The problem with relying so heavily on argument from coincidences is that one then incurs the epistemic responsibility to seek out and explain alway other coincidences in the neighborhood putatively pointing to alternative explanations (a step people often forget, but is essential for the validity (insofar as one can speak of validity) of one's argument from coincidences). And such coincidences are always easy to find, since coincidences are cheap. (To take just one example, the pandemic happened shortly after the World Military Games, which US servicemen attended, at a time when the relations between the two countries were at their worst in recent times, and who came from a country one of whose household names novelists once publicly fantasized about all the world's nations coming together and use biological weapons to wipe out the entire population of China, based on none other than the desire to curb China's peaceful rise (cf. Unparalleled Invasion)) Do these "coincidences" need explaining away? Do they need to create a presumption in favor of the bioattack theory? If not, what is it about spatial proximity coincidence that gives it such power to confer that sort of presumption?
I've found the best note taking system that works for me is literally to store my notes in a full fledged programming language with built-in OOP support.
So for (a super simplified) example if I want to have a daily note system, I'll just define (say) a JavaScript object called DailyNotes, and everyday I'll just append some lines to my code saying, in effect, add the key for today's date to the object DailyNotes and assigns that key an array and each time I have a thought or idea I just pushes ["thought", "…"] into it.
So all of my notes comprise a huge code project.
(My actual system isn't quite like that, I use a custom syntax + language server that serves my purpose better and faster (in particular, it makes it easier to write multiline notes without need of escaping and makes it easier to default to do the literate programming style of defaulting to text))
The nice thing about it is I get to piggyback on IDE features of vscode. All the "roam-like" features are available in VSCode and implemented better (think the "peak" feature, and the wiki link feature, which can easily be simulated by using function calls! (And you can project-rename a function name at a reference just like in Roam)
I absolutely love the show Girls. I loved it so much, I was positively depressed when it ended and I emailed Lena Dunham multiple times to BEG her to revive it. I literally witnessed myself turning into a "fanboy" like I'm 16 again. Normally, if I love something I have reason to consider a "guilty pleasure", I will feel reluctant to publicly say I love it for fear of being judged. But in the case of Girls (and Titanic), I have so often been moved to tears watching them, I have so often experienced the feeling (for me, the mark of great art, because it's the exact same feeling I feel when falling in love) of "death is no longer something to be afraid of because I've just caught a glimpse of something eternal, something that is bound to go on exist forever" - I have so often experienced such feelings watching them, that it's immediately clear to me that it'd be a silly betrayal of my entire being to try and pretend I don't love them. It would be no different from publicly joking about my mom's appearance just to fit in with the cool kids. Have you watched Girls? Yes, it's comedy. Yes it's often silly. But there is so, so much more to it. I'd go so far as to say that anyone who's watched Girls without becoming mesmerised by Lena Dunham by the end, has not really watched the show.
Is Bill Gates still programming nowadays? He seems to have completely abandoned it. Which seems a little sad, because if he really liked doing it you'd expect him to at least work on a utility app or something in his spare time.
> My code no longer goes into shipping products so I am rusty. I do like to try the new tools to understand how they help. I just did a review of the low-code tools where there is a lot of great innovation.
Time is an extremely precious commodity. It seems somewhat arbitrary to assume that if you like something, you automatically do it in your spare time. It's fairly easy to like more things than you could possibly have time to pursue :)
But when you’re a billionaire almost all of your time is spare time. Aside from basic bodily functions billionaires can spend their all of their time doing whatever their little hearts desire.
Yes. But time is still finite. And a much lesser quantity than "what our hearts desire".
To put into a very simplified example: I work 8 hours a day, sleep 8 hours a day, spend 4 on chores, and 4 on doing what I want. That's 4h/day. Bill Gates has almost immeasurably more money than I have, but he still, at best, gets 16h/day. He can do 4 times as much as I.
And I can guarantee you that "things I'd love to do" is significantly more than even 24h/day. I'd assume the same holds for Gates. This is one of the reasons rich people usually have an entire staff running their lives - if you make billions, spending $100k to save 30 minutes a year is actually a reasonable investment.
And so, even if he loves to code, he might well not be able to never get to it. (TBF: I'm not saying "poor Bill", I'm sure the other stuff he gets up to is reasonably fun :)
I think the point is that you might like so many things, you cannot do all of them.
And then, how do you prioritize them an allocate time? Some of us might go for 'whatever is the most fun', others 'whatever delivers the most results (for society, or for some obscure personal goal like making a clock that lasts 10,000 years, or a speed metal guitar university for girls, or... anything).
I really like coding, and plan to do it into old age. But I suspect if I suddenly found fifty billion dollars, I would have so many new options for how to spend my time I might well never write a line of code again.
Maybe I'm just a trivial person, but when I ask myself why I wouldn't live in those places, or any place, I find I'm simply psychologically incapable of being motivated by anything other than living standards, the attractiveness of members of my opposite sex, proximity to friends and family, and all that.
I would much rather not live in China, for the same reason I'd much rather not live in Montana, i.e. the living standards are a LOT lower in China than where I am, and it will be a lot harder to meet someone on places like Tinder I can feel attracted to.
