Three important steps in my maturation process
thomasdullien.github.io
thomasdullien.github.io
It's quite likely that you have significant issues you haven't addressed yet. Getting into good medical care, therapy, exercise, and supportive e.g. nutrition, etc is likely more important than virtually anything else you'll do in your life, with a reasonable exception for choosing the right person to spend your life with and having a family. But having a good social life is a hell of a lot easier if you're in great physical and mental shape. I took all of those things very seriously, and I probably did not put enough value into any of those things, even given that orientation.
That leads right into: The only thing you can truly exert control over is yourself, and it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices, either indirectly through the environment you live in or directly through the actions you take. Humility is drastically underrated, and being healthy plays into this enormously as well.
That being said, I'd love to hear a perspective from some of the older HN folks - what am I missing as a mid-40s person that I should absolutely be paying attention to?
When you ask this question of others, you are asking what am I forgetting? What will I regret? They can’t tell you. They can tell you what they regretted it and maybe you will regret those same things they did. But you have to decide. In 10 years. In 20 years. All you have to do is ask your future self what you’re gonna regret that you didn’t do. I had found that we already know the answers to those things.
E: think of it this way. And you don’t have to have a dog for these questions to work they’re metaphorical really, but also physical if you do have a dog. Did you walk your dog? Did you play ball with it? If they die tomorrow, will you look back and say that today was good? Did you do everything you could do with your dog? If not go do those things right now don’t leave them undone. That’s all there is. And the same thing works with everything in life. You know what you should’ve done in the day. If you do those things in 10 or 20 years, you won’t look back and say I wish I would’ve done those things cause you’ve done them.
In one sense yes, but in another sense... humans are just so much alike. You can a learn a ton from your elders' common mistakes. Especially the ones where there's broad agreement. You're probably not an exception.
To use your dog metaphor (which I like), would you tell a dog looking for advice (if you could magically communicate with it) to just present and focus on the moment and he'll know what to do. Nah, we know a dog needs lots of walks, to be around other dogs, to eat the right foods, and so on.
The two approaches aren't mutually exclusive, but the practical one is... practical.
You don’t have to. Not all at once, anyway. You have enough information to make the right choices every day and learn more. We will always make mistakes, but if we acted with our best knowledge and fulfilled what we thought were the best choices in a given say you won’t have to regret the mistakes. That was kind of my whole point :)
And yes, always improve, and learn philosophy, and take care of your body and people around you. But at some point it all becomes obvious I think. At 46 it is all obvious for me now.
What does working at a hyper scaler have to do with the rest of the post? Do you want to mention your total comp or height while you’re at it?
To me that phrase added useful context how to treat the advice...
I was going to add more, but I kind of forgot. My post was a bit stream of consciousness about overthinking things, which I may have over over thought. Oh well. I’m kidding sort of. I was going to say that I see a lot of overthinking all over the place at work. Complex environments often lead people to assume that a complex solution is needed. Some of the time the complexity is unavoidable. Most of the time the complexity is avoidable. Our individual lives and affairs are no different.
My whole point is that you can't know that if your mind is clouded by ill health and ignorance - your predictions about what you'll regret are wrong, just as the decisions about what is important are wrong. Digging yourself out of that "what I think is important in this moment is important" mindset is a big part of it.
For most people, the common one is heart disease. Plaque buildup is irreversible. No amount of dieting, exercise, or pharmacology will reverse damage to your arteries. All you can do is prevent further damage, and yes, you will need drugs.
Yeah, I guess this was more my point, you don't ultimately control that much about your health (is my perspective at least), you either win the genetic lottery or not, play the hand you're dealt, enjoy life while it last, in the way you can, some of us can only enjoy it so much compared to the rest of you.
Sorry, life doesn't work that way. You are essentially saying, screw long-term planning, do right here right now what's best at this moment. If everybody did that, they'd be broke latest a year from now. Thereare things that I do, quite regularly, that I wouldn't do if this was the last day of my life. But I have to assume it is not, otherwise my life would collapse and I would pretty quickly be very restricted in what I could do in my life.
