Other People’s Problems
seths.blog
seths.blog
Maybe this applies more often when the one giving advice has more experience than the one receiving it, or when the person who is stuck has habituated a narrow perspective or some form of learned helplessness.
But I recoil at something I think I see more often, which is when several people stand around pointing out the obvious and congratulating each other on their fresh ideas and wondering what’s so hard for the guy who has lived the situation and would love to find a way forward if there were the right resources or the right change in policies or the right change in politics. The peanut gallery loses interest pretty quickly when faced with questions about the real constraints and it turns out their answers are not fresh at all.
But now we have someone who’s “marinating in the stuck,” surrounded by people who still agree with each other that they know how it should all be done but have now also been embarrassed.
It’s an ugly, toxic cycle that bottoms out at everyone constantly having their knowledge and competence questioned over things they know and can do, by people who don’t and can’t.
If someone is stuck, ask if you can help, sure. Ask what seems to be the trouble. Ask what has been tried so far. But maybe don’t lead with your advice.
Now imagine you are a software developer entering the offices of a group of bueraucratic clercs that keep an intricate fax-and-scanner-based system of bullshit just barely afloat. Of course as a person that is specialized on thinking about the storage, transformation, santitizarion, transmission and deletion of data you are going to probably have a slightly more sophisticated take on information processing than them. They might know the law better or which combinations of checkboxes a person is allowed to tick on a form, but they suck at the meta task of organizing the efficient, fast and error free flow, storage, deletion, etc of information. And sure now one could argue about the merrits of paper (and I routinely argue it's merrits for democratic elections, where correctness and traceability are more important than speed), but that would be like arguing for making doctors use medival hand tools in the age of the scalpel.
Now it is true that outsiders to a system won't see what reasons there are for a certain thing being shaped a certain way, but this can sometimes even happen to insiders if the information handover is bad enough.
But keep on telling yourself the story that the US is so exceptional that reasonable conservative policies that work everywhere else can't work. This is likely just going to work out great in the long run.
"Why don't you just do X", totally papers over the extent of what just needs to happen.
"Everyone should just do Y" is always bad policy. Just look at what happened with something as simple as wearing masks.
This is just so obviously not true on the surface. We all speak the same language at the very least, which isn't true for a single one of those countries you listed.
Tangentially related, but how long can languages really be considered a barrier when AI translations are ubiquitous.
Some countries are just 1000 years behind in some areas, or 1000 years ahead. The US is no exception in both.
If you never did leg day the gains will be easy.
But maybe I sould give an example: guns. I grew up in an European region where the percentage of gun owners is close to US levels, yet our last school rampage was a decade ago. The rural town I grew up in is famous for it's traditional gunsmiths and home of a Glock factory, so not what some in the US would call big city liberals. The reason gun crime is low here is because we have commons sense gun laws of the type most gun owners in the US supporr as well. Yet you have US politicians claiming "it is a slippery slope" and it "can't possibly work".
Yeah, look at the numbers, it works, it also works in comparable regions to mine with totally different social and cultural circumstances. Of course if you'd like to you could also implement it in a way so it doesn't work, but that would be evil on a comic book villain level right?
The problem in the US is that corporations are really damn effective there to trick a sizable amount of the population into believing all kind of excuses that fall apart the second you look elsewhere.
E.g. given our gun laws many US citizens would say our freedom has been taken away, yet somehow 10 year old me managed to go shooting on empty cans with my hunter grandfather. We had a god damn shooting range in the cellar of our school. It is just that our guns are stored safely and people who shouldn't have guns don't have them. E.g. because they issue threats, have a history of violence, drug abuse, mental illness, or showed otherwise that they act irresponsible with the lives of their neighbours.
But maybe you know more about why the world I live in can't work and have a good explaination that for some reason keeps benefiting certain corporations, while it kills the kids of your population.
