We optimize for grades in school, promotion cycles, citation counts, but I keep wondering, who decided these metrics? Or more importantly, should I be optimizing for metrics I don’t believe in? Most people never ask this question. They inherit their metrics from parents, teachers, institutions. If you go through any form of public system in your life, you’ve likely inherited the metrics rather than deriving your own. It’s easier that way. Your parents wouldn’t want you to be contrarian in a rational sense. But I think increasingly, it’s needed. ...
Invest
My ranking of the most important investment in the world. Educators / Teachers Venture Capitalists / Angel Investors
Mediocrity
I have a distaste for mediocrity. Humans are born with agency. By pure environmental and social luck, that potential either dissolves or flourishes. This produces a power law distribution: small group with developed agency, and masses with atrophied agency. I bought into Nietzsche’s Übermensch because it empirically captures this split. But I’ve learned that empiricism alone isn’t enough - David Deutsch (learning from Karl Popper) reasons that good explanations that are hard to vary, and so here is my attempt at derivation: ...
Welcome to DuyDoc
In a world increasingly filled with slop, the ability to index through them - judgment - is something I want to develop, hopefully through documenting this. That’s the purpose of DuyDoc. Welcome! Connect: Feel free to reach out to me through any of these channels: GitHub: @yudduy Twitter: @duyknguy LinkedIn: /in/duynguy Email: kduynguy@gmail.com I hope you find something useful here!
College
Newton came to Cambridge in 1661, and the curriculum was scholastic philosophy, classical languages, Euclidean geometry. Medieval education that hadn’t changed for 200 years. Newton ignored it. He went to the library and devoured the moderns instead, reading Descartes, Galileo, Kepler, filling notebooks with his own experiments and observations. When plague closed Cambridge in 1665, he went home to Woolsthorpe and invented calculus, discovered gravity, developed his theory of light, all in the span of a few years away from the institution that would later claim credit for his genius. ...