Ok, so you can’t decide
randsinrepose.com
randsinrepose.com
a) that the fact that the decision was difficult meant that either choice had a close likelihood of turning out well. b) that the biggest mistakes I have made tended to lead to my biggest successes.
I should have also added:
c) Sometimes, you perception has limited you to choosing between two choices. Change your perception enough to see that there are always a multitude of choices. You may not want to pick the 3rd+ choice, but knowing that you made your choices freely allows you to own the choice and the outcome.
This is the result of, yes, marketing, but also the kind of naive belief that more magnification → better.
The idea of always just throwing more brain-racking at a problem strikes me as similarly naive. Yes, getting down to work and doing the analysis is important, and sometimes there isn't enough of that. When you don't have enough, go ahead and add more.
But sometimes, the naive brute-force method isn't what’s called for. Sometimes, instead, you need to zoom out.
In any case, the thing that struck me, was the recommended dose, of 300 micrograms (0.3mg). Since the lowest OTC dosage is 3mg, and it goes up to at least 10mg, this was a shock. I have been taking 6-9 mg per night.
I immediately lowered the dosage to about 1mg (I have 300 microgram pills on order).
Slept like a baby.
The combination of turning the lights off in my room, watch something relaxing/calming (that doesn't make me laugh hard or scared) for 1 hour before bed helped me, BUT I also had to use night light for my monitor (flux). I can get at best around 6 hours of sleep and has become my norm as my neighbors can get loud early morning.
Also, I always use relaxing apps to sleep. Rain sounds, white noise, music, I just install and uninstall them 3 times a week trying stuff out.
Have you tried earplugs? They changed my life on days where people decide to be noisy, which is every other day here. I don't here the car honks, loud neighbors, and thunder anymore.
The best part is I still get woken up by my phone's alarm at full volume, even with earplugs on.
After years of terrible sleep, I gave in and started using melatonin daily. Every part of my life has improved.
I haven't seen anything to suggest dependency is an issue, and, if I miss a dose (forget to take it until too late), I have reverted to my old sleeping pattern, rather than anything worse. No increased onset insomnia or anything like that.
Just sticky bits of cellophane that let you still see the lights when you need them but not so intense at night. You can get them on amazon or w/e
Then scroll down the Accessibility settings page to Accessibility Shortcut. This sets what happens when you triple-click the power button. If you set this to Reduce White Point (RWP), it will turn on/off RWP while remembering the slider setting you selected.
I find this invaluable when I wake up in the middle of the night and want to read for a bit without filling my eyes with light / risking waking anyone.
(Edited for spelling)
It's not a total cure for delayed circadian rhythm (your hormone levels, body temp etc. are still out of sync) but as far as fitting into more typical "business hours" sleep schedule usually expected of us, it does the job.
But yeah, if you go to like CVS or something they only sell 10mg doses. Would not recommend.
To explain overscoped to a non shooter…
You’re lined up on a target at 30x. Fighting your breathing, heart beat, movement from the rest / bipod / barricade. It’s never going to be perfectly steady, and that 30x magnification is showing every bit of sway and deviation of the target and your reticle.
On 10x, a guy can come in, line it up, and not see all of that deviation. He sees the target, the aiming point (which is rarely your exact cross hairs, a different topic) and just focus on a good trigger pull. The target is a lot smaller to him, but that’s ok because it’s not a complicated shot, just a small target.
There is also getting lined up for your next shot, the recoil on 30x means your field of view has jumped and left the target somewhere out in the ether. If you have multiple shots to make, the guy on 10x will be able to see his next, or at least track where he is now and needs to be next.
(And I think the Carolina business suffered greatly during the 07 recession, but I bought a house in Cali before the market fell... so either way was a path with struggle.)
Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,
and you’re hampered by not having any,
best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No—not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you’re passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you’re hoping.
There is indeed a song there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvLjJE7Bt88.
(Also, for any musicians who dislike or are ambivalent toward country music, maybe even give it a listen. Those Nashville studio musicians are ridiculous.)
also, if you can't decide it often (but not always) means choices are about equally good (unless you're missed something big), so you probably won't be terribly wrong either way
Suggest you all go to McDonald's.
There's nothing that gets people to immediately shoot down an idea and suggest something else quite like the prospect of a Big Mac.
* Anyone can veto a suggestion, but they must suggest an alternate restaurant (that has not already been vetoed) instead.
This rule is gameable. A bad faith participant could veto a restaurant and suggest a patently horrible one and then rely on someone else to veto that and do the work to come up with a good suggestion. But there is a meta-rule here which is:
* Don't be friends with people who would do that.
