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It might apply to some traditions. However, for others, this is more accurate: "Tradition is a set of solutions for problems that don't exist anymore". An example of the latter that immediately springs to mind is circumcision.
What problem did it solve before?
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The "Hagakure" literally starts with something like "The art of the samurai lies in a way of dying. A samurai warrior enters battle as if already dead."
The samurai died out though, where as Japan’s unchanging ancient businesses managed to remain. I wonder if quick thinking isn’t just what leads one to an early end, business, life, or otherwise. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25281164
Of course any endeavour can meet an early end due to carelessness or because of not stopping and considering whether what you're doing is actually a good idea. But carelessness would probably not have been held in high regard by the samurai, and I generally fail to see a simple connection between to the samurai class becoming outdated and a preference for "quick" thinking.
Thinking keeps me awake. It's getting worse as I get older. Maybe it's anxiety or something related, and sometimes it's worried thoughts, but often it's just running through scenarios. Video games, media plots, what I need to do next week. My brain is far more active after 10pm, and I am personally more motivated. I get a burst of energy but it's not really the right time to clean the house so lying in bed has it all…
I assume you have already considered and observed the effect of alcohol and/or caffeine intake. One thing that definitely helps me is to have a routine for bedtime. A hot shower, bed preheated in winter (heated underblanket), keeping the room cold and reading a book while lying in bed. I typically pick technical material as it's less likely to keep me up all night with an engrossing story. At some point, I notice tha…
Then after closing my eyes I go through the stuff I just read (to avoid getting stressed out over real-life stuff), and after a while will have one or more thoughts that make no sense.
That’s the sign that falling asleep will happen very soon. From there on I don’t know what happens next.
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I assume you have already considered and observed the effect of alcohol and/or caffeine intake. One thing that definitely helps me is to have a routine for bedtime. A hot shower, bed preheated in winter (heated underblanket), keeping the room cold and reading a book while lying in bed. I typically pick technical material as it's less likely to keep me up all night with an engrossing story. At some point, I notice tha…
The part about reading but no longer comprehending sounds very familiar. If it happens twice that I’m looking at the words, but my mind is going somewhere else, I judge myself ready to fall asleep. Then after closing my eyes I go through the stuff I just read (to avoid getting stressed out over real-life stuff), and after a while will have one or more thoughts that make no sense. That’s the sign that falling asleep w…
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I like to believe that experience will eventually drive people towards using scientific parsimony when creating solutions to engineering problems. I don't think over-engineering is the only problem: shiny-new. Shiny-new syndrome wherein the typically junior programmer cannot help but jump from one new thing to the next, advocating that some new system must use the new tech that they recently discovered. While the ent…
> Another problem: we are facebook too! In the sense that small companies heartily believe that they actually have problems at the scale of a company like facebook (or will ever get to that level). Precisely! It's tiresome how many people setup Kubernetes for a network of 2-6 computers.
The only problem it has (and why I don't use stuff like kubernetes at home) is that the configuration formats aren't stable and thus require a lot of ongoing maintenance.
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“In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths. Lord Takandobu said, “If discrimination is long, it will spoil.” Lord Naoshige said, “When matters are done leisurely, seven out of ten will turn out badly. A warrior is a person who does things quickly. When your mind is going hither and thither, discrimination will never be brought to a conclusion. With an intense, fresh…
Ubuntu the operating system takes its name from the concept that you talk about here. That is also why the logo of Ubuntu the operating system is three people holding hands, which kind of blew my mind when I first heard about it. Prior to that I thought the logo was just some lines and circles in a pretty pattern with no specific meaning.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/geekfeminism/images/9/94/S...
> The really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about
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That’s an interesting point. Makes me think of the loops that are required to be jumped through to enable a trustless digital currency like Bitcoin. The entire network, with transactions of about 1kB in size, can do at most 7 transactions per second (3-4 orders of magnitude lower than Visanet, which itself is lower throughput than all the world’s physical cash transactions could theoretically do if everyone bought on…
There are quite a few places in bitcoin where trust is required. For example, the software is developed by a relatively small group of core devs and 99%+ of bitcoin users will never read that code (and its dependencies) to see if it contains backdoors. We just have to trust the devs to "do it right" and not get compromised by either greed or blackmailed by external parties. If you presuppose a sophisticated enough at…
And I agree with your overall point. The only issue is when you end up having unnecessarily high transaction fees, as we do now. Satoshi was trying to fix that part. But unfortunately, Bitcoin isn’t better on that front.
Bitcoin has high transaction fees because of the lack of scalability of the blockchain concept at scale while Visa has high transaction fees (although for most daily transactions, less than Bitcoin) due to network effects allowing them to charge near-monopoly rents.
What we need is government action to enable instant ACH/payments. And to make that common. Visa ought to be unnecessary.
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Not exactly. Meditation is a solitary activity where one can train the mind to emptiness. What the article and I'm referring to is getting to that state while still being in the moment. Meditation might be the ability to sharpen the sword but this is about being able to use it in battle.
Upvoted; I like your analogy. IMHO (and IME as a daily practitioner of zazen meditation), mindfulness is entirely about being in the present moment. Ideally, you simply stay there all the time at which point the "sword" is already sharp and always swinging, whether there's a "battle" or not. (shrug)
