
Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life - yarapavan
Inspired by David Perell&#x27;s tweet - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;david_perell&#x2F;status&#x2F;1257484391204352002" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;david_perell&#x2F;status&#x2F;1257484391204352002</a>
======
endymi0n
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of
us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there
is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that
good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste,
the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why
your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they
quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years
of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to
have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are
still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing
you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week
you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that
you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And
I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s
gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your
way through.

— Ira Glass

~~~
teraflop
"Dude, sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at
something."

\-- Jake the Dog

~~~
devin
When I was learning to play the game Go, someone told me that there's some old
advice about "losing your first 100 games as quickly as possible". That's
stuck with me.

Another one is (and I don't even know if it's 100% true, but I don't much
care) that a common housefly will change its path if it runs into a window
more than twice. I strive to be better than a common house fly.

~~~
ISL
There is a photography adage that your first ten-thousand photographs are your
worst.

I'm not sure I agree -- sometimes you get lucky or circumstance is favorable
-- but I am certain that my second ten-thousand photographs were better, on
average, than my first.

~~~
Aeolun
My iPhone photo’s are vastly better than anything I ever took with my DSLR,
but I’m positive it’s mostly for that reason.

That said, the incredible digital processing helps a lot.

------
aazaa
Favor interrogative-led questions over leading questions.

A leading question attempts to get the listener to agree or disagree with a
premise you feed to them.

An interrogative-led question often begins with the words: who; where; what;
when; why.

Imagine the responses to these two questions:

\- "Did you like the movie?" (Leading)

\- "What did you think about the movie?" (Interrogative-led)

How do each of these questions make you feel? How comfortable would you be
saying something you think would displease the asker in each case. What kind
of responses are possible/likely in each case?

Of course, you can always be talking to someone who's not interested in
talking. It's possible to answer either question with a word or two. So
there's some assumption of willingness to participate. Even so, you can still
sometimes use carefully-chosen interrogative-led questions to find reasons for
the disinterest.

Asking good interrogative-led questions is essential for above-average results
in many pursuits: science; engineering; interviewing; and negotiation; to name
a few. It can also be an important way to de-escalate tense situations. I've
found it especially useful when talking to subject matter experts when trying
to learn something about areas I know little.

Here's an actionable way to apply the idea. The next time you find yourself
asking a question that doesn't begin with {who, where, what, when, why}, stop
yourself and rephrase it to begin with one of those words. What differences do
you notice in how the conversation goes compared to similar conversations
you've had in the past?

~~~
ken
I hear suggestions like this occasionally, and I don't get it. Apparently
sentences like "Did you like the movie?", which sound to me like perfectly
neutral questions, actually have a slant.

Which way is this question leading me to answer? How can I tell? "Yes" and
"No" seem equally acceptable answers here. I don't see how either one would
"displease the asker", without knowing more about the situation.

~~~
uoaei
The framing suggests that the asker did like the movie. It makes it harder to
answer in the negative because some (most) folks have an instinct to achieve
social consensus. I think it's a society-wide learned defense mechanism
against tribalism in the presence of allies. Maybe a good test for these sorts
of questions is to add the word "also" at the end.

~~~
smichel17
I think it can lean either way depending on how you ask it ("Did _you_ like
the movie??").

However, regardless of leaning, the non-leaning version feels like it will
generate more interesting responses, while "Did you like it?" is likely to
elicit a "yes" or "no".

------
darkerside
This might be super basic, but... assume positive intent.

Your parent is not your enemy. Your teacher is not your enemy. Your boss is
not your enemy. The other team at work is not your enemy. The corporation is
not your enemy. The other political party is not your enemy. Or, more
accurately, YOU are not THEIR enemy. At best, you're an NPC in their game.
Many of them probably even want to help you, because you are another person in
the world, and that feels good.

I take back what I said about this being basic. The first steps (learning your
parent, teacher, boss are on your side) is pretty basic. But applying this
concept to more complex systems, like corporations and communities, can be
pretty advanced. But at the end of the day, what it means is that, most of the
time there isn't a conspiracy against you, there are simply incentives that
you don't understand.

~~~
afpx
My life experiences don't match your mental model, sadly. Maybe it has to do
with where and how one grows up? For example, I know with certainty that my
parents, teachers, and first bosses were enemies.

A lot of people on HN seem to have grown up in safe, nurturing, loving
environments. But, remember that most of the world's people didn't. I don't
mean to call you out - just saying that I would love to have had your
experiences.

~~~
ignoramous
Sad reality, adequately explained by game theory:
[https://ncase.me/trust/](https://ncase.me/trust/)

~~~
zeroerrorraghav
Whoa. Excellent website. Thank you so much.

------
nstart
From my father:

No matter how correct you are, you won't get anywhere by making the other
person feel stupid.

He gave me this after we went together to a conference on communication and I
found the presenter to be making some rather doubtful statements. I asked
questions and tried to break the presenter in the QnA session and when I
didn't get what I wanted, I left. I was 15 at the time. So, I forgive myself
but still cringe hard whenever I remember it.

This advice had and continues to have a really long lasting impact on me
(especially in getting me out of my incredibly arrogant stage in life) and my
relationships with people. I can still be critical of things while maintaining
respect for the other person's context and intelligence. I've found that also
helps a lot in disconnecting ego amidst a debate.

~~~
colourgarden
It's been a few years since I read it but one of the early topics in _How To
Win Friends And Influence People_ is on a similar track to this:

You can't make people do something. They have to want to do it (unless you're
the big boss ruling through fear).

I've found it's much more productive to present information or an argument so
that the other party is not made to feel stupid and is willing to accept it.

~~~
kaybe
Even then it helps not to expect people to change their mind right there.
Especially in the case of relatives with weird ideas, it can be helpful to not
go into a discussion with the explicit aim of them seeing the problems right
now but to just plant a few seeds.

I've seen it quite a few times that after a few days we talked about it again
and they had shifted their opinion to be more in line with the presented
evidence without ever really acknowledging it.

------
abetusk
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil"

More and more, I'm realizing this applies more broadly than just for code.
Abstraction is a form of optimization and shouldn't be done before the space
has been properly explored to know what abstractions should be built.
Standardization is a form of optimization and shouldn't be proposed until
there's a body of evidence to support what's being standardized.

Failure to validate a product before building it? Premature optimization.

Build infrastructure without understanding the use case? Premature
optimization.

Build tools before using them for your end product/project? Premature
optimization.

This advice comes in different forms: "Progress over perfection", "Iteration
quickly", "Move fast and break things", "Don't let perfection be the enemy of
good enough", etc. but I find the umbrella statement of not prematurely
optimizing to encompass them all.

~~~
movedx
> Build infrastructure without understanding the use case? Premature
> optimization.

Hence my issues with micro services and Kubernetes/containerisation (by
default.)

I've always hated the fact people simply jump onto these technologies and
methodologies as if they're automatically the right solution because everyone
is talking about them. What they don't understand is that they're
optimisations.

You build a monolith and put it on one machine to begin with. No load
balancer. Just a single EC2 instance with snapshots. As the customer count
grows and demand increasing you scale it out...

Now you're on two EC2 instances and might want to consider using RDS. You have
an ALB and you're using ACM to offload TLS certificate management. More
customers come along and the monolith begins to slow down, so you optimise the
application this time...

Now you have the most successful/popular parts of your application split out
into separate components but still using the same database. You're still just
running Docker on a few EC2 instances though. You don't need orchestration
yet. But now your customers start demanding more features and changes on a
more frequent basis. Also your customer count is rising more and more. You're
now ready to scale out and re-architect things again...

Now you've got 80-85% of your monolith split out into separate components, in
Docker images, and you're using Kubernetes to orchestrate the whole thing
because you need to iterate and deploy parts of the software on a near daily
basis.

Taking it slow and keeping things simple in the beginning allows you to focus
(from a systems perspective) on stability and security, which are much easier
when you have a monolith and two EC2 instances. As you need to iterate faster
and more often you increase the complexity of the network to meet the needs of
the development team. It becomes much harder to secure and manage, but the
trade off is worth it.

That's how you optimise your infrastructure over time.

The only situation in which I would contradict my self on this point is if
you're developing a product that you know will need micro services and K8s to
begin with AND everyone on the team has extensive experience implementing an
application in that manner.

~~~
gonzo41
Why people start at the K8 end state is twofold, fashion and a lot of younger
people don't look at highways and see they started out as either single lane
tarmac or dirt roads that were remade in place. There's a lot more talk these
days about refactoring complex systems. But its really a job for senior
engineers or young folk who have time for it (Like the new grads who complain
about being dumped on legacy systems :) ). When you're jumping from framework
to framework and shipping features, sitting back and considering things is
really tricky, and the inertia to build from scratch but also have 20 years of
refactored improvements delivered makes jumping on K8's and the magic that
brings seem like a no brainer.

~~~
gen220
I really, really like your metaphor of the dirt roads remade in place. It’s
fascinating to look down at the sidewalk in NYC and know that it was farmland
only a few centuries ago. We know the aphorisms: Rome wasn’t built in a day,
but we don’t always think them through.

At work, when a new person joins our team, it’s fascinating (in a non-cynical
way) to hear “why are we using a dirt road here instead of a highway? Wouldn’t
that be more efficient?” It’s fun to imagine the implications of such a
project, and it’s a great opportunity to give perspective on the traffic flow
of customers, developers, operations.

Could we build a highway there? Yes. But usually, it’s a better allocation of
our finite resources to do some maintenance on the existing highway.
Sometimes, we actually need to take highways apart and replace them with
something more informal, since their maintenance costs more than they’re
worth.

Something tangential this reminds me of is the concept of “Desire Lines”:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path).
The work of an SWE can be summed up as the identification and “improvement” of
desire lines. If you build a highway, but it’s not on a desire line, you’ve
just wasted a lot of energy!

------
Waterluvian
A decade of success against steep odds later, I ran into the high school
teacher who I idolized and who helped me actually achieve something. Most
teachers tolerated me or insulated the rest of the classroom from me. But he
put in the effort to get me engaged with something that got me to sit down and
try. I was excited to show him what his work had helped me accomplish. He had
two things to share with me:

1\. He doesnt remember me.

2\. That he felt I was smarter than him, hearing what I was working on.

It hit really hard. And when I recovered it made me realise that all
relationships are ephemeral if you aren't there to foster and cherish them.
There's also a lesson in there I'm trying to parse. About how I always saw him
as this brilliant teacher. But he's just a guy.

~~~
toufka
But it's also much more than that - he's not just a guy, he's one of just a
few guys that put in the effort to do their job well and honestly. And that
positive daily effort had profound effects on the lives of people he cared
about. (And conversely, those that did not put in that effort did not create
profound and positive wakes).

And that idea can be paid forward. There are plenty of times one doesn't get
to go back and thank their mentors and those that inspired them. But that
practiced and daily support of others really can lead to outsized positive
effects - that we might not ever hear about.

And if you step forward with the idea - the more people that work to support
others in their daily routine, even without obvious immediate benefit, the
more those wakes can become entire waves that lift everyone upwards.

~~~
Waterluvian
It's so true. I started mentoring a robotics team and I doubt I'll remember
most of the kids. But wow it's so soul filling to watch them learn.

------
ignoramous
I am going to cheat a bit and give you three things that have had a lasting
impact on me:

First is this quote from Lincoln, "I hate that man. I must get to know him
better".

This has helped me shed biases and prejudices that stop me from liking someone
on the first few interactions. Instead of shunning them, I seek to know them
better, in the hope that I see past the veil and reach out to the actual human
on the other side. This ties in nicely with Stephen Covey's quote, "We judge
ourselves by our intentions and others by their behaviour."

Second thing that has stuck with me is this zen-koan about a disciple having a
tough time forgiving their master for a _sin_ [0]. The koan ends with the
thought that the disciple who's holding on to resentment, disapproval,
outrage, disappointment, grudge is really the one who's in distress and
enduring the punishment and not the master. It is really powerful, at least to
me. If I liberally tie it to the 'broken windows theory' [1], it explains to
me why such resentments over time aren't simply good for me, personally,
despite how few the broken windows may be, they need to be fixed.

And the third is producer v consumer mindset [2]. Do not consume excessively,
refrain from stifling the production line with tendency to consume all day,
every day.

[0] [https://medium.com/@soninilucas/two-monks-and-a-woman-zen-
st...](https://medium.com/@soninilucas/two-monks-and-a-woman-zen-
story-c15294c394c1)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555237](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3555237)

~~~
admiral33
Thank you for that Lincoln quote. I went to a very diverse University
(Upstream, Red Team) and one of the hunches I've walked away with is that at
the core of prejudice is a missing friend on the other side.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
> Upstream, Red Team

Forgive my ignorance, what does this mean in this context?

~~~
quchen
It's the battle chant of Rutgers University :-)

------
lootsauce
My opinions are not mine and they are holding me back.

Give multiple and opposing views equal respect and disdain at the same time.
Treating a thought as your own, as an opinion "you hold" greatly holds you
back from a great deal of valuable perspective. Of course you surely hold some
world-view and gauge things from that position but try to cultivate more of
these positions as if you were someone else.

Don't get your sense of self so wrapped up in all the thoughts and ideas that
flit about in your brain. You will surely be a different person in 1, 5, 10,
20 years and may well have a completely different perspective then.

There is very little original thought, mostly there is just repetition and re-
contextualization of the same old stuff. That is not a bad thing but you
should really divest yourself from being emotionally wrapped up in opinions
(yours or others) and treat them as the conclusions of research papers with
small sample sizes.

Now when you converse with someone, stop thinking about "your" response, and
just listen, really listen to what they are saying and try to really
understand where they are coming from so you can integrate that into your
thinking.

~~~
pedalpete
I think you may mean "My opinions are not me", or "I am not my opinions" gives
you the space to separate your identity from your thoughts, giving you the
freedom to change.

~~~
kortilla
No, that’s something very different. The point GP is trying to make is that
most opinions people hold on things are not actually their own formed
conclusions, they are just regurgitations from authorities they trust.

This happens excessively in politics. Suddenly a huge chunk of a political
faction will have the same “opinion” on a complex topic they have no day-to-
day interaction with or previous educational coverage. When you try to dig
deeper on these topics people hold such fervent “opinions” on, it turns out
that it’s just a restatement of what they heard from a friend/talking head.

------
mwfunk
One thing that’s been super meaningful for me is the notion that if you don’t
put something into words, either in speech or in your head or on paper, you
don’t know anything about it, even if it’s a feeling or a belief or an
intuition deep within you that you’ve held for as long as you can remember.

The act of simply putting a thought into words makes it immediately obvious to
you if you really understand it or not, and if not, where your blind spots
are.

If the thing you’re concerned with is an unresolved problem or a question,
simply articulating the problem or the question can make the solution or the
answer obvious. Just going through the process of putting it into words, one
way or another, and being sure you’ve settled on the most concise and accurate
description of it you can muster, will often make so many things that were
hazy obvious, and can reveal to you areas of haziness in your own thinking
that you may not have been aware of.

Rubber duck debugging is one result of this. Rubber duck debugging is based on
the observation that by the time you’ve explained your bug to someone, often
times you figure out your next steps before they even respond. Just
articulating your problem in the form of a question asked to someone else will
sometimes reveal the answer to you.

~~~
_0ffh
I once heard something along the lines of "to learn to express yourself
properly is to learn to think". Sometimes our understanding of something is a
muddle of unstructured thoughts and hunches. To express yourself properly you
need to organize these. After you did that, things are often much clearer.

------
purerandomness
The idea that your mind is not _you_.

That "thinking", as a process, is just a tool of your body, just like
eyesight, for example.

Listening to meditation and mindfulness practitioners like Jon Kobat-Zinn and
Eckhart Tolle, I found it absolutely groundbreaking, for myself, to realize
that the mind is an instrument that needs training and tuning, and sometimes
can lead you astray, and can't be trusted unconditionally.

Disassociating from my mind and understanding that my _thinking_ is not my
_being_ has helped me in innumerable ways.

~~~
TACIXAT
The other more Daoist end of this spectrum is that your mind and body are you.
Through the power of will you control both of these.

As a long time meditator the "I am not my body, I am not my mind" mantra has
always bothered me. I am both of those and will shape both of those in my
image. Dissociative practices will not bring me closer to my goals.

The comparison to eyesight is strange too. If your eyesight is poor you can
not really train it to be better. Through regular meditation practice, and
practice in other areas (self-discipline) you can absolute shape your mind and
change your thought patterns.

~~~
didroe
While there are obvious flaws with the analogy (like any analogy), I think the
comparison with eyesight (or touch, etc.) is about making people think of the
mind as more of a sensory organ. One that gives you input that may or may not
be useful to you, rather than as something that defines you.

I don't really see that as a dissociative practice, but more as the
prerequisite for being able to start on the long term journey of challenging
and changing your thought patterns.

~~~
hexaga
From my perspective, thoughts are the sensory experience of 'my mind moving'.
Similar to arm movements - when you move your arm, where does the motion come
from?

I'm reminded of a time in my childhood when I realized that I could
consciously direct my eyes without turning my head. I was struck with wonder
at the time, having not known such a thing was possible, _because nobody told
me_. I still remember it vividly by the impact it had on me. The more I
converse on this topic, the more I see people considering the mind as I had
considered my eyes prior to my childhood realization.

The point I'm trying to get to is that I believe the dichotomy of mind and the
body is a false one. I think the abstraction level of 'mind' is different from
the level of 'body'. It should rather be 'mind' and 'arm' and 'eye' (and
etc.).

The command of these in concert is somewhere outside of my perception, or so
deep inside of it that I am blinded by its normality. Calling something we
can't perceive by the name of something we can, I think, is magical thinking
and folly. Why are my thoughts this way? Because my Mind. Why do planets orbit
stars? Because Science. Why are we alive? Because we have élan vital.

Looking at it this way, the impossibility of controlling thoughts is lifted.
When thoughts are solely something that happen to you, the very notion of
controlling them except indirectly is incoherent. But re-framed, I can train
my mind as I would train skill or form in body.

I know that I can't play the cello with any skill, as I am now. If I try, it
will grate on the listener and cause more displeasure than pleasure. It's not
an inherent failing of mine, simply that I haven't devoted the requisite time
and energy to train myself in it. But it does define me, at least in part.

Would that skillful thinking was perceived the same as skillful cello playing.
Instead, educational institutions must suffice to verify that you have the
tools (in the form of knowledge, or acquired frameworks), but say little of
skill achieved. Imagine a 4 year cello playing course in which a passing grade
is earned if you but present a cello at the end.

I think that if this concept is fully integrated, outcomes would be better. If
the mind is viewed as an intangible thing that blasts thoughts in your general
direction, from where can it be improved? I know my body can be improved, by
strenuous exercise. I know my skill at cello can be improved, if I simply
practice. But my mind? If I'm hamstrung by its conception as a pure source,
I'll forever stay at whatever minimal level is required to survive. And that's
a tragedy.

This went a little off into conjecture-land, but I think I'll leave it for the
time being.

tldr: imo minds are limbs, not monitors

~~~
friendlybus
You describe thoughts as if you are in receivership of them, like a mom
receiving a work of art from her child.

