
Ask HN: What Is Your Worldview? - lookinward
I&#x27;ve recently been struggling with the &quot;Robert Greene&quot; worldview: life is a battlefield of psychological warfare. Greene adopts a postmodernist lens of seeing social situations as transactions of power between people. While this view and the associated tactics have allowed me to identify malicious people in my personal life, I find it neither romantic nor rewarding. It pains me deeply to worry about wolves in sheep&#x27;s clothing, and to worry about miscategorising people (both false negatives and false positives).<p>I want to know your worldview. I&#x27;m a strong believer in the cliche that you find what you&#x27;re looking for. In effect, the confirmation bias. I find HN to be an honest crowd largely due to the nature of our work. I ask you to take a leap and share your worldview. Maybe we can figure this out together.<p>Thank you.
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oldsklgdfth
"All models are wrong, some are more useful than others."

All worldviews ultimately will fail to describing the world around us. All
philosophies will fail because we cannot hold all the ideas in out head in the
same time. All ideas that we have are underpinned by our language, which is a
model for the world around us. Ex. we have a word for "tree" and we create a
delineation between the "tree" and the forest. But there is no tree in
isolation. There is no tree, this is merely a label for our sensory perception
of the tree.

To use plato's cave analogy. We do not see the world, we see the shadows. The
game of trying to describe the shadows will not give you a valid model. It may
have predictive value, but it ends there. So greene's "life is a battlefield"
has value, but that does not mean that all human interacts are transnational
or that they can be modeled that way.

I try to remind myself that my ideas/views/perceptions fall short of the real
thing. Attempting to better understand and describe things is a way of trying
to control them. You are this label, this other person is that label.

Ultimately, I try to remember that the only control I have is over my choices
and how I chose to see the world.

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lookinward
Thank you, this is very helpful.

When you say you only have control over your own choices, don't you then have
control over outcomes in some approximate sense? I find that people always
tout: "don't worry about things you can't control" while simultaneously
massively underestimating what could be in their control and what agency they
do have. What I'm getting at is the predictive value you talk about. The
better we can predict, the better it seems we can control.

~~~
oldsklgdfth
At some point you have to depart from the model. It’s useful, but doesn’t
provide all the answers.

Weather models can tell you when it rains. But you can’t control the weather.
You chose to stay out of the rain.

~~~
lookinward
But some day we really might be able to control the weather. It is within our
control to start working towards it today.

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LockAndLol
We're here for a while and then we're gone. The highest high or the lowest
low, nothing is as serious as it seems, because in the grand scheme of things,
nothing really does matter.

Look at the size of our solar system compared to our galaxy, compared to our
cluster, compared to the observable universe. Put it all in perspective and
don't let things bother you so much.

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alexmingoia
There is nothing to figure out. Go chop wood.

