What a time to be alive!
The trouble with self-help advice is that it’s often based
on barely any evidence.
... [however] we’ve found that there are a number of
evidence-backed steps that anyone can take to become more
productive and successful in their career...
So we’ve gathered up all the best advice we’ve found over
our last five years of research.
In many cases, the evidence isn’t as strong as we’d like.
Rather, it’s the best we’re aware of. We’ve tried to come
to an all-considered view of what makes sense to tryI was hoping to see some actual evidence, but instead I found product advertisements and cheap motivational shit.
Aside from your other complaints, what's wrong with these two pieces of advice? They seem like completely sensible things that far too many people eschew.
Flossing is nearly useless (the studies that led to ADA recommendations turned out to be deeply flawed and inconclusive).
Retirement is a historically relatively recent concept which doesn't make people happy.
Some programming paradigms obviate the need for array length checks, eg with robust constructs for nil.
I note these not to be argumentative, but to highlight that defining what's "obvious" as the right thing to do is anything but.
Since we're going into a high level of detail, I want to point out that "nearly useless" implies that we've concluded no correlation. We actually just don't have a conclusion, so "we don't know" is much more accurate. I got your point, but let's make sure to stay on the right side of rigor.
Retirement: feel free to substitute "retirement" with "time period at end of life that usually correlates with less ability to draw income." The advice is still sound whether or not you choose to retire at 65. There are exceptions, but if you're that rich, then you're a tiny exceptional minority of the potential audience of the advice.
Array length checks: as long as indexing into arrays is a thing, it's going to remain good advice the vast majority of the time. Thankfully most modern languages realized that it's better if the language does the low level bounds checking for you, but high level bounds checking is still very much a thing.
What counts as "obvious" is like what counts as a "heap" of sand. The exact line is subjective, but there's a point where pretty much everyone is in agreement. Defining what's "obvious" in the gray middle area is hard, but defining what's "obvious" or "not obvious" on the extremes tends to be far easier.
If you want to be better at small talk, make small talk any opportunity you can (or become an Uber/Lyft driver, tour guide, or some other job that requires you to use these skills). If you want to be better at flirting, flirt. Make note of when you're practicing, try and look for social/body language cues and make adjustments. Replay the conversation later in your head and figure out places you can do better next time. Then try again.
You do it the same way if you suffer from social anxiety. You are just forced to practice coping with anxiety at the same time.
This is very important, as well as, as you say, just doing it.
You (the general you) have a better chance of going on a date if you ask ten people than if you ask only one. You need to be able to handle that not every interaction will be successful, that sometimes people are not interested, and then you just cut it short and move on. Since it's important to get as much practice as possible, it's better to have ten short conversations at the coffee machine, in the elevator, and so on during the day, than one prepared line to say to the person at the front desk as you leave for the day.
Another suggestion to practice talking to people is to approach people who work in clothing stores, cafes, libraries, and so on, and talk to them. They get payed to talk to you, and will make an effort to make the conversation be pleasant for you. You probably won't have the deepest conversations, but the idea is just to experience what it's like to small talk with people. You can either talk about clothes, books, or coffee, or tell them something small about your day and see if they pick it up and asks a follow up questions.
Asking people about themselves and listening is a great place to start. Caring about the interaction/person helps too.
And like someone else posted: practice.
Watching others interact with people is good too, just be wary of modeling people too much. Some people can make a whole room laugh with a single phrase, while others would get slapped for saying the same thing. Delivery counts, and it's not always obvious what it is in the delivery that matters.
HN might not be the best place.
But we'd like to find more.
Which reminds me, I just watched an excellent documentary on Karl Marx which was very timely. It's largely forgotten what he was really about I think.
Really hit home that his concept of the "Surplus Value" of a worker is just as important if not more so today as it was the day he critiqued capitalism in the 1800's.
Shame about how his work was twisted into authoritarian dictatorship by the likes of Stalin. You just can't win :/
You really just nailed it though.
Next week, back to Nietzsche.
I'm pretty sure it was Marx himself who first used the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat".
I don't think a country the size of the US, China or Russia can really be a democracy governed by and for the people.
