To me, it seems like a lot of these "systems" do actually work, and can lead to "good thinking". But, they all seem to suffer from the same flaw, which is that they seem to work better for the creator of the system than they do for adopters. "Good thinking" for many is still likely worse than what no system would yield.
Why is this the case? I think a good guess at the reason might be
1) The very act of creating a system is itself a meaningful practice which improves thinking
2) People document systems which they found natural to themselves, and therefore are a better fit for themselves than others.
Until I see someone "invent" a system which has broad success that goes beyond the inventor's own success, I'm not going near any of these systems with any degree of seriousness.
3) people who adopt someone else's thought-system are effectively admitting they are bad at thinking. They will likely continue to be bad, no matter how refined the system is.
You can get Leo Messi to teach me football but my first touch will still be sub-par.
> 3) people who adopt someone else's thought-system are effectively admitting they are bad at thinking.
> You can get Leo Messi to teach me football but my first touch will still be sub-par.
Isn't that conflating practice with thinking? You would also never invent football on your own if you'd never heard of it. If you want to be good at football, letting Leo teach you is likely to be a lot faster and produce better results than not learning from anyone.
Everyone adopts thought systems from others, you do and I do. Failing to admit that is to be actually bad at thinking and fail to admit you're human. It's not possible to have only original thoughts, and even if it was, it wouldn't be practical.
Try to be honest with yourself and think about how many things you know for certain, that you weren't taught by someone else. How many facts do you know that you've verified yourself first hand? How do you know the sun is 93 million miles away, or that there are electrons in your CPU? I trust scientists who've studied it and thought about it, I haven't verified those things myself. How do we even understand words and speak languages? As children, we learned everything about the world from others, including how to think.
Isn't this is a feature, not a bug? We learn from each other over time, and we'd be nowhere without people having adopted and then built upon the thought systems of others.
To be honest, I thought (eh) we were talking about "thinking" as "reasoning" (and mostly in an original sense).
Obviously if you redefine the concept as "having any thought whatsoever", then anything goes. I personally don't consider "reading a fact in a book" or "associating sounds to concepts" as "thinking" in the terms of the upthread conversation, but you clearly do.
I don't think (eh) we can agree on much in this conversation given the premises.
Oh, is that what you meant when you said "my first touch will still be sub-par."?
> I personally don't consider "reading a fact in a book" or "associating sounds to concepts" as "thinking" in the terms of the upthread conversation, but you clearly do.
I don't think you can learn philosophy without learning a language. I don't think you can learn the scientific method without first learning some scientific facts.
Please elaborate, where would you draw the line between facts+language, and "reasoning"?
I'm pretty sure every single person who is good at thinking has had a good think about what other people think and how they do it. They've taken on some ideas, rejected others, applied some in this area and decided this is the wrong area for another good idea. They've recalled what they've thought previously and analysed that working out what they missed and how they could have approached it differently.
I doubt anyone is silly enough to let someone else tell them "how to think." Without thinking a lot further about that.
Whether it's FOX, MSNBC, CNN or the Russians there seems to be a rather common belief that everyone is quite happy being told what to think and can think no further about it. Maybe it's true. (Except the russians, that's such obvius garbage it's embarrassing). n
4) It's not possible to express a thinking system sufficiently clearly in writing - after all we've been thinking for far longer than we've been writing.
5) (related) The assumption that all aspects of thinking are conscious. The eureka moment, sleeping on a problem or just taking a distracting shower suggest otherwise.
If you are saying that you need to practice and find methods that work for you after being taught by Messi, you could apply the same concept to thinking. Sports, like most other things, consist of both a theoretical and practical aspect. Getting Messi to teach you the theoretical side of the sport should not be seen as a replacement for practicing the sport itself, and the same can be said for thinking.
I stopped subscribing to the Farnham street blog because it was too overwhelming, frankly. There are a ton of good ideas out there. Using the 80/20 rule (Pareto principle), I grabbed one: Charlie Munger says "I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do." Applying it to current events, I (very intermittently) tap into broadcast news, but watch both CNN and Fox News. Then I fact-check them both. It's pretty interesting. I personally have limited bandwidth learning and applying better thinking techniques. It's a slow process to learn new ones.
> they’re going to use them to justify their stupid decisions
I'm sorry, but isn't this the whole point of using mental models for your decisions? What's stupid is all up to you, but if I reasoned together some decision based on some model that I think works for me, it's hardy stupid for me.
I always saw the point of these mental models is to use them to justify my "stupid" decisions, and have some structured way of reaching that decision instead of just "because I wanted to".
Disclaimer: I don't really follow any mental models myself, except the model my organic brain comes up with on the fly, so don't let me tell you how others use these mental modals.
It doesn't have to. As long as it provides reasonable justification for a decision, that's better than no justification at all, eg. Like the OP said, "because I wanted to".
How is a false justification reasonable or better than admitting that the choice is arbitrary?
(especially in the framework of the comment I replied to, where they are talking about the process being internally useful. Of course it may be useful to bullshit someone else, but that's a different thing.)
Because at least you put some thought was put into it, which again, is better than no thought at all.
Consider your question applied to math: how is a false mathematical argument for believing a theorem better than just believing it for no reason at all? It's clearly better because you can actually point out the flaw in the specific argument.
If someone accepts a mental framework and is faced with a choice they want to make, either:
1. They can find no justification for a choice they want to make, at which point they are more likely to question whether their choice is justifiable, or their mental framework is sufficient. Either outcome should be encouraged.
2. If they find a justification that's valid in the framework, then they have an explicable basis from which to convince others they made the right choice.
3. If they find a justification that's fallacious, then pointing out either how the framework is incomplete, or their argument within the framework is incorrect is far more likely to change their minds than simply claiming their choice was wrong and trying to explain why from your own framework, which they haven't accepted (and likely won't without a lot more convincing).
Ultimately, applying thought to a problem is always better than no thought.
