How to Be More Agentic | Hacker News Reader

How to Be More Agentic

usefulfictions.substack.com

293 pointsdanboarder201 comments

  Assume everything is learnable

This made me think of late grandmother who used to say : "c'est faite par du mondes" which roughly expand to "a person did/learned/discovered that so there is no a prioi reason that I cannot do so myself". That's the greatest value she passed unto me. When I feel that I cannot do something, I think about that phrase and persevere.

I actually work for a guy like this now and at first I didn't quite get what he was doing, but I really like it now. He comes from a non-technical background but can code enough to be dangerous now.

He loves talking to experts in every facet of what we do, and just start from the most basic foundational questions. He has absolutely no ego about embarrassing himself by the basics of questions he asks and no shame about digging in with follow ups.

It's actually quite a powerful thing. Experts love to explain things if given the space. You also start to realize how narrow and sometimes shallow expertise is, and it lowers your own anxiety.

> You also start to realize how narrow and sometimes shallow expertise is

Thanks for putting this in such clear words.

What I would really like to learn is not to be ticked off about seeing this. I get annoyed when somebody is pawning their expertise of as something grand while I think it's quite limited, and often, of course, so limited that they can't even conceive of the space outside their limits. I find my natural reaction overly negative and just not productive.

This resonates with me. I’ve so far chalked it up to envy of their “unearned” confidence that’s rooted in my own self-esteem issues. Recognizing a fellow imposter in the wild.

I think it is fine to look at the details of what actually was achieved, see if it had an impact. In that particular case, the achievement seems to be contributing to operations to development of a new candidate COVID vaccine and putting it via a Phase-1 trial in South Africa, with the following result:

DNA SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine (Alveavax-V1.2) - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4645890 While safe, well tolerated, and shelf stable for >6 months at room temperature, a naked DNA SARS-CoV-2 booster candidate in doses up to 8 mg administered intradermally or subcutaneously, as well as Janssen Ad26.COV2.S comparator, did not significantly increase BA.2 antibody titers in a preimmunized, largely pre-infected population.

Not a breakthrough, but it is productive. Likely worth the resources that were spent on this. So it is just good job, keep on going. There's really no point of being negative or annoyed.

What is not clear to me, is if the author is applying herself in the place where she has an edge and could be most impactful. A world class poker player and Yale Law School grad potentially can do well in politics. Upholding democracy seems like a kind of annoying job that Yale grads should be on.

Yes, pride is the biggest obstacle to growth. It prevents you from making our needs known, because it means making an admission that you lack something (like knowledge or understanding, in this case). It means being honest about what you are (humility), revealing your deficits. And we all have deficits. We all have lack. Love is about seeking and receiving what you lack (eros), and giving to those who lack what they seek (agape).

So what does this tell us, this tendency toward pride? I means many of us spend a horrifying amount of time posing, pretending, feigning worth we don't actually have, in order to appear to be something we are not, because we think this will get us things we couldn't by being honest. In order words, we're liars, fraud, and cheats. We lie to get things we know, or least believe, we do not deserve, through false advertising. And we fear being belittled and ridiculed and put down, or losing or losing something. We shirk responsibility this way. We confuse purity with a kind of "cleanliness". We want to appear clean, but become impure and corrupt in doing so.

The choice between pride and humility is, I think, the basic decision in life one must make, and keep making, and it can be difficult as the world does not make it easy to prefer what is good. It seems to want to reward you for pretense, and punish you for honesty and the truth. That's why you also need courage, the courage to surrender to the consequences, of doing the right thing and being humble, and embrace them. You cannot control anything but your actions within your limits. You need to be able to accept just but painful outcomes gladly, and suffer the injustices. The inability to suffer, to suffer injustice, is the gateway to pride, and pride comes before the fall, before death and stagnation. You get further in life by suffering and moving forward, suffering and moving forward, suffering and moving forward.[0] There is no life in you otherwise. There is no love in you otherwise.

[0] This is also why the Via Crucis is so powerful. Life is not a party or a pleasure garden. It's a struggle that ends in death. The only choice is one between miserable comfort and wasteful decay on the one hand, and struggle, suffering, and total exhaustion on the other. The Via Crucis, a road full of suffering that passes through death, at least ends in final liberation. But that is the price, the narrow gate. Most choose the wide gate of miserable self-preservation, something they will loose in the end anyway.