I can direct and focus my thoughts beyond their capacity to perceive the
world, like channeling attention and sculpting potential words when I am
typing out this comment. I can direct myself to imagine worlds that never
existed and solve problems in the future, which requires directed thought.

Your mind is trivially easy to improve, conceptually. Focused improvement on a
hard skill will drag your mind along. Deciding to get better at cello will
require you to learn higher concepts of music reading, fine motor skills and
playing in a band that will form a structure in your mind. That will make
thinking and directing thoughts in new directions much easier. It's much
easier to ask someone to imagine what it's like working in a construction team
building a shopping mall when they know how people work together in a band,
compared to a blank slate that knows nothing. That imagination can be used to
prune off bad ideas and thoughts that go nowhere.

The educational institution that is supposed to be good at this is the
humanities. Philosophy will train you to express your mind through language at
such an articulated level that you will know yourself better and be able to
navigate a very wide array of arguments with precision. Thus giving you a much
better source of material for your mind to sculpt it's thoughts with.

The mind simply has to be pure to sort signal from noise, that's a fundamental
part of what it does. The mind is also incorporeal, it has the least matter.
The higher you think, the less quantities of properties and details you can
focus on. Their totality is summed up as categories that start doing all that
heavy lifting for you in implied abstractions. Keeping track of hundreds of
different sized numbers and the properties of each item you are counting in
one holistic picture is difficult. Purifying that into abstractions and
relations between them is incredibly powerful.

Do you centre your being on the spine, rather than the mind? Framing and
receiving the output of the mind is what a lot of people do and I hazard a
guess the ability to balance the difference between quantities and directions
is a lot easier when you hang that task on the spine, with limbs that protrude
out from it.

------
dorkwood
Nick Cave, on writer's block:

"My advice to you is to change your basic relationship to songwriting. You are
not the ‘Great Creator’ of your songs, you are simply their servant, and the
songs will come to you when you have adequately prepared yourself to receive
them. They are not inside you, unable to get out; rather, they are outside of
you, unable to get in."

[https://www.theredhandfiles.com/do-u-have-any-spare-
lyrics/](https://www.theredhandfiles.com/do-u-have-any-spare-lyrics/)

~~~
bananamerica
I cannot fathom how this metaphysics would help me at all.

And I’m both religious and a film major/screenwriter.

~~~
dorkwood
Maybe the flowery words obscured the message for you.

If it helps, I first came across the quote in a blog post by Austin Kleon[0],
an author, talking about people who say they have a book in them.

"I never feel like I have a book in me. I always feel like there’s a book
around me. It’s like I’m a planet and there’s all this space junk orbiting me,
and all the junk starts smashing together and forming book chapters. My job is
to grab that stuff around me and shape it into something."

[0]: [https://austinkleon.com/2019/06/06/its-not-inside-you-
trying...](https://austinkleon.com/2019/06/06/its-not-inside-you-trying-to-
get-out-its-outside-you-trying-to-get-in/)

~~~
bananamerica
That does make sense thank you.

------
soneca
News == entertainment.

Originally by Aaron Swartz
[http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews)

Although I have slightly different takes from his and the level of avoiding
the news might be different too, but the core idea that I follow these days is
there.

I used to think following the news was a mix of my duty as a citizen and
important for my life, personal and professional. Now I believe it's quite the
opposite, I better understand the world because I avoid the news. These days I
think it is as much entertainment as Netflix or comics.

~~~
fredsir
I'd like to hear more about how you have implemented this. Do you not read any
news? Some? How do you find out what's going on?

I've been dabbling with this too, and my current state is that I don't consume
any news or social media (twitter) that I cannot consume via my RSS reader,
which in practical terms means I don't subscribe to any major news outlets,
but instead subscribe to a smaller newspaper in my country that sends out
daily newsletters which I then forward to my RSS reader that then shows it
along regular RSS content - it's a feature of feedbin.com and it's a great
feature!. Then I follow a lot of personal blogs, lobste.rs and HN, and then a
curated list of twitter accounts, all via my RSS reader. The twitter thing is
also a feedbin.com feature. And then I try to read books about a lot of
different topics according to my mood, obviously. I get the feeling that any
news that is not relevant to me after a month, six months, a year and so on,
is probably not worth my time anyways except if it touches me directly, in
which case I'll know anyways, so by reading books about, say covid-19 in a few
years instead of news now, I'll get a much better picture of the whole thing
than if I was intensely following the news every single day doing the
pandemic.

But fear of missing out does often present itself. It's a constant fight
between my rational mind, and some kind of stupid, irrational thing that is
also part of me.

~~~
soneca
It's not hard for me. I have a very low fear of missing out.

I do end up consuming news, but always either through some sort of filter or
directly (rarely), but realizing the role of entertainment in whatever I am
watching.

I use Twitter a lot, but I follow people who mostly don't replicate the news.
I try to follow people that say interesting things.

I read Hacker News a lot, but there is the explicitly idea to not replicate
mainstream news here, so another good filter.

I use Whatsapp a lot, but I am only in groups with friends and family, so
another source of news, but filtered by people I care about. Maybe luckily, or
even by my influence, these few groups are not just spamming news to me.

I am not against the news, I don't particularly _" hate"_ the news.

I do inform myself through podcasts, a few that talk about books for example,
so it is another filter to consume the news.

~~~
mmsimanga
I would like to echo WhatsApp groups as a news source. I don't own a TV, don't
do twitter and keep Facebook for the odd monthly visit. WhatsApp groups keep
informed. The best group is my the one made up of people who went to same
boarding school. What's great about this group is you get both sides of the
story without anyone leaving in huff. Somewhere down the middle is the real
news. I find you can't have similarly discussions out in the open.

------
mortenjorck
I’m still only somewhat recently down this particular path, but it’s proven to
be one of the more profound realizations I can remember:

You can’t guilt yourself into doing things you want to accomplish. You’ll
always resist and make excuses. The only way is to enjoy the act of doing
them.

Fighting procrastination, whether by guilt or rewards, is a losing game.
Instead, cultivate an appreciation of the task you’re resisting, however
complex or banal it may be. Learn to enjoy the micro-accomplishments of each
moment. Instead of the dopamine hit of procrastination, train yourself on the
dopamine trickle of sustained action.

It’s not an all-at-once change, but for me, at least, it’s had a very concrete
effect so far.

~~~
pashamur
Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a really good book to that effect. And has
some practical tips on how to learn to enjoy doing things you might not
otherwise.

------
kalonis
There are no adults in the room
([https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/08/12/there-are-
no-a...](https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/08/12/there-are-no-adults-in-
the-room/))

During my career I was always looking for some senior developer to guide me in
my work. I was hoping someone has figured everything out and could tell me
whether my solutions where good or bad. It frustrated me that most of them did
not really have a clue and could not help me. I blamed it to my company which
would not invest the money to hire really good senior developers and switched
employers. I hoped to find better learning opportunities there (which I
thought meant better guiding). But it was the same everywhere: The people who
I thought had everything figured out seemed to be just as clueless as me.

It took me some time to realize this is the norm. There is no one who has the
perfect understanding of everything. There is a lot of uncertainty to any
solution you try out. Accepting the uncertainty and acting accordingly is the
true meaning of "seniority".

------
aaron_seattle
"Nothing is ever personal."

The way people treat you, has nothing to do with you. They are just living out
their own stories.

Related idea: "You train others how to treat you." Think reinforcement
learning as applied to training a dog. (And I love dogs, have the deepest
respect for them). The concept isn't that different when applied to our social
interactions.

~~~
sharemywin
You have to accept the world doesn't revolve around you. and that's hard for
people.

~~~
pstuart
I have a twist on that: "You are the center of the universe, and so is
everybody else"

~~~
brain5ide
How's the water today, boys?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-
ydFMI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI)

~~~
pstuart
I love that speech. But I had the notion I shared well before encountering it
:-).

------
jjice
Ignorance _can_ be bliss. Didn't change my life, but has definitely helped me
in a lot of cases, especially recent times. Generally speaking, I can't affect
what is currently happening in the news, despite how upsetting it might be,
and it won't even affect me in a lot of cases. I try to consume little
information for things I don't care about or will have a negative effect on me
as a way to spare myself from anxiety.

I've gotten a lot of shit for this in the past from people saying "you just
don't stay informed?" or "it's your civic duty to know what's happening in the
world!". If information is really important for me to know, I'll see it. If it
doesn't end up on one of the few media sources I consume, it probably won't
affect me. I got this idea from MMM [1], which was inspired by The Four Hour
Work Week.

[1] [https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/01/the-low-
informati...](https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/01/the-low-information-
diet/)

~~~
js2
Erik Hagerman is on a four year news blackout:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/style/the-man-who-knew-
to...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/style/the-man-who-knew-too-
little.html)

~~~
klenwell
Article date: March 10, 2018

 _He swore that he would avoid learning about anything that happened to
America after Nov. 8, 2016.

...

Mr. Hagerman begins every day with a 30-minute drive to Athens, the closest
city of note, to get a cup of coffee — a triple-shot latte with whole milk. He
goes early, before most customers have settled into the oversize chairs to
scroll through their phones._

Life finds a way I guess.

~~~
purplezooey
can't ya just make a triple-shot latte at home

------
ncfausti
The Growth Mindset.

To briefly sum up the findings: Individuals who believe their talents can be
developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a
growth mindset. They tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset
(those who believe their talents are innate gifts). This is because they worry
less about looking smart and they put more energy into learning.

Along with this goes embracing "feeling dumb" and pushing through. I don't
understand something because _I don 't understand it_...yet.

~~~
NewEntryHN
Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. But if talent starts
working hard, it's game over.

~~~
AlexCoventry
Talent is too vague a concept to be useful.

~~~
bjoli
Intelligence as measured by IQ on the other hand is a very well defined
concept. It is a quite good predictor of all kinds of life "success" (however
that is defined). It is not fluent.

Of course it is not everything, and there are lots of idiots who believe so.
However, the whole "you can do anything if you put your mind to it" is is not
true. The people who are the worst off in society (and I live in "socialist
Sweden") are the people with weak theoretical ability, but still within what
is called average intelligence. The have the worst mental health, the worst
physical health, the worst economical situation and the highest criminal
record.

The idea that working hard solves everything (from the right) and the idea
that intelligence does not matter (while politically mainly catering to the
middle class - the left) have made society a worse place for a large chunk of
people.

~~~
DoreenMichele
One of the problems with statements like this one is that IQ tests tend to be
classist. They tend to measure the kinds of information valued by people with
upper class lives and upper class educations, so they tend to measure people
who are well fed and privileged and so forth.

Also, if you aren't physically well, this will hinder your performance. So
it's really quit hard to sort out if your "low IQ" is due to your poor health
or if your poor health is due to your "low IQ."

And I put that in quotations marks because I know a fair amount about IQ
tests. I used to be somewhat seriously involved with a thing called The TAG
Project where I was briefly Director of Community Life and I rubbed elbows in
cyberspace with people who worked at the Gifted Development Center in Denver,
Colorado and such.

There are a lot of problems with IQ tests and with the history of IQ testing
and yadda. Most IQ tests top out at around 145 points, which makes it
inherently hard to measure anything about that and tests are only tools and
only as good as the person administering them and can be gamed and so forth.

The first test that started the whole IQ testing thing was never intended to
measure intelligence. It was intended to measure school readiness in France
because they couldn't use age at that time since a lot of kids didn't have
birth certificates and their exact age wasn't always known and there was huge
differences in school readiness between the big city kids and the rural farm
kids and it was the rural farm kids who tended to not have birth certificates
and birth dates.

So they asked a guy, I think named Binet, to create a test to sort out which
kids were ready for school and this went down in history as the first IQ test.
This is where you get the Stanford-Binet, if I recall correctly.

The entire concept of IQ is problematic for a lot of reasons and it ends up
being sort of circular, self-reinforcing logic and self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you do well on a test, we believe you are the best and brightest and have a
great future and we put you in better classes for "enrichment" and we give you
better opportunities and so on and so forth and then we announce that "See:
Smarts are how you succeed."

I've managed to do a lot of things the world told me couldn't be done because
I was one of the smart kids and all that, but I also have serious health
problems and spent years homeless and no one was lauding me as one of the
smart people when I was homeless. And I didn't seem that smart during that
time. I was very, very sick and my forum comments were full of typos and so
forth.

I still thought I was smart. I was still pulling off things the world said
couldn't be done against long odds under difficult circumstances, but I was
very poor and I wasn't getting social recognition for any of it and people
were literally calling me "crazy" to my face, probably in part because I was
homeless and still had the self concept and self esteem of one of the smart
kids who graduated at the top of my class and had a lot of academic awards and
the world had problems with me acting like one of the privileged people while
I was homeless.

~~~
bjoli
When I say IQ I mean the number gotten to through something like WAIS or WISC
(which start becoming unreliable above 130. It is almost as if it is hard to
standardise a test for the 99.3rd percentile... :) ) Not the crap used most
places. The only environment I know WISC from is cognitive disabilities
testing in school, where it is used for two things: check whether someone has
legal right to extra support and as a tool to understand what kind of extra
help a student needs even if there is no legal requirement for extra support.

I find the whole selection through IQ that you describe dubious at best, and I
seriously doubt the usefulness of it. It is a good predictor, but not that
good.

However, what I do see is a society today that requires higher abstract
intelligence than 20 years ago, which in turn had higher requirements than 20
years before that.

~~~
DoreenMichele
_However, what I do see is a society today that requires higher abstract
intelligence than 20 years ago, which in turn had higher requirements than 20
years before that._

This is partly a function of population going up. It means we need more
complex systems for the world to be able to support that population and for
human life to work.

In the time of President Lincoln, the average education level of a woman was
about 2nd to 4th grade and most of them were homemakers. I used to talk to
folks in Pakistan and they had similar education levels for their women. It's
one of the youngest countries in the world in terms of demographics.

In my father's day, most people grew up on farms and it was common to stop
formal education at the eighth grade. You typically completed high school if
you were planning on going to college and becoming a doctor or lawyer or
something.

My dad dropped out of the tenth grade. It was the Great Depression and he was
a big guy and he could earn a man's wage and finishing school didn't make
sense and it wasn't the stigmatizing failure that it is today.

He joined the Army and he had so many Army schools that he got out of going to
Korea. He fought in WWII and in Vietnam and he had his bags packed for the
Korean war and got a phone call the night before that he was the only guy in
the battalion -- about a thousand people -- with all the military schools they
wanted for teaching ROTC. She he and some officer got out of going and he
taught college ROTC instead of fighting in the front lines of the Korean war,
even though he was a high school drop out.

And in his day, enlisted soldiers like him never had college. That was limited
to officers.

By the time my husband was well into his Army career, enlistees needed some
college to make it to the higher enlisted ranks and I have seen articles that
a lot of factory workers these days have college degrees.

It's not really shocking that we need more information in the system to make
the same resources go further for purposes of letting 7 billion people occupy
the same land mass that used to support a lot fewer people than that and make
sure there is enough to go around. If you build up, you can fit more people in
the same land area than if you build out.

And this is something that can be overcome to a large degree by education and
"practice" so to speak.

Lots of people use tech today that would have been special tech only found at
a university or in a research facility or whatever and now it is the norm. I
think you are making a mistake to conflate that trend with some kind of
measure about individual intelligence.

Ant colonies change over time. They mature and behave differently. The
individual ants aren't anymore intelligent and they don't have books to read
or whatever. The system of the ant colony undergoes what you might call
cultural changes and the ants in a later stage colony inherit the accumulated
wisdom and they aren't any smarter or better educated and they don't have a
higher IQ individually, but the system becomes more intelligent in some sense
anyway.

And that's kind of what you are seeing with humans, more or less.

~~~
bjoli
I am not sure I agree with your analysis. I live in a country where most jobs
requiring low-to-no qualifications have dwindled. I just googled a little and
found quotes that 1 million jobs disappeared when most of the Swedish industry
was relocated in other countries (due to lower salaries). This is in a country
with 10 million inhabitants (with about 60% of those in "working age"). Sweden
has among the lowest amounts of low qualification jobs in the EU.

~~~
DoreenMichele
At the risk of sounding argumentative, I fail to see how that's a rebuttal of
anything I said.

I'm not trying to pick some kind of fight. I'm just talking on the internet
with a stranger during a pandemic about a topic I know a fair amount about
because it interests me. And that easily comes across as fighty and that's not
really my goal.

So you aren't required to agree with anything. I'm not trying to "win" some
argument. You said a thing. I responded. You chose to reply for whatever
reason. Rinse and repeat and here we are.

------
jcoletti
Steve Jobs' explanation of the simple, obvious truth that the world is made up
of everyone's contributions and how much power each individual person has to
contribute and influence it too:

"Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is:
Everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no
smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build
your own things that other people can use. The minute that you understand that
you can poke life and actually something will, you know — if you push in,
something will pop out the other side — that you can change it, you can mold
it. That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous
notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it,
change it, improve it, make your mark upon it. I think that’s very important
and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and
make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn
that, you’ll never be the same again.”

~~~
Tepix
I like that a lot. Thanks.

------
denzil_correa
“One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree.
‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ was his
response. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it doesn’t
matter.”

― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

~~~
jiggunjer
Another part I like:

“'Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on. 'I do,' Alice
hastily replied; 'at least–at least I mean what I say'”

------
LouisSayers
My Grandmother once told me:

"If you want to work at a company, dress like the people that work there.
Because those are the people that the company hires."

