291–300 of 323 posts
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now imagine each bad play had a cost and you had a budget before too many knocked you out of the game
now imagine doing nothing had a cost and you decided to sit there and pout because others have better cards
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Well, one extreme example is buying lottery tickets; it's the best way to expose yourself to the potential upside of winning the lottery, yet the expected value is quite negative. That example is quite bracing, but I think it points out that there are many ways to build this 'luck surface', and the expected values of each are probably very different, and likely situational.
Expected value is really a dumb way to evaluate lottery tickets. I can't believe even supposedly good mathematicians use it. The next dumb way to evaluate lottery tickets is to compare it with other long odds (lightning strikes, marrying your favorite actor). If you want to play along, the probability of you winning the lottery is 10000000000000x more favorable than the probability of you existing in this universe. B…
It’s almost like there is another variable that determines if this is a dumb idea, and it almost always is. Maybe those math professors are on to something after all.
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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…
Yeah, MA is very keen on the separation between brain (what he calls the "directing mind") and body, to the extent that he thinks it's possible for the brain to ignore pain because that's the body's problem, and it's only something that makes the brain feel bad if the brain chooses to feel bad about it. If your philosophical framework looks like that then it's not really conducive to "fix the things in the outside wo…
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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.
doesn't discipline require willpower though. I was told relying on willpower is bad because you only have limited amount of it per day and surely going to fail your when you run out of it.
This keeps getting repeated but there is no physical evidence to it. We know muscles have a limited amount of power (because they run out of ATP energy) but there is nothing that suggests it's the same for willpower.
Why does everything have to be some kind "porn" nowadays. Does anybody seriously think this is funny?
I suspect we use 'porn' as a shorthand for 'hypernormal stimuli' and I suspect we have so much of it because humans have fewer evolved defenses against manipulation by hypernormal stimuli on the internet.
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doesn't discipline require willpower though. I was told relying on willpower is bad because you only have limited amount of it per day and surely going to fail your when you run out of it.
That’s like saying you have a limited amount of muscular endurance per day. It’s true, but it’s completely trainable. Meaning just like you can go from barely able to run a mile to being able to run an ultramarathon, you can do the same thing with your willpower. But unlike running a marathon, training your willpower will yield real, life improving tangible benefits assuming you can correctly figure out how to apply…
Regardless of whether one accepts the arguments in the comic, I doubt willpower can be trained. It's not like a marathon where you have to actually run to practice, every day you're faced with decisions and temptations that you can "exercise" your will power with. In a sense you can't really stop practicing with your willpower...
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"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).
> 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.
"at least"?! upper-middle-class in US puts you well in the 0.5% of world population.
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"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).
The book "Conspiracy: A True Story of Power, Sex, and a Billionaire's Secret Plot to Destroy a Media Empire" is a wonderful example of how what seemed to be a lucky break for Peter Thiel was actually a product of extensive preparation for an opportunity to take revenge on Gawker.
Subsequently, he's used the resources that that lucky has afforded him.
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doesn't discipline require willpower though. I was told relying on willpower is bad because you only have limited amount of it per day and surely going to fail your when you run out of it.
> I was told relying on willpower is bad because you only have limited amount of it per day and surely going to fail your when you run out of it. This keeps getting repeated but there is no physical evidence to it. We know muscles have a limited amount of power (because they run out of ATP energy) but there is nothing that suggests it's the same for willpower.
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But the true answer lies between the two. The game is rigged. But that merely makes it less likely that someone who's on the wrong side can succeed, not impossible. You do have to do as much as you can, with what you're given, regardless of what it is. The real key, though, is that this tells us what we, as a society, need to change . If we genuinely value entrepreneurship and innovation, we need to create a universa…
Isn’t this what limited liability corporations help ensure? People need a way to limit downsides, not have zero downside. It’s like giving a student a service chance at a test to help ensure they learn the material. But giving them unlimited attempts with no risk doesn’t create the same environment.
Having something like universal basic income absolutely does not reduce the risk to zero. What it does is it reduces the penalty for failure—failure which is often largely out of your hands. Rather than such failures meaning you lose your life savings, have no job, and are months/weeks/days from homelessness, they would mean you are making only the minimum needed to sustain housing, food, and clothing. For most people, particularly those of the type to try starting their own business, that still won't be enough to be happy.
The threat of death by exposure and starvation should not be what drives us to do better. We, as a society, should have moved past that already.