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Ask HN: Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?

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Re: Ask HN: Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?

#661

Post by machiaweliczny »

alainchabat wrote: post #350

Having my tongue rest on the bottom of your mouth. Proper tongue positioning is when you rest your tongue on the roof of the mouth and away from the teeth. It's been 2 years I've been "mewing"[1]. A good side effect for me: Now I stop snoring and I believe I have better posture. Some claim that it will improve your jawline but not for me, I guess I started too late. If I had started in my teen, I believe I would have…

I also wrote about it. It’s connected to „infantile swallowing”. Seems like 3-4 year old child should change tongue placement but if you have alergy and runny nose then you might never learn it.

I suspect that for me it switched back later as I was very good in long distance running as kid and after one time beeing sick I never recovered to my previous form. It never occured to me that it was tongue placement :(

Re: Ask HN: Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?

#662

Post by dennis_jeeves1 »

tapanjk wrote: post #512

I always thought I need to exercise [more] to lose weight. Wrong. For all practical purposes, to lose weight you must change what you eat.

Great one. Not many people know this, or will even think it's nonsense. Exercise is overrated. What you eat is really, really important.

Re: Ask HN: Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?

#663

Post by hinkley »

thyrox wrote: post #83

Worrying and arguing about things in the future. I wasted so much time and energy on this but as I get older I've realised there is so little of what we can actually control vs what we think we can do. Most of the time just saying Yes and waiting for things to actually happen is so much easier. A lot of time what you worry about never happens and if it does it isn't always as bad as you make things out to be in your…

I used to worry about everything, now I mostly worry about stuff that has actually blown up in the last and people still prefer pain to preparedness.

I do see the Illusion of Control aspect in myself and others, and it’s weird being on the other side of that now and trying to explain to people that what they want isn’t what they need and also that we can put as much effort in as we like or we can just plan to do it twice and get on with it.

The latter is a problem magnified by management, who don’t want to pay for anything twice and will apply huge social pressure in service of the sunk cost fallacy.

Re: Ask HN: Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?

#664

Post by nbaugh1 »

jethkl wrote: post #8

I thought colorblindness tests were designed to be tricky and subtle, so I always passed them through very close inspection. I'm just colorblind.

Had a friend who was absolutely convinced we were all pranking him when doing a colorblindness test. We were all doing the test because about 15 minutes prior, someone had asked him to grab a pink object off of a shelf and he came back with a green one in total seriousness

Re: Ask HN: Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?

#666

Post by DarkTree »

notacoward wrote: post #316

Multiple people beat me to the shoelace one, so here's one I don't see yet: running. At 48, I had hated running practically since I had first been able to do it, but I was in a situation where I decided to give it another try. I quickly figured out why I had hated it. I had been doing it wrong all my life. A little reading taught me about pacing and body lean and foot landings, and then ... well, it still kinda sucke…

Along with this, the thing that helped me the most was learning to run much slower. I would always run at an uncomfortable pace that would jack my heart rate up and have me huffing and puffing. Then I learned about "Zone 2" training which essentially boils down to running at a pace where you could comfortably have a conversation and more easily run for extended periods. This now only made it so I could run more miles per week, but it turned running from an exhausted effort to a more meditative, enjoyable one.

Things I think have helped me the most: 1. Correctly fitting shoes (I always wore shoes that were too narrow and short for my feet) 2. Wearing a heart rate monitor so that I could run at a pace that allows me to stay within the heart rate range that improves aerobic fitness while being easy enough to sustain (heart rate zone 2) 3. Increasing my cadence to the 170-180 steps per minute range, which has allowed me to improve my form/efficiency and avoid shin splints.

Re: Ask HN: Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?

#667

Post by BurningFrog »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #189
rjmill wrote: post #152

When my then-gf/now-wife and I first moved in together, I got really mad at her because she kept "hiding" my stuff when I left it out for more than a day. I couldn't find anything! At some point, I yelled, "It's like you don't even want to see any of my things when I'm not using them!" Then I stopped for a second. For the first time in my life, it made sense. The whole point of putting things away is to hide them! No…

This is so absolutely hilarious to me because this is 100% something I'd do. I had a friend come over once and then he came over again a week later and all of my kitchen cabinet doors were open and in the exact same position as they had been a week prior. He was like "dude did you not shut your cabinet doors? Wtf" Its just not even on my radar

The solution is to not have any doors.

Re: Ask HN: Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?

#668

Post by enigmoid »

A few years ago I discovered that I had spent my entire life tying my shoes incorrectly, with a Granny Knot instead of the stable Square Knot (the knots are very similar). My shoes would always come untied and I frequently double knotted them. Now a single knot is always sufficient.

https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm

Re: Ask HN: Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?

#669

Post by CSMastermind »

Semaphor wrote: post #481
hgomersall wrote: post #13

A common one is the tying of one's shoelaces. It's pretty common to tie the knot in an unbalanced way. https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm

This was so confusing to me. Don’t American kids learn how to tie their shoes properly? Here in Germany, I was taught that in kindergarten.

The knots being discussed are similar with one small difference: the direction you wrap the shoelace during one step.

The "incorrect" knot still works relatively well and looks almost the same as the "correct" knot. The "incorrect" one also requires significantly less finger dexterity which is why children tend to prefer it.

Re: Ask HN: Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?

#670

Post by halfnormalform »

lucb1e wrote: post #496
yamtaddle wrote: post #479

Oh! Another! Car side mirrors. I spent more than a decade of driving adjusting them wrong. You want them so you don't see cars behind you at all in your side mirrors until they're transitioning off the edge of your center rear-view mirror. This gives you far more coverage of your sides, and every car is still visible in at least one mirror at all times. For me, where I put my seat, this usually means setting them as…

That's not what I was taught. It sounds logical but before I take an internet stranger's word on changing one of the likeliest things in life to kill you or those around you, did you read somewhere that this is a good idea based on research xyz or is this something you came up with?

Society of Automotive Engineers, 1995: https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/95...

Referenced in: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15131074/how-to-adjus...

(edited to include 2nd link)

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