Thanks for the clarification.
Though I still don't agree. Of course you should question sometimes. Regular reflection is important to realize whether your plans are still the right course of action. Otherwise you'll never course correct.
I have ADHD and OCD and grew up in total poverty and violent child abuse in a rural area with no economic opportunity, and was homeless from 16 to my early 20s.
While hindsight makes clear many of my own errors and shortcomings, a lot of the residual issues I face today, some of those shortcomings included, are the result of neglectful, ignorant or malicious choices from the adults in my early life. I have several physical health issues that were not addressed when they should have been, including lifelong gout and very likely fibromyalgia. I had a full-ride scholarship and campus job and lodging lined up that I worked very hard for in high school despite being homeless, and a malicious teacher illegally modified my grade out of spite to prevent me from graduating with the required credits. The administration did nothing and I had no family in my life to help me pressure the school board or file a lawsuit.
I also faced a gross mistrial after having a small town officer literally plant marijuana on me after a traffic accident, and the judge illegally sentenced me despite a total lack of evidence, and my defense attorney was corrupt and refused to submit a motion to quash or let me appeal the decision because "the judge is my boss and he will make my life hell." Six months jailtime for a first time criminal offense for a homeless seventeen year old. My whole life so far has been playing catch-up.
Your advice probably wasn't meant for me, but you were interested in hearing other perspectives so I figured you'd be interested to hear mine. I always find it interesting when casual conversation with other engineers reveals the gaps between our experiences and expectations. Lots of interesting and unique paths through our unique profession.
Things like good posture, exercise, and eating non-processed foods are within reach for the majority of us; and for those whose issues make exercise difficult, it's only even more important to try and double down if at all possible and close the gap.
Sleep should also be a top priority. I have had chronic insomnia since I was a toddler, sometimes staying up for days at a time unable to sleep, and honestly lack of sleep is destroying my mind and body faster than anything else. It's preventing me from maintaining a healthy weight, since fat burning is heavily impacted by irregular sleep.
I have tried everything under the sun, most recently I am re-experimenting with magnesium in the form of magnesium l-threonate because my magnesium deficiency might actually be causing me to have a very high "gain" in my CNS, meaning the smallest things wake me up or get me excited. It's still too early to rule out coincidence or placebo, but I think I'm noticing several differences since being on magnesium l-threonate, including better sleep.
Point being, leave no stone unturned when it comes to your health. Sometimes the solutions to complex issues might themselves be quite simple.
I'm in a lot of pain all of the time, and recently, thanks to an abusive family member, I experienced an absolutely devastating life event that might completely derail my life, leave me with a permanent disability and end my career, but I'm keeping my chin up and counting my limbs and senses. Eyes on the prize. I am driven to succeed so that I might help the less fortunate. I think any of us in a position to do so have a duty to do so.
My friend has a diagnosis and has a prescription for Amitriptyline.
While that works, getting exercise also works wonders.
I have seen it backfire when she did too much, but exercising well within your capabilities - on 30% of the maximum force you can exert - can greatly reduce the symptoms.
This is a journey for sure, finding out what your body can handle, but it's worth it in the end.
Have patience with your body.
Anything that compounds is better off started early.
It's not about the money at the high level, but relative comfort frees you up to be your best self.
Or so I'm told.
Back in the 1980s, when I was just getting started, I was told to save everything I could.
I thought it was silly advice, but I took it, starting in 1990, when I started my final job, which lasted until 2017.
Good thing, too.
I’m not rich, but I was able to retire, and it’s one of the best things that ever happened to me (although I didn’t think so, at the time).
I have enough to afford decent tools, and work hard, every single day, on stuff I always wanted to, but my management never let me.
Ignored all the sage advice, lived a rather tumultuous life, but lived it fast.