This guy will be a staff engineer soon.

Is this tongue in cheek? I appreciate and try to emulate this trait, but worry it comes off as politic-ing.

What I got out of it was "determination eventually beats natural skill over time".

A little, but it also wouldn't surprise me at all.

This trait is what I associate with people who quickly develop deep knowledge and impressive breadth.

Hopefully they want that title :)

I always assumed everyone assumed everything was learnable. Realizing this (i.e., that being everyone's default belief) might not be the case is kind of blowing my mind a little right now.

Ask ten people if they can draw, and half will say "No, I'm not artistic" or "I'm not creative", as though it were an innate quality.

When I've heard that before I always just thought they meant they had no particular talent for it and weren't interested enough to learn. More a case of choosing to focus on things you feel more naturally inclined to, as opposed to thinking something is unlearnable for you.

Some people really think it's totally outside of their capacity, even if they wanted to draw.

Feeling like it's useless also hinders the desire to try, declining the interest in it anyway.. a little bit chicken&egg.

Is there an alpha in domains that "require innate talent"?

You can learn anything you want, but really wanting is the hardest part.

Agreed, I've always believed you can learn anything you want. The realization I was talking about was the one where maybe that's not the default assumption for everyone.

Of course it's not the default assumption.

Why “of course”? I too took a long time to discover this wasn’t the case. I don’t think it’s as obvious as your wording makes it sound.

Surely you've heard countless "I just can't do math", "I can't draw to save my life", "I don't have talent for X", "Piano teacher tried but I just have no talent for it", "Wow, you must be very talented for doing Y", no?

I think actually following through over time is the hard part. Wanting to do something is easy.

Sustained motivation is just a matter of degree of want. If you want something enough you will do it.

At least that's my premise.

This is a wild oversimplification. And very dangerous if you try to apply to people in more complex situations.

Dangerous?

Yes, dismissing mental and health problems can make people not seek treatment, further increase them, or at more extreme cases even physically hurt people.

Dismissing social problems can have the equivalent of all those consequences, and even worse ones.

Where did he dismiss people problems ?

If someone want to do something enough, he should be compelled to seek help to overcome his limitations. Comment like your encourages learned helplessness, which to me is a lot more dangerous than what he said !

Full agreeance.

I grew up poor, had stints of homelessness, and all my friends/relatives came from the same background.

Learned helplessness is one of, if not the biggest, issues facing socially disadvantaged people. Money, counselling, temporary housing - all of this is moot and useless if the person retains a poor mindset.

Conversely, if there's a positive mindset, then they are most likely going to seek out those opportunities and use them to their advantage.

> You can learn anything you want

Without any quantifier/qualifier, say that "you can learn anything you want" is meaningless. If you are not disabled (broadly speaking), you can learn to run, where running is a way of continuously moving your body in which for some time no foot is touching the ground (marching/walking = one foot is touching the ground always). But, can you learn to run the 100 m dash in under 12/13/14 seconds?

Sure, anybody can learn to draw, where drawing means moving the ink from pen to paper, but can you draw something that is objectively good? And if yes, how long will it take for someone like me, who has close to no talent for it?

And so on.

There's all sort of obstacles to learning. It could be the price of the courses you want to take, the lack of motivation/willpower/discipline to follow through, poor learning skills, lack of equipment or materials.

Everything is learnable but most things are not worth learning.

People used to think few things were learnable and you had to have innate talent to learn something.

One of the few remaining holdouts of this idea is perfect pitch. Most people I've seen express an opinion don't believe it's learnable after some childhood cutoff period. I'm not sure how well researched it is, though.

There was a study where they found that taking valproate opened a critical period that helped people learn it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/

Very cool, I wasn't aware of that study. Thanks!

I found this out late in life working on an environmental cause. We were all volunteers and had limited money, so I started learning about pipelines and regulations and legal concepts, etc etc. If you have the right kind of mind, it very empowering to be able to step into a new field and really learn it and work it.

The flip side of this is that not everyone’s brain works this way. In fact, I’d say the vast majority can’t do this. The biggest mistake an autodidact can make is assuming other people can learn like they do. But if you have the gift, use it and explore it and it will likely be highly rewarding to your life.

I don't think I can believe that the majority can't do this without some evidence. But regardless, I'm really curious what makes you think that? What in your opinion would be stopping them, other than maybe just not believing they can or bothering to try (which imo has nothing to do with whether they _can_)?

