331–340 of 946 posts
The former is for dealing with any situation where we can't control the inputs and outputs. The latter is for when we can.
*"Grant to us the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed; courage to change that which can be changed, and wisdom to know the one from the other."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
2. Hits home for me as I’ve begun to realize the same thing. Not seeing any person of color in an activity makes it’s so I don’t want to be the first.
As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them. Anyway, I'd be interested to hear more about the psychology of this. I remember when I was growing up in the 90s and 00s in California,…
Is as helpful as you may have intended. The comment was about not wanting to be the first, even if the group is welcoming, the commentator will still be the first/only person of color in the group and there is a discomfort inherent to that even if everyone is trying to be welcoming.
Also re “colorblind” policies of the 90a versus the explicitness of today, I think it’s similar to the current reckoning in journalism. We all have biases and pretending we don’t/acting like we are capable of pure objectivity simply hides them and makes them more difficult to combat. On the other hand explicitly acknowledging them allows you to consider how they might be influencing your decisions.
Basic music theory. Almost no one I encountered bothered to actually explain anything. They simply regurgitated things and I guess expected me to somehow intuitively understand something or other.
Any good resources that do it the right way?
Music theory is not inherently complex, but the notation adds incidental complexity -- it's sort of like the QWERTY keyboard; once you're stuck on a suboptimal way of doing things it's hard to move off.
Had Statistics in college, but only understood it now that I use it to understand data.
1. Everyone is the main character in their own story. This manifest in all sorts of ways - from people not being there when you need them the most, from friends dying off as soon as proximity changes, to how and why get people get promoted in jobs. This isn't necessarily bad, but if you don't know how to navigate this it can be quite painful and confusing. 2. Representation matters. I knew this for a long time, but i…
As a well represented person I can tell you this has nothing to do with representation, its just that the vast majority of humans in the modern world have close to zero agency and/or don't think they can actually change things.
1. The Monty Hall problem
2. The Wason Selection Task.
I read about the first one eons ago and was impressed that Marilyn Von Savant was vindicated. Shoutout to her!
The name Wason was unknown to me but I bought a book called The Oxford Companion to The Mind (new in 1987!) and his 'task' was featured in it (pg. 639 in my edition). I spent a lot of time satisfying myself as to the answer and kind of got there. This Christmas I am reading Stephen Pinker's "Rationality" and the description of both have allowed the penny to fully drop. I hadn't been thinking about these puzzles for ages and then when they cropped up "unexpectedly" I grokked them easily. They "clicked". There is a certain type of wisdom that comes with passed time.
It wasn't until late teens/early twenties that lots of those piece of wisdom went from "cliché phrases you've heard all your life", to (often) deeply impactful aspect of human conditions.
The "road to hell" idiom explicitly didn't click until I had enough experience with counter-productive efforts who looks good on the outside, but actually fail to take into account a more nuanced reality.
It also kinda works with the distinction between "values I believe in" and "arguments articulated around shared values". Being able to disagree on something even when (especially when) it's invoking values I believe in is one of the most important thing I've gained as I matured, and yet it needs experience to 'click'.
I have tried hard, and can't for the love of me understand what lies at the bottom of trade, what is the base value of assets / activity. It just doesn't click.
Questions like:
- Can a services based economy work if the consumers of the services weren't producing some non-services based value ?
- How can there be any economic value in middle-men ?
- Is speculation on artificially limited assets (housing) just a pyramid scheme ?
- How is it NOT a zero sum game ?
- Is a Fiat currency just 'vibes based economics' ?
I think I've read about git multiple times before I started using it. And even then at first it was with a dash of scepticism. I can't put my finger on that moment, the moment of clarity but it had to be quite glorious. Before, I was "what else do you need we have svn". Sounds horrible now that I think about it.
An explanation of "interactive rebasing" to me might as well been an explanation of quantum entanglement to a learning-disabled ant.
Sometimes it still trips me up. I have an embarrassingly large number of copies of source folders, despite git's safety net of "don't worry, you can always restore it; pinky swear..."