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Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

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Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#211

Post by hackerblues »

Tycho wrote: post #135
larrywright wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about those things is undesirable? Leaving religion aside, it seems like all those (OpenOffice aside :) lead to a much happier state of mind than the alternative.

1. Automatically loving thy neighbour (ie. everyone) is a ridiculous notion. You love the people that are most important to you, that deserve your utmost respect and kindness, so of course this will mean you love a select few. Furthermore, trying to think up reasons why you should love any random neighbour would be an exhausting exercise in self-deception. Plus if you don't love people for their qualities, but instea…

It appears that you think loving your neighbour means trying to generate an artificial emotion, as if the goal is to become so smitten you spend all day writing them poems and blowing kisses.

To see that this is ridiculous, try substituting other emotions in for love: Happy thy neighbour, Angry thy neighbour, Sad thy neighbour.

In the phrase love is a solid verb. It is about taking the time to help the person out when they require external assistance.

Crawling out of bed at 3am to change the sheets after your kid pisses the bed -> Picking up an extra coffee at lunch for Bob at the office when he has had a ton of work dumped on him and can't get away from his desk.

Taking your spouse out to dinner to celebrate their new promotion -> Congratulating Sue from down the hall when her daughter makes the news for winning a spelling bee.

Picking up your brother from the airport -> Inviting the new guy over for a beer.

I would claim that all of these are loving actions but none of them require you to have exactly one special emotional state. Certainly, being dragged out of bed doesn't inspire much poetry at the time.

Further, none of these requires a specific justification beyond reducing human suffering/making the world a better place so you needn't exhaust yourself looking for reasons. And I certainly hope that welcoming the new guy without even knowing his qualities to judge him by doesn't devalue the act.

Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#212

Post by alexro »

neworbit wrote: post #169

"People are mostly good"

Maybe you were extremely unlucky or mostly in the unusual situations, but people ARE mostly good, for me and other I know.

Also, think about this: if people were mostly bad and that would mean they were getting worse and worse every next generation (because all the good ones were 'eaten' by the bad ones), how it'd have been right now? I think our world isn't THAT horrible!

Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#213

Post by Jach »

rudd wrote: post #161
Jach wrote: post #59

I'm not exactly sure how to word it, and I'm not aware of a single source who advised me on it, but it seems like there's a pervasive feeling in society that "If I want to learn something, I need a teacher." I outgrew this mental model around 14, and now in college I feel so much further ahead of many of my peers who are lucky to have taken a HS programming course once before choosing a programming degree. I wish I h…

The truth isn't that you don't need a teacher. You may be able to learn everything from a book or solitary practice, like yourself. But others probably can do that sometimes, may sometimes need a teacher, may sometimes need to discuss with peers, etc. And I don't mean that some people are visual learners, or readers, etc. I mean that people learn different topics in different ways, on different days, with different c…

Absolutely, I'm not saying teachers are never useful or needed. I'd much rather have a conversation with someone familiar with a large codebase to get a feel for it than diving in and creating assumptions. But the bad advice is that a teacher of some form is essential, and that's wrong-headed, and it paralyzes people when asked instead to not just solve a well-rehearsed problem, but actually to discover the problem that needs solving.

Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#215

Post by SteveC »

jdietrich wrote: post #157

Never, never, not in a million years, listen to a single word of advice uttered by someone who isn't happy with their life. They have absolutely nothing to teach you. This is strong stuff, granted, but I think it is tremendously important. Every single piece of bad advice I have ever received was from someone who didn't like their life. If you're unhappy, you have two basic options. You can do something to make yours…

I have a similar rule when it comes to business advice. It's only useful when coming from someone made rich through their own business. Of course there will be exceptions, but I've found this rule works from my own experiences. Maybe a more general rule would be to only take advice from people who already are where you want to be.

Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#216

Post by nostrademons »

hackerblues wrote: post #206
nostrademons wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, all the advice I had from upperclassmen when I started college was "do your homework and go to class", and I did neither, and I don't regret it at all. Yes, it hurt my grades. However, I've found that my grades haven't mattered at all.

Given grades are correlated with having understood the material, I assume the implication is that the material you might have learned but didn't hasn't been at all relevant.

It's more that understanding the material is a necessary but not sufficient condition for getting good grades. It's quite possible to understand all the material and still get bad grades.

Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#218

Post by zoomzoom »

mping wrote: post #210
irahul wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree. As already point, many philosophers, scientists, programmers have been bitter people, largely unhappy with life. Some people are bitter by design. No matter what I do, I will always have many complains to be unhappy about. Right now, I am trying to boot-up my startup. If it doesn't work, I will be bitter. If it works out, I will be bitter about my other pet peeve - schools killing creativity and I woul…

I believe that unless you are chemically, neurologically or biologically imbalanced, there's no excuse to be bitter or unhappy. I won't discuss happiness here, but even if the advice of some bitter person is good, I would say that an advice of a person who I lookup to will always be "better". Of course, things should be placed in context. An advice of a bitter math teacher on mathematics will always be better than an…

What does it mean to be chemically and biologically balanced?

Re: Ask HN: What advice messed up your life?

#220

Post by irahul »

zoomzoom wrote: post #218
mping wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that unless you are chemically, neurologically or biologically imbalanced, there's no excuse to be bitter or unhappy. I won't discuss happiness here, but even if the advice of some bitter person is good, I would say that an advice of a person who I lookup to will always be "better". Of course, things should be placed in context. An advice of a bitter math teacher on mathematics will always be better than an…

What does it mean to be chemically and biologically balanced?

It means the parent post assumes the world can be pigeonholed in whatever criteria he thinks/has been taught to be ideal. Anyone who doesn't fits there is abnormal in some way.

He assumes there is no reason to be unhappy, completely ignoring the various reasons I have pointed out and stated that ignoring them would lead to bliss, but that's not what I seek.

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