Based on the environmental and community based work I’ve done, and also my experience at school. I pick up most things on my own, and always suffered in a classroom environment.

But most people I know and have worked with are the opposite. They have real trouble picking up new subjects without a teacher guiding them through it and formal courses.

Anecdotal I know, but the true autodidacts I’ve encountered are rare in general terms. That said, a LOT of technology people can largely self-teach, and I think a much higher percentage of HN readers can learn new subjects quickly compared to the general population.

Thanks for elaborating. I think I realize now that we are talking about different things. I wasn't distinguishing between learning styles (e.g., guided or self taught), but more thinking of the ability to step into a new field and learn about it using whatever method works best for each individual. I think I understand now!

IMO, the majority of people are stumped by the opposite realization of yours: That you can be faced with a problem outside your sphere of knowledge, decide to teach yourself how to solve it, and then solve it.

I'd say most people think learning is a passive activity -- happens when someone is teaching you, or forcing you to learn.

Learning materials in itself a skill that is not widely taught.

That in turn reminds me of a British reality TV series from the 2000s called "Faking It". Participants were trained by experts in a specific skill that they had no existing knowledge of, and then they had to convince others that they were genuinely skilled in that area, which they almost always did.

It was "fake it 'till you make it" condensed into a single episode. Loved that show!

Interesting how different the things we're reminded of are: I was thinking of a maxim Feynman liked, "What one fool can do, another can." (Not sure if it's original to him; my memory suggests it might've been from one of the calculus book he read as a teen.)

Ancient Simian Proverb

That's how it's attributed in Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson and it stuck with me too.

Yeah. I clued into this at some point. I think it came to a head when I had a washer start making a lot of noise and behaving badly. I thought, "The worst thing you can do is break it more, these things were designed to be repaired by other humans with a manual, humans who might not have even gone to college, gasp."

So I ordered the manual and the parts I thought needed replacement and went at it. Boom, done.

Something else I find encouraging, and the reason, basically, that "everything is learnable" is that all knowledge, no matter how complex, is composed of fundamentally simple parts. Just as complex tasks or complex movements are composed of many simple steps or movements.

This is what makes the maxim that "you don't understand something unless you can explain it in simple terms" true.

Yes, and this has its limits. Many true experts in their fields would struggle to explain their field simply. I like to think I'm an expert in my work, but how many times have I explained to my wife what I do in simple terms, and she still has no idea what I do?

Complex ideas often get distorted or lost in simple explanations.

I think the limits are mainly a matter of time and mental energy. While quantum physics is ultimately composed of many simple concepts, the number is so large that it takes years to enumerate them all.

You could explain your work to your wife in terms simple and exhaustive enough for her to fully understand. It would just take a longer time and more concentration than either of you wants to expend.

Absolutely. And most things most people work on today are complex. To do my job I need to understand 100 different things. Not a single one is difficult. But to explain it in simple terms simply isn't possible because it's not 1 or 2 big things.

When people explain things in simple terms, they are often either borderline lying, or tucking an exceptionally large tree of concepts under a single word or phrase.

You probably mean "c'est fait par du monde" or maybe that's some way of mocking french language that I am not aware of !?

it's the way it's spoken where I reside.

My French knowledge is a little rusty but I was under the impression there would be no phonetic difference between monde and mondes (and possibly fait and faite, though I'm less sure about that).

"fait" being pronounced "faite" is a telltale sign of Québec or Acadie if I'm not mistaken

I am curious now, without revealing too much, can you give the phonetics ?

Where do you reside ?

southeast of Québec

As another Québécois I could immediately tell. That's exactly how it sounds, and I think it's a somewhat common expression.

I think this post does a great job of arguing against its own thesis. This woman was apparently the rank one poker player in the world. She obviously has great natural ability and works hard at what she does. So why doesn't she stick with anything for longer than a few years? Why has she had an impressive start to four or five different careers without following through on any of them to real greatness?

She believes, or wants us to believe, that her personality has helped her overcome her modest abilities. Instead it seems that her immense natural ability has overcome a personality that should by all rights have led her to ruin.

It's often said that to be outstanding, you should master two different fields then work at the intersection of those fields. For a lot of people the model of "real greatness" is Leonardo, who mastered about 7 fields.