Doubtful. Like the OP said, "because I want to" is all the thought it requires. It's the answer children instinctively give. How much thought do they give their justifications?
Finally, if you're giving credence to a process, even a faulty one, then at least it's possible to erode confidence in the process or your application of it. To see its effectiveness, you need only browse the countless posts on reddit written by former Christians about how they came to question and ultimately give up their religion after a discussion with an atheist.
>Because at least you put some thought was put into it, which again, is better than no thought at all.
That's the problem. By opting for a an argument that sounds reasonable to justify your pre-existing decision/idea, you don't "put thought into it". You use your emotions to pick a logical sounding justification.
That makes it even more dangerous than admitting "I don't really have a justification, I just like this decision/idea".
That is what we call "rationalization", and it's the worst thing one can do. It's how abuse victims remain with their abuser, how racists find supporting arguments for their beliefs, etc.
>Consider your question applied to math: how is a false mathematical argument for believing a theorem better than just believing it for no reason at all? It's clearly better because you can actually point out the flaw in the specific argument.
That's a false equivalent, because in actual life arguments about personal beliefs (about decisions/ideas/relationships/etc) can not always be shown to be faulty as they are not axiomatic but casual.
The fault in such arguments often depends on qualitative judgements, guestimations, subjective opinions about people and situations, and so on.
> By opting for a an argument that sounds reasonable to justify your pre-existing decision/idea, you don't "put thought into it". You use your emotions to pick a logical sounding justification.
So taking the time to read or consider an argument that might justify something you instinctively believe, is putting zero thought into it? Come on, the amount of thought is quite literally not zero, and it is zero when letting your emotions drive your decisions. Therefore, yes, a rationalization is putting some thought into it.
> That makes it even more dangerous than admitting "I don't really have a justification, I just like this decision/idea". That is what we call "rationalization", and it's the worst thing one can do.
Is it? What evidence do you have that people who rationalize make worse or "more dangerous" decisions in any or most contexts than those who apply no thought at all to their decisions?
> It's how abuse victims remain with their abuser, how racists find supporting arguments for their beliefs, etc.
And by relying on emotions to make decisions, you think victims of domestic abuse and racists are going to suddenly change those behaviours? The rationalization is a complete red herring here.
Domestic abuse victims stay in abusive relationships for emotional reasons. At least deconstructing their rationalizations could drive them to seek help. What argument do you think could contravene an emotional decision that was given no rationalization?
Similarly, you think racists who don't rationalize are somehow "more rational", or more open to changing their views than those who don't? Do you have evidence of this?
> That's a false equivalent, because in actual life arguments about personal beliefs (about decisions/ideas/relationships/etc) can not always be shown to be faulty as they are not axiomatic but casual.
Which is exactly the case for emotional decisions with no rationalization. Decisions which have been subjected to some thought actually have some justification that can be challenged.
The other person may assert they're right regardless, in which case you're no better off than if they had made decision without a rationalization. Or they may acknowledge their mistake or switch to another rationalization, either of which is a victory for truth. In the latter case, it's a retreat to an ever-narrowing gap of fallacious reasoning.
Like I said, you can see exactly this progession in hundreds of testimonials in the atheism subreddit. Former Christians admit that when challenged, they fell back on progressively more absurd rationalizations for Christian dogma until they could no longer accept it, and then they eventually became agnostics or atheists.
So I have plenty of evidence suggesting the progression I describe actually works. I've seen zero evidence that emotional decisions can be changed in any way other than some oppressive action (like jail time, social shunning, etc., all of which are dehumanizing).
In order to accept your framing that rationalization is "more dangerous", I require a comparable amount of evidence that people who don't rationalize are more rational on average, or are more easily convinced of the truth when challenged, or something along those lines. Can you provide that?
Sorry this is really random but I've been reading your contributions/comments on your profile and I've enjoyed it so much. I really like the way you think.
>I'm sorry, but isn't this the whole point of using mental models for your decisions? What's stupid is all up to you
Parent assumes there's an objective reality, and that, (even judging by one's own purposes and goals, and not the other person's), one can make stupid BS decisions that work against themselves and their goals...
The primary material on Lesswrong is a mixed bag, but certainly some of it is very interesting even to people with training in Philosophy.
Indeed you can thank Dennett's 'Intuition Pumps' for providing a source of legitimacy to those people who want to take the mental model stuff Very Seriously.
The same stuff can be mis-leading or well-leading. People will be people. Give it a few years and I half-expect a Mental-Models-cum-pseudo-Magickal Qabbalistic cottage industry to appear. Or at least a handy reference system, such as [Yudkowsky 24:10]...
I am big (closet?) fan of Farnam street blog and came across it many years ago as it was connected to munger and buffet (who I still remain a fan of). The funny thing is I know FS has good content and I subscribe to the free newsletters for years now but I have never really read them except for the occasional one here and there. They just go into a special folder with my hopes that I will get to it and I don’t want to lose out (fomo!). What follows may be poorly articulated but will try anyway as I could use help with this.
I don’t read FS cos I feel like I need to spend proper time behind it to read and learn what is has to share. It’s like studying read it and then perhaps take some notes and keep them handy to reference later. Then on top of this it has so many articles I feel I have no strategy to keep up. And then there is the whole when will I really use it if I need to go look it up / reference it In order to use it. This whole approach sounds twisted to me. And as someone on this thread said it’s essentially me learning how to think Which may be subconsciously tells me I am bad at thinking. I can say thst for the last decade i feel like I am on a quest to improve myself so that then I can be “smart”. In a way this had lead for me for the last decade or so to pursue reading / finding content on the web (largely through ask hn and the likes) that is about optimizing or making myself better. And I find that I have consumed a lot but may have not really realized it’s gains from a career or other tangible perspective.
