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Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?

#31

Post by ericb »

rugoso wrote: post #29

hey ericb, can you tell us how you learned social psychology? maybe what books, sites ... etc ? also im checking the material that FleursDuMal mentioned ;)

Absolutely. I was a psych major. Another huge thing I learned, btw, was that my persistence (stubbornness, if you ask my wife ;) lets me learn most anything, which is how I came to be a developer.

Instead of how I learned it, I'll point you to some topics in social psych:

Read Cialdini, the psychology of influence.

This doubles for attracting investment and women: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof

Social skills-the parens are part of the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirroring_(psychology)

Halo Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

Interesting experiments:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

http://www.prisonexp.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments

If an area I listed here or in the original post is of particular interest, let me know and I'll reply with the specifics of what I meant, or pointers to some info on it.

Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?

#32

Post by rugoso »

ericb wrote: post #31
rugoso wrote: post #29

hey ericb, can you tell us how you learned social psychology? maybe what books, sites ... etc ? also im checking the material that FleursDuMal mentioned ;)

Absolutely. I was a psych major. Another huge thing I learned, btw, was that my persistence (stubbornness, if you ask my wife ;) lets me learn most anything, which is how I came to be a developer. Instead of how I learned it, I'll point you to some topics in social psych: Read Cialdini, the psychology of influence. This doubles for attracting investment and women: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof Social skil…

thanks!, supercool! ;)

Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?

#36

Post by TheTarquin »

Computability and runtime efficiency. (I've productively applied this to problems in every domain of my life.)

The importance of limits. (From testing limit cases heavily, to time being the limit of being, to value sources being the limiting horizon of personality. Paul DePalma, Martin Heidegger, and Charles Taylor being to thank for teaching me those, respectively.)

Re: Ask YC: What have you learned that rocked your world?

#38

Post by tel »

ashu wrote: post #10

Euler's equation. That conservation laws follow from deeper symmetry principles (Noether's theorem). Symmetry under translation corresponds to conservation of momentum, symmetry under rotation to conservation of angular momentum, symmetry in time to conservation of energy! http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NoethersSymmetryTheorem.html

This has to do with the context where I learned Euler's Equation, but I can never separate it from Fourier and (later) Laplace transforms. Those are all so beautiful and mind blowing.
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