14 ms·

Ideas That Changed My Life

289 points by carltheperson 3y ago

irrational 3y ago
> People lie about their true opinions and conform to socially acceptable preferences instead. In private they’ll say one thing. In public, they’ll say another. Especially when your livelihood is on the line.
CraigJPerry 3y ago
> 3. Theory of Constraints: A system is only as strong as its weakest point. Focus on the bottleneck. Counterintuitively, if you break down the entire system and optimize each component individually, you’ll lower the effectiveness of the system. Optimize the entire system instead. This underpins a lot of what we call DevOps (i mean the actually useful interpretation of DevOps, not all the shit that gets a DevOps label in an attempt to sell something). Despite working with this idea every day for over a decade, the idea itself still blows my mind. Despite being theoretically quite succinct, it has so much practical depth that i struggle to see myself getting bored of applying the learnings from it. Anecdote: i landed in a role in a part of a big org that was on fire, but the fire wasn’t due to stupidity. The team was huge with genuinely no lemons on it (i later found out this was no accident - the head had been given permission to cherry pick staff from across the org and he took a lot of flak for causing brain drain in other parts of the org). They had a software component that everyone relied on in production but technically no one really owned. Everyone was maxed out, growth wasn’t the problem but an externally driven change in how the business worked was. The pace was non-negotiable. This component “worked” as far as we could tell. Volumes and the fact that some theoretical failure modes would be hard to detect in practice at that time, meant it was not possible to be confident that it was fully working correctly, but it was at least mostly working. The problem: no one could release changes to this component reliably but changes were often needed. Over 80% of releases were rolled back. On average it took 2-point-something releases to successfully get a change out to this component that didn’t need to be rolled back. Lots of optimisations had been applied to this component. This was not a stupid team and it did not suffer this pain willingly. There were software optimisations applied - mostly tools to abstract changes to be simpler to deal with. For example, one source of complexity was a bunch of rules that had to be dealt with but these could be handled in software allowing the human to just specify mostly the desired behaviours. That improved the situation but only slightly, also the continuously changing landscape meant this tooling itself became a moving target and a source of bugs. There were special review processes for changes, there were 3 experts in this huge org who reviewed everyone elses changes - this review process was excruciating to perform and involved examining a gargantuan model representation in excel. Still the failed releases ticked up. No other part of the system suffered in this way. There was popular thinking at the time was that this system just needed an owner. Of course no one wanted that thankless poisoned chalice. Applying ToC to this resulted in a system that needed no owner long term, the tools that been created were all disbanded, the review board too. The result was that newbies to the team pairing on a deliverable would be given responsibility to change that component as a way of flexing their solo skills.
flappyeagle 3y ago
We would all benefit from remembering this one > 23. Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.
- discarded1023 3y ago
  Indeed! Gall's SYSTEMANTICS [1] is worth a read in its entirety. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
- ranting-moth 3y ago
  Let me present the Paige Compositor. A typesetting machine if you like, made from 18,000 precision made parts in 1877. Well, 1877 is the start year of the contract. The project went on for about 15 years. 6 machines were ever made (out of 4,000 ordered). They kept failing. Meanwhile, a much more limited (initially) machine arrived on the scene, the Linotype machine. It was successfull and did run the world's news and magazine press for the next 100 years. It's really a fascinating read: https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2023/03/the-machine-that-bankrupted-mark-twain/ https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2023/03/the-machine...
  - ctxc 3y ago
    Really enjoyed the read, thank you!
- lll-o-lll 3y ago
  Incremental approaches are limited. A basic example of this is scaling. A chemical process worked out in a lab cannot be incrementally scaled for effective production with bigger test tubes. The entire production process must be designed again from scratch. Incremental approaches to designing a control system with many if statements will never evolve into a PID controller. Nor will a PID controller be evolved into being able to handle non-linearities. Scrum may be effective as an organisational process at a team level, but will fail utterly if it is applied to the entire organisation. Incremental approaches optimise, but that’s all they can do.
smitty1e 3y ago
> 24. Hock Principle: Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior. "Complexity is a subsidy."--Jonah Goldberg
hettygreen 3y ago
Another good idea that will change your life is to keep things short and simple. 51 ideas is like 43 too many :)
- elevaet 3y ago
  Totally, I came hoping for about 3-8 ideas that might change my life too. I can't be changing my life 51 times in one reading!
