biren34

My reply to another similar comment:

I think there must be some misunderstanding.

My point is that everyone will have to deal with not being the best. For the vast majority of people being the best at anything is out of the question, regardless of effort or focus. Even if you are one of the lucky few who can be "the best", it'll only be for a moment in time. All of us age and our capacities fade. Then you're left dealing with the additional burden of having once kissed the sky and now being earthbound like the rest of us.

The whole point of the philosophy is finding something else to focus on other than the (true but depressing) objective rank-ordering of you among your peers. Leaderboards are useless to all but a chosen few.

However, everyone (even the ones that will place on the top of the leaderboards) can benefit from taking their focus off the leaderboard and putting it on their own process and effort (in some sense replacing the comparison to others with a comparison to their yester-selves).

While I enjoy a good nitpicking as much as the next guy, when talking about rank ordering, the use of average to denote median is valid.

Median and mean only diverge when there's a long-tail scalar that skews the mean away from the median. Since rank ordering gives every individual the same weighting with no scalars, "average" is accurate enough, if somewhat colloquial.

I think there must be some misunderstanding.

My point is that everyone will have to deal with not being the best. For the vast majority of people being the best at anything is out of the question, regardless of effort or focus. Even if you are one of the lucky few who can be "the best", it'll only be for a moment in time. All of us age and our capacities fade. Then you're left dealing with the additional burden of having once kissed the sky and now being earthbound like the rest of us.

The whole point of the philosophy is finding something else to focus on other than the (true but depressing) objective rank-ordering of you among your peers. Leaderboards are useless to all but a chosen few.

However, everyone (even the ones that will place on the top of the leaderboards) can benefit from taking their focus off the leaderboard and putting it on their own process and effort (in some sense replacing the comparison to others with a comparison to their yester-selves).

Yeah, the fact is other people are often more talented, any maybe worse, even if other people aren't more talented, you just screw stuff up--often a lot.

It's part of life and putting your head in the sand about is just weak. If you could have been farther--and worst case the only reason you aren't is because of mistakes you knew better than to make--face it, accept it, forgive yourself and use the experience to keep your head on straight going forward. It's all you can do anyway.

As for tactics, sometimes it might help if you imagine it was someone else who screwed up the way you did and consider how you'd treat/view them. (For those of us with really super-critical inner voices, this can help us get in touch with our compassion.) Like all these kinds of things, YMMV.

Here's what I would tell my kids: "Odds are, you ARE behind. In any given rank ordering, 50% are below average. 90% are NOT in the top 10%

If you're lucky and work hard, you can be in the top 10%, 5% or even 1% of a few areas. But even then, you can beat yourself up about not being the best--because even if you sometimes are the best at something, sometimes you aren't. You can always make yourself miserable, if you choose to.

So what do you do? You have 3 choices:

1. sit there and complain about it

2. Deny the reality of your "behindness", which makes for weak men and women (and I didn't raise wimps)

3. Or, you can realize that there's a set of skills related to managing your internal state

The best way to do this is to focus on process-oriented goals, rather than results oriented goals. In other words, take pride in your work not in the output. You can lose every game, yet feel okay, if you set your goals to be play a bit better than last time--and do it.

Once you get there, you can admit others are better than you and be thankful for the opportunity to learn from them--since you're no longer competing.

This is what is meant by "losers focus on the winners, and winners focus on themselves".

It's simple, but not easy. It takes work to achieve this, just like it takes work to achieve any useful skill. And just like any other skill, you'll get this right sometimes and screw it up at others. Just try to do it better today than you did yesterday, yes, like it's any other skill.

Good luck, I'll always be rooting for you.

Shouldn't this question be asked in a larger context? Since the moon landing, pretty much every major government-led initiative has been less successful than the one before, as far as I can think of. (Admittedly this is my "general sense" and not based on any exhaustive research).

Is nuclear power special? I don't think so. I think it's just more sensitive to the various pathologies that have crept into the US political system over the past 5 decades.

If I wrote a history of modern technology since 1960, my first guess at a theme would be "the government led the development of many major new technologies then people decided it wasn't good at this, and it passed all the profits on to private companies--who then stopped working on big breakthroughs (mostly)"

Again, maybe I'm wrong, but that's my hypothesis.

There are two big forces driving this divergence.

First, the last 50 years have seen a series of "one off" increases to global labor supply. Between Asia and former communist countries, American workers have been forced to compete in an environment dominated by the largest globalization of labor ever. That competition pushes wages down for anything that can be done outside our borders.

