Live data from Hacker News

A Few Rules

collaborativefund.com

21–30 of 85 posts

Re: A Few Rules

#21
post #17
post #6

My top four: Behavior is hard to fix. People say they’ve learned but they underestimate how much of their previous mistake was caused by emotions that will return when faced with the same circumstances. Being good at something doesn’t promise rewards. It doesn’t even promise a compliment. What’s rewarded in the world is scarcity, so what matters is what you can do that other people are bad at. People learn when they’…

Most fields have only a few laws. When I've had the opportunity to talk with true experts in different fields, I was surprised to find that they tend to focus in very few factors, unlike books or other practitioners. Wasn't Karate Kid training something like that? The master was only interested in a few exercises that were done doing repetitive tasks apparently unrelated to fight.

That’s probably because the experts are focused on their current task at hand, and most easily recalled the few things that are relevant to the task.

Movies and stories don’t portray real life experience, as they cannot juggle all the relevant factors of an expertise without confusing the audience.

I don’t know about martial arts. But at least in the few professions I do understand, you cannot just do a few exercises diligently for ten years and come out a master.

Re: A Few Rules

#22
> Don’t expect balance from very talented people. People who are exceptionally good at one thing tend to be exceptionally bad at another, due to overconfidence and mental bandwidth taken up by the exceptional skill.

Also because of cross-compensation. Sometimes talent can compensate for the lack of another skill, thus allowing the person to be worse at that other skill and still succeed.

Re: A Few Rules

#23
post #6

My top four: Behavior is hard to fix. People say they’ve learned but they underestimate how much of their previous mistake was caused by emotions that will return when faced with the same circumstances. Being good at something doesn’t promise rewards. It doesn’t even promise a compliment. What’s rewarded in the world is scarcity, so what matters is what you can do that other people are bad at. People learn when they’…

> Behavior is hard to fix.

Scott Alexander over at SSC has a lovely phrasing for this rule applied at scale: society is fixed, biology is mutable.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biolo...

The money quote from the middle of the post:

"See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember thinking “Man, I hope it’s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix.”"

Re: A Few Rules

#24

> Don’t expect balance from very talented people. People who are exceptionally good at one thing tend to be exceptionally bad at another, due to overconfidence and mental bandwidth taken up by the exceptional skill. Also because of cross-compensation. Sometimes talent can compensate for the lack of another skill, thus allowing the person to be worse at that other skill and still succeed.

And often that other skill, the one they have less of, is about dealing with people.

Re: A Few Rules

#25

Reminds me of this great Non Sequitur[0], and this one[1], [0] https://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2020/08/10 [1] https://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2018/10/26

The whole website looks broken to me, even disabling all adblockers and tracking protection. EDIT: it's broken on Firefox.

I can't confirm that. I've just looked at it with Firefox+uBlock Origin on Linux and it renders fine. of course, I don't know if its supposed to look like that, but the content is there.

Re: A Few Rules

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole website looks broken to me, even disabling all adblockers and tracking protection. EDIT: it's broken on Firefox.

I can't confirm that. I've just looked at it with Firefox+uBlock Origin on Linux and it renders fine. of course, I don't know if its supposed to look like that, but the content is there.

Content is not there in Firefox 81 for Mac, uBlock Origin and tracking protection disabled.

Re: A Few Rules

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole website looks broken to me, even disabling all adblockers and tracking protection. EDIT: it's broken on Firefox.

I can't confirm that. I've just looked at it with Firefox+uBlock Origin on Linux and it renders fine. of course, I don't know if its supposed to look like that, but the content is there.

Same stack here, plus Decentraleyes, and it's working fine.

Re: A Few Rules

#30

Reminds me of this great Non Sequitur[0], and this one[1], [0] https://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2020/08/10 [1] https://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2018/10/26

The whole website looks broken to me, even disabling all adblockers and tracking protection. EDIT: it's broken on Firefox.

What? The UComics site?

It’s not my fave site. They play some games to try to force visitors to click, and their ad network gets hijacked by malware on a regular basis, but it’s usually working for me.

Here are a couple of direct links to the images (CDNs, so not sure how long they'll last):

[0] https://assets.amuniversal.com/a8cecaf0b7e00138179b005056a95...

[1] https://assets.amuniversal.com/1c1d4bf0b2c101365ec0005056a95...

Post reply on HN