Pro-Tip: If you aim to critique the points someone made, a sure way to come across like a total fool is to call the person names instead of saying anything useful. This is one of the things that says more about you than the person you attacked ; )
Just recently we had a bunch of comments here on HN about how bad candian health care can be if you live in the 'wrong' area. UK has had issues with NHS for decades at least (hell, they ALSO have 'private' insurance which seems to be almost a requirement). And several other EU countries have hit issues with healthcare lately (charge fat people/smokers more since they use more resources was fairly divisive recently.
Personally - I think it all boils down to scale. As these systems grow, it becomes harder to sustain them. That doesn't bode well for the US with 10x the population of Canada :-(
It sucks because I'd really like it, and I'd love not having my health care tied to my job ...
Obviously, there is a lot of good stuff we can copy/learn from both countries. The thing is to make sure we can iron out as many issues as possible (large population and geographic area mostly) before we attempt something and having politicians claim it "doesn't work".
Seem my response to isleyaardvark above for my (stupid) idea to try to us the VA hospitals to test bed some of this.
Thanks!
It had a scatter chart showing the metrics, and while Canada was shown as lower than many of the other countries, the gap between all those countries and the US was enormous.
When other countries complain about their healthcare, they're complaining about complaining about sane systems not performing to their standards, and that doesn't make the US any less of a dumpster fire.
One reason I look at Canada so much is the population is almost 1/10th of the U.S. population - so I would expect (naively) all issues would be magnified 10x. Also, the pain points with Canada's healthcare seems to be in scaling and funding as the population grows? Scaling up the number of doctors/hospitals available - to cut wait times, and providing consistent funding not based on where you live. Definitely solvable and much better then the issues the US healthcare system has.
For the US, I think good way to start might be to actually fund the VA Hospitals and see what it takes to properly run a national health organization in the US. How many doctors does it require? How many hospitals? What sort of budget? etc. If we can scale up the VA to provide quality healthcare without the under staffing, waits, long distances between facilities, etc across the entire country - then we can use those lessons to scale up to true universal healthcare? The last thing we want to do is introduce some half-assed 'designed to fail' system that lets politicians just say 'yeah, we tried that...Didn't work'
Thanks!
That rings so true in my head. Being too open and transparent got me quite a lot of misery already. More than once, I got the work of months discarded, because some other (shiny or new) approach was deemed to provide a better solution -- only to the effect that it was later discovered that it was the worse approach.
Apparently it is very easy to miss in the pursuit for the best solution, in unfortunate favor of one's preconceived notions.
Unfortunately people get annoyed when they ask for help and someone offers them 10 solutions they already have tried.
But often one of the obvious was not tried or considered so the person gets quick solution. Otherwise warmup to think more in details and ask follow-up questions why some of “obvious” solutions did not work gives great intro to get up and fix something.
Very different to ask something along the lines of "Why didn't you just do X?" (the unwritten "duh!" being very implicitly present!) vs. "Interesting. Naively I would've have thought that doing X might solve this and seeing you didn't go with that solution I'd be interested to understand the constraints and reasons that make X unviable."
With the first (type of) question you've disqualified yourself already, even though you didn't 'just give the solution' (which is even worse). After that kind of question we're already on adversarial grounds.
The "5 whys" is a great technique but if literally just ask "Why" a lot, you'll get the boot more often than not ;)
It's sort of like internet relationship advice.
It tends to lack nuance, like "if you can't agree on a couch to buy, you should leave the relationship".
> But maybe don’t lead with your advice.
Unsolicited advice is a pretty big relationship friction generator.
But as I've gotten older and more experienced, I've come to understand that everyone is uniquely talented and brilliant in some way. The vast majority of people are just vulnerable to becoming trapped in situations that are nontrivial to change, due to their own life choices yes, but just as often due to external circumstances and empathy for how following their desires might impact those around them.
This phenomenon presents as survivorship bias, the epitome of which is some rich person or billionaire telling young people that they could afford rent or a mortgage by giving up avocado toast. When the truth is that companies like RealPage formed a price-fixing cartel using algorithms to set rents in most major cities in the US, despite dwellings sitting empty, because it's more profitable to capitalize on a smaller number of high rents. Now they are being sued by attorneys general around the country.