Is anybody else in a similar boat? Sometimes I feel these are all time wasters disguised as things that can be helpful. May be a better approach is to just do things and then when you are stuck on a problem then go consult there types of sites to see if they have a solution to your problem. In that is where real growth might happen. I feel like the approach I current have is the other way around - let me find all the “general solutions” and (become “smarter” ) and then apply it to whatever I do.
Am I wrong here in think thst is whole chasing after self improvement is a real discretion from doing real things thst will actually make me “smarter”?
I'm not going to expand too much on this because I haven't made up my own mind about it either, but you strike me as being in the same position.
I've grown up online, constantly consuming information and thus building up what to me seemed like a large body of useful knowledge on topics from comp. sci, data science, history, psychology, business, marketing and more.
The issue is that just constantly reading articles, books and consuming information has made me think I'm knowledgable, but in reality that knowledge is superficial, shallow, fleeting and hard to act on. Anything I think I know takes way longer to do because of unknown unknowns and a myriad of other factors you just don't get exposed to.
To use knowledge you need to internalize and create mental connections and the only way of doing so is by actually doing - not consuming. You may feel smart when you recall something you read months or years ago and share it in a relevant situation - but that's just a tiny fraction of what you've consumed. People don't learn by reading, they learn by doing.
The question: "why am I spending so much time consuming instead of acting" is an important question to ask oneself and for me the answer is that doing is boring. My brain has been hijacked by easy dopamine from games, forums (like HN and Reddit), YouTube and even Spotify. All of these easy, on-demand sources of digital dopamine have made all other activities harder to do without getting bored out of my mind. For instance I was learning Ansible 20 minute ago, but I got bored and started wasting time on HN instead.
Anyways, while I do enjoy FS, lesswrong, and a handful of other industry bloggers, blogs and aggregators I came to the realization that reading isn't furthering my goals. Only directed attention, effort and completing discrete projects will bring me to where I want to be.
Ps. It's easy to waste time reading about this too. My biggest realization has been that using any forms of digital feeds in the morning wrecks my attention span most of the day.
> Only directed attention, effort and completing discrete projects will bring me to where I want to be.
I agree with you here.
But I also want to point out that you have to ends to the spectrum of "using information":
* At one end: Pure Consuming
* At the other end: Pure Doing
What I'm getting from what you wrote is that if you're not "Pure Doing" (e.g. doing discrete projects), then you might as well not do anything. Is that accurate?
Not at all, of course you need to stay informed about the knowledge, actors and networks you're participating in. I think we agree here, it's a balance. I'd say optimally 5-30% reading, 95-70% doing. But it depends on what you enjoy, want to spend time on, goals, and other personal factors. If you enjoy reading; read.
Also, my post was about my own experiences and observations and was a direct response to quietthrow - he seemed distraught and the emotional angle seemed more fitting than a neutral and balanced response.
I think the problem comes down to: there is no good way to retain the information. And writers don't think about it either.
Most writers will say you need to "practice" and "apply" whatever you read while being very vague on the how. I'm interested in a habit creation system for methodologically allowing you to get good at applying say a mental model, but aside from that I think the best alternative is incremental reading/spaced repetition. (https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading)
tl;dr: while it can't give you procedural/neurally honed representations of the models you would get from practice, it gets close by allowing you to memorize declarative info.
I've found it at least partially functional for being able to sort of apply mental models, though there is still a large gap between knowing and applying.
The first few paragraphs are not good and may be difficult to read through. But after that, things start falling into place and the rest of the article is absolutely great. But I agree that the other articles by the author may not have the same level of quality.
Why? Because it's a mix 'n match of quotes, bits and pieces and observations cobbled together to support the thesis that digital technology will disrupt how information - and therefore our thinking about the world - is controlled.
It's not that he's factually wrong about what he's saying. Rather, it's that the article lacks any references to a foundational understanding of historical dynamics and current affairs regarding economics, politics or economics.
Everything he discusses has a historical context steeped in competing ideological, economical and political theories that have shaped the world since World War 1. And yet, he makes no mention that background whatsoever. On the contrary.
For instance.
> Like a fish in water, we’re unaware of the integration between our education system, the corporate structure, and our media environment.
Uh. No. There's very much awareness about this among those who have participated in this debate and who are extremely worried about the state of education in America. And it's a debate about investing in public infrastructure, the advantages and drawbacks of free market dynamics in education and the long term impact on future generations.
For instance, Mary Sue Coleman, president of the Association of American Universities and former president of the University of Michigan and the University of Iowa, wrote in the Washington Post back in 2016:
> Public higher education is at a tipping point in the United States. It is an essential public good that is suffering from an unprecedented erosion of public support, with potentially devastating consequences for our students and our economy.
> If our country continues to disinvest, we will be abandoning an essential feature of American democracy. This is what is at risk: the means to educate the broadest possible swath of our society, for the betterment of society, with full public support. Public institutions, especially, educate large numbers of students from all walks of life — particularly low-income, first-generation and underrepresented students. We cannot lose sight of that, particularly as our society grows more diverse.
> We need to remind ourselves as a nation of higher education’s true value and its return on investment, not only to the individual but to society. Our collective progress and prosperity hinge on quality higher education. It is the strongest argument we have for lifting up our public support of this critical public good.
Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor, has voice his concerns at various times about the impact of education economics on higher education:
Even John Oliver pointed out in 2015 how nefarious standardized testing is on the quality of public education, how it is driven by market economics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6lyURyVz7k
And then there's the policies of current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos which haven't done anything but accelerate the overall decrease of quality in education and contributed to the overall widening of the equality gap in american society. As evidenced in this scathing article from The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/27/betsy-devos-...
Those are just a few examples. Education is a huge topic in it's own right with very heated debates in their own right. Buried below those highly visible examples are large groups of lobbyists, experts, unions, companies, non-profits, activists, academic researchers,... who have produced entire libraries filled with theories, frameworks, models, opinions,... that describe this field.
Simply referring then to "digital technology is going to disrupt the monopoly on information" is quite a reductionist view of that complexity.
