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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

#811

Post by beagle3 »

kmmlng wrote: post #623
koonsolo wrote: post #585

As a kid: Everything that you see was made by somebody. Someone had the idea, someone started a business for it, someone designed it, someone assembled it, etc. As an adult: Simulated annealing for your own life ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing ) You start something by going all over the place, trying even crazy ideas. Then you start refining and refining, getting better at the details. This is the…

SA for your own life sounds intriguing. Do you have a concrete example that elucidates how this could be implemented? The concept still seems a little slippery to me.

This is also known as “gradually shift from exploration to exploitation”

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

#812

Post by IndexPointer »

endymi0n wrote: post #150

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot o…

Quantity before quality, essentially.

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

#814

Post by Izkata »

admiral33 wrote: post #354
ignoramous wrote: post #292

I am going to cheat a bit and give you three things that have had a lasting impact on me: First is this quote from Lincoln, "I hate that man. I must get to know him better". This has helped me shed biases and prejudices that stop me from liking someone on the first few interactions. Instead of shunning them, I seek to know them better, in the hope that I see past the veil and reach out to the actual human on the othe…

Thank you for that Lincoln quote. I went to a very diverse University (Upstream, Red Team) and one of the hunches I've walked away with is that at the core of prejudice is a missing friend on the other side.

> the core of prejudice is a missing friend on the other side.

By far the best concrete example of that is Daryl Davis: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinc...

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

#815

Post by seanwilson »

mistermann wrote: post #779
seanwilson wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, so I'd say the vast majority of people are not familiar with cognitive biases or logical fallacies at all. Just look at advertising and politics, especially anything to do with medicine. I learned long ago that pointing out falacies is not a winning approach to changing someone's mind so I agree with what you mean by agitated. It's also really interesting your point about people acknowledging the fault in genera…

> Hmm, so I'd say the vast majority of people are not familiar with cognitive biases or logical fallacies at all. But would you say that applies to the userbase of HN? > My point was it's probably such a protected/strong part of thought because long ago those rules were generally really useful for survival. Overriding them now is possible but takes a lot of work. Agreed, but if no one is even willing to acknowledge t…

Yes, I'd say most people on HN are aware of this stuff. I guess that's why I comment here more than other places.

> Agreed, but if no one is even willing to acknowledge the existence of the phenomenon, what should one do?

It's just a slow process of education I guess to take a scientific approach to knowledge seeking. Discussions should be about seeking the truth, agreeing with the other person when you agree, questioning your own assumption etc.

I wasn't taught logical fallacies in school for example - I'd be for teaching critical thinking in school at an early age to help with the above.

Most people see views opposed to their viewpoint as an attack and cornering someone with logic to show they're wrong does not work because they're not genuinely seeking the truth anyway.

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

#816

Post by mistermann »

seanwilson wrote: post #815
mistermann wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hmm, so I'd say the vast majority of people are not familiar with cognitive biases or logical fallacies at all. But would you say that applies to the userbase of HN? > My point was it's probably such a protected/strong part of thought because long ago those rules were generally really useful for survival. Overriding them now is possible but takes a lot of work. Agreed, but if no one is even willing to acknowledge t…

Yes, I'd say most people on HN are aware of this stuff. I guess that's why I comment here more than other places. > Agreed, but if no one is even willing to acknowledge the existence of the phenomenon, what should one do? It's just a slow process of education I guess to take a scientific approach to knowledge seeking. Discussions should be about seeking the truth, agreeing with the other person when you agree, questi…

> Yes, I'd say most people on HN are aware of this stuff.

In the abstract (in principle), sure. But how consistently do people exercise this awareness during real-time behavior?

> It's just a slow process of education

Ideally. But often, but it often seems like many individuals and communities very much prefer taking the shortcut of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil". Or in other words, those other people suffer from that, but not us. No siree Bob, we are fully conscious and logical, at all times.

You and I seem largely in agreement, but I wonder if we agree on how well we here at HN, as a community, execute these principles. In my experiences, most people are "not very fond" of even discussing the topic.

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

#817

Post by seanwilson »

mistermann wrote: post #816
seanwilson wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'd say most people on HN are aware of this stuff. I guess that's why I comment here more than other places. > Agreed, but if no one is even willing to acknowledge the existence of the phenomenon, what should one do? It's just a slow process of education I guess to take a scientific approach to knowledge seeking. Discussions should be about seeking the truth, agreeing with the other person when you agree, questi…

> Yes, I'd say most people on HN are aware of this stuff. In the abstract (in principle), sure. But how consistently do people exercise this awareness during real-time behavior ? > It's just a slow process of education Ideally. But often, but it often seems like many individuals and communities very much prefer taking the shortcut of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil". Or in other words, those other people su…

> You and I seem largely in agreement, but I wonder if we agree on how well we here at HN, as a community, execute these principles. In my experiences, most people are "not very fond" of even discussing the topic.

My feelings are people here will tolerate a few anecdotes (as long as you're not pushing it as absolute truth) but generally if you post appeals to nature, appeals to popularity etc. it'll be challenged and downvoted pretty quick.

Certain topics seem worse than others though e.g. eating meat, x10 programmers, job interview processes and programming language comparison topics are full of anecdotes and fallacies with bold statements.

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

#819

Post by dilippkumar »

abetusk wrote: post #156
dilippkumar wrote: post #58

The Central Limit Theorem. It's hard to explain the precise way in which an understanding of the central limit theorem has changed my life. However, knowing how any random distribution sums up to a Gaussian has subtly changed how I perceive and comprehend the world around me. Over time, this has added to a significant number of choices and decisions that I've subconsciously made, informed only by rough estimates of a…

Just a word of warning, the central limit theorem is a bit misleading. Assuming the sum independent and identically distributed random variables converges to a distribution, that distribution is not necessarily the Gaussian, but a larger family called the Levy-Stable distributions [1]. Levy-Stable distributions are "heavy-tailed" in that far away from zero they behave like (inverse) power laws. This is probably why y…

TIL. Thank you for the links. I've got more studying to do now :-)

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

#820

Post by lol636363 »

ken wrote: post #363
aazaa wrote: post #193

Favor interrogative-led questions over leading questions. A leading question attempts to get the listener to agree or disagree with a premise you feed to them. An interrogative-led question often begins with the words: who; where; what; when; why. Imagine the responses to these two questions: - "Did you like the movie?" (Leading) - "What did you think about the movie?" (Interrogative-led) How do each of these questio…

I hear suggestions like this occasionally, and I don't get it. Apparently sentences like "Did you like the movie?", which sound to me like perfectly neutral questions, actually have a slant. Which way is this question leading me to answer? How can I tell? "Yes" and "No" seem equally acceptable answers here. I don't see how either one would "displease the asker", without knowing more about the situation.

I am with you here, it seems perfectly neutral question to me.

But this reminds me of a time when I went to movies with some younger family memeber and their friends. After the movie they asked each other if they loved the movie. To me love was really strong word. I wanted to say I liked it, not loved it but then I thought no need to be negative here. So I just said yes.

So when people ask did you like the movie, many people subconsciously say yes even if they disliked it.

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