To even get close to that you need to be the sort of person who changes fields every 5 years or so. I think this temperament is relatively fixed, perhaps because it's a feature of some kinds of neurodivergence. If ND and innate ability are both fixed, what you need to reach greatness is a bag of tricks like the author has so you optimise the many parts of personality and behaviour that are not fixed.

What I think is sad about modern times is, it's increasingly difficult and impractical to make a career change into a regulated profession. You can switch to CS, painting, or poker any old time. But if you're not a doctor by the time you're 40, forget about it. I bump into many people who are interested in medicine and would be great at it, but the switching cost is insurmountable. A shame because there's so much greatness to unlock at the intersection of CS, medical research, and clinical practice.

There has to be a high correlation between people who get bored and move on and people who can learn things fast (either by technique/personality or raw iq points or both).

I think you see moving around careers as a failure of some type. I disagree and see that as success, so there is no "arguing against your own thesis".

For some the real greatness is to be involved in a more than one discipline.

Good article! I am in a phase of life where I'd prefer to be less "agentic", and more of a mindless automaton, always doing the tasks I set out to do myself in a day.

What stands between me and most of my current goals is nothing but investments of time - hundreds, thousands of hours of time. There is no money component, and I cannot significantly accelerate my progress on any of them using money either. My agency isn't going to go anywhere, in fact it reasserts itself annoyingly often with flights of fancy and going back to focusing purely on making money. But I do wish I could tell it to shut up and just let me focus on the grind more often.

Care to share what you're working towards?

Language learning, endurance biking, weight loss, and meditation at this point. (EDIT: some physical wound healing too, forgot about that)

Quitting alcohol was also a very similar battle after a decade of increasingly severe abuse of it. I had my last drink 467 days ago, and for the first 6 months or so basically the only things I had the mental fortitude to juggle were "don't lose my job" and "don't succumb to the bottle". Much easier said than done to willingly remove the one coping mechanism you could rely on all throughout NEETdom to graduating from a top university with honors, but I did it, thank goodness.

Doing what you want to do is my very definition of being agenty. Some of the most difficult thing in the world required long duration effort.

So refreshing, and timely. Diving into the moat of low status is a huge multiplier. Courting rejection is a super power because when success is explosive and non-linear, it favours the players who make the most attempts, and not the hardest ones.

Timely because it's not just winter, I hit a really hard personal low over the last few months. This article reminded me that I do hard, scary, and difficult things, and my lows get none of the consolations of mediocrity. I do them because once you are good at hard things, you get untouchable confidence founded on genuine humility of having crossed the moat of low status, which translates into other parts of your life. The lows are when you lose sight of that, and thank you for helping to put this back in perspective.

Cate believe success is all about luck. She said it herself.

https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/things-you-learn-dating-c...

What is your purpose with these posts?

My point is to help you not forget your compassion. All this talk about agency is nothing if you don’t have the luck to go along with it. So if you see someone who’s homeless, don’t talk to them about their agency. Just help them.

> Just help them.

Trivializing homelessness like this doesn't help, and I strongly disagree that "agency is nothing" to unhoused people. There are many free resources available, but the organizations providing them often don't have the capacity to efficiently allocate them to those in need, due to difficulties with reach, etc.

Escaping poverty is a function of others' generosity (luck) but also agency; you can't do it without some amount of self-belief and proactivity and exposing yourself to opportunities for aid. But it's very difficult and a lot of people give up.

They didn't say 'agency is nothing', you took that out of context. They said 'talk about agency is nothing without luck'

It's like me saying a bowl of soup is useless without a spoon. And you go quote me as, "a bowl of soup is useless".

You are arguing with yourself

I’m homeless. And I never said agency is nothing. I am saying that luck is everything. For instance, I’m unlucky to be a man who is homeless.

Laboring Under Correct Knowledge

>“manifest determination to make things happen.”

In my family, my mother always called this as "Reality Bending" (no relation to airbender) -- but they referred to Jobs' "reality distortion field"

My father had this to great effect.

My brother has it to a certain degree.

I used to have it in spades when I was younger - but I have become "will-power" complacent in my older years, which snowballs into to depression.

I certainly feel getting dumber as I age - which is in part to the fact that I had a vast amount of information relating to my job when I was younger in my head - but now a ton of the knowledge I once had on quick access is simply obsolete.

Here is a quick example.

When I was ~20 someone I knew had accidentally changed ALL the display UI elements in Windows 95 to black.