And that's just the part of his essay that touches on education.
The fact that the article lacks a clear understanding of the historical complexity that underpins the construction of his theory about the current state of American society, is of less concern to me.
When I read this, it stood out to me as written by someone who has a background in media. On LinkedIn, he mentions that his education is a BA in Media & Arts. Now, there's aboslutely nothing wrong with that. But his background clearly define his writing. Someone who has a degree in education studies or social studies will arrive at a very different take on american society.
However, what truly concerns me is that instead of going deeper and doing the research, looking for context and these debates, interviewing people and looking for insights, he chose to write in isolation and conjure his own theory on american society and the role of media, education and politics.
It was literally true that my mother had taught her children that emotion should play a major role in making decisions. That generally meant identifying wants and then pursuing them, regardless of whether we should.
I led my life with that approach until I had an epiphany about 10 years ago. It was inspired by my exposure to 2 people[0].
Between 2009 and 2012, I encountered several people who were very smart, but expressed their intelligence in a different way than I was familiar with. One I met personally, the other through media (YouTube, etc.) I realized at one point that what they had in common was this: their explanations and reasoning were precisely sufficient. They expressed themselves with exactly the right amount of evidence, logical flow and correct reasoning such that virtually everything they claimed was unassailable. I found myself strongly attracted to this type of thinking and in a short time, started second guessing all of my analysis and decision making and discarding any points that were not clear thought. It wasn't just emotional wants that were discarded, but in many cases, incorrectness as well.
One area that benefited quite a bit from this was in my investments. The best performing investments I've made were executed since that epiphany.
[0] (I prefer not to name them, lest I be disregarded as a fanboy, but the clues are in the comment)
One of the people he's referencing has become a political Rorschach test - people see what they want to see and don't actually look at what the picture is trying to convey.
Bah. Don't fall for this kind of bullshit manipulation.
> [0] (I prefer not to name them, lest I be disregarded as a fanboy, but the clues are in the comment)
Cite your sources mate. If they had such a profound affect on you, surely you can link to something they've said or written as an example.
But I'll bite: is it Eliezer Yudkowsky and Warren Buffett? Elon Musk and Steve Jobs? I want to get progressively more psychotic and unhinged as my guesses progress. Is it Slavoj Žižek and Donald Trump?
Paul Graham and Richard Stallman?
I don't believe in personalities. Wisdom is perishable.
What's interesting, and I didn't know this until I scanned this article, is that Reed Hastings also uses a First Principles approach. I mentioned my stock picks got better. I bought TSLA in 2012 and NFLX in 2013.
For Paul Graham, his body of essays is a great source for how he thinks through problem solving in general, and he takes on more than just science or tech related topics:
"From the start, Charlie and I have believed in having a rational and unbending standard for measuring what we have – or have not – accomplished. That keeps us from the temptation of seeing where the arrow of performance lands and then painting the bull’s eye around it."
Huge fan of Elon and Warren buffet. But I always wonder would they be who they are by lurking on HN trying to improve themselves? And they certainly didn’t get where they are by being on hn or similar forums. Even thought I don’t know them personally I feel The way they built their knowledge was in Avery different way thst you and I might be going about based on the click baity thread we are talking at currently. In that sense may be HN is a waste of time too?
The more I think about this the more I feel is thst we have it wrong. I think what they have is focus. I think what we have is distractions by virtue of seeking things thst improves us and on the internet there are so many of them that one may be all over the place. He who chases two rabbits catches none.
I see it a bit differently. Some people get on a cycle of taking action, reviewing the results, and learning to improve the results of their next action. All three of those I cited have that in their DNA (or so it seems to me). Learning from others is a key aspect of that approach. In reviewing the results, and even before taking the action, search for how others have approached the same problem. Not necessarily to copy them, but to identify what worked and adopt it, what didn't work and avoid it, then, synthesize and move forward to the next challenge.
A Musk quote that stuck with me came in the midst of one of his Twitter escapades wherein he was regularly attacked for seemingly erratic, likely sleep-deprived statements. He came across as very defensive to a reporter who asked him if he felt he could accept criticism. He responded, "How do you think rockets get into space?" He may not be so concerned about how Wall Street perceives his character, but when it comes to SpaceX, and likely all of his serious endeavors, he's relentlessly critical of solutions.
Hacker News is just one source to get ideas, learn new things and practice rational thinking. Folks around here are more than happy to help hone your skills. If you can carry that into daily life, you'll catch a rabbit or two.
I agree with what you say and perhaps what I am trying to say ineloquently is they have focus on what they want to do first and when they need a solution they go searching for it leveraging what others have done and reviewing it etc. I can’t speak for you but I am a regular visitor to hn and the content it shows and in that sense I am here first looking for ways to improve and then hoping to apply what I have learned to something when it’s needed and may be it will never be needed. Former is focused to unfocus as needed and latter is unfocused to focus someday. If that makes sense.
I tend to believe people have some sort of predisposed propensity to succeed, for whether definition of succeed we like to use, for whatever type of endeavour we’re pursuing.
Combine that with the genetic lotto—born in the right place at the right time in to the right family—and a fairly random dose of luck—right idea at the right time.
And there’s a statistical side to it too: only about one in one hundred people can be in to top 1%, and the Musks / Buffets / Grahams of the day world are more rare still.
Here in my garage, just bought this new Lamborghini here. It’s fun to drive up here in the Hollywood hills. But you know what I like more than materialistic things? Knowledge. In fact, I’m a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold two thousand new books that I bought. It’s like the billionaire Warren Buffett says, “the more you learn, the more you earn.”