  - layer8 3y ago
    Maybe take one per week over the course of a year. ;)
- mdp2021 3y ago
  Offer your regards to wealth, and be grateful. Edit: practically, in fact, some of the points presented are stubs - and require more elaboration, on the contrary. Edit2: not to mention that Perell also expresses falsities just to bargain on words (like quantifiers).
- m463 3y ago
  - get enough sleep - don't eat junk - get out and exercise 6 days a week - commit - don't overcommit - forgive yourself - be sovereign
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    > Eric Idle: «Now, here's the meaning of life. (Thank you, Brigitte.) M-hmm. Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations» ~~~ Monty Python, The Meaning of Life
    - m463 3y ago
      very very misguided view of life. avoid eating sugar!
makeitdouble 3y ago
hmm, starting with these two so high in the list makes it difficult to properly read the rest. > 2. Doublespeak: People often say the opposite of what they mean > 4. Preference Falsification: People lie about their true opinions Are we supposed to apply these to the 48 other ideas that he pitches as his guiding lights ? Otherwise I think more than the ideas themselves, it's a good reminder that anyone having seen enough paradigms will have a prism of often contradicting ideas to look through any specific issue. None of these ideas would make sense on their own, nor has much value outside of being another perspective to complete the others. This is often lost when trying to pigeon hole a real situation into a single well-know pattern or single idea.
- sdwr 3y ago
  #2 is the truest statement ever stated. Other examples of the form are "people say things about themselves that are really about you", or "things about someone else that are really about themselves". Indirection (and proxies!!) are cornerstones of human communication. I've found it reasonably helpful to test all strong statements through those 3 lenses.
  - kaoD 3y ago
    I don't think this is a human trait but rather something ingrained in your particular culture. This doesn't feel right at all from my culture's perspective. We are not indirect at all.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    I need to find a way to deal with it (in me and others) beside avoiding social interactions :)
kelseyfrog 3y ago
It's funny that both Overton Window and Horseshoe Theory are both listed. They tend to contradict each other.
mif 3y ago
One idea that changed my life is stop believing that other people have changed their lives based on ideas. The only way of change is by habit.
- haswell 3y ago
  Ideas and habit change are rather intertwined. Habit change is itself just an idea until someone chooses to actually do it.
- nequo 3y ago
  > The only way of change is by habit. That’s a compelling idea. Maybe I’ll adopt it and get into a habit.
  - sdwr 3y ago
    This is why I try not to think anything, for any reason, to anyone, for any reason at all, ever.
  - swyx 3y ago
    did... did you just change your life based on an idea
- aik 3y ago
  One category of idea is a tool-in-a-toolbox idea. Many on this page is of that type. A lot of ideas in economics is this, for example. They become thinking tools that are easily synthesized into the brain as they are super easy conceptual ideas. So as you go about your day and come across a problem, your brain can pull from that toolbox to better solve the problem. I love sites full of wisdom like this. Sometimes there’s a tool buried deep in my toolbox that my brain forgot I had and this brings it back to the surface. And sometimes there’s a new tool I can grok/incorporate in seconds. And inevitably there will be a tool I don’t care about or agree with and simply discard it. Big win for very minimal investment of time.
- jrm4 3y ago
  This is so important. Over the years as someone who's constantly trying new note-taking mind mappy things, interacting with my own thoughts in the past, it took an embarrassingly long time to realize that one of the the fundamental differences between me and the computer is that I require multiple writes. (The other is that graphy mind-mappy tools on the computer are often pointless, because this is the thing that human brains are WAY BETTER AT than the computer. What the computer is good at is "perfect recall of specifics in the form of words")
irishloop 3y ago
> The world always makes sense. But it can be confusing. I just don't agree with this at all. I think its folly to assume the world will always make sense. As humans we seek to make sense of things, but not everything fits into our cognitive little boxes.