Second, as the issuer of the world's reserve currency during this period of massive globalization (while all this increased trade is creating a demand for dollars overseas), America's financial sector is involved in exporting dollars the way Norway exports oil. So Wall Street is sitting at the center of an incredible boom driven by international forces + the increased financialization that has come from having an artificially strong dollar (kind of a Dutch Disease for us, where the "sector" thats growing is the dollar-printing sector). Most dollars are printed using private debt, so Wall Street is basically the Saudi Arabia for dollars.

Given these two forces, of course Wall Street compensation was going radically outpace the minimum wage. (Not that I would/could have predicted that in 1970 if I had been alive then.)

Fair.

My main point was that people don't want to talk about the main issue, but rather these details.

The fact that natural hunger/satiation doesn't seem to work anymore certainly counts as a main issue (and you got some off topic replies).

Thinking about "what's broken" though, I have a few hypotheses:

1. We're surrounded by supernormal stimulatants that are hijacking our brain. (While this is possible, most of the worst food was available before the recent spikes in obesity)

2. Economics: calories (in any form) used to be expensive, so only the rich could get fat. The skills required to thrive in a world that doesn't impose calorie restriction at some level are just not widespread.

3. Our internal systems can't function in a world where people get less than 1 hour of vigorous exercise a day (or even a week). It doesn't matter how little you're spending, the body expects you're going need at least, say 1500 calories and for many people that's too many.

4. Something environmental. We're awash in so many new chemicals building up in our environments and bodies, and few have been studied for their long term effects. Maybe there's something in here that's throwing off internal signals or hormones.

The other replies to this comment are examples of what I was talking about.

Do different foods have difference metabolic properties, including variations in accessible calories? Yes.

Can we accurately measure calorie intake? Kind of. Even with a food scale, I'm not sure we get to within 10% of the "correct" calorie count because the methods for determining the calorie / lb may have issues.

Could people do weird things, like wrap food in cellophane, burnt it before eating, or even just throw it all up? Of course.

But so what? We have a real world problem here in that Americans (and others) are suffering a material degradation in quality of life due to health issues related to diet and exercise.

There are tons of optimizations possible, but they don't matter to cohort in question. For them, CICO is good enough by far. These optimizations are like trying to teach matrix math to someone who can't add--and doesn't want to learn.

Yet, I regularly see these discussions veer into the realm of these optimizations, presumably because the real problems are too hard and/or depressing.

I understand the desire to investigate stuff like this, but for 90%+ of people, every inquiry in to "most optimal way to not be debilitating unhealthy" is just a waste of time.

If you're not in a special group (gout, hypertension, allergies, etc.) the answer is incredibly simple:

- your diet determines your size

- your activities (or lack thereof) determine your shape

I realize that type 2 diabetics (as being studied in this paper) might be considered one of those groups, but as far as I can tell, almost all of the war is in getting people wanting to improve, and very little of it is in the how to do it.

Maybe that's just me, but I feel like we're searching for our keys under streetlight here. These are easily studied problems, so there are papers/book written. Trying to understand the myriad psychological and societal (and possible environmental) processes is where the real gains will be made.

In modern politics, you simply cannot defend your left flank

The best resource I can think of offhand is the book "Overshoot" by William catton. It has a pretty strong political bent to it that I don't agreed with. But despite that, it frames up the problem of energy quite well.

I'm sorry to say, but the idea that "we don't need energy" is both false and dangerous.

The earth's carrying capacity before fossil fuels was far, far lower than the 7 billion current population, especially with current living standards.

The only reason we can support that many is because of a complex web of economics that causes the earth to produce far more food than it otherwise could, and then enables distribution of that food to where the people are.

Without fossil fuels, we couldn't even produce the fertilizer needed to support the food. You could argue that there is some alternative set of lifestyles that would enable to eliminate fossil fuels without asking 90% of the population to die, but that would similarly require some sort of top-down totalitarian regime in order to get there and keep us there.

At this point, we do need the energy. The only way to maybe not need it would be to somehow put a global version of Stalin in a position of absolute power.

Failing to understand just how critical energy is to any sort of non-apocalyptic future is one of the biggest dangers in our current political debate about what should come next.

Of the two I know, one is a general manager / executive type that surfs and used to be in a frat.

The other is a sales guy / stoner type, who always seems to have been to every new bar and restaurant and already know the owners by the time I've heard of the place.

These descriptions are just the two I know--but you get the idea. They genuinely value people, so it's not a chore for them to know people, and they never really "network". They just like people.

There's actually quite a lot of people with these kinds of traits. The trick, which is harder, is finding ones you respect and get along with, so you (the relative introvert) will keep up your end of the relationship.