Diagnosed ADHD at 45 was a bit of an aha moment!
So I'm stuck on the treadmill for quite a few years yet.
Envious of where you've ended up, but imagine the path there wasn't easy.
All the best with retirement!
That can't afford a house.
Crazy times.
When I got married, I had a lot of credit card debt, and I had to use most of our wedding gift money to nullify it.
It was humiliating, and I vowed never to carry a balance again, and to avoid any form of debt, if at all possible.
WFM YMMMV
I plan to “work”, until I croak. The coroner is gonna have to rub “QWERTY” off my cheek.
The difference is that no one is paying me, and that makes all the difference. When someone pays me, they pay for veto rights, and the right to impose their stupid on me.
Having enough, so I don’t have to deal with that, is heaven.
Anyways, yes, weightlifting + something active (tennis, football, etc) is the way to go.
But weightlifting first. It is the only hralth-related hobby that teaches honest body control: muscle, gaining/losing weight, dieting basics, monitoring key body parameters over time.
As you get older you need more and more protein to build muscles. I need to get 150 grams of protein per day. That is difficult.
And you need more recovery time.
I have friends who never went to the gym. They develop more back issues.
The past is in the past. It had good and bad outcomes for you. Those stand, and you're best served by making your peace with them. All that matters are the decisions you make now.
I didn't understand what the word "stress" even meant exactly until I got into my late 30s. Then I realized that I had been under extreme stress for most of my life but had not noticed it because I could just keep going despite constant exhaustion and borderline depression. Then, that suddenly stopped working.
I wish I'd realized this a decade or two earlier.
For some reason it strikes me that we don't think of a potato plant as needing life lessons. I doubt anyone here has moral compunctions about leaf structure or starch formation. People seem much the same way to me. Another part of me does instinctively model the inner world of people as small deviations from my own. Other parts of me think that is quaint.
It appears to me that the sense of clairty imparted by wisdom often looks like mere rigidity when seen from the outside. I have little doubt that your particular wisdom has been hard-earned, and at the same time, I think it is hopelessly myopic. The thing that gets me is that this also almost surely applies to my own wisdom, which is why I distrust them implicitly.
I think the world is so vast and our exposure so limited such that any Life Wisdom is hopelessly doomed to be a horrible overfit on the particulars of an individual.
Keep growing your idiosyncratic leaves though. I also genuinely think they're beautiful.
But as we grow old, not achieving some things we thought would be easier when we were young can cause frustration. Wisdom helps dealing with that.
>it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices, either indirectly through the environment you live in or directly through the actions you take
This is a horrible thing to say, and I wouldn't go around saying stuff like that if you value your safety. Its probably true if you're a white guy with a average intelligence who was raised in the suburbs by loving family with a silver spoon in your mouth. However, the rest of us didn't choose to be born into poverty and family violence; we didn't choose to spend our formative years be assaulted, hungry, groomed, and abused; we didn't choose to be subjected to systemic problems, racism, sexism, and institutional abuse.
What you're basically doing is telling someone who was born with multiple sclerosis "the reason you have trouble walking is due to your choices."
That being said, this isn't a fatalistic post. I think everyone can and should make choices to make the best of what they have. I've been trying for 4+ decades. I spend thousands of dollars a year on therapy and medication trying to move on. I've personally witnessed the effects of bad decisions and I have the cognitive capabilities to see cause and effect so I won't be making the same choices for myself.
It's just a straight up fact that my suffering is not due to my own choices. I did not ask for this.
You changing your environment to void problems plenty of times means "abandoning your kids".
You may even have greates starting point ever and still have externally imposed diseases, injuries and problems.
I would reframe this, in my view, that your suffering is not due to your own choices, but you are probably suffering a lot less than you might otherwise, due to good choices. That's what I mean - you can't control your situation or the world around you, but you can do the best with what you have, and in my view many people have never been given permission to do that.
