Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

1,084 pointsyarapavan815 comments

Inspired by David Perell's tweet - https://twitter.com/david_perell/status/1257484391204352002

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

— Ira Glass

"Dude, sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something."

-- Jake the Dog

When I was learning to play the game Go, someone told me that there's some old advice about "losing your first 100 games as quickly as possible". That's stuck with me.

Another one is (and I don't even know if it's 100% true, but I don't much care) that a common housefly will change its path if it runs into a window more than twice. I strive to be better than a common house fly.

There is a photography adage that your first ten-thousand photographs are your worst.

I'm not sure I agree -- sometimes you get lucky or circumstance is favorable -- but I am certain that my second ten-thousand photographs were better, on average, than my first.

My iPhone photo’s are vastly better than anything I ever took with my DSLR, but I’m positive it’s mostly for that reason.

That said, the incredible digital processing helps a lot.

I got basically the same advice from my adviser about collecting data for my thesis. "If too many experiments are failing," he said, "just do more of them, and faster."

Sometimes I wonder if failing twice is an optimal evolutionary state. Once is not enough to know if it’s worth changing for.

Yeah, as a kid this is what always bugged me about Wile E. Coyote.

If at first you don't succeed, try two more times so that your failure is "statistically significant"

or: If at first you don't succeed, Sky Diving is not for you.

What part constitutes success? Jumping or safely arriving on the ground?

In that case it's still statistically significant ;)

.. and the only thing that matters is you don't give up.

"The secret to making great barbeque is to make a lot of bad barbeque" ~ Aaron Franklin

To be fair, even Aaron Franklin's bad barbeque is some of the best BBQ you'll ever have.

"The master has failed more times than the beginner has even attempted."

"A beginner practices until they get it right, a master practices until they can't get it wrong."

Although there is a sort of dual "… until they can make their errors beautiful" or something. If you're good enough, it doesn't matter if you make mistakes, because you can turn those mistakes into good things just as quickly as you could have constructed the original correctly.

It does depend on the medium though, for example painting is pretty forgiving while glass blowing is not at all.

> "A beginner practices until they get it right, a master practices until they can't get it wrong."

You can get to the point where no one can see any mistakes. It appears perfect... But not to you. The only way to get to that point is to never be satisfied with your own performance, it could always have been a bit better, you could see that small error (or more likely--those small errors) that no one else could see.

Ayrton Senna talked about trying to drive the perfect lap using this anology: "It is like trying to tie your necktie so that both ends are exactly the same length; experience and practice say that you can do it--but you can't."

Oh Adventure Time - has such a special place in my heart.

If it does for you too - I could not more highly recommend Pendleton Ward's latest project The Midnight Gospel.

"How did you almost know my name?"

"I have approximate knowledge of many things, child..."

"I have approximate knowledge of many things" - is my favorite quote ever, because it accurately describes my job role as a systems integration engineer.

So when my role says electrical and I teach people about cooling, hydraulics, human factors and user experience, some people raise questions and I generally debuff with a paraphrase of this line.

There are so many people who don't mind being stuck at "sucking at something" it's outright scary. I'm currently learning Python, and very frequently I feel that my solution is not elegant, and I hate it. I imagine a lot of people would just go along with it. Maybe not on HN, but in general.

Whenever someone says they "aren't good at something" I'm fond of reminding them (and myself) that "you don't get better at something by _not doing it_".

Worse yet, most people have bad taste and actually can't tell good and bad design work apart, so you're really spending all that effort to please a minority that you're unfortunate enough to be part of.

https://xkcd.com/1015/

True, but here is - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gutenberg_bible_Old_Testa... - an example of old font. Do you think a lot of people would have problems with reading this?

> Do you think a lot of people would have problems with reading this?

I don't know. Readability and aesthetics are at odds. I believe there used to be a strong aesthetic desire for text to be of uniformly block-like shape. It took centuries for spaces to appear between words and even longer for paragraphs to become as short as they are today.

> Readability and aesthetics are at odds.

I'm not sure. If it's a cafe front, I can deal with Comic-like windings. If I'm reading something for a reasonably long time, I start valuing functionality - here it's readability.

Maybe people could train to read easily that font - they didn't have much of alternatives. That would mean readability is rather conditional. I'd like to know.

> Maybe people could train to read easily that font - they didn't have much of alternatives. That would mean readability is rather conditional. I'd like to know.

I feel like comprehension of the underlying language will aid readability. If it were written in English, despite the illegibility, I'd be able to read it easier by having a general sense of what the words are supposed to be from context.

Blub paradox applied to taste is even harder to deal with because people without it want to believe it doesn't exist. Programmers can eventually move along the spectrum.

I used to scoff at Blub, but with the experience I gathered, I came to the conclusion that with all things considered, it is actually Blub that is the most powerful language.

Even worse is when you think you’re part of the minority but aren’t.

It's so upsetting when someone with poor taste is putting in their 10k hours and wondering why they're getting no traction. Time + talent + exposure (luck) are all needed in some sort of formula. Talent is the one variable that you can't grind.

Also, between two years in and death, it's still very common to fail into the trough of despair when working on a creative project. Brian Eno has had a pretty good creative run, but he didn't make that Oblique Strategies card deck because he never runs out of great ideas.

Five beats a day for three summers - Kanye West

I've never seen this quote and it is excellent.

The quote appears in many variants -- here's one as an interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE .

> All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste

Like saying “How bout them Cowboys” at a club in Dallas.

Everybody wants to think they have good taste and everybody wants to be told they have good taste.

Of all the people who read that quote and nod along thinking, “yes this is me” how many are actually right?

> Of all the people who read that quote and nod along thinking, “yes this is me” how many are actually right?

Those who actually fight their way through their creative difficulties as the quote suggests, as opposed to those who read the quote and think "yup, no one recognizes my good taste, screw em".

Some people have innate creativity that just needs to be tuned through hard work. Many (most) don't have it in them to begin with.

We should all be OK with the idea that we're not all geniuses (creative genius, business, mathematical, whatever) waiting to be unlocked.

This says it best: https://mashable.com/video/jj-watt-robbie-rudy-snl-sketch/

Except as the quote actually says, it is advice to beginners.

Every expert started out as a beginner.

Yes but the quote is to be told to beginners, none of whom have yet to “actually fight their way through their creative difficulties.”

I don't think we're in disagreement.

You asked: Of all the people who read that quote and nod along thinking, “yes this is me” how many are actually right?

Of those people who think "yes this is me" as beginners, those who stick with it and move beyond the stage of beginner by fighting their way through their creative difficulties will be the ones who actually did have good creative taste and were right. Those who reach creative roadblocks and blame the cause on external circumstances are not among those with good creative taste.

I don't think you should be downvoted, because you speak truth. The comment/quote is factually wrong: not everyone who gets into creative work has "good taste", nor is Ira Glass correct that you just need to plow through it. Go peruse an end-of-senior-year art exhibit or dance recital at your local college. Bless 'em, they worked hard and gave it their best, but usually the raw creativity and talent isn't there.

I don't think your example disproves Glass' statement. Surely students are in the beginner phases and their work does not represent their full potential. Glass' statement seems to say forgive students (and yourself for being one) instead of writing them off as hopeless.

Look at the first sentence of Glass’s statement. It is meant to be told to beginners to encourage them. He’s telling beginners that because you’re trying you must have good taste (which is clearly not true) so stick with it.

> He’s telling beginners that because you’re trying you must have good taste

That's not how I read the quote. I read it as him saying, you can't know whether or not you have good taste without first producing a lot of bad work, and that producing bad work is not necessarily a sign that you have bad taste.

If anything, those who judge themselves harshly are demonstrating good taste because they can see the flaws in their work compared to the works of others. It's those that don't feel any sense of criticism toward their own work that lack good taste, but they wouldn't feel this quote applies to them in the first place, because they wouldn't feel that their work is disappointing. They would instead be blaming others for not recognizing their superior work.

Ira is obviously trying to point out that the self-hatred comes from the fact that you know enough about your work to hate it. He turns pessimism into meta-cognition.

I don't read it that way. I read it as a message to not be discouraged if you aren't immediately a master because nobody is immediately a master. If everyone looks at the results of their work and says "I can't do this" then nobody will ever improve. It's a hacker's viewpoint for sure. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of not just the good but anything. Fail fast, etc, etc.

I didn't learn to use a command line or write python scripts instantly. I spent thousands of hours banging my head against the wall. Progress is slow. Imperceptible even. Stick with it and eventually you get there.

Does this mean everyone can do everything? No. It means you'll never find what you are good at it if you just give up at the first sign of failure.

You're really getting lost in the weeds.

Glass' is talking about good taste by your own standards, and standards that are higher than you can achieve as a beginner. Whether other people think you have good taste is irrelevant to the quote/advice.

The point is to not let this discourage you from putting in the work.

Most likely: all of them. Most people have above average taste in some subject they are, for whatever reason, overly interested in. And you can't really judge this based on how good they are now or will be because that doesn't say anything about their taste just their current ability.

It's kinda like your example. No one in Dallas really thinks the Cowboys are any good. Not anymore. It's just something mildly amusing you can say. In fact the comment is rooted in being obviously tasteless. It's just the local team that was really good way back when. Those with taste may recognize that Romo was actually good or that he's made a good commentator but no one actually thinks the Cowboys are or were good since their heyday. (Though honestly I don't know or care about the team. I'm basing this on listening to sports people.)

“Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson

“Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.” ― Chuck Jones

This is a cool thing about learning something as a kid: You have no taste to get in the way of learning. You just learn. This is true of six-year-olds learning to play the violin.

Another taste-bypass is to jump into a field that's new enough to have no established standards for taste. For instance when I learned programming, there were no beautiful websites or even software to compare my work to. Websites were a decade away, and I had no access to any interesting software other than what I wrote myself or could find in a magazine. I was having a blast, and felt like master of the universe, though my programs by today's standards would be laughable.

I don't see how you can learn anything without such taste. To learn you have to be able to know what can be done better. Or someone tells you.

I think the point here is diminishing returns. When you're younger or rather a beginner you can make bigger leaps because you're learning the rough basics. When you're an expert and you can still tell that it's not good enough it can take months or years to make you reach that next milestone.

Parent seems to refer to taste _being in the way_ of learning (not the lack of it) and I definitely get the sentiment. Sometimes I catch myself thinking about the stuff I could have learned when I was young: I had a C64 and I could have learned assembly programming, if I just had met anyone with an actual disk of an assembler program and my library had a book about it, nothing of which was the case.

But then again, if there had been YouTube already, I'm not sure I wouldn't have been immediately discouraged by some 4-year old whiz kid somewhere in the world doing it better than me.

Back then I was the king of computer science because I was comparing myself to the rest of my rural high school. Now where I'm instantly comparing myself to 4 billion people, that can get pretty discouraging pretty quick.

Or in my case, likely distracted by some random stuff on youtube.

It is best of times, it is the worst of times.

There's so much educational content on YouTube, I envy my brother who has access to courses from CMU, MIT, and Stanford, and countless other presentations he can learn from. Kids, on the other hand...have it worse, ironically, when they should be the ones benefitting the most from all the accelerated learning on offer.

I think the suggestion is that at the earliest levels of mature fields where you've got a lot of basic and technical skills to develop, you're not really able to do much useful with your taste, and it's more likely just to depress you with how far you have to go.

You will need that taste to progress eventually, but in the more mechanical early phases it can be a distraction.

I am a pianist that went throught this. The first time I wrote something of my own "taste" was when I was 15. A couple of somewhat important guys told me "We can't wait until you are 18."

This is the only field in which I had this kind of luck. (I am about 30 now and I can write a song within about three days that I would be happy with. A more recent one was when I took an Estonian poem by Johan Liiv and set it to music. I can sing the words, know their meaning, wrote the song accordingly, but I don't speak Estonian.)

My other interests had no such kind of luck. I am still aweful at soccer, but better than other people who started off as rugby players. My MSc was the first time I discovered/invented mathematics and I still am looking for my taste, though I know what it is (self-dual frameworks). I can program the way I think in mathematics, but I am not an accomplished programmer. All of this takes a lot of time, but the recognition along the way is important–especially that one song that I could write at an early age–but then again, I started playing piano when I was, indeed, a six-year-old.

How did you happen to take Juhan Liiv's poem without knowing Estonian?

I asked an Estonian which poet's work to use and then bought the book [1] where his poems are translated to English.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Snow-Drifts-Sing-Essential-Translatio...

I watched Ira’s video probably 9 or 10 years ago. And while I didn’t notice it back then, this message had a huge impact on me and resonated heavily with my world view over the years, serving as a great motivational driver on my most challenging times.

The funny thing is, as time went by and I valued this lesson more and more, I couldn’t, for the life of me, find this video again, nor the author of the quote. I remember going on lengthy google sessions trying to find it back, but failed hard every time, to a point I thought I had dreamed of it, or that it was lost for good.

And here it is, 10 years later, on HN, and we meet again. Finally!

Thanks for posting this.

Reddit's "Tip of my tongue" is great for finding things you remember, but can't name. People manage to figure out exactly what the poster is asking for, no matter how obscure the description.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/

John Mulaney said the same thing about stand up. Its far, far easier to recognize good work than it is to do it. It may be be years before your ability matches your taste.

I think the problem I have is that I don't understand how to get good at something that I have good taste in. Of everything that I've been able to learn I've always had some sort of pleasure in the doing. I enjoyed my C++ assignments in college. I've enjoyed learning the basics of woodworking.

I love art and would love to learn to paint or draw but I can't figure out how to enjoy the small victories there. It's not about being objectively good but about enjoying an "ah-ha" moment where you feel like you've gotten better. Any advice for me? I'm very open to anything but I just can't seem to enjoy learning a lot of the activities that I value more than anything.

It's just like Glass says: you have to do a lot of work. Be comfortable that everything will suck for a while. Probably a long while. You may not notice day-to-day progress, but if you practice frequently, you'll eventually be able to look back and see that you're doing better.

For many, a good way to do that is just to take a class. You commit to showing up with other people and just working on the thing. A good friend joined an MFA program not because she really expected to learn much from the teachers, but because she benefits from the structure that forces her to write, write, write.

I’ve found that I need to alternate between two kinds of practice within a session: Pushing my limits with no real expectation of success is where I actually learn things, but is demotivating. I also need an easier task that I’m confident that I can succeed at, where I can just get into a flow state and perform.

I’ve never tackled drawing, but if I did, I would probably pick some simple object and sketch it at the end of every practice session. By drawing the same object over and over again, you’ll notice it getting easier and better over time, and you’ll build a ritual around drawing that feels familiar and comfortable.

Hey there, I struggled with the exact same thing as you when it comes to art. I started teaching myself to draw around a year ago. I made my way through the well known books, 'Drawing on the right side of the brain' and the Andrew Loomis books on faces and figures.

The main thing that pushed me through, and still motivates me, is that now I know the language and the reasons for the 'wrong' parts in my drawing. Now when I draw a figure I catch myself thinking 'These legs look weird because I didn't pay attention to the calf muscles and now my figure looks completely out of proportion' or 'My initial gesture drawing was rigid and as a result my figure looks static, with none of the weight being balanced'. For me I can see myself get better, but a lot of the 'Ah-ha!' moments actually come from realising where I've gone wrong and what I need to look at next to make sure I can do better next time.

As an aside, a huge bonus with this sort of thinking is an renewed interest and appreciation for artists you like, I catch myself looking at the work of guys like Charles Dana Gibson and marvelling at their control over light and shadow, or the expressions they're able to conjure with a few lines. It's an intensely rewarding experience. I'd really recommend grabbing a pencil and just going for it.

I am doing this, YMMV: I started drawing exactly 1 quick sketch (mostly human figures, taken from https://line-of-action.com/) a day. EVERY DAY.

After 30-40 days of this I started putting the results on Instagram. I had an Instagram account for maybe five years, only to follow friends there, never posted on it. I kept drawing and publishing at least one piece a day, every day, from April to December. In some cases (e.g. I went away for a holiday) I either took drawing stuff with me or built up a bit of "buffer" before the trip in order to keep posting regularly.

Now it is a bit over a year since I started, I post at least once every two days, actually more like once every 1.3/1.5 days...

I do believe I am improving, and anyway I am enjoying this immensely. I do not know if for you the publishing part may act as an incentive or you maybe feel intimidated by this. So try just drawing without publishing for at least one month, possibly daily.

Would you mind sharing your Instagram? I'd love to see your progress - I'm sure it would be inspiring for others to follow your lead (even if you're not quite Picasso yet)

Of course! I did not put it in the original comment because I didn't want to make my message look like "clickbait" - here it is: https://www.instagram.com/pamar/

And here is my webpage on the process (I want to add more about how I draw, including some technical tips): http://pa-mar.net/Hobbies/Drawing.html

Thanks, and looks like you're really making some progress. Good effort!

Speak for yourself. My Blender donut looks fantastic!

I didn't see anyone posting this, which is in my opinion the best essay on PG's site:

http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

My best advice about writer's block is: the reason you're having a hard time writing is because of a conflict between the GOAL of writing well and the FEAR of writing badly.

By default, our instinct is to conquer the fear, but our feelings are much, much, less within our control than the goals we set, and since it's the conflict BETWEEN the two forces blocking you, if you simply change your goal from "writing well" to "writing badly," you will be a veritable fucking fountain of material, because guess what, man, we don't like to admit it, because we're raised to think lack of confidence is synonymous with paralysis, but, let's just be honest with ourselves and each other: we can only hope to be good writers. We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that's a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck.

We are terrified we suck, and that terror is oppressive and pervasive because we can VERY WELL see the possibility that we suck. We are well acquainted with it. We know how we suck like the backs of our shitty, untalented hands.

We could write a fucking book on how bad a book would be if we just wrote one instead of sitting at a desk scratching our dumb heads trying to figure out how, by some miracle, the next thing we type is going to be brilliant. It isn't going to be brilliant. You stink. Prove it. It will go faster.

And then, after you write something incredibly shitty in about six hours, it's no problem making it better in passes, because in addition to being absolutely untalented, you are also a mean, petty CRITIC.

You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you're an asshole.

So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team "I will one day write something good" to team "I have no choice but to write a piece of shit" and then take off your "bad writer" hat and replace it with a "petty critic" hat and go to town on that poor hack's draft and that's your second draft.

— Dan Harmon

Oh man, this one is great. I’ll try this sometime and actually write a story.

This one is absolutely genius.

This one works for dating too. If you are trying to get rejected, it turns out to be incredibly hard to do.

>It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap

I think this is key to building any skill. Find a way to get more reps in. Find a safety net to allow you to finish quickly and start over.

For example, when I learned how to juggle the important thing was to find a way to recover from failure and start over. I started juggling standing up. The balls would fly everywhere and I would spend 10seconds picking them up, bending over, etc. Very annoying. Then I found out that if I use cloths or juggled over my bed or on the ground, I could easily pick them up and start over within seconds. This got me reps. They weren't always quality reps, but I wasn't going for quality, I just wanted to get the skill down.

"For the process of fulfillment of art is of higher importance than the transcendence imagined and desired to throttle the world with. Yes, it is healthy and the essence of the sacredness of artistry to the plenitude of society that the artist becomes entranced by his vision of the transcendent, which offers him salvation in the face of material impoverishment while enacting his being.[1] But the vision is often mistaken as the completion of the work instead of understanding it most critically as only its beginning.

Perhaps such verisimilitude is impenetrable to the stubborn set, who would be already fatigued at the awareness of the mountain they have yet to climb in sharing to the world what they imagine they see. They do not get excited at the prospects of the sweat they need to be drenched in to arrive at the glistening of perfection they think sparkled in the corner of their mind’s eye and holds them captive until they unearth it from the stream of their consciousness. They misplace their feeling of self satisfaction in feeling the illuminating spark versus the product of anguishing labor. And more so, with collaborative works, they fail to concede that spark of the incomprehensible is not solely their ownership, it is merely a beacon to direct their will towards and that they must acknowledge that the sublime they are reaching towards can be identically perceived by their fellow artists. As such, the collaboration itself can and does bring a greater fulfillment than what can possibly be imagined by the artist on his own.

Again, the strong-headed simply have misconstrued perfection as existing sufficiently in their minds. And this is reasonable to understand when taken in terms of understanding the sense of gratification that is involved in creating the work. Having to accept the labor involved is demoralizing. But what other choice does the artist have? He is not rewarded in hiding his gifts to himself, indeed, society punishes him for it.

It is expected, however, that the artist finds pleasure in the labor of creating his being. But again, not all artists possess the same courage in reaching beyond them and of confronting uncertainty. For the creative process is similarly heroic in this sense. The artist must have faith in his efforts, or at the least, be so blinded with passion any creative ejaculation creates the pleasure of self-fulfillment. Indeed, this is the Dionysian method, where the artist has no regard for the merit of his work and is simplistically fulfilled with its spawning. And how poetic; by being so unhinged and drunk, the artist is, through the process, rationalizing the incomprehensibly rational with its final appearance as his artwork. He is making Providence coherent to human conscious experience. There is no impedance erected by his subjectivity’s stubbornness. He merely acts as a conduit to a higher realm of truth, by in a certain sense becoming one with a higher power. It is a tantric dance that dissolves the self, which itself has no concern for its quality and therefore no prejudices which block the artist from becoming an artist. Might we say this oracular feat is pure will?

Note that the artist in this instance does not make the work for anything other than itself. He has no expectations, no simian entanglement with which he concerns the relation of his creation to others. The work transcends society, and transcends appropriately human experience. This is the entire aim of art."

From my essay On the Struggling Artist: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M037G3I

[1] Which is the quintessence of idealism contra materialism.

My dad doesn't speak / understand english well. He did manual labor for the past 3 decades (pretty much since having me). For the past year (at 55 years old), he has been learning coding from a javascript book that I've been writing every day every though he didn't understand much. He asks questions and commits to doing problems from the book every day. He updates his progress on notion every day, 7 days a week.

https://www.notion.so/songz/26617ff591e44d4f9c376950e7449819...

Its been a year and he went through a few notebooks of practice problems back to back. He now catches bugs in my book and proofreads my lesson exercises. He can understand my code and give me feedback. His perseverance and dedication to my content is the greatest gift I can ever receive from anyone.

Quantity before quality, essentially.

Favor interrogative-led questions over leading questions.

A leading question attempts to get the listener to agree or disagree with a premise you feed to them.

An interrogative-led question often begins with the words: who; where; what; when; why.

Imagine the responses to these two questions:

- "Did you like the movie?" (Leading)

- "What did you think about the movie?" (Interrogative-led)

How do each of these questions make you feel? How comfortable would you be saying something you think would displease the asker in each case. What kind of responses are possible/likely in each case?

Of course, you can always be talking to someone who's not interested in talking. It's possible to answer either question with a word or two. So there's some assumption of willingness to participate. Even so, you can still sometimes use carefully-chosen interrogative-led questions to find reasons for the disinterest.

Asking good interrogative-led questions is essential for above-average results in many pursuits: science; engineering; interviewing; and negotiation; to name a few. It can also be an important way to de-escalate tense situations. I've found it especially useful when talking to subject matter experts when trying to learn something about areas I know little.

Here's an actionable way to apply the idea. The next time you find yourself asking a question that doesn't begin with {who, where, what, when, why}, stop yourself and rephrase it to begin with one of those words. What differences do you notice in how the conversation goes compared to similar conversations you've had in the past?

I also find a similar technique useful when searching online. If you search "do Aliens exist?" or "does teflon cause cancer" you're guaranteed to find articles that match the bias of your question. Instead, search "extraterrestrial life" or "teflon health effects" or similar terms that are likely to match articles that both agree and disagree with the premise in question. You will end up significantly more informed from the results.

The most significant time that I made this mistake was during the attempted coup in Turkey.

I was living close to Istiklal Street, and I was woken up by a very loud boom. I was pretty sure it was a sonic boom but wanted to make sure. The smart thing would have been to search for "Explosion Istiklal" or maybe even "Boom Istiklal". Instead, I searched for "Bomb Istiklal", and of course I found the 7 people who had leapt to conclusions.

It took me a while to realize I also needed to search for other alternatives, that was a good lesson in the availability bias.

Great advice. Interrogative questioning was my biggest takeaway from my high school journalism class. We would often have to write interrogative-style fake interviews at the beginning of class and it took a while to develop an intuition for it.

I hear suggestions like this occasionally, and I don't get it. Apparently sentences like "Did you like the movie?", which sound to me like perfectly neutral questions, actually have a slant.

Which way is this question leading me to answer? How can I tell? "Yes" and "No" seem equally acceptable answers here. I don't see how either one would "displease the asker", without knowing more about the situation.

The framing suggests that the asker did like the movie. It makes it harder to answer in the negative because some (most) folks have an instinct to achieve social consensus. I think it's a society-wide learned defense mechanism against tribalism in the presence of allies. Maybe a good test for these sorts of questions is to add the word "also" at the end.

I think it can lean either way depending on how you ask it ("Did you like the movie??").

However, regardless of leaning, the non-leaning version feels like it will generate more interesting responses, while "Did you like it?" is likely to elicit a "yes" or "no".

‘Like’ is a positive verb so it’s not a neutral question.

More importantly it directs you to frame your reaction on a simple like-dislike axis, when the full spectrum of your opinion is probably more complex, and eliciting that yields a better conversation.

The problem with the question is that it reduces an infinite dimensional space (all the things you could have thought about the movie) into a single scalar value. Your mind is likely to be preoccupied with performing that projection which is fundamentally uninteresting.

It’s like asking “Is the pharmaceutical industry good or bad?” vs. “How should the pharmaceutical industry participate in society over the next 20 years?”

It's ok to ask follow-up Why questions.

But the opening of a conversation influences the rest of it. It's like the old experiment about guessing the number of countries in Africa.

What do you think about follow-up questions?

You are right that there are two acceptable answers to the question. How does this compare to the number of acceptable answers to the other question?

My favorite way to ask this question is “What did you (dis)like about the movie?”

Makes the question more open ended and encourages the person to dig deep for answers and think critically.

"Did you like the movie?"

"Did you hate the movie?"

The idea is that people are more comfortable answering yes to a yes/no question.

It's also overly simplistic and tends towards binary outcomes. Yes. No. Conversation over.

It was a two hour movie, surely the answer is more complicated! Caveat: does not apply to all movies.

I am with you here, it seems perfectly neutral question to me.

But this reminds me of a time when I went to movies with some younger family memeber and their friends. After the movie they asked each other if they loved the movie. To me love was really strong word. I wanted to say I liked it, not loved it but then I thought no need to be negative here. So I just said yes.

So when people ask did you like the movie, many people subconsciously say yes even if they disliked it.

