Back when I was a 16 year old mediocre chess player, the captain of our high school team took me aside, set up a position and asked "Do you like white or black?" I looked at the board and said "I don't know." And channeling a Yoda then decades in the future, he said "That is why you lose."<p>His name was Matthew Looks, and his point was that it doesn't matter whether you're right or wrong. It only matters that you have a visceral opinion.<p>If you believe something or care about something strongly, it gets you to engage. If it turns out that you're objectively wrong, the clash will focus your attention and you'll learn. Just having an opinion, just caring, will bring out a better game.<p>This is how I interpret PG's post on taste. Having good taste is wonderful. But having taste, even bad taste, is better than not caring at all.
I wish I'd known 20 years ago how important design was going to be. Getting my 10,000 hours of design isn't going to be easy. I started this course a few days ago on Udacity:<p><a href="https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-the-design-of-everyday-things--design101" rel="nofollow">https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-the-design-of-everyd...</a><p>And I'm using this subredit to learn how to draw: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals</a>
It's amazing how close pg's ideas in this essay are to those of David Deutsch's in his <i>Beginning of Infinity</i>, e.g. on the topic of why flowers are beautiful to humans as well as insects (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMiP2SM8Tpk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMiP2SM8Tpk</a>).
"In math and engineering, recursion, especially, is a big win. Inductive proofs are wonderfully short. In software, a problem that can be solved by recursion is nearly always best solved that way."<p>I don't make use of recursion very often but this statement doesn't sound right to me. Actually the opposite seems right. If you read the chapter on recursion from Concrete Mathematics (I'm thinking about the The Tower of Hanoi, Lines in the Plane and The Josephus Problem here, it seems obvious that a closed form is much faster, simpler and according to the blog post more beautiful. Does anybody with more extensive knowledge on the topic care to comment on this?