"Pluck" is a wonderful verb for this action of picking from a curated list. Thanks, I will use it from now on.
101 karma · joined September 30, 2019
1. THE CAUSE - How is he doing academically? I was doing really poorly because of lack of support, and to suppress that frustration I would try to stifle it with games, anime etc. So do consider that possibility that its a response to an emotional problem and not a deliberate decision. They may not want to indulge in media consumption all day, and it may merely be a way to reduce their friction against the world and themselves.
2. THEIR BACKGROUND - Some of the responses here suggest kicking out the kid as they're a legal adult. If my parents were to suddently ask me to step up massively at 18 and did so using force, I would resent it tremendously. Because since I hit my teens, they had long abdicated the role of supporting any personality development activity for me. So I would directly attribute my inabilities to them. Some of you would be aghast reading this, like how could an "18 year old adult" claim this. That's because I'm not American, there was a genuine lack of such opportunities during high school because all was forfeit at the altar of college exams. I actually still resent it a little that they didn't enroll me in something like the (Boy) Scouts, or a karate class, or a swimming class etc. i.e. avenues where I could get out and grow a little as a person. In hindsight, I've recognized that ny parents are people too with shortcomings, and I shouldn't blame them for everything because I can. That would be foolish and myopic. However, my point is that the parents were responsible kid's upbringing and environment growing up, so the resulting kid they have at 18 is their creation. (Americans wouldn't agree, I'm sure some Asians who grew up middle/upper-middle class would.) So its not fair to pin it all on the child. Punitive measures may be a bad idea. I much prefer what /u/WastingMyTime89 has suggested below, to sit down with your child regularly so that they open up about their issues and problems. In any case, opportunities for the kid to get out would be a great idea, both by themselves or with their parents.
3. GLOBAL TRENDS - I assume the kid is a male. I've observed the same phenomenon happening with a male cousin personally, wherein a boy doesn't grow into a being a young adult very well, and instead retreats into his room and anime/games/porn. I think Warren Ferrel's work might be a good start. It might be good to take a birds eye viee of the whole thing and be informed by other individuals ans how they self-improved.
P.S. of course, the kid in question may be quite different from what I've described. But if they are the trying-but-struggling type, you could give him a book called 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. It seems to have been fantastically effective for and well-received by many many young men. My 2 cents.
My 2 cents: Learn by need. Figure out your needs (e.g. required feature) and go get just that knowledge from the internet, and put it to practice.
My Pocket Oxford Dictionary --which requires a rather large pocket-- defines "intuition: immediate apprehension by the mind without reasoning". If we don't believe in miracles, we seem to have only two possibilities: either the reasoning required is so short and standard that it is hardly worth being recorded or mentioned, or the "immediate apprehension" does not amount to much. In the first case "intuitively clear" means "obvious", in the second case it probably means no more than the absence of obvious counterexamples. In both cases, mathematical texts "recommended" for their appeal to the reader's intuition should be ignored, for such texts promote non-reasoning instead of better reasoning.
Despite the above, there are still people that believe that intuition is a good thing; there is no point in arguing with them for they prefer to believe in miracles.
-----------------------
Source: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E...
+1 - I really admire him too. I wonder, what makes people like him and Edsger Dijkstra so charismatic in this sense?
Yes! These are called desirable difficulties in the book 'Range'.
I logged into HN after a year to respond to this prompt. I've dealt with this too, and some things did help quite a lot.
1. Orwell wrote this about choosing words, which I found in a similarly excellent LessWrong article[1]: "What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations."
2. It also gave me great relief to find that Edsger Dijkstra, one of the greats of Computer Science, wrote slowly in order to write elegantly and correctly: Whether written using a fountain pen or typewriter, Dijkstra’s technical reports were composed at a speed of around three words per minute(!!). “The rest of the time,” he remarked, “is taken up by thinking.”
3. Try ditching full sentences. Write phrases. Make some words in the sentences BIG FOR EMPHASIS. Do whatever styling or structuring that corresponds to the feeling in your mind. Your notes are for you, they only need to make sense for you.