I'm not taking advice from someone who says "it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices, either indirectly through the environment you live in or directly through the actions you take." So stop giving it.
Here's my advice, saying stuff like that gets you your ass kicked in the real world.
These are very different classes of things. Good medical care, of course, if there is a problem, get it fixed by somebody who knows what they are doing. Good exercise, of course, get your physique in shape, for well being, for health and for confidence. But therapy? If there is a problem and therapy is treatment, of course. But where does this desire in the western world come from to just by default having to go to some kind of psychotherapy? I refuse to believe that a happy life requires therapy. If it ain't broken etc.
> it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices
That's a position that must be deeply rooted in privilege. There are countless folks out there who don't have it easy because of conditions they didn't create, and saying it's because of their own choices is extremely ignorant, maybe even arrogant. Many could, theoretically, so sth about it, at least improve their situation marginally, but it would require extreme steps which they are just not able to take. It too simplistic to dump it all on the "well it was their choice". No need to blindly victimize folks, but the other extreme is just not helpful either.
I suspect you're exactly the kind of person I'm talking to when I say therapy is a valuable thing for everyone. You will experience stressors, grief, loss, and strife in your life, being psychologically healthy and having your coping skills in order is absolutely something you want to do in advance, and is something everyday people can and should do before they actively have any specific disorder or problem.
To think one's own choices can impact matters like this is such a disgusting level of privilege I can't even imagine. There are too many people that can't simply choose to escape their situation, and it's not their own fault. It's not something you can fix by sprinkling on a little therapy or some self-help books. It's something they'll be fighting for the rest of their entire life, whether they escape or not. You can't just choose to be free of that. No one can.
Definitely. Doesn't mean the only way out is therapy.
That's not to say therapy is universally good. There are bad therapists. But ultimately the point of therapy is to encourage introspection, and defeat ignorance of the self. Ignorance of the self is a vital tool to people because it allows them to believe just about anything. Problems no longer exist, in your mind, if you cannot identify them.
But the proof is in the pudding. You have to analyze your behaviors, your relationships. If things are constantly going south, that's a sign even if you can't identify why. That's when therapy has value, it can help you identify why.
> People who are self-aware and introspective are already in therapy, or at least recognize it can benefit them.
I don't agree. I know tons of folks who are introspective and very balanced and ever have been to therapy nor do they have the need.
> just like everyone can benefit from physical therapy.
I wouldn't agree here either. Everybody arguably benefits from physical exercise. That's different from physical therapy. The former is sth preventative, you can do yourself, no personal trainer needed, just go for a run or play some squash or push some weights. Physical therapy you need when you had an injury or need to correct an issue limiting your health. That's corrective, not preventative.
Similar with mental exercise (some introspection or meditation or philosophising you can do alone or with friends or strangers on the internet, or with a therapist/professional, why not) versus mental therapy (an issue needs to be addressed and that should be done with a professional).
A key question is maybe whether the risk of an undiagnosed issue left untreated is too high to take. That's where the self-improvement movement is going to far, I think. We all have our wrinkles, and that's ok. Not every personality quirk needs correction, just like not all odd movement pattern needs a fix nor ever wrinkle in the face needs plastic surgery. The latter has been driven much too far in western culture (particularly american), and I'm basically arguing that the same seems to be happening with mental therapy too.
I feel similarly to physical therapy. Even if you work out, physical therapy can introduce you to new ways to optimize your body that you would never know about. And it's specific to you and your body.
I also agree not every personality quirk needs correction, nor is the goal of therapy correction. It's management. We all have things in our head that we are constantly managing, and we have to manage it if we want to be successful and maintain our relationships. Therapy helps finding out new management strategies, specific to you and how your mind tends to work.
That's the key point here: Why does everything about the body (physical or mental) need to be optimized?
If that's your kink, go for it. But acknowledge that not having that kink is fine too.
Yes, it is. They are speaking to the people who read comments on HN.