I've used this general philosophy in my life to pass courses at university,
win competitions, and get through job interviews. I don't know if my
grandmother meant this in a literal sense, or was hinting at the fact that (as
Tony Robbins says) success leaves clues. When you understand what people are
looking for, the game becomes a lot easier - you simply need to mould yourself
and your communication to fit a winning persona.

~~~
PodCurator
Wouldn't a counter argument be that the MOST successful people do not do what
others do and define their own path. I.e. it's great if you're optimizing a
game for a particular outcome but if you're creating a new game following what
other people do may just leave to the average (of whatever group)?

~~~
deathgrips
The most unsuccessful people also follow that strategy.

------
abnry
Focus on the theorem and its proof, not the name of the theorem.

My background in mathematics and there is an unhealthy adulation of genius.
Granted, praise of genius is warranted, but it becomes too much.

One symptom of this is that almost every theorem is named for whoever
discovered it. Gauss this or Euler that. Shannon this or Nyquist that. What
can happen is you begin to think of mathematics in terms of making a mark and
having something named after you, and not actually about the objective
beautiful reality of the mathematics before you. The mathematics is greater
than the discoverer--it certainly isn't owned by them!

Or to put it another way: Focus on the joy of the task at hand, not on the
hope of adulation from the task well finished.

It is a good way to reduce anxiety.

~~~
hi41
Do you how to overcome the need for adulation. I for one constantly seek
adulation. For the good of one's career, some say one has to constantly repeat
their achievements. Evolutionarily we may do it because some will fall for it
and support us thereby enhancing our chances of survival. But, I think I love
adulation to the point of being mentally sick.

~~~
abnry
It is quite possible your career will suffer if you don't value adulation
highly. It is a strong motivator to do well. It is sort of necessary to get
adulation in order to get promoted.

That said, the costs of valuing adulation are too high and I've observed an
even pathological need to seek praise in myself. It wasn't overt praise
seeking but it was buried in there.

The way I fight my need for adulation is with my Christian faith. There is a
higher purpose and higher goal than success in my life.

------
michaelrpeskin
Antifragility

Or more specifically, just getting the term for it. I spent years trying to
articulate in my own mind many of the ideas in Taleb's book, and once I had a
word for it I could see it everywhere and actually start to change my life to
take advantage of the chaos in the world.

Basically: you can't control what happens to you, but you can set your life up
so that the natural variability of the world can be used to your advantage.

I can't do it justice in an HN comment, but it's one book and one idea that
has changed my life.

~~~
jiggunjer
Sounds like stoicism?

~~~
DoingIsLearning
Taleb's book and premise doesn't just cover human behaviour and mindset in a
Stoic philosophy although there are common points. It covers wider systems:
Politics, Biology, Innovation, Economy, Life decisions, etc.

I suppose the book's premise is more about finding out how a system can be
setup such that it is either resistant to or improved by variability,
uncertainty, and unknowns.

A real world biology example would be the multi-purpose shape of the beak of a
crow versus the specialized beak of humming bird.

The humming bird is more succesful in specific environment but it is more
fragile if this environment were to collapse. The crow maybe not be as
optimized but is "Anti-fragile" to eco-system changes.

I am simplifying but that is the central premise. The book goes into a lot
more depth specially when re-visiting ancient history across different human
eras and the 'lessons learned' from those periods.

------
k4ch0w
No one is thinking about you. That stupid thing you said in the meeting, the
thing you did in middle school, that pimple on your face that feels huge. It's
entirely in our mind and everyone else is too focused on themselves to ever
see or think about the silly things you're embarassed about.

~~~
idkwhoiam
>No one is thinking about you That hurts

~~~
JoeAltmaier
...and it also helps, when you get out the other end of the ego tunnel. Lets
you be truer, and freer.

------
TheAdamAndChe
Spaced repetition. It's a method of learning where you only get a reminder of
material when you're about to forget it. I've found a way to use spaced
repetition to self-learn maths without forgetting processes between obsessive
cycles. I memorize names, birthdays, dates, locations, and anything else I
want to remember much easier than before because of it.

[https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition](https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-
repetition)

~~~
pizzicato
Anki[0] is great for this, and it's free.

[0]: [https://apps.ankiweb.net/](https://apps.ankiweb.net/)

~~~
RMPR
mdanki[0] can speed up the acquisition of new cards

0:
[https://github.com/ashlinchak/mdanki](https://github.com/ashlinchak/mdanki)

------
mattlondon
Not really an idea, but I guess something of an epiphany:

We were doing a basic physics class at school at maybe 12 or 13 years old. We
were learning about Newton's laws of motion etc.

One day we had a test and there was a question about why playgrounds often
have rubber matting or tiles around the climbing frames or swings etc. Cue a
load of waffly nonsense answers about "cushioning impact" or being "soft so it
doesn't hurt" etc from everyone in the class. The teacher berated us: Force =
mass X acceleration - reduce the acceleration and the force goes down too.

A lightbulb went off in my head - suddenly science actually _meant something
in the real world_ rather than just being something your learnt at school.
This was _how the world worked_.

The fact that this moment still sticks out in my mind suggests that it was
probably quite a formative moment for me and I guess changed my outlook on the
world quite significantly. (... but then there was also a sort of
philosophical existential thought about the "tyranny of equations" we end up
living our lives by if we like it or not!)

~~~
GistNoesis
Yeah the "Physics applies to the real world" idea.

I like its corollary. Mac-Gyvering your way through life.

I remember getting strange looks when to light some candles for a birthday
cake, I used paper and an induction hob.

Using a siphon to remove the water from a washing machine.

Bending small locks open.

Pulleys and rope tricks.

There are similar epiphanies in physics, when you realize those chemistry
formulas, atoms and molecules are like real object just real small. That those
chemistry rules, are just statistical mathematics calculation shortcuts for
modelling what's happening to large quantities of small objects.

Phases of matter : solid, liquid, gaz : you can transform any matter between
those states. Water is not the only liquid. You can melt plenty of metals. You
can vaporize away the matter you don't want. You can freeze liquids into
solids by cooling them.

------
adamredwoods
Seek content-ness, not happiness. Happiness comes later.

In my early-twenties, I kept thinking that I always wanted happiness, and if I
wasn't then something was wrong. I later realized that it was the pursuit of
something that I could never attain that was draining and I realized that was
the wrong path. I cannot attain perfection. So I decided to look for a better
life-path that I could sustain, feel comfortable, and be content for long
periods of time. Happiness comes later, naturally almost. It comes in small
packets sometimes. Sometimes I don't even notice.

It's a concept that I read once in Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, where the
grandmother did not want to go into this box and see the world, because if she
saw things she wanted but couldn't attain, she'd be unhappier than she
currently was. This concept can be explained further with the parable of the
fisherman and the businessman. I also think this is one of the ideas behind
the movie "Mr. Holland's Opus", which took me years to understand.

~~~
c-oreills
Your last paragraph reminds me of this research on more advertising leading to
less contentedness: [https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-
unhappy](https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-unhappy)

Showing us what we don't have makes us question and think less of ourselves.
It's the same mechanism that can lead to lower mood after seeing everyone's
carefully curated lives on social media. Everyone around me is happy all the
time, why aren't I?

Once you're concious of that bias, it becomes a bit easier to weather, but
also uncomfortable in a different way. Personally, we want to share pics of
our baby smiling with our friends, but will that make them feel worse when
their baby cries for hours? We've been sharing experiences more openly with
new parent friends so they understand it's not all rainbows all the time, and
have been grateful for others who have done the same to us and reassured us
that everyone's taking the bad with the good.

------
rsecora
The concept of "Unknown Unknowns" changed my approach to life for better.

I was one of those laughing to the famous speech [1] the very first time I
heard it. After a few days, I begin to grasp the epistemological truth in it,
making me humbler.

Today in every system I work on, I know there will be risks unexpected and
possible, and the system shall be resilient and with physical negative
feedback in case control loop fails. Same in private life, I do not expect
luck and I try to minimize kurtosis in all known scenarios (hoping it somehow
covers the unknown unknows).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns)

~~~
DapperZoom
Relatedly, I was struck by philosopher Bernard Longergan's concept of one's
horizon.

He distinguished three classes of questions:

\- The questions one can raise and answer satisfactorialy \- The questions one
can raise, but can not yet answer \- The questions one is not even able to
raise

One's intellectual horizon sits between the second and third categories. You
can only think of humanity's horizon in this same sense.

~~~
rsecora
Your comment is food for the brain. :)

------
AndrewKemendo
The OODA Loop [1]

Air Force Colonel John Boyd came up with the OODA loop as a simplified way to
explain a very complex system of observability and feedback that he developed.
I read about this in the early 2000s and ever since I've been totally obsessed
with the concept of learning, iteration and optimization - and it's the prime
mover in my research and work motivations to this day.

There are many parallel theories and concepts in Reinforcement Learning and
Control Theory such as Sense Plan Act, but the fundamental system is the same.

The OODA loop is often abused and the depth of Boyd's contribution to decision
science has been underserved in my opinion.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop)

~~~
abhiyerra
This has been the most profound for me in terms of decision making. It is just
so applicable to most decision making situations. Also led me to expand my
mental models so I can be more certain about my decisions before I act.

------
sanfranciscoave
The quote "We often suffer more in imagination that we do in reality" has
really stuck with me.

I consider myself to be a bit of an introvert and this idea has helped me
tremendously with networking and meeting new people. I often project the worst
casinario in my mind, but in reality, outcomes are almost always positive and
enjoyable.

~~~
kieckerjan
“I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”

~~~
progre
This sounds like every John Green-vlog ever

------
mlamina
The Dichotomy of Control

A concept I discovered when reading about stoicism. Focus on the things that
you can control and disregard what is outside of your control. Sounds simple
and obvious, until you apply it to everyday life and realize that most things
you worry about are not under your control - other people's actions, opinions,
politics, most external circumstances, really. What you can control however is
how you react to those circumstances - your thoughts, actions and words, for
example.

~~~
chartpath
I used to love Stoic thinking and read the usual primary sources a few years
ago. I still do love it and practise it.

However, I became more and more turned off by the modern company of success
porn bros who use it as a kind of macho way to justify not caring about
others. This is not the truth of it, as Stoic ethics is about concentric
circles of concern emanating outward (family, friends, community, country). I
wish there was more focus on that.

------
krisroadruck
Around 10 years ago I figured out the vast majority of mid and upper level
management have no frickin clue how to do the thing they're tasked with doing,
no capacity or desire to teach themselves, and will gladly fork over $250/hr
or more to work with a consultant or agency who will help their immediate
supervisor never catch on to that fact. Learning this took me from an overly-
qualified low earning tech and marketing generalist employee to a very high
level earner doing agency and solo consulting work pretty much overnight. Wish
I had figured this out a few years earlier than I had but just happy I figured
it out at all.

------
daniel-thompson
Actor-observer asymmetry. Briefly, it's the idea that when we observe others,
we're more likely to attribute their behavior to the nature of their
personality than to their circumstances or situation, and that we do the
opposite when judging our own behavior.

Example: You drive your car faster than the speed limit. You're probably doing
it because you feel like you have a reasonable need (you're late for
something, etc), not because you just inherently like to be a jerk and drive
too fast everywhere.

On the other hand, if you see someone else speeding, you're more likely to
think they're doing it because they're just an unsafe asshole, and less likely
to think they're doing it for a legitimate reason.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93observer_asymmet...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93observer_asymmetry)

~~~
vehementi
When I commit the fundamental attribution error it's just because I'm
distracted, but when others do it's because they're lazy idiots

------
syncsynchalt
"Less is more"

Applicable to programming, applicable to life. Covers everything from device
convergence to PR reviews to retirement planning.

I discovered that spending less on personal happiness brought me more personal
happiness. Try it sometime, give yourself permission to give away half of your
stuff and see if you don't feel better.

~~~
sharemywin
I remember when I used to work at a pizza shop the manager would always say
"where here to feed them, not fatten them".

------
kyoob
My favorite thing about "Finite and Infinite Games" by James Carse is you can
yadda-yadda the whole book:

"There are two types of games. One could be called finite; the other infinite.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the
purpose of continuing the play. [...] There is only one infinite game."

~~~
hnick
> There is only one infinite game

It's World of Warcraft, isn't it? :)

Thank you for the quote. I get the point and it gives me something to think
about as a gamer who often settles into the gamer equivalent of comfort food.

------
Mindless2112
"You can use your laptop power brick as a foot warmer."

Not quite so grand as some ideas here, but still... my feet are warm.

~~~
frosted-flakes
Along the same lines, my new (to me) Apple Thunderbolt display generates a
ridiculous amount of heat, and the vents are on the bottom, right above my
keyboard (I have the display on a VESA mount). Which is great, because my
hands get cold easily and my office doesn't get very warm. It won't be very
fun come summer though.

~~~
rukuu001
Similarly, my 2015 MBP huffs hot air _out from between the keys_ on the
keyboard when it's overheating.

Horrible in summer (I got a heat rash, then an external keyboard) but great in
winter.

edit: formatting

------
tomhoward
The power of the subconscious mind.

Without actively seeking it, I happened to stumble on this idea about 8 years
ago, at a time when I was struggling with some pretty big problems in my
relationships, career and physical+mental health.

Since then, I've been living "as-if" the biggest factors that influence my
reactions, choices and outcomes are in my subconscious, and that by
continually undertaking practices that identify and resolve subconscious
fears, biases, resentments, attachments, etc, I can keep my life on a steady
path of improvement.

Over 8 years on, so far so good.

It also helps me to be more understanding and patient with others, when I can
remind myself that this applies in different ways to all of us, and that
everyone is doing the best they can in the moment.

Related: the idea of living "as-if" something is true, even if it isn't true
yet, or it's unknown (but testable) whether it's true or not.

I.e., building a business for market conditions or technologies that don't
exist yet but are reasonably likely to within a reasonable timeframe, and/or
that may be more likely to come to exist through your work.

Or thinking/operating in a way that may not be consistent with existing
laws/norms/established science, but in doing so you help to change said
laws/norms or make new scientific discoveries.

Obviously, considerable risk management is necessary with this approach.

~~~
hammock
What are these "practices that identify and resolve subconscious fears,
biases, resentments, attachments, etc"?

~~~
tomhoward
Sincere thanks for your interest.

I've learned not to get into the details here, because it can too easily
trigger boring/repetitive arguments with cynics.

But I'm happy to share my experiences directly via email, and also I'm now
hosting a Discord group with other hacker types talking about this stuff.

You're welcome to email me (address in profile) if you're interested to know
more.

------
elliekelly
Don’t accept a “no” from someone who doesn’t have the authority to give you a
“yes”.

~~~
thomasfromcdnjs
Amazing, thanks.

------
abj
The Elephant in the Brain

A lot of common ideas about education, charity and laughter (we laugh because
something is funny) are evolutionary useful lies we tell ourselves.

"But while we humans often play by ourselves (e.g., with Legos), recall that
we laugh mostly in the presence of others. So what communicative purpose does
laughter serve in the context of play? Gregory Bateson, a British
anthropologist, figured it out during a trip to the zoo. He saw two monkeys
engaged with each other in what looked like combat, but clearly wasn’t real.
They were, in other words, merely play fighting. And what Bateson realized was
that, in order to play fight, the monkeys needed some way to communicate their
playful intentions—some way to convey the message, “We’re just playing.”
Without one or more of these "play signals,” one monkey might misconstrue the
other’s intentions, and their playful sparring could easily escalate into a
real fight"

~~~
cheezebubba
This book shows that many of our institutions have both visible, socially-
respected goals, but also hidden goals nobody likes to acknowledge.

Example: Health Care

Visible goal: Improve Health

Hidden goal: Show how much we care ("kiss the booboo")

This explains why much of health care is devoted to high-cost high-visibility
interventions (like bypass surgery) and much less to lifestyle interventions
(like diet/exercise).

It also explains why many obvious changes that would improve the stated goal
keep failing to be adopted - they hamper the hidden goals.

Software example: Why do people keep estimating development task size assuming
nothing goes wrong? And why do their managers not hold them responsible for
continually slipping the schedules?

Visible goal: Accurate estimates

Hidden goal: Brag about how fast we are

If accurate estimates were the only goal, then when schedules slip there would
be a strong feedback loop to improve future estimates. My experience has been
the opposite - the slip is blamed on something "no one could have foreseen"
and everybody keeps estimating as before.

To be clear, it's always a mix of the visible and hidden motives. Much of
health care is actually about improving health. But acknowledging the hidden
motives is vital to understanding how much of society works.

~~~
elliekelly
I had a boss who used to say there was always a “good reason” and a “real
reason” for doing something. A person will tell you the good reason but they
won’t often admit the real reason. Sometimes not even to themselves.

------
smoe
“Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” ― Terry
Pratchett

------
mettamage
The Wim Hof Method. I never had any issue with:

\- snow

\- rain (being soaked was in rare cases still an issue)

\- anything cold really

Before that I was unhappy with whatever was cold. Now I'm neutral at worst and
super exhilarated and hyped like I'm taking drugs (but legally) at best. The
adrenaline rush is very strong and very real, and a lot of fun :)

How I would pitch this to my younger 18 year old self: want insta-ten-percent
more happiness without changing anything about yourself, but by simply
learning a breathing technique? Learn the Wim Hof Method and never complain
about being cold again!

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
Can you explain the method simply? I Googled and all the websites seem to be
full of marketing BS.

~~~
roter
From [0]: 30 cycles of controlled hyper-ventilation, followed by holding
breath with lungs empty as long as possible, then deep breath and hold for
15-20 secs.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof#Wim_Hof_Method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof#Wim_Hof_Method)

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
Interesting how closely this matches many Yogic breathing techniques.

------
monkeydust
2 minute rule. Only useful productivity tool I learn from reading dozens of
books a decade ago.

[https://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-stop-
proc...](https://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-stop-
procrastinating-and-stick-good-habits-using-the-2-minute-rule.html)

~~~
jjice
This one is great. As a student, there are a lot of 2 minute tasks out there
that are easy to push off, like adding something to a calendar or responding
to an email. Mundane things that take very little time (generally speaking),
but can cause much bigger problems down the road if not taken care of.

------
jasoneckert
As childish as it seems, this one actually stuck with me for over 20 years and
makes me step back and relax in situations where bad thoughts can snowball and
result in stress.

Basically, it's a saying that a neighbour's 5-year-old son said once (likely
repeated from his father): "It's better to be pissed off than pissed on."

