Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ideas That Changed My Life

perell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 160 posts

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#91

Post by majewsky »

m463 wrote: post #86
mdp2021 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eric Idle: «Now, here's the meaning of life. (Thank you, Brigitte.) M-hmm. Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations» ~~~ Monty Python, The Meaning of Life

very very misguided view of life. avoid eating sugar !

Maybe the real lesson here is that the meaning of life is always a product of its time.

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#92

Post by blowski »

Ensorceled wrote: post #83

I found the biases revealed by some of the examples fascinating, for example: > 16. Russell Conjugation: Journalists often change the meaning of a sentence by replacing one word with a synonym that implies a different meaning. For example, the same person can support an estate tax but oppose a death tax Why did they choose “journalists” when the “death tax” narrative was created by politicians, a much better example…

The Overton Window works as a concept when we all talk to each other. But we now have three separate echo chambers - "Left", "Right", "Center" - and they each have their own Overton Window.

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#93

Post by imachine1980_ »

Ensorceled wrote: post #83

I found the biases revealed by some of the examples fascinating, for example: > 16. Russell Conjugation: Journalists often change the meaning of a sentence by replacing one word with a synonym that implies a different meaning. For example, the same person can support an estate tax but oppose a death tax Why did they choose “journalists” when the “death tax” narrative was created by politicians, a much better example…

I need to write a post about why the invisible hands doesn't mean what people think, it means if you kill the king, the system won't collapse because the secret sauce of the society is in the trade of the parts, Adam's Smith write about that people aren't rational and that we need controls over monopolies, most what people think Smith say is what Lucas say.

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#94

Post by jiggawatts »

ramraj07 wrote: post #26
flappyeagle wrote: post #2

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.

This is awesome because I’d landed on the same concept but via evolution, especially a section in the Blind watchmaker where Dawkins implores on one fundamental requirement for evolution, which is that every step in the evolutionary process the individuals need to have a functional version of the trait. You can’t just shut down the process to retrofit things. Evolving eyes from light sensitive cells means that the or…

> Evolving eyes from light sensitive cells means that the organoid in every intermediate step should be a functional light detector that’s slightly better than the previous iteration if not the same.

This is not entirely true, because there is horizontal gene transfer, and serendipitous combinations, even of "junk" DNA. For example, eyes started off as ordinary brain cells that just happened to have a light-sensitive chemical in them: melatonin. The melatonin could have had another non-photosensing use prior to this, or it could even have been a mere byproduct of some other process.

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#95

Post by jiggawatts »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #8
flappyeagle wrote: post #2

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.

Incremental approaches are limited. A basic example of this is scaling. A chemical process worked out in a lab cannot be incrementally scaled for effective production with bigger test tubes. The entire production process must be designed again from scratch. Incremental approaches to designing a control system with many if statements will never evolve into a PID controller. Nor will a PID controller be evolved into be…

"You can never get to the moon by incrementally improving on a truck."

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#96

Post by blowski »

abacadaba wrote: post #89
afpx wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just blew my mind. Dweck's theories are used all over the corporate-sphere. Here's the article (the wikipedia link 404d): https://web.archive.org/web/20210216192213/https://www.spect...

yes the corporate-sphere is.. how to say.. very dumb.

Corporations are the aggregation of thousands of individual agendas being compromised semi-publicly as you watch. Having some scientific-sounding bullshit support your agenda often works.

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#97

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

makeitdouble wrote: post #9
flappyeagle wrote: post #2

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.

I have a hard time with this. I see the obvious examples of complex systems failing, but we also have so many other complex systems that sure have their shares of issues, but I am not sure we can mark as failed. For instance government constitutions are arguably complex, and formed from scratch. Or to stay in the tech sphere and look at the problem from the other end, is it possible to build anything that hasn't effe…

The most salient example to me is microservices. It's unfortunately quite common for a microservices architecture to be invented during a whiteboarding session.

This is, at best, expensive.

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#98

Post by throwaway2037 »

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.

This is a great story!

Pay tell: What was the 2nd order consequence? The childcare center started to make more money from late parents. It sounds like a good trade. Ideally, raise the price little by little, until behaviour hits an equilibrium. Then you have extracted maximum value for both sides! If parents don't like it, they can go to a different daycare.

Re: Ideas That Changed My Life

#99

Post by npteljes »

Ensorceled wrote: post #83

I found the biases revealed by some of the examples fascinating, for example: > 16. Russell Conjugation: Journalists often change the meaning of a sentence by replacing one word with a synonym that implies a different meaning. For example, the same person can support an estate tax but oppose a death tax Why did they choose “journalists” when the “death tax” narrative was created by politicians, a much better example…

>Why did they choose “journalists” when the “death tax” narrative was created by politicians, a much better example group for this conjugation.

I think for the same reason people blame web developers for how websites are built, ignoring that the web developer is not the product manager.

Post reply on HN