Ideas that changed my life
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collabfund.com
Love this one ... I wonder what would happen if every Tweet creation screen had this gentle reminder on top
The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril
I like this framing from Ferguson as well. Ray Dalio's recent book The changing world order talks about recurring patterns in human history, and how we're in the middle of one right now.
The US is not as productive as it used to be; its currency is being devalued; and this leads to intense political conflict.
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As a concrete example, it makes me think we're ignoring the wisdom of societies (and religions) that have disallowed gambling:
A lobbying blitz made sports betting ubiquitous (nytimes.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33684467
If you asked me 10 years ago, I would have beeen closer to the viewpoint that gambling should be legal everywhere.
But my experience watching UFC aligns with other commenters here -- sports betting is rampant, and I'll also add that crypto pumping is rampant.
This pattern has played out many times in history -- gambling is destructive for societies and their currencies, and then it is banned.
If large portions of the population are engaged in negative sum games, then that bill becomes due eventually. This extends to the stock market (which I've benefited from) and crypto, not just sports betting.
It's likely that societies that ban or limit gambling are the ones that survive!
I feel like this is silly. The daily events of my life - waking up, using the restroom, driving a car, the work that I do all day, the conversations I have - all have an extremely close resemblance to the same actions almost everyone else does every single day. My exact explicit experiences are a minuscule fraction of all experiences, but they're extremely representative of how life and the world works for a billion other people.
Question one: do you have a uterus?
Nor are there any society constructs or expectations that cause people with uteruses to be treated differently from those without, especially those that might challenge gender norms that traditionally go along with those physical attributes.
There are no differences in pay, or career expectations; no laws passed anywhere in the world that might legislate either of groups being treated differently.
We definitely don't still segregate humans into different rooms to urinate or defecate.
You heard it here first! Half an hour a month is all it takes! The rest of the time, everything else is totally the same!
Where the source for this? Like, a LOT of our thinking, our stories, our traditions are based off of or directly attributed to people who have come before.
I think this is could be a rational matter of trust. You can't be an expert on understanding every proposal. You have one political representative group that has the appearance of being relatively aligned with your values, and another group that seems to be actively against many of your values. Which representative group are you going to extend some benefit of the doubt or delegate to, and which are you going to be more skeptical of?
But it's not always a matter of trust, it can also be a matter of attack. Consider one political party blocking all initiatives by the other party, to deny the other any wins, even if the initiative is also in the interests of their own party. Or consider the "own/trigger the libs" behavior, where the goal seems to solely be to hurt, not to advance any other goal. On the other end of an attack, though, they'll tend to have less trust of anything from any group they associate with the attack.
To me that doesn't sound like it. As an outsider, republicans project an image of populist demagogues who thrive in bait-and-switch politics. I'd be surprised if the average American expected republicans to actually implement policies that go against what they've been always proposing.
You trust your tribe, because it's your tribe. I don't think it's "some benefit of doubt" for very complex issues, it's basic stuff. The study mentioned is about welfare policy.
> One version provided generous benefits, whereas the other version provided stringent benefits. Informal pilot testing confirmed both that self-identified liberals preferred the generous policy to the stringent one and that self-identified conservatives preferred the stringent policy to the generous one
So it's not like "I know Neil and trust him and he's been working on anti-gravity for years, so if he says the right equation are these 44 pages, I'll take it", it's "I know Neil and trust him. If he says we have to sacrifice our firstborns, I'll get the axe."
I totally get the idea of delegating away thinking about specific, maybe esoteric issues... but we're at a point where one party could say "the sky is green" and people will agree with that, even if they know (or once knew) that to not be the case, simply to be in defiance of the "others." (or the "own the libs" as you say)
Just look at any popular page for either party. The majority of the content is utter nonsense designed to get engagement. So much collective energy spent on things people won't even remember by next week.
Relatedly, you can get voters to say they don't like a social program, but get them to agree they like all the individual things it actually does (usually, they don't really know what it does, they've just been told to dislike it).
that's called "lying".
In this case, it discovers that their opinions are not fact-based, despite proclaiming to be so.
it's an absurd gotcha. nobody has every statistic memorized.
Rather, leaders perform a delicate balancing act where they act the way in-group expects them to, least they will lose any power and importance. Because your peer group, nation, firm, profession etc. is not just a passive influence on the way you think and behave, it's also the fundamental tool you have to change the world. Outside philosophy or chess nobody can succeed alone, and even there people need opportunities and support.
You can see this balancing act most clearly with politicians, who must change their apparent convictions from one day to the next as circumstance unfold (for example, see Obama's flip on gay marriage once his wider voting public flipped). But it's true in almost any setting you can imagine, all success involves a political power game. Troublemakers, those who are too easily willing to go against the status quo, are culled early, even if they are technically right and even if most people know they are right.
[1] https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MH9suFZbxXCYsr5Z5/...
http://stephendavies.org/writings/mitterederEtAl.pdf
We referred to the phenomenon of supporting "unrelated" issues as "issue alignment."