We talk about this a lot in k12 education (I teach at the high school level). It’s often immediately apparent how new/effective a teacher is by monitoring their question style.

Not heard this term before - I believe this is often called "open Vs closed questions" (where open questions are the open-ended ones that cannot be answered with yes or no).

I was taught that by a sales guy. Never ask a yes/no question. Don't ask "Are you satisfied with your current provider?" rather "What do you like/dislike about your current provider?". The wrong answer to a yes/no question ends the conversation.

In a job I had as a student, I had to sell a product over the phone. My boss told me to ask a couple of obvious leading questions first. The point was to get the customer to say „yes“ a couple of times, before trying to sell the product.

I was very ineffective and got fired after a week.

I read a book recently suggesting the opposite. That it's much more effective to get them to say No right out of the gate. People feel like they are in control when they say "No."

Yes there's a psychological principle at work there, when you ask a serious of "softball" questions that are intended to get the respondent to agree, blatantly so, the respondent's "radar goes up", so to speak. I've heard someone give this approach -- and its unintended consequence -- a name, but currently it escapes me. And yes, the gentlemen I'm thinking of was in sales, technical sales actually.

I assume people are meant to find the second question easier to answer? But I don’t know why. The first gives you some vital information for pulling this interaction off successfully. It tells you the speaker liked the movie (or hated it, depending on tone of voice), so you’d better think about how vehemently you want to disagree with them. The second sounds like a trap! If you say “boy, it sucked!” and the speaker loved it, they might not like that! It only works if you trust the speaker to be some kind of enlightened being who never gets offended. If I didn’t know the speaker well, I’d be tempted to give a really wishy-washy non-answer to the second question.

The point is to shift conversations from opinion to insight.

Instead of getting someone’s opinion about something, which is ultimately subjective and of little benefit, you are trying to get unique insights into the subject that you may have not considered which can be very beneficial.

Eh. I don’t know if I’d frame it the same way?

When I think about this, the only time I’m getting single word responses is when someone wants to kill a conversation. If you’re finding this happening a lot because you /only/ ask yes/no questions and/or people don’t feel free/comfortable/interested to tell you more past that then that’s the issue. You can try to ask more open ended questions rather than thinking of it as leading vs non leading. (You’re almost always asking leading questions in real life. Context is abundant) Ones with more potential ways of answering can be good for those who are not as conversational/literal. But be prepared for the conversation killer of, “I didn’t like it.” It will happen...

This is well said. This reminds me of this wonderful dialogue from `Yes, Prime Minister`: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA

"did you like the movie?" doesn't seem like a leading question to me. It's just a yes/no question so it's certainly not the best question to ask for an open ended discussion compared to the "what did you think about the movie".

A better example of a leading question in my opinion would be something like "how much did you like the movie?" where the question is loaded with the premise that the person actually did like the movie.

Yet there's no universal truth to which types of questions should you be asking. Sometimes a simple yes/no is in fact what you want.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_question

But probably don’t start your interrogative sentence with ‘Why don’t you just...?’ ;)

Learning Columbo Technique was great advice I got.

This might be super basic, but... assume positive intent.

Your parent is not your enemy. Your teacher is not your enemy. Your boss is not your enemy. The other team at work is not your enemy. The corporation is not your enemy. The other political party is not your enemy. Or, more accurately, YOU are not THEIR enemy. At best, you're an NPC in their game. Many of them probably even want to help you, because you are another person in the world, and that feels good.

I take back what I said about this being basic. The first steps (learning your parent, teacher, boss are on your side) is pretty basic. But applying this concept to more complex systems, like corporations and communities, can be pretty advanced. But at the end of the day, what it means is that, most of the time there isn't a conspiracy against you, there are simply incentives that you don't understand.

I agree with this, it's much better to collaborate or collude when possible. The one exception is that corporations are absolutely my enemy.

Most of us (non-sociopaths) don't get to choose our enemies though. They choose us.

Honestly, I think the majority of us don't have any enemies at all. We might imagine we do, though.

Everyone has enemies but might not know it yet because their enemies don't have the power to act on their malevolent desires.

This seems like paranoia

Paranoia is thinking that lizard people are spying on you.

Find common instances where people regularly abuse power: child abuse, terrible bosses, emotional abuse of a spouse. The most common denominator is that people hurt others because they can, and those who couldn't will claim that they choose not to.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia

What you're describing happens, but it's not rampant. Paranoia isn't lizard people, it's simply ascribing blame out of fear where it may not exist.

Assume good intent until proven otherwise. Because there are plenty of people who'll repeatedly treat you like shit, and then continue to demand you assume good intent.

To which I say, pardon my french, fuck that noise. People are entitled to the benefit of doubt only as long as there can be doubt. Once that is gone, act accordingly.

This is so true.

Ditch the toxic people in your life.

Absolutely! But corporations can also treat you like shit. When they do, try to ditch them. Well, that is a challenge.

Yes, definitely a problem, specially in markets where there are only a small hand full of players. At my place, internet providers come to mind. They all suck immensely, but you know the competition is approximately equally shitty.

where was the french in this ?

Just an idiom :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon_my_French

It is an English expression to say "pardon my French", before using expletives or crude language.

> assume positive intent.

I feel like this is somewhat related to Hanlon's Razor:

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

Maybe the guy driving like an asshole and making a sudden lane change is actually unfamiliar with the area and noticed a bit late that their lane ends or is becoming an exit/turn-only lane.

I like this one, and I read a good follow up for that one on HN recently:

Never attribute to stupidity what can be adequately explained by opportunity costs.

(Hope I'm not butchering the quote)

Sometimes I have the feeling that, at the very extreme ends of each spectrum, stupidity and malice converge and become indistinguishable.

Sometimes, I would spent time trying to understand if someone was "asshole" or "idiot", the distinction being whether or not they understood the negative effects of their actions. I've recently decided that it didn't matter because I deploy the same polite mitigation strategy for both.

I think that's bad advice. Enemy is too strong of a word, but there are conflicts of interest between you and your teacher, your boss, your team members and even your parents.

What's best for you is not necessarily what is best for them. They may help you to achieve what's best for both of you, but not what's best for you alone. Those are often not the same things. Assume people are acting in their best interest, not yours.

> Assume people are acting in their best interest, not yours.

This. And even people that actually cares about you, could be wrong due to biases, beliefs, etc.

I guess it depends a lot on the type of environment you were raised.

Positive intent is a somewhat subjective term. I prefer the term good faith.

Assuming good faith does have two downsides. Firstly, handling in good faith isn't the same as handling in your best interests. Secondly not all people are handling in good faith, and some collectives are subject to selection bias.

My life experiences don't match your mental model, sadly. Maybe it has to do with where and how one grows up? For example, I know with certainty that my parents, teachers, and first bosses were enemies.

A lot of people on HN seem to have grown up in safe, nurturing, loving environments. But, remember that most of the world's people didn't. I don't mean to call you out - just saying that I would love to have had your experiences.

Sad reality, adequately explained by game theory: https://ncase.me/trust/

Whoa. Excellent website. Thank you so much.

Excellent find!!

This mirrors my experience in many ways. People with legitimate ill intention were a lot more common in my youth and when I was in a lower socio-economic position.

Now I live in a world very similar to the one described by the GP. It took me quite a while to adjust, and I still have my moments.

Most people grew up with parents who love them. They might not know how to show it, and I'm sure there are exceptions, but love for offspring is about as close as it gets to universal human experience.

Parents may not express that love all the time, and may even harm their children in spite of it. And they will probably hate themselves after the fact for it.

I was oversimplifying, of course. You can certainly end up with enemies. But your boss didn't start out hiring you because he wanted an enemy. He hired you to do a job.

I know for a fact my mom loved me and only wanted my best when beating the crap out of me.

Intentions don't even matter in such cases. The end result does

I normally do not comment here, but I feel like I have to say this. My mom also was beating the crap out of me for most of my childhood and when my sister killed herself, I blamed my mom for it. But after living with all this hate and anger in my life for years, I started to realize that I can only truly be in peace if I learn to let go of these feelings. It definitely wasn't easy and I still find it very hard to trust her from time to time, but recently I hugged her for the first time in many years and to my surprise that actually felt good.

I helped me a lot to imagine how she grew up and how she must have felt to be pushed to such extreme measures. I don't say it's easy and I don't say you have to forgive your mother or anything like that. I just wanted to share that trying to forgive my mother actually made me feel better in the long run.

I hope you will be able to sort this out some day. I wish you all the best.

I tried for decades to let go of the (completely justified) hatred I have for my parents and tried so hard to have a semi-normal relationship with them,or at least one of them.

Nope, didn't work, they are just horrible people nobody sane gets anything positive from being around. My husband pointed out that they were a huge negative in my life with no positives and why was I doing that to myself?

I let go and stopped contact with them and it's been one of the best things I've ever done for my overall well-being.

Thanks for the kind words! I am in a much better place now and apart from some long term effects such as general trust issues with people, I am mostly fine now.

Thank you!

You and I are clearly living in two completely different worlds.

I estimate at least 20% of parents don't love their children, based on my personal experience and observations.

Even if terrible parents who do terrible things actually love their children, it is not like it actually matters. If someone, for example, molests you because they love you, molests you because they hate you, or molests you because they don't have any particular emotion towards you. You still are molested.

Most? Based on what?

I guess maybe it’s worth remembering that even if someone is an enemy it is in conflict with you, nobody thinks they are “the bad guy”.

If you want to understand why someone does what they do, you can’t chalk it up just to “they’re evil” or “they’re crazy”. There’s some reason why they’re doing what they do and to them, they feel like they’re on the right side.

Indeed. I don’t know the origin, but I’ve heard it phrased as “no one is the villain in the movie that is their life”, or “no person is the villain in that person’s autobiography”

On the internet, everyone assumes bad faith. Like the kid staring at the native american guy, not everything is intended to be malicious (and so he successfully sued CNN for defamation). I think there's a theme of "Person supports X" and every commentator who is predisposed to disliking that person, twists X into the worst possible form.

The kid (wearing a MAGA hat who happened to be in Washington, D.C. from Kentucky to attend an anti-abortion rally, with his school.)

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18192831/c...

Also, the suit with CNN was settled out of court without any disclosure of terms on either side. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/cnn-settles-l...

> At best, you're an NPC in their game. Many of them probably even want to help you, because you are another person in the world, and that feels good.

Oh man, I learned the opposite lesson that changed my life: Sociopaths and psychopaths will not help you because you are not a person in their world but an object that either helps them achieve their goals and can be discarded when your usefulness is expired, or you are an obstacle that needs to be destroyed. Helping you doesn't make them feel good, and they can sleep just fine at night after destroying your world because they have no semblance of empathy.

Yes, there are people like that. Identify and avoid them. They won't help you win, and in most cases, over long time frames, will not win themselves.

This has advantages even in situations where you are sure the counter-party has malign intent. You can suspect someone, yet still speak and act in good faith. The worst case is your suspicions were correct and now they think they have you at a disadvantage, but the best cases include them lowering their guard and being more forthright, or even your suspicions proving unfounded.

I like what you said. One thing I'd add is: if you're not assuming positive intent, at least assume ignorance. Classic Hanlon's razor https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

It's easier to believe that when the person saying that grew up in a system where there was no effective penury, where serious economists/experts used to say (and still do) "relax, not everything is a zero-sum game" (which it's how I imagine most of the Western economies/societies view themselves, i.e. as non-zero sum games).

But I for example grew up in a society (Eastern Europe before 1989) where my dad had to wake up early at 4.45 or 5AM in order to go the State-owned grocery store, hoping to catch one bottle of milk for child-me out of a limited supply of 100 or 200 bottles (or something like that). That was a hell of a "zero-sum game" (you wake up early and you're lucky, you get a bottle of milk for your kid out of a limited supply, you don't, your kid is out of milk). As such, it's very difficult for me (and close to impossible) not to view the other people as potential adversaries.

In other words, viewpoints like the one you suggest ("everyone else is not an adversary") most probably come from a position of privilege, i.e. of having grown up in a society which afforded itself the luxury of not having everything as a zero-sum game.

Interesting point. So what should I do now : treat anyone not from western democracies as an adversary ?

You're right. Those environments exist. Most of us who can sign onto HN and post comments are not in those environments. If you still act like you are, you'll be left behind by your peers who cooperate with each other, treat their superiors as partners, and give generously to those who need help.

It's simple game theory. The prisoners dilemma has multiple equilibria, but you don't find the optimal one unless you take the less rational choice once in a while.

> It's simple game theory. The prisoners dilemma has multiple equilibria, but you don't find the optimal one unless you take the less rational choice once in a while.

I also agree it's simple game theory, but ignoring the HN audience for a moment you're probably assuming that the non-zero sum situation will still continue to hold at a society-wide scale for large parts of the world (at least for the "former" Western world).

The present covid crisis has proven that to be false, what with countries/states members of the same political union (the EU, different US States) fighting for limited medical resources in the early stages of the pandemic. We'll probably end up in similar scenarios if and when the climate crisis will worsen, reducing the availability for resources for many of us.

I don't think you should assume that someone is intending to be positive towards you.

But you should assume that someone, in their own mind, thinks they're doing the "right thing".

If you assume people are evil and are motivated by wanting to pursue evil ends, then you're going to have a bad model for predicting them.

Everybody at that store wants to get the milk because in that situation, that's what feels like the right thing to do, all things considered. They're not getting up at 5am to ensure you DON'T have milk. If there weren't milk shortages, they wouldn't be buying it up just to spite you.

Everyone is picking the best option on the internal menu that they see in their mind.

Meh. I think you can assume the average person is casually well-meaning. You can't assume the average person is trying to help you with all/most of their actions.

I don't think you can assume the average person is honest/transparent. You can't assume the person you're negotiating your salary with is going to tell you if your offer is much too low. You can't assume HR isn't going to lie about the reason the fired somebody. You can't assume the company will give you any heads up if they're thinking about firing you.

A lot of people offering "feedback," especially public, especially if it's negative, are just angry venters. And this goes both directions E.g. Glassdoor.

Not saying it's good to have a chip on your shoulder about any of this, but it definitely shouldn't be swept under the rug.

You're totally right. I believe step 1 to understanding these things is understanding that other people aren't out to get you. They're out to help themselves. Once you've got that down, the rest comes naturally over time.

This is generally true when you're not a minority, unfortunately, that trait is (almost always) decided when you're born.

From my father:

No matter how correct you are, you won't get anywhere by making the other person feel stupid.

He gave me this after we went together to a conference on communication and I found the presenter to be making some rather doubtful statements. I asked questions and tried to break the presenter in the QnA session and when I didn't get what I wanted, I left. I was 15 at the time. So, I forgive myself but still cringe hard whenever I remember it.

This advice had and continues to have a really long lasting impact on me (especially in getting me out of my incredibly arrogant stage in life) and my relationships with people. I can still be critical of things while maintaining respect for the other person's context and intelligence. I've found that also helps a lot in disconnecting ego amidst a debate.

Nick Carraway, is that you?

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, " just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

Along the same lines: Just because someone doesn't know something, doesn't mean they know nothing.

We all come across information in different orders at different times. If you jump to the conclusion that someone is not worth your time because they didn't know something you know, then you might not engage with an otherwise good person.

> No matter how correct you are, you won't get anywhere by making the other person feel stupid.

I came to the same realization some time after an incident at Uni...

In a Uni class I tried to correct the lecturer about some Unix/Solaris? feature using my Linux knowledge and when he wouldn't agree, I basically ignored everything he taught for the rest of the class.

I think it was maybe something about file systems and IIRC I looked it up after (realizing what a dick I was) and I found that I was indeed correct, but I still feel bad about the way I acted to this day.

Although, in my defense, earlier in the class I had to show a whole bunch of students how to exit Vi/Vim so as you can imagine, I was already starting to feel like some kinda Unix god at that point.

I think both of you failed to learn from each other there. He had an opportunity to learn from you but refused it. For me, every person presents an opportunity to learn, but I maintain a filter for each person because there are varying levels of bullshit and presence of a little knowledge about certain things. I consider it one of my talents that I can quickly and effortlessly gauge these levels for people and discover what it is I can learn from them and what I definitely can't learn from them.

On similar lines, the anecdote at the beginning of this speech - https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/05/30/2010-baccalaureate... -changed my life too. Since then I’ve been trying to follow - it’s harder to be kind than clever.

So many cringe-inducing interactions where I was a total jerk just to come off as the smarter guy. Feels awful and I strive to not behave like that anymore. This quote serves as an anchor.

I didn't expect that story to be from Jeff Bezos. It is so at odds with the way we hear low-level Amazon employees are treated.

> So, I forgive myself but still cringe hard whenever I remember it.

This has actually resonated with me as advice in its own right. I have wasted a lot of time worrying about past mistakes that I have made, wishing I could change the past etc. I'm not so bad for it now, but still struggle sometimes and worry myself with what people think of me now remembering what drunk (and sober) me did at university 10 years ago (and at other times in my life). This line has helped reframe it a bit in my mind: it's ok to still cringe at how I behaved and forgive myself for it - the former does not rule out the latter.

It's been a few years since I read it but one of the early topics in How To Win Friends And Influence People is on a similar track to this:

You can't make people do something. They have to want to do it (unless you're the big boss ruling through fear).

I've found it's much more productive to present information or an argument so that the other party is not made to feel stupid and is willing to accept it.

Even then it helps not to expect people to change their mind right there. Especially in the case of relatives with weird ideas, it can be helpful to not go into a discussion with the explicit aim of them seeing the problems right now but to just plant a few seeds.

I've seen it quite a few times that after a few days we talked about it again and they had shifted their opinion to be more in line with the presented evidence without ever really acknowledging it.

"A man convinced against his will, Is of the same opinion still"

― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

You can't force people to agree with you by making them feel stupid, they'll resent you.

I just finished this book and it has a profound impact on me. I have taken detailed notes so I have an easy access to it. https://themihirchronicles.com/bookshelf/how-to-win-friends-...

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

— Maya Angelou

I struggle with this a lot, and am super aware that I do this. It's NEVER my intention to make someone feel stupid, but I think the way I say things comes across that way.

I have a hard time correcting it, or even knowing what / how to say things differently upon reflection.

My current iteration of figuring this out is maybe things I think are important to criticize (or give my 2 cents on) aren't as important as I think they are.

It's tough.

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil"

More and more, I'm realizing this applies more broadly than just for code. Abstraction is a form of optimization and shouldn't be done before the space has been properly explored to know what abstractions should be built. Standardization is a form of optimization and shouldn't be proposed until there's a body of evidence to support what's being standardized.

Failure to validate a product before building it? Premature optimization.

Build infrastructure without understanding the use case? Premature optimization.

Build tools before using them for your end product/project? Premature optimization.

This advice comes in different forms: "Progress over perfection", "Iteration quickly", "Move fast and break things", "Don't let perfection be the enemy of good enough", etc. but I find the umbrella statement of not prematurely optimizing to encompass them all.

> Build infrastructure without understanding the use case? Premature optimization.

Hence my issues with micro services and Kubernetes/containerisation (by default.)

I've always hated the fact people simply jump onto these technologies and methodologies as if they're automatically the right solution because everyone is talking about them. What they don't understand is that they're optimisations.

You build a monolith and put it on one machine to begin with. No load balancer. Just a single EC2 instance with snapshots. As the customer count grows and demand increasing you scale it out...

Now you're on two EC2 instances and might want to consider using RDS. You have an ALB and you're using ACM to offload TLS certificate management. More customers come along and the monolith begins to slow down, so you optimise the application this time...

Now you have the most successful/popular parts of your application split out into separate components but still using the same database. You're still just running Docker on a few EC2 instances though. You don't need orchestration yet. But now your customers start demanding more features and changes on a more frequent basis. Also your customer count is rising more and more. You're now ready to scale out and re-architect things again...

Now you've got 80-85% of your monolith split out into separate components, in Docker images, and you're using Kubernetes to orchestrate the whole thing because you need to iterate and deploy parts of the software on a near daily basis.

Taking it slow and keeping things simple in the beginning allows you to focus (from a systems perspective) on stability and security, which are much easier when you have a monolith and two EC2 instances. As you need to iterate faster and more often you increase the complexity of the network to meet the needs of the development team. It becomes much harder to secure and manage, but the trade off is worth it.

That's how you optimise your infrastructure over time.

The only situation in which I would contradict my self on this point is if you're developing a product that you know will need micro services and K8s to begin with AND everyone on the team has extensive experience implementing an application in that manner.

With many apps, you can completely bypass kubernetes entirely and just use something like elastic beanstalk or heroku for scaling (just by adding nodes).

With many apps, you can completely bypass kubernetes entirely and just use something like elastic beanstalk or heroku for scaling (just by adding more nodes behind a load balancer).

I invested several days setting up my product's backend on Elastic Beanstalk. After several weeks, I learned that Elastic Beanstalk is not reliable.

Then I spent several days learning Kubernetes and gave up when I learned that it is overly complex and mostly undocumented.

Then I wasted a week using Packer to build EC2 AMIs and deploy with terraform and run with supervisord. I learned that Packer is slow and Linux package repositories are unreliable. Both of these things could prevent me from deploying an emergency patch. Also, there are no reliable tools to clean up old AMIs generated by Packer.

Then I spent several weeks learning Docker and migrating my product's backend to that. Docker's APIs and tooling are hard to use but at least they're reliable. And I can run the same binaries in production and on my dev machine.

Throughout this process, I frequently looked at Heroku and then remembered how much they charge. I just can't bring myself to spend $500/mo for their ops automation. Perhaps I'm being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

I find it strange that you believe that Elastic Beanstalk is not reliable... That hasn't been my experience at all.

My company has been using it to host our production infrastructure for over a year and a half now, and it has been performing excellently. Our site reliability over the past year has been somewhere around the 99.99% range (and few outages we did have were not related to Elastic Beanstalk in any way).

We have our site hosted in multiple redundant physical locations (AWS regions), with a load balancer routing requests between multiple nodes.

We do about 10-20 deploys to production on a daily basis, with zero downtime. Any time there is a deployment, the code is automatically deployed in rolling batches, and the nodes aren't added back to the load balancer until they pass their health checks.

See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23136482

Why people start at the K8 end state is twofold, fashion and a lot of younger people don't look at highways and see they started out as either single lane tarmac or dirt roads that were remade in place. There's a lot more talk these days about refactoring complex systems. But its really a job for senior engineers or young folk who have time for it (Like the new grads who complain about being dumped on legacy systems :) ). When you're jumping from framework to framework and shipping features, sitting back and considering things is really tricky, and the inertia to build from scratch but also have 20 years of refactored improvements delivered makes jumping on K8's and the magic that brings seem like a no brainer.

I really, really like your metaphor of the dirt roads remade in place. It’s fascinating to look down at the sidewalk in NYC and know that it was farmland only a few centuries ago. We know the aphorisms: Rome wasn’t built in a day, but we don’t always think them through.

At work, when a new person joins our team, it’s fascinating (in a non-cynical way) to hear “why are we using a dirt road here instead of a highway? Wouldn’t that be more efficient?” It’s fun to imagine the implications of such a project, and it’s a great opportunity to give perspective on the traffic flow of customers, developers, operations.

Could we build a highway there? Yes. But usually, it’s a better allocation of our finite resources to do some maintenance on the existing highway. Sometimes, we actually need to take highways apart and replace them with something more informal, since their maintenance costs more than they’re worth.

Something tangential this reminds me of is the concept of “Desire Lines”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path. The work of an SWE can be summed up as the identification and “improvement” of desire lines. If you build a highway, but it’s not on a desire line, you’ve just wasted a lot of energy!

Yeah, I just wish the quote were "folly" instead of "evil".

All fine and well, just consider that Donald Knuth was talking about shaving off some cycles by carefully selecting machine instruction.

Donald Knuth, the same guy that got upset about being forced to use 64-bit pointers in a binary compiled for x86-64 even in programs where he would've been just fine with a 4GB address space.

He didn't exactly mean to say "omg wtf computers are so fast just use create-react-app", but that seems to be the general reception.

You're prematurely optimizing donald knuth out of the algorithm.

I'm at a big slow non-tech corp and as much as I would prefer "move fast and break things," I can't see it working here. "Move fast" becomes "hurry up and wait" as you end up being dependent on another group's input (10-20 people total get involved, 3-10 meetings) to move forward on something. You end up trying to over-plan because it lets you schedule things to happen in parallel. Everything has to be a huge depth first search because being on the wrong track can cost months and even be fatal. By the time you figure out it won't work, you're way behind schedule and restarting would take another 10+ meetings to coordinate. You have to exhaustively evaluate every path beforehand because it's so slow to right the ship, at an institutional level.

Well, yeah. You guys should stop doing that.

“Move fast and break things.” wasn’t advice given to every individual at every company. It won’t work if you’re the only person doing it. It’s the mantra from the top down for the whole company.

"The difference between over-engineering and under-engineering is that you can fix under-engineering."

> Failure to validate a product before building it? Premature optimization.

I largely agree with your comment, minus this. Unless everything after the initial idea for a product is an "optimisation" - which is quite a claim - building something shouldn't be lumped together with optimising it.

My point is that it seems like you're attributing more to this idea than is fair.

Its a stretch of the original meaning, but a good one I think.

Building a product before a good indication it is the right thing to build is prematurely optimizing a business.

At any level of a project, it is important to do things in the right order, to avoid wasting unrecoverable time and effort on work that never needed to be done.

Consider:

- Programs we wanted to write so badly that we invented computers along the way.

- Programs we realized we could write & benefit from once familiar with computers and their capabilities.

Infrastructure shouldn't be totally clueless about anticipated use cases, but it shouldn't be too subservient to them either.

Proof of value vs Proof of concept.

Also YAGNI

I would also add to that: adopting tools before you need them. Premature optimisation.

Too often I see people adopting tools just because it's the latest fashion or because they've seen their friends use them. But do you actually need them? The need should come first. For two reasons. First, you might simply not need that tool, so why not keep your life more simple and make it easier for developers to work on your project? Second, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Grow your project first, decide what tooling you need later. Otherwise you'll be constrained by the limitations of your tools. Some projects will need completely custom tooling, many won't, but you won't know until you get your teeth into the damn project.

This is good when you have infinite time. The converse is putting an end date on all of your tasks.

Building a body of evidence to support a standard, but never building the standard because there's always more to do and everything has decayed into a mess of different forks by the time the deadline appears.

Spending time to investigate the use case and requirements change. You're further down the road with no infrastructure to show for it, a changing deadline will take you out.

Building tools as you need them works fine if you have an infinite project.

Planning work with a limited time-frame means you are required to 'prematurely optimize' everything. With perfect understanding you don't hit those problems. You're trading a lack of understanding that comes from revelation and analysis with spending time on process to compensate. Neither understanding or spending time are perfect, it's unsolvable, they are separate categories.

