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Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

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Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#741

Post by possiblelion »

mikorym wrote: post #657
analog31 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a cool thing about learning something as a kid: You have no taste to get in the way of learning. You just learn. This is true of six-year-olds learning to play the violin. Another taste-bypass is to jump into a field that's new enough to have no established standards for taste. For instance when I learned programming, there were no beautiful websites or even software to compare my work to. Websites were a dec…

I am a pianist that went throught this. The first time I wrote something of my own "taste" was when I was 15. A couple of somewhat important guys told me "We can't wait until you are 18." This is the only field in which I had this kind of luck. (I am about 30 now and I can write a song within about three days that I would be happy with. A more recent one was when I took an Estonian poem by Johan Liiv and set it to mu…

How did you happen to take Juhan Liiv's poem without knowing Estonian?

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#742

Post by kleer001 »

sdegutis wrote: post #503
krapp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That said I've come around to the usefulness of deification of ideals and the idea that not every moment should be lived in object-space, but also in drama-space. I can agree with that. God as an idea is real in the abstract sense that all powerful ideas are real, and people believe in them, and treat them as real. But as someone who was raised in a (Christian, US Southern) religious background, I've come to believe…

Religion as a psychological tool is a very sad thing. But it's a very common thought, one I grew up with. In fact, I only started praying while still thinking it was all fake, but needing some kind of mental help past my problem in life at the time. So I understand that theory as well as anyone here. But not all religions are created equal. The Protestant religions are emasculated to some degree. Since they're based…

Not just psychological, but also economic (halal mortages and hawala), sociological (their biggest strength is gathering people IMHO), parasocial (all the little morality plays/stories in them), interpersonal (various golden rules), historical (often muddled with myth), sometimes physical (yogas), and on and on with all the different dimensions of the human experience.

As I'm sure you understand every religion is (among other things) an attempt at distillation of important perspectives and wisdom to help coming generations. So, I would not say "sad" by any means, well, except when misused.

I don't know much about the Protestant / Catholicism schism, but it sounds pretty heated. Though, as an outsider, I'd peg them as sects rather than separate religions. Heck, I'd lump all the Abrahamic religions together into a single clade as they share some bits of the same holy books.

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#743

Post by setgree »

When learning something, trying to reward myself when I feel stupid or frustrated, because that generally means I'm doing something difficult that will pay off long-term.

I think of this as another 'habit to unlearn from school' (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/48WeP7oTec3kBEada/two-more-t...). For most of my life, I did what came easily, and I got a lot of praise and reward in those areas. I neglected the things that made me feel stupid or frustrated, and I think that consequently, my education is not as well-rounded as it might be.

Or, like Jake the Dog says [0]: "Dude, sucking at something is the first step to being sorta good at something."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smgQiGABQMs

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#744

Post by csense »

kyoob wrote: post #17

My favorite thing about "Finite and Infinite Games" by James Carse is you can yadda-yadda the whole book: "There are two types of games. One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. [...] There is only one infinite game."

> There is only one infinite game

How could this possibly be true? I'm sure you could invent lots of non-isomorphic infinite games. In fact, couldn't just about any game be re-purposed into an infinite game by changing the win condition to "continue to play for an unbounded amount of time"?

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#746

Post by DanielBMarkham »

Profound Ignorance. The more you think you know, the less able you are to learn anything. Being profoundly ignorant doesn't reduce your ability to do anything in life, but it can be uncomfortable for both yourself and others around you. We like thinking we know things, we like hanging with people who know things, whether anybody knows anything or not.

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#747

Post by kgin »

fredsir wrote: post #88
saadalem wrote: post #59

“You live in a mechanical universe. It’s time to start understanding that.” I was disillusioned with myself. I was performing badly in highschool(even dropped out) I couldn’t understand why. I wanted so badly to do something epic. I feared being an average guy and living an ordinary life. I didn’t understand this advice at first. However, I decided that I couldn’t take the life I was living, so I decided to change. I…

> Elon Obviously, it's also a good advice to be born with wealth from the blood of an emerald empire. Hyper-rational, being born wealthy. Great advice! Kidding aside. I'm just sick of people putting people like Elon up on a pedestal. Look at all the rich, successful people out there. How many come from wealth, and how many come from dirt poor conditions and just worked themself up? Working hard is good advice, but it…

Most great chefs would be nothing without access to a grocery store, but that doesn't mean I can't learn more from that great chef than the 99% of the other people going to that grocery store who never learn to make amazing things.

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#748

Post by takinola »

Try to be truthful to others. Always be truthful to yourself.

Recognizing reality is a surprisingly difficult thing. Our perceptions are clouded by bias, wishful thinking and outright deception. The truth is the only foundation from which you can faithfully apply judgement to address any situation.

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#749

Post by arendtio »

"When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity." ― Dale Carnegie

I think my friends would say that I am rational and calm under fire. I always knew that people have emotions and just thought, that I am pretty good at handling mine. However, the more I thought about the quote above, the more I realized, that only about 10%-20% of my decisions are rational. The other 80%-90% are driven by my emotional state and my mind just saying 'Do what you like, it's not critical'.

Accepting that humans are mostly driven by their emotions helped me understand and predict their actions.

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