Just by memory I could hit start and navigate to settings and display and fixed it back to normal - all by memory.

I couldnt even tell you where any of those setting were as fast on W95 today even if I had the machine in front of me and access to google.

Your Windows 95 story definitely resonates. I installed Windows XP so many times that I had not only the pirated key memorized, but I would start moving my mouse toward the next button before it had even appeared on screen. People used to be impressed at how fast I could find the "Eastern Time Zone" option in the combo box.

This piece about how she lives, by her husband Sasha, is also great:

https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/things-you-learn-dating-c...

Reading that it sounds like to me she’s unipolar manic. And this is coming from someone who knows about it because I have bipolar disorder.

This would also possibly describe her drug addiction If the drugs weren’t drugs that would fuel mania.

>I told her that she was a really inspiring person, and that I would keep her in my life indefinitely whether or not we ended up together

Whats wrong with men

Here is a question I asked about concrete examples of doing agentic things, because I think that concrete examples are necessary to expand your horizons: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/umJmRfcJndY3Gsr36/concrete-e...

This article really spoke to me, but, ironically, I am concerned about my ability to put it into practice.

I feel like there are areas of my life I have extreme agency over and others I have no agency over. I hate it because the areas I feel I lack agency in run counter to my sense of self. Things I struggle to do don't feel like things I should struggle to do. I wonder if this is something I learned when I was young?

Some examples:

* I live on my own in SF. I moved to California after college and confidently left my small hometown without much support.

* I've led teams of engineers in fast-paced startup environments and gotten us to exceptional results. I wouldn't bat an eye at interviewing technical executives.

* I've quit my job, repeatedly, without backups in place, to pursue technical side projects that sound meaningful to me until I run ~out of money.

* I've led groups of 50+ people through week-long music festivals, coordinating all the people, money, accommodations, etc.

* I can confidently speak to large groups of people without feeling self-conscious.

* I've travelled alone, internationally, for work and everything went great and without cause for concern.

And yet...:

* I learned to drive at 32. I'm still "scared" of the concept, don't own a vehicle, and haven't integrated driving into my lifestyle.

* I can make a down-payment on a house, but continue to rent because it sounds big and scary to do such a thing.

* I "fall into" relationships and jobs rather than actively evaluating my wants, pursuing them, contrasting varying options, etc.

* I would never dream of travelling alone, internationally, by myself just to do a thing. It sounds scary doing it for myself, but doing it for work sounds trivial.

* I'm very prone to overthinking situations and trying to solve them in my head before taking a small, tangible step forward with physical actions. This feels similar to lacking agency -- like I would trust myself to gain agency but only once I'm confident I've seen where taking action will take me.

Sometimes I feel like I don't understand myself because I feel like all of these issues should be in the same class. I've done things others feel are challenging, but struggle to apply that same mindset to tasks I know others find trivial. Does this mean I am lacking in agency? Does this mean I just have weird standards for myself? Or is it something else entirely?

IMO, everything in your "and yets" except relationships and overthinking sound like ordinary preferences, rather than lack of agency. Like, if you actively want to change those preferences and haven't, maybe that's less agentic, but they seem reasonable to me. Although I'm biased because I share some of those traits.

And the other two I would personally consider in meaningfully different categories than your successes, so maybe they're just not in line with your strengths (yet).

Perhaps agency is less one single 'meta-skill' than a bunch of domain specific 'micro-skills'. E.g., strategic thinking in a tech company leadership roll is one skill (or set of skills), strategic thinking in the context of a personal relationship is another skill (or set of skills); managing fear in the context of public speaking is one skill (or set of skills), managing fear in the context of driving is another skill (or set of skills).

Sometimes skills that seem superficially similar are surprisingly non-transferable and context specific.

Ultimately, I think that the most generally applicable advice is getting feedback from others, getting an outside view, blindspot fuzzing, etc. Bottlenecks are usually not the obvious things, because usually the obvious things have been tried, without success. [That is, until the obvious thing is so obvious that everyone assumes it has been tried before without actually trying it. In which case it is again non-obvious!]

Personally, I have found that in personal relationships, a fairly effective strategy to get "unstuck" is to take actions that seem bizarre, unimaginable, or otherwise far outside the distribution of my ordinary responses. I do this because usually if I feel stuck, or there is some unpleasant dynamic, then a part of that dynamic that keeps it going is my actions, which are based in what I tend to do. If I find myself in the 3rd, 4th, or 5th iteration of something unpleasant that I feel like has played out before, I'll do something far outside the distribution of my ordinary actions, and it has a much better chance of getting me unstuck (though, it still might only be a 1%-10% chance of getting me unstuck per random action).