IMO, the "benefits" of tribes just don't nearly outweigh the cons and I have only ever been happier by leaving as many as possible. I can't really say if society benefits from them or not (my guess is no) but on a personal level, I'd say leave any if you realize you're spending significant amounts of time pouring over trivial issues.
I really like these ideas though. Some might find them simple but simple is good. It's _very_ easy to forget things like this while operating in the day to day.
Why am I expected/forced to vote in a manner that bundles my views on guns, gender/orientation, race, immigration, education, abortion, jobs, war, taxes, and the economy? I'm "liberal" on some of those issues, "conservative" on others, and centrist on most of them. Ain't no candidates (or even party!) for me to vote for.
Audio books: https://librivox.org/
Libgen like Project Gutenberg often has poor formatting on eBooks. Librivox recordings are donated by volunteers. A single book might have multiple readers. Not ideal but you get what you pay for. Audible also has some classics for free, with subscription.
The irony is that I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if the post listed “Ideas are cheap…” as another takeaway.
I wonder whether someone who’s truly internalized these lessons will actually write a post like this. I hate to be wantonly critical, but (I say this sincerely, and with the best possible intent) it feels like it would take a kind cluelessness (and lack of higher-order thinking) to write this post. Maybe there’s a translation chasm and I’m reading too much into it :shrug:
I honestly do get what you're saying... but I think a post like this can only help people. Ironically, one of the ideas is that your experience is not applicable to 99% of people, so for some, these ideas _are_ new :)
If someone asked you on the spot, what are your ideas for life, I feel it would be hard to really answer.
If someone asked this author, I think he would have the answer down pat. Almost exclusively because he wrote them down. It takes some organizational effort to write.
> There’s as much to learn about your field from other fields than there is within your field
You may be on to something
1) Practice makes you better. 2) You can make decisions that affect the rest of your life. 3) Programming (the idea that many procedures can be broken down into precisely defined steps which can be done by a computer.) 4) People are mostly kind. women are somewhat more likely to be kind than men.
5) Your conscious mind can make changes to your brain and your body. You can exercise. You can teach yourself to like or dislike things more. You can change your habits. 6) You can learn skills from a book or other written materials. 7) The idea and laws of probability (including Baysian) 8) The ability to estimate (Fermi Questions).
9) Information Theory and Kolmogorov Complexity (Algorithmic Complexity) 10) Polynomial and Exponential Growth (related to Black Swans) 11) You can use algebra to solve for one variable given a few equations 12) Calculus (Esp Fundamental Theorem of Calculus)
13) Object oriented Programming (Inheritance, Polymorphism) 14) Mathematical proof - the ideas that you can take a bunch of axioms and use logic to reach many amazing and useful conclusions. Furthermore, you can have a high degree of certainty that the result (theorem) is true especially if it is verified by another mathematician or a computer. 15) Game Theory (The Nash Equilibrium often exists and it (or they) can often be found.) 16) Energy and Momentum are both conserved. That fact arises from the symmetries of the universe (invariance under translation by space time, and rotation (see Emmy Noether).
17) Optimization ( many problems have an optimal solution and often calculus or math can be used to find it.) 18) You can guess many of the formulas of physics 19) Thermodynamics (Laws of Thermodynamics) 20) Recursion
21) Extending the idea of the pythagorean theorem (Application of Hilbert Spaces) 22) Declarative Programming
Reposted here
http://artent.net/2022/12/08/ideas-that-changed-my-life-morg...
This explains every online discussion about programming that has comments invoking "toy problems" and "in production".
Oof, bump that 80 up to 99% and that's my wife. She will see two <people with a similar trait> doing <same thing> and then confidently declare "All <people with trait> do <thing>"
...which often ends up with not very politically correct conclusions.
I'm more of the "expect the unexpected; there's no such thing as normal; there are more exceptions than there are rules" kind of person.
>Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.
Contradictary.
I think that the second is completely wrong. Not that any of us watch in real time everything that is happening. But certain patterns remain the same.
For example, when I was an 8-year-old kid, my father would always say the lines of tv shows and movies a few seconds before the actors said them. I asked him how and he said it was because they were all predictable and said the same thing all the time. I said, "No, you watched the tv show/movie before." And he said, "How could I have watched it, this is a brand new episode, right?" And he had me there, because it was.
Of course, I can now always say the lines in movies before the actors do, because, my dad was right - lots of shit is the exact same and predictable as hell. I don't need to see 100% of every single tv show or movie to know what they are all about.
Pretty much I do understand 80% or more of what's going on in the world through my 0.00000001% seeing stuff that I do see.
The older you get, the more everything becomes the same fucking shit, day after day.
Someone wrote this shit about 2,500 years ago:
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.
Perhaps the ideas did change the authors life, but also at a very early age?
> The only truly sustainable sources of competitive advantage I know of are:
Learn faster than your competition.
Empathize with customers more than your competition.
Communicate more effectively than your competition.
Be willing to fail more than your competition.
Wait longer than your competition.
There may be better posts that might have appealed to more people but did not make it to the front page because the post could not find the 4-5 people who care enough to vote on it.
This just means that climate change is not a scientfic/technological/engineering problem yet, but a political one.