thing I miss most about working, as a retiree

teleforce• 2 years ago

Successful people's currency is not money but networking and working with great people is one of the best part in life as the last point of Sam Altman's list is probably the most wise of advice from the list [1].

17. Working with great people is one of the best parts of life

I think this is why teleworking proponents are missing the important point. Meeting in person for example having lunch with co-workers can create eureka moment that online discussions hard or impossible to replicate. The game changing Transformer early concept was discussed and proposed in Google cafeteria. The legendary AT&T cafeteria environment as mentioned by Hamming was a prime example where many of inventors and Nobel Prizes recipients gathered, is now very difficult or nearly impossible to replicate in the industry [2].

[1] What I wish someone had told me:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38728172

[2] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering:

https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...

barfbagginus• 2 years ago

This article has convinced us to RTO. /s

Hear me out!

We will return to the office:

1) For not more than an hour a day

2) To talk to Kurt Godel, and nothing else

Sadly, Kurt died some 46 years ago. Our grief cannot be approximated, even by Godel Numbers.

Therefore, we will not return to the office.

---------------

Ps: Assuming Bankruptcy Risk Prevents the Sale of Your Office

Sell the office anyways. Write the loss off, file for bankruptcy protections if needed, and try to bounce back on good will.

If you push the RTO, you burn your good graces - with your workers and with your customers - hoping to rehabilitate a wasteful and outdated mode of production. You might easily run out of good will while finding yourself nipped to death by more up to date and worker friendly organizations.

Einstein went to his office just so he could walk home with Gödel

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