I prefer the "no revisiting" rule because it places backpressure on participants to not veto unless they really meann it. If they really would be OK with the restaurant such that they would allow revisiting it, then they probably shouldn't veto in the first place.
This tends to make the game go faster, which is an important goal.
> * Don't be friends with people who would do that.
Lol, I think this is actually very generalizable for.. many rules. Pretty good call.
So he had 8hrs sleep and a name.
That strategy didn’t work well for Jeff Bezos, who went with “Cadabra” for a few months, which he admits is a terrible name (cadavra).
PS I'm almost always open for McDonald's lunch, so that one isn't going to encourage me to give a good idea. Not eating at Jack in the Box though, would rather starve, thanks.
We enter a different thinking mode, termed "diffuse", where the release of focus allows us to subconsciously zoom out and stitch together the newly acquired information and partial revelations into a clearer more advanced picture.
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If you wanted to truly answer such a question you have to:
1. Be able to perceive multiple timelines in their entirety and
2. be able to convert those entire timelines into some comparable values
From where we stand, both of those are impossible, and whatever cascading effects may come from any action are completely invisible. We simply do not know the long term outcomes of our actions, and rarely can prove even short-term causation in the first place.
There's an ocean between:
- "I did x because I thought it was the right thing" and
- "I can tell what's good or bad in the world"
I can not know whether me personally, as a specific individual, buying an electric car to go to work is better or worse for the ecosystem than buying a used fuel efficient ICE.
I can know that all the carbon we dump in the air and the general carelessness with which we treat the planet on a large scale are extremely detrimental to our civilisational wellbeing.
I btw highly recommended Breaking Boundaries on Netflix.
You really, really, really can not. For all you know, the impending doom of climate change could be the chaotic event that stops us from going full nuclear.
Or perhaps humans are bad fruit, and our form of space colonization is filled with rape, torture, and slavery. Perhaps it's better humans die.
One really, really, really can not know.
I really really really can’t know if the sun comes up tomorrow or 100 days from now either, but it is exceedingly likely and the same is true about my previous statement.
Disregard at your own (and all of our) peril.
I am in no way saying we shouldn't pursue it, or do our best. But simply admitting that we could be wrong is the first step to catching our own mistakes.
Being aware of our own ignorance is important. Extremely so. And failing to see it is a far greater source of peril than "depart[ing] into theoretical/philosophical mode"
But when you say: > Much the opposite. Yours is the belief which every war has been fought over: the belief that you know what's good and bad, or right and wrong.
I can also say that the same is true for all progress the world has seen. That some group of people made a decision and acted.
It’s about likelihoods. Everything can be wrong but some things are more likely than others.
Science, art, and creation all tend to be rich with ambiguity and uncertainty.
Most of the time, people hope they can do a thing and stick to it through many ups and downs. And the times when it works out, even the people who believed in it all along appear to be surprised.
The Coddling of the American Mind.
What if we discover that everyone really can "just get along" because we coddled 300 million people into believing it, and it actually becomes a reality in the US and spreads throughout the globe? Even the Taliban ends up being nice and people don't even get picked on in school anymore. I mean...its possible right?
Re: coddling of the American mind, I was talking about increasing intolerance of opposing views views, decreasing willingness to seek truth, seeing words as violence etc. It's hard to see a path where this type of thinking becomes universal. No matter how strong that movement, it won't completely eradicate those who believe in freedom of thoughts and freedom of speech.
I'm not sure how you can fairly put odds on something as complex as climate change, but say you're right. Even so, its still consistent with the parable. What are the odds if your horse runs away that it returns with 7 wild horses? Probably not that good, but it could happen.
Like in the parable, you are the neighbor saying "climate change, isn't it awful?" and the farmer would say "maybe". And he wouldn't be wrong. Because maybe implies uncertainty, and you seem to agree it's possible something good can come from climate change. So the parable seems to apply to "emergent systemic effects" as well.
But more importantly the real lesson is how that one can chill the fuck out, like the farmer. The neighbors' emotions are ruled by events, but not the farmer because he's not trying to judge these things that are out of his control. It doesn't mean he wouldn't fight climate change. It does mean though he's not gonna be an emotional wreck every time he turns on the news.
It's not solar, wind, hydro or fusion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
I'm not interested in a debate, just observing that people who say (correctly or incorrectly) the world is coming to an end don't believe it, because otherwise they'd stop bickering and do what needs to be done.
The world isn’t coming to an end but our cozy place in it might very well be.
Nuclear power should have been the only thing built by rich countries for the last 5 decades but of course there are real dangers regarding the unreliability of us humans as maintainers and operators.
On the other hand, they may just think there is no political route to stopping it.