This othering/prejudice extends to homelessness where people blame drugs instead of economic injustice, or mistreatment of the elderly where they think they should have paid more into their retirement rather than seeing that 30% of their life savings got wiped out after the pandemic due to corporate greed inflation and soon stagflation.
This isn't the tech dystopia I signed up for. In my experience, people are wealthy due to their ruthlessness, not their business acumen, but maybe those are the same thing. I think often now about how to stop this algorithm-driven late stage capitalism, but by definition it may be too late. Going off grid via solarpunk might be a great individual strategy, but it's similar to not voting, in that the people profiting from the decline in the human condition do better without the innovators. I feel now that eternal vigilance, mainly through organizing, is the only way that we'll actually reclaim the economic liberty that we used to enjoy.
These broad connections are what I see any time I read these truthy/quippy essays now.
If you think fentanyl is not a critical component of the US’ homelessness crisis I don’t know what to say - go to Europe, the homeless there are not in a zombie-like state. There’s no compassion in ignoring people’s real problems and instead blaming them on our own political gripes. The festering of this problem is a product of bad government.
As for retirement savings - are you kidding me? Pensions are the most protected assets on this planet - no matter how hard they fail they will be bailed out. That inflation you speak of is, again, due to all that post-2008 money from the government. Interest rates are set by the central bank. (No doubt some unfortunate people had to draw-down their retirement savings but they’re the exception that proves the rule). For the first time in history we will have an economy where money is flowing up from the young to the old, rather than downwards - it is the young people who are being exploited! The children who will pay for this don’t even get a vote.
The real problem I see here is that people vote themselves all the money whenever they get the chance, with governments able to pile on more and more debt to be paid by future generations. Plus a government that is more interested in ideological posturing than solving problems - unless the solution is more government.
First the post-2008 asset bubble; why does that exist? Lenders became extremely lax with credit requirements and created an incredibly toxic debt bubble. Sure you can argue the bailouts and subsequent low interest rate environment maybe have been the wrong medicine, but it's easy to say that in hindsight when at the time several people had been wiped out.
>If you think fentanyl is not a critical component of the US’ homelessness crisis I don’t know what to say
Why is fentanyl a problem in the US? I think it's insincere to pretend Purdue didn't have an outsized effect on this problem. They pushed opioids on doctors and flooded rural america with oxycontin. Once addicted Americans could no longer get oxycontin, they turned to heroin, and the increased demand of heroin created the conditions for fentanyl to flood the market.
>Pensions are the most protected assets on this planet
401(k) were almost completely wiped out in 2008. Why focus on pensions when most people's retirement vehicles today are tax-deferred investment accounts?
Businesses are free create deeply systemic issues and when those behind the issues are rich and the problems externalized onto the rest of the country, we are free to turn around and blame the "bad" government.
It's like licking a door handle and blaming the human body in the "drivers seat" for cells dying when it raises the internal temperature to 102 degrees. How about instead of blaming the immune system for the 102 degree fever, we just don't lick door handles?
The inflation is the inevitable result of flooding the economy with trillions of dollars in freshly printed money. It happens every time the printing press is run like that, in every country, throughout history.
> we'll actually reclaim the economic liberty that we used to enjoy
Having the government run the economy is not economic liberty.
Especially entertaining with the way demographics are going. It wasn’t much of an issue in previous decades due to momentum of population growth.
That's like saying the fact the first couple payments on a loan are almost all interest because of a conspiracy among politically active bankers, when in actuality it's because that's how math works.
The US had zero net inflation from 1800 to 1914, and fantastic prosperity.
This happens in every country that tries it.
For an example of an economy entirely focused on resource extraction? The Arab oil nations.
For examples of highly prosperous nations that have no resources to speak of? Japan and S Korea. With free markets.
