Powerful Life Skills for the New Decade

I've wondered this for some time too, and I think the issue is culture. Ask anyone who's moved continents (or even say from somewhere like Manhattan to New Mexico) and they'll probably tell you there's a culture shock that requires adjustment, even sometimes in the little things. Everything from how the banks operate, what days and times grocery stores are open, and how to get around with what transport all the way to bigger things like ease of socialising with locals or a new language (not to mention nearby family help/responsibility).

In areas with easy migration I think there's less of a cultural shift that a person has to go through in order to make it work. That's why it works within cities and states/provinces, and Europe and India could fall into this as well. Even when it is legally and logistically possible, how many people actually do make the move from NY to New Mexico or how many French decide to work somewhere like Germany?

> There are huge disparities in wealth and income within America, right? America's poorest state has a median income of 45K (Mississippi) and it's richest state has a median income of 80K (Maryland). Why doesn't everyone just move to Maryland? Or better yet just move to San Francisco (median 112K). Obviously there's factors other than economics keeping people in place.

That's still a relatively small difference compared to places where incomes can be $100/year or much less. I definitely think there's room for more experimentation in this area, but it's probably not as simple as "just open the borders".

I think it could be because labor laws differ much more between nations than they do between states. There's more room for corps to drive down wages by outsourcing labor to nations that don't have labor laws.

Yes, you’re right it doesn’t make any sense, there’s no real reason it wouldn’t work. You’d have to rethink national and supranational government at that point though.

It's the ghost of merchantalism, really. What matters to a nation or empire historically is putting more stuff - goods, ships, people - "on the books", and calling that the wealth, but annexation and political incorporation as the way of accomplishing this gradually fell out of favor as we entered the modern period and turned towards productivity metrics. But you can create a scenario where your accounts - you being "whomever holds political power" - are inflated relative to others by enforcing favorable borders and terms of trade, so that you wield more productive forces relative to everyone else. And that's been the strategy of industrial-colonial countries.

If you are for global productivity, rather than local wealth, then open borders are the way, but they come with all kinds of other political challenges since they put the world on a course to unification more generally.

So the obvious answer is that you can either have welfare programs or you can have open borders, you can't have both.

To be fair it does seem pretty random when stuff gets taken up and when it doesn't. AFAICT sometimes content that ends up very popular is ignored the first few submissions.

Never heard the term listickle before. Thanks for introducing it :)

I wss enjoying the discussion without reading the article

Noted, I was starting to submit way too much as a part of an experiment. That experiment failed miserably (and led to a shitlist addition).

I don't submit things more than 4x now. What you see are the remnants of the experiment.

At the same time, I don't think things make it to the front-page if they're bad.

Aside, but on similar lines:

I have to keep reminding myself that everyone isn't like me.

In my private talks with myself, I refer to this skill as modelling other people well: in effect, I'm trying to build models for different kinds of people.

There's lots of different kinds, and a few broad types show up, explaining most of their (general / broad) actions.

This is still very much a work in progress for myself too, but would be very interesting to see if I get somewhere substantial.

FWIW I often feel the same as you. But as an aside have you ever tried to get a cab outside Manhattan before Uber?

>I have the most difficulty with the 'learn to see what others see' point. It can take me a long time to see why non-technical people have some of views they do

One way I've thought about this is a difference in understanding patterns.

Imagine that you can see a picture of a landscape. You can see the sun in the sky, rolling hills covered in grass, and a town in the distance. You can probably reproduce this picture. You might not be able to draw it well, or maybe at all, but you could at least describe it.

Now imagine a picture of some English text. You can reproduce this rather accurately. Maybe even from memory.

After that, imagine a picture of text in Dutch. You can reproduce it when you can see it, but you'll probably have difficulty recalling it. The patterns don't make as much sense, because you don't understand Dutch.

Now, imagine an image of Japanese text. Reproducing it, even when it's right next to you, would be difficult. The patterns that make up the text don't make sense to you. You don't have enough experience with Japanese to even try to put pieces together to describe it to someone. You can forget about trying to memorize it.