4. Even if what's on the paper doesn't reflect the original idea, write it down regardless. Even if it doesn't do your original thought justice, the written version will persist into the future while the thought in your head will fade, losing much or all of its clarity. That written version will continue to be useful. The more you practice this habit of writing, the better you will get at representing your own thoughts. In time, you will be able to consistently write notes that are passably good. Keep at it. This is the most important thing.
5. The last and yes the least, I'd suggest experimenting with tools. Google Keep is garbage as a platform for creating and organizing your notes. I switched to Notion earlier this year, and it was a paradigm shift. Through Notion, I found this nice site called Excalidraw where you can draw things online. When it comes to writing on phone, I found that I only like to see my current sentence when I'm writing. So I made a solo group on Whatsapp, and write my notes there. It really makes a difference.
[1] https://www.readthesequences.com/Rationality-And-The-English...
Here is how meditation can help here. (1) You become okay with having those sort of thoughts - you don't have to flee from them or push them away. (2) You can observe exactly based on what you criticize yourself, or what you feel hung up on. (3) After meditating, with a clear mind, you can rationally consider those matters. "Huh, do I really regret <xyz> decision? Why does <abc> aspect of it bother me now that I notice it?". You can resolve this conflict now.
This is my experience. Besides this, it just feels good to be calm.
> Why would I want to get unhappy again because someone tells me it’s good for me?
I also understand this sentiment. Sometimes if something gives you anxiety or intrusive thoughts, its better to leave it and let it slip by your thoughts rather than to bring it into attention. But even so I want to tell you this - a lot of the benefit of meditation comes not from exercising your cognitive and reasoning abilities, but from just being okay with how things are. It's really that simple.
But I like the idea of blogging under a fake name! This will sound ridiculous, but I'm a young individual with big ambitions. I don't want to blog, lest my future enemies figure out my psyche to use it against me.
I can relate to your experience. However, I struggle with keeping digital entertainment away from me. On good days, I keep away from entertainment until I'm done with work. On unproductive days, I start one thing piece of entertainment and collapse through a series of distractions. It's like, I start with Instagram, find myself on reddit, then on Youtube, then on Netflix, then on porn. I have this problem of the dopamine train which I unwillingly get on. Can you offer some advice?
That said, it isn't a smooth transition going from explicit lifecycle methods in class based components to useEffect hooks in functional components. But it refines the quality of the thinking, and the quality of the code overall, imo.
What's your opinion on this?
Imo,the biggest plus point of the bidet over the above is that it doesn't get the floor wet.
Edsger Dijkstra was a pioneer in computing. Yet he lived like a luddite. He did not own a television or go to the movies and did not even own a personal computer until much later in his career! He enjoyed playing the piano and left behind a large amount of papers and documentation - both personal and technical.
Leslie Lamport wrote one seminal paper after another in the field of distributed computing and concurrency. He co-created LaTex and the Paxos algorithm. He then rigorously defined the temporal logic of actions (TLA) which is a mathematically correct basis for a checking a program's behaviour/models at a high level. I took his TLA+ web course recently. The presentation of the course is fantastic. His mirthful yet sincere attitude really shines through in it.
Are there any pioneering researchers who you find fascinating?
* The common denominator of success – secret of success of every individual who has ever been successful – lies in the fact that he or she formed the habit of doing things that failures don’t like to do.
* Why are successful people able to do things they don't like to do while failures are not? Because successful people have a purpose strong enough to make them form the habit of doing things they don't like to do in order to accomplish the purpose they want to accomplish.
* Any resolution of decision you make is simply a promise to yourself which isn’t worth a tinker's damn until you have formed the habit of making it and keeping it. And you won't form the habit of making it and keeping it unless right at the start you link it with a definite purpose that can be accomplished by keeping it.
I found this speech quite compelling. It might seem full of truisms at first, but in the context of habit-making it makes perfect sense.
Simple points may sound trivial and obvious, but simple things can add up to make something magnificent.
Isn't that what genetic algorithms are?