BTW, it wasn't possible in the 19th century to have a 40 hr week and vast welfare payments. The productivity wasn't enough to fund it.
For example, open a lemonade stand in your neighborhood. Charge $20 a cup. See how it goes.
No ad is going to make $500/box for 9mm or 45 handgun ammunition seem reasonable.
‘Market rate’ is exactly what I’m talking about.
Thus you can often find communities of people with disabilities who understand the problems and the people from the outside who offer insulting and simple solutions to the problems.
As soon as someone falls from group B into group A the problems stop becoming simple and easily soluble though.
In reality, it's something like "they don't understand the problem space", which includes not just not understanding the problem itself, but also understanding the history, context, and realistic daily details of the problem, and the real or imagined blocks that are created by personal philosophy, mindset, and psychology, plus the impact of relationships, biases, etc...
May I suggest the book "The Innovators Dilemma". Sometimes people who don't understand the problem manage to solve it in a much better way.
https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Manag...
This.
And not just for personal problems. I have a rule when I start working in a new place to not offer any real criticisms or unsolicited advice for the first year. This is because it's very likely that my advice is too naive and is coming from a place of being ignorant of some aspect of the work that is the reason why people are doing something "wrong" in the first place. Being there for a year is enough to clue me in to those hidden variables so that I can make recommendations that have a chance of being useful.
Even if there are good reasons why things are how they are, you'll find out much faster why. Contrary to when interacting with people where advice is often simply not wanted, you are pretty much paid to treat an organization's problem as your own. Sometimes problems persist because people simply have stopped caring about them.
I think the most common reason might be toxic or ineffective management, fighting their own problems, real or imagined. Newcomers should read the room whether that's the case as fast as possible since in that case offering "solutions" could indeed be counterproductive or outright dangerous to one's career.
This. I am currently facing such a problem having very recently joined a new company. They recently had a very expensive incident and would like to not repeat it. I was handed an analysis task for the system that caused the incident with the expectation for me to make recommendations to improve the reliability. And, so far, my recommendation would be to refactor/rewrite large chunks of it (reduce cyclomatic complexity, greater test coverage and from the perspective of use cases, strict exception handling, fully documented state chart with all transitions validated, etc). When I gave a status update on my analysis that isn't finished yet, my manager was concerned that I would recommend exactly what I am going to recommend.
So now I am kinda stuck. Do I openly say exactly what they don't want to hear even if I was tasked to do exactly that? Luckily, I don't really give a shit about "career" nonsense, I am too old for that. But at the same time, I do want to build credibility and social capital in this org. My experience in building highly scalable, resilient systems says that the current implementation is sub par, and it shows with amount of break-fix work the team is constantly doing. I don't really want to be Cassandra and say "If you don't do this, the risk of another catastrophic error is really high". And I don't have enough data or time in the org to know what kind of persuasive arguments tend to find sympathetic ears.
So I have to gamble a bit, follow my principles, and honestly explain why their system is shit, in palatable terms, and hope they don't give me the boot.
It is stressful and I hate it.
They absolutely can, and I make note of my thoughts during my early employment so I can revisit them once I'm more familiar with the context that things are done in.
I wait, though, because it's more effective to bring these things up once you're no longer so green. If my criticisms are legitimate, I can refine them to better match the circumstances in the workplace and so be of greater usefulness. Also, nobody likes or listens to the new guy telling everyone how they're doing everything wrong. The (legitimate) defense is "you don't understand the big picture". So I like to get the big picture.
None of this is to say that I keep completely silent. I'll totally question my colleagues about things that look off to me. I just won't press about them or push for change until I am standing on more equal ground.
But this changes depending on the nature of the employment. I've been talking about being a permanent employee. If I'm a temp or contractor, I am much more vocal about this stuff because very often, that sort of thing is what the company hiring the contractor is wanting.
I find it odd to immediately distill this down to "group A with disabilities" and "group B without". Both groups have problems, maybe just different ones. I also don't see what is insulting about making a sincere attempt to help, whether it ends up being helpful or not.
