The Top Idea in Your Mind (2010)

Yes it makes me wonder if there's another consciousness in my brain, with its own thoughts and feelings.

See the talk "Hammock driven development" by Rich Hickey on the topic: https://youtu.be/f84n5oFoZBc

There's a problem in classic combinatoric artificial intelligence, where an automated reasoning program (such as the General Problem Solver)[1] gets easily lost among the huge volume of all possible logical paths.

To avoid that pitfall and reach some conclusions, the programmer needs to provide some guiding heuristic that limits the problem subspace where solutions are being searched. But if the provided heuristic is the wrong one, the logic-based solver will still get lost.

I make no claim that the rational brain works in any way similar to an automated solver, but I find it plausible that, when you withdraw your conscious attention, the brain keeps working on the problem using multiple parallel, non-inference-based brain processes that continue to do pattern matching on the problem, without being limited to intermediate consistent steps.

Such non-focused strategy could very well expand the search space considered, and find potential solution matches that weren't near the focus of the previous conscious thinking.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Problem_Solver

It's called "incubation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubation_(psychology)

“[3] Corollary: Avoid becoming an administrator, or your job will consist of dealing with money and disputes.“

Absolutely. For me it’s because of two reasons. When you’re young, you feel like you have unlimited time. When you’re old you know that's not so true anymore. Also, when you’re young you have much more time at your disposal. The older you get, the more your job and your family will take a toll on your time, until you realize one day that the only time you have for yourself is when you take a shower.

Just do what everybody else does: try to make Covid charts, or Python models or whatever. Seems to me half the people I follow are somehow coding something related to Covid. I'm updating http://covid.410go.net/ mostly for myself because I want to track the current dimension of Covid (ie. infectious people, not total cases) and at least it's been an interesting exercise in dealing with the somewhat messy data Johns Hopkins kindly provides.

PG doesn't brag incessantly. Both produce a large stream of consciousness that may have nice tidbits and sayings. But the real test is to see if such ideas can be turned into a consistent algorithm or formulas that one can test via historical scenarios or in practice. Just because you have a cool-sounding idea doesn't mean it will usually fly in practice.

T has made some interesting claims about success in business, but they conflict with works such as Dale Carnegie's classic HTWFAIP, which better matches life as I have observed it. But some trolls and demagogues do gain success as counted in money and power. There is more to one strategy in life, but HTWFAIP is probably easier for the average person to use effectively. Plus, trolls and demagogues tend to generate new regulations that prevent later T&D's from pulling the same tricks. There's kind of a first-mover-advantage to jerk-hood, like people selling Purell at huge markups.

I fail to understand how your comment is substantive

I don't think this is specific to PG, it's accurate for any article you read where you have more knowledge about the subject than the author. PGs knowledge about ideas is so high, that probably just a few people look at it as confused, while other articles have a lower limit for when people thinks it's confusing.

That's not why. From now on PG should only write about things he thought about in the shower.

I wanted to remove the second paragraph because it sounded unnecessarily harsh but I must be too late- I really enjoy his essays and I have taken a lot of advice from them.