It's easier to exercise daily, but I make better progress if I rest alternate days.
It's easier to keep working, but I do my best thinking during a nap.
How to Be More Agentic
121–130 of 209 posts
Re: How to Be More Agentic
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
You got flagged bc you’re a jerk about it. For what it’s worth. If you come to disagree and have a civil discussion that’s typically fine. But your posts are condescending and needlessly inflammatory.
Dude, I’m on the edges. You know that uncomfortable place where no one likes to go. Just because you don’t like what I’m saying doesn’t mean I’m being a jerk about it. And if you can point out anything specific in a comment that was flagged, I would appreciate it.
I don’t even know what that means
Re: How to Be More Agentic
#123Good article! I am in a phase of life where I'd prefer to be less "agentic", and more of a mindless automaton, always doing the tasks I set out to do myself in a day. What stands between me and most of my current goals is nothing but investments of time - hundreds, thousands of hours of time. There is no money component, and I cannot significantly accelerate my progress on any of them using money either. My agency is…
Care to share what you're working towards?
Language learning, endurance biking, weight loss, and meditation at this point. (EDIT: some physical wound healing too, forgot about that)
Quitting alcohol was also a very similar battle after a decade of increasingly severe abuse of it. I had my last drink 467 days ago, and for the first 6 months or so basically the only things I had the mental fortitude to juggle were "don't lose my job" and "don't succumb to the bottle". Much easier said than done to willingly remove the one coping mechanism you could rely on all throughout NEETdom to graduating from a top university with honors, but I did it, thank goodness.
Re: How to Be More Agentic
#124> Someone recently asked me how one might go about learning charisma, and the answer was really boring: by reading a few books, watching many hours of charismatic people interacting with others, and adopting a few of their habits.
Any recommendations for books?
Re: How to Be More Agentic
#125> and the number one female poker player in the world
If the author was that then contrary to the thesis of their blog post they are an outlier in that they have unusually high raw mental power / intelligence in at least some dimensions of intelligence. This means that, in fact, other people cannot follow in their footsteps because those other people are not lucky enough to have a brain like hers. The reason they don't have a brain as good as hers might be genetics but is much more likely to be that they didn't have educated parents with books on the shelves who established a culture and expectations of academic achievement. In other words, sorry, but TFA is the same tired old right wing bullshit / American Dream crap of anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they work hard enough. (And I'm saying that as a wokery-hating centre-rightist!)
Re: How to Be More Agentic
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I hope one day if you’re down on your luck, someone lend you a hand. I know I would.
I’ve been lucky lots of times in life. I’ve been helped by many, deserved and undeserved. But to remove the role of agency from success is an overreaction. The extreme right says life is a perfec meritocracy. The extreme left says it’s all down to luck and power dynamics. As usual, they are both wrong and it’s a healthy mix of both. But since agency is the only thing you control, it’s best to focus on that.
I’m not removing the role of agency from success, as long as luck is on your side.
Re: How to Be More Agentic
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always assumed everyone assumed everything was learnable. Realizing this (i.e., that being everyone's default belief) might not be the case is kind of blowing my mind a little right now.
People used to think few things were learnable and you had to have innate talent to learn something. One of the few remaining holdouts of this idea is perfect pitch. Most people I've seen express an opinion don't believe it's learnable after some childhood cutoff period. I'm not sure how well researched it is, though.
There was a study where they found that taking valproate opened a critical period that helped people learn it.
Re: How to Be More Agentic
#128Re: How to Be More Agentic
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would other pros say “nuh-uh, that’s not a thing”? I thought the concept of a tell was widely known.
It’s widely known but many pros consider it to be of low importance compared with “hand reading”, which is more about putting someone in a play-style bucket based on the hands you observe and then deducing what hand range they are likely to hold from their actions in the hand up to that point. Physical tells are typically considered as unreliable compared to this unless they are really obvious. Amateurs tend to overe…
So it’s perhaps more like there’s a local minimum before you reach the global maximum.
Re: How to Be More Agentic
#130Is agency closely related to self-confidence? Most of the points on this list seemed related to that. Not the "don't work too hard" bit, but the rest seem in the same ballpark.
To some degree, but if you find that your agency is impaired by a lack of self-confidence, you can start by trying to fake self-confidence.