1. Don’t read advice on how to think for yourself
1a. Read advice on how to think and make up your own mind
How to Think for Yourself
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Re: How to Think for Yourself
#121. Start by following someone's else advice, about how to think for yourself. That should work. Because why not? 2. In case it did not work out, for whatever reasons, became an autist, in whatever way you can. Not that it is possible, or that you will really understand anybody after the fact, but hey. 3. Still interested? Learn a different (alternative) language (semantics), based on nothing (emptiness) at all. You m…
2a. Then you not only will start thinking for yourself. You will also start overthinking about why Apple didn’t put macOS on the iPad Pro, or why your friends don’t care about org-mode.
Re: How to Think for Yourself
#13> When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?"
This is also a good thing to ask when the someone is oneself.
Re: How to Think for Yourself
#141. Start by following someone's else advice, about how to think for yourself. That should work. Because why not? 2. In case it did not work out, for whatever reasons, became an autist, in whatever way you can. Not that it is possible, or that you will really understand anybody after the fact, but hey. 3. Still interested? Learn a different (alternative) language (semantics), based on nothing (emptiness) at all. You m…
2a. Then you not only will start thinking for yourself. You will also start overthinking about why Apple didn’t put macOS on the iPad Pro, or why your friends don’t care about org-mode.
Friends? Overthinking - relative to standard set by who?
Re: How to Think for Yourself
#15Excellent article > When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?" This is one of my favorite things to do, though the list of people who will talk to me again after I do it is very short. (Edit: To be extra clear... While this is a bitter pill - I do not like it when others do it to me - I do find it to be very effective for reinforcing good faith in close, trusting relationships. I also…
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Re: How to Think for Yourself
#16> You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it.
Unless it's a schlep: http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
Re: How to Think for Yourself
#17Thinking for yourself means accepting the consequences of such. For some people it is easier to follow someone else's advice and then blame them if something goes wrong than making decision themselves and then trying to learn from it.
It is a tough one, but if you engage critical thinking you may end up somewhere in the middle, which isn't bad.
Re: How to Think for Yourself
#18>> You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea.
Any examples of this in B2B/Enterprise-Tech startups ? (likes of SnowFlake, Slack etc)
Re: How to Think for Yourself
#19While I agree holding your own views and opinions help with doing something novel and different. I do feel like articles like this are mostly used to cover up and excuse hostility, bad work environments and Jobs esque management styles.
You can have groundbreaking ideas without "disrupting" every single part of your work life. Assuming large groups of people can't think for themselves is both short sighted and insulting. Not everyone is in the position to push their views on their environment without repercussions.
I'm pretty sure a janitor or administrator can think for themselves really well. It's their bosses that limit their subordinates, not the employees limiting themselves.
Re: How to Think for Yourself
#20It seems to me that throughout the essay Paul Graham keeps undermining his own claims. Early on he states:
> Independent-mindedness seems to be more a matter of nature than nurture.
Subsequently he starts giving advice about how to make yourself more independently-minded:
> Can you make yourself more independent-minded? I think so. This quality may be largely inborn, but there seem to be ways to magnify it, or at least not to suppress it.
> But if you surround yourself with independent-minded people, you'll have the opposite experience: hearing other people say surprising things will encourage you to, and to think of more.
> You can also take more explicit measures to prevent yourself from automatically adopting conventional opinions. The most general is to cultivate an attitude of skepticism.
etc.
Only to come back to claims about the strength of certain natural tendencies:
> I don't think we can significantly increase our resistance to being told what to think. It seems the most innate of the three components of independent-mindedness; people who have this quality as adults usually showed all too visible signs of it as children.
> Everyone I know who's independent-minded is deeply curious, and everyone I know who's conventional-minded isn't. Except, curiously, children. All small children are curious. Perhaps the reason is that even the conventional-minded have to be curious in the beginning, in order to learn what the conventions are.
I guess the overall takeaway would be that intellectual independence is primarily innate, but can be cultivated with targeted effort.
Personally I find this view unconvincing, or at least not well specified. I suspect early care and environment play a much larger role than biology in developing one's intellectual attitudes, as well as personality.
To the extent to which there are genuinely biological factors involved, I would have been really curious to see more concrete evidence of what those factors might be.
Nevertheless, the article is sprinkled with nuggets of useful advice or insight, such as the following:
> If you later find yourself in a situation that makes you think "this is like high school," you know you should get out.
> try to meet as many different types of people as you can. It will decrease the influence of your immediate peers if you have several other groups of peers. Plus if you're part of several different worlds, you can often import ideas from one to another.
> You can expand the source of influences in time as well as space, by reading history.
> When you hear someone say something, stop and ask yourself "Is that true?"
> unfashionable ideas are disproportionately likely to lead somewhere interesting. The best place to find undiscovered ideas is where no one else is looking.