I have never been an advocate of nuclear power in general, and I don't think the world needs more conventional fission reactors. I don't believe fusion power will ever be viable either.
But my pop-sci understanding of a fast breeder reactor is it consumes waste and produces more fuel.
Couldn't it be ripe for someone to take up a similar role to SpaceX only with nuclear power? Assuming we do really believe that climate change has to be stopped at any cost.
Without a circuit breaker, indecision and inaction would rule the day. What is needed is a mental switch that stops infinite ruminations and calms our fears of missing an unknown superior alternative. Such a switch can't be a thought or we would be back at the same problem. The simplest solution would be a sensation that feels like a thought but isn't subject to thought's perpetual self-questioning. The constellation of mental states that constitutes the feeling of knowing is a marvelous adaptation that solves a very real metaphysical dilemma of how to reach a conclusion. [0]
This clicked to me. I try to think my way to a decision. But what I really need is a feeling.
[0] https://www.rburton.com/_i_on_being_certain_i___believing_yo...
As moderns, we take it for granted that the best decisions stem from a process of empirical analysis and informed choice, with a clear goal in mind. That kind of decision-making, at least in theory, undergirds the ways that we choose political leaders, play the stock market, and select candidates for schools and jobs. It also shapes the way in which we critique the rituals and superstitions of others. But, as the Kantu’ illustrate, there are plenty of situations when random chance really is your best option. And those situations might be far more prevalent in our modern lives than we generally admit.
https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-ran...
Randomness, in the face of insufficient information or a poorly-scoped model for interpreting data, at least avoids the overt biases of bad decisionmaking systems.
I truly wish this were my experience. If I'm facing a decision that it really hard for me to make, then once I've made it, I experience no such relief.
If I feel bad about the decision I try again until I feel good about it. Letting go of the choice and leaving it to fate to decide kinda sets you free.
Isn't this what got you mental paralysis in the first place? And why young people are generally more risk-taking? As you get more experience, you learn that every endeavor hides unknown risks.
It's this uncertainty (and unknown) that makes you hesitant. If you did enough endeavors that made you go through significant pain, you'll likely don't want to go through the experience again.
Of course he wouldn't advise dithering forever, but if your subconscious is making you anxious about the decision, it might be for a good reason.
0 and 6 seconds --> Action C
6 and 12 seconds --> Action B
12-60 seconds --> Action A
Another useful trick I use is to take the sequential digits of pi mod (n) for n possible actions. I happen to remember 40 digits or so of pi, so I can produce 40 very random-looking actions that way.
Now I am aware of the phrase: 'If you wait until you are ready, you will never get it done'. But I've actually blogged professionally for about 3 years and saw what that meant. You had journalists cold-calling you in the middle of the night because your blogpost was going viral, traffic going through the roof.
Though the blog didn't go down because of the traffic, I was still paying for the CDN monthly which at the time because of AD revenue didn't hurt my pocket as much. Today I simply can't afford it, and out of respect for my users, I won't serve ADS. So the workaround for many in that situation, is to go with a free service like wordpress.com or Tumblr or Blogger etc. But they're all weaponized with ADs and tracking cookies, and I don't want to make my users suffer loss of privacy because of what I've written.
I used to self host, but then even that comes with caveats: can you harden the VPS enough to stop bots and bad actors getting in and ruining your blog? How does the CMS bounce back after the VPS has been rebooted? All these stupid edge cases can make you go insane. Then the CMS itself has to be configured the right way. Have you got HSTS turned on? Have you got your caching right? Are all your images optimized?
It's too much. I prefer to just lurk on various Internet forums since I can still reach a large audience that way, albeit even forums come with caveats. So far certain communities haven't had their Eternal September yet, and places like Tildes.net look promising. In the end, it was a good run, but it can't last. Maybe I'll take up blogging again, when I'm 'not ready' for it and DGAF anymore, who knows?
1: I prefer EU companies with strict privacy laws. I only host with Switzerland.
2: Github won't be happy with 1/2 million unique IPs in a day hitting their servers when a post goes viral. (That's an expense on their part)
3: With a free GH account everything is public knowledge and every change made to your blog is visible via diffs. I don't want nosey people poring over every mistake I made in posts. I'm not sure it's possible to have a Github Pages instance that is private.
4: Whilst 3rd party tools assist in markdown generation (for use with Jekyll and Hugo), you still have to peek inside templates to customize everything to your liking. Something I am tired of doing.
5: Whilst TLS & HTTPS on Github pages is supported, I still have problems getting it to work properly. Seems to only work on {username}.github.io and not a custom domain.
6: There are issues with what URL to serve to on GH Pages. Do I use `www.site.com` or `site.com`? And how does the server negotiate which one to use?