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Maybe you should learn something

marginalia.nu

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Re: Maybe you should learn something

#211

Post by foxglacier »

hirvi74 wrote: post #178
foxglacier wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered it might be something medically treatable? There are drugs for that sort of thing. I've tried some and wouldn't have believed it was possible before - aren't I anxious because I haven't done things I'm supposed to do and the consequences are nebulous and growing? Isn't anxiety a real signal telling me to get them finished? If you lose that feeling, you'll be even more screwed! But it turns out neu…

I am a firm believer in the saying, "Show me a pill with no side-effects, and I will show you a pill that does nothing." It appears you definitely have received some benefit, but if you do not mind me asking, at what cost? > But it turns out neurotypical people can be productive without being driven by stress. As some that is neurodivergent, I cannot even fathom this. I cannot function without stress.

There are side effects and you may have to try different drugs to minimize them and maximize the effect. Medicine makes sense when the side effects are less bad than the problem that the main effect is solving, not only when there are no side effects.

Some people choose what, if any pill to take each day according to what they intend to do that day.

Re: Maybe you should learn something

#212

Post by CalRobert »

dripdry45 wrote: post #202
philangist wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment actually triggered something in me and I wanted to write a dismissive and condescending response but in the spirit of HN I’d like to try a different approach. I’ve honestly never been able to understand this kind of thinking (uniformly ruling children as a negative because of the downsides), but I’d be curious to understand more about your perspective. How do you weigh the joy and meaning many people fin…

It’s not that these aren’t valuable. It’s that you can also see the enormous damage done to children and the suffering that you put them through as parents. Life is a grueling, often thankless and cruel situation. It has no real explanation and we toss more and more people into the meat grinder every year. I see very little love from parents, but I generally see an enormous amount of selfishness. True betrayal, overt…

I think your view is… skewed… but also, remember that many parents are not, in fact, in America.

Re: Maybe you should learn something

#213

Post by CalRobert »

ndriscoll wrote: post #114
abc123abc123 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children are not god for peace of mind and a life of liberty. I do not recommend anyone to have children, becaues of how negatively it affects your life, cost of living etc. It is basically just tying yourself down to the wheel of consumption, and in order to jutsify everything, all the struggle, push your hopes and aspirations to the next generation, and then letting them deal with it. If you are rich, you can get a…

Children don't necessitate a consumption spiral. The fact that they grow so quickly means there's plenty of cheaply available used items (clothes, books, toys, etc.). If you have multiple, or if they have cousins, then there's also hand-me-downs. Then there's free stuff like parks or libraries, or e.g. our county has a nearby recreation center with a splash pad. We did buy a more expensive home to live near better pe…

Ironically having kids motivated us to live somewhere we could be car free, which is a pretty major reduction in consumption.

Re: Maybe you should learn something

#214

Post by abalashov »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #205
jcgl wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bad info becomes apparent, almost immediately Can you elaborate on this? I suspect that you’re thinking mostly of cases in which you already have a fair bit of domain expertise. But in the general case, this seems to be very untrue. Which is why it’s so pernicious that LLMs can generate such quantities of syntactically-plausible-but-factually-untrue text.

Valid point, but I don’t really just start learning whole new vocations, cold. I’m an engineer/software developer, with over 40 years’ experience, and my learning is generally some branch off that (like learning asynchronous programming, or a new UI framework). Can’t really put it into precise terminology, but I get a “gut feeling,” that something is/is not plausible, and it happens pretty quickly; usually when I sta…

Fair enough, but I'm not sure this is how the general population uses LLM chatbots, nor how the highly qualified always use LLMs.

On the contrary, I believe most people use them precisely to find out more about topics of which they know vanishingly little, much as they'd have used Google before LLMs.

Re: Maybe you should learn something

#215

Post by abc123abc123 »

philangist wrote: post #41
abc123abc123 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children are not god for peace of mind and a life of liberty. I do not recommend anyone to have children, becaues of how negatively it affects your life, cost of living etc. It is basically just tying yourself down to the wheel of consumption, and in order to jutsify everything, all the struggle, push your hopes and aspirations to the next generation, and then letting them deal with it. If you are rich, you can get a…

This comment actually triggered something in me and I wanted to write a dismissive and condescending response but in the spirit of HN I’d like to try a different approach. I’ve honestly never been able to understand this kind of thinking (uniformly ruling children as a negative because of the downsides), but I’d be curious to understand more about your perspective. How do you weigh the joy and meaning many people fin…

I like this. If you can share your email address I will give you a personal answer.

Re: Maybe you should learn something

#216

Post by abc123abc123 »

dripdry45 wrote: post #202
philangist wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment actually triggered something in me and I wanted to write a dismissive and condescending response but in the spirit of HN I’d like to try a different approach. I’ve honestly never been able to understand this kind of thinking (uniformly ruling children as a negative because of the downsides), but I’d be curious to understand more about your perspective. How do you weigh the joy and meaning many people fin…

It’s not that these aren’t valuable. It’s that you can also see the enormous damage done to children and the suffering that you put them through as parents. Life is a grueling, often thankless and cruel situation. It has no real explanation and we toss more and more people into the meat grinder every year. I see very little love from parents, but I generally see an enormous amount of selfishness. True betrayal, overt…

Wise words. But you must remember that society is a self-perpetuating system, that grows to consume all, like cancer, and for "it" (society) to exist, children must be produced to fuel its growth. Politicians, the sole benefactors of the modern society, therefore scream about children to fuel the machine.

Of course there are kind and loving parents, but you are right in that many (most?) just follow their biological program on autopilot, never thinking about the consequences.

But I do think, at some level, the species is starting to realize how unsustainable this is, and we see this in dropping fertility and child birth levels.

These levels I think, will only start to increase again, once society has adapted to man, instead of like today, when authoritarian politicians try to adapt man, pushing him like a cog wheel into the machinery of the state. Man is now tired, and refuses, and as a result, more and more people just stop procreating, which I see as a sign of health.

Re: Maybe you should learn something

#217

Post by deterministic »

rdiddly wrote: post #147
frankie_t wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overall, I agree, especially the unplugging part. It's just optimizing for time doesn't really apply in my case. I can carve some time in the evening, but if I spent energy at work, I can hardly learn much. But, some things like doomscrolling and procrastination are both huge energy sinks as well as timesinks. However, targeting them is very hard (again, for me), as it is usually not the root problem but a symptom of…

So probably the thing you need to start practicing and learning is how to deal with anxiety. Conveniently those sessions can fit right into the time slots you're currently spending procrastinating because of selfsame anxiety. See how long you can sit with it and reassure yourself, before reaching for the phone. Once that's been tamed a bit, I think the ability to enjoy doing something poorly will start to appear natu…

Agree. In my experience, the only way to overcome anxiety is to push yourself to do the thing anyway.

The more you safely do something that scares you, the more your brain learns that it's safe.

The key is to break it down into small steps. Each step feels less intimidating and the brain learns bit by bit not to feel anxiety anymore.

It most definitely worked for me.

Re: Maybe you should learn something

#218

Post by deterministic »

HexPhantom wrote: post #16

One thing I wish this emphasized more is that adults often confuse learning with consuming material about learning, which is why my useful rule has become: if I'm not producing errors, I'm probably not practicing yet

Yep learning is really a participation sport not a spectator sport. In other words, you only really learn by creating something not just reading about how to create something.
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