I agree, but I think it's overrated as wisdom as it's circular reasoning. Of course doing anything too early is bad, because it is by definition.

You're right, but it's worth reading the rest of the paragraph:

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%." -- Knuth

Knuth was trying to say you shouldn't guess. If you think you will get a performance gain, but you're not sure where or how the performance is going to suffer, hold back. But if you know you're doing something that is normally bad and you can fix it, it's OK to get on with it.

Your final paragraph makes me think we're both on the same wavelength here, but I think it's worth remembering that Knuth was not saying "never optimize until you have to"

I was thinking “premature action ...” covers it, but it doesn’t properly match the stuff in your last paragraph.

The way I usually put it is “level and division of effort should match and be informed by the level of knowledge”, but that also doesn’t cover “move fast...” properly, because some people take that to mean “I don’t know enough, so I should move slowLy” whereas often it should be “I don’t know enough so I should experiment quickly”

A decade of success against steep odds later, I ran into the high school teacher who I idolized and who helped me actually achieve something. Most teachers tolerated me or insulated the rest of the classroom from me. But he put in the effort to get me engaged with something that got me to sit down and try. I was excited to show him what his work had helped me accomplish. He had two things to share with me:

1. He doesnt remember me.

2. That he felt I was smarter than him, hearing what I was working on.

It hit really hard. And when I recovered it made me realise that all relationships are ephemeral if you aren't there to foster and cherish them. There's also a lesson in there I'm trying to parse. About how I always saw him as this brilliant teacher. But he's just a guy.

But it's also much more than that - he's not just a guy, he's one of just a few guys that put in the effort to do their job well and honestly. And that positive daily effort had profound effects on the lives of people he cared about. (And conversely, those that did not put in that effort did not create profound and positive wakes).

And that idea can be paid forward. There are plenty of times one doesn't get to go back and thank their mentors and those that inspired them. But that practiced and daily support of others really can lead to outsized positive effects - that we might not ever hear about.

And if you step forward with the idea - the more people that work to support others in their daily routine, even without obvious immediate benefit, the more those wakes can become entire waves that lift everyone upwards.

It's so true. I started mentoring a robotics team and I doubt I'll remember most of the kids. But wow it's so soul filling to watch them learn.

Paying forward is such a powerful concept. I know where I am being fairly successful is due to tons of people to whom I may not pay back, but doing the similar helpful gesture to other people is so empowering. Hopefully the link never breaks.

Sounds like he actually is a brilliant teacher. Keep in mind he has probably taught several hundred other students since teaching you, which is well above Dunbar's number. He might have had a similar impact on many of them, and he probably invested a lot of time, thought, and energy into his teaching for that to happen. Maybe he just doesn't have a good memory for former students.

You might feel like some guy, but be someone's brilliant teacher.

To me this is completely okay and a heartwarming success story.

Sure there is the alternate history where you stayed in touch and he still remembers you and cherishes the relationship…

But it’s also wonderful that he impacted you so strongly and positively, yet has taught so many students that he doesn’t remember you specifically. If he did this for you he likely did it for other students too and we are lucky that we have him as a teacher in our world.

It also reminds us that though we know ourselves to be human with very human limits, we can still pay forward the kindness and guidance we received to the next generation.

I think the real lesson here is you never know exactly how profoundly you're going to impact someone, especially young people. What was just another day for your teacher, helping one student in an endless stream of students, was a life-changing formative experience for you.

He's much more than just a guy -- in many ways he was the vehicle for your own success. Just because he didn't recognize you later, or his intelligence is less than yours, doesn't take away from the other unrecognized qualities that helped lead your life to this moment as if by destiny. He's very special; I hope you recognize and appreciate the strange gift in this.

Well, it's sad that he could not remember you ; but maybe his mind was already full caring about his current students - whose life he's going to change too - that would be cool, he ?

Great that you could "pinpoint" someone that had a such a profound effect on you. Do you think there's anything in his behavior that can be "stolen", to try and have the same effect on other people down the line ?

I've had a similar experience with a professor. We used to chat about more advanced topics after class and he seemed really happy that I took an interest in his subject.

Some years ago I was giving a recruitment talk at the university and I bumped into that teacher. I greeted him like an old friend. He said "Oh, you were in my class?" as he hurried off. It hurt and I felt so silly for it.

On the other hand, I've had elementary school teachers approach me with a smile while I was in my late twenties.

I would imagine the job of an elementary school teacher is primarily to have a relationship with their kids and teach what general skills they can, whereas a university or even high school teacher is pulled in more directions (curriculum, standards, research, admin, etc.).

My opinions are not mine and they are holding me back.

Give multiple and opposing views equal respect and disdain at the same time. Treating a thought as your own, as an opinion "you hold" greatly holds you back from a great deal of valuable perspective. Of course you surely hold some world-view and gauge things from that position but try to cultivate more of these positions as if you were someone else.

Don't get your sense of self so wrapped up in all the thoughts and ideas that flit about in your brain. You will surely be a different person in 1, 5, 10, 20 years and may well have a completely different perspective then.

There is very little original thought, mostly there is just repetition and re-contextualization of the same old stuff. That is not a bad thing but you should really divest yourself from being emotionally wrapped up in opinions (yours or others) and treat them as the conclusions of research papers with small sample sizes.

Now when you converse with someone, stop thinking about "your" response, and just listen, really listen to what they are saying and try to really understand where they are coming from so you can integrate that into your thinking.

I think you may mean "My opinions are not me", or "I am not my opinions" gives you the space to separate your identity from your thoughts, giving you the freedom to change.

I heard similar phrasing used by one psychotherapist that I admire, "I am different from my wishes" and "I am different from my (past) behavior". He once said jokingly that if someone realizes that, he can give them a "60 year warranty on their mental health".

What I also find interesting is that this idea is rather old, it can be found in Christianity, for example, where "devil is tempting you", that is thoughts and wishes you have might not be your own (but from some demon tempting you). It may sound a bit silly in modern times, but it boils down to the same idea.

No, that’s something very different. The point GP is trying to make is that most opinions people hold on things are not actually their own formed conclusions, they are just regurgitations from authorities they trust.

This happens excessively in politics. Suddenly a huge chunk of a political faction will have the same “opinion” on a complex topic they have no day-to-day interaction with or previous educational coverage. When you try to dig deeper on these topics people hold such fervent “opinions” on, it turns out that it’s just a restatement of what they heard from a friend/talking head.

As an addition, your opinions are mostly formed from the information you have and haven't been exposed to. It's easy to come to a conclusion if someone feeds you specific facts you can verify. But there may be other facts that can change the perspective that are not so easy to verify.

We don't have perfect information, so clinging to a perspective is bound to create some sort of conflict when you are exposed to valid information that may change your perspective. Either you discount and ignore that information, or you are forced to abandon your identity and get emotionally hurt(which can be a good thing if it causes growth and maturity).

I like the related Marc Andreesen model, have strong opinions, weakly held. To get anywhere new requires some degree of (probably misplaced) confidence in what you're doing. The key is balancing that with the ability to apply new information to your model, possibly even doing a 180 on what you believed was true.

I learned this a few years ago. The phrase I still remember is "your idea is not your identity" (probably from this article[1]). This completely changed my mindset and the way I communicate.

Not sure where I've read this about originality, but the idea is "there is no such thing as original thought, only original perspective"

[1]: http://lanceschaubert.org/2017/02/22/my-idea-not-my-identity...

I am going to cheat a bit and give you three things that have had a lasting impact on me:

First is this quote from Lincoln, "I hate that man. I must get to know him better".

This has helped me shed biases and prejudices that stop me from liking someone on the first few interactions. Instead of shunning them, I seek to know them better, in the hope that I see past the veil and reach out to the actual human on the other side. This ties in nicely with Stephen Covey's quote, "We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviour."

Second thing that has stuck with me is this zen-koan about a disciple having a tough time forgiving their master for a sin [0]. The koan ends with the thought that the disciple who's holding on to resentment, disapproval, outrage, disappointment, grudge is really the one who's in distress and enduring the punishment and not the master. It is really powerful, at least to me. If I liberally tie it to the 'broken windows theory' [1], it explains to me why such resentments over time aren't simply good for me, personally, despite how few the broken windows may be, they need to be fixed.

And the third is producer v consumer mindset [2]. Do not consume excessively, refrain from stifling the production line with tendency to consume all day, every day.

[0] https://medium.com/@soninilucas/two-monks-and-a-woman-zen-st...

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

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555237

Thank you for that Lincoln quote. I went to a very diverse University (Upstream, Red Team) and one of the hunches I've walked away with is that at the core of prejudice is a missing friend on the other side.

> Upstream, Red Team

Forgive my ignorance, what does this mean in this context?

It's the battle chant of Rutgers University :-)

I really loved that quote, but are you sure it is a Lincoln quote?

A Google search leads to this page.

"I don't like that man. I must get to know him better."

-Abraham Lincoln

Close enough

> the core of prejudice is a missing friend on the other side.

By far the best concrete example of that is Daryl Davis: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...

One thing that’s been super meaningful for me is the notion that if you don’t put something into words, either in speech or in your head or on paper, you don’t know anything about it, even if it’s a feeling or a belief or an intuition deep within you that you’ve held for as long as you can remember.

The act of simply putting a thought into words makes it immediately obvious to you if you really understand it or not, and if not, where your blind spots are.

If the thing you’re concerned with is an unresolved problem or a question, simply articulating the problem or the question can make the solution or the answer obvious. Just going through the process of putting it into words, one way or another, and being sure you’ve settled on the most concise and accurate description of it you can muster, will often make so many things that were hazy obvious, and can reveal to you areas of haziness in your own thinking that you may not have been aware of.

Rubber duck debugging is one result of this. Rubber duck debugging is based on the observation that by the time you’ve explained your bug to someone, often times you figure out your next steps before they even respond. Just articulating your problem in the form of a question asked to someone else will sometimes reveal the answer to you.

This works surprisingly well. I think to also pays to master a language for the same reason to be able to articulate thoughts precisely to self and to others.

Tangential: https://fs.blog/2012/04/feynman-technique/

Well, it's been said the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else.

But you're right. Just making a presentation for nobody is a great way to learn something on many levels.

I once heard something along the lines of "to learn to express yourself properly is to learn to think". Sometimes our understanding of something is a muddle of unstructured thoughts and hunches. To express yourself properly you need to organize these. After you did that, things are often much clearer.

The idea that your mind is not you.

That "thinking", as a process, is just a tool of your body, just like eyesight, for example.

Listening to meditation and mindfulness practitioners like Jon Kobat-Zinn and Eckhart Tolle, I found it absolutely groundbreaking, for myself, to realize that the mind is an instrument that needs training and tuning, and sometimes can lead you astray, and can't be trusted unconditionally.

Disassociating from my mind and understanding that my thinking is not my being has helped me in innumerable ways.

Do you think your premise is arguable? If yes, is it defendable?

Related : you are more what you do than what you think. What you think mostly comes from what you do, and that determines who you are; act more, think less. Do things, don't overthink it.

This reminded me of Revealed Preference Theory[1], which is about observing consumer choices, but the idea is broadly summed up as "It is not what you say, it is what you do that reveals what you want." or who you are.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference

The other more Daoist end of this spectrum is that your mind and body are you. Through the power of will you control both of these.

As a long time meditator the "I am not my body, I am not my mind" mantra has always bothered me. I am both of those and will shape both of those in my image. Dissociative practices will not bring me closer to my goals.

The comparison to eyesight is strange too. If your eyesight is poor you can not really train it to be better. Through regular meditation practice, and practice in other areas (self-discipline) you can absolute shape your mind and change your thought patterns.

In such practices your mind and body are 'not you' they are just the expression which can be materially perceived, as a shadow of the 'greater you'. It's less obvious in Abrahamic traditions as they use different words, but it's there as well.

A 'life-changing insight' can just be figuring that one out, which is odd because it's conceptually simple enough a child could totally get it. For some people it's innate, for some it's a 'revelation' for some they never get (or even try to get) that perspective.

While there are obvious flaws with the analogy (like any analogy), I think the comparison with eyesight (or touch, etc.) is about making people think of the mind as more of a sensory organ. One that gives you input that may or may not be useful to you, rather than as something that defines you.

I don't really see that as a dissociative practice, but more as the prerequisite for being able to start on the long term journey of challenging and changing your thought patterns.

From my perspective, thoughts are the sensory experience of 'my mind moving'. Similar to arm movements - when you move your arm, where does the motion come from?

I'm reminded of a time in my childhood when I realized that I could consciously direct my eyes without turning my head. I was struck with wonder at the time, having not known such a thing was possible, because nobody told me. I still remember it vividly by the impact it had on me. The more I converse on this topic, the more I see people considering the mind as I had considered my eyes prior to my childhood realization.

The point I'm trying to get to is that I believe the dichotomy of mind and the body is a false one. I think the abstraction level of 'mind' is different from the level of 'body'. It should rather be 'mind' and 'arm' and 'eye' (and etc.).

The command of these in concert is somewhere outside of my perception, or so deep inside of it that I am blinded by its normality. Calling something we can't perceive by the name of something we can, I think, is magical thinking and folly. Why are my thoughts this way? Because my Mind. Why do planets orbit stars? Because Science. Why are we alive? Because we have élan vital.

Looking at it this way, the impossibility of controlling thoughts is lifted. When thoughts are solely something that happen to you, the very notion of controlling them except indirectly is incoherent. But re-framed, I can train my mind as I would train skill or form in body.

I know that I can't play the cello with any skill, as I am now. If I try, it will grate on the listener and cause more displeasure than pleasure. It's not an inherent failing of mine, simply that I haven't devoted the requisite time and energy to train myself in it. But it does define me, at least in part.

Would that skillful thinking was perceived the same as skillful cello playing. Instead, educational institutions must suffice to verify that you have the tools (in the form of knowledge, or acquired frameworks), but say little of skill achieved. Imagine a 4 year cello playing course in which a passing grade is earned if you but present a cello at the end.

I think that if this concept is fully integrated, outcomes would be better. If the mind is viewed as an intangible thing that blasts thoughts in your general direction, from where can it be improved? I know my body can be improved, by strenuous exercise. I know my skill at cello can be improved, if I simply practice. But my mind? If I'm hamstrung by its conception as a pure source, I'll forever stay at whatever minimal level is required to survive. And that's a tragedy.

This went a little off into conjecture-land, but I think I'll leave it for the time being.

tldr: imo minds are limbs, not monitors

But does the dog have a buddha nature?

You describe thoughts as if you are in receivership of them, like a mom receiving a work of art from her child.

I can direct and focus my thoughts beyond their capacity to perceive the world, like channeling attention and sculpting potential words when I am typing out this comment. I can direct myself to imagine worlds that never existed and solve problems in the future, which requires directed thought.

Your mind is trivially easy to improve, conceptually. Focused improvement on a hard skill will drag your mind along. Deciding to get better at cello will require you to learn higher concepts of music reading, fine motor skills and playing in a band that will form a structure in your mind. That will make thinking and directing thoughts in new directions much easier. It's much easier to ask someone to imagine what it's like working in a construction team building a shopping mall when they know how people work together in a band, compared to a blank slate that knows nothing. That imagination can be used to prune off bad ideas and thoughts that go nowhere.

The educational institution that is supposed to be good at this is the humanities. Philosophy will train you to express your mind through language at such an articulated level that you will know yourself better and be able to navigate a very wide array of arguments with precision. Thus giving you a much better source of material for your mind to sculpt it's thoughts with.

The mind simply has to be pure to sort signal from noise, that's a fundamental part of what it does. The mind is also incorporeal, it has the least matter. The higher you think, the less quantities of properties and details you can focus on. Their totality is summed up as categories that start doing all that heavy lifting for you in implied abstractions. Keeping track of hundreds of different sized numbers and the properties of each item you are counting in one holistic picture is difficult. Purifying that into abstractions and relations between them is incredibly powerful.

Do you centre your being on the spine, rather than the mind? Framing and receiving the output of the mind is what a lot of people do and I hazard a guess the ability to balance the difference between quantities and directions is a lot easier when you hang that task on the spine, with limbs that protrude out from it.

We know there are colors of light the eye can't see, consider there are true things the brain can't think. Your brain has tricked itself into believing its a universal understander. It's not.

This is especially useful for those of us who have grown up thinking of ourselves as smart and becoming very identified with intelligence as personality. It can lead to anxiety disorders because sometimes rumination and thinking harder just can't help explain things. Listening to nature and letting it happen to us is such a sweeter ride than trying to carry around a simulation of everything.

I don't have a quote handy but one idea I'm partial to is that that mind is not one. It's a noisy group of sub-minds all clamouring for attention, with different goals.

This has echoes of Stoicism, as well, which teaches that emotions and feelings, to a large extent, are not under your control, but are fleeting impressions created by your mind. How you think about and act upon those impressions, though, is under your control.

I have an exercise I like to do when I experience pain, which is to tell myself that this sensation I'm experiencing is just a signal in some nerve. It does not actually hurt me in any way. Interestingly, this usually makes the pain a lot more bearable.

This whole thread is great. It's amazing how many people seem to be gaining the same inner wisdom I've found, of disidentifying with the mind, yet feeling more whole with all of who I am in the moment.

Alan Watts has a ton of stuff on this

Nick Cave, on writer's block:

"My advice to you is to change your basic relationship to songwriting. You are not the ‘Great Creator’ of your songs, you are simply their servant, and the songs will come to you when you have adequately prepared yourself to receive them. They are not inside you, unable to get out; rather, they are outside of you, unable to get in."

https://www.theredhandfiles.com/do-u-have-any-spare-lyrics/

That's interesting considering it sounds to me that he approaches songwriting like work rather than something he has a lack of control over: "He gets up early, goes to work in his office (a flat connected to his house in Hove), does an honest day’s work, returns home in the evening to his wife and kids, and starts out again the next day."[1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/feb/23/popandrock.fea...

I don't see any conflict, personally.

In the linked article, he goes on to say that songs "are attracted to an open, playful and motivated mind". To cultivate that, you need to show up.

I cannot fathom how this metaphysics would help me at all.

And I’m both religious and a film major/screenwriter.

Maybe the flowery words obscured the message for you.

If it helps, I first came across the quote in a blog post by Austin Kleon[0], an author, talking about people who say they have a book in them.

"I never feel like I have a book in me. I always feel like there’s a book around me. It’s like I’m a planet and there’s all this space junk orbiting me, and all the junk starts smashing together and forming book chapters. My job is to grab that stuff around me and shape it into something."

[0]: https://austinkleon.com/2019/06/06/its-not-inside-you-trying...

That does make sense thank you.

It might be more helpful to call it a metaphor. Metaphors can be powerful for reframing one's thinking, dropping limiting assumptions, even reorienting how the body relates to a habitual activity.

Thank you for conveying the power of metaphors. You did that very well. I’m familiar with this line of reasoning. I also happen to be autistic so, while I have no trouble with the semantics, these kinds of metaphors usually have little effect on me.

I think productivity rewards focus - deeper focus on discerning the fine details of a problem and actively diving and driving.

Creativity rewards sort of the opposite. It's like letting your gaze wander and see what's around you. Capturing the ideas that fly by like butterflies in a net, and being their steward.

Try doing a side-project based on a whim and then expand it as butterflies collect.

This reminds me of Sam Harris's guided meditation app. One of the common questions raised in the guided meditations is whether or not you can observe the part of your mind that is generating your thoughts. His suggestion is that you can't--the thoughts come into consciousness on their own; you can observe the thoughts as they come and go, but you can't observe where thoughts come from. Like the sensation of breathing, of temperature, or of pressure, thoughts enter consciousness as if they were an external stimulus.

Its like we don't have access to all the conscious regions of our brains. Who knows, what evolutionary pressure might have locked us out of there, who know

The other side of the coin being we haven't developed access to it yet. Either way, an interesting perspective, thanks!

I actually started using that meditation app because Nick Cave recommends it in one of the Red Hand Files too.

As an aside, that is also why he declined[1] the MTV Best male artist nomination back in the 1990's. The short of it is "my muse is not a horse".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqdX-aglsXU

Either way, he's amazing. So few can get to the point that the songs come to them. Celebrate him for that, then.

News == entertainment.

Originally by Aaron Swartz http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

Although I have slightly different takes from his and the level of avoiding the news might be different too, but the core idea that I follow these days is there.

I used to think following the news was a mix of my duty as a citizen and important for my life, personal and professional. Now I believe it's quite the opposite, I better understand the world because I avoid the news. These days I think it is as much entertainment as Netflix or comics.

I'd like to hear more about how you have implemented this. Do you not read any news? Some? How do you find out what's going on?

I've been dabbling with this too, and my current state is that I don't consume any news or social media (twitter) that I cannot consume via my RSS reader, which in practical terms means I don't subscribe to any major news outlets, but instead subscribe to a smaller newspaper in my country that sends out daily newsletters which I then forward to my RSS reader that then shows it along regular RSS content - it's a feature of feedbin.com and it's a great feature!. Then I follow a lot of personal blogs, lobste.rs and HN, and then a curated list of twitter accounts, all via my RSS reader. The twitter thing is also a feedbin.com feature. And then I try to read books about a lot of different topics according to my mood, obviously. I get the feeling that any news that is not relevant to me after a month, six months, a year and so on, is probably not worth my time anyways except if it touches me directly, in which case I'll know anyways, so by reading books about, say covid-19 in a few years instead of news now, I'll get a much better picture of the whole thing than if I was intensely following the news every single day doing the pandemic.

But fear of missing out does often present itself. It's a constant fight between my rational mind, and some kind of stupid, irrational thing that is also part of me.

It's not hard for me. I have a very low fear of missing out.

I do end up consuming news, but always either through some sort of filter or directly (rarely), but realizing the role of entertainment in whatever I am watching.

I use Twitter a lot, but I follow people who mostly don't replicate the news. I try to follow people that say interesting things.

I read Hacker News a lot, but there is the explicitly idea to not replicate mainstream news here, so another good filter.

I use Whatsapp a lot, but I am only in groups with friends and family, so another source of news, but filtered by people I care about. Maybe luckily, or even by my influence, these few groups are not just spamming news to me.

I am not against the news, I don't particularly "hate" the news.

I do inform myself through podcasts, a few that talk about books for example, so it is another filter to consume the news.

I would like to echo WhatsApp groups as a news source. I don't own a TV, don't do twitter and keep Facebook for the odd monthly visit. WhatsApp groups keep informed. The best group is my the one made up of people who went to same boarding school. What's great about this group is you get both sides of the story without anyone leaving in huff. Somewhere down the middle is the real news. I find you can't have similarly discussions out in the open.

"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers." — Nassim Taleb

In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, CNN was seen as somewhat skeptical of the rationale and purpose of the war, but the intro to each segment about the war was so thrilling: rousing, percussion-heavy music, tanks roaring over sand dunes, fighter jets banking in formation, night vision shots of anti-aircraft fire. Their primary, overriding mandate was to make people watch, so they made war exciting and attractive. What was said in their coverage made very little difference next to that.

Something you read in the news today, is going to worth nothing tomorrow.

Rolf Dobelli [0] wrote a few columns on Avoiding News Consumption and will publish a book later this year with the title Stop Reading the News: How to cope with the information overload and think more clearly.

In 2011 he wrote an essay Quit the News in Dutch NRC Next newspaper[1]. The next day the withdrawals poured in :-)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolf_Dobelli#Avoid_News_Cons...

[1] https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2011/09/01/weg-met-het-nieuws-1203...

There is a paradox here that while it's not important for you to know about 99.99% of the things that happen and are reported in the news, the fact that people are paying attention disincentivizes people in government from doing bad things in the extreme.

So it's not the news that you consume that improves your life, it's the news you never have to consume that improves your life.

I'm mixed on Tim Ferriss, but he also advocates this. His take is that if it's important enough news, then you will hear about it from your friends. Hearing about something a day or a few days later usually doesn't make a difference. I believe he also advocates trusting your friends' opinions when you need to vote and make political acts. However, this essentially is a selfish position that only works if a few people do it.

Sadly, this post retroactively suggests that we should not care about his arrest and death.

I once met someone who had notifications turned on for CNN's "Breaking News" (which is rarely urgent). I couldn't believe someone would think allowing interruptions multiple times a day with things that are likely to make you angry or sad is a good idea.

News is best consumed in one-week chunks. Read a newsmagazine for the summary; dive deeper into particular topics.

I’m still only somewhat recently down this particular path, but it’s proven to be one of the more profound realizations I can remember:

You can’t guilt yourself into doing things you want to accomplish. You’ll always resist and make excuses. The only way is to enjoy the act of doing them.

Fighting procrastination, whether by guilt or rewards, is a losing game. Instead, cultivate an appreciation of the task you’re resisting, however complex or banal it may be. Learn to enjoy the micro-accomplishments of each moment. Instead of the dopamine hit of procrastination, train yourself on the dopamine trickle of sustained action.

It’s not an all-at-once change, but for me, at least, it’s had a very concrete effect so far.

Yes, realizing this was a key breakthrough for me.

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a really good book to that effect. And has some practical tips on how to learn to enjoy doing things you might not otherwise.

There are no adults in the room (https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/08/12/there-are-no-a...)

During my career I was always looking for some senior developer to guide me in my work. I was hoping someone has figured everything out and could tell me whether my solutions where good or bad. It frustrated me that most of them did not really have a clue and could not help me. I blamed it to my company which would not invest the money to hire really good senior developers and switched employers. I hoped to find better learning opportunities there (which I thought meant better guiding). But it was the same everywhere: The people who I thought had everything figured out seemed to be just as clueless as me.

It took me some time to realize this is the norm. There is no one who has the perfect understanding of everything. There is a lot of uncertainty to any solution you try out. Accepting the uncertainty and acting accordingly is the true meaning of "seniority".

"Nothing is ever personal."

The way people treat you, has nothing to do with you. They are just living out their own stories.

Related idea: "You train others how to treat you." Think reinforcement learning as applied to training a dog. (And I love dogs, have the deepest respect for them). The concept isn't that different when applied to our social interactions.

You'd be surprised how hard it is to internalize the first principle. The mind can become very attached to the feeling of being attacked / rejected / overlooked / snubbed / etc.

...And with abuse patterns a lot of us had that ingrained at a super young age as a control lever our parents/guardians installed.

I think a hard part of this is that people commonly abuse these mechanisms for control in social structures. I grew up with it, I experienced it in school, I've experienced it in relationships, and I've experienced it professionally.

In so many ways it's human social nature to subvert each other and I think that's why so many of us get attached to those concepts. It's really hard to not get bitter and still let the good in =(

That sounds really rough man, I'm sorry to hear that. I too have struggled with being on the receiving end of other people's power trips. My curiosity on "what's really happening here, at the level of the brain" lead to some interesting reads.