I don't see a disinction here between 'yourself' and 'the environment/world'. Both affect you, and you can/cannot control both. And the logical solution is to try (when it is worth it and not to try when it isn't).
My add: max out you 401k contributions if you haven't already. It's the single most important financial decision most of us will (hopefully) make.
I'd add: try to sleep well. It adds up.
Is this a metaphor?
There is an implication from this one that the article doesn't get into, which is whether you've picked a strategy of fail-safe or fail-disastrously. Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start. It is one of those ideas that sounds very simple to incorporate into your life and turns out to be hard.
IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous.
> The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
He's technically right, but our instincts are not suitable for a complex 8-billion person global economy. We have a bunch of instincts calibrated so that a group of ~200 monkeys probably raises >200 descendants on average, just. We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment.
It doesn't have to be a reason-emotion dichotomy, but there has to be something where effective people > destructive people in situations where our instincts don't trigger or push people in predictably bad directions.
> Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start
I'm just going to quote that because it's a great statement of a truly astounding idea. Most people do not think like you do. Even inside the HN bubble, most people don't think like you do. The diversity in humanity is enormous, and I wish I'd known sooner how fallible and narrow a single person's view is, even when it's your own. Making the best choices you can possibly make does not guarantee success, and even if you succeed, there's no guarantee that it was the best idea or even a good idea.
Basically what Nietzsche said on morality. However, there is a counterfactual to this line of thinking as well and it doesn't map as easily.
> We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment.
This is where Immanual Kant's categorial imperative comes into play. Kant thinks there is absolutely an evidence-based principle to be moral. And he grounds it in reason and human beings themselves. His ideas make sense when you start thinking "okay lets say I am free to make my own values and must have a good relationship with my values, what is an objective way to evaluate this so I can be morally good?" Kant becomes a good starting point and he claims that you don't need any external objective way/method of evaluation other than the reason afforded to you by nature as a human being and then he spends a lot of pages elucidating how this type of a system would work.
Both Nietzsche and Kant are worth reading if you want to understand morality in general, even though Nietzsche fundamentally disagreed with Kant that there can be an objectively correct mode of evaluation.
I very much like the bias for action mindset, but I don't have a great answer for the problem of 'what if the things you want are bad for the world?' Your mention of destructive people makes me think there might be an angle with bias for action being helpful if it's building - some people will build the torment nexus, but newly built things are so inherently fragile that maybe we can absorb a certain amount of harmful building without serious damage, in a way we can't absorb much harmful destruction. Does that ring true?
Understanding the self loop. The strange self loop. Seeing that the thing that is doing the observing inside of us is the whole and that from within our own system, we cannot completely reason about ourselves. The incompleteness theorem.
We have named it we call it the default mode network. It is essentially a recursive predictive machine. It only stops when we die. It is essentially making predictions about reality constantly. It is retrieving previous state and associating at the current state to make decisions. What it associates with previous memory and current state are encoding of our hormonal state and mental state at that point in time.
You can call it emotions. You can try and reason about it. It just exists. At some level, you just have to learn to let it be. All of the sophisticated words of psychology and trying to describe the machinery from within the machinery. It’s useful, you need a guide to live life. To keep the machinery and coding clean and not over, indexing on states that aren’t useful. But it all boils down to some pretty simple things. And when you see that the observer is the observed, and that it is all a part of the whole of the self, things become more manageable, for me, at least.
Take grief for example. What is grief? It is a prediction error. An expectation of some past state that the prediction machinery keeps expecting to come up one way, but it comes up another. And when it does come up as an error it hurts. It’s OK to experience it and to embrace it even. But it’s also OK to see it for what it is. We can’t escape the machine. But we can step outside of it briefly and watch it at work and acknowledge what it actually is.
Having thought about it some, I have been concluded that there’s only so far one can get when operating within that narrative. There’s only so much they can help with until you yourself can see that the “I” is it itself a machine generating the narrative, but also something else and more than just that narrative that is constantly running in our brains. It is something that can be observed. The observer is the observed as Krishnamurti would say.