It's the equivalent of people wanting to escort you across a road without getting run over. They don't think you're capable of understanding the risks of crossing a road.
Or giving someone in a wheelchair tips on how to walk normally.
Or your completely tech illiterate grandparent telling you how to write code. (Yes, this has happened to me.)
A lot of people I've dealt with have no interest understanding the problem. They just want to do the easy thing that feels good to them. When what they expect doesn't happen, they feel bad and expect me to make them feel better.
Similarly, this pattern always happens around food. It's not uncommon I can't eat any of the food at a social event. I'm used to that and I'm not bothered by it. But everyone else feels bad for me and decides to tell me so. No matter how much I say I'm fine, they keep apologizing because they feel guilty. Of course, I can't tell them to stop making their feelings my problem.
I guess there is also a distinction to be made between problems to be solved, and currently acceptable, non-problematic situations where you receive unsolicited advice on how to improve it.
1. I didn't ask for it.
2. They didn't bother to understand the problem.
3. Now I am socially obligated to talk to them.
4. I have stop everything I'm thinking about to figure out how to respond to them in a way that doesn't make them feel bad.
This seems grossly unfair to me. Social norms that don't come naturally to me. They are allowed say anything they want and I'm not allowed to reject it.
Frown, and walk away while they’re talking.
Or
Deeply analyze why they’re wrong and they know it. In front of them, where they can hear you do it.
You’ll get hate, but what else is new?
You could also just lie, say ‘oh that’s good advice’ and then ignore it like most normal people.
Or, figure out what painful personal failure they are trying to warn you about from their side, with no real solution they’ve been able to figure out. And see if there is some lesson you can learn from it.
Wait, am I giving unsolicited advice now?
I understand what neurotypical people feel but I am unable to predict it without logical analysis.
Thus,
I fully understand social norms but I am not capable of following them in realtime.
Absolutely none of your unsolicited advice is even remotely useful to me because my current strategy of building logic trees and memorizing appropriate responses is far superior to anything you suggest. :P
You're not happy, because you're here complaining about it. So perhaps it isn't as superior as you want to believe? QED.
(As someone who does the same sometimes, like apparently right now. Sorry.)
I am not happy I have to play by social norms. However, playing by those norms is the optimal solution in maintaining important relationships with people I care about.
Why do you care about relationships at all except for your short/long term emotional needs, safety, etc?
Because #2 then is not actually optimal or perfect then for that stated goal, correct? It isn’t playing to social norms.
#3 and #4 tend to produce better outcomes in that sense. And #4 also can provide useful contextual information on a person, which is necessary for having a real relationship with them.
So isn’t hating these kinds of interactions, actually hating the difficulty you have in meeting emotional/relationship needs naturally? Instead of having of do exhausting rational work all the time while emotionally disliking (or even hating) it for reasons that are nearly impossible to see?
And this discussion is me demonstrating that. Because now you hate me, eh? But not because I’m wrong. But because it’s a truth you don’t know how to change or make better, and for which knowing makes it more painful - as it strips away the comforting self image.
Interestingly, despite what folks say, this also appears to be why a lot of people get so angry when someone offers unsolicited advice.
Because it’s often a solution that could work, if it wasn’t for the problem they had that they can’t seem to fix - because it hurts too much even seeing it.
Because I care about people as people. They have their own lives. Their existence isn't defined by their utility to me.
I just can't instinctively navigate verbal communication and social norms. I had to learn everything through logical analysis, which is very slow and difficult to apply in real time.
It's no different than if I had a significant speech impediment. My dislike of social norms is solely due to the barriers it creates to communication.
And no, I don't hate you. I'm just frustrated with the assumptions you're making.
Personally, I’ve found EMDR to be helpful to reconnect, but it’s not an easy road. And it may not be applicable here either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_road_to_hell_is_paved_with...
Being vegetarian seems to generate this problem.