Chimpanzee behavior: when a higher ranked member is smacking and harassing a lower ranked one -- the higher ranked one is literally experiencing a rise in serotonin. Their dominance becomes a self-soothing behavior that relaxes them, makes them want to repeat the behavior. It's not hard to extrapolate this "very mammalian script" into whatever workplace situation where your counterparts are just lesser skilled at valuing the well-being of those around them.

I think part of the paradox here is your counterpart can both "be a huge asshole" and also just be a mostly helpless automaton of their own harmful behavior, applying a lack of critical thought or self-reflection about their own impulses and tendencies. It's not that you're trying to reframe the situation into one where you are better than them, or that you pity them. Rather, it's just to recognize the sharp qualitative differences between the state of their mind, and yours.

The Aurelius quotes: "The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury."

and (more dramatic than appropriate here, but all the same): "Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil." -- i.e. of course these default behaviors are a starting feature of the human animal.

I wrote a lengthier reply here, it may give you a possibly new way to reframe things:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23093457

I'd try not to read too much into chimpanzee behaviour. While they're genetically the most similar to humans, they have quite different behavioural patterns. IMO Orangutans are much more similar to humans behaviourally.

So sorry to hear this man. Do you have examples? I'm trying to learn to recognize if it exists in my current social relationships.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/ is a support community for people who have experienced childhood abuse. It might be helpful for looking for examples.

From my personal experience, I've had:

- conditional parental approval based on performance - teacher: "do what i say because i'm authority, I don't have to explain" - More I can't remember or don't feel is relevant

Can you point to some source/material that elaborate on this ? Would like to read more about it.

The evolutionary biologist Diana Fleischman is currently writing a book (a bit tongue-in-cheek) called "How To Train Your Boyfriend". She's discussed the ideas in a few talks and podcasts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jre_xN2HSrk

https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-second-agreement-dont-take... , opening passage.

Be warned, there's a "woo-woo shit" risk factor here, which my skepticism keeps at arm's length. I'm more of a neuroscience / mindfulness meditation kind of guy. But I do cherry-pick from other areas, where my curiosity takes me. And the original quotes were good cherries.

Reframing the "nothing is ever personal" idea in more neuroscience terms: some astonishing high degree of our neurological processes (90+% ?) are subconscious or preconscious. A similar percentage of neurons are formed before the age of 18. In many ways, the quest to improve ourselves reduces down to the skill of paying slightly more attention to the activity of our minds.

So when someone interacts with you in a way that causes you stress or hostility, you can choose to recognize the above facts as playing out in the arena of their brain, in the same way as they are playing out in yours.

This is not to excuse behavior, nor disregard the need for boundaries, protection, standing up for yourself, etc. But it does take the sting off. What's better for your own equanimity? Succumbing to a feeling of being singled out? Or recognizing your counterpart as being stuck in their own behavior loop, unaware that they're (arguably) in a state of some kind of suffering?

Socializing is our most complex and wonderful skill; there are a ton of attendant instincts that evolved with it: status signaling, negotiation and exchange; hierarchies for coordinating group actions; grudges and revenge as deterrents meant to preserve social harmony (see chimpanzee behavior; then see bonobo behavior for something more inspiring). All of this monkey software can be dialed down, even outright idled at times. Because nothing is ever personal.

These are some truly advanced and empowering concepts, so apologies if I'm probably not representing them properly.

You have to accept the world doesn't revolve around you. and that's hard for people.

And in the same breath, accepting that it's entirely natural / inevitable that others tend to operate as though the world revolves around them, and forgiving them for it (within reason). Carnegie's "How To Win Friends..." is corny and dated but still relevant.

I'm glad that I can recognize it for the corny and giddy book it is, because a few years ago I worshiped it. Many of its lessons regard selflessness, and fanning others' egos. It's like the fast food of social advice, 'let them eat cake.'

I have a twist on that: "You are the center of the universe, and so is everybody else"

How's the water today, boys?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

I love that speech. But I had the notion I shared well before encountering it :-).

> Because of our desire to get a project going, most of us have a tendency to overlook and downplay early resistance and skepticism. We delude ourselves into thinking that once clients get into the project, they will be hooked by it and learn to trust us. This can lead to our bending over more than we wish in the beginning, hoping that we will be able to stand up straight later on. This usually doesn't work. When we bend over in the beginning, the client sees us as someone who works in a bent-over position. When we avoid issues in the beginning, the client sees us as someone who avoids issues. It is difficult to change these images and expectations of us - particularly if the client wishes us to bend over and avoid issues.

> Flawless Consulting, A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used by Peter Block (2011)

I've worked with so many folks who take things personally and then I don't know if they realize it but all sorts of possibilities are closed off to them because of their response.

My career started weirdly but at one point I wasn't put off by a grizzly old guy at my first 'real' job. He was a wealth of technical information and etc, but could be kinda rough around the edges. He wasn't mean by any means, just not friendly in an office of really friendly folks who took things personally too often IMO.

So many folks were sort of scared / avoided him. I made it my job to watch for what he liked folks bringing him and what he didn't, made notes... and in a year or so we got along great.

After a while people who had a lot more experience than me would bring things to me ... to take to grizzly guy.

Technically I wasn't nearly as skilled as most folks (maybe all), but I just didn't take technical things personally as they did and ended up being this gateway that management recognized was ultra useful / valuable. Anyone could have done it, but for social reasons people just didn't.

For me, it was important to learn the converse, that other people will interpret my behavior in a situation as being about them. I have social anxiety and other issues that tend to create a strong undercurrent of aversion and discomfort in me in any social interaction. I realize now that a lot of people think I don't like them because when they talk to me they can read in my face that on a deep level I would rather not be interacting with them. I do my best to communicate enjoyment and interest, but in the context of evident discomfort, it can come off as fake. The onus is on me to minimize (ideally) or hide (when necessary) my social discomfort so people don't think I'm faking my appreciation of them.

True for about 90% to 95% of interactions but the reason I still find this idea very problematic as it is easily used an excuse by all sorts of sociopaths, narcissists and power addicts that their behavior is somehow ok because it's either "not about you", or it's your fault in the first place because "you asked for it".

Let me tell you, for these people, it absolutely is about you and it is personal. And the more you try to ignore it or brush it off or search the fault within yourself, the more they will see it as confirmation of their own behavior.

This is the most challenging edge case, for sure. But if I may proffer:

> the more you try to ignore it or brush it off or search the fault within yourself

It should never come to any of these things. "It's never personal" doesn't mean you put up with unacceptable behavior, nor blame yourself. If some sociopath decides to fling emotional abuse my way, he gets called out on it. Not because it's an attack and I will defend myself (both of which are true, at the limbic system level) but because in the end, my personal integrity requires it: I wouldn't treat others this way, I won't be treated this way, I wouldn't be an idle witness to somebody receiving similar abuse, there are healthy ways of resolving conflict, etc. In this way, it's fully de-personalized: it's not about him, or me, but the values which I'm always free to choose and reaffirm.

The fact that they may make it personal, make it about you -- that's a further reflection of how impersonal it is for them. The psych term is projection, but you don't need to concern yourself with their diagnosis.

There's a reason I paired the "it's never personal" quote with the "you train others how to treat you" quote. The latter is a reminder of your own agency.

Dealing with a sociopath or narcissist is, in some ways, easier. Their behavior is so uncooperative, they immediately forfeit the privilege of your empathy. They clearly have had a terrible emotional upbringing to even arrive at a point where they would so freely treat another person like this. And that's the point: it's not personal, they're just... a fairly broken human being.

People this broken, they can't hide broadcasting their brokenness from a mile away. It makes it easier for you to know who to keep at arm's length with minimal trust.

Ignorance can be bliss. Didn't change my life, but has definitely helped me in a lot of cases, especially recent times. Generally speaking, I can't affect what is currently happening in the news, despite how upsetting it might be, and it won't even affect me in a lot of cases. I try to consume little information for things I don't care about or will have a negative effect on me as a way to spare myself from anxiety.

I've gotten a lot of shit for this in the past from people saying "you just don't stay informed?" or "it's your civic duty to know what's happening in the world!". If information is really important for me to know, I'll see it. If it doesn't end up on one of the few media sources I consume, it probably won't affect me. I got this idea from MMM [1], which was inspired by The Four Hour Work Week.

[1] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/01/the-low-informati...

Edit: Just saw this link on here and this is great blog post about just this.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

And this: https://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-whe...

Erik Hagerman is on a four year news blackout:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/style/the-man-who-knew-to...

Article date: March 10, 2018

He swore that he would avoid learning about anything that happened to America after Nov. 8, 2016.

...

Mr. Hagerman begins every day with a 30-minute drive to Athens, the closest city of note, to get a cup of coffee — a triple-shot latte with whole milk. He goes early, before most customers have settled into the oversize chairs to scroll through their phones.

Life finds a way I guess.

can't ya just make a triple-shot latte at home

I feel a bit conflicted on this idea as I too believe that some things do not require attention. However, I always try to maintain a balance and try to read information if it feels imperative even when I might not be necessarily interested. This topic looks very similar to one's Circle of Competencies.

I've taken a slightly similar approach:

If the information won't affect my behavior/actions, I choose not to invest time into it.

This allows for me peruse headlines to be aware of what's happening (and to consider looking further into something), but keeps me uninvested enough to avoid becoming emotionally consumed by things I won't be taking some action toward/against.

I would argue that it should only be done if you know it makes you significantly more unhappy. If everyone would abstain from the news, no one would be held responsible for anything. While I agree that most of the news are not for me, the small percentage that alarms me and makes me go research and talk about issues is worth it. I can never know what might be concerning to me outside of my interest bubble.

Its some sort of Western nonsense, that we're all Kings and must keep up on politics, current events etc. Something about being right, or being the smartest person in the room, or something.

So much satisfaction from living your life, right where you are. Trust that it all won't come crashing down without your input, and go back to your garden (or whatever you cherish).

Definitely leave facebook memes behind, forever.

I think a better way to put this is - don't worry about things you can't change. It's my prime directive in life.

A big one thing you can't change is "the past". People fret about what could have been different or opportunities they missed, or their childhood being different. But you can't do anything about it. You can learn from it and use that going forward, but you can't wish it was different.

Steve Jobs' explanation of the simple, obvious truth that the world is made up of everyone's contributions and how much power each individual person has to contribute and influence it too:

"Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is: Everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. The minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will, you know — if you push in, something will pop out the other side — that you can change it, you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

I like that a lot. Thanks.

The Growth Mindset.

To briefly sum up the findings: Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset. They tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset (those who believe their talents are innate gifts). This is because they worry less about looking smart and they put more energy into learning.

Along with this goes embracing "feeling dumb" and pushing through. I don't understand something because I don't understand it...yet.

Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. But if talent starts working hard, it's game over.

"Talent" is not always a there-or-not quality. IMHO it depends what we're talking about, and to what degree. Math genius, NBA player, obviously yeah you need some degree of inborn talent plus a crazy intense environment (for the NBA) in your youner years.

But there's a huge range below "world elite" where "talent" is relevant, and it's not at all clear when it's a "you-have-it-or-you-don't" kind of thing.

Same with hard work. Two people work hard; one person has a more efficient system, or a better teacher.

It's not zeros and ones here imho.

This hits the mark.

Anyone can be moderately good at most things if they work and try hard.

But to be truly exceptional it often requires built in talent.

I think of it as more relevant to the inner game.

But the only thing under your control is how hard you work. Do other people that are more capable than you exist in the world? Maybe. But how does that fact influence your actions?

Talent is too vague a concept to be useful.

Intelligence as measured by IQ on the other hand is a very well defined concept. It is a quite good predictor of all kinds of life "success" (however that is defined). It is not fluent.

Of course it is not everything, and there are lots of idiots who believe so. However, the whole "you can do anything if you put your mind to it" is is not true. The people who are the worst off in society (and I live in "socialist Sweden") are the people with weak theoretical ability, but still within what is called average intelligence. The have the worst mental health, the worst physical health, the worst economical situation and the highest criminal record.

The idea that working hard solves everything (from the right) and the idea that intelligence does not matter (while politically mainly catering to the middle class - the left) have made society a worse place for a large chunk of people.

One of the problems with statements like this one is that IQ tests tend to be classist. They tend to measure the kinds of information valued by people with upper class lives and upper class educations, so they tend to measure people who are well fed and privileged and so forth.

Also, if you aren't physically well, this will hinder your performance. So it's really quit hard to sort out if your "low IQ" is due to your poor health or if your poor health is due to your "low IQ."

And I put that in quotations marks because I know a fair amount about IQ tests. I used to be somewhat seriously involved with a thing called The TAG Project where I was briefly Director of Community Life and I rubbed elbows in cyberspace with people who worked at the Gifted Development Center in Denver, Colorado and such.

There are a lot of problems with IQ tests and with the history of IQ testing and yadda. Most IQ tests top out at around 145 points, which makes it inherently hard to measure anything about that and tests are only tools and only as good as the person administering them and can be gamed and so forth.

The first test that started the whole IQ testing thing was never intended to measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness in France because they couldn't use age at that time since a lot of kids didn't have birth certificates and their exact age wasn't always known and there was huge differences in school readiness between the big city kids and the rural farm kids and it was the rural farm kids who tended to not have birth certificates and birth dates.

So they asked a guy, I think named Binet, to create a test to sort out which kids were ready for school and this went down in history as the first IQ test. This is where you get the Stanford-Binet, if I recall correctly.

The entire concept of IQ is problematic for a lot of reasons and it ends up being sort of circular, self-reinforcing logic and self-fulfilling prophecy. If you do well on a test, we believe you are the best and brightest and have a great future and we put you in better classes for "enrichment" and we give you better opportunities and so on and so forth and then we announce that "See: Smarts are how you succeed."

I've managed to do a lot of things the world told me couldn't be done because I was one of the smart kids and all that, but I also have serious health problems and spent years homeless and no one was lauding me as one of the smart people when I was homeless. And I didn't seem that smart during that time. I was very, very sick and my forum comments were full of typos and so forth.

I still thought I was smart. I was still pulling off things the world said couldn't be done against long odds under difficult circumstances, but I was very poor and I wasn't getting social recognition for any of it and people were literally calling me "crazy" to my face, probably in part because I was homeless and still had the self concept and self esteem of one of the smart kids who graduated at the top of my class and had a lot of academic awards and the world had problems with me acting like one of the privileged people while I was homeless.

When I say IQ I mean the number gotten to through something like WAIS or WISC (which start becoming unreliable above 130. It is almost as if it is hard to standardise a test for the 99.3rd percentile... :) ) Not the crap used most places. The only environment I know WISC from is cognitive disabilities testing in school, where it is used for two things: check whether someone has legal right to extra support and as a tool to understand what kind of extra help a student needs even if there is no legal requirement for extra support.

I find the whole selection through IQ that you describe dubious at best, and I seriously doubt the usefulness of it. It is a good predictor, but not that good.

However, what I do see is a society today that requires higher abstract intelligence than 20 years ago, which in turn had higher requirements than 20 years before that.

However, what I do see is a society today that requires higher abstract intelligence than 20 years ago, which in turn had higher requirements than 20 years before that.

This is partly a function of population going up. It means we need more complex systems for the world to be able to support that population and for human life to work.

In the time of President Lincoln, the average education level of a woman was about 2nd to 4th grade and most of them were homemakers. I used to talk to folks in Pakistan and they had similar education levels for their women. It's one of the youngest countries in the world in terms of demographics.

In my father's day, most people grew up on farms and it was common to stop formal education at the eighth grade. You typically completed high school if you were planning on going to college and becoming a doctor or lawyer or something.

My dad dropped out of the tenth grade. It was the Great Depression and he was a big guy and he could earn a man's wage and finishing school didn't make sense and it wasn't the stigmatizing failure that it is today.

He joined the Army and he had so many Army schools that he got out of going to Korea. He fought in WWII and in Vietnam and he had his bags packed for the Korean war and got a phone call the night before that he was the only guy in the battalion -- about a thousand people -- with all the military schools they wanted for teaching ROTC. She he and some officer got out of going and he taught college ROTC instead of fighting in the front lines of the Korean war, even though he was a high school drop out.

And in his day, enlisted soldiers like him never had college. That was limited to officers.

By the time my husband was well into his Army career, enlistees needed some college to make it to the higher enlisted ranks and I have seen articles that a lot of factory workers these days have college degrees.

It's not really shocking that we need more information in the system to make the same resources go further for purposes of letting 7 billion people occupy the same land mass that used to support a lot fewer people than that and make sure there is enough to go around. If you build up, you can fit more people in the same land area than if you build out.

And this is something that can be overcome to a large degree by education and "practice" so to speak.

Lots of people use tech today that would have been special tech only found at a university or in a research facility or whatever and now it is the norm. I think you are making a mistake to conflate that trend with some kind of measure about individual intelligence.

Ant colonies change over time. They mature and behave differently. The individual ants aren't anymore intelligent and they don't have books to read or whatever. The system of the ant colony undergoes what you might call cultural changes and the ants in a later stage colony inherit the accumulated wisdom and they aren't any smarter or better educated and they don't have a higher IQ individually, but the system becomes more intelligent in some sense anyway.

And that's kind of what you are seeing with humans, more or less.

I am not sure I agree with your analysis. I live in a country where most jobs requiring low-to-no qualifications have dwindled. I just googled a little and found quotes that 1 million jobs disappeared when most of the Swedish industry was relocated in other countries (due to lower salaries). This is in a country with 10 million inhabitants (with about 60% of those in "working age"). Sweden has among the lowest amounts of low qualification jobs in the EU.

At the risk of sounding argumentative, I fail to see how that's a rebuttal of anything I said.

I'm not trying to pick some kind of fight. I'm just talking on the internet with a stranger during a pandemic about a topic I know a fair amount about because it interests me. And that easily comes across as fighty and that's not really my goal.

So you aren't required to agree with anything. I'm not trying to "win" some argument. You said a thing. I responded. You chose to reply for whatever reason. Rinse and repeat and here we are.

On my Twitter bio, I labeled myself an infosec noob. I've been doing it for 4 years now, but I'm definitely still a noob.

And I will always be a noob. When I stop calling myself a noob, I stop learning.

of course, there is a PG essay about this: http://www.paulgraham.com/noob.html

It's a neat idea and I like the mindset, but the research is very likely false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism

The title states "Name one idea that changed your life."

I haven't considered the research, I'm just talking about the positive changes I've seen in my life as a result of changing my mindset from "I can't do this because I'm not smart enough" to "this is hard, but I will learn it."

In the case of the former I was a non-starter. With the latter, everything becomes much more accessible.

Absolutely, and as I said, I support the mindset.

I just object to this line in your comment: To briefly sum up the findings

Ah, I see! I agree. That paragraph is an excerpt from the website (as I was on my phone and didn't feel like summarizing the full theory).

On a macro level i.e. comparing people with vastly different circumstances/experiences/variables it does seem questionable, but on an individual level the change can be quite profound, going from a self-defeating to a more open/growth oriented mindset.

Also reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, by Henry Ford:

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.”

I was looking for this. My take on this is, in the nature or nurture debate, it is more useful to just assume nurture, because assuming nature is just a dead end.

You could also say that geniuses are made, not born. There is a wonderful book/interview with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r that explores this.

“One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ was his response. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.”

― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Another part I like:

“'Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on. 'I do,' Alice hastily replied; 'at least–at least I mean what I say'”

My Grandmother once told me:

"If you want to work at a company, dress like the people that work there. Because those are the people that the company hires."

I've used this general philosophy in my life to pass courses at university, win competitions, and get through job interviews. I don't know if my grandmother meant this in a literal sense, or was hinting at the fact that (as Tony Robbins says) success leaves clues. When you understand what people are looking for, the game becomes a lot easier - you simply need to mould yourself and your communication to fit a winning persona.

One would argue the ability to mold yourself, letting go of your ego in the process, is where the challenge lies for many.

You could think of it more as acting the part.

Wouldn't a counter argument be that the MOST successful people do not do what others do and define their own path. I.e. it's great if you're optimizing a game for a particular outcome but if you're creating a new game following what other people do may just leave to the average (of whatever group)?

The most unsuccessful people also follow that strategy.

I don’t see any conflict with pushing to do something extraordinary. If you’re going to do something out of the ordinary, you do what successful out of the ordinary people have done. You put on their uniform and put in the work.

It’s a simple strategy, but that’s not to say the process is at all easy.

Yes, for me it was also an epiphany that people weren't professional, they _acted_ professional. Suddenly a lot made sense! Careerwise, it can help to ask what a professional would do, as it is a solution that while it might not work, you will be commended for. And guess what, that behaviour is what makes you a professional!

Oh I like that one! Its like the disabled Scout who sold more popcorn than anyone in the district, when asked "How do you sell so much popcorn?" answered "I go to the houses where the lights are on!"

Sometimes we jump right past the simplest, most direct solutions. We're looking for a shortcut or something. But all successful journeys start, not with a single step, but by facing in the right direction!

Focus on the theorem and its proof, not the name of the theorem.

My background in mathematics and there is an unhealthy adulation of genius. Granted, praise of genius is warranted, but it becomes too much.

One symptom of this is that almost every theorem is named for whoever discovered it. Gauss this or Euler that. Shannon this or Nyquist that. What can happen is you begin to think of mathematics in terms of making a mark and having something named after you, and not actually about the objective beautiful reality of the mathematics before you. The mathematics is greater than the discoverer--it certainly isn't owned by them!

Or to put it another way: Focus on the joy of the task at hand, not on the hope of adulation from the task well finished.

It is a good way to reduce anxiety.

Do you how to overcome the need for adulation. I for one constantly seek adulation. For the good of one's career, some say one has to constantly repeat their achievements. Evolutionarily we may do it because some will fall for it and support us thereby enhancing our chances of survival. But, I think I love adulation to the point of being mentally sick.

It is quite possible your career will suffer if you don't value adulation highly. It is a strong motivator to do well. It is sort of necessary to get adulation in order to get promoted.

That said, the costs of valuing adulation are too high and I've observed an even pathological need to seek praise in myself. It wasn't overt praise seeking but it was buried in there.

The way I fight my need for adulation is with my Christian faith. There is a higher purpose and higher goal than success in my life.

Antifragility

Or more specifically, just getting the term for it. I spent years trying to articulate in my own mind many of the ideas in Taleb's book, and once I had a word for it I could see it everywhere and actually start to change my life to take advantage of the chaos in the world.

Basically: you can't control what happens to you, but you can set your life up so that the natural variability of the world can be used to your advantage.

I can't do it justice in an HN comment, but it's one book and one idea that has changed my life.

I read this before Black Swarm, but Antifragility should have been read later. When I read Antifragility, the idea is cool and convincing, and it did change the way I understand things, especially the essential difference between organic things and engineering systems, but still I always felt like it is a puzzle missing some pieces.

I am almost finishing my Black Swarm read now. It turns out that it is the missing pieces.

I wonder what Taleb will say if someone can present software engineering practices to him.

Never heard about this. I'm starting to read some things and it seems interesting. Thanks!

And about this: > Or more specifically, just getting the term for it. I spent years trying to articulate in my own mind many of the ideas in Taleb's book, and once I had a word for it I could see it everywhere

It is called Hypocognition, I recently read about it here [1] and here [2], and that blew my mind.

[1]: https://aeon.co/ideas/hypocognition-is-a-censorship-tool-tha... [2]: https://psyarxiv.com/29ryz

Sounds like stoicism?

Taleb's book and premise doesn't just cover human behaviour and mindset in a Stoic philosophy although there are common points. It covers wider systems: Politics, Biology, Innovation, Economy, Life decisions, etc.

I suppose the book's premise is more about finding out how a system can be setup such that it is either resistant to or improved by variability, uncertainty, and unknowns.

A real world biology example would be the multi-purpose shape of the beak of a crow versus the specialized beak of humming bird.

The humming bird is more succesful in specific environment but it is more fragile if this environment were to collapse. The crow maybe not be as optimized but is "Anti-fragile" to eco-system changes.

I am simplifying but that is the central premise. The book goes into a lot more depth specially when re-visiting ancient history across different human eras and the 'lessons learned' from those periods.

No one is thinking about you. That stupid thing you said in the meeting, the thing you did in middle school, that pimple on your face that feels huge. It's entirely in our mind and everyone else is too focused on themselves to ever see or think about the silly things you're embarassed about.

>No one is thinking about you That hurts

...and it also helps, when you get out the other end of the ego tunnel. Lets you be truer, and freer.

This hasn't been my experience. I know tons of people who just revel is recounting stories about things other people did that were stupid or mad them angry for some reason, even years after the fact.

Spaced repetition. It's a method of learning where you only get a reminder of material when you're about to forget it. I've found a way to use spaced repetition to self-learn maths without forgetting processes between obsessive cycles. I memorize names, birthdays, dates, locations, and anything else I want to remember much easier than before because of it.

https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition

Anki[0] is great for this, and it's free.

[0]: https://apps.ankiweb.net/

mdanki[0] can speed up the acquisition of new cards

0: https://github.com/ashlinchak/mdanki

Seek content-ness, not happiness. Happiness comes later.

In my early-twenties, I kept thinking that I always wanted happiness, and if I wasn't then something was wrong. I later realized that it was the pursuit of something that I could never attain that was draining and I realized that was the wrong path. I cannot attain perfection. So I decided to look for a better life-path that I could sustain, feel comfortable, and be content for long periods of time. Happiness comes later, naturally almost. It comes in small packets sometimes. Sometimes I don't even notice.

It's a concept that I read once in Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, where the grandmother did not want to go into this box and see the world, because if she saw things she wanted but couldn't attain, she'd be unhappier than she currently was. This concept can be explained further with the parable of the fisherman and the businessman. I also think this is one of the ideas behind the movie "Mr. Holland's Opus", which took me years to understand.

Your last paragraph reminds me of this research on more advertising leading to less contentedness: https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-unhappy

Showing us what we don't have makes us question and think less of ourselves. It's the same mechanism that can lead to lower mood after seeing everyone's carefully curated lives on social media. Everyone around me is happy all the time, why aren't I?

Once you're concious of that bias, it becomes a bit easier to weather, but also uncomfortable in a different way. Personally, we want to share pics of our baby smiling with our friends, but will that make them feel worse when their baby cries for hours? We've been sharing experiences more openly with new parent friends so they understand it's not all rainbows all the time, and have been grateful for others who have done the same to us and reassured us that everyone's taking the bad with the good.

Happiness is haphazard, something you snatch from the maws of life now and then, mostly by accident.

