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Ideas That Changed My Life

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Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#21

Post by jrm4 »

mif wrote: post #11

One idea that changed my life is stop believing that other people have changed their lives based on ideas. The only way of change is by habit.

This is so important. Over the years as someone who's constantly trying new note-taking mind mappy things, interacting with my own thoughts in the past, it took an embarrassingly long time to realize that one of the the fundamental differences between me and the computer is that I require multiple writes.

(The other is that graphy mind-mappy tools on the computer are often pointless, because this is the thing that human brains are WAY BETTER AT than the computer.

What the computer is good at is "perfect recall of specifics in the form of words")

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#22

Post by elevaet »

hettygreen wrote: post #4

Another good idea that will change your life is to keep things short and simple. 51 ideas is like 43 too many :)

Totally, I came hoping for about 3-8 ideas that might change my life too. I can't be changing my life 51 times in one reading!

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#23

Post by gagege »

mif wrote: post #11

One idea that changed my life is stop believing that other people have changed their lives based on ideas. The only way of change is by habit.

I very much disagree. Some of the biggest changes in my life were driven by the reading or hearing of a few words which suddenly made everything click. These moments led to huge behavior changes.

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#24

Post by kortilla »

gagege wrote: post #23
mif wrote: post #11

One idea that changed my life is stop believing that other people have changed their lives based on ideas. The only way of change is by habit.

I very much disagree. Some of the biggest changes in my life were driven by the reading or hearing of a few words which suddenly made everything click. These moments led to huge behavior changes.

Such as?

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#26

Post by ramraj07 »

flappyeagle wrote: post #2

We would all benefit from remembering this one > 23. Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

This is awesome because I’d landed on the same concept but via evolution, especially a section in the Blind watchmaker where Dawkins implores on one fundamental requirement for evolution, which is that every step in the evolutionary process the individuals need to have a functional version of the trait. You can’t just shut down the process to retrofit things. Evolving eyes from light sensitive cells means that the organoid in every intermediate step should be a functional light detector that’s slightly better than the previous iteration if not the same.

This is a great, but absolutely not necessarily the only, way of writing software. As mentioned by other replies this is maybe not even possible in some fields. And as Dawkins points out, it’s is absolutely not the most efficient way and you don’t explore the full efficiency landscape by a long shot. But it works, and is predictable. I’ve had great success in software by following this rule.

It is also highly resilient to unpredictable organizational politics and inefficiencies because from the moment of having an MVP, you always have a functioning product.

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#27

Post by AmericanChopper »

irishloop wrote: post #14

> The world always makes sense. But it can be confusing. I just don't agree with this at all. I think its folly to assume the world will always make sense. As humans we seek to make sense of things, but not everything fits into our cognitive little boxes.

I agree with it fully, it’s only based on the assumption that all decisions a person makes are made for a reason. Which is almost certainly true. If you say that somebody’s decision making doesn’t make sense, the only actual explanations for that are either that you don’t understand their rationale, or that you’re making a value judgement that their rationale is bad. Neither of those things involve a lack of making sense. The claim “this doesn’t make sense…” is always associated with an implicit “…to me”.

The same thing applies to anything that emerges from a system of multiple people making multiple decisions, or from any observation about nature. The only thing that changes is the complexity of what you’re trying to understand.

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#28

Post by oh_sigh »

kortilla wrote: post #24
gagege wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I very much disagree. Some of the biggest changes in my life were driven by the reading or hearing of a few words which suddenly made everything click. These moments led to huge behavior changes.

Such as?

What's the point? What one person needs at one point in their life is very unlikely to be what another person needs - it might appear banal or unintelligible to another.

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#30

Post by _throwawayaway »

moosedev wrote: post #15
irishloop wrote: post #14

> The world always makes sense. But it can be confusing. I just don't agree with this at all. I think its folly to assume the world will always make sense. As humans we seek to make sense of things, but not everything fits into our cognitive little boxes.

I agree with your disagree. The very idea of "making sense" is a human construct. The universe doesn't care about making sense - to us or otherwise, except to the extent that we are part of it, and some of us care. There's no magical rule that says "the world" should, will, or even can "make sense". (IMO :)

But this magical rule does exist, it is a human construct called 'making sense' :)
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