------
daxfohl
The recognition that the greatest success of modern marketing is having
subconsciously convinced us that things are harder than they are, and there's
a right way to do things.

I can't run a server without AWS. I can't run an email server without O365. I
can't clean a toilet without toxic blue stuff.

Lots of things are actually pretty easy and cheap, and whatever makes you
happy is the right way to do it.

~~~
kevmo314
I recently started a vanilla js project and I've gotta say I'm pretty happy
with it.

Granted, it's sitting on top of an Electron + Webpack stack so I don't have to
worry about compatibility, but hey, small victories, and both of those were to
solve explicit problems I ran into in the project, not just a choice because I
was comfortable with them.

------
vincentmarle
We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.

Confucius

~~~
mettamage
Oh man, so true, realized this when I became 25. Nowadays I talk to my
grandparents about these things and they say "grandson, when I was your age _I
never_ thought about how it was to be 80 years old or any other age for that
matter."

I sometimes wonder how it is to be older. I also venture back to younger ages,
and of course think about my current age.

------
Sohcahtoa82
Don't sweat the small stuff. And it's almost all small stuff.

If you're finding yourself stressed out about something, ask yourself...will
it have a significant impact on your life within the next month? Will you even
remember it in a year?

If you can truly adopt this mentality, it cures road rage. Okay, so some
asshole cut you off in traffic. Why lose your mind over it? It won't even have
an impact on your day, let alone a month.

Even something more significant like a minor car collision. Yeah, you might be
out your car for a few days while it gets repaired, but once it's resolved,
life returns to normal.

I'm lucky that even this COVID-19 crisis hasn't significantly affected my
life. The only difference is that I'm working from home and cooking more
rather than eating out all the time. A vacation and two conventions have been
cancelled, but life goes on.

~~~
groby_b
Life always goes on. Until you're dead. But then you won't care. (Flippant
advice given to me a long time ago, but with a lot of truth buried in it)

It's just important to remember that most of us care _how_ life goes on. And
so "the small stuff" suddenly spirals into big stuff, because you didn't pay
attention. So, be careful to label things "small stuff" unless you can't
influence them.

You can't fix idiotic driving, so the idiot driver? Small stuff. The fact that
every driver on the road is potentially an idiot, or, worse, actively out to
get you? A really important reminder.

Focus on what you can control, dismiss the rest.

------
WalterBright
I am responsible for what happens to me. (I.e. I am not a victim.) Accepting
responsibility is very empowering, as it implies I can do something about it.
Being a victim is dis-empowering, as it means you are helpless.

(People who read my posts will recognize this as a consistent theme. Being a
victim is a choice. I choose not to be.)

~~~
JackFr
What’s funny is that I find this much easier to do in the large than in the
small.

A layoff at work or a seriously ill child engendered a stoic “This is the way
the world is, and you deal with it rather than cursing the unfairness or
wishing it was some other way”.

On the other hand, when my bread gets stuck in the toaster? Rage at the the
universe and despair for my miserable and forlorn situation.

~~~
WalterBright
Oh, everyone is allowed a rage at the universe moment :-)

------
pizzicato
Outside of work, to create at least as much as I consume. I'm trying to pick
up writing as a hobby to shift my creation:consumption balance.

Edit: Related to that, I've been writing brief notes on interesting articles I
read for the past few years. This has two advantages: 1) It helps me to read
critically, and 2) It forces me to be more intentional about the articles I
read - one way to combat the deluge of information

------
lutorm
That every dollar you spend directly translates into pushing your financial
independence further into the future.

I hadn't really reflected on becoming financially independent as a real
possibility, but now I'm mentally bookkeeping spending against being locked
into needing to work longer. The real revelation was when I realized that this
"save 20% of your income for retirement" advice that's thrown around is
totally backwards. Your _income_ is not the yardstick, your _spending_ is.
Rather than scaling your spending to your income, spend what you _need_ and
save the rest. If you have a tech salary, that likely means you'll be
financially independent much, much, earlier than traditional retirement age.

~~~
throwaway7281
I lived like a student when I was a student and did not change much of my
lifestyle and could not be happier. I usually save 2/3 of my salary and do not
miss anything. My runway today is about 15 years.

------
advertising
I was raising money and met this zen style investor for lunch to talk about
some issues we were having, basically complaining and blaming and things like
that, he interrupted me and said -

“Be careful the stories you tell yourself because they will eventually become
true”

It hit me that I really was telling these stories of how the company was or
where the business was going in a negative light and things were simply
becoming more and more negative because of me. So be careful!

------
TwelveNights
We may harm ourselves or others around us for nothing but the feeling of
control in our lives. I remember reading somewhere that eating disorders were
an example of simultaneously losing and gaining control and, though I haven't
had an eating disorder before, I could see how the same logic could apply to
other actions.

~~~
chadcmulligan
I have come to the conclusion that pretty well everything negative in human
society is about control - religion, business, management, politics, even, as
you say, food. It's all about some one doing something that makes me
uncomfortable, so I have to control it, once you realise this it's very
freeing.

------
cecilpl2
Always, always, stop people to ask them questions. Whenever they do something
you are surprised by or say something you don't understand, ask them to
explain.

I never fail to get a positive response.

Sometimes you feel silly if it was a simple thing, but you get used to that
easily, and now you know that thing for the rest of your life.

------
koonsolo
As a kid: Everything that you see was made by somebody. Someone had the idea,
someone started a business for it, someone designed it, someone assembled it,
etc.

As an adult: Simulated annealing for your own life
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing))
You start something by going all over the place, trying even crazy ideas. Then
you start refining and refining, getting better at the details. This is the
optimal way for anything: dating, starting companies, creating products,
learning something new, investing, ... .

~~~
kmmlng
SA for your own life sounds intriguing. Do you have a concrete example that
elucidates how this could be implemented? The concept still seems a little
slippery to me.

~~~
koonsolo
Dating: give everything a quick try: Tinder, speeddating, okcupid, socializing
(dancing classes). Then see what works best, and put your effort into that
one.

Marketing: try everything before you start focussing on the best (I think the
book Traction describes it like this).

When I was looking to make my own logo and pinned it down to hiring on fiverr,
I let a few different artists do a quick, cheap sketch. Then I hired the best
to do the full thing.

I think it comes down to: first, get a quick & cheap taste of everything ("go
all over the place"), then slightly start focussing on the things that work
for you.

------
hartleybrody
Jeff Bezos has a great interview where he talks about his decision to leave
his cushy Wall Street job and start a website selling books. He talks about
how he used a "regret minimization framework" where he projects himself into
the future and imagines which decision he would regret the least.

I have used this technique multiple times myself to help with otherwise
fraught or overwhelming decisions, and I think it's a great way to shift your
frame of reference.

Interview where he describes it here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
As a trick for solving a single problem, ok sure. That sounds like chess,
where a failure loses the game. Not the same risk of failure in life decisions
(well, skydiving maybe). To minimize later regret sounds terribly hesitant,
cautious and small.

So many other ways to organize your life: joy maximization is one for
instance. There's the money thing. And character should come in there
someplace, not just utilitarian nonsense.

Einstein(?) said it this way: "When I want to make a decision, I flip a coin.
If I'm disappointed in the outcome then I know I wanted the other choice."
Sounds about like the same thing (only a century earlier)

------
downerending
If your friends--or especially your SO--don't have your back, it's time to
move your back.

You deserve to have at least one person in your life that is _always_ on your
side. Especially for an SO, if they can't do that, get rid of them. Far better
to be alone.

~~~
ryandvm
Not sure I agree with this. I don't want someone to have my back if I'm on the
wrong side. I want my SO to challenge my ideas and to help me improve as a
person, not to reinforce my bad ideas.

~~~
downerending
To me, "having my back" doesn't mean nodding yes to everything. It means
starting with the strong assumption that I'm a pretty good guy. It means doing
for me what someone who loved me would do. Kind of the opposite of an Internet
troll. In any case, it's up to each person to set the mark.

------
jlengrand
For me it was this : (job) interviews are not a one-sided judgment of your
worth and value as a person where you have to do your best to convince the
party, but a discussion of whether what the opposite side is searching for is
in line with what you have to offer as a person / company.

It's not obvious at all, especially early in your career but it has really
changed the way I handle interviews in very positive ways. It's OK to get
refused, it's even expected actually. And even if it doesn't work out today,
taking the meeting with proper framing can bring opportunities further down
the road. Some friends are now hired in positions I was chased for, and it's a
win :).

Kalzumeus has been an inspiration for me on all those things couple years back
: [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-
negotiation/](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/)

------
setgree
When learning something, trying to reward myself when I feel stupid or
frustrated, because that generally means I'm doing something difficult that
will pay off long-term.

I think of this as another 'habit to unlearn from school'
([https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/48WeP7oTec3kBEada/two-
more-t...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/48WeP7oTec3kBEada/two-more-things-
to-unlearn-from-school)). For most of my life, I did what came easily, and I
got a lot of praise and reward in those areas. I neglected the things that
made me feel stupid or frustrated, and I think that consequently, my education
is not as well-rounded as it might be.

Or, like Jake the Dog says [0]: "Dude, sucking at something is the first step
to being sorta good at something."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smgQiGABQMs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smgQiGABQMs)

------
perlgeek
A famous golfer once scored a hole-in-one after not playing tournaments for
some time, only focusing on training.

A reported asked "Surely that was luck? You cannot train for a hole-in-one
reliably."

To which the golfer answered: "Yes. But the more I train, the luckier I get."

That has stayed with me. Whenever I complained about bad luck (at least in my
internal monologue), I started wondering what would have happened if I had
trained more, be better prepared etc. Really helped me to shift a bit towards
growth mindset.

------
scojomodena
Passive income. Or recognizing at least the goal of increasing your
income/time ratio.

~~~
cactus2093
> the goal of increasing your income/time ratio.

Not sure that's quite the right simplification of the appeal of passive
income. Your time is fixed, the appeal of passive income for many is
recovering more of your time. There's always more money you could make if you
just get that next raise or promotion, so the most straightforward way to
maximize your income/time is just to climb the corporate ladder and make more
income.

~~~
maerF0x0
An interesting issue with climbing the corporate ladder is that often your
time spent actually increases. I've yet to find a role w/ seniority that is
less than 40 hrs a week.

Some have even said that getting a promotion+raise can lead to less $ per hour
because of a variety of factors such as more responsibility/time spent,
increased requirement for dry-cleaning (suits or whatever)...

------
MattGrommes
When I was 12 I saw a kid on a local tv show who was autistic and had
intentionally started cataloging facial expressions and body language because
he couldn't do it automatically like most people. I remember thinking "You can
do that!?" I was very similar to him and that tv show started me on the path
of trying to figure out how to get past my mental limitations, which has
significantly improved my life.

------
arunbahl
Everything is temporary.

This is a central tenet in a variety of approaches and philosophies, from
religions (it's one of the Marks of Existence in Buddhism) to cognitive
behavioral therapy — but few ideas have changed my thinking, resilience, self-
control, and happiness as much as this one.

~~~
nocman
> Everything is temporary.

Therefore, at some point, some thing(s) will be permanent, because otherwise,
the axiom "Everything is temporary" would be permanent.

Oh crap. :-D

------
throwaway7281
As a German, the idea that mass murder and high tech are different sides of
the same coin has shaped my world view forever (after reading Dialectic of
Enlightenment and On the Critique of Instrumental Reason).

Horkheimer red-pilled me on our western societies and I'm grateful for it.

~~~
el_dev_hell
I mean this sincerely: WTF does that mean? Mass murder is the opposite to
technology?

~~~
throwaway7281
Germans learn about the history of the Third Reich in detail and I always
asked myself: how could this happen? Smart, hard-working, intelligent,
compassionate, literate people start to plan industrial murder of millions of
people on the basis of what exactly?

Now, here's the thing. Progress is not that shiny guiding light. It is an
extreme force, especially a force to control things, especially nature. The
Third Reich planned mass murder, as it were a railroad track or lunar landing
- the form was exactly the same and they did not understood: that this
similarity in form revealed and forever merged the idea of progress to the
most inhumane behavior and destruction.

If that does not make sense, I encourage you to just read a bit about the
concentration camps or the Third Reich in general. Good timing, too - we have
75th anniversary of V-E Day coming up.

~~~
tim333
Bad though that was, massacres and genocides go back millenia and went on
without much tech involved. eg
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history#Neanderth...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history#Neanderthals),
Pinker's stuff, the book Demonic Males on how chimps do it

------
BiteCode_dev
There are a thousand ways to suffer, and I don't know most of them.

The more I grow, the more I discover new ways people fight their own battle.

Every time I think somebody had it easy, I end up dead wrong. There is just so
much I didn't know about.

I even recently realized it's very common to deeply suffer without being
conscious of it, and yet being unhappy because of it. It's a terrible curse,
because deep down some part of you knows there is something wrong but you
cannot put your finger on it, and yet it affects your whole existence.

People just mechanically don't think about it so they can make the best out of
life.

It makes you feel much closer to people, much more tolerant, and you suddenly
understand a lot more about the choice they make and the things they do.

------
motiw
My personal realization that Evolution is the other “theory of everything”,
with the exception of the laws of physics, evolutionary processes are shaping
everything, including progress in science, economy, history, politics, ideas,
social, emotions, religion, etc.

~~~
gfodor
I came to the same conclusion, and here's the result:

[https://medium.com/@gfodor/evolutionary-simulation-
theory-81...](https://medium.com/@gfodor/evolutionary-simulation-
theory-81154c392e77)

------
TheChetan
I read somewhere on the internet that, "If grass is greener on the other side,
you aren't watering enough".

Sure some people get lucky, but on the long term, the ones who consistently
make better decisions and work harder are the ones who are benefitted more
often.

------
smckk
Weeks.

Segment your time to complete things into weeks. Months have too much wiggle
room and days are too tight. Most people don’t even have the weeks option
displaying on the digital calendars (phones, laptops) they use.

For long term projects of any kind using the week as a unit of time is the
best way to cross the finish line.

This is possible for personal projects and for entrepreneurs. If you can get
into this time frame in an organisation you are going to have a much easier
time with your projects.

Another important point is not to overload the time either, if you end up
completing something within a few days do not move to the next phase within
that week. Stick to the schedule.

~~~
hmd_imputer
In my current company, we have a "calendar week" based schedule. Everything is
planned based on that time segmentation principle. For example, "the start of
production is planned for calendar week 45" \- that is it, no month, no
quarter no date - simply, the 45th week of the year.

------
intopieces
If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.

I am not one tenth as talented as the people I work with on a daily basis.
That they give me the time of day I am grateful for. It's what keeps me coming
back.

~~~
3fe9a03ccd14ca5
I’m actually really relieved when the smartest person in the room (their
words) leaves. We can have fun, drink beer, and share war stories without
feeling judged by peers who haven’t spent enough time in self reflection.

~~~
nocman
That really sucks -- assuming that person really _is_ the smartest person in
the room. You said "their words", which kind of makes me think you don't
agree, but I'm not sure.

But for the sake of discussion, let's assume they actually are the smartest
person in the room. Unfortunately having that disctinction sometimes means the
same person is also the most arrogant person in the room. And that's very
unfortunate.

I have had the good fortune to be employed at multiple companies where I
worked with some _very_ smart people. I almost all of those cases, the smart
people I worked with were easy to talk to, generous with their time, and happy
to help me pick up new things, and think about things I might not have
otherwise.

If you're very smart, please be one of those kind of people. You'll be
happier, you can help make others around you better, and the world will be a
better place because of it.

Like in the rest of life, what matters most is what you do with what you've
got.

------
arminiusreturns
If information equals knowledge, and knowledge equals power, then secret
information is secret knowledge and hence secret power. (of course if correct
and applied correctly).

One I learned at a young age is that you can learn to absorb the good traits
of people around you while avoiding picking up bad traits (mostly around the
idea that just because you don't like what a person does in area Y, doesn't
mean they can't be good teachers/mentors etc in other areas). Rejection for
single issues is a major problem in todays society I think.

------
KerryJones
"Do more and more with less and less until you can move a mountain with the
push of a button."

Advice I got from a born-low-class turned upper class -- richest man I know
(and father of a highschool friend).

------
pacomerh
"No One Knows What They're Doing"

This gave me more power to make stronger decisions and feel on the same plane
as everyone else. I used to think there where people that had everything
figured out

------
rayalez
Since people seem to be sharing their favorite quotes, I'll share a couple of
my own. It's kind of like a litany to repeat in difficult situations, replace
placeholders as needed:

“What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being
open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is
there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People
can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it."

"If [scary thought] is true, I want to believe that. If [scary thought] is not
true, I want not to believe [scary thought]. Let me not become attached to
beliefs I may not want. If I'm living in a world where [scary thought] is
true, that’s what I have to believe, I have to know what’s coming, so I can
stop it, or in the very worst case, be prepared to do what I can in the time I
have left. Not believing it won’t stop it from happening."

"I am not afraid. I am not afraid because if I let myself get too scared I
might not be able to do what needs to be done. And I'm not the type of person
who backs down. I am the type of person who does the right thing, even if it's
hard. Right now, the right thing is to [x]. And even if it doesn't work, I'll
just do the next right thing, and the next, and the next. I'll keep on trying
until I figure out a way."

------
av501
The principle of non-violent communication (NVC)[1] completely changed my
approach in life to stressful situations. Practicing the same with my family,
friends, work colleagues changed my life. Changed the way I approach
situations. Allowed me to also apply it in reverse where I am now able to lead
those stressed with me towards a NVC path. I am trying to understand their
fundamental base need rather than just focus on what they are saying. This
allows those around me also to become in tune with themselves and I can see it
on their faces when they get the aha moment. I've received simple thanks
sometimes for this so I know it is not just me that finds it useful. Works
wonderfully well with toddlers as well! The whole premise that kids are stupid
or don't understand stuff also gets upturned when you apply NVC to communicate
with them or help understand their point of view.

It wasn't easy, took months before it became habit, just had to keep it going.
Even now sometimes I forget and my lizard brain pops up from years of
conditioning that will take some time to undo. But am I so happy I found out
about it.

[1] [https://baynvc.org/key-assumptions-and-intentions-of-
nvc/](https://baynvc.org/key-assumptions-and-intentions-of-nvc/)

------
areweforreal
"Find an excuse to win"

I had an attitude of quitting early or pausing on the first obstacle I faced.
I used to think of it as "This is not my area of expertise" or "Let me wait
for other person to confirm this" or "This is too hard, let me give myself
some time" etc.

Unknowingly, I used to look out for excuses to no give my 100%.

Somewhere I read this quote, and that's where I realized the stark difference
of mentality I had. From then on, it's really changed my life for good.

------
tiborsaas
Procrastination is an emotional problem.

[https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200121-why-
procrastin...](https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200121-why-
procrastination-is-about-managing-emotions-not-time)

------
avmich
The rocket science is not a rocket science.

Meaning that we sometimes habitually consider something hard because it used
to be hard, or it became known to be hard. But with time passing, sometimes
things like that change.

The literal rocket science is a prime example - we reached orbit in 1957 using
technology which is very modest by today's standards. It's still hard to
launch a satellite - but it's so, so much easier.

Knowing that, SpaceX approach suddenly becomes practically the most logical.

------
dullroar
One that knocked me upside the head once was, upon remarking "That's going to
take a long time, like a year" to accomplish something, as if that made it not
worth doing, being told, "That time is going to pass anyway." In other words,
you can either start working towards it now, and be in a better place in a
year, or let that length of time discourage you and then, when next year rolls
around, still be discouraged. So just start.

------
yizhang7210
“The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And,
paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a
positive experience. (p.9)”

That whole book by Mark Manson:
[https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/48297245-the-subtle-
ar...](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/48297245-the-subtle-art-of-not-
giving-a-f-ck-a-counterintuitive-approach-to-livi)

------
veets
My wife once told me "no one wants to listen to you talk" when I was preparing
to give a speech. It is obvious now, but I had never really thought about it.
Her point wasn't that no one cares about what I have to say but that when I am
done talking no one will think "I wish he would have talked longer."

When I interact with others, I try to spend most of my time understanding
their viewpoint rather than talking at them about my viewpoint.

------
pjs_
Someone once told me that you can tell you are close to burnout when you think
that everyone around you is an idiot. You must be burning out because it's not
plausible that literally everyone you encounter is an idiot!

I like it because it is a logical construction that can be deployed even when
your own perception is distorted by stress. It has definitely functioned as an
effective safety alarm and I'm sure prevented some chaos more than once.

------
brightball
“The test of first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas
in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” -
Dwight Whitney Morrow

I heard that quote sometime around age 18 and it has always stuck with me to a
degree that impacts how I view everything. It’s made a habit of trying to
understand both sides of hard topics...which often leads to frustration with
people who only want to understand one.

