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Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

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Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#701

Post by grogenaut »

therealdrag0 wrote: post #555
satvikpendem wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding literature, I'll give an opposite opinion. Being forced to read the classics in school led me to not caring about them at all because I just couldn't relate at all, I had not had the requisite life experience for them to make an impact on me. Now, being an adult and having the life experience, reading them again makes me think more deeply and I can actually relate. So I think in school, we actually shouldn'…

The vast majority of adults read almost 0 books. I think there’s some value in forcing classic cultural capital when we can even if it’s lost on some.

There's always "that book" for everyone. That one they finally click with. And then they can't shut up about it, such as the davinci-code... or outliers (my daughter's first)... but so few books hit you like lightning... I think part of it is just trying to get to that point where one hits you so expose people to books, who know what will stick. Worked for my daughter.

For me it was axctually the first novel I read. My aunt gave me The Malloreon. I was bored in winter break in the late 80s and I felt guilty I hadn't used my aunt's gift. So I read it. Now I recall spending an entire day curled up with a quick trip insulated mug in our breakfast nook when it was below freezing out reading the next book next to my mom. It'd take about 3 hours to finish that herbal tea.

Shortly after my dad gave me unlimited allowance for books. It was a smart but mildly costly move.

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#702

Post by andsoitis »

carapace wrote: post #423
icepat wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controversial in that it's generally considered a pseudoscience. I'd advise against anyone looking to figure out how to navigate this wasting their time with pseudosciences.

> it's generally considered a pseudoscience. Only by people who have no experience with it. NLP ("Neurolinguistic Programming", not Natural Language Processing) is pre-scientific , yes, but that's not the same as being a pseudoscience, and calling it such is a disservice. We have pretty much discovered the operating system of the human mind. applying the principles and techniques discovered and systematized under the…

> pre-scientific

What does that mean?

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#703

Post by leftcenterright »

satvikpendem wrote: post #411
leftcenterright wrote: post #222

Visual thinking! [1] I had read a bit about different types of thinking but I didn't really understand it so well until I saw a kid who had amazing visual thinking capability and could visualize years' old memories in a very detailed manner. It has also been related to photographic memory according to some research. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking Nikola Tesla's Creative Thinking Secrets: https://ww…

You should read Moonwalking with Einstein and look into memory palaces. I have memory palaces I can still walk through and remember after a decade.

Thanks for the suggestion, that does look like an interesting read! I will check it out.

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#704

Post by grogenaut »

kamaal wrote: post #599
9804 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people come out of school hating reading because nobody likes being forced to read specific books, as everyone's tastes are different. It sounds like this might have been what happened to you.

And exams. Learning is one thing, being tested on facts and trivia is totally something else.

I woudl get so far ahead on the books I'd forget trivial things thye'd ask on the quizz. In high school our teacher made us read The Sword of Shanarah (~1991). I remember missing a question on a quizz because it was about a first encounter with Allanon where I answered about later in the book. But the teacher was a smart person, he just gave me the final exam on the book which I passed. So I got opted out of the quizzes. He had a whole group of nerds who were way onto scions of Shanarah or later. But this was a private school.

He told me that the reason he chose that book was that it was actually easy and a page turner, but also different than what most kids read. But most of all he chose it cause it's a big honking bok. To that point at the end of the class 90% of the kids had near on finished the book. Even the laziest kid in class had to agree that no it wasn't a big chore to read that big of a book if you broke it down and they weren't afraid of big books anymore.

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#705

Post by bennysonething »

huijzer wrote: post #653
fortituded0002 wrote: post #196

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…

Point 3 also hit me a few months ago during a Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast about Rome. Caesar got back from his conquests and half the senate wanted to punish him for crimes against humanity that he conducted during his wars. However, he also claimed massive amounts of land for Rome. Long story short: he wasn’t punished. And this happened 2000 years ago.

Did they actually care about crimes against humanity? I thought they were worried about the amount of power he had?

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#706

Post by [deleted] »

btown wrote: post #671
fortituded0002 wrote: post #196

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…

> Everyone is the main character in their own story For those with anxiety, one of the best pieces of advice I ever received (that also took me years to internalize!) was the corollary to this: nobody is thinking about you in a critical way, at the level that you are criticizing yourself, because they are their own main character. Which is incredibly freeing, because the anxious person’s assumption that one embarrass…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#707

Post by bennysonething »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #497
ShredKazoo wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the colorblindness part, I think my core objection to the cultural changes which have occurred since I was a kid is not to increased awareness of biases per se, but rather this phenomenon: https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb My feeling is that the best way to reduce subconscious bias is to have good race relations. And the best way to have good race relations is to have more positive interactions than negative interactio…

I know this just your example but I think it demonstrates the larger issue with victim culture. Cinco de Mayo is not actually a very important holiday in Mexico. I agree that it’s not good to turn everything into a negative interaction but it’s not clear to me that having “cultural appropriation” as a top of mind issue is a very healthy thing either.

Cultural appropriation is nonsense. Probably most of what we are is a result of cross-pollination of cultures. Who gets to decide who belongs to one group or another?

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#708

Post by ljf »

jdkoeck wrote: post #442
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some interesting studies about girls and women playing chess. When blind, the two sexes perform on average about the same, but when they know the gender of their opponent, girls and women underperform. It is hypothesised that the reason behind this is because chess is a boys’ club, so to speak, and thus there is not a lot of representation. Absence of representation means that it may seem that you are the o…

I’ll bet this does not replicate, the effect of stereotype threat is notoriously overvalued. Don’t fall for junk science.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.440

The study. Note that this is about taking equally matched players, and having them compete via the Internet without knowing the gender of their partner, then again knowing the gender.

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#709

Post by v-erne »

metadat wrote: post #537
I_complete_me wrote: post #337

Two are very pertinent for me at the moment: 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…

New to me me, interesting problem and origin story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

That's a great paradox that can be really hard to understand for some but it's quite obvious when it finally clicks. You just needs proper reference or rather point of view that makes You understand that Monty selection and player decisions are not unrelated events and Monty just eliminates a whole branch of possibilities by introducing his knowledge into the system (he cannot show the prize and thus must always select one of the goats). And if You can imagine this problem as a decision tree You suddenly, as a bonus, understand conditional propability.

Re: Ask HN: Concepts that clicked only years after you first encountered them?

#710

Post by KolenCh »

MPI.

A prof. teaching a grad level course on parallel computing mentioned in class that even he himself took a few years to get used to program in message passing protocol like MPI.

Funny enough, even when I don't need to program in MPI extensively, after a few years my fear of writing in MPI just went away.

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