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Ideas That Changed My Life

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Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#61

Post by schoen »

hiharryhere wrote: post #60
pazimzadeh wrote: post #56

> Penny Problem Gap: Economists assume demand is linear, but people’s behavior totally changes once an action costs money. If the inventors of the Internet had known about it, spam wouldn’t be such a problem. If sending an email cost you $0.001, there’d be way less spam. Freakonomics argues it can have the opposite effect, of "licensing" undesired behavior by those who can afford to pay the cost. Something to think a…

Anecdotally a similar effect happened with a friend’s childcare center. They were sick of parents showing up late to pick their kids up so they instituted a penalty of $x for every minute a parent was late. More parents ended up being late because they felt less guilty knowing they could just pay the penalty. The social pressure to be on time was replaced by a financial one.

See also "A Fine is a Price": https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/468061

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#62

Post by hiharryhere »

schoen wrote: post #61
hiharryhere wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally a similar effect happened with a friend’s childcare center. They were sick of parents showing up late to pick their kids up so they instituted a penalty of $x for every minute a parent was late. More parents ended up being late because they felt less guilty knowing they could just pay the penalty. The social pressure to be on time was replaced by a financial one.

See also "A Fine is a Price": https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/468061

Ha! Perhaps I read about that some time ago and my brain decided to file it away as a memory of my own.

Thanks for sharing.

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#63

Post by ulnarkressty »

wenc wrote: post #40
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 actually changed my mind based on some simple ideas. 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 in…

How do you get past the feeling that nothing you do actually matters?

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#64

Post by mdp2021 »

jrm4 wrote: post #21
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 hu…

> me and the computer is that I require multiple writes

Remarkable in times in which we study "one shot learning" for machines.

Edit: incidentally, this human detail reveals precisely what seems to be crucially missing in machine learning, current stage: ideas do propagate change through internal elaboration, in an organic process - ideas fine-tune models, through internal work.

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#65

Post by m463 »

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 :)

- get enough sleep - don't eat junk - get out and exercise 6 days a week - commit - don't overcommit - forgive yourself - be sovereign

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#66

Post by mdp2021 »

oh_sigh wrote: post #28
kortilla wrote: post #24

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.

Instances are asked for the purpose of possible generalization.

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#67

Post by wenc »

metisto wrote: post #48
wenc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually changed my mind based on some simple ideas. 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 in…

Great insight about different kinds of rationality! Any recommendations to dive deeper into instrumental rationality topic?

I came across the idea on this website (https://commoncog.com/start-here/), which I feel is far more "applied" than the Farnam Street blog (https://fs.blog/). The latter is a distillation of essentially rationalist type mental models that sound good but often don't work in real life without a specific context (context really matters in real life).

The specific part about rationality is here: https://commoncog.com/putting-mental-models-to-practice-part...

The author of Commoncog actually puts stuff into practice and allows reality be the teacher. He also talks about "concept instantiation" in ill-structured domains. Most of our learning in school is geared toward structured domains where things behave in known ways. Our education system is based around abstract and principles based thinking, where a + b = c. And to be fair, this kind of thinking works very well.... in structured domains.

However, when you get into unstructured domains with lots of higher order effects like say, business or the battlefield or love, those ideas no longer work. First principles reasoning no longer gets you success -- instead you actually have to do the opposite, which is to reason analogically and "instantiate concepts" by assembling context fragments, not principles (e.g. "this has been done before under this context, which is similar to my context in these ways but different in these ways"). That's another insight that changed how I reasoned about ill-structured domains (note: only ill-structured domains! First-principles reasoning still works really well in structured domains so don't make the mistake of abandoning it... only know when to switch to analogical reasoning when you're in the realm of the ill-structured)

https://commoncog.com/cognitive-flexibility-theory-the-rules...

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#68

Post by wenc »

ulnarkressty wrote: post #63
wenc wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually changed my mind based on some simple ideas. 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 in…

How do you get past the feeling that nothing you do actually matters?

Can I ask where you're coming from with this question? (just want to understand the context before I answer)

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#69

Post by m463 »

owenpalmer wrote: post #45

> 9. Competition is for Losers This one is weird. First of all, competition can be very healthy and good for everyone. Sure, there's toxic games you can play in life, but anyone who's ever actually competed at something knows the difference.

I've alway shied away from sort of personal competition.

On the other hand, I have tried to "play to win" with stuff I do, which is giving it everything to succeed. Just not with the intent to make someone else lose. I've never really enjoyed pvp games.

Can someone explain healthy competition in their words?

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#70

Post by dcl »

wenc wrote: post #40
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 actually changed my mind based on some simple ideas. 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 in…

It's great you've found techniques that work for you and you are correct the science is fuzzy...

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism

> Timothy Bates, a psychology professor at the University of Edinburgh, has been trying for several years to replicate Dweck's findings, each time without success, and his colleagues haven't been able to either.[23]

The statistics in Dweck's papers also fail the GRIM test which is a potential indicator of fraud (fake/false statistical values).

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