As long time meditator, I find that there is nothing that is hidden from ourselves if we look. Meditation is one of the few ways to begin to access the whole and step outside of the narrative loop. You can also try psychedelics, but that’s riskier. A good trip might save you a decade of therapy. A bad one might genuinely imbalance your brains machinery. In some sense, the time is wasted. However, if you genuinely spend this time learning to observe yourself, this is very much a way of being that is not wasted in my opinion.
A therapist is generally going to work with you inside of a particular framework and way of stepping towards a particular way of operating. It sort of like the long or hard way of solving a math problem before you learned underlying theory of whatever problem you were working on.
My recommendation to any of those interested: The Mind Illuminated by John Yates. Great intro to the meditation practice. Once you have some understanding of the general technique Goenka's 10 day vipassana courses is a great opportunity for deep introspective work.
My interpretation of therapy is that it helps you feel aligned with you. It will remove the surface contradictions and counter-actions. But if your deeper you has concluded that you should be evil (assuming there is no contradictions in this view - and there always is), therapy will probably help you too. As long as you are aligned with yourself.
They prioritize you. Not the others.
Also: incompleteness theorem again. The system cannot fully observe itself. A close friend can also do this too. In fact they are better at it than a therapist if you are open with the friend.
Also evil is a moral inclination and hard to discuss easily in this frame. Very little that is inherent in our machinery is disinclined towards evil or good. As social animals we must teach those values and hold them up. Different discussion :)
This is a version of the very classic problems "does the end justify the means" (should one torture a terrorist to prevent other terrorist acts). Much to the chagrin of utilitarians everywhere, the answer to that question is NO, because answering yes leads to a bottomless hole of infinite evil.
> 1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.
I think certainly your actions are maybe that paramount to the world because it has so many actors, but they are certainly important to you. The actions that we take on a daily basis nudge nudge nudge us to becoming something else. I think its something worth focusing on but not to the point it makes you anxious.
Thanks for the thoughtful piece.
It’s a journey. There isn’t some point where you’ll suddenly find you are now “wise” and understand yourself.
Those moments do appear - but a few years later you’ll likely realise that it was only relevant for that time of your life and things have changed. What might have worked and served you well then may not be the right thing for now.
Getting locked into a way of thinking or behaving is a recipe for being old before your time.
Try and apply the agile principles - do a retro - is it still working, what should keep doing, what should you stop doing?
And - the best time to start doing something good is now. Doesn’t matter if you should have done it 20 years ago. Regret can be disabling.
Try and be nice to people. We don’t know what is happening in other people’s worlds.
[edit] And be kind to yourself. Self compassion is underrated. Forgive yourself. You are human. Not perfect. And you don’t need to be. Show yourself some love.
Hard disagree with part of this. Reason is an intellectual construct, that has a basis in logic. (Neuroscience not finding a division: sure. Just like electrical engineering doesn't see a dichotomy between Microsoft Word and Firefox.)
Reasoning isn't separated from emotion because reasoning needs inputs. Some inputs are secondary: the result of other reasoning. Some are non-negotiable facts from the world. But some primary inputs that go into reasoning are determined by values and desires. E.g. "I feel it would be nice obtain such and such a result in the world" (hard reasoning on how to get it ensues).
Essentially, we make decisions based on emotion, then come up with an explanation for the decision that was already made. We form a memory that says the explanation was why we made the decision, but it was actually the emotion. In other words, by default, we’re rationalizing, not rational.
Let's assume I have pre-decided something: if the fruit weighs over 100g, I'll buy it, otherwise I won't.
I can then measure and find out. My emotions -- based on looking at the fruit -- may mislead me here.
Now what about "likely to weigh more than 100g"?
Here it's really easy to lie to yourself.
