The Weird Nerd Comes with Tradeoffs by Ruxandra Teslo at her substack goes in interesting directions on a favorite topic of my. She suggested they were autists, or at least overlapped strongly, which drew a lot of criticism. She has not changed her mind, but thought it wiser to change terminology in her writing.
David Foster sent it along, and I have liked a few things on her site. She goes one step deeper on a lot of my favorite topics, which is usually all I can stand at one go.
In one of her interviews, Katalin Karikó recalls her mother calling her from Hungary around the time when the Nobel Prizes were awarded and asking her if that year she was going to win it. The question, in its loving naivete, must have stung worse than an insult: not only was Karikó not close to this remarkable feat, she was actually unsuccessful by much less ambitious metrics. Put simply, she had left her family in Hungary to work in the US, but for little actual measurable reward, be it status or money. Karikó did not get grants. Karikó did not get tenure. What Karikó did was work until late at night on a topic people did not pay that much attention to at the time: mRNA for vaccines. And she did that for decades. Paul Graham talks about an underrated quality one needs for extreme success, namely the willingness to be low status. And Karikó had plenty of that: she lived her convictions, in this case the conviction in the importance of mRNA through rejections, humiliations (her office was vacated without her having received prior notice) and hardship. I would go even further and say: she had intellectual courage.
The comments on this and other essays are good as well. Sometimes the commenters can let you know what is a valuable site.
1 comment:
I recently saw a show that covered the life of the engineer that spent most of his lifetime discovering the last and most difficult LED.
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