- moosedev 3y ago
  I agree with your disagree. The very idea of "making sense" is a human construct. The universe doesn't care about making sense - to us or otherwise, except to the extent that we are part of it, and some of us care. There's no magical rule that says "the world" should, will, or even can "make sense". (IMO :)
  - aik 3y ago
    The universe doesn’t have to care about making sense to us for us to make sense of it. I tend to think the only reasonable and scientific viewpoint is that it’s possible to make sense of everything. Anything else is defeatist.
  - _throwawayaway 3y ago
    But this magical rule does exist, it is a human construct called 'making sense' :)
- AmericanChopper 3y ago
  I agree with it fully, it’s only based on the assumption that all decisions a person makes are made for a reason. Which is almost certainly true. If you say that somebody’s decision making doesn’t make sense, the only actual explanations for that are either that you don’t understand their rationale, or that you’re making a value judgement that their rationale is bad. Neither of those things involve a lack of making sense. The claim “this doesn’t make sense…” is always associated with an implicit “…to me”. The same thing applies to anything that emerges from a system of multiple people making multiple decisions, or from any observation about nature. The only thing that changes is the complexity of what you’re trying to understand.
- 3y ago
kennethologist 3y ago
Site is taking long to load: https://archive.is/Hzmcu https://archive.is/Hzmcu
keyle 3y ago
Those are great! I think I should read them once a week.
BugsHack 3y ago
This post is right from ChatGPT. Like, “tell me 50 life wisdoms which can be earned through time” or something. We arrived the end of internet as we know it. I hate this.
- INeedMoreRam 3y ago
  [dead]
- _throwawayaway 3y ago
  I imagine for a human creator this might sound like an insult. Care to share some proof?
- Barrin92 3y ago
  >This post is right from ChatGPT It's a self-help blog post, they had the ChatGPT prose style down before ChatGPT existed. For all the people who are convinced that humans are just running on autocomplete, with this particular genre they may actually have a point.
- majewsky 3y ago
  No, it's the reverse. Posts like this are a dime a dozen, so they are probably over-represented in GPT's training set.
vishnugupta 3y ago
Money is a social obligation that can be precisely quantified. This succinct nugget of a concept which appears at the end of David Graeber’s magnum opus, Debt: The First 5000 Years, has completely transformed the way I look at and understand the world. It’s as if I was waiting all my life for that exact book.
owenpalmer 3y ago
> 9. Competition is for Losers This one is weird. First of all, competition can be very healthy and good for everyone. Sure, there's toxic games you can play in life, but anyone who's ever actually competed at something knows the difference.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  I wonder if it's the Peter Thiel meaning of the phrase. His entire book Zero to One is about how one should strive to do things no one else has done, for true capturing of the market. Of course, that's much easier said than done.
  - sharemywin 3y ago
    There's still competition your just playing with a stacked deck.
- rapnie 3y ago
  It is maybe too strongly phrased and not universally applicable (where would sports be without competition?). But it is an interesting idea nonetheless. In general we are so deeply instilled with the notion that we should be competitive at all things. Our whole society is based on hyper competitiveness. And look where that gets us. We say that competition is a law of nature, survival of the fittest, etc. But there are a lot of synergetic, collaborative processes in nature. And, while there's competition on micro scales, don't ecosystems find their balance in what species leave for others to thrive on? Is competition the best way, in all those cases we think it is? Or is it just the easiest, low-friction way for an individual to gain advantage? And not so much benefiting the collective. Are coopetition, collaboration, cross-pollination more advanced and sophisticated mechanisms of evolution? Maybe requiring higher levels of civilization than mankind can bring to the table right now.