Well, to go meta, you get about 80% of the way with 20% of "insight porn". After a while it's just repetition, rephrasing and marketing. Self help and business growth mindset etc whatever we call this can become a trap in itself. Go out, do something boring and you'll learn more through that than reading little enlightening maxims. Sure some of it is helpful. Read some Kahnemann, some Taleb, some Marcus Aurelius, some classic novels etc. Reading can be good, you don't have to learn everything on your own example. But it's often the case that these lessons are only intelligible in hindsight. You may feel like you intellectually understood it and got some insight orgasm from it, but getting some actual stuff done then becomes more beneficial. Advice always depends on where you are now. It's never generic.
These materials also put a lot of emphasis on the weird, the counterintuitive, the quirky, the paradoxical. But what you actually need to know first is the solid default normal way the world works. This can be learned from "boring" old textbooks, not from shiny new strange theories. Whenever you read something new about a surprising new discovery about the brain or physics or AI or whatever, think about whether you even know what the straightforward, non-counterintuitive result would have been. Do you even know the basics, the foundations or just have a large collection of curious bits and pieces of nice cocktail party did-you-know material?
>I’ve noticed there’s been a trend of people capitalizing on teaching others about “thinking how to think”, more or less. But does it really work, or does this stuff just make you better at winning an argument?
Depends. There's stuff you learn by experience, and there's stuff that you learn by studying.
Thinking how to think is somewhere in between - you learn a lot of it by experience (e.g. when you get duped in a certain way, you learn to recognize the pattern and avoid it), but you miss a lot too. And even the things you learn, you might merely apply subconsciously or practically, without really understanding them.
So having some kind of teacher / book / course into it makes sense, as much and in the same way it makes sense for math or chemistry or driving.
Generally any subject in which someone can be much better at it than you, and the principles of which can be communicated, makes sense to be taught...
That said, there are all kind of crap teachers online, people who make those mental models into some rigid dogma (either teachers or students), people who discovered/came up with some thinking models / mental guidelines and think they're the next Aristotle, and so on. If they make money off of ads or selling courses, I'ld stay well away...
One particular pet peeve is how people discover the "logical fallacies" and force them upon any conversation, when part of mastering conversing with humans is to know when and how to apply or break strict logical consistency - and understand context and applicability.
When someone a friend tells you not to go with X's proposition because they're not trustworthy, they're a criminal, etc, their talk might be an "ad hominen" and the proposition might be great in itself.
But the result of trusting X might still be bad (e.g. they might use what's a great proposition to their advantage to dupe you), and that's the point your friend tries to convey.
> My concern is that people are going to go around collecting mental models and they’re going to use them to justify their stupid decisions.
If I look beyond blog posts about how to think, your sentence seems like an accurate description of human behavior. Isn't this what has always happened, haven't people always used mental models they've collected to justify stupid decisions?
I'd be curious to hear more about the alternatives, or how and where to find balance. And I mean this seriously and expect it's a hard-to-possibly-unanswerable question. We have a limited ability and time to construct our own mental models about everything, and we are exposed to other's mental models at all times through communication. It's not possible to be completely independent about ideas. It's only possible to build on, practice, and prove out maybe a few ideas that came from others during a lifetime.
"Does it really work?" I think is a great and essential question, and for many of these items in the list, the answer has to be yes for someone in some context. Maybe the question is when do they work, and will they work for me?
“So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” - Ben Franklin
Couple that with so much advice that encourages people towards action with their current worldview and not introspection and then action, and it isn't too surprising that we end up with discussion-via-screaming-match as the standard in a public forum.
I think it was Jefferson who said something to the effect of “if you want to know what’s true, look at what all the great religions agree on”
Similarly, people have been writing about thinking for a looong time, so rather than jumping from framework to framework it’s good to read a few old books and see what the authors agree on.
I’m not an expert on what those agreements are, but off the top of my head:
-be more prepared than your competitor
-master principles and you can select your methods
-don’t have rigid tactics, things always change so adapt accordingly.
-chain is as strong as its weakest link
- etc
I've realized that the biggest obstacle in my life isn't about knowing what to do but mustering the will to do it. Nearly everyone knows a thing or two that they can do to improve their life or to maximize the chance of reaching their goals. But they don't do it. Not even after reading countless self-help books that always promises to solve this exact problem!
I think it is fair to accept the fact that we do _not_ have the full privileges of the system, and sometimes what we want to do gets overridden by other primal behaviors.
Here's a good TED talk on behavioral change. Short answer is that knowledge doesn't change behaviors as you pointed out. Knowing the right thing to do and actually doing it are very different things.
You can't teach people how to think. Like everything else only once it gets applied to do learn how to use it i.e. like everything else if you don't practice it's mostly useless because you have developed the intuition for using it (and even when you do it's still a lot of practice and you will still get it wrong.
There are steps to learning and copying is one of them, and if someone is willing to acknowledge this that's a win. The problem is when people decide someone else has done the heavy thinking for them and they just have to copy-paste mental models, as you're alluding to.
I've read all 3 of those and have found some interesting stuff but I'm not sure how much they actually changed my life because none of them think much about the most important aspect of teaching: how to get people to retain and apply stuff.
> 12. Demand Curves Slope Down: The harder something is to do, the fewer people will do it. For example, raise the price of a product and fewer people will buy it. Lower the price and more people will buy it. Economics 101.
Not always as true as you might think. There are Veblen goods [0], luxury status symbols for which the high price is part of the attraction.
More controversially, there may be Giffen goods [1]. Imagine a poor part of the world, where an average family spends half of its food budget on some cheap staple -- bread or rice or whatever -- and half on meat and fresh fruit and vegetables, but the staple part of the diet provides three-quarters of their calories. If the price of the staple rises , then their food budget will no longer provide enough calories. The only way they can make up the deficit is by buying less meat/fruit/veg and more of the staple: in other words, as the price of the staple rises, so demand for it goes up.
My favorite part of the paper that used field experiments to demonstrate that rice in Hunan is a Giffen good for the poorest consumers [0] is the cheeky inclusion of this quote from George Stigler:
> Perhaps as persuasive a proof [of the “Law of Demand”] as is readily summarized is this: if an economist were to demonstrate its failure in a particular market at a particular time, he would be assured of immortality, professionally speaking, and rapid promotion while still alive. Since most economists would not dislike either reward, we may assume that the total absence of exceptions is not from lack of trying to find them.