~~~
jerry1979
I have heard this quote credited to tons of different people. I still like it.

------
boston_sre87
Memory is graph based, not a dictionary of key/value pairs. You learn and
retain information more easily by making many connections to information.

------
splatzone
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need
to know." from Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn

Realising that honesty and candour is the root of all good things has made me
a much better musician and, yes, programmer and businessperson! I don't try to
appear impressive or sophisticated any more, just tell the truth and speak
sincerely, and it makes life much more manageable

~~~
Balgair
Emerson's take on Beauty is also pretty good:

[https://www.scribd.com/doc/15437251/Emerson-on-
Beauty](https://www.scribd.com/doc/15437251/Emerson-on-Beauty)

------
cagenut
Class consciousness. So so so so much hypocrisy and confusion over seemingly
contradictory things people say and do have a remarkably tendency to suddenly
make sense when you apply rudimentary class analysis.

You don't even need to know what marxism or socialism are, much less agree
with them, but if you haven't gotten the hang of basic class consciousness
you're missing a key reality-rubric in life.

------
ilamont
"No one on his deathbed ever said, I wish I had spent more time at the
office." \- Paul Tsongas

~~~
avh02
I found this funny because the opposite thought also exists by Henry Royce (of
Rolls-Royce), lifted straight from wikiquotes:

>I have only one regret … that I have not worked harder.

>Deathbed assertion, as quoted in Outlook Business, Vol. 3, No. 4 (23 February
2008)

------
alexpotato
This line which, apparently, came from a famous con man:

Interviewer: "Sir, how did you get these otherwise worldly, intelligent and
sophisticated people to give you whatever you wanted?"

Con Man: "You see, everyone has something that they desire above all else. If
you can give them that thing, or appear to be able to give them that thing,
they will give you whatever you want in return."

------
Dumblydorr
Ctrl + right arrow moves to the end of a word. Game. Changer.

~~~
DavidPeiffer
And paired with this:

* Ctrl+backspace/delete to delete an entire word at a time.

* Ctrl+shift+left/right arrow selects entire words at a time.

------
bushido
The thing I dislike the most about other people is often something I do
myself.

So when dealing with any people-related issues, the first thing I do is
reflect if it's something I do myself.

If it is, then I try to determine if its something I like about myself; if I
like it, I try not letting it bother me again; if I don't like it, I change
it.

------
kleer001
That destruction is easy, creation is hard, but the most valiant, boring,
thankless, and difficult task, that we should all do to some extent, is
maintaining.

------
srl
I don't have a name for this. A person can make a statement "X", and X can be
true, but the person's act of claiming "X" was in no sense caused by "X" being
true. In my head I call this "causal disconnection" or similar phrases, but
it's not a good name.

The underlying idea here is that, when you are told "X", it's useful to think
about the causal chain that resulted in you being told "X". Is the truth of X
a powerful force in that chain? Is it one of many competing forces? Or is it,
perhaps, totally irrelevant? In some sense this is a Bayesian viewpoint on the
question "suppose somebody makes a claim -- how much should you update your
probability that that claim is true?"

Politics obviously abounds with this, but a good non-political example is pop-
sci rumors. For instance, I often hear the claim that cicadas sleep for prime-
numbered years because that minimizes the probability of
overlapping/conflicting/getting-caught-by other species (explanations vary).
Now, _without making much effort to evaluate the truth of this statement_ ,
think about what causes people to make this claim. Well, clearly, it sounds
very good, so it'll spread quickly (as a meme). Now, what if the claim was
false -- how much would that fact impede its spread? Probably not so much.

(Somewhat remarkably, this suggests a concrete reason to be wary of oft-
repeated claims. The fact that a claim is often repeated suggests that it
spreads quickly. The reason you're hearing the claim, then, may be because it
spreads quickly, and not so much because it's true.)

It's really important that the truth or falsehood of the claim has nothing to
do with the question of the nature of the causal chain underlying the claim.

A related idea is that one must have great respect for -- and fear of --
social processes. I'm far from fully appreciating the consequences of this.
This is also related to another comment in this thread about evolutionary
processes, because those are often the causal forces behind people making
claims.

------
rrival
\- Time spent working on myself (exercise, personal development) seems to
improve my business

\- Adding value for others is the best way I've found to achieve greater
success

\- (and this is very recent) consider price as a measure of value, like a
liter is a measure of volume

------
matthewwk
"It's not done when you can't add to it, it's done when there's nothing left
to take away."

Ken Segall (former ad executive that worked with Steve Jobs) shared this
during a talk in Ann Arbor at the Michigan Theater in 2018.

~~~
decebalus1
That idea is from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, actually.

~~~
matthewwk
I figured it wasn't novel to Segall, but that is the first time I heard the
line.

------
awat
"Before Enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood,
carry water".

~~~
aerovistae
What

~~~
carapace
First the mountain is a mountain,

then it is not a mountain,

then the mountain is a mountain.

[https://terebess.hu/zen/qingyuan.html](https://terebess.hu/zen/qingyuan.html)

~~~
DoingIsLearning
"Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch and a kick, just a kick.

After I learned the art, a punch was not longer a punch, a kick, no longer a
kick.

Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a
kick"

\- Bruce Lee

------
eranation
Bell's theorem, proving Einstein's intuition was wrong, and that quantum
mechanics does have some sort of a spooky action at a distance, (this or that
the moon is not necessarily there when you don't look at it). E.g. we have
either no locality (cause and effect can't propagate faster than light), or no
realism (things don't have a "realness" until measured, e.g. the wave function
mode of particles), or superdeterminism (everything is predetermined, no free
will, nothing is random, not even the random behavior of quantum particles
that seem the most random thing in the world)

------
orsenthil
Self-Discipline.

Specifically, a book called "How to do what you want to do" by Dr. Paul Hauck
has influenced and shaped my thinking.

------
Envec83
Intermittent fasting. These days I only have one meal a day

~~~
frosted-flakes
How has it affected you? Are you doing it for weight loss, or for other
reasons?

I had a month off work recently (unrelated to the pandemic), which I spent
learning programming. During this time I never ate lunch, only a small
breakfast and a normal supper. But now that I'm back at work and I'm on my
feet all day, I _have_ to eat, otherwise I get super hungry, lightheaded and
generally lethargic. But I've discovered that I don't have to eat very much
before I'm back to normal.

~~~
pizzicato
Not the person you replied to, but you might find this comprehensive and
plainly worded summary from the NIH interesting:
[https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/calorie-restriction-and-
fasti...](https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/calorie-restriction-and-fasting-
diets-what-do-we-know)

An important caveat to bear in mind is that not all fasting diets entail
calorie restriction (though many often do); it is calorie restriction that is
linked to reduced inflammation and possible benefits to lifespan.

~~~
Envec83
Agreed. I should have been more precise stating that I adopt both fasting and
calorie restriction.

------
DoreenMichele
Milestones instead of deadlines for the creative process. Worry about hitting
a certain benchmark, not a certain date.

------
lukifer
Learned Optimism & Explanatory Style:

\- Permanence: Optimists point to specific temporary causes for negative
events; pessimists point to permanent causes.

\- Pervasiveness: Optimistic people compartmentalize helplessness, whereas
pessimistic people assume that failure in one area of life means failure in
life as a whole.

\- Personalization: Optimists blame bad events on causes outside of
themselves, whereas pessimists blame themselves for events that occur.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism)

------
Rury
It is impossible to have a thought that does not stem from another thought or
your senses (seeing, hearing etc.)

To demonstrate: it is impossible to imagine a color that is not some
combination of colors you've already seen before.

Trace any idea to their origin, and you'll realize all ideas are founded upon
by what you have already seen, heard etc.

New ideas can only come from discovery via the senses, or are thus simply a
new combination of old ideas...

Your reality is limited by what you can sense and remember.

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" \- Ludwig Wittgenstein

------
floathub
Adaptation == Learning

This was at the early stages of a lot of agent based modeling, genetic
algorithms, etc., etc. And John Holland wrote a book called Adaptation in
Natural and Artificial Systems[1]. The universality of the idea that "simple"
adaptation _is_ learning applied to a lot of different domains was crisp and
very powerful.

1\. ([https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/adaptation-natural-and-
artifi...](https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/adaptation-natural-and-artificial-
systems))

------
dmitshur
For me, the most life-changing idea I've been exposed to continues to be from
Bret Victor's¹ 2012 talk titled "Inventing on Principle"². The idea is that in
addition to the two well-known paths to live one's life, there is also a
third, less well-known path.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Victor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Victor)

[2] [https://vimeo.com/36579366](https://vimeo.com/36579366)

------
digitaltrees
Paul Graham - maker vs manager schedule. It instantly explained why I was
frustrated with certain work environments and my own habits.

Reid Hoffman - his cofounder, in a video course at Stanford called blitz
scaling, talks about a unique strength Reid has to focus on only the most
important task and ignore all other tasks. He says, in the start up phase of a
company there is literally too much to do, and for many this is overwhelming
because they look at a growing list of tasks and they can become
incapacitated. Reid can focus on the the bon fire, and ignore all the small
bush fires without stress. For me personally, I felt broken for a long time. I
worked as a lawyer and every task was almost equally important so there was
always a long running list. I was overwhelmed and not as good as peers. I am
honestly only able to focus on the existential bon fire tasks so when I saw
this I felt instant clarity and validation. As a start up founder it’s been a
super power and when the company transitions to a stable growth phase I know
to hand it to someone that can focus on a broader task list.

The common principle of both is accept yourself and find a context where your
strengths shine. We live in a culture that emphasizes certain traits and we
can feel bad about our characteristics that seem to deviate but in reality
they might be unique strengths if we were in different circumstances.

------
p0d
Praying to God at a party 30 years ago changed my life. I guess I felt like I
was broken on the inside and the idea that some higher power could help led me
to pray while sleeping on someone's sofa. I was so into the idea I went on to
work for a missionary organisation with no salary at 19. After 25 years in IT
I am on an accelerator programme now and feel like I am 19 again... doing
something out there with no money...hopefully I will enjoy being a startup as
much as I enjoyed my first job.

~~~
Dumblydorr
What about praying to God changed your life? Were you religious before then?
What led to the transformational moment?

------
saadalem
“You live in a mechanical universe. It’s time to start understanding that.”

I was disillusioned with myself. I was performing badly in highschool(even
dropped out) I couldn’t understand why.

I wanted so badly to do something epic. I feared being an average guy and
living an ordinary life.

I didn’t understand this advice at first. However, I decided that I couldn’t
take the life I was living, so I decided to change.

If you accept that the universe is essentially mechanical, then you accept
that there is nothing actually standing in your way. You do not have inherent
bad luck, and you aren’t cursed.

Probably the best example of this is Elon Musk. The guy watched his entire
fortune burn as his companies crumble. He worked 20 hour days. But what
separated him was a very specific ability, and it wasn’t just his ability to
work hard.

“Most people when confronted with a disastrous scenario start to make bad
decisions. When that happens to Elon, he becomes hyper-rational. I’ve never
met someone with his ability to take pain.”

This is a paraphrased quote from Musk’s biography, from a Tesla engineer who
knew Musk personally when the company was on the verge of collapse. The
ability to make hyper-rational decisions during hardship is one of the most
important traits of a leader.

This advice got me through that period. I understood that everything had a
cause and effect, so I decided to change. Reading made me more prepared for
anything. Building and making things made me more friends.

The second you understand that we live in a mechanical universe is the second
you are given the key to changing it. I may never become the next Elon
Musk(asking myself how can I do it better, but that's another subject if you
want to talk about it I'm happy to do so) but my life will be so much happier
because I understand that it can change according to rules.

Rationality and a cause-effect mindset is an incredibly tough road to go down
because there are no easy answers. When you do, however… you can change
anything.

~~~
fredsir
> Elon

Obviously, it's also a good advice to be born with wealth from the blood of an
emerald empire. Hyper-rational, being born wealthy. Great advice!

Kidding aside. I'm just sick of people putting people like Elon up on a
pedestal. Look at all the rich, successful people out there. How many come
from wealth, and how many come from dirt poor conditions and just worked
themself up? Working hard is good advice, but it doesn't guarantee success,
quite the contrary. A lot of successful people never worked hard a single day
in their life, and billions of people work hard their whole life and never
come close to the kind of success the former enjoys.

Hell, I guarantee that Elon is not even the hardest worker at his companies,
even though he enjoys most of the fruit of the labour.

~~~
gfodor
Being born into wealth helps, but it also hurts. If you have something to
lose, its harder to take risks. Elon put all of his wealth on the line for
SpaceX and almost lost it. Anyone, from him down to the person who scrapes
together pennies to start a risky business to make a better life for
themselves, deserves respect for taking risks to achieve their dreams.

~~~
fredsir
Elon knows that money is something he can always get, because he has gotten
them before. Also his family is rich. He knows that worst case is he goes to
them and get some millions and back to work again.

Rich people aren’t taking any real risks by using their money. The people
taking the real risks are those putting their lives and livelihood on the line
every day, doing the dangerous, back breaking, mind numbing work for the rich
people with the money, while the rich just look on from a far while their
workers are doing the actual work for them using their resources and making
them even more rich while the workers doing the actual job have nothing to
gain in comparison themselves, often being far closer to personal and
financial ruin everyday than the rich ever are.

Elon isn’t risking shit.

That those with money that invest them is taking the risks and thus also
deserves the rewards is a myth, is a ruse, but it’s not hard to figure out who
would stand to gain from such a myth.

~~~
gfodor
Yes, I’m aware of this meme, which echoes loudly on twitter, yet it’s still
wrong.

~~~
fredsir
How so?

~~~
gfodor
Your post started with "Elon knows", which implies you can read minds, so as
long as your arguments stem from knowing the inner thoughts and assumptions of
someone else, it's a rickety foundation to say the least.

------
cmod
Not everything in life has to be solved, and in fact many things can't be
solved. If you do enough therapy you begin to understand the fuzzy traps of
the mind, and catch it falling into the "we must solve this" loop.

Often times the answers to many of our problems are obvious (that doesn't mean
not-complex; i.e., an alcoholic often knows the best way to improve the
quality of their life), and people aren't dumb, but they can't commit to the
"solution."

As soon as you break from obsessing over solutions, you begin to break down
habits and reasons why you're in the position you're in. Which has the
corollary effect of, eventually, "solving" it.

Once I got good at noticing "solution loops" in my own mind I began to notice
it in the conversations of friends. It's amazing how many people are stuck in
sometimes multi-year loops. And so now, for life problems of a more macro
scale: I a) never try to solve anything for anyone, and b) try to gently guide
the conversation away from finding an explicit solution to better
understanding why they may be in the position they're in.

This sounds simple / reductive, but it's one of the most powerful ideas /
tools I've discovered in the last few years.

------
mistermann
We don't live in reality, or even "see" it directly.

The reality that we live in is firstly based on _perception_ of actual
physical reality, and then also experienced/conceptualized _via a proxy_ ,
which is a _model_ of our _perceived_ reality (and all the objects, people,
and ideas within it), all implemented by a sophisticated biological neural
network of sorts.

An example of how you can test this theory is to observe conversations on
forums, where you will find plentiful (and ultra-confident) examples of
supernatural acts like mind reading, future predicting, _knowing_ things that
are not knowable, etc.

Even more interestingly, these "beliefs" seem to be entrenched _extremely
deeply_ in the human psyche, and almost "protected" in some way, by some sort
of process. Merely pointing out the obvious fact (the existence of this
phenomenon) is _highly unpopular_. But even further, most people seem to be
_literally unable to even ponder_ the phenomenon, particularly in real-time.
Abstract discussion seems much easier for most people, but rare is the person
who can consistently walk the talk - personally, I only have one friend who
can do it, _across multiple domains_ (cross-domain capability is a key
differentiator that separates those who can from those who cannot).

~~~
seanwilson
> Even more interestingly, these "beliefs" seem to be entrenched extremely
> deeply in the human psyche, and almost "protected" in some way, by some sort
> of process.

My explanation for this is the brain has lots of mental shortcuts that help it
make useful quick decisions when lacking complete information (like in
survival situations), but these shortcuts break down in the modern world

E.g. "everyone else is doing it so it must be good" is a decent rule of thumb
when you don't have time to look into things but you have to resist this rule
of thumb when seeking scientific knowledge, which isn't natural for many.

