Please don't get stuck on semantics. When you decide to take a longer route because you think there will be less traffic, you "make a bet". You "make a bet" by deciding to go to college instead of straight into the working world. Anywhere there is a decision to be made with uncertain outcomes, you "make a bet". It doesn't have to be about money, although it often is.
Look at Newton's Early life (0) and we can see that he did not 'make a bet' with his life. Though he managed to get into Cambridge on a scholarship (an element of luck), he was considered 'undistinguished as a Cambridge student.' His 3 really big accomplishments (optics, gravitation, calculus) were generated when he was on break for 2 years from Cambridge due to plague. The question we then must ask is: what would he have done otherwise? It's a 'bet' if there is an element of risk, though it seems this discussion is more about what different English speakers use the word 'bet' to mean. What were the downsides to just poking about with math and lenses in your 'free' hours? Maybe he missed out on some farming/church duties or he traded this time to do Optics instead of gossiping. I don't know. What did young mid-17th century celibate Englishmen do in those days while hiding from the black death? Tennis? Point is, he wasn't really risking anything but a little bit of time spent in the mid 1600's English countryside that he had to spend out there anyways. A 'real bet' would have been staying at Cambridge despite the plague to work on Optics with the professors, as the risk there was quite clearly your life.
He could have chosen to focus solely on theology. He could have chosen to focus on entirely different areas that were all dead-ends. People are really getting hung-up on the word "bet"; evaluating opportunity costs is part of life. To focus on one word and miss the forest for the trees speaks more about the critic than it does of Newton.
But none of that has to do with Newton. Was alchemy or physics the long route? Only Newton knows and he's dead.
Not trying to be dense here, I just don't see the insight. How is what you are saying any different than "you don't know what's going to happen" without Newton attached to it?
When you write "Was alchemy or physics the long bet?" it seems you concede that Newton made a bet, and that it didn't involve money. That was my only point: We all make decisions that involve some amount of guesswork on risk vs reward, and it's not always about money.
For sake of argument, let's say Newton's reward was the advancement of human knowledge. He made some high-risk bets that didn't pay off (alchemy, theology), and some that did (physics, calculus).
All PG is saying is that when we look at famous historical figures, after centuries of deification, we tend to focus only on the bets that paid off, and ignore all the failures. But those failures are crucially important to who these figures were as people, and it does them (and ourselves) a disservice to only focus on the successes.
That's a blaming statement used to indicate someone is being pedantic, which can then be used to "prove" them wrong by the followup. All of your counter examples are based on the obtaining a better position, which is all about dealing with globalized suffering (money is stored work and work is a unit of causality and suffering is a result of causality).
Newton presumably pursued understanding the unknown, which means he chose his own suffering/work that was different from any objective based on making bets to get ahead in life at the time.
I think it's entirely fair to point out that Newton wasn't betting at the time. He was discovering purely for the sake of discovery.
Are you denying he had any choice in what areas of discovery to pursue? And that there were no trade-offs involved? If not, then you are stuck on semantics.
I'm not stuck on semantics, so that's the truth of the matter, whether you attempt to rationalize I am or not. Make no mistake that semantics are always important. Without the English language, neither you or I could communicate concepts here. It also allows you to attempt to reword what others are saying, but I'm not going to allow that here.
When you attempt to state someone is "stuck on semantics" and that person actually hasn't said as much, you are speaking for their intent. When that is backed up with the intent of proving them wrong on some topic, it only serves to indicate intent. The older I get, the more irritating this behavior becomes, especially when the person refuses to acknowledge what is being said and continues to rationalize from their point of view in order to frame a statement by someone else. You act as if language (and semantics) are logical. They aren't, and neither are humans. We'd do well to stop speaking for each other in aggregate in an attempt to make it more logical. This concept itself is counterintuitive.
Newton had every choice to pursue interests. Not having prior knowledge of "areas of discovery", it would appear he pursued what was interesting to him. If you look at Faraday, he pursued things to find a single source force - I would expect Newton though along the same lines. In fact, even if he knew someone else was interested in an "area of discovery", he could have just been interested in that topic for purely knowing purposes.
Wanting to know more about things, the nature of things if you will, is not something that can be considered a "bet". It's simply curiosity.
I didn't 'make a bet' by going to college, it was the assumed thing in my family, it was culturally ingrained that I would go to college. This way of looking at life as a series of 'bets' that one makes is it's own particular kind of culture, one that Newton did not belong to.
Newton didn't investigate alchemy and theology because he was trying to diversify his fame investment portfolio. To see him this way is to do a disservice to him and to history.
I'd say that asserting Newton had no choice does him a greater disservice. Call them bets, choices or decisions; there were opportunity costs involved, paths to choose, and he chose some that worked out and some that didn't.
