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by nicebyte 27 days ago
Ridiculous justification.

"Where is todays Jon Carmack?"

Where is the "John Carmack" of ML? Where is the John Carmack of physics? This hero worship crap needs to be left in the past. There isn't a singular active researcher you can point to and say "this person has made the field what it is today". There are very influential papers, but they all have multiple contributors. Is that really a valid reason to not engage in a particular area of research or engineering?

And who cares anyway? No matter what you choose to do with your time, chances are that you will not have that much of an impact on your chosen discipline. You should choose how to spend your time based on whether an activity genuinely interests you, not on whether you think it would be easy to get recognition.
2 comments
OkayPhysicist 27 days ago
Physics is a weird one to bring up, because even compared to other fields, it's one where breakthroughs are frequently the result of relatively singular genius. Newton, Faraday, Planck, Einstein, their discoveries were generally not incremental progress along existing lines of inquiry like most physics research is, they made pretty radical changes to our understanding of the world writ large.

In comparison, Carmack is grossly overhyped. He's like the Feynman of CS: A significant contributor to relatively young field, and a pretty influential communicator, but their contributions were moreso being the first to make a certain type of incremental progress than a paradigm shift.

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nicebyte 27 days ago
No, that is exactly the reason I am bringing up physics. There used to be a time when a singular person could make an outsized impact. In the recent past though, this has not been the case: significant breakthroughs are usually the result of coordinated effort of many individuals. Is that really a valid reason to not do physics?
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nicebyte 27 days ago
now, if you said "don't get into it because your primary employment prospects would be games or film industry, which are known to be less than stellar towards their workers" - that would be a different story.
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