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Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

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Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#331

Post by haihaibye »

cmetzger4 wrote: post #310
runjake wrote: post #306

- Learn to code. (not everyone here codes) - Once you learn how to code, learn how to automate. Design everything you can to be declarative. - Learn how to speak and write well. - Learn how to negotiate and influence people (read the "classics", eg "Never Split the Difference...", "How to Win Friends...", and so on.) - Work to increase your EQ/Emotional Intelligence. (Yes, these are all actually productivity multipli…

Will you explain what you mean by "Design everything you can to be declarative"?

I think they mean if you can, don't define the execution yourself. Rather, specify what needs to be done, then have the machine work out what to execute.

Eg declare dependencies and have Make build things, specify SQL query and have the optimiser fetch the data

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#332

Post by jonas_kgomo »

I would argue that computational complexity helps you branch out on many problems and fields. In terms of thinking models I would say basic understanding of theories like Moore's Law, Pareto Principle, Uncertainty principle and Matrix Multiplication go a long way.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#334

Post by vorpalhex »

kalev wrote: post #226
dmos62 wrote: post #67

- Writing as form of (or tool for) thinking; Leslie Lamport said (maybe quoting someone) that if you're thinking, but not writing, you only think that you're thinking; - High tolerance for feeling ignorant, confused, silly, inadequate, a novice: none of these states should phase you: you should not have a comfort zone: let your mind feel at ease in not understanding something: go to the eye of the storm and weather i…

> High tolerance for feeling ignorant, confused, silly, inadequate, a novice: none of these states should phase you: you should not have a comfort zone: let your mind feel at ease in not understanding something: go to the eye of the storm and weather it: you'll come out being more capable; I’d love to be more at ease on uncomfortable situations. Any tips?

I'm going to go a different advice route then other commenters here.

If you went to the gym and did a really easy workout that was comfortable.. that would be a bad gym session. The goal is to push yourself. Not to injure yourself but to go until failure.

We don't learn in the comfort zone. We learn and grow by pushing ourselves where we feel like we might fail and then pushing until we fail.

Success isn't a game of avoiding failure. Success requires learning and growing from repeated failure. Failure isn't the opposite of success, it's part of it.

Feeling dumb, not knowing where to go, having difficulty even reading and comprehending material is when we know we are engaged in building ourselves.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#336

Post by AlexCoventry »

cmetzger4 wrote: post #310
runjake wrote: post #306

- Learn to code. (not everyone here codes) - Once you learn how to code, learn how to automate. Design everything you can to be declarative. - Learn how to speak and write well. - Learn how to negotiate and influence people (read the "classics", eg "Never Split the Difference...", "How to Win Friends...", and so on.) - Work to increase your EQ/Emotional Intelligence. (Yes, these are all actually productivity multipli…

Will you explain what you mean by "Design everything you can to be declarative"?

Automate figuring out how to do things from a machine-readable specification of the desired result.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#337

Post by cosmojg »

Learning to adequately estimate probabilities and make decisions based on those probabilities is extremely powerful, and that's true whether you use those skills in your investments, your career, or your relationships. You can get a lot of practice on sites like Metaculus[1] and Manifold Markets[2].

I've also found a lot of useful discussion around these and similar skills on LessWrong, a site dedicated to the art of recognizing and correcting errors in reason and cognition. That site is full of 10x multipliers, particularly in their "Best Of" collection[3].

[1] https://www.metaculus.com/questions/

[2] https://manifold.markets/home

[3] https://www.lesswrong.com/bestoflesswrong

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#338

Post by raffraffraff »

vorpalhex wrote: post #334
kalev wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> High tolerance for feeling ignorant, confused, silly, inadequate, a novice: none of these states should phase you: you should not have a comfort zone: let your mind feel at ease in not understanding something: go to the eye of the storm and weather it: you'll come out being more capable; I’d love to be more at ease on uncomfortable situations. Any tips?

I'm going to go a different advice route then other commenters here. If you went to the gym and did a really easy workout that was comfortable.. that would be a bad gym session. The goal is to push yourself. Not to injure yourself but to go until failure. We don't learn in the comfort zone. We learn and grow by pushing ourselves where we feel like we might fail and then pushing until we fail. Success isn't a game of…

There comes a point in your life where this may not still be true. At 70 I doubt I'll be pushing "to failure" in training sessions. In fact, I'll probably consciously reduce the intensity of my training sessions and use them to maintain muscle mass for as long as possible into old(er) age.

The same goes for work. I'm a hard worker, but I'm not gonna bust my balls at some startup so the CEO and his buddies can make a billion. Not unless I'm one of the founders.

Some people have already done a shit ton of learning and growing, and maybe they're at a different stage in their lives. Like the stage where their 30+ years of experience are extremely valuable without grinding 50 hours a week.

Re: Ask HN: What bits of fundamental knowledge are productivity multipliers?

#339

Post by VirusNewbie »

Monads and monadic comprehension and recognizing when to use such. The fact that so many tricky things are simplified when boiled down to map/flatmap/join/ (along with laws) is so fucking powerful it's astounding. That you can model state transitions, concurrent computations, callbacks, dealing with 'happy path' short circuiting all with the same 'pattern' (and syntactic sugar!) seems like a cheat code.
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