Not really an idea, but I guess something of an epiphany:

We were doing a basic physics class at school at maybe 12 or 13 years old. We were learning about Newton's laws of motion etc.

One day we had a test and there was a question about why playgrounds often have rubber matting or tiles around the climbing frames or swings etc. Cue a load of waffly nonsense answers about "cushioning impact" or being "soft so it doesn't hurt" etc from everyone in the class. The teacher berated us: Force = mass X acceleration - reduce the acceleration and the force goes down too.

A lightbulb went off in my head - suddenly science actually meant something in the real world rather than just being something your learnt at school. This was how the world worked.

The fact that this moment still sticks out in my mind suggests that it was probably quite a formative moment for me and I guess changed my outlook on the world quite significantly. (... but then there was also a sort of philosophical existential thought about the "tyranny of equations" we end up living our lives by if we like it or not!)

Yeah the "Physics applies to the real world" idea.

I like its corollary. Mac-Gyvering your way through life.

I remember getting strange looks when to light some candles for a birthday cake, I used paper and an induction hob.

Using a siphon to remove the water from a washing machine.

Bending small locks open.

Pulleys and rope tricks.

There are similar epiphanies in physics, when you realize those chemistry formulas, atoms and molecules are like real object just real small. That those chemistry rules, are just statistical mathematics calculation shortcuts for modelling what's happening to large quantities of small objects.

Phases of matter : solid, liquid, gaz : you can transform any matter between those states. Water is not the only liquid. You can melt plenty of metals. You can vaporize away the matter you don't want. You can freeze liquids into solids by cooling them.

The concept of "Unknown Unknowns" changed my approach to life for better.

I was one of those laughing to the famous speech [1] the very first time I heard it. After a few days, I begin to grasp the epistemological truth in it, making me humbler.

Today in every system I work on, I know there will be risks unexpected and possible, and the system shall be resilient and with physical negative feedback in case control loop fails. Same in private life, I do not expect luck and I try to minimize kurtosis in all known scenarios (hoping it somehow covers the unknown unknows).

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

Relatedly, I was struck by philosopher Bernard Longergan's concept of one's horizon.

He distinguished three classes of questions:

- The questions one can raise and answer satisfactorialy - The questions one can raise, but can not yet answer - The questions one is not even able to raise

One's intellectual horizon sits between the second and third categories. You can only think of humanity's horizon in this same sense.

Your comment is food for the brain. :)

I've written about this before, but the thing that always gets overlooked about this quote is the "unknown-known" corner of the truth table: the things we take for granted, but do not ever think about. These are what we _really_ need to worry about.

In the case of Rumsfeld, it was the prisoner abuse, the civilian casualties, the torture, the blowback, ISIS..

In our lives this can be structural inequalities, the way power manifests in systems, Conways's law, all that.

The big one, of course, is the environment. We're all fully aware that we're in the middle of a complete ecological collapse, and that without drastic action and change in both our habits and the geopolitical world order, our grandchildren will inherit a nearly uninhabitable Earth. Yet we all continue on as if nothing is wrong..

under-rated comment.

The quote "We often suffer more in imagination that we do in reality" has really stuck with me.

I consider myself to be a bit of an introvert and this idea has helped me tremendously with networking and meeting new people. I often project the worst casinario in my mind, but in reality, outcomes are almost always positive and enjoyable.

“I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

This sounds like every John Green-vlog ever

The OODA Loop [1]

Air Force Colonel John Boyd came up with the OODA loop as a simplified way to explain a very complex system of observability and feedback that he developed. I read about this in the early 2000s and ever since I've been totally obsessed with the concept of learning, iteration and optimization - and it's the prime mover in my research and work motivations to this day.

There are many parallel theories and concepts in Reinforcement Learning and Control Theory such as Sense Plan Act, but the fundamental system is the same.

The OODA loop is often abused and the depth of Boyd's contribution to decision science has been underserved in my opinion.

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

This has been the most profound for me in terms of decision making. It is just so applicable to most decision making situations. Also led me to expand my mental models so I can be more certain about my decisions before I act.

Around 10 years ago I figured out the vast majority of mid and upper level management have no frickin clue how to do the thing they're tasked with doing, no capacity or desire to teach themselves, and will gladly fork over $250/hr or more to work with a consultant or agency who will help their immediate supervisor never catch on to that fact. Learning this took me from an overly-qualified low earning tech and marketing generalist employee to a very high level earner doing agency and solo consulting work pretty much overnight. Wish I had figured this out a few years earlier than I had but just happy I figured it out at all.

The Dichotomy of Control

A concept I discovered when reading about stoicism. Focus on the things that you can control and disregard what is outside of your control. Sounds simple and obvious, until you apply it to everyday life and realize that most things you worry about are not under your control - other people's actions, opinions, politics, most external circumstances, really. What you can control however is how you react to those circumstances - your thoughts, actions and words, for example.

I used to love Stoic thinking and read the usual primary sources a few years ago. I still do love it and practise it.

However, I became more and more turned off by the modern company of success porn bros who use it as a kind of macho way to justify not caring about others. This is not the truth of it, as Stoic ethics is about concentric circles of concern emanating outward (family, friends, community, country). I wish there was more focus on that.

Actor-observer asymmetry. Briefly, it's the idea that when we observe others, we're more likely to attribute their behavior to the nature of their personality than to their circumstances or situation, and that we do the opposite when judging our own behavior.

Example: You drive your car faster than the speed limit. You're probably doing it because you feel like you have a reasonable need (you're late for something, etc), not because you just inherently like to be a jerk and drive too fast everywhere.

On the other hand, if you see someone else speeding, you're more likely to think they're doing it because they're just an unsafe asshole, and less likely to think they're doing it for a legitimate reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93observer_asymmet...

When I commit the fundamental attribution error it's just because I'm distracted, but when others do it's because they're lazy idiots

"Less is more"

Applicable to programming, applicable to life. Covers everything from device convergence to PR reviews to retirement planning.

I discovered that spending less on personal happiness brought me more personal happiness. Try it sometime, give yourself permission to give away half of your stuff and see if you don't feel better.

I remember when I used to work at a pizza shop the manager would always say "where here to feed them, not fatten them".

My favorite thing about "Finite and Infinite Games" by James Carse is you can yadda-yadda the whole book:

"There are two types of games. One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. [...] There is only one infinite game."

Not familiar with the book, but a thing I heard recently that I think gets at the same idea and is one of those things that make you say hmmm was something like:

"Your heartbeat is just the latest heartbeat in an uninterrupted line back to the original heartbeat."

Doesn't really matter what spiritual or scientific tradition you use to define "original", and it doesn't mean that there weren't innumerable branches that ended up in a dead-end. But it gives a bit of perspective towards this infinite game.

> There is only one infinite game

It's World of Warcraft, isn't it? :)

Thank you for the quote. I get the point and it gives me something to think about as a gamer who often settles into the gamer equivalent of comfort food.

> There is only one infinite game

How could this possibly be true? I'm sure you could invent lots of non-isomorphic infinite games. In fact, couldn't just about any game be re-purposed into an infinite game by changing the win condition to "continue to play for an unbounded amount of time"?

"You can use your laptop power brick as a foot warmer."

Not quite so grand as some ideas here, but still... my feet are warm.

Along the same lines, my new (to me) Apple Thunderbolt display generates a ridiculous amount of heat, and the vents are on the bottom, right above my keyboard (I have the display on a VESA mount). Which is great, because my hands get cold easily and my office doesn't get very warm. It won't be very fun come summer though.

Similarly, my 2015 MBP huffs hot air out from between the keys on the keyboard when it's overheating.

Horrible in summer (I got a heat rash, then an external keyboard) but great in winter.

edit: formatting

This idea might not have changed my life, but it changed my day :-) (Within seconds and for the better; what more could you ask for?)

Don’t accept a “no” from someone who doesn’t have the authority to give you a “yes”.

Amazing, thanks.

Perfect!

The power of the subconscious mind.

Without actively seeking it, I happened to stumble on this idea about 8 years ago, at a time when I was struggling with some pretty big problems in my relationships, career and physical+mental health.

Since then, I've been living "as-if" the biggest factors that influence my reactions, choices and outcomes are in my subconscious, and that by continually undertaking practices that identify and resolve subconscious fears, biases, resentments, attachments, etc, I can keep my life on a steady path of improvement.

Over 8 years on, so far so good.

It also helps me to be more understanding and patient with others, when I can remind myself that this applies in different ways to all of us, and that everyone is doing the best they can in the moment.

Related: the idea of living "as-if" something is true, even if it isn't true yet, or it's unknown (but testable) whether it's true or not.

I.e., building a business for market conditions or technologies that don't exist yet but are reasonably likely to within a reasonable timeframe, and/or that may be more likely to come to exist through your work.

Or thinking/operating in a way that may not be consistent with existing laws/norms/established science, but in doing so you help to change said laws/norms or make new scientific discoveries.

Obviously, considerable risk management is necessary with this approach.

What are these "practices that identify and resolve subconscious fears, biases, resentments, attachments, etc"?

Sincere thanks for your interest.

I've learned not to get into the details here, because it can too easily trigger boring/repetitive arguments with cynics.

But I'm happy to share my experiences directly via email, and also I'm now hosting a Discord group with other hacker types talking about this stuff.

You're welcome to email me (address in profile) if you're interested to know more.

Is that fake it til you make it?

Not quite. I'm very familiar with the concept of "fake it till you make it", but I don't think it works as much as its proponents claim. Perhaps it can have a similar effect internally, sometimes.

But the approach I'm talking about is not about "faking", but rather operating _as if_ something really is true, because it might be, or might become so by your acting that way.

In some ways it's the other way around; you're operating as if the rest of the world is behind/wrong and you're forging ahead while waiting for it to catch up.

The Elephant in the Brain

A lot of common ideas about education, charity and laughter (we laugh because something is funny) are evolutionary useful lies we tell ourselves.

"But while we humans often play by ourselves (e.g., with Legos), recall that we laugh mostly in the presence of others. So what communicative purpose does laughter serve in the context of play? Gregory Bateson, a British anthropologist, figured it out during a trip to the zoo. He saw two monkeys engaged with each other in what looked like combat, but clearly wasn’t real. They were, in other words, merely play fighting. And what Bateson realized was that, in order to play fight, the monkeys needed some way to communicate their playful intentions—some way to convey the message, “We’re just playing.” Without one or more of these "play signals,” one monkey might misconstrue the other’s intentions, and their playful sparring could easily escalate into a real fight"

This book shows that many of our institutions have both visible, socially-respected goals, but also hidden goals nobody likes to acknowledge.

Example: Health Care

Visible goal: Improve Health

Hidden goal: Show how much we care ("kiss the booboo")

This explains why much of health care is devoted to high-cost high-visibility interventions (like bypass surgery) and much less to lifestyle interventions (like diet/exercise).

It also explains why many obvious changes that would improve the stated goal keep failing to be adopted - they hamper the hidden goals.

Software example: Why do people keep estimating development task size assuming nothing goes wrong? And why do their managers not hold them responsible for continually slipping the schedules?

Visible goal: Accurate estimates

Hidden goal: Brag about how fast we are

If accurate estimates were the only goal, then when schedules slip there would be a strong feedback loop to improve future estimates. My experience has been the opposite - the slip is blamed on something "no one could have foreseen" and everybody keeps estimating as before.

To be clear, it's always a mix of the visible and hidden motives. Much of health care is actually about improving health. But acknowledging the hidden motives is vital to understanding how much of society works.

This is a much better summary

I had a boss who used to say there was always a “good reason” and a “real reason” for doing something. A person will tell you the good reason but they won’t often admit the real reason. Sometimes not even to themselves.

The recognition that the greatest success of modern marketing is having subconsciously convinced us that things are harder than they are, and there's a right way to do things.

I can't run a server without AWS. I can't run an email server without O365. I can't clean a toilet without toxic blue stuff.

Lots of things are actually pretty easy and cheap, and whatever makes you happy is the right way to do it.

I recently started a vanilla js project and I've gotta say I'm pretty happy with it.

Granted, it's sitting on top of an Electron + Webpack stack so I don't have to worry about compatibility, but hey, small victories, and both of those were to solve explicit problems I ran into in the project, not just a choice because I was comfortable with them.

“Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” ― Terry Pratchett

The Wim Hof Method. I never had any issue with:

- snow

- rain (being soaked was in rare cases still an issue)

- anything cold really

Before that I was unhappy with whatever was cold. Now I'm neutral at worst and super exhilarated and hyped like I'm taking drugs (but legally) at best. The adrenaline rush is very strong and very real, and a lot of fun :)

How I would pitch this to my younger 18 year old self: want insta-ten-percent more happiness without changing anything about yourself, but by simply learning a breathing technique? Learn the Wim Hof Method and never complain about being cold again!

Can you explain the method simply? I Googled and all the websites seem to be full of marketing BS.

Take cold showers and do the breathing exercise. The first part was easy when I lived in LA, in Seattle it has been a struggle.

From [0]: 30 cycles of controlled hyper-ventilation, followed by holding breath with lungs empty as long as possible, then deep breath and hold for 15-20 secs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof#Wim_Hof_Method

Interesting how closely this matches many Yogic breathing techniques.

Some science behind it: https://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7379

Disclaimer: I was one of the guinea pigs.

The method is found on YouTube actually. The hallmark of you performing the method well is that you can go longer without oxygen by timing yourself (my progression went from 20 seconds to after 16 rounds to 3 minutes -- by breathing out all air first and then not breath). I won't describe the method here as you're more helped with people overexplaining it than underexplaining it.

One wouldn't teach a full programming language to a novice in one comment either.

Disclaimer 2: I'm not a doctor.

I have a headache right now and am wondering if you have seen success with wim hof for that.

Seems like it only takes a few minutes...did you try it? How did it affect the headache?

2 minute rule. Only useful productivity tool I learn from reading dozens of books a decade ago.

https://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-stop-proc...

This one is great. As a student, there are a lot of 2 minute tasks out there that are easy to push off, like adding something to a calendar or responding to an email. Mundane things that take very little time (generally speaking), but can cause much bigger problems down the road if not taken care of.

Midway through the article I was thinking it sounds exactly like Atomic Habits... Finished to read it’s from James Clear. I can recommend AH if you haven’t read it yet. It has quite more to say about this concept than just a short article.

As childish as it seems, this one actually stuck with me for over 20 years and makes me step back and relax in situations where bad thoughts can snowball and result in stress.

Basically, it's a saying that a neighbour's 5-year-old son said once (likely repeated from his father): "It's better to be pissed off than pissed on."

We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.

Confucius

I like that a lot.

Oh man, so true, realized this when I became 25. Nowadays I talk to my grandparents about these things and they say "grandson, when I was your age I never thought about how it was to be 80 years old or any other age for that matter."

I sometimes wonder how it is to be older. I also venture back to younger ages, and of course think about my current age.

Don't sweat the small stuff. And it's almost all small stuff.

If you're finding yourself stressed out about something, ask yourself...will it have a significant impact on your life within the next month? Will you even remember it in a year?

If you can truly adopt this mentality, it cures road rage. Okay, so some asshole cut you off in traffic. Why lose your mind over it? It won't even have an impact on your day, let alone a month.

Even something more significant like a minor car collision. Yeah, you might be out your car for a few days while it gets repaired, but once it's resolved, life returns to normal.

I'm lucky that even this COVID-19 crisis hasn't significantly affected my life. The only difference is that I'm working from home and cooking more rather than eating out all the time. A vacation and two conventions have been cancelled, but life goes on.

Life always goes on. Until you're dead. But then you won't care. (Flippant advice given to me a long time ago, but with a lot of truth buried in it)

It's just important to remember that most of us care how life goes on. And so "the small stuff" suddenly spirals into big stuff, because you didn't pay attention. So, be careful to label things "small stuff" unless you can't influence them.

You can't fix idiotic driving, so the idiot driver? Small stuff. The fact that every driver on the road is potentially an idiot, or, worse, actively out to get you? A really important reminder.

Focus on what you can control, dismiss the rest.

I've started keeping an Anxieties Journal. When something is worrying me, I add it to a checklist that I review every so often (checking off things that retrospect are NBD).

Adding it tends to get it off my mind, and then periodically reviewing things I'm no longer anxious about tends to put in perspective what's currently on my mind.

> Don't sweat the small stuff. And it's almost all small stuff.

The comparable idea I repeat to myself: "There are problems and there are inconveniences. Recognize the difference."

I have adopted this way of thinking many years ago.

Now the only thing that creeps up during the day is the occasional feeling of existential dread, of losing my senses to age and illness until the universe finally suffocates me and casts me into the eternal void.

Honestly, I think I'd rather get upset about that asshole in traffic.

I am responsible for what happens to me. (I.e. I am not a victim.) Accepting responsibility is very empowering, as it implies I can do something about it. Being a victim is dis-empowering, as it means you are helpless.

(People who read my posts will recognize this as a consistent theme. Being a victim is a choice. I choose not to be.)

in a similar vein, "Be the change that you wish to see in the world." - Mahatma Gandhi.

(or in your case, "D the change...")

See also: Locus of Control[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control

My version: Our state in life is for a large part a consequence of our choices, including times we chose non-action. Each choice has a risk vs reward, and the dice won't always be in your favor.

What’s funny is that I find this much easier to do in the large than in the small.

A layoff at work or a seriously ill child engendered a stoic “This is the way the world is, and you deal with it rather than cursing the unfairness or wishing it was some other way”.

On the other hand, when my bread gets stuck in the toaster? Rage at the the universe and despair for my miserable and forlorn situation.

Oh, everyone is allowed a rage at the universe moment :-)

Outside of work, to create at least as much as I consume. I'm trying to pick up writing as a hobby to shift my creation:consumption balance.

Edit: Related to that, I've been writing brief notes on interesting articles I read for the past few years. This has two advantages: 1) It helps me to read critically, and 2) It forces me to be more intentional about the articles I read - one way to combat the deluge of information

That every dollar you spend directly translates into pushing your financial independence further into the future.

I hadn't really reflected on becoming financially independent as a real possibility, but now I'm mentally bookkeeping spending against being locked into needing to work longer. The real revelation was when I realized that this "save 20% of your income for retirement" advice that's thrown around is totally backwards. Your income is not the yardstick, your spending is. Rather than scaling your spending to your income, spend what you need and save the rest. If you have a tech salary, that likely means you'll be financially independent much, much, earlier than traditional retirement age.

I lived like a student when I was a student and did not change much of my lifestyle and could not be happier. I usually save 2/3 of my salary and do not miss anything. My runway today is about 15 years.

I was raising money and met this zen style investor for lunch to talk about some issues we were having, basically complaining and blaming and things like that, he interrupted me and said -

“Be careful the stories you tell yourself because they will eventually become true”

It hit me that I really was telling these stories of how the company was or where the business was going in a negative light and things were simply becoming more and more negative because of me. So be careful!

We may harm ourselves or others around us for nothing but the feeling of control in our lives. I remember reading somewhere that eating disorders were an example of simultaneously losing and gaining control and, though I haven't had an eating disorder before, I could see how the same logic could apply to other actions.

I have come to the conclusion that pretty well everything negative in human society is about control - religion, business, management, politics, even, as you say, food. It's all about some one doing something that makes me uncomfortable, so I have to control it, once you realise this it's very freeing.

When I was 12 I saw a kid on a local tv show who was autistic and had intentionally started cataloging facial expressions and body language because he couldn't do it automatically like most people. I remember thinking "You can do that!?" I was very similar to him and that tv show started me on the path of trying to figure out how to get past my mental limitations, which has significantly improved my life.

Always, always, stop people to ask them questions. Whenever they do something you are surprised by or say something you don't understand, ask them to explain.

I never fail to get a positive response.

Sometimes you feel silly if it was a simple thing, but you get used to that easily, and now you know that thing for the rest of your life.

As a kid: Everything that you see was made by somebody. Someone had the idea, someone started a business for it, someone designed it, someone assembled it, etc.

As an adult: Simulated annealing for your own life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing) You start something by going all over the place, trying even crazy ideas. Then you start refining and refining, getting better at the details. This is the optimal way for anything: dating, starting companies, creating products, learning something new, investing, ... .

SA for your own life sounds intriguing. Do you have a concrete example that elucidates how this could be implemented? The concept still seems a little slippery to me.

Dating: it's better to try many partners to know what you like / don't like before commiting.

Imo it's a better way to keep people together than religion.

Dating: give everything a quick try: Tinder, speeddating, okcupid, socializing (dancing classes). Then see what works best, and put your effort into that one.

Marketing: try everything before you start focussing on the best (I think the book Traction describes it like this).

When I was looking to make my own logo and pinned it down to hiring on fiverr, I let a few different artists do a quick, cheap sketch. Then I hired the best to do the full thing.

I think it comes down to: first, get a quick & cheap taste of everything ("go all over the place"), then slightly start focussing on the things that work for you.

This is also known as “gradually shift from exploration to exploitation”

Jeff Bezos has a great interview where he talks about his decision to leave his cushy Wall Street job and start a website selling books. He talks about how he used a "regret minimization framework" where he projects himself into the future and imagines which decision he would regret the least.

I have used this technique multiple times myself to help with otherwise fraught or overwhelming decisions, and I think it's a great way to shift your frame of reference.

Interview where he describes it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ

As a trick for solving a single problem, ok sure. That sounds like chess, where a failure loses the game. Not the same risk of failure in life decisions (well, skydiving maybe). To minimize later regret sounds terribly hesitant, cautious and small.

So many other ways to organize your life: joy maximization is one for instance. There's the money thing. And character should come in there someplace, not just utilitarian nonsense.

Einstein(?) said it this way: "When I want to make a decision, I flip a coin. If I'm disappointed in the outcome then I know I wanted the other choice." Sounds about like the same thing (only a century earlier)

If your friends--or especially your SO--don't have your back, it's time to move your back.

You deserve to have at least one person in your life that is always on your side. Especially for an SO, if they can't do that, get rid of them. Far better to be alone.

Not sure I agree with this. I don't want someone to have my back if I'm on the wrong side. I want my SO to challenge my ideas and to help me improve as a person, not to reinforce my bad ideas.

To me, "having my back" doesn't mean nodding yes to everything. It means starting with the strong assumption that I'm a pretty good guy. It means doing for me what someone who loved me would do. Kind of the opposite of an Internet troll. In any case, it's up to each person to set the mark.

Forget your friends. You want a BOSS that has your back. If your boss doesn't have your back, it's time to move jobs.

Yeah, that's very, very true. Spent way too much of my career not knowing that.

Once had a real bastard of a boss, back in the early days of the web. I put together a prototype web site, carefully describing it as such and as never even tested with multiple users. Without telling me, he put together a demonstration that involved 20 big-wigs hitting it at the same time. Without doubt he was hoping for a major failure. Was too dumb to see that coming.

Take it from me: One whiff that your boss doesn't care for you? GTFO--immediately.

yeah even if they're great. I worked for a nobel laureate, was hoping to get great letters of rec or whatever for professorships, but all he really cared about was getting his projects funded, tinkering in the lab, and spending pennies at the slot machines. After about three years, I just left.

For me it was this : (job) interviews are not a one-sided judgment of your worth and value as a person where you have to do your best to convince the party, but a discussion of whether what the opposite side is searching for is in line with what you have to offer as a person / company.

It's not obvious at all, especially early in your career but it has really changed the way I handle interviews in very positive ways. It's OK to get refused, it's even expected actually. And even if it doesn't work out today, taking the meeting with proper framing can bring opportunities further down the road. Some friends are now hired in positions I was chased for, and it's a win :).

Kalzumeus has been an inspiration for me on all those things couple years back : https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

When learning something, trying to reward myself when I feel stupid or frustrated, because that generally means I'm doing something difficult that will pay off long-term.

I think of this as another 'habit to unlearn from school' (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/48WeP7oTec3kBEada/two-more-t...). For most of my life, I did what came easily, and I got a lot of praise and reward in those areas. I neglected the things that made me feel stupid or frustrated, and I think that consequently, my education is not as well-rounded as it might be.

Or, like Jake the Dog says [0]: "Dude, sucking at something is the first step to being sorta good at something."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smgQiGABQMs

A famous golfer once scored a hole-in-one after not playing tournaments for some time, only focusing on training.

A reported asked "Surely that was luck? You cannot train for a hole-in-one reliably."

To which the golfer answered: "Yes. But the more I train, the luckier I get."

That has stayed with me. Whenever I complained about bad luck (at least in my internal monologue), I started wondering what would have happened if I had trained more, be better prepared etc. Really helped me to shift a bit towards growth mindset.

Passive income. Or recognizing at least the goal of increasing your income/time ratio.

> the goal of increasing your income/time ratio.

Not sure that's quite the right simplification of the appeal of passive income. Your time is fixed, the appeal of passive income for many is recovering more of your time. There's always more money you could make if you just get that next raise or promotion, so the most straightforward way to maximize your income/time is just to climb the corporate ladder and make more income.

An interesting issue with climbing the corporate ladder is that often your time spent actually increases. I've yet to find a role w/ seniority that is less than 40 hrs a week.

Some have even said that getting a promotion+raise can lead to less $ per hour because of a variety of factors such as more responsibility/time spent, increased requirement for dry-cleaning (suits or whatever)...

out of curiosity do you apply this into expenditures too? ie spending time when it's expensive or spending money when its time intensive?

Classic examples could be learning to do automotive work to save money and hiring out cleaning services to save time. (please ignore the specifics, but understand the concept).

You could increase your income to time ratio by getting a higher salary, no? Whereas passive income is about investing your income to make you money, which is agnostic of how much money you actually pull in due to salary.

The cool thing about passive income is that there's a bit of a tax "trick" involved.

Because I'd rather have 5 years of $20k passive income than $100k in 1 year.

Well, I guess in SV it wouldn't matter, but in Amsterdam it does ;-)

“The test of first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” - Dwight Whitney Morrow

I heard that quote sometime around age 18 and it has always stuck with me to a degree that impacts how I view everything. It’s made a habit of trying to understand both sides of hard topics...which often leads to frustration with people who only want to understand one.

I have heard this quote credited to tons of different people. I still like it.

Everything is temporary.

This is a central tenet in a variety of approaches and philosophies, from religions (it's one of the Marks of Existence in Buddhism) to cognitive behavioral therapy — but few ideas have changed my thinking, resilience, self-control, and happiness as much as this one.

well said. in the end nothing lasts and yet impermanence is one of those things that always seem to catch us by surprise

> Everything is temporary.

Therefore, at some point, some thing(s) will be permanent, because otherwise, the axiom "Everything is temporary" would be permanent.

Oh crap. :-D

As a German, the idea that mass murder and high tech are different sides of the same coin has shaped my world view forever (after reading Dialectic of Enlightenment and On the Critique of Instrumental Reason).