Personally, I'm a big fan of a couple of approaches that I think would work well in concert:
* Federalism. Devolve as much power as practical down to the State (or, as I suspect will happen, the City-State, level). Taking the USA as an example (I'm not American myself), you'd pare back all of the unconstitutional three-letter-departments (FCC, FDA, EPA, ...) and leave those up to the States.
* Sortition. Don't select the Government by voting, select it by random poll of the citizenry, in much the same way as jury duty is arranged in many countries.
* Libertarianism. Legislate to protect rights and in the case of collective problems (e.g. atmospheric pollution, which may surprise people by being the go-to example Rand reached for as a case where environmental legislation may be justified by human costs), but nothing else.
Human Nature.
The ideas in and of themselves were profound but the prescription was unfortunately childishly naive.
That given sufficient resources and everyone pulling together we will all get along is great, but it just takes one self-interested outlier to spoil that soup, and there are plenty of those to go around.
Some people can just never have enough.
Personally I believe self interest is pre-programmed at the genetic level in all species. Dawkins wrote a book about that, and it manifests itself in everything we do individually or across species.
So back to your question, that's a good one.
The only way to make it work is probably some kind of authoritarianism, but perhaps authoritarianism comes in many flavors.
I'm highly suspicious that a single individual can do it. Even if they are a benevolent dictator they can be corrupted by the people who surround them. It really doesn't take much to Gaslight someone and it happens a lot more and in more subtle ways than many of us think.
So what is a more pure form of a benevolent dictator. A computer program with hard rules that we agree upon?
At least it would be consistent.
Then again, the program would be written initially by our own genome, and it better be pretty clever to quickly figure out how to ignore that aspect.
But just imagine it ,a logical machine that only does the right thing to maximize outcome... (Already sounds like the Genome)
Planet in jeopardy, insufficient resources, no way to create more resources? Simple answer, kill a percentage of the populace.
Looks pretty Stalinesque already. But I guess you already know that.
It's a problem for sure.
There are radical ideas to sidestep it, but those would take more than a spoonful of sugar I think to get the medicine to go down.
As far as dictatorship of the proletariat...
"In Marxist sociopolitical thought, the dictatorship of the proletariat refers to a state in which the proletariat, or the working class itself has control of political power."
The big mistake I see in HN is that the members believe themselves to be elites, which for the time being may well be true, and many here are making hay. Probably a wise move.
The truth is we are also soon to be no more than axle turners in wheel factories, and many of us already are.
I'm not a dystopian, I really am an optimist. Hence the desperation.
Many of us are waiting for the day that the wealth is spread to the outer reaches of the populace, those who have not. I suspect, we'd see a huge explosion of wealth for both less and more wealthy people. Here I'm not just talking about dollars on the bank statement, but a happy, enjoyable society to spend you time in. You don't have to step over the homeless person, for example.
Stop concentrating wealth, what does that mean? You're just going to give people stuff? Yep, you get a phone, you get shelter and everyone gets a bed, meal and healthcare.
We used to talk about having "Fuck You" money back in the day.
What was the amount of cash required to get off the system.
Turns out it isn't that much, and it would be even less if the system was geared around that mentality.
I need groceries, some nice olive oil a nice clean bathroom, perhaps a bottle of wine and watch a couple of movies.
Just provide that to everyone and lay out the propaganda to set the bar that this is all you need.
If you want more than that, taxation should go through the roof on an exponential scale, and not to be fed into the military, but fed to others to get them to the same basic standard.
Anyone with billions in their bank account should be very embarrassed by that fact, and I hope they are.
People have to sleep at night, even them.
I don't think Marx anticipated just how many chocolates Eight Billion people were capable of eating.
Funnily enough, I remember going to some talks about something called "Economy of Communion", to which an audience member asked a similar question.
The response: think globally, act locally. I wish I could remember more about the explanation, and although I remember not being completely satisfied with the answer, I also remember thinking that it made sense and it's probably better than the alternatives.
"All of human history is based around class struggles punctuated by revolutions, and in modern times this continues with those who own the means of production (Capitalists) having all the power over the common workers (employees). But don't worry because Capitalism is a self-destructive system, and soon there will be a socialist revolution, which will ultimately evolve into a Communist state, and then everything will be cool."