~~~
mistermann
Sure, these are simply heuristics..."rules of thumb" approximations, there are
brazillions of them. I doubt there are many people here who aren't fairly
familiar with the abstract concept.

What I mean by the "protected" part is that even when talking to someone who
is familiar with the abstract concept, who will readily acknowledge the
existence of heuristics and inherent fallibility, _even within themselves_
(while discussing the topic _in the abstract_ that is), but when the topic is
something else (a concrete topic like politics for example), and heuristics
clearly assert themselves in the conversation, people will get "agitated" if
the topic of heuristics is brought up.

~~~
seanwilson
Hmm, so I'd say the vast majority of people are not familiar with cognitive
biases or logical fallacies at all. Just look at advertising and politics,
especially anything to do with medicine.

I learned long ago that pointing out falacies is not a winning approach to
changing someone's mind so I agree with what you mean by agitated. It's also
really interesting your point about people acknowledging the fault in general
but can't apply it to themselves.

My point was it's probably such a protected/strong part of thought because
long ago those rules were generally really useful for survival. Overriding
them now is possible but takes a lot of work.

~~~
mistermann
> Hmm, so I'd say the vast majority of people are not familiar with cognitive
> biases or logical fallacies at all.

But would you say that applies to the userbase of HN?

> My point was it's probably such a protected/strong part of thought because
> long ago those rules were generally really useful for survival. Overriding
> them now is possible but takes a lot of work.

Agreed, but if no one is even _willing to acknowledge the existence_ of the
phenomenon, what should one do?

~~~
seanwilson
Yes, I'd say most people on HN are aware of this stuff. I guess that's why I
comment here more than other places.

> Agreed, but if no one is even willing to acknowledge the existence of the
> phenomenon, what should one do?

It's just a slow process of education I guess to take a scientific approach to
knowledge seeking. Discussions should be about seeking the truth, agreeing
with the other person when you agree, questioning your own assumption etc.

I wasn't taught logical fallacies in school for example - I'd be for teaching
critical thinking in school at an early age to help with the above.

Most people see views opposed to their viewpoint as an attack and cornering
someone with logic to show they're wrong does not work because they're not
genuinely seeking the truth anyway.

~~~
mistermann
> Yes, I'd say most people on HN are aware of this stuff.

In the abstract (in principle), sure. But how consistently do people
_exercise_ this awareness _during real-time behavior_?

> It's just a slow process of education

Ideally. But often, but it often seems like many individuals and communities
very much prefer taking the shortcut of "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no
evil". Or in other words, those other people suffer from that, but not us. No
siree Bob, we are _fully_ conscious and logical, at all times.

You and I seem largely in agreement, but I wonder if we agree on how well we
here at HN, as a community, execute these principles. In my experiences, most
people are "not very fond" of even discussing the topic.

~~~
seanwilson
> You and I seem largely in agreement, but I wonder if we agree on how well we
> here at HN, as a community, execute these principles. In my experiences,
> most people are "not very fond" of even discussing the topic.

My feelings are people here will tolerate a few anecdotes (as long as you're
not pushing it as absolute truth) but generally if you post appeals to nature,
appeals to popularity etc. it'll be challenged and downvoted pretty quick.

Certain topics seem worse than others though e.g. eating meat, x10
programmers, job interview processes and programming language comparison
topics are full of anecdotes and fallacies with bold statements.

------
krapp
God's not real. We're just apes whose ancestors caught a lucky break when an
asteroid flattened the dinosaurs 60 million years ago. We shouldn't even be
here.

~~~
kleer001
Not a literal actor in time/space, for certain.

That said I've come around to the usefulness of deification of ideals and the
idea that not every moment should be lived in object-space, but also in drama-
space.

~~~
krapp
>That said I've come around to the usefulness of deification of ideals and the
idea that not every moment should be lived in object-space, but also in drama-
space.

I can agree with that.

God as an _idea_ is real in the abstract sense that all powerful ideas are
real, and people believe in them, and treat them as real.

But as someone who was raised in a (Christian, US Southern) religious
background, I've come to believe that everything wrong with religion comes
from taking it literally.

~~~
sdegutis
Religion as a psychological tool is a very sad thing. But it's a very common
thought, one I grew up with. In fact, I only started praying while still
thinking it was all fake, but needing some kind of mental help past my problem
in life at the time. So I understand that theory as well as anyone here.

But not all religions are created equal. The Protestant religions are
emasculated to some degree. Since they're based around rejecting the truth,
their foundation is all wrong, and they can never get back to reality.
Unfortunately, they turn many people away from Christianity.

But that's not necessarily true. Those who keep looking for it will find it in
Catholicism, just like John Henry Newman did. As he said, "to be deep in
history is to cease to be Protestant." But more often, people don't really
want to find out the truth. So they reject religion altogether. Except as a
psychological tool.

~~~
kleer001
Not just psychological, but also economic (halal mortages and hawala),
sociological (their biggest strength is gathering people IMHO), parasocial
(all the little morality plays/stories in them), interpersonal (various golden
rules), historical (often muddled with myth), sometimes physical (yogas), and
on and on with all the different dimensions of the human experience.

As I'm sure you understand every religion is (among other things) an attempt
at distillation of important perspectives and wisdom to help coming
generations. So, I would not say "sad" by any means, well, except when
misused.

I don't know much about the Protestant / Catholicism schism, but it sounds
pretty heated. Though, as an outsider, I'd peg them as sects rather than
separate religions. Heck, I'd lump all the Abrahamic religions together into a
single clade as they share some bits of the same holy books.

~~~
sdegutis
That's not true of Christianity; this along with Judaism are historical
religions. They exist not to pass on wisdom or ideas, but because of
historical events, which they claim are the interventions of God in human
history. In particular, Christianity exists as a result of the Resurrection,
which it claims literally and historically happened. And there is significant
proof that it really happened:
[https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12789a.htm](https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12789a.htm)

------
seph-reed
Life is a paradox.

The ultimate point is that there is no point. If you want something, the best
way to get it is to not want it. You have to try to relax.

Humans can handle cognitive dissonance, things don't have to be logical for us
to believe. We can believe two things that can't both be true at the same
time. If we didn't we'd die.

Somehow life requires the ability to believe conflicting things... so in order
to even begin perceiving reality, you have to be incapable of pure logic.

------
iansowinski
Realizing that time speeds up for us when we grow up. Maybe this sounds
obvious and silly, but thinking not only how short life is, but also how
faster and faster it passes by gives you something. (I had to pick one idea
though!).

Here some article: [https://qz.com/1516804/physics-explains-why-time-passes-
fast...](https://qz.com/1516804/physics-explains-why-time-passes-faster-as-
you-age/)

------
BitwiseFool
“The universe is a cruel, uncaring void. The key to being happy isn't a search
for meaning. It's to just keep yourself busy with unimportant nonsense, and
eventually, you'll be dead.”

Thanks Mr.Peanutbutter

~~~
JadeNB
I guess that the bleakness is the point, but I prefer a more optimistic spin
on the same thing: the key to happiness isn't a _search_ for meaning, because
the universe has none to offer. It is the _creation_ of meaning for
yourself—what you do has the importance you attach to it, neither more nor
less.

~~~
BitwiseFool
That's exactly what I took from it too.

------
stblack
"Always deliver superlative value, and your customers will take care of you."

Changed everything.

~~~
chrstphrhrt
This can sometimes lead to burnout for me. When I blindly try to please no
matter what, it also raises the bar of expectations. Sometimes people just
want to feel superior and will take advantage, which can be hard to see in the
moment.

------
deltaveedaddy
All these responses are pretty good, and there's some valuable lessons in
there. I thought of a simpler idea than most others have.

Honestly, coroutines.

Coroutines challenged everything that I had learned about programming at the
time with something different, this made my program more powerful than just
one line running after the other. It was mind-blowing to me as a young man,
and I remember the impact setting me towards a journey of learning.

------
b3lvedere
A project is not done unless all the people who have to support it have access
to all the information they need.

I have witnessed a lot conversations where support could not help them because
support did not have the right information. This made a lot of people very
angry.

So i started applying this rule more and more. Now only some people (mostly
project leaders) are sometimes angry.

------
stewfortier
Opportunity cost.

It's relatively easy to measure how much an investment of time or money will
"cost" in absolute terms.

But it's pretty unnatural to try and define the opportunities you're not going
to pursue and factor them in as a cost.

Understanding opportunity cost has led me to make a few important decisions in
my life that would have otherwise gone another way.

------
mam2
The trump 2016 election (and even the whole presidency) was a slap in the face
for some people, but if you look objectively there seem to be a bunch of
unconventional truths / ideas in it. Like

\- "Become a good person doesn't matter and can even look weak, being
aggressive and though is more important". (I still remember jeb bush offended
saying to trump that he will not 'bully his way to the presidency' while he
was doing exactly that)

\- "The person who talk the louder set the stage"

Funnily i was visiting "the red pill" subreddit.. it has become a very toxic
subreddit but some of the concepts (like the concept of "frame") described on
the sub explain trumps election. They basically say that women are basically
only attracted to any display of "strength" and "dominance", wether it's good
or bad. Kinda shocking, and you don't want to believe it until you try it

~~~
dmichulke
Regarding Redpill:

Word. Visit it, try it out and take what you want. This dominance thing also
translates at least partially to relations between any human.

------
MichalSternik
Permaculture.

First paragraph from wikipedia article:

> Permaculture is a set of design principles centered on whole systems
> thinking, simulating, or directly utilizing the patterns and resilient
> features observed in natural ecosystems. It uses these principles in a
> growing number of fields from regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and
> community resilience.

------
vehementi
I forget where I got it from - a biography of an old professor I think

And the way he explained not holding on to things was "I had my turn being 19.
I had my turn being 40. Now it's my turn to be 85". I did those things,
nothing can change that -- I don't need to _keep_ doing them lest I lose my
worth or something.

------
l0b0
Our minds are enormously flawed:

\- There's a certain fidelity to any memory which you just can't get beyond,
and the vast majority of memories are nowhere near that.

\- Our memories warp and decay with time.

\- Even our most logical thought processes have a really hard time grasping
provable things like the Monty Hall problem and exponential growth.

\- Cognitive biases are everywhere.

------
ekianjo
This sentence from Fight Club has had a long lasting impact on me: "The things
you own, end up owning you".

------
lifebeyondfife
There are two versions of you: the experiencing self and the remembering self.
If you only pleasure the experiencing self then you make lots of short term
decisions e.g. it's the experiencing self who enjoys the cake, but the
remembering self gets almost no benefit from it. Worse, they have to deal with
the consequences of the extra calories.

I'd convinced myself that there were things I didn't like so I wouldn't do
them anymore, like travelling for long holidays. But after hearing this idea I
realised sometimes the pain and inconvenience of being away from home, and
being stressed by travel is a temporary pain for the experiencing self. The
remembering self however gets lifelong benefit.

I use this model to analyse the cost/benefit to each persona which helps make
better long term choices.

------
317070
"Life is unfair." Simple, but for me it was an important insight. I used to
think I deserved things, and now I know that while that might be true, you
still need to be assertive to get them. There is no karma or divine
intervention which will put a finger on the balance to make sure everything in
life (love, friends, opportunities, adventure) is shared equally. And it goes
multiple ways.

First, don't expect life to be fair and give you what you deserve. It won't.
Don't expect other people to be fair towards you either. They might, and they
might not.

Second, it is not always your fault when you are in a bad situation, because
life is in fact unfair. Shit happens.

Third, be assertive to handle the unfairness. You need to stand up for
yourself to get your fair share. And stand up for others to get theirs.

~~~
tim333
Also it can be unfair in positive ways - you can get better than you deserve.

------
orisho
1\. That getting good at something can sometimes be quick; if you have the
right background. But when it's not quick - that doesn't mean you can't get
good. It simply means it's a process. Experiencing the part where I'm bad at
something as simply the "beginning of a progress bar" and knowing it's going
somewhere, and that practice is necessary allows me to persevere and not
experience frustration or a feeling of inadequacy.

I would tell this (along with a real life story to match about myself) to my
employees whenever they got discouraged. As a team lead, I would often do the
same work they did, so they compared themselves to me, thinking something
should be easy for them just because it's easy for me at this point in time. I
would tell them it's not a fair comparison to make - I have several years of
additional experience doing this compared to you, and I've done this a
thousand times, while they're doing this the first time. Of course it appears
easier to me - I've had practice, and that's all the difference between them
and me, not intelligence or some other trait they have no direct effect on.

2\. Evaluating my own and others' ideas through a set of explicit criteria
(asking yourself "what does the solution to this problem need to solve in
order to be considered adequate?") keeps me from falling in love with my ideas
or solutions to problems. For example, my specific implementation for some
software might look good to me. If someone else shows up with a different
solution (e.g. during code review), then those criteria are the questions I
need to ask them to verify that it is indeed a better solution, and that it
doesn't overshoot what's needed. If it is better by those criteria, then
there's no reason not to toss my idea aside and use theirs.

Of course, this concept also applies to the criteria themselves - someone else
might convince me that my criteria are wrong, by noting that some of them are
not explained by a greater goal (such as the larger task at hand -- the
company's mission, turning a profit, etc.), and so on.

------
yizhang7210
The Tyranny of Structurelessness. My shallow interpretation of it is
essentially: wherever there's a group of people, there's politics.

[https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

------
simonebrunozzi
Exponential growth. Learned properly when I was maybe 7 or 8 years old. I was
learning about the game of chess, and the story describes that the reward for
the inventor was one seed of grain on the first square, double that on the
second, double that on the third... and so on.

------
js8
Rationality is self-contradictory, and part of your own motivations will
always be irrational.

As a consequence, at some level, you have to stop worrying about economic
consequences of your actions on you. It is, in particular, rejection of
utility maximization as a human motivator, because there has to be something
more, something that cannot be measured.

And empirically, it seems that people who we recognize as creators or
inventors have mostly not done the things they have done for pure economic
profit, but they have been driven by something else, that cannot be explained
in economic terms.

Also related to this is my earlier comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22964404](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22964404)

------
brailsafe
1) Give yourself time, not too much and not too little, to spend alone. Then
spend as much as you can with or talking to others who would return the
gesture.

2) Most work, especially in tech, isn't that important and won't change
anything, so reduce your sacrifice for some company. Whatever SaaS thing
you're working on to save small business owners 5 minutes a day just isn't
worth your mental health, and some aspects of American industrialism is toxic
af. I used to think of Apple as a world changing product designer, but later I
realized that it's just a company with a vaguely interesting story, and one
that does make well-designed objects, but most people could do without their
iPhones for a long time and be better off.

------
arendtio
"When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures
of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with
prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity." ― Dale Carnegie

I think my friends would say that I am rational and calm under fire. I always
knew that people have emotions and just thought, that I am pretty good at
handling mine. However, the more I thought about the quote above, the more I
realized, that only about 10%-20% of my decisions are rational. The other
80%-90% are driven by my emotional state and my mind just saying 'Do what you
like, it's not critical'.

Accepting that humans are mostly driven by their emotions helped me understand
and predict their actions.

------
canada_dry
_Mindfulness._

Lately I've been reading/listening to Eckhart Tolle.

I'm a recently retired (IT Exec) and wish I'd have adopted some of these
ideals earlier in life e.g. stop fretting over the future and dwelling on the
past. Stay firmly routed in the moment and savour it.

------
otikik
"Let's have a child!"

------
tasty_freeze
In junior high school, at the end of the brief morning announcements broadcast
to all classrooms, the principal would end with some quote. One stuck with me,
and was something like this:

The character of a man is revealed by how he behaves when he knows he won't be
caught.

------
dgritsko
"It is always better to not have a problem than to mitigate it", from this
article that John Carmack wrote several years back[1]. In the context of the
article it feels almost like a throwaway line, but I've found it to be deeply
profound and it has since affected how I choose potential solutions in almost
any situation. Should I do the "quick fix" (mitigating a problem), or would it
be better if the problem _didn't exist in the first place_?

[1]: [https://www.wired.com/2013/02/john-carmacks-latency-
mitigati...](https://www.wired.com/2013/02/john-carmacks-latency-mitigation-
strategies/)

~~~
rkangel
This is a great line in the C/C++ vs higher level language debate on memory
safety.

------
sdegutis
The idea that maybe there really is a God after all, and that it's a cop out
to assume that, just because it's unlikely for us to know for sure, therefore
no breadcrumb trails about God or religion are really worth following.

I'm unable to describe the magnitude of the amazingness of the world I found,
simply by wanting to believe that God is real, and then finding out that the
Resurrection actually did happen. Anyone who does enough research on this
topic and has a good and honest heart will eventually become Catholic.

God how I wish I had looked into this years earlier, but I didn't because I
assumed it was just too unlikely to be worth investigating. What an awfully
powerful fallacy.

~~~
kgin
> Anyone who does enough research on this topic and has a good and honest
> heart will eventually become Catholic

This is a big claim. You're saying that anyone who isn't catholic either
hasn't done enough research or doesn't have a good and honest heart?

~~~
sdegutis
There's a third option: that enough time hasn't passed. I said they will
_eventually_ become Catholic. A person generally can't understand
multiplication until they understand addition.

~~~
kgin
I guess my question is why. What makes it inevitable?

~~~
sdegutis
Because it’s based around facts, hence an honest heart, and benevolence, hence
a good heart. If a person looks into the Resurrection and whether it happened,
they will inevitably become a Bible believing Christian, and when they ask
where the Bible came from and who has the right interpretation of it, they
will become Catholic.

------
tmaly
I just saw a similar tweet thread last night

[https://twitter.com/orangebook_/status/1257710884719333376?s...](https://twitter.com/orangebook_/status/1257710884719333376?s=20)

Some gems in there.

------
toohotatopic
When you are surrounded by assholes, chances are that it's you who is the
asshole.

------
franze
Changing feedback loops has a much higher impact on a system than changing
variables.