Horkheimer red-pilled me on our western societies and I'm grateful for it.

I mean this sincerely: WTF does that mean? Mass murder is the opposite to technology?

Germans learn about the history of the Third Reich in detail and I always asked myself: how could this happen? Smart, hard-working, intelligent, compassionate, literate people start to plan industrial murder of millions of people on the basis of what exactly?

Now, here's the thing. Progress is not that shiny guiding light. It is an extreme force, especially a force to control things, especially nature. The Third Reich planned mass murder, as it were a railroad track or lunar landing - the form was exactly the same and they did not understood: that this similarity in form revealed and forever merged the idea of progress to the most inhumane behavior and destruction.

If that does not make sense, I encourage you to just read a bit about the concentration camps or the Third Reich in general. Good timing, too - we have 75th anniversary of V-E Day coming up.

Bad though that was, massacres and genocides go back millenia and went on without much tech involved. eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history#Neanderth..., Pinker's stuff, the book Demonic Males on how chimps do it

Two sides of the same coin generally means complementary items that may seem unrelated, not opposites. An English teacher I had banged on about theme and style being two sides of the same coin when writing.

The example here would be that mass murder is not really as effective without technology, whereas technology enables us to flip to mass murder quickly even if we previously didn't consider it. They are complements.

That's an excellent point, and most likely lost on 99.99% of tech enthusiasts. If I could get people in science and engineering to understand one concept deeply, that'd be it - that grand narratives of progress are often used as tools of oppression, including mass murder; especially for those whose stories don't fit neatly into the overall plot. Power regimes co-opt key constituencies (such as technocrat/builders) with these progress narratives to preserve the order of the world.

Can you elaborate why high tech is similar to mass murder? I don't always embrace tech but I see tech as a tool that can function differently based on who is using it

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." from Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn

Realising that honesty and candour is the root of all good things has made me a much better musician and, yes, programmer and businessperson! I don't try to appear impressive or sophisticated any more, just tell the truth and speak sincerely, and it makes life much more manageable

Emerson's take on Beauty is also pretty good:

https://www.scribd.com/doc/15437251/Emerson-on-Beauty

There are a thousand ways to suffer, and I don't know most of them.

The more I grow, the more I discover new ways people fight their own battle.

Every time I think somebody had it easy, I end up dead wrong. There is just so much I didn't know about.

I even recently realized it's very common to deeply suffer without being conscious of it, and yet being unhappy because of it. It's a terrible curse, because deep down some part of you knows there is something wrong but you cannot put your finger on it, and yet it affects your whole existence.

People just mechanically don't think about it so they can make the best out of life.

It makes you feel much closer to people, much more tolerant, and you suddenly understand a lot more about the choice they make and the things they do.

My personal realization that Evolution is the other “theory of everything”, with the exception of the laws of physics, evolutionary processes are shaping everything, including progress in science, economy, history, politics, ideas, social, emotions, religion, etc.

Have you read https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/story-of-us.html ?

I came to the same conclusion, and here's the result:

https://medium.com/@gfodor/evolutionary-simulation-theory-81...

This might be it for me too -- although it feels wrong to call this "one idea", because to me it's really a broad family of related ideas. There's some Jordan Peterson video where he sums up a social aspect of evolution as (paraphrasing slightly) "the thing that rises to the top of hierarchies is necessarily that thing which is good at rising to the top of hierarchies". CGP-Grey has a video discussing the version of this idea that applies to... well, to ideas, I guess. It's weird, because at some level I already knew everything he said, but that video nevertheless made quite an impact on me.

It's not at all obvious to me that the laws of physics are an exception to this, by the way. Anthropic arguments are a sort of primitive form of evolutionary process (in the vein of "we're in this part of the universe because this is the part of the universe that could have us").

One should not too quickly provide an exception for the laws of physics. The underlying axioms which make evolutionary dynamics deducible elsewhere do not obviously exclude physical law.

I read somewhere on the internet that, "If grass is greener on the other side, you aren't watering enough".

Sure some people get lucky, but on the long term, the ones who consistently make better decisions and work harder are the ones who are benefitted more often.

Weeks.

Segment your time to complete things into weeks. Months have too much wiggle room and days are too tight. Most people don’t even have the weeks option displaying on the digital calendars (phones, laptops) they use.

For long term projects of any kind using the week as a unit of time is the best way to cross the finish line.

This is possible for personal projects and for entrepreneurs. If you can get into this time frame in an organisation you are going to have a much easier time with your projects.

Another important point is not to overload the time either, if you end up completing something within a few days do not move to the next phase within that week. Stick to the schedule.

In my current company, we have a "calendar week" based schedule. Everything is planned based on that time segmentation principle. For example, "the start of production is planned for calendar week 45" - that is it, no month, no quarter no date - simply, the 45th week of the year.

If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.

I am not one tenth as talented as the people I work with on a daily basis. That they give me the time of day I am grateful for. It's what keeps me coming back.

I’m actually really relieved when the smartest person in the room (their words) leaves. We can have fun, drink beer, and share war stories without feeling judged by peers who haven’t spent enough time in self reflection.

That really sucks -- assuming that person really is the smartest person in the room. You said "their words", which kind of makes me think you don't agree, but I'm not sure.

But for the sake of discussion, let's assume they actually are the smartest person in the room. Unfortunately having that disctinction sometimes means the same person is also the most arrogant person in the room. And that's very unfortunate.

I have had the good fortune to be employed at multiple companies where I worked with some very smart people. I almost all of those cases, the smart people I worked with were easy to talk to, generous with their time, and happy to help me pick up new things, and think about things I might not have otherwise.

If you're very smart, please be one of those kind of people. You'll be happier, you can help make others around you better, and the world will be a better place because of it.

Like in the rest of life, what matters most is what you do with what you've got.

Memory is graph based, not a dictionary of key/value pairs. You learn and retain information more easily by making many connections to information.

If information equals knowledge, and knowledge equals power, then secret information is secret knowledge and hence secret power. (of course if correct and applied correctly).

One I learned at a young age is that you can learn to absorb the good traits of people around you while avoiding picking up bad traits (mostly around the idea that just because you don't like what a person does in area Y, doesn't mean they can't be good teachers/mentors etc in other areas). Rejection for single issues is a major problem in todays society I think.

"Do more and more with less and less until you can move a mountain with the push of a button."

Advice I got from a born-low-class turned upper class -- richest man I know (and father of a highschool friend).

"No One Knows What They're Doing"

This gave me more power to make stronger decisions and feel on the same plane as everyone else. I used to think there where people that had everything figured out

Since people seem to be sharing their favorite quotes, I'll share a couple of my own. It's kind of like a litany to repeat in difficult situations, replace placeholders as needed:

“What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it."

"If [scary thought] is true, I want to believe that. If [scary thought] is not true, I want not to believe [scary thought]. Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want. If I'm living in a world where [scary thought] is true, that’s what I have to believe, I have to know what’s coming, so I can stop it, or in the very worst case, be prepared to do what I can in the time I have left. Not believing it won’t stop it from happening."

"I am not afraid. I am not afraid because if I let myself get too scared I might not be able to do what needs to be done. And I'm not the type of person who backs down. I am the type of person who does the right thing, even if it's hard. Right now, the right thing is to [x]. And even if it doesn't work, I'll just do the next right thing, and the next, and the next. I'll keep on trying until I figure out a way."

The principle of non-violent communication (NVC)[1] completely changed my approach in life to stressful situations. Practicing the same with my family, friends, work colleagues changed my life. Changed the way I approach situations. Allowed me to also apply it in reverse where I am now able to lead those stressed with me towards a NVC path. I am trying to understand their fundamental base need rather than just focus on what they are saying. This allows those around me also to become in tune with themselves and I can see it on their faces when they get the aha moment. I've received simple thanks sometimes for this so I know it is not just me that finds it useful. Works wonderfully well with toddlers as well! The whole premise that kids are stupid or don't understand stuff also gets upturned when you apply NVC to communicate with them or help understand their point of view.

It wasn't easy, took months before it became habit, just had to keep it going. Even now sometimes I forget and my lizard brain pops up from years of conditioning that will take some time to undo. But am I so happy I found out about it.

[1] https://baynvc.org/key-assumptions-and-intentions-of-nvc/

"Find an excuse to win"

I had an attitude of quitting early or pausing on the first obstacle I faced. I used to think of it as "This is not my area of expertise" or "Let me wait for other person to confirm this" or "This is too hard, let me give myself some time" etc.

Unknowingly, I used to look out for excuses to no give my 100%.

Somewhere I read this quote, and that's where I realized the stark difference of mentality I had. From then on, it's really changed my life for good.

Procrastination is an emotional problem.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200121-why-procrastin...

The rocket science is not a rocket science.

Meaning that we sometimes habitually consider something hard because it used to be hard, or it became known to be hard. But with time passing, sometimes things like that change.

The literal rocket science is a prime example - we reached orbit in 1957 using technology which is very modest by today's standards. It's still hard to launch a satellite - but it's so, so much easier.

Knowing that, SpaceX approach suddenly becomes practically the most logical.

One that knocked me upside the head once was, upon remarking "That's going to take a long time, like a year" to accomplish something, as if that made it not worth doing, being told, "That time is going to pass anyway." In other words, you can either start working towards it now, and be in a better place in a year, or let that length of time discourage you and then, when next year rolls around, still be discouraged. So just start.

“The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience. (p.9)”

That whole book by Mark Manson: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/48297245-the-subtle-ar...

My wife once told me "no one wants to listen to you talk" when I was preparing to give a speech. It is obvious now, but I had never really thought about it. Her point wasn't that no one cares about what I have to say but that when I am done talking no one will think "I wish he would have talked longer."

When I interact with others, I try to spend most of my time understanding their viewpoint rather than talking at them about my viewpoint.

Someone once told me that you can tell you are close to burnout when you think that everyone around you is an idiot. You must be burning out because it's not plausible that literally everyone you encounter is an idiot!

I like it because it is a logical construction that can be deployed even when your own perception is distorted by stress. It has definitely functioned as an effective safety alarm and I'm sure prevented some chaos more than once.

All these responses are pretty good, and there's some valuable lessons in there. I thought of a simpler idea than most others have.

Honestly, coroutines.

Coroutines challenged everything that I had learned about programming at the time with something different, this made my program more powerful than just one line running after the other. It was mind-blowing to me as a young man, and I remember the impact setting me towards a journey of learning.

Class consciousness. So so so so much hypocrisy and confusion over seemingly contradictory things people say and do have a remarkably tendency to suddenly make sense when you apply rudimentary class analysis.

You don't even need to know what marxism or socialism are, much less agree with them, but if you haven't gotten the hang of basic class consciousness you're missing a key reality-rubric in life.

"No one on his deathbed ever said, I wish I had spent more time at the office." - Paul Tsongas

I found this funny because the opposite thought also exists by Henry Royce (of Rolls-Royce), lifted straight from wikiquotes:

>I have only one regret … that I have not worked harder.

>Deathbed assertion, as quoted in Outlook Business, Vol. 3, No. 4 (23 February 2008)

This line which, apparently, came from a famous con man:

Interviewer: "Sir, how did you get these otherwise worldly, intelligent and sophisticated people to give you whatever you wanted?"

Con Man: "You see, everyone has something that they desire above all else. If you can give them that thing, or appear to be able to give them that thing, they will give you whatever you want in return."

Ctrl + right arrow moves to the end of a word. Game. Changer.

And paired with this:

* Ctrl+backspace/delete to delete an entire word at a time.

* Ctrl+shift+left/right arrow selects entire words at a time.

macOS has emacs style key bindings like this OS-wide.

Ctrl+e: end of line

Ctrl+a: beginning of line

Ctrl+p: go up a line

Ctrl+n: go down a line

Ctrl+f: go forward a character

Ctrl+b: go back a character

etc...

The trump 2016 election (and even the whole presidency) was a slap in the face for some people, but if you look objectively there seem to be a bunch of unconventional truths / ideas in it. Like

- "Become a good person doesn't matter and can even look weak, being aggressive and though is more important". (I still remember jeb bush offended saying to trump that he will not 'bully his way to the presidency' while he was doing exactly that)

- "The person who talk the louder set the stage"

Funnily i was visiting "the red pill" subreddit.. it has become a very toxic subreddit but some of the concepts (like the concept of "frame") described on the sub explain trumps election. They basically say that women are basically only attracted to any display of "strength" and "dominance", wether it's good or bad. Kinda shocking, and you don't want to believe it until you try it

Regarding Redpill:

Word. Visit it, try it out and take what you want. This dominance thing also translates at least partially to relations between any human.

there is a saying, although very vulgar, "if you f* you will be loved if you love you will be f*d"

The thing I dislike the most about other people is often something I do myself.

So when dealing with any people-related issues, the first thing I do is reflect if it's something I do myself.

If it is, then I try to determine if its something I like about myself; if I like it, I try not letting it bother me again; if I don't like it, I change it.

That destruction is easy, creation is hard, but the most valiant, boring, thankless, and difficult task, that we should all do to some extent, is maintaining.

I don't have a name for this. A person can make a statement "X", and X can be true, but the person's act of claiming "X" was in no sense caused by "X" being true. In my head I call this "causal disconnection" or similar phrases, but it's not a good name.

The underlying idea here is that, when you are told "X", it's useful to think about the causal chain that resulted in you being told "X". Is the truth of X a powerful force in that chain? Is it one of many competing forces? Or is it, perhaps, totally irrelevant? In some sense this is a Bayesian viewpoint on the question "suppose somebody makes a claim -- how much should you update your probability that that claim is true?"

Politics obviously abounds with this, but a good non-political example is pop-sci rumors. For instance, I often hear the claim that cicadas sleep for prime-numbered years because that minimizes the probability of overlapping/conflicting/getting-caught-by other species (explanations vary). Now, without making much effort to evaluate the truth of this statement, think about what causes people to make this claim. Well, clearly, it sounds very good, so it'll spread quickly (as a meme). Now, what if the claim was false -- how much would that fact impede its spread? Probably not so much.

(Somewhat remarkably, this suggests a concrete reason to be wary of oft-repeated claims. The fact that a claim is often repeated suggests that it spreads quickly. The reason you're hearing the claim, then, may be because it spreads quickly, and not so much because it's true.)

It's really important that the truth or falsehood of the claim has nothing to do with the question of the nature of the causal chain underlying the claim.

A related idea is that one must have great respect for -- and fear of -- social processes. I'm far from fully appreciating the consequences of this. This is also related to another comment in this thread about evolutionary processes, because those are often the causal forces behind people making claims.

- Time spent working on myself (exercise, personal development) seems to improve my business

- Adding value for others is the best way I've found to achieve greater success

- (and this is very recent) consider price as a measure of value, like a liter is a measure of volume

"It's not done when you can't add to it, it's done when there's nothing left to take away."

Ken Segall (former ad executive that worked with Steve Jobs) shared this during a talk in Ann Arbor at the Michigan Theater in 2018.

That idea is from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, actually.

I figured it wasn't novel to Segall, but that is the first time I heard the line.

"Before Enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water".

before with a frown, and after with a smile though?

What

Any pursuit or attainment of enlightenment should be kept in relative place to everyday behaviour. Even the most holy of holy person (whatever your religion or creed) still has to attend to their basic needs.

I think the point is that enlightenment doesn't change what you do, only how you do (and/or perceive) it.

Is that the point? Or is it that enlightenment is grounded in the every day. That monks and Buddhist masters can simply sit and do basic chores and that's it, enlightenment is grounded next to the most basic human needs of fire and water and food.

I agree with you, but I see our phrases as different ways of saying the same thing. When you can perform the same mundane tasks in a way that brings meaning to, and takes meaning from, them, then you have found enlightenment.

It's that enlightenment doesn't change anything.

People set out pursuing enlightenment to try to find fulfillment or happiness, but enlightenment is realizing that fulfillment or happiness is entirely dependent on your attitude towards things.

Therefore, nothing changes from becoming enlightened, other than your decision to keep a positive attitude about the every day.

As they say, you can choose to be happy, and mind over matter...

This makes me think of a story I like:

> Somewhere in the ocean is a place called the "Dragon Gate". Any fish that swims through the Dragon Gate turns into a dragon. However the Dragon Gate is invisible. Also, when a fish swims through it the fish doesn't look any different afterwards. And finally, after a fish has swum through the gate it doesn't feel any different, it just is a dragon.

First the mountain is a mountain,

then it is not a mountain,

then the mountain is a mountain.

https://terebess.hu/zen/qingyuan.html

"Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch and a kick, just a kick.

After I learned the art, a punch was not longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick.

Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick"

- Bruce Lee

Bell's theorem, proving Einstein's intuition was wrong, and that quantum mechanics does have some sort of a spooky action at a distance, (this or that the moon is not necessarily there when you don't look at it). E.g. we have either no locality (cause and effect can't propagate faster than light), or no realism (things don't have a "realness" until measured, e.g. the wave function mode of particles), or superdeterminism (everything is predetermined, no free will, nothing is random, not even the random behavior of quantum particles that seem the most random thing in the world)

Self-Discipline.

Specifically, a book called "How to do what you want to do" by Dr. Paul Hauck has influenced and shaped my thinking.

Intermittent fasting. These days I only have one meal a day

How has it affected you? Are you doing it for weight loss, or for other reasons?

I had a month off work recently (unrelated to the pandemic), which I spent learning programming. During this time I never ate lunch, only a small breakfast and a normal supper. But now that I'm back at work and I'm on my feet all day, I have to eat, otherwise I get super hungry, lightheaded and generally lethargic. But I've discovered that I don't have to eat very much before I'm back to normal.

I decided to do it to get healthier. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that fasting for long periods is good for you and that living by on 1200 cal per day increases your lifespan by 5 to 10 years.

I lost a lot of weight, feel much better, and save money and time every day now.

Not the person you replied to, but you might find this comprehensive and plainly worded summary from the NIH interesting: https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/calorie-restriction-and-fasti...

An important caveat to bear in mind is that not all fasting diets entail calorie restriction (though many often do); it is calorie restriction that is linked to reduced inflammation and possible benefits to lifespan.

Agreed. I should have been more precise stating that I adopt both fasting and calorie restriction.

Were you a breakfast eater before you started?

The thought of food usually makes me queasy before around noon. So I naturally slipped into intermittent fasting before I knew what it was.

Yes, I loved breakfasts and used to eat a lot. But you get used to it.

Milestones instead of deadlines for the creative process. Worry about hitting a certain benchmark, not a certain date.

Learned Optimism & Explanatory Style:

- Permanence: Optimists point to specific temporary causes for negative events; pessimists point to permanent causes.

- Pervasiveness: Optimistic people compartmentalize helplessness, whereas pessimistic people assume that failure in one area of life means failure in life as a whole.

- Personalization: Optimists blame bad events on causes outside of themselves, whereas pessimists blame themselves for events that occur.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism

It is impossible to have a thought that does not stem from another thought or your senses (seeing, hearing etc.)

To demonstrate: it is impossible to imagine a color that is not some combination of colors you've already seen before.

Trace any idea to their origin, and you'll realize all ideas are founded upon by what you have already seen, heard etc.

New ideas can only come from discovery via the senses, or are thus simply a new combination of old ideas...

Your reality is limited by what you can sense and remember.

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" - Ludwig Wittgenstein

Adaptation == Learning

This was at the early stages of a lot of agent based modeling, genetic algorithms, etc., etc. And John Holland wrote a book called Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems[1]. The universality of the idea that "simple" adaptation is learning applied to a lot of different domains was crisp and very powerful.

1. (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/adaptation-natural-and-artifi...)

For me, the most life-changing idea I've been exposed to continues to be from Bret Victor's¹ 2012 talk titled "Inventing on Principle"². The idea is that in addition to the two well-known paths to live one's life, there is also a third, less well-known path.

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

[2] https://vimeo.com/36579366

Paul Graham - maker vs manager schedule. It instantly explained why I was frustrated with certain work environments and my own habits.

Reid Hoffman - his cofounder, in a video course at Stanford called blitz scaling, talks about a unique strength Reid has to focus on only the most important task and ignore all other tasks. He says, in the start up phase of a company there is literally too much to do, and for many this is overwhelming because they look at a growing list of tasks and they can become incapacitated. Reid can focus on the the bon fire, and ignore all the small bush fires without stress. For me personally, I felt broken for a long time. I worked as a lawyer and every task was almost equally important so there was always a long running list. I was overwhelmed and not as good as peers. I am honestly only able to focus on the existential bon fire tasks so when I saw this I felt instant clarity and validation. As a start up founder it’s been a super power and when the company transitions to a stable growth phase I know to hand it to someone that can focus on a broader task list.

The common principle of both is accept yourself and find a context where your strengths shine. We live in a culture that emphasizes certain traits and we can feel bad about our characteristics that seem to deviate but in reality they might be unique strengths if we were in different circumstances.

Praying to God at a party 30 years ago changed my life. I guess I felt like I was broken on the inside and the idea that some higher power could help led me to pray while sleeping on someone's sofa. I was so into the idea I went on to work for a missionary organisation with no salary at 19. After 25 years in IT I am on an accelerator programme now and feel like I am 19 again... doing something out there with no money...hopefully I will enjoy being a startup as much as I enjoyed my first job.

What about praying to God changed your life? Were you religious before then? What led to the transformational moment?

“You live in a mechanical universe. It’s time to start understanding that.”

I was disillusioned with myself. I was performing badly in highschool(even dropped out) I couldn’t understand why.

I wanted so badly to do something epic. I feared being an average guy and living an ordinary life.

I didn’t understand this advice at first. However, I decided that I couldn’t take the life I was living, so I decided to change.

If you accept that the universe is essentially mechanical, then you accept that there is nothing actually standing in your way. You do not have inherent bad luck, and you aren’t cursed.

Probably the best example of this is Elon Musk. The guy watched his entire fortune burn as his companies crumble. He worked 20 hour days. But what separated him was a very specific ability, and it wasn’t just his ability to work hard.

“Most people when confronted with a disastrous scenario start to make bad decisions. When that happens to Elon, he becomes hyper-rational. I’ve never met someone with his ability to take pain.”

This is a paraphrased quote from Musk’s biography, from a Tesla engineer who knew Musk personally when the company was on the verge of collapse. The ability to make hyper-rational decisions during hardship is one of the most important traits of a leader.

This advice got me through that period. I understood that everything had a cause and effect, so I decided to change. Reading made me more prepared for anything. Building and making things made me more friends.

The second you understand that we live in a mechanical universe is the second you are given the key to changing it. I may never become the next Elon Musk(asking myself how can I do it better, but that's another subject if you want to talk about it I'm happy to do so) but my life will be so much happier because I understand that it can change according to rules.

Rationality and a cause-effect mindset is an incredibly tough road to go down because there are no easy answers. When you do, however… you can change anything.

> Elon

Obviously, it's also a good advice to be born with wealth from the blood of an emerald empire. Hyper-rational, being born wealthy. Great advice!

Kidding aside. I'm just sick of people putting people like Elon up on a pedestal. Look at all the rich, successful people out there. How many come from wealth, and how many come from dirt poor conditions and just worked themself up? Working hard is good advice, but it doesn't guarantee success, quite the contrary. A lot of successful people never worked hard a single day in their life, and billions of people work hard their whole life and never come close to the kind of success the former enjoys.

Hell, I guarantee that Elon is not even the hardest worker at his companies, even though he enjoys most of the fruit of the labour.

Would you deny Elon has a knack for finding great opportunities and executing? He's at the head of two of the most innovative companies, you make it seem like hes totally lucky and there's nothing to his approach.

Indeed. He has some great ideals, I think. And he is great at finding brilliant people to work for him, it seems. But is he anymore brilliant than what thousands or millions of other people would be were they giving his shoes? I don’t think so.

Being born into wealth helps, but it also hurts. If you have something to lose, its harder to take risks. Elon put all of his wealth on the line for SpaceX and almost lost it. Anyone, from him down to the person who scrapes together pennies to start a risky business to make a better life for themselves, deserves respect for taking risks to achieve their dreams.

Elon knows that money is something he can always get, because he has gotten them before. Also his family is rich. He knows that worst case is he goes to them and get some millions and back to work again.

Rich people aren’t taking any real risks by using their money. The people taking the real risks are those putting their lives and livelihood on the line every day, doing the dangerous, back breaking, mind numbing work for the rich people with the money, while the rich just look on from a far while their workers are doing the actual work for them using their resources and making them even more rich while the workers doing the actual job have nothing to gain in comparison themselves, often being far closer to personal and financial ruin everyday than the rich ever are.

Elon isn’t risking shit.

That those with money that invest them is taking the risks and thus also deserves the rewards is a myth, is a ruse, but it’s not hard to figure out who would stand to gain from such a myth.

Yes, I’m aware of this meme, which echoes loudly on twitter, yet it’s still wrong.

How so?

Your post started with "Elon knows", which implies you can read minds, so as long as your arguments stem from knowing the inner thoughts and assumptions of someone else, it's a rickety foundation to say the least.

As somebody who grew up poor, but has many friends who did not, being born to wealth hurts far less often than being born poor.

Where did I claim the opposite? What you state is so beyond obvious I'm not sure the point.

Most great chefs would be nothing without access to a grocery store, but that doesn't mean I can't learn more from that great chef than the 99% of the other people going to that grocery store who never learn to make amazing things.

I'm not saying everyone is the same as Elon, except for the money. I'm saying his inherited wealth, and being at the right place at the right time, and so on, has probably more to do with Elons success than anything else, so let's stop worshipping the guy, and everyone else like him. Our society favours the few, and that's not something we should celebrate.

> "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

– Stephen Jay Gould

I guess it's depends on the goal. If you're looking for people to celebrate, I agree with you.

If you're looking for people to learn from, then I think there's a case to look at people who achieved more than others who started with similar circumstances.

> If you're looking for people to learn from, then I think there's a case to look at people who achieved more than others who started with similar circumstances.

Very good point! Which just illustrates why those people like Elon, Bill Gates, and whoever else celebrity there is, is not someone to look up to, except if you were born rich, which most people aren't. Also the worshipping, like what we do with celebs, is just never a good thing. One can try to learn from someone without worshipping them.

The history books about Elon, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and so on, all demonstrates how they are sociopathic scum, that also achieved great things. The big question is if they achieved it because of being those things or despite of it, and I'm inclined to think it's despite of it. And maybe it's because we learn our "idols" are ruthless sociopaths, that we then go on and tolerate our bosses being it, which just enables others to be sociopaths, which is just a fucking vicious cycle. Instead, if we as a society didn't tolerate such a behaviour, Bill, Steve, Elon, you name it, wouldn't have achieved shit, because they did it using other people, and if no one tolerated such behaviour, they would just be twiddling their thumbs, and someone else with more empathy and solidarity would have gone ahead and done what they did, and we would all be better off.