- m463 3y ago
  I've alway shied away from sort of personal competition. On the other hand, I have tried to "play to win" with stuff I do, which is giving it everything to succeed. Just not with the intent to make someone else lose. I've never really enjoyed pvp games. Can someone explain healthy competition in their words?
pazimzadeh 3y ago
> Penny Problem Gap: Economists assume demand is linear, but people’s behavior totally changes once an action costs money. If the inventors of the Internet had known about it, spam wouldn’t be such a problem. If sending an email cost you $0.001, there’d be way less spam. Freakonomics argues it can have the opposite effect, of "licensing" undesired behavior by those who can afford to pay the cost. Something to think about when it comes to carbon credits, etc.. Here's an idea which will hopefully change someone's life: If you take the best parts of in silico computing and the best parts of synthetic biology, you can make transformative hybrid devices much faster than trying to make just making tinier and tinier computers or smarter and smarter cells. Example: Mimee, M., N. Nadeau, T. J. Hayward, S. Carim, C. A. Flanagan, J. Jerger, S. Collins, T. R. McDonnell, R. N. Swartwout, W. C. Citorik, S. H. Bulovic, R. Langer, and G. Traverso. 2018. An ingestible bacterial-electronic system to monitor gastrointestinal health. Science 360: 915-918. doi: 10.1126/science.aas9315. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6430580/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6430580/
- hiharryhere 3y ago
  Anecdotally a similar effect happened with a friend’s childcare center. They were sick of parents showing up late to pick their kids up so they instituted a penalty of $x for every minute a parent was late. More parents ended up being late because they felt less guilty knowing they could just pay the penalty. The social pressure to be on time was replaced by a financial one.
  - schoen 3y ago
    See also "A Fine is a Price": https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/468061 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/468061
    - hiharryhere 3y ago
      Ha! Perhaps I read about that some time ago and my brain decided to file it away as a memory of my own. Thanks for sharing.
  - 3y ago
irchans 3y ago
I really like this idea "Optimism in the face of uncertainty". I love that the idea arises from real mathematical theorems. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030326471730268X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03032... See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
tunnuz 3y ago
Can anybody elaborate on the overlap between this and the Great Mental Models (https://fs.blog/tgmm/ https://fs.blog/tgmm/)?
Ensorceled 3y ago
I found the biases revealed by some of the examples fascinating, for example: > 16. Russell Conjugation: Journalists often change the meaning of a sentence by replacing one word with a synonym that implies a different meaning. For example, the same person can support an estate tax but oppose a death tax Why did they choose “journalists” when the “death tax” narrative was created by politicians, a much better example group for this conjugation. > 18. Overton Window: You can control thought without limiting speech. You can do it by defining the limits of acceptable thought while allowing for lively debate within these barriers. For example, Fox News and MSNBC set limits on what political thoughts they consider acceptable, but in the grand scheme of things, they’re both fairly conventional. While this is true of MSNBC, Fox News is clearly swinging to the right more and more. > 41. The Invisible Hand: Markets aggregate knowledge. Rising prices signal falling supply or increased demand, which incentivizes an increase in production. The opposite is true for falling prices. Prices are a signal wrapped in an incentive. More recently, the invisible hand has been shown to have its thumb on the scale.
- blowski 3y ago
  The Overton Window works as a concept when we all talk to each other. But we now have three separate echo chambers - "Left", "Right", "Center" - and they each have their own Overton Window.
  - tpoacher 3y ago
    That's because what was described above isnt the overton window. It's a quote by Noam Chomsky. The actual definition of the Overton window exactly predicts what you both describe. See wikipedia for a better description.
  - jutrewag 3y ago
    I wish there was a sizable center echo chamber, unfortunately there isn’t really one.
    - zaccusl 3y ago
      That's because the center doesn't work for many things. If you support individual patients making their own healthcare decisions with their doctors, how do you find the center with someone who wants to take that right away for reasons that have zero effect on them? If you support a consenting adults right to love and marry whichever consenting adult they want, how do you find the center with someone who wants to tell people which consenting adults they can and can't marry? If you think people should not be denied jobs or housing based solely on what's in the their pants, how do you find the center with people who think it's okay to deny people jobs and housing based on what's in their pants? How do you find the center with the Nazi party? The center is meaningless for most issues that actually matter.
prakhar897 3y ago
Sorry for being rude. The above article sounds like written by GPT. Also, the author's tweets look like this: "If you really wanna learn about somebody, skip the 60 minute interview and have them drive you through New York City for 15 minutes." And then this person calls himself "The Writing Guy" on his twitter bio and unironically sells a writing course.
