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Ask HN: What Is Your Worldview?
I've recently been struggling with the "Robert Greene" 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's clothing, and to worry about miscategorising people (both false negatives and false positives).
I want to know your worldview. I'm a strong believer in the cliche that you find what you'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.
Thank you.
- oldsklgdfth 6y ago"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.
- lookinward 6y agoThank 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 6y agoAt 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 6y agoBut some day we really might be able to control the weather. It is within our control to start working towards it today.
- LockAndLol 6y agoWe'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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- alexmingoia 6y agoThere is nothing to figure out. Go chop wood.