What's the controversy over whether these types of good exist?
Is it over whether the family would truly choose to buy more staple food and less luxury food based solely on cost and not some other figure of merit such as nutrition? For example, I could see a situation where a family might still choose to purchase luxuries in the event the staples went up in price in order to maintain the wider variety of nutrients they would get from the varied diet than what they would get from eating just the staple.
Obviously there is some limit to this, where the need for simple calories outweighs the need for a wide variety of nutrients, at least over short periods.
I believe the controversy is whether an example of this happening in real life has been found. Several possible instances have been pointed at -- e.g. during the Great Famine in Ireland -- but none has yet been fully accepted.
If you buy exactly the same amount of kg of staple as before, you won't have enough money to buy the same amount of other food stuffs as before, so you'll be short of calories. Assuming you can't spend more money on food, your only options are to go without or to buy more of the staple (and even less of the other foodstuffs).
Some made-up figures:
* Staple costs $1/kg, and provides 1500 calories/kg
* Other stuff costs $2/kg and provides 1000 calories/kg
Out of every dollar in your food budget, you spend:
* $0.50 on 0.5kg of staple for 750 calories
* $0.50 on 0.25kg of other stuff for 250 calories
for a total of 1000 calories for every dollar spent on food.
Then the price of staple goes up to, say, $1.20/kg.
If you stick to buying the same absolute amount of staple as before, your spending looks like this:
* $0.60 on 0.5kg of staple for 750 calories
* $0.40 on 0.2kg of other stuff for 200 calories.
You're 50 calories short.
You can get back up to 1000 calories per dollar by spending like this:
* $0.67 on ~0.56kg of staple for 833 calories
* $0.33 on ~0.17kg of other stuff for 167 calories
That's an absolute increase in staple consumption from 0.5kg to 0.56kg for every dollar spent on food -- a bit more than an 11% rise.
Simplest model: peasants get 90% of their calories from cheap grain, and the balance from expensive meat. The price of grain goes up, so now they can't afford meat and have to eat more grain to meet their caloric needs.
Overall interesting ideas, but I think he did a disservice to this one.
> 47. The Medium Is the Message: We pay too much attention to what is being said. But the medium of communication is more impactful. For example, the Internet’s impact on humanity has a bigger influence than anything that’s said on the Internet.
The concept here is that the character of the medium defines the types of ideas that can be transmitted through it. An example is how writing promotes logical and structures ideas, where television invokes emotion.
EDIT: a relevant example is comparing HN and fb. The are both internet-based and have high-speed responses. However, HK is text based and all ideas must be written in a way that is clear to the reader. FB has text, but also has the like/heart/laugh/hate button. I think this encourages "a response", whether you can articulate it or not. Also fb has images. Memes can be used, which are quite ambiguous and not a structured, logical statement. The different environments are a consequence of the rules that define the medium.
It's a very subtle concept. I do a pretty poor job explaining it to friends all the time.
I think of it as an extension of "to a person with a hammer, everything is a nail". There's only so many ways to use a hammer. There's only so many ways to use smoke signals, or twitter or a picket sign or a sitcom to convey an idea. The main takeaway is that they are all tools, each with their specific use.
Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan [0] is where the phrase is first seen, but it's a dense book and tough to read at times. It's quite theoretical, kinda like he's developing an information theory of communication mediums.
Amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman[1] is more specific to written text and tv, but is a much easier read and very eye-opening.
ALVY: Well, that's funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here. So ... so, here, just let me-I mean, all right. Come over here ... a second.
(Alvy gestures to the camera which follows him and the man in line to the back
of the crowded lobby. He moves over to a large stand-up movie poster and
pulls Marshall McLuban from behind the poster.)
MAN IN LINE: Oh.
ALVY: (To McLuhan) Tell him.
MCLUHAN: (To the man in line)
I heard what you were saying. You-you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.
I have a text file I've been keeping since 2003 full of "things other people said."
One day, maybe, I'll get around to tizzy it up and start a blog with some witty as fuck domain name and retire on the shoulders of every else's hard work.
You've caught my attention. Care to share it? I promise I won't host it. If you put the source quotes on github it could be a cool project that you accept pull requests to. And that does not preclude you from still making a good website out of it.
Totally agree. This is a classic clickbait title. Few months ago I came across a good resource that deconstructed the syntax of click bait sentences. Can’t find it now but came across this which you can try it for yourself https://www.contentrow.com/tools/link-bait-title-generator (I tired “mental models” and got pretty good results).
>40. Penny Problem Gap: Economists assume demand is linear, but people’s behavior totally changes once an action costs money. If the inventors of the Internet had known about it, spam wouldn’t be such a problem. If sending an email cost you $0.001, there’d be way less spam.
Or, more likely, the internet as we know it would not exist and it'd just be some crappy failed commercial venture where everything cost money and it never took off. Building commerce into protocols is a terrible idea.
Regarding 8, cultivating talent vs. genius - I'd argue an increasing majority of what we call genius nets out when we control for the effect of crazy meeting survivor bias.
As someone familiar with all of the listed ideas, I get the sense these contrarian proverbs form a kind of modern hacker subculture tribal knowledge. What I've noticed is that none of the most (or least) successful people I know think this way, it's like a view from the outside or the middle.
Maybe the co-incidence of financial success and a mind full of gnomic aphorisms is no better than random too?
It gives the sense that the whole thing is click-bait, designed to draw in the reader and then get them to sign up for for his mailing list. As I read the list I was thinking "This feels pretty content-free ... there are a few nuggets, but mostly it feels really fluffy."
Then there's the sign-up form, and everything became clearer. Colour me cynical[0], but it's the reaction the post provoked in me, so I thought I'd share it with other readers here in case they felt the same way.
