31–40 of 160 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
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.
Let me present the Paige Compositor. A typesetting machine if you like, made from 18,000 precision made parts in 1877. Well, 1877 is the start year of the contract. The project went on for about 15 years. 6 machines were ever made (out of 4,000 ordered). They kept failing. Meanwhile, a much more limited (initially) machine arrived on the scene, the Linotype machine. It was successfull and did run the world's news and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In that case, we should all be viewing random sentences and hope something clicks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It would be interesting to hear grandparent’s perspective. We learn from the experience of others. Otherwise, schools, best practices, or forums like HN would be completely useless.
But I found this random post online one day which has some ideas about trying to do small annoying things for no reason, to train your brain to be better at doing hard things.
The blog gave an example: go on a walk, but go out of your way to take on a pointless task. Like at the beginning, set out to touch 50 flowers. Then go on your walk touching flowers. When you get to the end, you’ve gotten practice doing something that you didn’t want to and which was a bit annoying. But now you’ll have a bit more confidence to do something else in the future.
I got in a habit of taking on these pointless goals a lot for a few weeks. Eventually I was sitting down and looking at my homework, thinking “I spent two hours touching flowers for no reason, I can spend a few minutes doing this” and would make some progress.
Looking back it seems ridiculous, but it was the advice I needed at the time, and it actually helped me make some changes in life. That whole process made me get into a habit of thinking about the end goal & how small little steps can help you do big things. And actually practicing and seeing that, took me out of the headspace of “I can never do that” to “maybe I can”.
And more interesting, I wrote about this on a forum back then, and more than a month after writing it I received a message from someone who said “hey, I just wanted to let you know that I started doing the annoying-little-task strategy after reading your post, and I feel it’s helped me a lot so thank you”
This post is right from ChatGPT. Like, “tell me 50 life wisdoms which can be earned through time” or something. We arrived the end of internet as we know it. I hate this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In that case, we should all be viewing random sentences and hope something clicks.
No, that’s not what I meant. I’m talking about reading books and lasting life changing things from them, and GP is right, I can guarantee the thing I have in mind probably won’t mean anything to you.
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.
Carol Dweck wrote a book called Mindset, which talks about two mindsets: a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. The idea is super simple, and you don't even need to read the book to know what it is. But just knowing that idea changed my entire motivation to do things, and now I believe that even if I'm not talented at something, I can get surprisingly far. (for instance, I'm a deep introvert, but I'm able to socialize for long periods of time and talk to strangers easily now, but only after I kept practicing for a period of 2 years -- I discovered it's possible to "bend" your introversion if you don't put yourself in a box and are willing to make an effort)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset#Fixed_and_growth_minds...
Arguably the science around fixed vs growth mindsets is fuzzy, but here's the other insight: sometimes you can blunder into the right by holding some vague ideas loosely (the rationalist crowd think that avoiding biases leads you to correct actions -- in real life I have found this to be false).
There are two kinds of rationality: epistemic rationality (believing the right things) and instrumental rationality (believing in ideas that work to get you the ends desired, even if the ideas themselves are not 100% rational).
In business and life, instrumental rationality is much more useful and works more of the time (this is why the LessWrong crowd isn’t good at stochastic domains like business because their models, though logical, are insufficient -- this is a realm where instrumental rationality leads to success). That's another idea that changed my life.