Why “useless” exercise is good for you:
A lot of times when faced with problems that raise the question, “I'll never need to do this ever again in my life” one asks themselves if it's useless. But here’s the counter:
Useless exercise is useful.
The objective of exercise has never been in the application, it's always been in the compounding nature. It is typically painful or challenging, which is kinda the point. Sometimes I ask myself why I even chose this program—but then I keep forgetting the point of exercise. This is the point! l-m-a-o, wake up in the morning and show up! Oh my laziness.
For example, could you argue that the bench press is a useless movement?
Absolutely ...theres plenty of other ways to move yourself that is more applicable to what you need to physically accomplish. There’s plenty of lateral/iso-movements that are more optimal for growth than benching…So why do people keep going back to it when it's so damn “useless”? The point of this exercise is to give you an understanding of your physical limitations. Otherwise yeah, it is incredibly “useless”...
Betting on no other info, two players exactly equally terrible at football, the one larger, marginally more athletic coaches will be betting on. Two programmers who are unfamiliar with a diff company’s infrastructure, given all experience equal, the one who used to be olympic giga math nerd is still arguably in better shape to solve something meaningful than candidates with some relevant experience.
Unfortunate truth? Maybe. I too wish I was born more capable, but that’s just not how it works.
It would beg the question of how much is in your control to keep you competitive, especially given AI tools replacing half of NA’s thinking workload. I can control what I do tomorrow, that’s literally about it.
Excluding any genetic/nurture/upbringing variance + outliers, the thread of thinking that still remains still hinges on people’s training.
Can you find people significantly brighter than yourself? Of course you can. In the sea of thinkers, I'm a fish. A tadpole born yesterday, or maybe a forgetful goldfish. But even if I am ridiculously weak or braindead right now, it doesn’t mean I have to stay weak. The gap in any human capability, its X factor is arguably primarily time spent training. (ie: excluding prodigies from this set, vast majority had to work for capability)
So is "unnecessary" work or exercise useless? No—it may just be the only thing that keeps ordinary people relevant in the next coming decades as AI progresses to scale in application, resourcefulness, and “usefulness”. A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step--
One step forward for AI, and a thousand steps back for humanity.
[To be continued]