91–100 of 203 posts
Every home has a built in natural ionizer -- the shower. This surfeit of negative ions has long been associated with improvements in mood and physical health. Research conducted in the last decade has begun to support the view that negative ions have a net positive effect on health.
A very closely related idea is that most people have a "ground state": an activity that they naturally gravitate toward when nothing else intervenes. For many people, their ground state is shopping, or talking with friends, or watching tv. Nothing wrong with any of these. For some people, their ground state is aimless coding, or writing, or drifting around some community (e.g., the community of actors, or musicians,…
Unfortunately,I am becoming most people and that has to stop now.
The middle Ages drew a distinction between the understanding as ratio and the understanding as intellectus. Ratio is the power of discursive, logical thought, of searching and of examination, of abstraction, of definition and drawing conclusions. Intellectus, on the other hand, is the name for the understanding insofar as it is the capacity of simplex intuitus, of that simple vision to which truth offers itself like a landscape to the eye. The faculty of mind, man's knowledge, is both these things in one, according to antiquity and the Middle Ages, simultaneously ratio and intellectus; and the process of knowing is the action of the two together. The mode of discursive thought is accompanied and impregnated by an effortless awareness, the contemplative vision of the intellectus, which is not active but passive, or rather receptive, the activity of the soul in which it conceives that which it sees.
PG talks about the problem of having a top idea that he didn't want, something practical like making money or impractical like disputes, stealing his ambient-thought time. I have the opposite problem: practical things that need some ambient thought to really get right (day-to-day work, money stuff) fall by the wayside, while things that I care about or find more interesting (like programming projects or relationships…
The issue of day-to-day work falling by the wayside was addressed in pg's essay on "Good and Bad Procrastination" http://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
Hamming's Questions ("What are the most important problems in your field? Are you working on one of them? Why not?") are great, but somewhat daunting. Maybe the blow can be softened by loading those problems into ambient thought mode instead of pounding against them systematically. That was one of Feynmann's methods: keep a few hard problems in the back of your head all the time and wait to stumble on something that helps.
While changing your top thought directly may not be feasible, I think you can at least adjust the weights on various competing thoughts. For instance, my aunt is the president of a teacher's union and she recently recruited me to work on their website. She's paying me $25 an hour. I can feel the money pulling around my ankles like quicksand. It would be dangerously easy to get sucked into making web pages for the res…
Sorry, I do not see the problem of actually working and getting paid, while working on your own projects. How else are you living? (You sound like someone out of college who has not worked before, if this is not the case then ignore that sentence. If you have worked, and are taking a break to pursue your startup, then I completely understand.) Meanwhile you are learning about doing web pages, and more importantly, de…
If I focused on getting paid, I think I would start to rationalize putting short-term gains ahead of long-term gains. I would tell myself that by working I'm learning X, Y or Z while avoiding thoughts like, "...but those things are easy."
I am recently out of college, yes. Or rather I dropped out (about five years ago). I'm living off of savings -- about $5000 a year. You can stretch a little bit of money a long way like that.
And yeah, completely isolating oneself is probably a bad idea.
I realized the ability of my unconscious mind to solve hard problems some time around high school. I made good use of it in college, especially in courses involving coming up with algorithms or proofs. I could rarely come up with a good solution consciously, but if I spent 30 minutes thinking about the problem right before bed, the next morning optimal answers would come easily. I also formed a habit of driving at le…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like your idea... it makes me wonder if it's possible to change your own "ground state". It certainly seems like it would be an awesome lifehack if you could change it over time to suit your objectives.
In my experience, yes. I shifted my ground-state from 90% video games to 33% video games + 66% coding. It's helped a lot, but I would like to push it further.
I suspect that one of the major reasons why big companies are incapable of innovating is that the top idea on most employees minds' is "What is my boss thinking about me?" Followed closely by "What are my coworkers thinking about me?" Social approval is a powerful motivator, particularly when that social approval is essential for your continued livelihood. Only the most self-confident (or delusional ;-)) people can c…
Actually there was a paragraph about this in the essay that I cut: The Nile Perch quality of disputes may help explain why large organizations are so unproductive. The size of large organizations insulates them from the forces that keep smaller ones in line. Questions tend to be decided instead by political battles, and such disputes have a terrible cost because they push other ideas out of all the participants' head…
My small team operates as a startup inside of a large company. We have produced more software at a faster pace than any other group in the company. We had a conf call today with the powers that be who have decided they want more process.
Why would they do this? Well, while other groups are sitting around talking about resource this and ticket that we have simply been churning out software that meets the operational needs. The problem is that by doing this we are stepping on all sorts of political toes..."why did your team do this it's not your area?"
Sigh, I guess it's time to move on so I can get my mindset back to solving problems with software.
The reason this struck me so forcibly [...]
While "forcibly" isn't wrong here, if you mean "with force" (sin. poignantly) rather than "by force" (sin. inevitably) then "forcefully" is less ambiguous: