Epistemology from The Fabric of Reality (to start)
Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
71–80 of 85 posts
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#721. I could learn how to be attractive to women. Everything I learned when younger was wrong, and relationships don't just happen, you must work to make them happen. Intelligence actually can be used for sexual attraction.
2. When I am sure I am being totally logical, something analyzing myself shows very clearly that my motivations aren't what I think. People who deny their irrational humanity the most often are extremely irrational humans in many obvious ways (to someone other than themselves). A whole lot of extremely complex things are really a form of very simple, and often counterproductive, fear.
3. I really don't have to be what other people want me to be.
4. A lot of deeply held and complex human phenomena have extremely simple explanations, which you aren't allowed to say, but which can be extremely useful to know nonetheless. (For example, take the tapestry of specific social and philosophical beliefs about religion, all constructed out of transparently motivated falsehood or meaningless gibberish.)
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#731. I could learn how to be attractive to women. Everything I learned when younger was wrong, and relationships don't just happen, you must work to make them happen. Intelligence actually can be used for sexual attraction. 2. When I am sure I am being totally logical, something analyzing myself shows very clearly that my motivations aren't what I think. People who deny their irrational humanity the most often are extr…
ditto on #1. What women sometimes view as happy coincidences in romantic fate is actually the work of meticulous planning on part of the guy.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#741. Systems Theory with Buckminster Fuller and Russell Ackoff.
2. Recursion, not just in programming, but in other parts of nature.
3. Memory and social size approximations, such as memory chunking in seven plus or minus two, and Dunbar's number.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#75I don't have any mind-blowing scientific proof to quote, though I am a trivia and wikipedia junky.
Just the other day I was watching my dog 'dig a hole' inside my house and attempt to bury one of his toys. The problem was that he wasn't actually digging anything up, and was covering the toy with 'ghost' matter (there wasn't anythying there, it was make believe dirt).
This got me to thinking that our entire universe has conspired for planet Earth to harbour life, and for life to evolve through millions of iterations to create the genus canus, and animal behaviour has developed to this exact point in time, where my dog innately knows how to dig, and he has no idea why.... and for that matter, neither do I. We're all such a fluke of existence, and we never take a moment to realize that.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#76Girls like sex too.
On this tangent. I think that the moment I realized that nobody thinks as complicated as we think they do. Basically it boiled down to this thought, "If that girl came up to me right now, how would I feel?" "I'd feel great thats what!". And then I get up the balls to go and talk to her. The idea of putting myself in other's shoes really changed my attitude on a lot of things.
You know what's funny? What you said is true for pretty much everything else in life, too. Not just sex.
Here's something I've learned that rocked my world: most things are not nearly as complicated as I make them in my head. Apparently this comes from some kind of childhood issue with pleasing parents. But if you're smart, chances are you can do a lot more than you give yourself credit for.
I just wish I'd learned that earlier.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#771. Ludwig Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico Philosophicus" (the extremism of the idea, the solemn (poetic?) tone that nevertheless emerges from the sentences of such a rigorous work) 2. RMS reflections about morals in software programming (I may not wholly agree, but he taught me a whole new way of thinking about software) 3. Prolog declarative approach (instead of describing how to solve a problem, just describe the…
You actually read the Tractatus? Wow.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#78Don't know why, but I really liked network calculus in university:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_calculus
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#79Economics. After years of studying earth science and natural processes, economics taught me that economic drivers dominate everything, including everything about the natural world. It also taught me that economics is completely amoral. It doesn't look for good or bad, it just achieves results that society wants - versus what society says it wants.
Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?
#80Airway, Breathing, Circulation... Everything else is details
Carl Jung's ideas of Myth and Robert Johnson's "He"
Wealth is what people want. If you have what people want, you have wealth. You can create what people want.
The point of working is to make enough wealth to retire. You can do that all at once, or by selling off hours of your life in exchange for money.
The "money problem" can be solved.
Recursion.
Code == data == code