But if you set conditions for what counts as likely before you know what they'll be used for, and you stick to them, you can make a decision based on reason.
There is no way to decide 100g is the threshold divorced from emotion, however -- unless it's rationally derived from something else emotionally based.
The "rationalisation" bit comes from us not making decisions for the reasons we think we are -- or in the way we claim to be.
If this were written on a single subject, like engineering philosophy, then fine. But writing a multi-subject article requires simpler language so those who may be familiar with one thing but not the other can understand everything.
I find it hard to trust the intelligence of someone who uses words like "dichotomy", "meta-cognition", and "monocausal determinism" - language like this is purely performative. Let's not be performative, who are you trying to impress with your big words?
Have I always known what these words meant? No, but it’s the reward for a habit of right-clicking every word and looking up the definition - which also stretches your cognitive capacity over time so it’s worth doing for purely selfish reasons.
Take the "meta-cognition" advice to heart and perform some self-debugging in order to determine what exactly in your psyche made you react in this way.
An odd position to take.
If you don’t know a word just look it up, you may well learn something.
Pedagogy is very important in writing. Without care for the reader, these words come off as performative.
Dichotomy is not a particularly complicated word, nor is it ‘performative’ for most readers.
Meta-cognition is a compound word, where both parts are widely known, and the combination should be pretty obvious.
'Monocausal determinism' is different, very specific, and probably only known to a minority of readers. Determinism, the idea that everything within a system happens exactly according to cause and effect, comes from ontology, which is the study of existence and our place in the world. Mono derives from old greek single. Monocausal determinism is the idea that everything within a system derives from a single cause.
It is not a writers duty to be understood by everyone. Sure is nice, but more difficult to pull of, and often futile.
I work in trading with a lot of software engineers, and one thing I noticed is that these cannot reason about uncertainty if their lives depended on it. Their way to approach any problem is like you debug code: there must be a specific code path that was followed that led to that outcome. But markets aren't like this, and things happen for no reason, or are better modelled as if happening for no reason.
This is also the reason why I don't really think "software engineers" are real engineers, because real engineers can reason about uncertainty.
You are what you do, I think it's expected that if you spend your life reasoning in one framework, atrophies your practice at any other framework.
1st one requires that you actually care
2nd one relevance depends on what are you doing, not everyone works on airplane software
3rd one, novelty for me
This has probably been the highest value such article I've read in years. You've phrased item 3 better than I have been trying to for years after my own journey in realizing this.
Thank you.
> 3. The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
Guessing: Essentially that's psychology. And Human psychology is itself emergent behavior cannot be directly traced back to neuroscience. Logic, that is another thing, which primarily is used for understanding and reconstruct retainable after emotional experiences.
Also, reason is essentially a combination of pattern recognition and abstraction, and emotion is a set of spontaneous limbic responses.
Which is not to say there's no relationship between them, or that the grey area where they overlap isn't unusually interesting.
But it's a wild overreach to say the distinction is a cultural construct and not grounded in (largely) mammalian biology.
Points 1 and 2 are also questionable. They're not novel opinions, they have philosophical names (more or less consequentialism vs deontology, with some wrinkles), and they can be - and have been - hotly debated.
I don't see them as evidence of maturity or of immaturity, more of a considered moral position that not everyone agrees with.
1. Emotion has no biological marker, which refute the idea of mechanical connection between brain (and other body parts) to emotion
2. Reasoning, by general feeling, is a mental process carried out by brain primarily, but has a seemingly much stronger connection to biological signals
3. What I was inferring from the theory of constructive emotion, is that emotion really is a form of higher level reasoning. It's higher than the typical reasoning, so that it's connection with biological signals are extenuated and more indirect
I don't remember the words of the book.
This connection between reasoning and emotion is primarily my own rudimentary idea. Can be seen as an expolation of the theory.
Does that say something about steps required in our own maturation processes?
maybe not 0day stuff, but breaking the build is something that mature people have learned not to do. What are the rewards for move fast and break things for people?