Perhaps there is some sort of general algorithm in that for getting unstuck. A sort of exhaustive process of elimination, with some sort of outside generativity, and some feedback loops grounded in reality, that is one's best chance at escaping local optima.

I am feeling the same way. It makes me get confused about myself a lot. I think it is ok that, I can fear from or fail at things that are easy for other people while something that is hard for the most people can be trivial for me.

anything external is possible

anything internal is impossible

ie make money ez

lose weight impossible

got to be some kind of psych issue

I liked the author’s idea of finding rough edges that other people don’t want to deal with. Unlike the author, I have always been a bit of a slacker, working just part time most of my life. That said, I do think that when I do work I like rough edges! Good read.

I feel like what I actually need to have more agency is just money or rich connections that want to give me money. Since I'm broke, not very healthy, and isolated, I am just trying to get by. My ambition (in some sense) is probably about a billion times greater than my means, however.

Side topic, I understand "agency/agentic" means "taking matter at own hand" but I have problem understanding why. In principal-agent problem [1], an agent is someone acting on principal's behalf. Conflicts arise when the doer, the agent, has more influence to the result, which the result may not align with that of a principal. Shouldn't having more "agency" means acting on people's behalf on steroids? Why one would want to have more "agency" instead of "being your own principal"?

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

Agreed that it's confusing. In case it helps, the concepts you're conflating are "agent-y" as an adjective (i.e. agent-like, for others) and "agency" the abstract noun for the quality of being a good agent for oneself.

Does your confusion arise because you are generalising a specific definition of agency.

I wish the author had included concrete examples of finding edges (and the process of finding them). I wonder if anyone here has an example from their experience?

One way is seeing if the predictions you make repeatedly come true in some domain, especially if they go against the general consensus. Is so, it means you have an edge in that domain - you see things more clearly than others or have original insights. Now think about your current predictions about that domain, and see if you can act on them somehow.

One definition of an edge is knowing something other people don't. You have to be careful not to fool yourself.

She talked about physical reads as an edge and gave two aspects of finding the edge.

a) she put herself in a room with her adversaries, the other poker players, and paid attention to how their behavior correlated with their hands

b) she brought up what she noticed and was discounted by other players.

These are two excellent components of an edge:

1) primary data and repeated experience

2) watching the consensus reject that data

Data scientists go through a stage called EDA, or exploratory data analysis, where they just play around and look at the shape of data. From that, they can begin to form conjectures and dig further to validate or refute their hypothesis. Cate was doing that IRL.

Is agency closely related to self-confidence?

Most of the points on this list seemed related to that. Not the "don't work too hard" bit, but the rest seem in the same ballpark.

I think the connotations are a little different. Self-confidence can include a sort of complacency (confidence in what you're currently doing), whereas agency seems to be more a will to figure things out, whatever it takes.

Self-confidence is helpful alongside agency, but I think it's a totally different concept.

Agency is about self-awareness and realizing that you have a choice. Lack of agency means going along with the default, societal script or what is handed to you even if it is not a good option for you.

One example is dropping out of a university program, even if you are capable of graduating. There is a strong social expectation that you finish, but maybe you don't like it, or your time is better spent elsewhere. Agency is that realization that you can choose.

I wondered the same. Seems very difficult for a person with low self-confidence to act on these recommendations.

One of the tips is assume everything is learnable - you can learn to be self-confident.

My self-confidence was in the trash during high school. In college I had a couple of experiences that gave me opportunities to learn to be confident.

The sense of difficulty is a sign of opportunity.

Yes but self confidence works against all this when it doesn’t come with awareness and humility around what you don’t know. You need self skepticism about opinions and new knowledge but confidence around ability to perform actions.

To some degree, but if you find that your agency is impaired by a lack of self-confidence, you can start by trying to fake self-confidence.

Anyone recommends a good book on this subject?

Also, I'm always looking for book worms to follow on Goodreads, so here is my Goodreads link in case you want to join me there!

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/43909278-alexandre-gomes

Not a book worm myself but I found this one really enlightening: https://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Carol-S-Dweck/dp/0...

