68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice • Hacker News Board

Re: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

#231

Post by drfuchs » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 7:07 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #127

barbegal wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I completely disagree with this sentiment that debt = bad. You should use debt where it acts as an investment (in the true sense of the word investment, rather than speculation). If you need to take on debt to buy that car that saves you an hour walk to work every day then that is good debt. Is it a good idea to use debt to purchase a house? If we believe in free markets then ownership should have roughly the sa…

Debt is risk. What happens when you lose all your income (as millions are right now)? Payments can't get made, and repossessions happen. If losing a job doesn't sound like a disaster to you, you've probably never experienced it, and/or you have the privilege of having a career in an in-demand field.

Even if your house gets foreclosed on, they don't confiscate it; you still own whatever equity you have in it, so you get a check when it's sold. Yes, you don't build equity quickly at the start, but still it's better than the rental situation in this regard.

Re: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

#232

Post by bmn__ » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 7:20 PM UTC

gouggoug wrote: post #226

egypturnash wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A renter does not get anything of inherent, transferable value out of the exchange. Does "I didn't have to find a contractor to tear out the kitchen wall when a leak on the third floor got all the way down to my first floor apartment, nor did I have to pay for them to do this, and could just keep on going to work as normal" count as value? Any decent landlord provides the service of "medium-sized repairs happen witho…

> Does "I didn't have to find a contractor to tear out the kitchen wall when a leak on the third floor got all the way down to my first floor apartment, nor did I have to pay for them to do this, and could just keep on going to work as normal" count as value? How often does this happen, and how much does it cost? I can guarantee you your time is not worth this much and it is still less expensive and safer for you to…

> If you rent for 30 years, at the end of these 30 years you will have nothing

That chestnut again. It makes me sad to see it on HN. It's just a dishonest comparison.

The money saved by not paying back a bank loan plus interest goes into long term investment, not into consumables. In most places on the world, for the last 40 years, the renter comes ahead of the home-owner in spe in terms of total cost.

Re: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

#233

Post by wpietri » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 7:28 PM UTC

projektfu wrote: post #211

wpietri wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be veering into tiresome nitpicking and willful misunderstanding, but I'll give it one more go. I suspect you already understand that novelty is not the only goal of creative work, so I'm just going to go on past your first bit. Let me know if you truly don't get it. He didn't say that debuts are usually the best art pieces. One, you have the flow wrong. He's more saying that the best art pieces were de…

The flip side to your example is, of course, artists like Rodgers & Hammerstein, Sondheim or Bernstein, all of whom produced good works in their youth but some of their best works as they gained more experience and developed more style.

Ok. You seem determined not to understand his point. I'm done here.

Re: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

#234

Post by inetsee » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 8:39 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #107

Here's one I heard elsewhere, and isn't in the list. If you're searching for something important, search until you find one that satisfies all your requirements. Then, don't stop, keep searching until you find a better one. Then stop. This raises you maybe a whole standard deviation in quality, without taking exponential time. Works for all sorts of things. A new pair of shoes; a favorite dish in a restaurant; a spou…

Most people are satisficing problem solvers. Given a problem to solve they will come up with a solution that they consider to be satisfactory. Ask them to come up with a better solution and they will respond that they came up with a satisfactory solution, and a darn good satisfactory solution at that. If they can be persuaded to try, their brain will immediately head for the original, satisfactory, solution.

Truly creative people are the ones whose brains are able to avoid the trap of immediately heading for the original solution, and continue searching until they find better and better solutions.

Re: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

#235

Post by V-2 » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 8:48 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #205

V-2 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He's pretty clearly talking about creative work here, where the goal is to make new things. Isn't it a tautology then? If the goal is to make something you haven't before, then obviously it's accomplished the first time round, by definition. And in a broader sense, is it really true? Are debuts usually the best art pieces?

This seems to be veering into tiresome nitpicking and willful misunderstanding, but I'll give it one more go. I suspect you already understand that novelty is not the only goal of creative work, so I'm just going to go on past your first bit. Let me know if you truly don't get it. He didn't say that debuts are usually the best art pieces. One, you have the flow wrong. He's more saying that the best art pieces were de…

Of course there are Rimbauds, and there are Monets. That's beyond dispute. The implication I'm not sure about is whether the former outnumber the latter.

It's psychologically understandable for someone who's accumulated considerable life experience to feel more nostalgic towards the freshness of being unexperienced.

Re: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

#236

Post by wahern » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 9:32 PM UTC

bmn__ wrote: post #232

gouggoug wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does "I didn't have to find a contractor to tear out the kitchen wall when a leak on the third floor got all the way down to my first floor apartment, nor did I have to pay for them to do this, and could just keep on going to work as normal" count as value? How often does this happen, and how much does it cost? I can guarantee you your time is not worth this much and it is still less expensive and safer for you to…

> If you rent for 30 years, at the end of these 30 years you will have nothing That chestnut again. It makes me sad to see it on HN. It's just a dishonest comparison. The money saved by not paying back a bank loan plus interest goes into long term investment, not into consumables. In most places on the world, for the last 40 years, the renter comes ahead of the home-owner in spe in terms of total cost.