I guess you didn't.
[0] The power of accurate observations is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it. -- George Bernard Shaw
It's fair & fine to come to the conclusion that the content is fluffy (plus I happen to agree with that conclusion here.) On the other hand, does being cynical automatically make an observation accurate? I think the question by @chance_state above is legitimate, inclusion of a cloud service in the page source is not strong evidence of your conclusion. The problem is that the online services in the page source are not created by the author and cannot be assumed to reflect directly on the content, and that all pages on the internet are intentionally designed to draw traffic. How many pages do you read that don't have a signup form, don't invite the reader to subscribe, aren't offering a value exchange of some kind?
> ... does being cynical automatically make an observation accurate?
Not at all, and that's not the claim made by GBS. It's the converse, that things that are accurate and true are often incorrectly dismissed under the umbrella of "cynicism".
> I think the question by @chance_state above is legitimate, inclusion of a cloud service in the page source is not strong evidence of your conclusion.
Agreed, but it did serve to crystallise the feeling that had been developing.
> ... all pages on the internet are intentionally designed to draw traffic.
Actually, that's not true. It' might be true in the world you inhabit, but most of the content that's directly relevant to my work is provided "as is", information and ideas, offered without a follow-up "Sign up for my weekly email".
> How many pages do you read that don't have a signup form, don't invite the reader to subscribe, ...
For me, most of them. I suspect we inhabit different circles, mine isn't full of people trying to develop a following. This isn't a criticism, it's an observation. I do, however, feel that when I read many of the more popular items linked from HN and other tech forums that I'm walking through a carnival and being beset by hawkers and barkers.
Not sure why some commenters have been put off by this. I actually learned a few things (and was reminded of a few other things I had forgotten) while going through this list. The stuff I disagreed with, I just skipped over.
Interestingly I was reading Charlie Munger's Biography - Poor Charlie's Almanac - over the weekend. My recollection is that it took Munger almost a couple of decades of living, reading and contemplating to start formulating his system of models and it did not gell for another 10-20 years.
He uses them not on the spur of the moment but in analyzing investments and this process can take a while (think weeks or months and not days).
These systems of mental models sound fascinating but I fear that unless the model has come from lived experience it will just be intellectual junk found - eaten, digested and out the rear rather fast with the only effect being intellectual blubber in your cerebral cortex. What one needs is a system of tutelage that might take a few years during which you can try out and codify these models one-by-one. Your list might be different than Munger or whomever but it will be tailored to your context and enable you to draw upon it with fluidity akin to a muscle reflex.
On a related note, I recall, from a Buddhist class on ethics, that Buddhist monastics have hundreds of rules that they have to observe. The story goes that when the historical Buddha formulated the order of monastics - there were no rules. Overtime in response to various incidents the rules were formulated and those incidents are recorded. The monastics are taught those stories that lie behind each rule to inculcate some notion of lived experience and a guideline for when/why that rule is to be used.
A list of rules is useless sans lived experience or a tradition that creates them is rather useless. You are better of throwing away the list and trying on your own supplemented by good reading. Charlie Munger His speeches and his reading recommendations are a good place to start.
You may also like Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger. Pretty much same ideas but aligned in more memorable way. Liked it way better than Poor Charlie's Almanac.
Great. Yet another online psuedo-intellectual "guru" with pretentious posts full of meaningless, vague trueisms. Why are posts like these so popular on Hacker News?
People are attracted with articles with pseudo-intellectual discussions, especially if they are filled with well-sounding buzz-terms like faustian bargain or overton window.
48 is wrong without qualification. A resource-rich country indeed can become both economically powerful and it's people empowered -- look at the US.
48 is true only when two more constraints apply: 1) when the natural resources are few (like only oil or diamonds), and 2) when the resource is dominated by monopoly, especially when abetted by the gov't, like Saudi Arabia or Russia, or 1970's South Africa.
the second law says that there are statistically (infinitely) many orders of magnitude more ways to be disordered than ordered, so the inescapable tendency is from order to disorder.
the same goes for a room. many orders of magnitude more ways of being disordered than ordered. it tends toward disorder without additional energy to keep it ordered.
It's much simpler to simulate your universe if we only have to render what you're observing. I remember the days when we had to keep deleting telescopes and microscopes until we had enough processing power. Trains caused a lot of scenery to pop in before the new algorithm - we tried telling customers that the increased speed would kill them.
The only reason your room gets messier and messier is because you are messy, there is no law and physics has nothing to do with it. It just makes you feel smarter because you can use "thermodynamic" in a sentence
Physics does have something to do with it. It takes less energy to leave a food plate on your night stand than to get up and bring it to the sink. It takes less energy to throw your clothes in a mess on a chair than to fold them and put them away. Then when you eventually clean everything up, you expend less energy than the sum of energies that it would have taken to keep it tidy. For example, you can make 1 trip with 4-5 plates and cups to put them away as opposed to 1 trip per item. So you turn an energy profit. Messiness is energy expenditure minimization.
You might ask why clean up at all. For most people there comes a time when the mess starts being distracting and once they start having to look for items, they start to expend more energy per action. So it makes sense to clean everything up and start over.
You can tidy your room and the mess (that they mistake for entropy) would be reduced.
The 2nd law of thermodynamics states that in an isolated system the entropy is always increasing (or at best constant), so the room analogy does not work.
Tidying your room would be adding energy to the system, to make it tidy. This is still in line woth thermodynamics where adding energy can decrease entropy
"Tidy" is a subjective quality, not an objective physical one. It does take mental energy to tidy a room, and without that effort it will tend to get messy through use. As long as you don't confuse mental energy for physical energy and tidiness for entropy in the literal sense, then the analogy works surprisingly well.
> For example, raise the price of a product and fewer people will buy it. Lower the price and more people will buy it. Economics 101.