Now

Think about people with different language backgrounds looking at these same images. They might be looking at the same thing, but they will see something different. People who aren't familiar with Japanese and Korean might not even be able to tell these two languages apart! They look very different, but with no experience they both look like squiggly gibberish. It comes down to a difference in experience with different patterns.

This idea applies to basically everything in life. Be it understanding tech, playing sports, riding a bike, or playing video games. People's past experiences will influence what they can recognize and reproduce in those activities.

If you want to experience this distance yourself then I recommend playing some video game where you can significantly improve at the game quickly. Something like Super Hexagon. At first, you'll fail. You'll fail within the first few seconds over and over. In minutes, however, you'll fail less and less. Soon, you can go a whole minute without failing. You do this on a few different occasions and suddenly, it's difficult for you to understand how you couldn't do this right from the start. After all, the game is quite simple! It just wasn't simple for you at the time.

It's not just a difference in preferences.

"Many of the 'Unicorns' spark this reaction from me. Which is probably why I'm not retired on a private island somewhere :-P "

Haha, me too.

Do you use a digital labbook? If so what do you use? I am currently trying MS OneNote. Just pasting everything in. Pictures, screengrabs, thoughts parameters. But I am wondering if there is a better alternative.

I think a thing you have to be careful of here is that “taste” does not imply a single optimal solution. It’s entirely possible to have very definite tastes and views while acknowledging there are other equally valid viewpoints that doesn’t mesh well with yours.

For example I may love and have a highly developed taste for “western” style classical music and have little appreciation for microtonal Indian classical music without believing it is somehow inferior, yet at the same time believe that not all music is equally good. This isn’t exactly the same as moral relativism that you call out but related.

I would tell those people the good pots weren’t the first ones, they were the last ones. Which suggests smashing the poorly built prototype and starting over.

In other words I read it as an elaboration on “practice makes perfect.” Or, there’s no substitute for experience. (100% true in my... er, experience, across several different fields.)

One of the first pieces of advice I got in my career was about a study on expertise. (Wish I had a reference.) The authors wanted to know what made the experts different from the non-experts. You know what the difference was? Reps. That’s it.

Now, as someone who has taught a technical, challenging, and all-encompassing field—by which I mean a field that covers not just a knowledge domain but also psychomotor skills and personal values—I can tell you that some people do bring more natural ability at the start. But even those folks don’t achieve mastery without the reps.

That isn’t really a problems with the analogy, if people are choosing to ignore it.

I like looking through documentation, but between knowing how to read documentation and knowing how to make sense of code, the later is more important, because the code is always there [1], and documentation is often missing, outdated, inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading.

When you have documentation you can trust to be accurate, complete, and up to date, it can be very helpful to use it though.

[1] unless you're building on top of binary only software, and you're not comfortable with reverse engineering

I like the expression "insight porn" for this sort of thing, since it describes both the relationship readers have with it as well as the outcomes (or lack thereof)

Partially, yes! - And partially about priorities.

So, you're doing whatever sequence is better. It's a general case of the example you mention:

With one permutation (yours), you can get everything done. With another permutation (relax first, meeting prep later) - you might be leaving the prep for the last minute.

There's some cases when the first permutation is better - when you have enough energy, say, and the meeting is important.

There's other cases when the second permutation is better - when, say, you're already low on energy and the meeting isn't that important - so you're prioritising relaxing.

There's more examples on the linked page[0]

An example of neither delayed gratification, nor priorities:

Permutation 1: Accusing someone of spewing non-sense, then understanding what they really meant.

Permutation 2: Understanding what they really meant, and then, if necessary, accusing them of spewing nonsense.

Permutation 2 as a habit leads to better outcomes. Mostly.

[0]: https://neilkakkar.com/sequencing-things-in-the-right-order....

I think this is just a corollary of having your priorities straight. You'll likely prioritize the most important things first if you have a clear goal of what you want.

The ISO date standard says that decades begin on years ending in zero. Should be the end of the debate.

These lines of thinking actually work, though. Which is very interesting in itself.

https://laboriacuboniks.net/manifesto/xenofeminism-a-politic... !

Alternatively, see QAnon sites xD