------
tootie
Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night: "You are what you pretend to be"

Nobody knows what you think or what you intend. Only what you do and what you
say. On the flip side, you should judge people on their actions and not their
hidden intentions.

------
sizzzzlerz
Pursuit of knowledge should be a goal until your last breath. Never stop
learning. Learn about new things that aren't necessarily related to your
career. Use what you learn as a launching pad to explore even wider areas.

~~~
david927
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

― Mahatma Gandhi

------
pecantree
Things happen because they can. Like a vacuum that gets filled, just because
it can be filled.

(The thought came at a time of mental rut, and thinking that I cannot
contribute further to the idea I had)

Things get discovered/invented just because they can. If you were to stop
existing at this moment, it'd still get made. The best you can do is
accelerate the process. If it can exist, it will be brought into existence.
The only thing you can influence is the time at which it'll start existing.

Basically led to me pacing down my life and stop living with the constant
stress of "I got to make it or it'll never exist".

------
searchableguy
Selfishness is a strong motivator and one that remains consistently in your
life.

You will change your country, city, neighbours, partner, community, and
company once you are no longer satisfied with them.

The motivation to improve those is temporary. The motivation to improve your
life and you remains till the day you die. The want to live healthier,
happier, and better.

The distinction is important because motivation resulting from my selfishness
is responsible for things I do for others. That means, I am only improving
myself by bettering the environment I live in and everything that exists in it
but my end goal still remains a better me.

------
peguin3
Understand that failure is not the opposite of success. Failure is an
essential part of success. Once you succeed, no one will remember your
failures anyway. Microsoft wasn’t Bill Gates’ and Paul Allen’s first business
venture. Who remembers that their original Traf-o-Data business was a flop?
The actor Jim Carey was booed off many a stage while a young comedian. We have
electric light bulbs because Thomas Edison refused to give up even after
10,000 failed experiments. If the word “failure” is anathema to you, then
reframe it: You either succeed, or you have a learning experience.

\--Steve Pavlina

------
jrvarela56
Happiness depends on the discrepancy between expectations and reality.

Your mind has a simulated copy of reality. The more you develop opinions about
the future based on this copy, the more likely that they are out of sync by
the time the future comes.

Seeing these two as separate, and their distance as something that hurts, has
made me wary of elaborating my expectations. I dream about stuff I consider
important and this category shrinks with age.

I’m not saying don’t plan/dream/hope. Just pick your battles and focus your
efforts on the ones you decide to keep. Otherwise, just go with the flow.

------
ivantopalov
I read this in a book once:

"Never settle for anything less than you know you deserve".

Sounds simple and obvious, but when you are under pressure it is easy to give
up and convince yourself you're not good enough for whatever it is you are
aiming at. It always pays to aim higher. The thing you want to achieve may be
hard, it may take a long time, it may not even be entirely possible, but if
you keep telling yourself you don't deserve this or that sooner or later you
start believing it and then your chance of achieving it is completely
destroyed.

------
ivantopalov
I read this in a book once:

"Never settle for anything less than what you know you deserve".

Sounds simple and obvious, but when you are under pressure it is easy to give
up and convince yourself you're not good enough for whatever it is you are
aiming at. It always pays to aim higher. The thing you want to achieve may be
hard, it may take a long time, it may not even be entirely possible, but if
you keep telling yourself you don't deserve this or that sooner or later you
start believing it and then your chance of achieving it is destroyed.

------
alexpetralia
Probability distributions.

------
PhilAtHN
There is a lot of time spent waiting that can be used for learning, thinking
or other useful activities. If we just spend a little time each day improving
our lives, it adds up.

------
dilippkumar
The Central Limit Theorem.

It's hard to explain the precise way in which an understanding of the central
limit theorem has changed my life. However, knowing how any random
distribution sums up to a Gaussian has subtly changed how I perceive and
comprehend the world around me. Over time, this has added to a significant
number of choices and decisions that I've subconsciously made, informed only
by rough estimates of a mean value and it's standard deviation.

~~~
abetusk
Just a word of warning, the central limit theorem is a bit misleading.

Assuming the sum independent and identically distributed random variables
converges to a distribution, that distribution is _not_ necessarily the
Gaussian, but a larger family called the Levy-Stable distributions [1].

Levy-Stable distributions are "heavy-tailed" in that far away from zero they
behave like (inverse) power laws. This is probably why you see so many power
laws in nature (gravity, "small-world" networks, income distribution, galaxy
distribution density, etc.). This was one of the central themes of
Mandelbrot's soapbox, that power laws were more fundamental than normal
distributions. Mandelbrot gets remembered for the highly symmetric and pretty
fractal pictures but those images (Koch curve, Dragon Curve, Sierpinski
gasket, etc.) are like a focusing on a sine wave when talking about Fourier
analysis.

The central limit theorem applies to sums of random variables _with finite
variance_ [2]. Once you relax the condition of finite variance, or finite mean
for that matter, Levy-Stable distributions are the more likely result.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_distribution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_distribution)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem)
" ... Mathematically, if X ... is a random sample ... taken from a population
with mean ... and _finite variance_ ... the limiting form of the distribution
... is the standard normal distribution." (emphasis mine)

~~~
mturmon
On the other hand, for many systems the energy is related (in some way) to the
square of the value. For example, voltages, currents, photon counts, etc. So
if energy is finite, then you get CLT behavior.

------
Balgair
"You're not co-workers, you're co-owners" and "you _are_ both right, even when
you are saying _opposite_ things"

This really helped my relationships with loved ones. It's not about chores and
the lack of doing them. Or about who is _right_ in an argument. It's about
both of you deciding what to do as equals, accepting differences, and loving
each other especially when you don't like each other right then.

------
humaniania
This is Water [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-
ydFMI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI)

------
aklemm
The concept of Comparative Advantage unlocked a helpful perspective on
politics for me. It led me to shed a series of errors in thinking by
confronting me with the idea that a lot of critical political issues are
complicated and non-obvious.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage)

------
tempestn
Don't worry about remembering facts; instead, seek to understand how and why
things are the way they are. By understanding deeper reasons behind things,
the facts will make contextual sense, and will be much easier to recall, or if
necessary, to deduce. This can apply essentially anywhere, from physics
formulas to historical events to programming conventions to political actions.

~~~
jiggunjer
This is called abstraction.

------
imakwana
Stumbling upon "Latticework of Mental Models" concept of Charlie Munger [1]
really helped me over the years to develop mental clarity, ignore noise and
focus on fundamentals in many aspects of life.

[1] [https://fs.blog/intellectual-giants/charlie-
munger/](https://fs.blog/intellectual-giants/charlie-munger/)

------
dqpb
The tradeoff between exploration and exploitation.

------
DanielBMarkham
Profound Ignorance. The more you think you know, the less able you are to
learn anything. Being profoundly ignorant doesn't reduce your ability to do
anything in life, but it can be uncomfortable for both yourself and others
around you. We like thinking we know things, we like hanging with people who
know things, whether anybody knows anything or not.

------
cwkoss
All ideas/technology are living organisms:

\- they reproduce imperfectly through a two stage process.

\- First they 'infect' a human (human sees tech or is told idea), then they
replicate when that human manifests or speaks that idea to others

\- Through this imperfect replication, ideas/tech evolve over time

If we believe life is inherently valuable, we should consider our stewardship
of the kingdom of ideas.

------
godDLL
That's easy.

You're actually tripping all of the time. Except when you're not.

And you know when you're not. But you don't know when you are.

You can stop tripping for a moment, any time you like. I find it easy to do
with Wim Hof breathing, but I'm sure there are other ways of getting that.
Point is, then you find out that you were tripping. Or you were being led.

------
stevenj
Spend less time looking at a screen. Spend more time outside and/or around
people I enjoy.

(Note: I'm more extroverted than introverted.)

------
sparker72678
Nothing (or nearly nothing) is black and white. It's shades of gray.
Understand where _this thing_ is at on the spectrum.

~~~
bananamerica
IDK dude, some things seem black and white. The Holocaust, for example.

~~~
kleer001
Only thing I can think of that's anywhere close is that without WWII we
wouldn't have modern computers.

Still, doesn't seem worth it. I say, using a computer, my entirely lively hood
being based on computers.

------
albertine
Wanting to improve my handstands by easily tracking them, I came up with an
app idea to leverage voice to work out.

Not only is the idea becoming real, but I learned so much that I would not
have been able to learn in daily job.

More about it:
[https://www.handstandquest.com/](https://www.handstandquest.com/)

------
ge96
You've only failed if you stop trying.

In my case go homeless or die is what it means to fail.

edit: granted I'm not trying to split an atom or something crazy like that,
but yeah. The fear of failure is always in the back of my mind.(currently
means lose job/debt or generally just making an ass of myself eg. in
meetings/srum/professional convo)

~~~
joyj2nd
"Only the one who gives himself up is lost" Hans-Ulrich Rudel

"Fun" fact: This guy was a convinced Nazi who basically destroyed two Russian
tank divisions alone. I told this quote to an African American friend when he
was struggling badly and had to go abroad for a job and it has inspired him
ever since. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-
Ulrich_Rudel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Ulrich_Rudel)

Beowulf has a similar quote: "fate often enough will spare a man if his
courage holds"

~~~
ge96
trying to have me use Nazi's as a role model? ha /s

They did build some cool stuff though

------
pagade
You don't HAVE to finish reading a book.

------
hydandata
People do not understand exponential growth.

------
lisper
1\. Lisp code is not text. An S-expression is distinct from the serialization
of that S-expression into text. This is the unique feature that distinguishes
Lisp from all other programming languages.

2\. Measurement and entanglement are the same physical phenomenon.

3\. Most people's lives suck. This is a big reason they sometimes act like
dicks.

------
zkirill
Splitting (also called black-and-white thinking or all-or-nothing thinking)
was debilitating well into my adolescence.

------
Dowwie
Effectuation: [https://innovationenglish.sites.ku.dk/model/sarasvathy-
effec...](https://innovationenglish.sites.ku.dk/model/sarasvathy-
effectuation/)

Entrepreneurship is a process. Effectuation helps to explain how opportunities
are not just discovered but made.

------
alchemyromcom
Reading about alchemy, especially the concept of transmutation, has inspired
my life in numerous ways. I would also suggest reading The Kybalion which, if
I recall correctly, is about Gnosticism more than alchemy? Anyway, it has some
great general concepts to open up your imagination, plus the prose is
beautiful.

------
itshonza
Mental health has `health` in the name for a reason - it can deteriorate and
there is no shame in needing external help to heal.

Realizing this after listening to an interview with one of my favorite
musicians really helped me approach my (at that point) deteriorating mental
health from a different perspective and feel better.

------
eldacila
if it's only one, then it is the idea that "the word creates objects", or that
"creating a word, makes the object", and the power of language

for example, you can take some time to study a language, until it becomes
impossible for you to not understand it when you perceive it, it becomes a
part of you, of both your cognitive self and your subconscious, and you can
encapsulate all of that, saying that "you grok the language"

you can also see this in a lot of places, instead of "the study of the
properties of matter in relation to heat and temperature", you can say
"thermodynamics", and you instantly convey a lot of meaning

and this has "given me" some moments where "a lot of pieces fall into place",
like understanding that a less general version of this, is the Abstraction
taught at CS classes, where it is about computational systems, and hiding
implementation details, rather than the more general idea of encapsulating the
understanding complex ideas, in short sentences (or words)

it's the title of an Essay I had to read in high school, when I read it,
rather than the message it was supposed to convey, which is how language gave
women a lesser standing in society, I got really interested in the title, in
Spanish it's "La palabra crea objetos"

there are also others, like how "you don't _really_ have to do anything, other
than deal with the consequences of your decision to do, or not do something",
you don't have to eat, but if you don't, you have to deal with the
consequences, it gave me a more concrete feeling that that our choices shape
our lives

and how everything is connected, in the way that when there was a terrorist
attack in NY, thousands of miles away, in another country the price of fish
and shrimp dramatically drops, in that the space station's parts were
influenced by the Roman Empire, and in that war has driven a lot of the
development of science and technology

------
charwalker
The simplest version is my best choice is the one that, given your possible
choice, provides me the greatest outcome or the basis of Game Theory. Everyone
is working both together and against each other and taking other choices into
account can educate your decisions and lead to better outcomes for all.

------
armandososa
I don't remember where I got it, but "do the important, not the urgent" help
me focus my life.

Also, the central message from (the otherwise mediocre) Coelho‘s The Alchemist
novel teach me at 25 that I didn't have to conform to living the life of an
unhappy low-grade employee for the rest of my life.

------
mertnesvat
Kiichiro Toyoda was a good engineer and thinker.

I learned from him to ask 5 whys when there's a problem.

Changed my understanding about understanding, have found my self in
multiverses.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys)

------
austincheney
For me its practical application of objectivity: Any person who touts the
superiority of their proposed opinion is not somebody you should trust. Any
given opinion is superior or not on its merits. That distinction is the
difference between a subjective person and an objective person.

------
new2628
Understanding is a poor substitute to convexity.

There is no such thing as rationality of belief, only rationality of action.

both by NN Taleb.

------
takinola
Try to be truthful to others. Always be truthful to yourself.

Recognizing reality is a surprisingly difficult thing. Our perceptions are
clouded by bias, wishful thinking and outright deception. The truth is the
only foundation from which you can faithfully apply judgement to address any
situation.

------
andersthue
That our responses and our negative relational feelings are based on out own
choice - Nobody makes me feel angry, victimized, as a failure - it is always
my choice to feel those feelings.

It is not always i am able to choose not to feel it, but i always know i am
feeling it because of my own choosing.

------
JKCalhoun
Language is thought.

But like the chicken and egg paradox, how can one come before the other? I was
incapable (I think) of formulating even the concept of "Gestalt" until I had
heard the word for it, had it explained to me.

Now I see the concept of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts
everywhere.

~~~
Dumblydorr
Thought exists without language, does it not? How can dogs dream of sticks and
walks and chasing squirrels? Can't cats see a high place and think about how
to reach it, those aren't thoughts?

The word Language comes from the word for tongue, language therefore is
grounded in human ability to make complex thoughts borne out in simplistic
squishy tongue air sounds.

We could extend language beyond tongues though, if we think of binary or rust
or gobbledygook made up languages impossible to speak. Those still Express
thoughts, though they be divorced from tongues.

So, IMO, thoughts are broader than language, which can come close to thought
but can not adequately encapsulate the color red, a beautiful piece of music,
or a cat's devilish designs.

~~~
joyj2nd
"Thought exists without language, does it not?" This is a very interesting
question.

The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have
words for.” Wittgenstein

"How can dogs dream of sticks and walks and chasing squirrels?" Do Androids
dream of electric sheep? :-) You may want to read the books mentioned here. I
found it so impressive, I bought a first issue.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_\(psychology\))

------
idoby
"Once you've understood the core of your problem, the rest is merely millions
of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours"

My high school physics teacher, the only one who believed in me, whom I
continue to disappoint every day by not achieving a Nobel prize in physics.

------
iluvblender
Not to be afraid of taking the road less traveled by. It is not going to be
easy, but needs to be done.

~~~
kleer001
Lovely sentiment, and I agree. Also I learned recently the original poem was
meant sarcastically:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH3Y_-
Hxh_Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH3Y_-Hxh_Q)

------
dcminter
"Say yes more" \- from reading the book "Yes man" by Danny Wallace. It's a
light and not-too-serious read, but I was much influenced by that central
message.

It got me outside of my comfort zone and the resulting experiences changed my
life in lots of positive ways.

------
reubenswartz
We don't get a practice life. There's no "play again." Make the most of it.

------
na85
Money really does buy happiness.

To a point, anyways. Vacations, homes in safe neighborhoods, the best schools
for your kids, drugs, hookers, technology gadgets, early retirement, just
about anything is more accessible if you are wealthy.

The day I realized this was a disappointing day.

~~~
bloodorange
Having the things you mentioned (or easy access to them) only frees you up to
see if you are happy and to figure out what will make you happy if you aren't.
They don't, by themselves, make you happy.

~~~
na85
Disagree. If I couldn't afford to live in a safe neighborhood and was always
worried about my kid getting shot on the way home from school I would be
miserable and stressed out.

Moving to an area with a lower violent crime rate would objectively make me
happier.

If I was wealthy enough I could simply not work, and spend my days hanging out
with my daughter and spouse. That would objectively make me happier.

------
fortran77
Rust's "borrow checker" [https://doc.rust-lang.org/1.8.0/book/references-and-
borrowin...](https://doc.rust-lang.org/1.8.0/book/references-and-
borrowing.html)

------
carapace
There have been many. (I collect ideas.)

The single most important and far-reaching idea that changed my life is simple
to state:

All are One.

Oddly enough it was Hofstadter's GEB[1] that clued me and not a religious or
spiritual book. Somehow I directly intuited that the "strange loop" at the
core of each being was none other than the _Universal_ "strange loop" at the
core of everything.

"Thou art _That_."

The thing that is both speaking and being said.

You have a body but you are not your body; you have emotions but you are not
your emotions; you have thoughts but you are not your thoughts; you have will
but you are not your will. You are _that_ which is awareness: Being-
Consciousness-Bliss Sat-Chit-Ananda.[2]

From this, all morality and ethics flow easily and firmly.

One can walk down the street and watch the expressions on peoples faces change
as they are observed from this context or viewpoint. Toughs melt into shy
little boys and old ladies smile.

On the subject of _bliss_ : it's not an emotion. It's more like gravity or
electricity, fundamental and physical. (Just something I wanted to record.)

[1] "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satcitananda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satcitananda)

------
gfodor
What are the most important problems in your field? If you're not working on
them, why not?

From Hamming

------
gdubs
“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s
there are few.”

------
throwaway_pdp09
Decency, summarised.

The tale of the man who wanted to know what the torah meant in TL;DR form.
Various rabbis chased him off for asking until he came to rabbi Hillel who
told him "That which is repugnant to you do not to to others. That is the
whole of the torah".

There are many forms of that[0] but for some reason this one stayed with me
strongest despite being an atheist.

[0] At the other end of the scale but just as fine: "Be excellent to each
other!"

------
formercoder
No one is out there to help me (other than family). Everyone is trying to
advance their own interests and wealth. Once I learned that this was true
above all else, I started pushing my own life forward as opposed to waiting to
be pushed.

------
cdcarter
From Buckminster Fuller, retold to me by Brandur Leach:

> Do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything
> with nothing.

[[https://brandur.org/minimalism](https://brandur.org/minimalism)]

------
hutzlibu
Giving, without expecting something in return.

I used to be very calculating, if I do this, what will I get from person X,
what will person Y think of me.

Now I just do, what I want. What I think and feel is right. And I give freely,
of what I have. Sharing feels good.

------
DeepYogurt
The concept of opportunity cost.

------
f0ok
"Are the people I'm following going where I wanna go?" Earl Nightingale

------
telesilla
"She who chases two rabbits catches none" \- _Confucius, apparently_.

Keeps me on task.

------
withinboredom
I don’t know if I read this somewhere or was told it: “you can do whatever you
want, as long as you accept the consequences and can pay the price.”

I find the hardest part discovering what to do, but even that has a price and
consequences ;D

------
kibwen
That you are the average of your five closest friends. In other words, if you
would like to achieve or become something, surround yourself with people who
are also focused on (or have already achieved) that goal.

------
mroche
Not sure where this originated, but I learned it from one of my martial arts
teachers growing up:

You know what you know. You know what you don’t know. You don’t know what you
know. You don’t know what you don’t know.

------
crankylinuxuser
Reprap.

From Adrian Boyer's start, we all can have the means of production on our
desk. I can start with some plastic spool, and have finished structural pieces
to do what I wish.

It's the first major step to a replicator.

