> It's a crazy important quote and everyone should really keep it in mind when they set out to do something.
I don't agree at all. It seems to me that the most interesting advances of mankind have happened precisely when people were trying to do something else, and had to invent new tools. The tools turn out to be more important than the final result because they can be used by other people.
> when people were trying to do something else, and had to invent new tools.
(Author here.) My point was not that you shouldn't invent tools if you need them. By all means, go ahead. My heart beats for creating tools (especially tools to create other tools...).
What I wanted to express was this: if you want to write _a book_, first write the book and only then worry about the tools. If you then notice that you need a custom toolchain to get the book in exactly the shape you need it to be, do it.
I've had people tell me that they would love to write a book, but, well, the existing tools are not sufficient enough. And I think that's the wrong approach to writing a book: write something and you'll quickly realize that the tooling is not your biggest hurdle.
> What I wanted to express was this: if you want to write _a book_, first write the book and only then worry about the tools. If you then notice that you need a custom toolchain to get the book in exactly the shape you need it to be, do it.
I agree 100% with this. Following the case of Knuth/TAoCP/TeX, in fact the first edition of TAoCP was not written in TeX, he made TeX to improve his already written book.
> I've had people tell me that they would love to write a book, but, well, the existing tools are not sufficient enough.
That’s hilarious. Humans were hand writing books on paper and giving them to other humans to hand write copies. A good craftsman never blames his tools.
> Humans were hand writing books on paper and giving them to other humans to hand write copies.
Not very many were, and a big reason for that was the available tooling.
> A good craftsman never blames his tools
Someone who writes a book by blames the available tooling support for the low quality of its content is a craftsman (but, per the saying, not a good one) blaming his tools.
A person who chooses not to write a book at all because the anticipated opportunity cost given the existing tooling support and that person’s personal utility function is not.
Yes! I use Scrivener. It exists because the developer needed a better tool to write novels. I end up too disorganized trying to write with other tools like word processors or flat files.
I managed to write a 25,000 word story in a word processor once, but it was such a jumble that I just closed the file and forgot about writing for a few years. I know now there are ways to organize with folders and spreadsheets, but now I do most of my writing on the phone. Scrivener's binder makes that easy on a small screen.
Thank you. I've thought about making this exact thing multiple times. Word docs and dropbox just weren't cutting it for my organizing needs. Combined with the scrapple product oh man. The only thing they are missing is a wiki feature for character/show bibles
"Most interesting" seems like a pretty subjective metric. The advances that come to my mind are things like agriculture, calculus, the scientific method, Newton's theories, representative democracy, post-modernism... those all resulted from decades of effort by groups of people who focused on that task specifically.
Tools are super valuable; it's arguable that many of the things I list above are sort of tools. I just don't think that a tool that is quickly slapped together in the service of another project is likely to be a game-changer.
In fact, I'd say that one of the keys to growing your personal impact is to find the best work that's already been done, and use it to further your goal. Even Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of giants.
Calculus of all things was not an end by itself, but a set of secret tricks by Newton to prove results about the orbits of planets (that then he translated into a more cumbersome geometrical language)
Then there are the three branches of modern mathematics, according to V.I. Arnold:
1) modern hydrodynamics and PDE, are just guys procrastinating while they are paid by the manufacturers of nuclear submarines
2) celestial mechanics, control theory and ODE, are just guys procrastinating while they are paid by the manufacturers of rockets and missiles
3) number theory, are just guys procrastinating while they are paid by the CIA to develop cryptographic tools
agriculture : this kid is just playing with small seeds instead of collecting nuts for winter
computers : just tools to speed-up the important computations of nuclear reactors
TeX : the guy just had the write a damn book about algorithms but spent 10 years procrastinating
Bach : the guy just wanted to glorify God
I stand by my point that nearly all important advances of mankind are tools developed to solve a long forgotten goal.
The idea that calculus was some sort of side project for Newton both diminishes the level of focused effort he put into it, and ignores the contributions of Leibniz and the many other mathematicians whose work was known and incorporated by Newton and Leibniz.
If we just open up the idea of "tool" wide enough, everything becomes a tool. Writing a book isn't actually a goal, it's just a tool for acquiring money and fame. Calculating the orbit of planets was just a tool for Newton to establish social credit and historical significance. Agriculture is just a tool for eating, but eating is just a tool for living, but living is just a tool for procreating, but procreating is just a tool for perpetuating genes.
Why are we perpetuating genes? Really, no one knows. Solve that problem, I guess, and finally we'll have the one project enriquto can't easily dismiss as tool development.
"I stand by my point that nearly all important advances of mankind are tools developed to solve a long forgotten goal."
That is indeed true.
Of course, almost all of the goals I have accomplished for myself have been accomplished by actively engaging in pursuing that goal rather than pursuing some side channel, while the side projects I've created have generally been a lot less useful to myself and humanity than, say Bach. :D
[citation needed] -- but addressing your point without a citation, even if what you say is true, it doesn't change anything at an individual level.
If you're trying to write a book, and you want to write a book, write the damn book. There's an infinitesimal chance that the tool you're writing instead of your book will change the world.
If you're trying to write that tool, and want to write that tool, then power to you, but don't lie to yourself and tell yourself it's "for the book". Just admit you're switching focus.
A close friend of mine has been trying to create a game for .. a decade or so. Every time he starts, there's always something. Instead of using, say, Unity, he tried his hand at writing a game engine. A physics engine. A programming language. Because none of the tools are "quite right". Of course, none of those get completed either because they're a shitton of work. And his work didn't change the world, because it's never completed. At the end of the day, much like many in the software engineering world, he's a brilliant mind busy optimizing ads. And he doesn't have a working game engine, a working programming language, or a game.
I don't want to sound demeaning, because it's still very good experience to acquire. And in general I don't want to tell people "don't write your own a programming language". I think these things are super cool. But then if that's what you set out to do, make that your project instead, it'll have a much higher chance to actually complete, instead of sitting in an incomplete state, in a hidden unfinished repo with nobody to share it with.
The common thread between all of mankind's most interesting advances: They're finished. How do you finish a project? Well... start.
> [citation needed] -- but addressing your point without a citation, even if what you say is true, it doesn't change anything at an individual level.
> If you're trying to write a book, and you want to write a book, write the damn book. There's an infinitesimal chance that the tool you're writing instead of your book will change the world.
Not the person you were replying to, but their point certainly rings true to me, from all the history I've read or otherwise heard of over the years. They could just as easily ask you for citations.
"if what you say is true, it doesn't change anything at an individual level" -- yes it does. It's usually individuals that come up with the important tools and inventions. Those development are very significant because they make systemic advances.
"There's an infinitesimal chance that the tool you're writing instead of your book will change the world" - it doesn't matter how small the odds are for any one individual.
There's two points here. One is that the effects can be cumulative -- even small advances and bits of knowledge gained contribute, over a longer period of time, to large benefits.
The other is that the historical reality is that tools that were developed as side effects of other goals have made a very significant overall effect, and this can't be denied by a blinkered focus on the probabilities concerning individual cases.
I don't agree at all. It seems to me that the most interesting advances of mankind have happened precisely when people were trying to do something else, and had to invent new tools. The tools turn out to be more important than the final result because they can be used by other people.