It's often the grown-up equivalent of a child learning about a longstanding religious conflict and offering "why don't they just all be friends instead" as a solution.
---
To take the emotions out, I had witnessed an interesting exchange a while back.
A startup dealing with removing plastic from the oceans posted on LinkedIn about their work, and highlighted the difficulty of sorting the different types of plastic (so they could be subsequently dealt with appropriately). Their current method was simply humans sorting the plastic manually, by sight.
An LinkedIn acqaintance thought he had a solution for them, and tried to get in touch with the startup. He was gently but firmly rebuffed, and was very upset that the organisation didn't "give him anyone senior" to deal with. His ego was bruised. The funny thing was, the startup was totally correct. This guy is a marketing consultant with (I know) zero domain knowledge of anything related to plastics, recycling, computer vision, robotics, etc. He was just an arrogant guy who absolutely didn't understand anything relevant in the problem space.. and yet still thought he needed to get involved and offer his opinions and ideas.
Was his approach insulting? Not in this case, but potentially so, in more sensitive areas. More than anything, it was a powerful example of the Dunning-Kreuger effect in action. :)
Whether something is insulting depends on the particular interaction and how the recipient of the 'help' feels about and perceives the attempt to help.
I've been learning the importance of consent in any intervention. Without consent, my attempts to help a person may be perceived as an act of taking control, overriding the other person's will.
> Both groups have problems, maybe just different ones.
So my problem might be a lack of perspective that is characteristic of privilege, and their problem might be me; sincerely, innocently & naively making their situation worse.
There's an old H. L. Mencken quote:
"There’s always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
And another one of my faves:
"The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake."
This is called [The Dunning–Kruger effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect).
we, as a third party, don't have the extra stress associated with having the problem (or having to deal with the consequences of any potential solution). So we can think without those anxieties and more impartially.
It seems to me that the far more reasonable and understandable conclusion is that our friends are much like us. Things aren't as easy as they may seem from the outside.
Those two things are separate and we often get them confused, when things are hard, we think it must be more complex than it is, which is not usually the case.
Just do the thing is a lot more powerful than people realize. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. But it is often simple.
"Just" always hide a lack of knowledge. Of the problem, of the environment, of the team, of what the future will be.
> If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just...” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At no time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.
https://squareallworthy.tumblr.com/post/163790039847/everyon...
sometimes when a group gets "wrapped around the axle" and the proposed thing is spiraling out of control (usually due to hallucinated requirements or group anxiety feeding on itself), "Just <simple option>" is EXACTLY what is needed, especially from a confident leader.
Advising people that all they had to do is outlast everyone and that was easy because everyone else quit.
They didn't seem to understand the difference between simple and easy, when I mentioned that was the hard part and the reason everyone else was quitting was because it was hard, there response was that 'they just needed discipline, which is easy'.
So glad we have genius level thinking out there that has solved all of life's issues.
Talking to yourself by Name or in second person like you are talking to a friend seems to have a positive way of changing your perspective and allowing you to regulate your emotions and deal with something more rationally.
but that guy is crazy and never listens to anything i say! ;)
I've found people are long on advice and short on actual help. When people offer me advice, I usually turn it back around on them to see if they are willing to help.
Recently I was taking care of some shared property repairs and received a lot of complaints that the cost was too high. I asked people for their help on finding a better price and , just as expected, they couldn't.
Everything seems trivial and deterministic until you actually embark on the solution. The hard part is actually completing the task.
Lesson: the world is short on help. If you want to help, pick up a broom. Lead, follow or get out of the way.
>An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot.
It's one thing to look at each problem in isolation, it's another to live a good life overall, which may entail many tradeoffs between different problems.
You can acknowledge the ideas, but if you jump on every one that comes to mind, your life ends up being extremely chaotic.
However, if you find yourself thinking about a certain idea a lot of times, it might be worth considering it, because your subconscious might be trying to tell you something.