~~~
mLuby
It's amazing to me how little progress is being made in such an important
area.

------
jv22222
Hyper Iteration

This concept changed my life and career in a big way!

I first heard about hyper iteration (my name for it) in a story[1] about Paul
MacCready, a guy who built the first human-powered airplane.

He achieved this goal by changing how he attacked the problem. Rather than
focusing on the larger goal, he built a machine that enabled him to test new
human-powered flight theories on a daily basis. __This enabled him to run
hundreds of tests. __The other teams trying to achieve this goal took 6-12
months for each iteration.

With regard to startups our entire startup journey consists of a loop of
asking one single question:

If I do this, will it work?

As we build we ask that one question over and over again:

\- Will this new feature help me get more customers?

\- Will advertising on Facebook help me make more sales?

\- Etc.

The faster we can iterate each answer to that question, the faster we can
achieve great things!

So basically, just always think abut any task you have to do and work out is
there a faster way to get the answer?

i.e Spend 9 months building a mobile on demand platform to deliver coffee and
see if people want the service? Or spend a week printing up business cards
with "we deliver coffee" and hand them out in the street. See if anyone calls.

9 months vs 1 week to start learning about that particular product ;)

But really it works in many contexts, just spend some thinking time to find
the absolute fastest way to iterate at all times.

[1] [https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2861-how-nature-and-naivet-
he...](https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2861-how-nature-and-naivet-helped-paul-
maccready-build-a-human-powered-airplane-in-only-six-months)

------
manytimesfail
Everything that happens to me is a consequence of decisions I have made based
on decisions others have made based on decisions others have made...
Everything is playing out how it should.

------
mLuby
"Homo Economicus": that we all act out of rational self-interest, subject to
mental and physical constraints (though few are _conscious_ of the reasons
they act as they do).

~~~
movedx
> we all act out of rational self-interest

That's why the (global) economy can exist and function as it does: the desire
for things.

------
jzwmowzzeayzzaj
Differentiation of Self

[https://thebowencenter.org/theory/eight-
concepts/](https://thebowencenter.org/theory/eight-concepts/)

------
cseguin
"Never waste a chance to pee" \-- grandpa

def changed my life for the better

------
janwillemb
Two sets of ideas:

1\. Getting Things Done (David Allen) as a system to organize and reorganize
my life, 2\. How to win friends and influence people (Dale Carnegie), as a way
of treating other people

------
milanspeaks
"Don't become a philosopher until you become rich."

------
bobbydreamer
"Do what you made for" When my mind tells me this, I get energized and start
to work and complete lots of things. This particular words gives me all the
focus I need.

------
sesm
The basic function of a healthy psyche is to withstand reality and adapt to
it. (don't remember the author, it's a common concept in psychotherapy
circles)

------
aswanson
Math is the eternal truth. Any physical implementation of a solution to a
problem relies on the manipulation of abstract symbols. Math is truth, the
rest is details.

------
RajSinghLA
Your external world is only a reflection of your inner state.

------
GistNoesis
Here is a smart one : Being wise is better than being smart.

------
woodruffw
It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even
beyond it, that could be taken to be good without limitation, except a good
will.

------
el_don_almighty
The more you scare people, the more they will pay you

------
bherms
A few things:

Adults are just winging it. The ones who don't seem like they are pretend the
hardest.

The world is only as cruel as you help make it. Be kind.

------
mirimir
I'm distinct from the voice in my head.

------
alexslobodnik
You must believe to see; not see to believe.

~~~
kgin
Can you explain this a bit more?

------
daledavies
"Starting the work is two thirds of it."

I wish I knew the source of this but my parents used to say it was a Welsh
proverb.

~~~
ilikepi
Often I feel like finishing is the other four thirds.

------
mlboss
Ego is a myth. Everything is connected and is one. Our mind creates boundaries
and give names for practical reason.

------
andrewstuart
Get angry, but first decide if it matters.

------
w3mmpp
The idea of impermanence in Buddhism that completely changed the way I've been
seeing the world and myself.

------
Tepix
“Everything in moderation, including moderation.” \-- Oscar Wilde

I've found it to be an excellent philosophy to live by.

------
saltcod
Something I follow now, but didn’t until I was 35 or so: rise early.

A lot of very good things follow from just doing this.

------
ct520
You CAN have your cake and eat it too.

~~~
renjimen
Fun note: it's one of these proverbs that people know the context for but not
many (at least, not me until recently) really understands why it means what it
does. Apparently it's because the old English usage of "have" included to
keep/retain something, so it goes that you can't simultaneously eat your cake
and keep it for later.

------
meiraleal
\- I don't need to eat every day

------
andrey_utkin
The most important thing to know about your tasks is WHY you need to do them.
Connecting my TODO list items all the way to Maslow's categories of needs has
resolved all of my task motivation, categorization and prioritization
struggles.

Corollary, which you hear sometimes in investors' blog posts: not all problems
are worth the effort, only valuable problems are.

------
alfiedotwtf
Clean your desk before you do work

------
wasnthere
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” \-
Samuel Beckett

------
r34
Not sure if "idea", but the word that comes to my mind is "meditation".

------
asdff
"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" Dobzhansky.

------
frenchie4111
Good ideas are grown, not found.

~~~
screamingninja
what about inspiration?

------
kunle
Engage your core when doing any physical activity.

Might be the difference between success and injury.

------
jpn
Bayes Rule.

------
harshdeep
Reading Joseph Albahari's Threading in C#. Must read for .Net Developer.

------
surfsvammel
That which seems very important today, will seem far less important tomorrow.

------
nazgulnarsil
When you have finished doing konmarie externally, begin doing it internally.

------
stareatgoats
That the existence of infinity and eternity is the most probable hypothesis.

------
ncmncm
The Sunk Cost fallacy, with the peripherally related Opportunity Cost.

------
flipcoder
"Be proactive, not reactive."

and

"Effectiveness is more important than intelligence."

------
graycat
The fast Fourier transform and related topics in stochastic processes.

~~~
charliemil4
I’ve read your comments and am floored with what I read - if you’re up for
making an acquaintance who has 1/10th your expression but knows what you’re
doing is real... shoot me an email in the bio.

------
sparker72678
The greatest strengths are almost always also the greatest weaknesses.

------
orasis
The past and future are memory and fantasy. There is only this now.

------
activatedgeek
Side note: This is probably a good place to discover mental models.

------
kratom_sandwich
The idea of marginal utility (among other ideas of economic theory)

------
fegu
"Keep your identity small." From a Paul Graham essay.

------
fit2rule
All culture is a lie which only persists through re-telling.

------
indymike
There doesn't have to be a loser. Win-win is an option.

------
whatsmyusername
The 9 alignments from the Baldur's Gate series.

------
callesgg
Everything is a metaphor. Literally everything.

~~~
lucb1e
How did that help you or change your life?

~~~
callesgg
I made me see that what people say/talk about might not necessarily be right
or wrong. Just metaphorical.

------
acrophiliac
You don't have to believe your thoughts.

------
ca98am79
Consciousness may not come from the brain

------
ForrestN
Our thoughts are subconsciously motivated

~~~
rokhayakebe
Expand.

~~~
ForrestN
I think many people go through life uncurious about why an idea occurs to
them, why they have a certain preference, why something makes them feel a
certain emotion.

The subconscious, for all its mysteries, offers the best chance of
understanding the underlying forces that motivate our thoughts and behaviors.
Realizing this and developing a curiosity about the reasons for my own
thoughts and behaviors has totally changed my life for the better.

------
kasey_junk
“The internet is going to be a big deal”

------
brianliou91
Chase curiousity, don't chase money

------
cityzen
Love how @naval answered like 600 times

------
RajSinghLA
A bowl is most useful when it is empty.

------
j_p_hackworth
The boot theory of economic inequality.

------
codegladiator
Practice is not the same as execution

------
shaunxcode
Love is the law. Love under will.

------
mikro2nd
Iterated Prisoners' Dilemma

~~~
joyj2nd
Has a Nash Equilibrium for the first n-1 iterations if I remember correctly.

------
openfuture
Time is the absence of balance

------
0xFFC
Courage Alexander Solzhenitsyn

------
stillbourne
Skepticism.

------
lutorm
Stoicism.

------
medell
Everything is a remix

------
RivieraKid
Solipsism is correct.

~~~
kleer001
Correct, but worthless, from what I can tell.

------
l0c0b0x
Knowledge, by itself, isn't power. The sharing of knowledge is power.

------
dqpb
Information theory

------
jklepatch
Pick your battles.

------
elixanchor
Every cool thing from the underground ends up mainstream in a predictable
pattern.

Article: [https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-
sociopaths](https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths)

------
motohagiography
"Is."

------
vmception
Credit Default Swaps

good times

------
iamgopal
Nofap.

------
greendestiny_re
Astrology.

------
vincentli2010
have a secret - peter thiel

------
mdonahoe
Recursion

------
eointierney
Why?

------
mncharity
The idea that science education is profoundly and pervasively dysfunctional.

It was a slowly accumulating realization. There was Feynman's critique of rote
memorization in Brazil[1], but ok, Brasil isn't CaTech. And Mexico high-school
graduates having TIMSS scores similar to US high-school dropouts, but oh well,
that's Mexico. And news media have a trope, like "Harvard MBA students don't
know what causes Earth seasons", but that's merely misunderstanding the nature
of expertise -- if someone last studied a topic in middle school, then a
middle-school-like understanding shouldn't come as a surprise. Similarly for
grad and undergrad, professors and grad school. MIT and Harvard graduates
being unable to light a bulb with a battery and wire[2], that seemed more
bizarre. But by the time I saw Eric Mazur's (Harvard, intro physics) "it
became clear that in spite of high evaluations, and in spite of good
performance, my students were not really learning very much"[3], it didn't
come as a surprise. Though it could still felt odd, for a time. Talking with
first-tier medical school graduate students, with no clue how big blood cells
are, beyond "really really small". Asking first-tier astronomy graduate
students, "a five-year old asks you 'I'm told the Sun is a big hot ball [...]
what color is the ball?'"... and of the very few who didn't get it wrong,
half-ish learned it as "common misconceptions in astronomy education", rather
from their own, atypically extensive and successful education. A follow-up of
"what color is sunlight?" repeatedly produces these cute, not "aha!", but "uh
oh" moments... the "that doesn't make sense, does it..." of two conflicting
bits of unintegrated knowledge colliding for the first time. I no longer find
it even slightly odd when a physical sciences gradate student tells me the Sun
doesn't have a color, or is rainbow color. A person's understanding very
rapidly becomes ramshackle as they move beyond their active research focus.
And education content is pervasively authored beyond that. Far far beyond.
Chemistry education research describes chemistry education content using
adjectives like "incoherent". To be fair, rote education in Brasil and
elsewhere achieves... something, some societal value. And ours does too, and
more of it. But now when I occasionally encounter someone who thinks of
science education as working... it's become an exercise of empathy and
imagination to picture how that might be a plausible description of the world.

[1] From "Surely You're Joking[...]" "In regard to education in Brazil, I had
a very interesting experience." [https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-
education](https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education) [2] "Minds of Our
Own" clip
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng5qzH39nyg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng5qzH39nyg)
full 1997 [https://www.learner.org/series/minds-of-our-own/1-can-we-
bel...](https://www.learner.org/series/minds-of-our-own/1-can-we-believe-our-
eyes/) [3] Eric Mazur's "Confessions[...]"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI&t=920](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwslBPj8GgI&t=920)

------
badsavage
open-source software

------
olalonde
That free market capitalism is a good system that works. I grew up in a family
that pretty much believed the opposite so I probably never would have become
an entrepreneur otherwise. I mainly credit Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose"
series for persuading me, as well as some of Paul Graham's essays.

~~~
chrstphrhrt
What are your thoughts on the welfare state and its compatibility with your
freedom? What do you think about homelessness?

~~~
olalonde
HN is probably not the best medium to discuss this but the "Free to Choose"
series I mentioned touches on those issues and is available for free on
YouTube. It's still quite relevant today despite its age.

------
chenpengcheng
open your mind

------
jll29
recursion.

------
cl0rkster
peace

------
macawfish
evolution

------
vincentli2010
bitcoin

------
kladskull666
Toilet paper.

------
dilandau
That doing the right thing, even when it seems unfair, even when I shouldn't
have to, always works out for the best.

Doing the selfish thing, even if I'm justified, even if it makes sense,
ultimately never leads to getting what I want.

~~~
Balgair
The fastest way up the corporate ladder is not knifing people in the back,
it's complimenting others behind their backs.

------
0x8BADF00D
Execution matters more than an idea.

------
ronilan
The misguided idea that there is more than one sense of something being
someone’s data, and that thus, some how, the public has eternal right to any
comment I make in Hacker News.

As expressed here by Paul Graham
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226)
and enforced with blind loyalty by Daniel Gackle who repeatedly refuses to
delete my stuff instead spending his nights examining and debating the minute
details of my words deciding which should or should not be deleted.

If this misguided idea never existed, HN would be like all normal web
services, the user would have a delete button and my life would be better.

But, the idea and the power position it allows are here, and my life is
changed for the worse.

------
lostmsu
Bitcoin.

------
AirMax98
“Nothing, absolutely nothing, happens in God's world by mistake.”

~~~
downerending
That's a depressing thought.

------
bobbysands88
The Bitcoin whitepaper. It's the American constitution of the internet.

------
maerF0x0
Compounding, growth etc

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O133ppiVnWY)

Taught me the logical impossibility of the stock market to go up by x% per
year, forever.

Taught me that getting better today (however small) can give resources to
getting better(er?) tomorrow.

Taught me that many "experts" just say whatever to get voted in or to get a
budget without regards to the absurdity of their own statements, and that many
people eat up this kind of absurdity without fact checking / validating it.

~~~
abetusk
For me, this type of thinking does the exact opposite in that it has a
chilling effect on finding solutions and correctly assessing reality.

While some of what Al Bartlett says is true, that unfettered exponential
growth can't go on forever, other statements are misleading or outright false.

He has a soapbox about limiting population growth now (in the US) [0], tied in
to concepts of peak oil and other "dark green" talking points. This type of
thinking misses the larger picture. The irony is that exponential growth
happens all across the board, not just in population growth and energy usage
but in innovation for more efficient energy usage and in finding alternative
energy sources.

Al Bartlett builds a straw man argument, saying "technological optimists
assure use that technology will always solve all of our problems ..." [1] but
this isn't true. The argument against Bartlett's statement is that we haven't
hit the ceiling on energy that's available to us. This is one of the first
issues I have with this thinking: if we were to take his argument at face
value, limit population growth, turn down our energy usage and try to live
with what we have, then we're setting ourselves up for failure as every other
country on the planet shifts to solar because it provides cheaper energy (yes,
even to coal) and will only get exponentially cheaper for a good period of
time [2] [3].

Here's some simple arithmetic [4]: The average US household consumes 30kWh of
energy a day. The available energy falling to the surface of the earth is
about 700 * 10^12 kWh per day. That means, at _US levels of consumption_ , the
ceiling on _just using the sun for our energy needs_ is 23 trillion people.
The earth's population is 7.6 billion now. Even taking Bartlett's estimate of
population doubling every 40 years, that's over 400 years of growth.

This is zero-sum thinking and leads to all sorts of "us vs. them" mentality.
My first thought is that these are the proto arguments for new forms of
eugenics and other oppressive behavior. It also ignores the complexity of the
situation of population in the US. I think it's pretty conclusive that strong
public education and financial freedom lead to _less_ children. In the US, we
already are at sub-replacement but for immigration that boosts our population
[5].

I would suggest you take Al Bartlett's advice and not let other people do your
thinking for you [6].

[0] [https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY?t=4042](https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY?t=4042)

[1] [https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY?t=3640](https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY?t=3640)

[2] [https://e360.yale.edu/digest/renewables-cheaper-
than-75-perc...](https://e360.yale.edu/digest/renewables-cheaper-
than-75-percent-of-u-s-coal-fleet-report-finds)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanson%27s_law)

[4] [https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY?t=4070](https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY?t=4070)

[5]
[https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_01-508.pdf](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_01-508.pdf)

[6] [https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY?t=3332](https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY?t=3332)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Isn't this all obsolete thinking? America (and nearly every other nation in
the world) is at replacement population, or nearly. The idea of geometric
population growth is some 1950's meme that won't die.

~~~
maerF0x0
He uses population growth as an example, but the big point is anything that
grows geometrically has a doubling rate, and when you're at 50% consumption
your only 1 doubling away from catastrophe. Or if you want to talk about
summations, If you want to double the availability of something (say houses)
you have to repeat the entire time series of production thus far (not counting
removals, like demolitions)

Same with the stock market. A stock is basically priced based on it expected
future income flows compared to other investment options like bonds. Most
things being equal, you need to build an entire whole new business of equal
size if you want to double your share value (without dilution i might add).

This task of doing the whole sum again sounds (doubling) much more difficult
than "oh just grow at 6% per year for 7 yrs" (rule of 42).