> Someone recently asked me how one might go about learning charisma, and the answer was really boring: by reading a few books, watching many hours of charismatic people interacting with others, and adopting a few of their habits.

Any recommendations for books?

The classic is How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie -- highly recommended. If you're young and looking for something more helpful in romance, watch Before Sunrise.

> a massive edge was available in the form of physical reads, but almost entirely ignored

No. The word poker face exists for a reason. Everyone knew about the importance of physical reads.

It's easier to exercise daily, but I make better progress if I rest alternate days.

It's easier to keep working, but I do my best thinking during a nap.

> My rule is never to take instructions on how hard I should work from someone who hasn’t burned out before

I love this piece!

Anyone here finding hard to balance politeness and what the author calls courting rejections?

Sandwich tactic: first the good, then the bad and finally a bit more good.

But yes, the balance between being polite and being honest is hard, there is no the right way since it depends on who you are talking to.

I need to do this as well… Pretty amazing article. I end up doing a mix of autopilot and other stuff

Overstepping and getting pummeled by rejections hurts a LOT.

For me it’s not something i can laugh it off.

Was anyone else surprised to learn that this article is not in fact about AI agents?

> and the number one female poker player in the world

If the author was that then contrary to the thesis of their blog post they are an outlier in that they have unusually high raw mental power / intelligence in at least some dimensions of intelligence. This means that, in fact, other people cannot follow in their footsteps because those other people are not lucky enough to have a brain like hers. The reason they don't have a brain as good as hers might be genetics but is much more likely to be that they didn't have educated parents with books on the shelves who established a culture and expectations of academic achievement. In other words, sorry, but TFA is the same tired old right wing bullshit / American Dream crap of anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they work hard enough. (And I'm saying that as a wokery-hating centre-rightist!)

I've never understood seemingly successful people who feel the need to brag. I think it must be some kind of Midwest modesty

What the heck is a “physical read” in poker? Is that like a person having a tell? (Something they do that is unintentionally revealing.)

"Is that like a person having a tell?"

Yes, same thing.

Why would other pros say “nuh-uh, that’s not a thing”? I thought the concept of a tell was widely known.

It’s widely known but many pros consider it to be of low importance compared with “hand reading”, which is more about putting someone in a play-style bucket based on the hands you observe and then deducing what hand range they are likely to hold from their actions in the hand up to that point. Physical tells are typically considered as unreliable compared to this unless they are really obvious. Amateurs tend to overestimate the importance of tells vs. hand reading.

So it’s perhaps more like there’s a local minimum before you reach the global maximum.

Right. If you're already really good at hand reading, you might get some extra edge in working to improve your physical reads, but otherwise looking for subtle tells will probably just make you play even worse.

In elite games, you would assume everyone is an expert at hand reading, so it makes sense that physical reads would become more important.

Tells are something you see more of in “movie” poker rather than real poker. Most poker guides (as the OP alludes) discourage tell based play unless you are playing with people you are very familiar with and have studied over time. Even then, it’s a bit of a crapshoot as opponents can use this against you (“did he scratch his temple because he has a poor hand or because he wants me to think he has a poor hand?”)

The one suggestion that I do find helpful is not to look at your cards as they are dealt but instead look at your opponents’ faces as they look at theirs. Sometimes their micro-expressions betray them before they regain composure.

I really miss n-gate, they would have richly savaged this post.

Does anyone know what happened to it?

I think he got tired of it. It was clearly a one man show.

There are some interesting points in there, but the author sounds like a bit of a narcissistic jerk.

> In many contexts, the way to get good feedback is to give people a way to provide it anonymously. Anything else creates friction by layering on social dynamics. To get honest feedback, you want to make it as comfortable as possible for people to give it. You also want to make it easy to find -- I have a link to my feedback form in my Twitter bio, and get a few comments a week through it.

> I imagine resistance from some people on the grounds that anonymity frees people to be assholes, but in my experience they rarely are. 90% of what I get in my inbox is either nonsense or nice -- I get lots of “keep up the good work!” type messages

So 10% are assholes, and the rest are "nonsense" or nice - does she get any actual criticism in her "feedback inbox" (kind of a strange concept in my opinion in itself)?

Also, all of the accomplishments she bragged about in the intro are from business. Impressive as they may be, it seems a bit narrow minded to be only focusing on that part of life when recounting what you are most proud of.

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