There are of course exceptions, and knowing your demographic is important. I worked for a company that released a skincare product at an affordable price point, and no-one bought it. They raised the price, and people started buying. It was because they were in a premium product niche, so being affordable made the product look bad in comparison to other products on the shelf, and people looking to buy that product used price to qualify the products quality.
> 50. The Map Is Not the Territory: Reality will never match the elegance of theory. All models have inconsistencies, but some are still useful. Some maps are useful because they’re inaccurate. If you want to find an edge, look for what the map leaves out.
>> The world always makes sense. But it can be confusing. When it is, your model of the world is wrong.
That was my mistake when I first heard about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.
I was assuming that the economy was efficient and relatively fair and that made me see Bitcoin as a bubble. My assumption about economic efficiency was very wrong... Then I took the time to learn everything I could about the Federal Reserve Bank and money printing. I'm not going to make that mistake again.
Something I've noticed:
There's been some things that I initially thought were bubbles. But they seemed to work - I even started doubting myself. Turns out they were just longer lasting bubbles.
This is definitely something that I keep at the back of my mind. That said, my current world view is that the entire fiat monetary system itself is a bubble. In that context, cryptocurrencies are a lesser bubble and by virtue of their limited supply, they will continue going up in value as they are constantly propped up by an infinite supply of newly printed credit from banks. The cryptocurrency community's ability to continuously buy politicians and journalists also helps ensure continued dominance.
Everything that's happening around the world now perfectly aligns with my world view. Guess who is going to benefit from the Fed's massive covid-19 fiat injections?
“This is how to contemplate our conditioned existence in this fleeting world:”
“Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream;
Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.”
I've been slowly working my way through understanding a tiny fraction of systems that reveal the world. Doing it partly from a humanities perspective, where I look into examples from history and art as much as tech and business. It's incredibly overwhelming and wonderful. This is the way I spend my early mornings and walks. I know what you mean about the "how to think" blogs though. I'm just trying to teach myself how to think or at least notice underlying systems. (This is what I've been writing: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/blog/)
>>> Robustness Principle: Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. It’s a design guideline for software and a good rule for life:
My understanding is this is flat out wrong and bad for software development. Design software that is rigid in both what it accepts and sends. Loose standards lead to incompatiblities and chaos. Tightly define. This is not to say that your design should be inflexible, but for example a specification for data interchange should not accommodate loosely or incorrectly structured data.
The success of email and HTML disagree with you. Also most human interactions.
The standards definitions aren’t loose. But the network effect means everyone benefits when more nodes can exchange data because the individual implementations are forgiving of misformatted messages.
> "36. Creativity Begins at the Edge: Change starts away from the spotlight. Then, it moves towards the center. That’s why the most interesting ideas at a conference never come from the main stage. They come from the hallways and the bar after sunset"
Made me think that, when in times of Corona lock-down where most conferences have gone online, there is no real place away from the spotlight anymore, no hallway talk and no meeting at the bar after sunset.
We should have a replacement for that, but Discord chatter isn't it.
I read some stuff about how various cognitive biases produce poor investment decisions, like "fear of loss" and "sunk cost". I recognized that I fell prey to them.
I thought "how would I invest if I was investing Monopoly money just to win a board game?" and realized that my decisions would be completely different. With that gedanken experiment I was able to make better investment decisions, though I still can't entirely overcome the biases.
> 20. Bike-Shed Effect: A group of people working on a project will fight over the most trivial ideas. They’ll ignore what’s complicated. They’ll focus too much on easy-to-understand ideas at the expense of important, but hard to talk about ideas. For example, instead of approving plans for a complicated spaceship, the team would argue over the color of the astronaut's uniforms.
That's not quite what I understood by the bike-shed effect. In the version I heard, although the approval committee would indeed descend into endless arguments over the colour of the astronauts' uniforms, the complicated spaceship would get passed through on the nod: no one on the committee understands the technical details of the latter, so they defer to the experts, while they all grasp, and can make a contribution to, a decision on the former (or at least think they can).
I've seen this at work in people (including myself) as well. Wherever people have a natural, unusual strength that starts at a young age, they often have many underdeveloped abilities due to relying on their strength. (ex: smart kids never learn how to study and hit a wall in college)
Can somebody elaborate on the "go-for-it window"?
> . The Go-For-It Window: Large gaps between accelerating technologies and stagnating social norms create lucrative new business opportunities. But they are only available for a short time when people can capitalize on the difference between the real and perceived state of the world. For example, 2007 was the perfect time to launch the iPhone, but Google Glasses launched too early.
What was the "stagnantig social norms" in that benefited the iPhone era, yet left Google Glasses in the dustbin?
>> Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available. People don’t want to look like they’re lazy, so they find extra tasks to tackle, even if they’re trivial.
This can easily be fixed with the right project management approach and incentives. This problem is mostly relevant in corporate settings where there are no clear individual incentives for delivering results.
Working in a corporate setting. I think my management tries to actively counter that with arbitrary deadlines. That strategy does not work well either.
"8. Talent vs. Genius: Society is good at training talent but terrible at cultivating genius. Talented people are good at hitting targets others can’t hit, but geniuses find targets others can’t see."
If you can find targets others can't see, you may be a genius. Or delusional. Check your prescription interactions for clues.
50 is too much. Reading about yoga these days. Seems like following 5 Yamas & 5 Niyamas or noble eightfold path may keep clear from most of the troubles.
The concept of Differend -> A wrong or injustice that arises because the discourse in which the wrong might be expressed does not exist. This technology of Western Civilization retains coherence via a white supremacist patriarchal order based economic system. Racism is deciding what dies, guaranteeing profits. All meaning has been surgically drained over centuries of enmity leaving only the calculable.
But does it really work, or does this stuff just make you better at winning an argument?
My concern is that people are going to go around collecting mental models and they’re going to use them to justify their stupid decisions.
Some examples that come to mind:
https://fs.blog/
https://jamesclear.com/feynman-mental-models
https://www.lesswrong.com/