I disagree, but I am happy that this has helped you.

For me, it was the opposite, it was that the universe is stochastic. That the random parts happen, and you can't fix that. But you can bet on the 'averaging' of the universe. You can't guess the roll of dice, but you can build systems that will survive bad rolls.

I'm glad you've found something that works for you and I'm glad you shared this with us.

We don't live in reality, or even "see" it directly.

The reality that we live in is firstly based on perception of actual physical reality, and then also experienced/conceptualized via a proxy, which is a model of our perceived reality (and all the objects, people, and ideas within it), all implemented by a sophisticated biological neural network of sorts.

An example of how you can test this theory is to observe conversations on forums, where you will find plentiful (and ultra-confident) examples of supernatural acts like mind reading, future predicting, knowing things that are not knowable, etc.

Even more interestingly, these "beliefs" seem to be entrenched extremely deeply in the human psyche, and almost "protected" in some way, by some sort of process. Merely pointing out the obvious fact (the existence of this phenomenon) is highly unpopular. But even further, most people seem to be literally unable to even ponder the phenomenon, particularly in real-time. Abstract discussion seems much easier for most people, but rare is the person who can consistently walk the talk - personally, I only have one friend who can do it, across multiple domains (cross-domain capability is a key differentiator that separates those who can from those who cannot).

> Even more interestingly, these "beliefs" seem to be entrenched extremely deeply in the human psyche, and almost "protected" in some way, by some sort of process.

My explanation for this is the brain has lots of mental shortcuts that help it make useful quick decisions when lacking complete information (like in survival situations), but these shortcuts break down in the modern world

E.g. "everyone else is doing it so it must be good" is a decent rule of thumb when you don't have time to look into things but you have to resist this rule of thumb when seeking scientific knowledge, which isn't natural for many.

Sure, these are simply heuristics..."rules of thumb" approximations, there are brazillions of them. I doubt there are many people here who aren't fairly familiar with the abstract concept.

What I mean by the "protected" part is that even when talking to someone who is familiar with the abstract concept, who will readily acknowledge the existence of heuristics and inherent fallibility, even within themselves (while discussing the topic in the abstract that is), but when the topic is something else (a concrete topic like politics for example), and heuristics clearly assert themselves in the conversation, people will get "agitated" if the topic of heuristics is brought up.

Hmm, so I'd say the vast majority of people are not familiar with cognitive biases or logical fallacies at all. Just look at advertising and politics, especially anything to do with medicine.

I learned long ago that pointing out falacies is not a winning approach to changing someone's mind so I agree with what you mean by agitated. It's also really interesting your point about people acknowledging the fault in general but can't apply it to themselves.

My point was it's probably such a protected/strong part of thought because long ago those rules were generally really useful for survival. Overriding them now is possible but takes a lot of work.

> Hmm, so I'd say the vast majority of people are not familiar with cognitive biases or logical fallacies at all.

But would you say that applies to the userbase of HN?

> My point was it's probably such a protected/strong part of thought because long ago those rules were generally really useful for survival. Overriding them now is possible but takes a lot of work.

Agreed, but if no one is even willing to acknowledge the existence of the phenomenon, what should one do?

Yes, I'd say most people on HN are aware of this stuff. I guess that's why I comment here more than other places.

> Agreed, but if no one is even willing to acknowledge the existence of the phenomenon, what should one do?

It's just a slow process of education I guess to take a scientific approach to knowledge seeking. Discussions should be about seeking the truth, agreeing with the other person when you agree, questioning your own assumption etc.

I wasn't taught logical fallacies in school for example - I'd be for teaching critical thinking in school at an early age to help with the above.

Most people see views opposed to their viewpoint as an attack and cornering someone with logic to show they're wrong does not work because they're not genuinely seeking the truth anyway.

> Yes, I'd say most people on HN are aware of this stuff.

In the abstract (in principle), sure. But how consistently do people exercise this awareness during real-time behavior?

> It's just a slow process of education

Ideally. But often, but it often seems like many individuals and communities very much prefer taking the shortcut of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil". Or in other words, those other people suffer from that, but not us. No siree Bob, we are fully conscious and logical, at all times.

You and I seem largely in agreement, but I wonder if we agree on how well we here at HN, as a community, execute these principles. In my experiences, most people are "not very fond" of even discussing the topic.

> You and I seem largely in agreement, but I wonder if we agree on how well we here at HN, as a community, execute these principles. In my experiences, most people are "not very fond" of even discussing the topic.

My feelings are people here will tolerate a few anecdotes (as long as you're not pushing it as absolute truth) but generally if you post appeals to nature, appeals to popularity etc. it'll be challenged and downvoted pretty quick.

Certain topics seem worse than others though e.g. eating meat, x10 programmers, job interview processes and programming language comparison topics are full of anecdotes and fallacies with bold statements.

Not everything in life has to be solved, and in fact many things can't be solved. If you do enough therapy you begin to understand the fuzzy traps of the mind, and catch it falling into the "we must solve this" loop.

Often times the answers to many of our problems are obvious (that doesn't mean not-complex; i.e., an alcoholic often knows the best way to improve the quality of their life), and people aren't dumb, but they can't commit to the "solution."

As soon as you break from obsessing over solutions, you begin to break down habits and reasons why you're in the position you're in. Which has the corollary effect of, eventually, "solving" it.

Once I got good at noticing "solution loops" in my own mind I began to notice it in the conversations of friends. It's amazing how many people are stuck in sometimes multi-year loops. And so now, for life problems of a more macro scale: I a) never try to solve anything for anyone, and b) try to gently guide the conversation away from finding an explicit solution to better understanding why they may be in the position they're in.

This sounds simple / reductive, but it's one of the most powerful ideas / tools I've discovered in the last few years.

God's not real. We're just apes whose ancestors caught a lucky break when an asteroid flattened the dinosaurs 60 million years ago. We shouldn't even be here.

Not a literal actor in time/space, for certain.

That said I've come around to the usefulness of deification of ideals and the idea that not every moment should be lived in object-space, but also in drama-space.

>That said I've come around to the usefulness of deification of ideals and the idea that not every moment should be lived in object-space, but also in drama-space.

I can agree with that.

God as an idea is real in the abstract sense that all powerful ideas are real, and people believe in them, and treat them as real.

But as someone who was raised in a (Christian, US Southern) religious background, I've come to believe that everything wrong with religion comes from taking it literally.

> I've come to believe that everything wrong with religion comes from taking it literally

I don't disagree, but would only refine your point.

I think the pathology of religions come from several places: the inevitable divide between the environment in which they were written and the current world and not refreshing that original view quickly enough with enough wisdom, the projection of one's ethics on to other people, and, like you said, mistaking the metaphorical for the literal when it is not adaptive (which is difficult as sometimes feedback can take decades if not generations to hit).

IMHO religions are like Swiss army knives. They've got a huge number of blades and tools. Idiots use Swiss army knives like a hammer and bang away and their problems. People that have only seen it used as a hammer miss out on its finer wisdom. And if one gets stabbed with it they're less likely to look openly upon the tool or kindly upon the user.

Religion as a psychological tool is a very sad thing. But it's a very common thought, one I grew up with. In fact, I only started praying while still thinking it was all fake, but needing some kind of mental help past my problem in life at the time. So I understand that theory as well as anyone here.

But not all religions are created equal. The Protestant religions are emasculated to some degree. Since they're based around rejecting the truth, their foundation is all wrong, and they can never get back to reality. Unfortunately, they turn many people away from Christianity.

But that's not necessarily true. Those who keep looking for it will find it in Catholicism, just like John Henry Newman did. As he said, "to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant." But more often, people don't really want to find out the truth. So they reject religion altogether. Except as a psychological tool.

Not just psychological, but also economic (halal mortages and hawala), sociological (their biggest strength is gathering people IMHO), parasocial (all the little morality plays/stories in them), interpersonal (various golden rules), historical (often muddled with myth), sometimes physical (yogas), and on and on with all the different dimensions of the human experience.

As I'm sure you understand every religion is (among other things) an attempt at distillation of important perspectives and wisdom to help coming generations. So, I would not say "sad" by any means, well, except when misused.

I don't know much about the Protestant / Catholicism schism, but it sounds pretty heated. Though, as an outsider, I'd peg them as sects rather than separate religions. Heck, I'd lump all the Abrahamic religions together into a single clade as they share some bits of the same holy books.

That's not true of Christianity; this along with Judaism are historical religions. They exist not to pass on wisdom or ideas, but because of historical events, which they claim are the interventions of God in human history. In particular, Christianity exists as a result of the Resurrection, which it claims literally and historically happened. And there is significant proof that it really happened: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12789a.htm

Life is a paradox.

The ultimate point is that there is no point. If you want something, the best way to get it is to not want it. You have to try to relax.

Humans can handle cognitive dissonance, things don't have to be logical for us to believe. We can believe two things that can't both be true at the same time. If we didn't we'd die.

Somehow life requires the ability to believe conflicting things... so in order to even begin perceiving reality, you have to be incapable of pure logic.

Realizing that time speeds up for us when we grow up. Maybe this sounds obvious and silly, but thinking not only how short life is, but also how faster and faster it passes by gives you something. (I had to pick one idea though!).

Here some article: https://qz.com/1516804/physics-explains-why-time-passes-fast...

“The universe is a cruel, uncaring void. The key to being happy isn't a search for meaning. It's to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense, and eventually, you'll be dead.”

Thanks Mr.Peanutbutter

Underrated comment. Bojack Horseman is one of the best shows out there :)

I guess that the bleakness is the point, but I prefer a more optimistic spin on the same thing: the key to happiness isn't a search for meaning, because the universe has none to offer. It is the creation of meaning for yourself—what you do has the importance you attach to it, neither more nor less.

That's exactly what I took from it too.

"Always deliver superlative value, and your customers will take care of you."

Changed everything.

This can sometimes lead to burnout for me. When I blindly try to please no matter what, it also raises the bar of expectations. Sometimes people just want to feel superior and will take advantage, which can be hard to see in the moment.

As a follow on - my grandpa often said to "give each customer the best you have at that moment." Selling goods or giving attention, if every customer gets the best you have none will have reason to feel bad towards you.

A project is not done unless all the people who have to support it have access to all the information they need.

I have witnessed a lot conversations where support could not help them because support did not have the right information. This made a lot of people very angry.

So i started applying this rule more and more. Now only some people (mostly project leaders) are sometimes angry.

Opportunity cost.

It's relatively easy to measure how much an investment of time or money will "cost" in absolute terms.

But it's pretty unnatural to try and define the opportunities you're not going to pursue and factor them in as a cost.

Understanding opportunity cost has led me to make a few important decisions in my life that would have otherwise gone another way.

Permaculture.

First paragraph from wikipedia article:

> Permaculture is a set of design principles centered on whole systems thinking, simulating, or directly utilizing the patterns and resilient features observed in natural ecosystems. It uses these principles in a growing number of fields from regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and community resilience.

I forget where I got it from - a biography of an old professor I think

And the way he explained not holding on to things was "I had my turn being 19. I had my turn being 40. Now it's my turn to be 85". I did those things, nothing can change that -- I don't need to keep doing them lest I lose my worth or something.

Our minds are enormously flawed:

- There's a certain fidelity to any memory which you just can't get beyond, and the vast majority of memories are nowhere near that.

- Our memories warp and decay with time.

- Even our most logical thought processes have a really hard time grasping provable things like the Monty Hall problem and exponential growth.

- Cognitive biases are everywhere.

This sentence from Fight Club has had a long lasting impact on me: "The things you own, end up owning you".

There are two versions of you: the experiencing self and the remembering self. If you only pleasure the experiencing self then you make lots of short term decisions e.g. it's the experiencing self who enjoys the cake, but the remembering self gets almost no benefit from it. Worse, they have to deal with the consequences of the extra calories.

I'd convinced myself that there were things I didn't like so I wouldn't do them anymore, like travelling for long holidays. But after hearing this idea I realised sometimes the pain and inconvenience of being away from home, and being stressed by travel is a temporary pain for the experiencing self. The remembering self however gets lifelong benefit.

I use this model to analyse the cost/benefit to each persona which helps make better long term choices.

"Life is unfair." Simple, but for me it was an important insight. I used to think I deserved things, and now I know that while that might be true, you still need to be assertive to get them. There is no karma or divine intervention which will put a finger on the balance to make sure everything in life (love, friends, opportunities, adventure) is shared equally. And it goes multiple ways.

First, don't expect life to be fair and give you what you deserve. It won't. Don't expect other people to be fair towards you either. They might, and they might not.

Second, it is not always your fault when you are in a bad situation, because life is in fact unfair. Shit happens.

Third, be assertive to handle the unfairness. You need to stand up for yourself to get your fair share. And stand up for others to get theirs.

Also it can be unfair in positive ways - you can get better than you deserve.

1. That getting good at something can sometimes be quick; if you have the right background. But when it's not quick - that doesn't mean you can't get good. It simply means it's a process. Experiencing the part where I'm bad at something as simply the "beginning of a progress bar" and knowing it's going somewhere, and that practice is necessary allows me to persevere and not experience frustration or a feeling of inadequacy.

I would tell this (along with a real life story to match about myself) to my employees whenever they got discouraged. As a team lead, I would often do the same work they did, so they compared themselves to me, thinking something should be easy for them just because it's easy for me at this point in time. I would tell them it's not a fair comparison to make - I have several years of additional experience doing this compared to you, and I've done this a thousand times, while they're doing this the first time. Of course it appears easier to me - I've had practice, and that's all the difference between them and me, not intelligence or some other trait they have no direct effect on.

2. Evaluating my own and others' ideas through a set of explicit criteria (asking yourself "what does the solution to this problem need to solve in order to be considered adequate?") keeps me from falling in love with my ideas or solutions to problems. For example, my specific implementation for some software might look good to me. If someone else shows up with a different solution (e.g. during code review), then those criteria are the questions I need to ask them to verify that it is indeed a better solution, and that it doesn't overshoot what's needed. If it is better by those criteria, then there's no reason not to toss my idea aside and use theirs.

Of course, this concept also applies to the criteria themselves - someone else might convince me that my criteria are wrong, by noting that some of them are not explained by a greater goal (such as the larger task at hand -- the company's mission, turning a profit, etc.), and so on.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness. My shallow interpretation of it is essentially: wherever there's a group of people, there's politics.

https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

Exponential growth. Learned properly when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old. I was learning about the game of chess, and the story describes that the reward for the inventor was one seed of grain on the first square, double that on the second, double that on the third... and so on.

Rationality is self-contradictory, and part of your own motivations will always be irrational.

As a consequence, at some level, you have to stop worrying about economic consequences of your actions on you. It is, in particular, rejection of utility maximization as a human motivator, because there has to be something more, something that cannot be measured.

And empirically, it seems that people who we recognize as creators or inventors have mostly not done the things they have done for pure economic profit, but they have been driven by something else, that cannot be explained in economic terms.

Also related to this is my earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22964404

1) Give yourself time, not too much and not too little, to spend alone. Then spend as much as you can with or talking to others who would return the gesture.

2) Most work, especially in tech, isn't that important and won't change anything, so reduce your sacrifice for some company. Whatever SaaS thing you're working on to save small business owners 5 minutes a day just isn't worth your mental health, and some aspects of American industrialism is toxic af. I used to think of Apple as a world changing product designer, but later I realized that it's just a company with a vaguely interesting story, and one that does make well-designed objects, but most people could do without their iPhones for a long time and be better off.

"When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity." ― Dale Carnegie

I think my friends would say that I am rational and calm under fire. I always knew that people have emotions and just thought, that I am pretty good at handling mine. However, the more I thought about the quote above, the more I realized, that only about 10%-20% of my decisions are rational. The other 80%-90% are driven by my emotional state and my mind just saying 'Do what you like, it's not critical'.

Accepting that humans are mostly driven by their emotions helped me understand and predict their actions.

Mindfulness.

Lately I've been reading/listening to Eckhart Tolle.

I'm a recently retired (IT Exec) and wish I'd have adopted some of these ideals earlier in life e.g. stop fretting over the future and dwelling on the past. Stay firmly routed in the moment and savour it.

"Let's have a child!"

In junior high school, at the end of the brief morning announcements broadcast to all classrooms, the principal would end with some quote. One stuck with me, and was something like this:

The character of a man is revealed by how he behaves when he knows he won't be caught.

Probability distributions.

"It is always better to not have a problem than to mitigate it", from this article that John Carmack wrote several years back[1]. In the context of the article it feels almost like a throwaway line, but I've found it to be deeply profound and it has since affected how I choose potential solutions in almost any situation. Should I do the "quick fix" (mitigating a problem), or would it be better if the problem _didn't exist in the first place_?

[1]: https://www.wired.com/2013/02/john-carmacks-latency-mitigati...

This is a great line in the C/C++ vs higher level language debate on memory safety.

The idea that maybe there really is a God after all, and that it's a cop out to assume that, just because it's unlikely for us to know for sure, therefore no breadcrumb trails about God or religion are really worth following.

I'm unable to describe the magnitude of the amazingness of the world I found, simply by wanting to believe that God is real, and then finding out that the Resurrection actually did happen. Anyone who does enough research on this topic and has a good and honest heart will eventually become Catholic.

God how I wish I had looked into this years earlier, but I didn't because I assumed it was just too unlikely to be worth investigating. What an awfully powerful fallacy.

> Anyone who does enough research on this topic and has a good and honest heart will eventually become Catholic

This is a big claim. You're saying that anyone who isn't catholic either hasn't done enough research or doesn't have a good and honest heart?

There's a third option: that enough time hasn't passed. I said they will eventually become Catholic. A person generally can't understand multiplication until they understand addition.

I guess my question is why. What makes it inevitable?

Because it’s based around facts, hence an honest heart, and benevolence, hence a good heart. If a person looks into the Resurrection and whether it happened, they will inevitably become a Bible believing Christian, and when they ask where the Bible came from and who has the right interpretation of it, they will become Catholic.

I just saw a similar tweet thread last night

https://twitter.com/orangebook_/status/1257710884719333376?s...

Some gems in there.

When you are surrounded by assholes, chances are that it's you who is the asshole.

Changing feedback loops has a much higher impact on a system than changing variables.

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night: "You are what you pretend to be"

Nobody knows what you think or what you intend. Only what you do and what you say. On the flip side, you should judge people on their actions and not their hidden intentions.

Pursuit of knowledge should be a goal until your last breath. Never stop learning. Learn about new things that aren't necessarily related to your career. Use what you learn as a launching pad to explore even wider areas.

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

― Mahatma Gandhi

Things happen because they can. Like a vacuum that gets filled, just because it can be filled.

(The thought came at a time of mental rut, and thinking that I cannot contribute further to the idea I had)

Things get discovered/invented just because they can. If you were to stop existing at this moment, it'd still get made. The best you can do is accelerate the process. If it can exist, it will be brought into existence. The only thing you can influence is the time at which it'll start existing.

Basically led to me pacing down my life and stop living with the constant stress of "I got to make it or it'll never exist".

Selfishness is a strong motivator and one that remains consistently in your life.

You will change your country, city, neighbours, partner, community, and company once you are no longer satisfied with them.

The motivation to improve those is temporary. The motivation to improve your life and you remains till the day you die. The want to live healthier, happier, and better.

The distinction is important because motivation resulting from my selfishness is responsible for things I do for others. That means, I am only improving myself by bettering the environment I live in and everything that exists in it but my end goal still remains a better me.

Understand that failure is not the opposite of success. Failure is an essential part of success. Once you succeed, no one will remember your failures anyway. Microsoft wasn’t Bill Gates’ and Paul Allen’s first business venture. Who remembers that their original Traf-o-Data business was a flop? The actor Jim Carey was booed off many a stage while a young comedian. We have electric light bulbs because Thomas Edison refused to give up even after 10,000 failed experiments. If the word “failure” is anathema to you, then reframe it: You either succeed, or you have a learning experience.

--Steve Pavlina

Happiness depends on the discrepancy between expectations and reality.

Your mind has a simulated copy of reality. The more you develop opinions about the future based on this copy, the more likely that they are out of sync by the time the future comes.

Seeing these two as separate, and their distance as something that hurts, has made me wary of elaborating my expectations. I dream about stuff I consider important and this category shrinks with age.

I’m not saying don’t plan/dream/hope. Just pick your battles and focus your efforts on the ones you decide to keep. Otherwise, just go with the flow.

I read this in a book once:

"Never settle for anything less than you know you deserve".

Sounds simple and obvious, but when you are under pressure it is easy to give up and convince yourself you're not good enough for whatever it is you are aiming at. It always pays to aim higher. The thing you want to achieve may be hard, it may take a long time, it may not even be entirely possible, but if you keep telling yourself you don't deserve this or that sooner or later you start believing it and then your chance of achieving it is completely destroyed.

I read this in a book once:

"Never settle for anything less than what you know you deserve".

There is a lot of time spent waiting that can be used for learning, thinking or other useful activities. If we just spend a little time each day improving our lives, it adds up.

The Central Limit Theorem.

It's hard to explain the precise way in which an understanding of the central limit theorem has changed my life. However, knowing how any random distribution sums up to a Gaussian has subtly changed how I perceive and comprehend the world around me. Over time, this has added to a significant number of choices and decisions that I've subconsciously made, informed only by rough estimates of a mean value and it's standard deviation.

Just a word of warning, the central limit theorem is a bit misleading.

Assuming the sum independent and identically distributed random variables converges to a distribution, that distribution is not necessarily the Gaussian, but a larger family called the Levy-Stable distributions [1].

Levy-Stable distributions are "heavy-tailed" in that far away from zero they behave like (inverse) power laws. This is probably why you see so many power laws in nature (gravity, "small-world" networks, income distribution, galaxy distribution density, etc.). This was one of the central themes of Mandelbrot's soapbox, that power laws were more fundamental than normal distributions. Mandelbrot gets remembered for the highly symmetric and pretty fractal pictures but those images (Koch curve, Dragon Curve, Sierpinski gasket, etc.) are like a focusing on a sine wave when talking about Fourier analysis.

The central limit theorem applies to sums of random variables with finite variance [2]. Once you relax the condition of finite variance, or finite mean for that matter, Levy-Stable distributions are the more likely result.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem " ... Mathematically, if X ... is a random sample ... taken from a population with mean ... and finite variance ... the limiting form of the distribution ... is the standard normal distribution." (emphasis mine)

On the other hand, for many systems the energy is related (in some way) to the square of the value. For example, voltages, currents, photon counts, etc. So if energy is finite, then you get CLT behavior.

TIL. Thank you for the links. I've got more studying to do now :-)

Can you give an example of when this has informed a decision and how?

"You're not co-workers, you're co-owners" and "you are both right, even when you are saying opposite things"

This really helped my relationships with loved ones. It's not about chores and the lack of doing them. Or about who is right in an argument. It's about both of you deciding what to do as equals, accepting differences, and loving each other especially when you don't like each other right then.

This is Water https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

The concept of Comparative Advantage unlocked a helpful perspective on politics for me. It led me to shed a series of errors in thinking by confronting me with the idea that a lot of critical political issues are complicated and non-obvious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

Don't worry about remembering facts; instead, seek to understand how and why things are the way they are. By understanding deeper reasons behind things, the facts will make contextual sense, and will be much easier to recall, or if necessary, to deduce. This can apply essentially anywhere, from physics formulas to historical events to programming conventions to political actions.

This is called abstraction.

Stumbling upon "Latticework of Mental Models" concept of Charlie Munger [1] really helped me over the years to develop mental clarity, ignore noise and focus on fundamentals in many aspects of life.

[1] https://fs.blog/intellectual-giants/charlie-munger/

The tradeoff between exploration and exploitation.

Profound Ignorance. The more you think you know, the less able you are to learn anything. Being profoundly ignorant doesn't reduce your ability to do anything in life, but it can be uncomfortable for both yourself and others around you. We like thinking we know things, we like hanging with people who know things, whether anybody knows anything or not.

All ideas/technology are living organisms:

- they reproduce imperfectly through a two stage process.

- First they 'infect' a human (human sees tech or is told idea), then they replicate when that human manifests or speaks that idea to others

- Through this imperfect replication, ideas/tech evolve over time

If we believe life is inherently valuable, we should consider our stewardship of the kingdom of ideas.

Spend less time looking at a screen. Spend more time outside and/or around people I enjoy.

(Note: I'm more extroverted than introverted.)

That's easy.

You're actually tripping all of the time. Except when you're not.

And you know when you're not. But you don't know when you are.

You can stop tripping for a moment, any time you like. I find it easy to do with Wim Hof breathing, but I'm sure there are other ways of getting that. Point is, then you find out that you were tripping. Or you were being led.

Nothing (or nearly nothing) is black and white. It's shades of gray. Understand where _this thing_ is at on the spectrum.

IDK dude, some things seem black and white. The Holocaust, for example.

Yeah, seems to be just as much a fallacy to believe "all things are shades of grey".

Only thing I can think of that's anywhere close is that without WWII we wouldn't have modern computers.

Still, doesn't seem worth it. I say, using a computer, my entirely lively hood being based on computers.

You've only failed if you stop trying.

In my case go homeless or die is what it means to fail.

edit: granted I'm not trying to split an atom or something crazy like that, but yeah. The fear of failure is always in the back of my mind.(currently means lose job/debt or generally just making an ass of myself eg. in meetings/srum/professional convo)

"Only the one who gives himself up is lost" Hans-Ulrich Rudel

"Fun" fact: This guy was a convinced Nazi who basically destroyed two Russian tank divisions alone. I told this quote to an African American friend when he was struggling badly and had to go abroad for a job and it has inspired him ever since. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Ulrich_Rudel

Beowulf has a similar quote: "fate often enough will spare a man if his courage holds"

trying to have me use Nazi's as a role model? ha /s

They did build some cool stuff though

>> You've only failed if you stop trying.

There are more details to the above, which I've explained in my blog: https://alokgovil.com/winners-quit-strategically/

Wanting to improve my handstands by easily tracking them, I came up with an app idea to leverage voice to work out.

Not only is the idea becoming real, but I learned so much that I would not have been able to learn in daily job.

More about it: https://www.handstandquest.com/

You don't HAVE to finish reading a book.

People do not understand exponential growth.

1. Lisp code is not text. An S-expression is distinct from the serialization of that S-expression into text. This is the unique feature that distinguishes Lisp from all other programming languages.

2. Measurement and entanglement are the same physical phenomenon.

3. Most people's lives suck. This is a big reason they sometimes act like dicks.

Splitting (also called black-and-white thinking or all-or-nothing thinking) was debilitating well into my adolescence.