A lot times, I see skilled specialists look down on the more generalists/people-oriented people as being some form of incompetent. Compared to the specialist in their field, they always are. The thing that makes these 2 special to me is that they're humble about their limitations in a way that makes really respect them. They're definitely not blowhards.

I'd add that it really matters who know about your work. If a lot of people know you do good work, but they all have very similar skills sets, you get a lot less value than if only a few people with very different skill sets know about you. In that case, you get to become "their guy for X", and that generates a lot of opportunities.

In this case, you also get the benefit that both of you can get credit for the same work. Everyone will know them as "the guy who knows people who get things done" (i.e., good manager/leader) and you'll get credit as a great individual contributer. There's no competition for credit here.

It gets even better if the few people who know you as "their guy for X" are social supernodes--while we're all only 6 degrees of separation from each other, it's actually because a small percentage of us know tons of people, while the average is much less. If you become the "guy for X" for one of these supernodes, you're basically the "guy for X" for anyone who would ask them "hey, do you know a guy for X?"

In my career, I've had two of those types of people know me and my work--and between the two of them, they have generated almost every opportunity I've had in the past 10 years.

I could spend 50% of my time networking, and I doubt it would generate as much value as adding just one more social supernode that knows my work.

The idea of NFTs is odd to me.

I get the idea of a digitally validated consumable (concert tickets, for example). I get the idea of owning a piece of digital art.

But as far as I understand, a lot of NFT transactions are for digital "ownership" without many of the rights normally associated with ownership.

They seem more like baseball cards than Picassos.

Maybe I just don't get the current frenzy, and that's that--but a lot of the buzz around NFTs make me think there are likely a ton of wash sales that fake run up the price to unload lower priced ones on speculators.

It just has my spider sense tingling that something shady is going on. Think of all the farmland or Bitcoin or stock in copper miners you could buy with these sums. How could the joy of ownership over a collectible compete? Or do these people really believe that these things will appreciate from these prices?

I've taken a few different "retirement" periods in my life, each lasting about 1-2 years.

The first one, I intended to write, but ended up playing World of Warcraft. The second one, I significantly improved my coding skills (I was primarily doing finance immediately before this, and as a result of this period, my career became concentrated in product management + data + BI). The the third one I spent learning to trade. I even flirted with starting a hedge fund for a bit, but have since backed off those ambitions. I'm currently back at a full time job doing data + BI + finance + product for a small startup.

My biggest takeaways from all these experiences:

1. That kind of freedom is challenge in and of itself. It's amazing to have 12-18 months to dig in deep into a new area (I call these my self-directed masters programs). The feeling of freedom and mastery can't be beat--but most people can't sit in a room by themselves 8-10 hours a day and not go crazy or just waste it on distractions. That in itself is a skill. My first attempt ended up in gaming instead of writing, which turned out okay--but I still wonder where I could have ended up if I had my current level of ability to stay on course.

2. No matter what you do, if you go deep into an area, it seems to add to your overall career progression (for example, I got into video-game product management largely because of my year playing WoW). I doubt you can do nothing--or anything--but at least for me, my desire to want to learn something seemed to be guiding light enough.

3. It's really lonely. Like in undergrad or my MBA, I was learning a ton of new stuff--but unlike those times, there were few people in my life to share the journey with. People were either busy/disinterested or much further along. I really wish I had understood the value of being part of a cohort when I had the chance.

4. I should have spent more time working out. At my age now, I can't believe I found it so hard to dedicated 5-10 hours a week for exercise, especially when my body responded so readily to it (compared to now--I guess youth is wasted on the young once again).

5. Going back and forth between these times and full-time jobs is a great way to level-up and then lock in a new backstop for your next career move. Adding in a little consulting also makes the interviewing story better and gives you some real-world problems to tackle with the new skills you're developing.

If you like this kind of content, I'm really enjoying the latest season of the Tides of History podcast. He's focused on prehistory in quite a compelling way: https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/

I get that it's frustrating and pisses people off. But "not being able to afford things you really want" is not really an economic harm in any serious sense of the concept, especially when it comes to the kinds of things are generally scalped in America.

In general, the way our society has chosen to distribute limited goods is through an auction, and poorer people generally lose auctions. The reason we do it this way is because the auction price signal then tells the whole world that more of X is needed.

This works really well for things where: 1. Buyer and seller have alternatives 2. There is sufficient legally allowed competitions 3. And supply CAN respond to price signals

And it always involves pricing some people out of the market (for at least some period of time) to direct the resources to those that can pay the most while supply responds to the price signal. To complain about "harm" in this setting, you also have to say that people who can't afford 4karat diamond rings are "harmed" or that people who can't afford penthouse NYC apartments are "harmed".