Reasoning is taking all emotions into context and focusing on actions that align with certain emotions.
Also: quite often does not exist inside computer debugging, either.
If you like these, you might be interested in the book, I Am A Strange Loop
> ... the scientific method is a classifier that is intentionally biased against accepting something as true - so that we only accept things as true that are beyond any reasonable doubt true.
> A somewhat fascinating corollary of this is that there exists a large class of true things that will never be scientifically shown as true.
The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
1. All serious cognitive philosophy since at least Kant has supported the idea of separate faculties -- in his case, specifically the four chambers [`--` quantitative sensitivity, `-+` qualitative perceptivity, `+-` causal judgement, `++` modal reason].[1] This is also at the root of the induction vs. deduction [vs. abduction] debate, which had been raging for at least 2,200 years before Kant.
2. Even our pre-gallilean understanding of neuroscience arrived at the same conclusion, though in hilariously abstract terms: 'fast thinking' vs. 'slow thinking'. Popularized primarily by a popsci book (?) that frames it like this: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
3. Psychologically the clearest paradigm is Freud's `- Id`/`+ Ego`/`* Super-Ego`, which is not nearly as discredited as his famous theories about parental lust would imply. If you asked your psychiatrist(/local research psychologist) about it today, they'd ofc use less medieval words for the same concepts -- roughly 'unconscious', 'cognition', and 'executive', in order.[2]
4. In cognitive science more broadly, a lot of the binaries discussed on Wikipedia's Mathematical Model article[3] are getting at this delineation.
5. Eastern philosophy has plenty of stuff on this dichotomy; in fact, I'd argue their discussion of it is predicated upon its existence and the various harmful states it can create if left unexamined. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_logico-epistemology
On a 'logical' level, the case for a separation of at least two types of thinking seems clear: any cognitive activity can either call the 'lightweight' model to guess what's happening (and be right 95% of the time), or call the 'superheavy' model to iteratively reason through webs of beliefs.
Sure, any call probably uses more than 0.0001% of both so they're not mutually exclusive, but I think the qualitative diffence is clear.
The sentiment is true in a bit more subtle of a way, I will admit... It's hard to articulate in brief (/at all), but I've become fascinated with the way the presence of the higher faculties sometimes seems to completely transform the lower ones, unlocking whole new affordances. Like the existence of a new structure of a higher level of complexity completely changing the behavior of nearby cellular automata. If you'll excuse the anthropomorphization of abstract patterns for moment: it reminds me of how a competent leader can unlock whole new affordances for the individuals on their team without actually directly changing the individuals themselves.
Like, consider how we have have tons of both instincts & intuitions related to language use -- speaking, writing, listening, etc. Chimpanzees & bonobos share many of our incredibly advanced intuitive abilities (e.g. manual dexterity, social 'theory of mind'/empathy, etc.), but they are categorically unable to pick those up. In this way the super-ego didn't add funtionality to our species, and it didn't even really multiply it geometrically (?) -- it seems much closer to an exponentiation of capability.[4]
TL;DR: Acknowledging the fallibility and inherently-subconscious basis of reason is a noble goal, but abandoning the Idea altogether is misleading. IMHO!
[1]: http://staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk/ppp/ksp1/toc.html
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_therapy#Basis
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_model#Classificat...
[4]: Here's to hoping that this fourth rung is the last one, at least for a while! Cause if there's a fifth one, and AI discovers and produces it... yikes. Truely alien ASI would follow, rather than just ASI-as-huge-but-fundamentally-grokkable-AGI.)
There's no point in denying that both emotions and rational thought exist, and that different regions in the brain are responsible for them. I do advocate pretty explicitly that all information sources should be considered when making decisions, including emotions - as a lot of them carry actual important non-verbalized information.
Point 3 was heavily influenced by reading the book "Descartes Error", fwiw, and I recommend that book to pretty much everybody.