Other people's problems are fun to solve when you're like "hey, I've seen that before / I know something about your problem", and I think I can advance you in your pursuit of a solution. Fun, win/win for everybody.
But too often you try to use some product or service, either of another company, or of another team at your company, and it doesn't work. And the other team is just "but I don't waaaaannnna" about figuring out why their shit is broken. And so it becomes your problem, because you're probably trying to do something that isn't shaving this teams yak, but here you are, blocked on them. So it's either "do their job for them" or be blocked by them.
And managerial chains are just, IME, utterly ineffective at dealing with this. My current boss does not want to handle these, ever. He wants me to fix the problem. Problem is I have no authority over others teams, so I can't get them to act, and so … now it's my problem! And soon I'm doing the work of 3 teams, it feels like, and shaving yaks all day.
Google, internally — at least way back in the day; I've got no idea if this is still a thing — had a philosophy at several levels of "it's our problem", and in internal team-to-team stuff, that meant if a customer of your team's junk was having a bad time, that was your problem. Not your "customers'", internal or external. One of the many things I think that led them to being a FAANG.
Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, but make sure you are not insulting someone’s intelligence by over simplifying the problem. This means you need to really get to understand their issue before chirping.
It is much harder to actually solve that problem back in the real world.
The classic example would be that it’s easy to solve someone else’s weight problem. Tell them to eat a proper diet of X, get enough sleep, get to the gym X times per week, etc. Saying all these things is very easy, but overcoming the barriers to actually implement each one in a life isn’t already doing these things, is much harder.
Providing a path is much more difficult than walking the path.
In a vacuum, I disagree quite strongly with this although I understand what the author is getting at. It is easy to get stuck with arbitrary and unnecessary constraints. Dropping those is great.
On the other hand, I find that adding constraints is one of the absolute best things you can do to enhance creativity. True freedom can only be found in the presence of immutable constraints.
> An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot.
> The Somebody Else's Problem field... relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else’s Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_else%27s_problem?wpro...
Due to job deformation, I cannot agree. Tight constraints make for easy solving. However, loose constraints allow more change. And ultimately, change is what people are looking for.
Additionally, when looking at others we see them as their own free agent, but looking at ourselves we see us as constrained in a system.
And I saw the boss come a-walkin' down along that factory line
He said, "We all have to tighten up our belts."
But he didn't look any thinner than he did a year ago
And I wonder just how hungry that man felt
But he knows it ain't too hard to get along with somebody else's troubles
And they don't make you lose any sleep at night
Just as long as fate is out there bustin' somebody' else's bubbles
Everything is gonna be alright
I suppose this just shifts the question to.. are we typically more hopeful for others than of ourselves and if so why?
Hopeful = helpful?
Novice swimmer to himself: Yeah right, but thats the problem, i have no idea how to breathe.
I haven't had a problem since.
Helping people is hard, I found a much easier approach. You have to make it worse for them: You won't solve your problem because it isn't in your nature. I'm convinced you will never find a new partner or a new job, you wont be able to pay your bills, you will be out on the street soon! If they are old I go with: If only you paid more attention in school.
Then they run out the door in rage and go do all of the things they should have done years ago. Ill pay for stuff if money gets in their way but ill remind them it is pointless, I might as well set fire to the money.
Sometimes they come back to pay me and to tell me what an asshole I am. Sometimes they come back with new problems for me to make fun of and to tell me what an asshole I am but then I at least know they need help since there is nothing convenient about my "help".
Alex Hormozi says "the life you want is on the other side of a few hard conversations."
I would channel that to say, "the solution you're looking for is on the other side of a few uncomfortable feelings."
And usually, it's just the fear of the feelings, not the feelings themselves.
Why does home-boy have a f-ing machete?!
(For that matter, nothing in the linked article depends on whether or not we have free will.)
That makes problem solving easy.
Yes, that's the kind of thing I had in mind by saying that I thought that there were problems with the claim.
* to: "OK, and why would our deterministic movements solve them easier than the deterministic movements of the person with the problem?"