If the vendor and customer want to engage in a different, non-auction based method of choosing who gets to buy things, they're totally free to do it. Modern technology actually makes that incredibly easy now.

Again, I'm not arguing FOR scalping. It's just so strange that people demonize scalpers for doing something every business in America does. If anything, the vendors are being lazy about thinking the problems through and scapegoating scalpers for taking advantage of the inefficiencies that arise.

It's odd to me that so many of this kind of thing takes a moral stance and uses comments like "making someone pay" for things like concert tickets or gaming consoles.

I'm not for scalping, by any means, but to claim that it harms the consumer is just weird. The vendor is clearly leaving money on the table, but if you're willing pay 4x to not have to wait a few months...that's just market forces.

The exceptions are forced buyers--but we're not talking critics meds here.

It's easy to focus on how evil this makes Amazon look.

If we take a step back, we can see our society is in the middle of grappling with some very large problems.

More and more of our economy is based on things that have no or negligible marginal costs. That's not to say they're free to produce--often far from it. But the cost of making 1M is the same as the cost of making 1.

Our economy is just not setup to handle this. The value captured by producers has always been tied to a markup over the marginal cost of production, aka gross profit.

When the cost of production is $0, the entire pricing structure breaks down. Piracy and knockoffs threaten to bankrupt producers. Any effort to stop those things comes off as greedy and artificial.

What's true right answer? I don't know. But we do need to find a palatable way to let people profit on products where the entire cost of production it is a fixed cost paid upfront.

Maybe the issue is as "simple" as fixing copyright to have a more reasonable profit window. But that is, of course, not simple at all.

If you live in the EU and work for Google, you probably actually work for Google's EU-based subsidiary. There's no US-based company involved in the relationship. It's confusing because the company treats all the subsidiaries as one whole, while the law treats the subsidiaries as their own entities.

An interesting thing I see here is that no one seems to be discussing the needs of the kids themselves in all this. It's all about races, politics, ideologies.

However, one of the main positive motivations behind gifted/advanced education is that if you put those kids in a class with 30 randomly selected children and force them to move at the pace of the slowest kid in the class, they become so bored they either disengage from education or become problem students.

At the same time, if you took the median student and constantly compared them to one of two of the advanced kids, who will look like they "just know everything (since prior work is invisible to the class), that's just disheartening.

A priori, I'd say the goal of an idealized education system is to continuously provide learning challenges at the optimal difficulty for each student. Since that's far from possible right now, the very least we can do is bracket kids in 3 categories so they don't drive each other insane.

Not having an gifted program is like having wrestling matches without weight classes. It's no fun and no good (for anyone).

I'm squarely of the opposite opinion.

There are 2 main concerns I think "only renewables" solutions miss:

1. Impact on land usage. The sheer amount of land required to provide 3-4x global use is impractical and has major environmental consequences. It's not free to pave over large areas with solar panels or make huge swaths of air unsafe for birds.

2. Cost of storage is usually projected using current prices with some decline due to production efficiencies. However, producing grid-sized storage would put such pressure on the supply of critical metals that the subsequent price rise would put bitcoin's performance to shame.

Whereas, we know we can scale nuclear to meet global demand, at least as a major base load supply as part of a mixed-generation strategy.

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It may be true in some cases, but it's just a mental model--and all models are wrong. Some are useful.

Worrying about things out of your control--once you've decided to move forward--is not useful.

If you can't stop yourself from doing that, you're probably not cut out for life at an early stage start up. That's not a dig--it's just means you should seek opportunities that better fit you.

I really like this way of thinking. For entrepreneurs, you could even go far as "all the work" being to subtract all the key risks/unknowns.

It's not about building a product (i.e. writing code or designing/manufacturing physical stuff), it's about making a list of all the reasons your idea won't work and then subtracting them all as cheaply and quickly as possible.

This is definitely something I wish I could back and beat into 20-year old me. It would have saved me so much time and effort between then and now.

That applies to all insiders, though. It's not specific to the employees.

While I totally understand the frustration with taxes, vesting rules, etc. the entire problem, IMO, comes from the lack of liquidity in these shares.

These are "realized" gains to the IRS, but unrealizable to the employee because there's no way to sell the shares. That leads to large tax bills only payable in cash, which you can't get by selling the shares.

There are solutions to provide this liquidity in the works: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/d52b0487-b13...

As soon as these are real, most issues with stock option compensation go away.

I'll have to take a look. Thanks!