The only real implementation details he talks about have to do with some kind of transitional "pre-Communist" society, where he talks about nationalization of banks and railroads and other things.
I think Marx is better read as a philosophy of human history rather than as a blueprint for creating a Communist society.
The reality is Marx is right in the sense that the "ownership class" (those who own the means of production) continue to accumulate wealth and project disproportionate power because they own large amounts of corporate stock and by extension have control over the physical (or digital) means to keep making money. However, in the Western World, no revolution was forthcoming due to (I conjecture) rising standards of living and a consumer-oriented society, along with a blurring of the lines between the "ownership" class and everyone else (via things like stock options, entrepreneurship, Unions, employee rights, etc.), which certainly diluted Marx's eternal class-struggle narrative. Still, at the end of the day, we find ourselves in a Capitalist world where the majority of wealth is concentrated in < 0.0001% of the overall population, which seems to be an undesirable situation.
So on and so forth. The centralization of wealth and power into a rich few running a bunch of oligopolies provably harms the many in this country. Directly when there was immediate layoffs, low quality/security, bad services, etc. Then indirectly in long-term and network affects.
That doesn't necessarily follow, for reasons you allude to. Massive wealth inequality is a lot more tolerable, if the _poor_ people are (by historical standards) incredibly wealthy.
Captitalism as it stands is totally unsustainable. Communism too but that was not Marx's idea that his critique should lead to what it became.
Some form of socialism is important. It should be drummed in to people that societal progress is based on individual choices.
Rand got it backwards, Marx got it forwards.
There is a middle ground, I'm sure of it; at least I hope so.
I think it's an Open University production by the BBC
Fortunately there are no rules for what you are supposed to feel happy about. If you are convinced that being an employee means you should not be happy, then that's a (painful) psychological trick as well. Even if you run your own business, you still have customers to satisfy, so are they in control of your life? Regardless if you work for yourself or not, you are always working to provide value to someone else. You are always selling yourself; your abilities & time.
Or, to put in even another way, Life.
In contemporary society, things are nice enough that people typically trade a fraction of their time in exchange for work, income, and reduced risk exposure. This is a nice comfy abstraction over the cold reality that you need resources to live and you need to work and fight to keep living.
The alternatives to this are: a) socialism/communism type deal where the government controls your work output and resource provision; even if it works out (it usually doesn't), you have far less control than you do now. b) unspecialized agriculture-based society; every second of every day is spent producing just enough food and material goods long enough for you to raise children that take over when you die. Your options are limited; you are perilously exposed to acts of God (what happens if the crop fails?). You are not in control. c) hunter-gatherer setup; you are still not in control of your own life. You have no option than to spend the vast majority of your day seeking food (without agriculture you really do need to spend almost all of your time on that work). Ask one of these people what a 'weekend' or 'vacation' looks like.
The reality is, modern society gives you many more options than were possible even 100 years ago. International (and even local) travel is commonplace; you can choose to start a startup or work for yourself; you can choose to buy or not buy hundreds of thousands of products, many of which were not existing or even possible in the recent past; etc. You can even choose to leave it all behind and live on the land.
Don't confuse dissatisfaction with your own life choices with lack of control.
Keep in mind that the fidelity of the simulations will only improve with technology (e.g. VR.)
I'm not even 100% on this theory and it's one of my least researched so there's plenty of room for someone to come and slay me with data but I think the discussion definitely needs to come from a place of "pre-agricultural humans living their pre-agricultural life while ignorant of modern life" compared to "modern humans living their modern lives", rather than one of "well why don't you just go live in a forrest if you like it so much!?"
AFAIK most aboriginal tribes are quite peaceful. Rivalry with other tribes around territory and food sources lead to fights that look closer sparring and rarely lead to any wounded.
But if organization acts immorally and increases profit through unethical methods, it drains motivation and makes employees a lot less inclined to put effort into 9-5 jobs.
An average peasant in the feudalism had more free time than an average 9-5 office worker now.
In fact, the 8 hour work day is a recent feature. When capitalism arrived initially, it was much worse.
The rest of your post shows that you had an easy life, and I'm happy for you. But don't assume everybody can start a startup, travel etc. That's just not the reality out there.
If you want the lifestyle of a medieval peasant, you can do that now. No one is stopping you.