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No More “Insight Porn”

jakobgreenfeld.com

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Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#191

Post by steveBK123 »

bombcar wrote: post #39
MOARDONGZPLZ wrote: post #28

I got super lucky. I started a company and didn’t really have any meaningful traction. I was about to shut it down. Walking out of the grocery store one night after work, I passed by my former manager when I was an intern. We got to talk for about 30 seconds, mentioned my company, she asked me to email her. I did, and that very quickly led to my first big customer which makes me about double what a FAANG swe would ma…

"Get lucky" is always the key - however, you can increase your "luck surface" by doing certain things (for example, you couldn't have gotten lucky if you hadn't started the company, nor if you hadn't bothered to talk to people).

“Why successful founders never get their groceries delivered”

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#192

Post by pwinnski »

whilestanding wrote: post #122
bearjaws wrote: post #17

Gotta hand it to The Secret (2006) for kick starting near two decades of bull shit "Insight Porn". I know a few people who got sucked into that universe and continue to read & share this kind of media today.

The foundational ideas of the secret was found in think and grow rich, an old book.

A book (and author) referenced in this very piece!

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#193

Post by NotTameAntelope »

bambax wrote: post #59

I'm confused, it seems insight porn is this guy's business. His article even ends with this: > If you’d like to get more honest strategies and proven frameworks for winning in life and business, then simply join my free newsletter here. Is he simply trying to trash the competition?

The "only I can truly help you" pattern is a very common one for selling hokum, so yeah I would agree this is probably a way to peel readers from other self-help gurus.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#194

Post by ska »

MilnerRoute wrote: post #146
danaris wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can increase your "luck surface" by doing certain things ....and your chances of being able to do those things (without severe risk of poverty and homelessness) are increased dramatically by having been lucky enough to be born wealthy, or at least upper-middle-class.

Someone once seriously proposed making the final determining decision for who gets into Harvard be based on...a random drawing. (From an oversized pool of qualified applicants.) The idea was students wouldn't go through the rest of their life thinking they'd prevailed in a meritocracy, and had earned and deserved every bit of their future success. They'd always have to acknowledge: some of it was pure luck.

This is an old idea.

If you believe the pool of qualified candidates is much bigger than the student body for a school like this (pretty easily supportable, imo) then this is also obviously a good idea - if the primary purpose of the school is to provide a great education to any qualified individuals who exist.

I don't think any reading of the history of the ivy's and similar schools can really support the latter.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#195

Post by rsanek »

thenerdhead wrote: post #97
recyclelater wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jocko willinck (and many others I am sure) likes to state that you can’t rely on motivation because it comes and goes. Rely on discipline, build habits using discipline if you want to get anything done. A trite but in my opinion helpful statement is discipline equals freedom.

This is not a new idea. Just a new messenger for the modern era. Marcus Aurelius was talking about this thousands of years ago. > At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets…

Rough self-talk from Marcus Aurelius in this passage. Not a big fan of this kind of approach personally. I've found that if I need to do this kind of self-motivation, I should be thinking much higher-level for the causes -- why do I not want to get out of bed? Perhaps I'm not working on the right thing, and need to change careers? Or perhaps I'm not dealing with something emotionally that is preventing me from doing my best work. In my experience, especially if this apathy is persisting over weeks+, it's been something much deeper than "oh I'm lazy and I just need to get up"

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#196

Post by Silverback_VII »

pessimizer wrote: post #154
Swizec wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ....and your chances of being able to do those things (without severe risk of poverty and homelessness) are increased dramatically by having been lucky enough to be born wealthy, or at least upper-middle-class. While this is true, it also isn’t helpful. Play the cards you have, not the cards you wish you had. You always gotta start somewhere . Might as well start with what you’ve got and go from there.

> While this is true, it also isn’t helpful. It isn't quite helpful. The second half of the advice should be to tell working class people to do whatever they can to get near rich/upper-middle class people, to flatter them, befriend them, attend their parties, and sleep with them. The more rich people around you, the luckier you get. Some rich manchild somewhere is waiting for you to be "the brains" behind something.

who wants to be "the brains" behind something which is not of his own?

Only your own cause and goal can generate the willpower and stamina necessary to ultimately create something great.

As Nietzsche said: "He who cannot obey himself will be commanded. That is the nature of living things."

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#197

Post by andrewflnr »

philipodonnell wrote: post #44
ycombinete wrote: post #2

Jonathan Haidt speaks about something similar in The Happiness Hypothesis . Epiphanies can only take you so far, before their novelty wears off and they lose the power to change your behaviour. This is why self-help book readers tend to keep reading self-help books. 4 weeks after finishing one they need another hit of epiphanies. Even the lamest examples listed in the OP article can probably give someone a boost in p…

"Epiphanic rush" is such a accurate but bittersweet term for this. It must be so ingrained in human psychology from the days of shamans, prophets and sages.

Pretty sure "shamans, prophets and sages" are effects, not causes, of that particular piece of psychology.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#198

Post by vkou »

leoc wrote: post #152
MilnerRoute wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone once seriously proposed making the final determining decision for who gets into Harvard be based on...a random drawing. (From an oversized pool of qualified applicants.) The idea was students wouldn't go through the rest of their life thinking they'd prevailed in a meritocracy, and had earned and deserved every bit of their future success. They'd always have to acknowledge: some of it was pure luck.

It's an excellent idea which has been proposed more than once, including by me. ;)

It's an excellent idea for people who want to go to Harvard, and maybe even society at large, but a terrible idea for people who have gone to Harvard. And for Harvard.

And Harvard cares about the latter a lot more than it does about the former.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#199

Post by andrewflnr »

vharuck wrote: post #102
enos_feedler wrote: post #4

Out of the 3 "Insight Porn" examples linked in the article, I think the Paul Graham essay seems out of place. I know I know, this is hacker news. Yet another person sticking up for pg. But I just don't think this essay (or others) is really trying to boil some dream/goal into steps. In fact, in the "How to get startup ideas" referenced in this post, pg says: "So if you can't predict whether there's a path out of an i…

>"if you're the right sort of person, you have the right sort of hunches" To me, this sounds like a line from a multi-level marketing pitch. It sounds like they're saying "This may not apply to you," but a lot of people will hear "There are chosen people (and you're probably one of them)." It reminds me of the Calvinism sect of Christianity. They believed in predestination for salvation: God has always known who be a…

Yeah, but there's always someone who will misinterpret you. You can try to mitigate it, but at some point you have to stop worrying about it and just be honest. Whatever the article's other merits, I don't think that's a good critique.

Re: No More “Insight Porn”

#200

Post by sebastianconcpt »

Good post. The metaphor is fair.

I remember being annoyed by way to many "insights" and "words of advice" that sounded plausible but in environments that were way too unattainable for me at the time, hence:

A) Not really plausible at all.

B) Too much self-referential and tautologic.

They pretended too much to be useful good advice but was actually just either show-off of success in disguise (false modesty/success porn) or tautologic; like "To be a multimillionaire just need to spend less than you earn but not earn low enough". Huh? Even a pigeon is smart enough to not need to hear that.

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