> In most places on the world

I presume the context is the United States where a typical loan requires no more than a 20% down payment, providing 4:1 non-recourse leverage, with 3-4% interest. Outside of home mortgages, that sort of sweet-heart financing is only available to the very wealthy. When you factor in retained equity, at the end of the day, unless mobility or liquidity is exceptionally important to you, buying absolutely makes sense for the vast majority of Americans who can afford it. The home mortgage interest tax deduction is just icing on the cake.

That housing prices don't appreciate as much as the stock market is not dispositive. Now, once you already own a home, then of course the fact that the stock market provides higher returns matters for subsequent investment decisions. The calculus of residential ownership isn't nearly as favorable for non-owner-occupants. For small-time real estate investors banks offer you less leverage (3:1 or worse), higher interest rates, and your risk exposure is greater because you're purely speculating--whereas with owner-occupier you were presumably going to be living in that market, so you're only marginally speculating.

The situation is different in many other parts of the world with different socioeconomic policies (e.g. expensive mortgages, high down payments) and real estate markets (e.g. more common for housing to depreciate in value), but that's irrelevant to the U.S. You can't say whether owning makes sense or not without accounting for all the opportunity costs, which can vary widely. But in the U.S., generally and historically, buying a home adds up. Maybe the U.S. is worse off for incentivizing homeownership, but it is what it is.

Re: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

#237

Post by kseifried » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 9:51 PM UTC

earthboundkid wrote: post #140

SloopJon wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The majority of my mortgage payment goes towards ownership of a product - my house For many (most?) people that's not true. Even ignoring that mortgage payments often include property taxes and/or private mortgage insurance, you can expect to pay more interest than principal for the first fifteen years or more of a thirty-year mortgage.

Yes, if you look at your mortgage payments, very little is going to principal. On the flipside, when you rent, you get certain services—maintenance of property and major appliances—that you don't get as a home owner. When I started my mortgage I was surprised at how much money I started spending on home stuff that I never used to spend as a renter. Partly it's because you own it so you have higher standards, but part…

But you pay for those in the form of rent. As a homeowner you can also pay someone to do those things. There are a ton of property management companies that will handle a single house if you want to completely hand it off to someone.

In general when renting you usually rent a LOT less than you end up buying which I think is where many people get the "renting is cheaper than buying" thought.

It's not like your landlord magically eats all these extra costs. They pass them on to you.

Re: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

#238

Post by jmgpeeters » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 10:22 PM UTC

I was expecting 62 bits of advice in the information theory interpretation. :/

Re: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

#239

Post by tbugrara » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 10:27 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #155

pjc50 wrote: post #46

> The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. This is very powerful. Reminds me of the "system 1 vs system 2" discussion, and some descriptions of e.g. ADHD and depression causing what could be described as "failure to terminate in self-negotiation".

Indeed. I've also been realizing recently that my #1 failure mode with procrastination is this: by the time I stared a distracting activity (e.g. reading HN, watching something on Netflix), the self-negotiation is already lost. My mind will drag the argument ad infinitum while continuing to do the thing it's currently doing, i.e. procrastinating.

Maybe I'm wrong but I think self-negotiation here means: when I put my dishes away after dinner, I attempt to negotiate with myself if I have to do it right now. A habit instead terminates this attempt at negotiating and gets you to just do it without thinking if you should or shouldn't.

Re: 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice

#240

Post by glangdale » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 11:46 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #193

glangdale wrote: post #55

Shakespeare knew what to do with people who proffer great quantities of unsolicited advice; look what happened to Polonius. A bunch of these are good, a bunch are just... OK, and some are questionable or just a matter of simple opinion. A lot just reek of "truthiness"; a sort of middle-brow confidence about art/business/doing stuff that's manages to frequently just pass off made-up bullshit as authoritative. The "rul…

Those make sense to me. Like all maxims, they're overcompressed; they imply a context that the reader has to be able to fill in. But I think they're useful in context. E.g., the phrase "It is what it is" is on the surface tautological and useless. But in context, it's a valuable reminder about coping with some of the flaws in human consciousness.

They "make sense", but they aren't really true. They are not such much "overcompressed" as subject to whatever interpretation makes them sensible, but as such, they are dependent more on the good sense of the person unpacking them than on their inherent virtue.

So, for example, the "Rule of 7" is a ludicrous exaggeration (by the time you actually go through a chain of 7 people you're talking to a random stranger and weeks have passed), but someone who had done some research might mentally fix this to a rule of 3 (which would be a pretty reasonable thing). However, a maxim that's on the face of it pretty dumb until you fix it up is Not Good.

Similarly, the one about "pros" vs "amateurs" is Just Plain Made Up - it's easy to conjure up situations where it seems clever, but in general it doesn't make a lick of sense.

I suppose I'm perennially annoyed - one might even say "triggered" - by these kind of wildly variable mixes of folksy wisdom, mild common sense and Just Plain Opinion. No-one has any business mixing fairly reasonable ideas about how to find a missing object or get a cable while traveling with Deep Wisdom About How To Live Your Life; the net effect is to anesthetize our critical facilities through sheer volume.

Putting your advice as to what constitutes a meaningful life on the same level as advice on how not to get into credit card debt is a serious category error; at worst it's banal, at best it's a way of smuggling a bunch of unexamined values in as universals.