Effectuation: https://innovationenglish.sites.ku.dk/model/sarasvathy-effec...

Entrepreneurship is a process. Effectuation helps to explain how opportunities are not just discovered but made.

Reading about alchemy, especially the concept of transmutation, has inspired my life in numerous ways. I would also suggest reading The Kybalion which, if I recall correctly, is about Gnosticism more than alchemy? Anyway, it has some great general concepts to open up your imagination, plus the prose is beautiful.

Mental health has `health` in the name for a reason - it can deteriorate and there is no shame in needing external help to heal.

Realizing this after listening to an interview with one of my favorite musicians really helped me approach my (at that point) deteriorating mental health from a different perspective and feel better.

if it's only one, then it is the idea that "the word creates objects", or that "creating a word, makes the object", and the power of language

for example, you can take some time to study a language, until it becomes impossible for you to not understand it when you perceive it, it becomes a part of you, of both your cognitive self and your subconscious, and you can encapsulate all of that, saying that "you grok the language"

you can also see this in a lot of places, instead of "the study of the properties of matter in relation to heat and temperature", you can say "thermodynamics", and you instantly convey a lot of meaning

and this has "given me" some moments where "a lot of pieces fall into place", like understanding that a less general version of this, is the Abstraction taught at CS classes, where it is about computational systems, and hiding implementation details, rather than the more general idea of encapsulating the understanding complex ideas, in short sentences (or words)

it's the title of an Essay I had to read in high school, when I read it, rather than the message it was supposed to convey, which is how language gave women a lesser standing in society, I got really interested in the title, in Spanish it's "La palabra crea objetos"

there are also others, like how "you don't really have to do anything, other than deal with the consequences of your decision to do, or not do something", you don't have to eat, but if you don't, you have to deal with the consequences, it gave me a more concrete feeling that that our choices shape our lives

and how everything is connected, in the way that when there was a terrorist attack in NY, thousands of miles away, in another country the price of fish and shrimp dramatically drops, in that the space station's parts were influenced by the Roman Empire, and in that war has driven a lot of the development of science and technology

The simplest version is my best choice is the one that, given your possible choice, provides me the greatest outcome or the basis of Game Theory. Everyone is working both together and against each other and taking other choices into account can educate your decisions and lead to better outcomes for all.

I don't remember where I got it, but "do the important, not the urgent" help me focus my life.

Also, the central message from (the otherwise mediocre) Coelho‘s The Alchemist novel teach me at 25 that I didn't have to conform to living the life of an unhappy low-grade employee for the rest of my life.

Understanding is a poor substitute to convexity.

There is no such thing as rationality of belief, only rationality of action.

both by NN Taleb.

For me its practical application of objectivity: Any person who touts the superiority of their proposed opinion is not somebody you should trust. Any given opinion is superior or not on its merits. That distinction is the difference between a subjective person and an objective person.

Kiichiro Toyoda was a good engineer and thinker.

I learned from him to ask 5 whys when there's a problem.

Changed my understanding about understanding, have found my self in multiverses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys

That our responses and our negative relational feelings are based on out own choice - Nobody makes me feel angry, victimized, as a failure - it is always my choice to feel those feelings.

It is not always i am able to choose not to feel it, but i always know i am feeling it because of my own choosing.

Language is thought.

But like the chicken and egg paradox, how can one come before the other? I was incapable (I think) of formulating even the concept of "Gestalt" until I had heard the word for it, had it explained to me.

Now I see the concept of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts everywhere.

Thought exists without language, does it not? How can dogs dream of sticks and walks and chasing squirrels? Can't cats see a high place and think about how to reach it, those aren't thoughts?

The word Language comes from the word for tongue, language therefore is grounded in human ability to make complex thoughts borne out in simplistic squishy tongue air sounds.

We could extend language beyond tongues though, if we think of binary or rust or gobbledygook made up languages impossible to speak. Those still Express thoughts, though they be divorced from tongues.

So, IMO, thoughts are broader than language, which can come close to thought but can not adequately encapsulate the color red, a beautiful piece of music, or a cat's devilish designs.

"Thought exists without language, does it not?" This is a very interesting question.

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for.” Wittgenstein

"How can dogs dream of sticks and walks and chasing squirrels?" Do Androids dream of electric sheep? :-) You may want to read the books mentioned here. I found it so impressive, I bought a first issue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

Try to be truthful to others. Always be truthful to yourself.

Recognizing reality is a surprisingly difficult thing. Our perceptions are clouded by bias, wishful thinking and outright deception. The truth is the only foundation from which you can faithfully apply judgement to address any situation.

Not to be afraid of taking the road less traveled by. It is not going to be easy, but needs to be done.

Lovely sentiment, and I agree. Also I learned recently the original poem was meant sarcastically:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH3Y_-Hxh_Q

"Once you've understood the core of your problem, the rest is merely millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours"

My high school physics teacher, the only one who believed in me, whom I continue to disappoint every day by not achieving a Nobel prize in physics.

"Say yes more" - from reading the book "Yes man" by Danny Wallace. It's a light and not-too-serious read, but I was much influenced by that central message.

It got me outside of my comfort zone and the resulting experiences changed my life in lots of positive ways.

We don't get a practice life. There's no "play again." Make the most of it.

Money really does buy happiness.

To a point, anyways. Vacations, homes in safe neighborhoods, the best schools for your kids, drugs, hookers, technology gadgets, early retirement, just about anything is more accessible if you are wealthy.

The day I realized this was a disappointing day.

Having the things you mentioned (or easy access to them) only frees you up to see if you are happy and to figure out what will make you happy if you aren't. They don't, by themselves, make you happy.

Disagree. If I couldn't afford to live in a safe neighborhood and was always worried about my kid getting shot on the way home from school I would be miserable and stressed out.

Moving to an area with a lower violent crime rate would objectively make me happier.

If I was wealthy enough I could simply not work, and spend my days hanging out with my daughter and spouse. That would objectively make me happier.

Rust's "borrow checker" https://doc.rust-lang.org/1.8.0/book/references-and-borrowin...

There have been many. (I collect ideas.)

The single most important and far-reaching idea that changed my life is simple to state:

All are One.

Oddly enough it was Hofstadter's GEB[1] that clued me and not a religious or spiritual book. Somehow I directly intuited that the "strange loop" at the core of each being was none other than the Universal "strange loop" at the core of everything.

"Thou art That."

The thing that is both speaking and being said.

You have a body but you are not your body; you have emotions but you are not your emotions; you have thoughts but you are not your thoughts; you have will but you are not your will. You are that which is awareness: Being-Consciousness-Bliss Sat-Chit-Ananda.[2]

From this, all morality and ethics flow easily and firmly.

One can walk down the street and watch the expressions on peoples faces change as they are observed from this context or viewpoint. Toughs melt into shy little boys and old ladies smile.

On the subject of bliss: it's not an emotion. It's more like gravity or electricity, fundamental and physical. (Just something I wanted to record.)

[1] "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satcitananda

What are the most important problems in your field? If you're not working on them, why not?

From Hamming

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

Decency, summarised.

The tale of the man who wanted to know what the torah meant in TL;DR form. Various rabbis chased him off for asking until he came to rabbi Hillel who told him "That which is repugnant to you do not to to others. That is the whole of the torah".

There are many forms of that[0] but for some reason this one stayed with me strongest despite being an atheist.

[0] At the other end of the scale but just as fine: "Be excellent to each other!"

No one is out there to help me (other than family). Everyone is trying to advance their own interests and wealth. Once I learned that this was true above all else, I started pushing my own life forward as opposed to waiting to be pushed.

From Buckminster Fuller, retold to me by Brandur Leach:

> Do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.

[https://brandur.org/minimalism]

Giving, without expecting something in return.

I used to be very calculating, if I do this, what will I get from person X, what will person Y think of me.

Now I just do, what I want. What I think and feel is right. And I give freely, of what I have. Sharing feels good.

The concept of opportunity cost.

"Are the people I'm following going where I wanna go?" Earl Nightingale

"She who chases two rabbits catches none" - Confucius, apparently.

Keeps me on task.

I don’t know if I read this somewhere or was told it: “you can do whatever you want, as long as you accept the consequences and can pay the price.”

I find the hardest part discovering what to do, but even that has a price and consequences ;D

That you are the average of your five closest friends. In other words, if you would like to achieve or become something, surround yourself with people who are also focused on (or have already achieved) that goal.

Not sure where this originated, but I learned it from one of my martial arts teachers growing up:

You know what you know. You know what you don’t know. You don’t know what you know. You don’t know what you don’t know.

Reprap.

From Adrian Boyer's start, we all can have the means of production on our desk. I can start with some plastic spool, and have finished structural pieces to do what I wish.

It's the first major step to a replicator.

It's amazing to me how little progress is being made in such an important area.

Hyper Iteration

This concept changed my life and career in a big way!

I first heard about hyper iteration (my name for it) in a story[1] about Paul MacCready, a guy who built the first human-powered airplane.

He achieved this goal by changing how he attacked the problem. Rather than focusing on the larger goal, he built a machine that enabled him to test new human-powered flight theories on a daily basis. This enabled him to run hundreds of tests. The other teams trying to achieve this goal took 6-12 months for each iteration.

With regard to startups our entire startup journey consists of a loop of asking one single question:

If I do this, will it work?

As we build we ask that one question over and over again:

- Will this new feature help me get more customers?

- Will advertising on Facebook help me make more sales?

- Etc.

The faster we can iterate each answer to that question, the faster we can achieve great things!

So basically, just always think abut any task you have to do and work out is there a faster way to get the answer?

i.e Spend 9 months building a mobile on demand platform to deliver coffee and see if people want the service? Or spend a week printing up business cards with "we deliver coffee" and hand them out in the street. See if anyone calls.

9 months vs 1 week to start learning about that particular product ;)

But really it works in many contexts, just spend some thinking time to find the absolute fastest way to iterate at all times.

[1] https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2861-how-nature-and-naivet-he...

Everything that happens to me is a consequence of decisions I have made based on decisions others have made based on decisions others have made... Everything is playing out how it should.

"Homo Economicus": that we all act out of rational self-interest, subject to mental and physical constraints (though few are conscious of the reasons they act as they do).

> we all act out of rational self-interest

That's why the (global) economy can exist and function as it does: the desire for things.

Differentiation of Self

https://thebowencenter.org/theory/eight-concepts/

Two sets of ideas:

1. Getting Things Done (David Allen) as a system to organize and reorganize my life, 2. How to win friends and influence people (Dale Carnegie), as a way of treating other people

"Never waste a chance to pee" -- grandpa

def changed my life for the better

"Don't become a philosopher until you become rich."

"Do what you made for" When my mind tells me this, I get energized and start to work and complete lots of things. This particular words gives me all the focus I need.

The basic function of a healthy psyche is to withstand reality and adapt to it. (don't remember the author, it's a common concept in psychotherapy circles)

Math is the eternal truth. Any physical implementation of a solution to a problem relies on the manipulation of abstract symbols. Math is truth, the rest is details.

Your external world is only a reflection of your inner state.

Here is a smart one : Being wise is better than being smart.

It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be taken to be good without limitation, except a good will.

The more you scare people, the more they will pay you

A few things:

Adults are just winging it. The ones who don't seem like they are pretend the hardest.

The world is only as cruel as you help make it. Be kind.

I'm distinct from the voice in my head.

You must believe to see; not see to believe.

Can you explain this a bit more?

"Starting the work is two thirds of it."

I wish I knew the source of this but my parents used to say it was a Welsh proverb.

Often I feel like finishing is the other four thirds.

Ego is a myth. Everything is connected and is one. Our mind creates boundaries and give names for practical reason.

Get angry, but first decide if it matters.

The idea of impermanence in Buddhism that completely changed the way I've been seeing the world and myself.

“Everything in moderation, including moderation.” -- Oscar Wilde

I've found it to be an excellent philosophy to live by.

Something I follow now, but didn’t until I was 35 or so: rise early.

A lot of very good things follow from just doing this.

You CAN have your cake and eat it too.

Fun note: it's one of these proverbs that people know the context for but not many (at least, not me until recently) really understands why it means what it does. Apparently it's because the old English usage of "have" included to keep/retain something, so it goes that you can't simultaneously eat your cake and keep it for later.

- I don't need to eat every day

The most important thing to know about your tasks is WHY you need to do them. Connecting my TODO list items all the way to Maslow's categories of needs has resolved all of my task motivation, categorization and prioritization struggles.

Corollary, which you hear sometimes in investors' blog posts: not all problems are worth the effort, only valuable problems are.

Clean your desk before you do work

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” - Samuel Beckett

Not sure if "idea", but the word that comes to my mind is "meditation".

"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" Dobzhansky.

Good ideas are grown, not found.

what about inspiration?

Engage your core when doing any physical activity.

Might be the difference between success and injury.

Bayes Rule.

Reading Joseph Albahari's Threading in C#. Must read for .Net Developer.

That which seems very important today, will seem far less important tomorrow.

When you have finished doing konmarie externally, begin doing it internally.

That the existence of infinity and eternity is the most probable hypothesis.

The Sunk Cost fallacy, with the peripherally related Opportunity Cost.

"Be proactive, not reactive."

and

"Effectiveness is more important than intelligence."

The fast Fourier transform and related topics in stochastic processes.

I’ve read your comments and am floored with what I read - if you’re up for making an acquaintance who has 1/10th your expression but knows what you’re doing is real... shoot me an email in the bio.

The greatest strengths are almost always also the greatest weaknesses.

The past and future are memory and fantasy. There is only this now.

Side note: This is probably a good place to discover mental models.

The idea of marginal utility (among other ideas of economic theory)

"Keep your identity small." From a Paul Graham essay.

There doesn't have to be a loser. Win-win is an option.

The 9 alignments from the Baldur's Gate series.

Everything is a metaphor. Literally everything.

How did that help you or change your life?

I made me see that what people say/talk about might not necessarily be right or wrong. Just metaphorical.

You don't have to believe your thoughts.

Consciousness may not come from the brain

Our thoughts are subconsciously motivated

Expand.

I think many people go through life uncurious about why an idea occurs to them, why they have a certain preference, why something makes them feel a certain emotion.

The subconscious, for all its mysteries, offers the best chance of understanding the underlying forces that motivate our thoughts and behaviors. Realizing this and developing a curiosity about the reasons for my own thoughts and behaviors has totally changed my life for the better.

“The internet is going to be a big deal”

Chase curiousity, don't chase money

Love how @naval answered like 600 times

A bowl is most useful when it is empty.

The boot theory of economic inequality.

Practice is not the same as execution

Love is the law. Love under will.

Iterated Prisoners' Dilemma

Has a Nash Equilibrium for the first n-1 iterations if I remember correctly.

Time is the absence of balance

Courage Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Skepticism.

Stoicism.

Everything is a remix

Solipsism is correct.

For what it's worth, I agree.

Correct, but worthless, from what I can tell.

Yes, but of whom?

Knowledge, by itself, isn't power. The sharing of knowledge is power.

Information theory

Pick your battles.

Every cool thing from the underground ends up mainstream in a predictable pattern.

Article: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

"Is."

Credit Default Swaps

good times

have a secret - peter thiel

Nofap.

Astrology.

Recursion

Why?

The idea that science education is profoundly and pervasively dysfunctional.

It was a slowly accumulating realization. There was Feynman's critique of rote memorization in Brazil[1], but ok, Brasil isn't CaTech. And Mexico high-school graduates having TIMSS scores similar to US high-school dropouts, but oh well, that's Mexico. And news media have a trope, like "Harvard MBA students don't know what causes Earth seasons", but that's merely misunderstanding the nature of expertise -- if someone last studied a topic in middle school, then a middle-school-like understanding shouldn't come as a surprise. Similarly for grad and undergrad, professors and grad school. MIT and Harvard graduates being unable to light a bulb with a battery and wire[2], that seemed more bizarre. But by the time I saw Eric Mazur's (Harvard, intro physics) "it became clear that in spite of high evaluations, and in spite of good performance, my students were not really learning very much"[3], it didn't come as a surprise. Though it could still felt odd, for a time. Talking with first-tier medical school graduate students, with no clue how big blood cells are, beyond "really really small". Asking first-tier astronomy graduate students, "a five-year old asks you 'I'm told the Sun is a big hot ball [...] what color is the ball?'"... and of the very few who didn't get it wrong, half-ish learned it as "common misconceptions in astronomy education", rather from their own, atypically extensive and successful education. A follow-up of "what color is sunlight?" repeatedly produces these cute, not "aha!", but "uh oh" moments... the "that doesn't make sense, does it..." of two conflicting bits of unintegrated knowledge colliding for the first time. I no longer find it even slightly odd when a physical sciences gradate student tells me the Sun doesn't have a color, or is rainbow color. A person's understanding very rapidly becomes ramshackle as they move beyond their active research focus. And education content is pervasively authored beyond that. Far far beyond. Chemistry education research describes chemistry education content using adjectives like "incoherent". To be fair, rote education in Brasil and elsewhere achieves... something, some societal value. And ours does too, and more of it. But now when I occasionally encounter someone who thinks of science education as working... it's become an exercise of empathy and imagination to picture how that might be a plausible description of the world.

[1] From "Surely You're Joking[...]" "In regard to education in Brazil, I had a very interesting experience." https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education [2] "Minds of Our Own" clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng5qzH39nyg full 1997 https://www.learner.org/series/minds-of-our-own/1-can-we-bel... [3] Eric Mazur's "Confessions[...]" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI&t=920

open-source software

That free market capitalism is a good system that works. I grew up in a family that pretty much believed the opposite so I probably never would have become an entrepreneur otherwise. I mainly credit Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" series for persuading me, as well as some of Paul Graham's essays.

What are your thoughts on the welfare state and its compatibility with your freedom? What do you think about homelessness?

HN is probably not the best medium to discuss this but the "Free to Choose" series I mentioned touches on those issues and is available for free on YouTube. It's still quite relevant today despite its age.

open your mind

recursion.

peace

evolution

bitcoin

Toilet paper.

That doing the right thing, even when it seems unfair, even when I shouldn't have to, always works out for the best.

Doing the selfish thing, even if I'm justified, even if it makes sense, ultimately never leads to getting what I want.

The fastest way up the corporate ladder is not knifing people in the back, it's complimenting others behind their backs.

All culture is a lie which only persists through re-telling.

Execution matters more than an idea.

The misguided idea that there is more than one sense of something being someone’s data, and that thus, some how, the public has eternal right to any comment I make in Hacker News.

As expressed here by Paul Graham https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226 and enforced with blind loyalty by Daniel Gackle who repeatedly refuses to delete my stuff instead spending his nights examining and debating the minute details of my words deciding which should or should not be deleted.

If this misguided idea never existed, HN would be like all normal web services, the user would have a delete button and my life would be better.

But, the idea and the power position it allows are here, and my life is changed for the worse.

Bitcoin.

“Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God's world by mistake.”

That's a depressing thought.

The Bitcoin whitepaper. It's the American constitution of the internet.

Compounding, growth etc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY

Taught me the logical impossibility of the stock market to go up by x% per year, forever.

Taught me that getting better today (however small) can give resources to getting better(er?) tomorrow.

Taught me that many "experts" just say whatever to get voted in or to get a budget without regards to the absurdity of their own statements, and that many people eat up this kind of absurdity without fact checking / validating it.

> Taught me the logical impossibility of the stock market to go up by x% per year, forever.

I mean, it's just a number, at ofc it can go up x% every year. For example, consider the case where the currency gets aggressively devalued.

we only care about the real return % which would account for what you're saying. Non-real return is meaningless

Man, I saw the whole video. Amazingly informative.

Thanks you so much.

For me, this type of thinking does the exact opposite in that it has a chilling effect on finding solutions and correctly assessing reality.

While some of what Al Bartlett says is true, that unfettered exponential growth can't go on forever, other statements are misleading or outright false.

He has a soapbox about limiting population growth now (in the US) [0], tied in to concepts of peak oil and other "dark green" talking points. This type of thinking misses the larger picture. The irony is that exponential growth happens all across the board, not just in population growth and energy usage but in innovation for more efficient energy usage and in finding alternative energy sources.

Al Bartlett builds a straw man argument, saying "technological optimists assure use that technology will always solve all of our problems ..." [1] but this isn't true. The argument against Bartlett's statement is that we haven't hit the ceiling on energy that's available to us. This is one of the first issues I have with this thinking: if we were to take his argument at face value, limit population growth, turn down our energy usage and try to live with what we have, then we're setting ourselves up for failure as every other country on the planet shifts to solar because it provides cheaper energy (yes, even to coal) and will only get exponentially cheaper for a good period of time [2] [3].

Here's some simple arithmetic [4]: The average US household consumes 30kWh of energy a day. The available energy falling to the surface of the earth is about 700 * 10^12 kWh per day. That means, at US levels of consumption, the ceiling on just using the sun for our energy needs is 23 trillion people. The earth's population is 7.6 billion now. Even taking Bartlett's estimate of population doubling every 40 years, that's over 400 years of growth.

This is zero-sum thinking and leads to all sorts of "us vs. them" mentality. My first thought is that these are the proto arguments for new forms of eugenics and other oppressive behavior. It also ignores the complexity of the situation of population in the US. I think it's pretty conclusive that strong public education and financial freedom lead to less children. In the US, we already are at sub-replacement but for immigration that boosts our population [5].

I would suggest you take Al Bartlett's advice and not let other people do your thinking for you [6].

[0] https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY?t=4042

[1] https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY?t=3640

[2] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/renewables-cheaper-than-75-perc...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law

[4] https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY?t=4070

[5] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_01-508.pdf

[6] https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY?t=3332

I agree that the limits maybe inconceivably high from here. But disagree they'll always grow. When populations are doubling you'll only at 50% before you're 1 doubling away from collapse / exhaustion.

>That means, at US levels of consumption, the ceiling on just using the sun for our energy needs is 23 trillion people. The earth's population is 7.6 billion now. Even taking Bartlett's estimate of population doubling every 40 years, that's over 400 years of growth.

I think we're starting to see the that the current limiting factor is not the inputs on earth's energy balance, but on the outflows. If we do not reflect a good portion of that energy, but instead utilise it (w/ a good portion being converted to heat) we'll eventually cook ourselves.

Isn't this all obsolete thinking? America (and nearly every other nation in the world) is at replacement population, or nearly. The idea of geometric population growth is some 1950's meme that won't die.

He uses population growth as an example, but the big point is anything that grows geometrically has a doubling rate, and when you're at 50% consumption your only 1 doubling away from catastrophe. Or if you want to talk about summations, If you want to double the availability of something (say houses) you have to repeat the entire time series of production thus far (not counting removals, like demolitions)

Same with the stock market. A stock is basically priced based on it expected future income flows compared to other investment options like bonds. Most things being equal, you need to build an entire whole new business of equal size if you want to double your share value (without dilution i might add).

This task of doing the whole sum again sounds (doubling) much more difficult than "oh just grow at 6% per year for 7 yrs" (rule of 42).

I want to point out the primary indices like the Nasdaq and S&P500 kick out poorly performing companies.

So they very well could go up x% per year if their managers felt like it. It doesn't really bound to the marketcap of its components, just their relative marketcap amongst each other.

If you assume we've only tapped 10% of the planet's economic capacity (raw materials, energy, human support capacity) then we're only about 30 yrs from exhausting this planet. To continue doubling we'll need a new _a new earth_ every 12 years to continue it's growth rate.

This is the point of the video, that when you're consuming a finite resource, you cannot have infinite growth and when you're 1 doubling away from complete exhaustion you'll only have consumed about 50% of those resources ... if doublings are 12 years apart that means the span between rapid growth and halted growth could be as small at 12 years.

I understand that talking point and that's not the point of my response.

The "stock market" - particularly the indices that are improperly used to show the health of the market - can indeed continue going up to infinity for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with physical production of physical goods.

If that rocks your world so much and would like to know more then let me know

I definitely would like to hear about how there can be a real valuation approaching infinity barring playing numbers games like currency/denomination manipulation[1] or artificially inflating share price extrapolated to the whole business[2].

[1]: massive devaluation of currency or a currency split can change the "valuation" in absolute count of the currency, but it wouldnt buy you any more real assets (bread, land, tanks, gold)

[2]: Start a business with a trillion shares, convince a friend to buy 1 share for $1. You're now a trillionaire on paper.

The stock market indices are abstractions of real world value, as in it is impossible for them to represent real world value, and they absolutely can go up to infinity. The S&P500 is printing the value 2,881 at time of writing, and it absolutely can print 1,000,000 and beyond.

When people think about stocks going up forever, they are referring to these indices. Many people are married to one or two particular stocks that they also hope to go up forever with no particular price point in mind. All of that energy is funneled into the indices, as this is what is seen as the lifeblood of economies, it is what the governments react to and the business cycle reacts to.

These are inefficiencies, as these are not the proper things to react to, but it is the best that exists.

All the major indices, for example in the United States: S&P500, Nasdaq, Dow Jones, Russell 2000, are all calculated in different ways.

The S&P500 is a weighted average of certain variables in their component companies, Nasdaq of different variables, Dow Jones of different variables.

These indices usually are attempts to solve problems of prior indices. So the Dow Jones being the most simplistic of them all, but novel at the time.

As I mentioned earlier, the indices also are not containing the same stocks as they did 10 years ago, or 20 years ago. So it does not represent the market cap growth or contraction that is actually occurring, specifically the actual money or supporting liquidity sustaining the stock prices of the individual companies that are part of the index.

Finally, currency "manipulation" is absolutely a factor. You can't "barr" it, what you described in your footnote is not the currency manipulation that happens. Inflation happens, this is continual devaluation and that is how fiat money works. There is an unlimited supply of money for a limited supply of assets.

The standard you created to support your main thesis is unfortunately divorced from the world. Market capitalization has nothing to do with real productivity. The talking points come from the critics of capitalism in general, yes, there are unhealthy incentives for appropriating the resources of the planet, pointing out that limitation does not have anything to do with what is happening in market capitalization and the role of fiat currencies. It greatly weakens your argument to try to conform things to that position.

Only thing I would add for now is that the major company components of the major indices are not producing real physical goods. Their revenues come from ephemeral intangible resources. These are tech companies using cloud platforms, where the entire platform exists in massive virtualized computational instances that are sharing resources over physical hardware, people are exchanging infinite money for an infinitely scalable resource. In this paragraph, infinite is hyperbole for an unknown maximum, where the point is that it is counterproductive to try to rationalize what the limit is in the entire supply chain of physical hardware just to say "see there is a limit".

You have to look at macroeconomics, and study it like a capitalist, and then have real applicable criticisms which people study to improve the system, compared to trying to dismantle it.

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