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Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

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Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#51
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I firmly believe that there is a sequence of words that [...] would convince anyone of anything. What does make you think that? Have you seen or experienced something like this before? Your thought/ idea makes perfect sense to me and there surely is more potential to transfer ideas/ ideologies/ etc more compact than we do most of the time. I too, don't believe in good and evil humans but that everyone is capable of…

It's based on the pervasiveness of some ideas. Some just shift the foundation of a person when they are accepted internally. If you can do that, you can steer anyone. Less controversially, I think there's good in almost any idea that a speaker really believes in (ignoring bad faith actors) and if you can make people see, truly, your point of view and mesh it to theirs, you can both agree, even if you both abandon you…

Okay, what you're talking about now, sounds a lot more like a dialogue than before. Beforehand I thought you were talking about an X-words-long argument that (without interaction), if constructed towards one specific individual, could flip this specific individual with certainty. Like a key that can be used.

Maybe I lacked structure in my initial comment and you're referring to my statement about value in dialogs/ discussions that I briefly mentioned. That said, I totally agree with what you say here. There are numerous ways to get something valuable out of an interaction. The actually exchange of information can be just one part. Observing how you or the other reacts/ feels/ etc. to an impulse (in whatever form), can be eye-opening as well. And so much more. Human interaction is complicated, nevertheless, sometimes I just don't feel like it's worth the energy - ofc not our little chit chat here (;

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#52
I am almost always considering "what did it take to make this thing work, and why did they do it this way?" Sometimes it is at a high level such as UX design or architecture, but more frequently it is akin to "gratitude" strategies where you look at a random object in your life, examine it and consider all the labor and materials and knowledge that went into it. It can get overwhelming: how many screws are in this window frame, what are they made of, where were they made, what does the screw factory look like, what were the logistics of getting that factory set up, what equipment is involved in making sure the screws are to the correct specifications, how are people trained on that equipment, who designed it, how many screws were needed to make that equipment in the first place, and how did THOSE screws come about? and on and on like that.

It's often a fun thought experiment, and really helps me appreciate all the little things that let me lead the life I do, even when that life is not going as well as I'd like.

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#53

Oh I got the perfect answer for this one. As someone who (now after about a year of therapy a while back) has my OCD managed, let me tell you what my brain still does with a moment of free time: Visualizes the worst possible scenario of any situation I’m in! Standing in line to get coffee: What happens if I blurt out a racial slur randomly in here? Or what if someone walks in with a gun? What if someone put poison in…

My favorite one lately has been, what if supply chains collapse and grocery stores are empty for weeks/month, causing most people to starve? Or similarly, what if the electrical grid just stops working for some reason, causing the majority of jobs to evaporate overnight (as well as the aforementioned supply chain problems, and a whole host of cascading effects).

As a SWE, I recognize that although this career is one of the most valued in our current economy, we're highly dependent on modern infrastructure. Take away certain services, and all our years of coding experience are rendered useless.

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#56

Sex, booze, sex, friends, sex,family, sex, books, sex, traveling, sex, science, sex, art, sex, tech, sex, movies, sex, art, sex, sociology, sex, anthropology, sex, big problems of the humankind, sex. In that order. Sometimes I wonder if an Eskimo girl would wear a pink finger ring while listening to Irish folk music while traveling between Mombasa and Easter Island for a conference about mouses who wear green umbrell…

> an Eskimo girl would wear a pink finger ring while listening to Irish folk music while traveling between Mombasa and Easter Island for a conference about mouses who wear green umbrellas. any good absurd movies to recommend anyone? This seems like a good starting point for a scenario

I really like some of the Adult Swim movies for absurd comedy. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters and Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie come to mind as good examples.

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#57
post #6

I'm a full-time (adhd-diagnosed) daydreamer. I have a bulk of projects that I can escape to. For all of them I have notes, so when my mind wanders around and I stumble across something that I think is note-worthy, I write it down. Most of these 'projects' (non of which ever came to life) are software related. My currently favorite one is a video game. It has about 60k words in the design document and about 35k safed…

Same here :)

> I guess this is not healthy

I'd say the contrary, thinking about projects and being enthusiastic about them is therapeutic. People get out of addictions by working on projects, just an example.

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#58
post #6

I'm a full-time (adhd-diagnosed) daydreamer. I have a bulk of projects that I can escape to. For all of them I have notes, so when my mind wanders around and I stumble across something that I think is note-worthy, I write it down. Most of these 'projects' (non of which ever came to life) are software related. My currently favorite one is a video game. It has about 60k words in the design document and about 35k safed…

Mind if I ask why none of the projects have ever come to life, is it lack of desire to make them more than an escape technique, or is ADHD or something else preventing you from doing what you would otherwise like to do?

I ask because it sounds to me like if you could figure out how to channel all of that energy going into your projects into the right thing then maybe in addition to the escape you might find your difficulty turns into a super power - many people would kill for the focus needed to write 60k words of game design!

Of course, figuring out some sort of "right thing" that's both easy for the mind and useful to do isn't always easy, and finding something in that venn overlap might be easier than expected or take so many failed attempts that it seems hopeless before finally stroking gold.

Or am I commenting too much from a place of not having lived in your mind, and the wandering nature of ADHD leaves you helpless to channel it at all, just having to hope that it might wander in useful directions?

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#59
I think a lot about words and meanings, and interesting things I've encountered. Like, what is the difference between catenation and concatenation? Why is unravel a word, when ravel means the same thing, and given that unravel has taken over the meaning of ravel, why hasn't ravel come to mean it's opposite? Why was the classical Latin pronunciation of "caesar" preserved in German but not English? Why are the common conception of zero as an absence, the scalar zero, and the vector zero all different?

Sometimes I just daydream about stuff. Often I remember things that make me laugh, or make me angry, or both. Occasionally I force myself to actually work on some of the projects I've daydreamed and planned out (forced, because for some reason that part is much less innately interesting to me than the planning and conceptualizing, even though I want to finish them).

Re: Ask HN: Where does your mind wander to?

#60

Oh I got the perfect answer for this one. As someone who (now after about a year of therapy a while back) has my OCD managed, let me tell you what my brain still does with a moment of free time: Visualizes the worst possible scenario of any situation I’m in! Standing in line to get coffee: What happens if I blurt out a racial slur randomly in here? Or what if someone walks in with a gun? What if someone put poison in…

My go to reaction is to remind myself that "if that event happen, I will deal with it then."
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