- punnerud 3y ago
  ChatGPT/OpenAIs detector does not agree: “The classifier considers the text to be very unlikely AI-generated.” I pasted first half of the article into it. https://platform.openai.com/ai-text-classifier https://platform.openai.com/ai-text-classifier
  - suddenclarity 3y ago
    That's the tool that only can correctly classify 26% of AI written text?
  - prakhar897 3y ago
    Here's one written by ChatGPT. https://sharegpt.com/c/cjnFahj https://sharegpt.com/c/cjnFahj 2 in the top 5 matches the handwritten article.
- zmxz 3y ago
  Could you explain how's that related to 51 ideas that are listed on the link? I'm struggling to see the connection you are seeing, can you clarify? Are the ideas mentioned worth less because you found a potential way to discredit the person listing them?
  - pcthrowaway 3y ago
    Opportunity cost. We'd do better to discuss something that wasn't GPT vomit. Especially this GPT vomit, which is not very good
    - 3y ago
thenerdhead 3y ago
I hate when authors include their own ideas inside a list of very notable ones while not including the original ideas they used. It comes off so pompous. Not that we can't stand on the shoulders of giants, but come on. Do you really need to include your unoriginal "ideas" in the same list and claim you came up with it? "The Never-Ending Now" - Also just known as novelty bias or "shiny object syndrome". Or simply put, neomania. Life has gone through 24 hour news cycles for millennia, this isn't an unique idea although the author has obviously claimed the phrase on the internet already.
emrah 3y ago
> 6. Mimetic Theory of Desire: Humans are like sheep Not quite.. We have mirror neurons, we imitate to learn (in fact just watching is sufficient) but this behavior can be overridden (thanks to prefrontal cortex) but most don't apparently
kirso 3y ago
I'll add one by collabfund that might be relevant for the crowd here: *Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking.* There is [little correlation between](http://climatescience.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228620-e-305 http://climatescience.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/978...) climate change denial and scientific literacy. But there is a strong correlation between climate change denial and political affiliation. That’s an extreme example, but everyone has views persuaded by identity over pure analysis. There’s four parts to this: • Tribes are everywhere: Countries, states, parties, companies, industries, departments, investment styles, economic philosophies, religions, families, schools, majors, credentials, Twitter communities. • People are drawn to tribes because there’s comfort in knowing others understand your background and goals. • Tribes reduce the ability to challenge ideas or diversify your views because no one wants to lose support of the tribe. • Tribes are as self-interested as people, encouraging ideas and narratives that promote their survival. But they’re exponentially more influential than any single person. So tribes are very effective at promoting views that aren’t analytical or rational, and people loyal to their tribes are very poor at realizing it.
CapstanRoller 3y ago
>Horseshoe Theory: Extreme opposites tend to look the same. For example, a far-right movement and a far-left movement can be equally violent or desire a similar outcome. This is terrible political ignorance disguised as "advice". Violence is the most fundamental form of influence, and is not owned by any particular political party or position, nor does the willingness to use violence communicate anything except that group's lack of commitment to pacifism. This is akin to saying that serial killers and carpenters are basically the same because they both use sharp objects. In fact, you can equate any political position to any other, or literally any sovereign group of people, when you account for the fact that all of them have gone to war or committed some other act of violence to further their interests. In fact, this is the Fox News/neocon Republican talking point: "anti-fascists are the same as fascists, because they harm fascists" Does the author really think in such simplistic terms?
- sharemywin 3y ago
  outside of the political analogy. this seems like a symmetry argument, which can have applications like realizing tic tac toe can be reduce by using rotational and mirror symmetry. I'm sure math people have better names but you get the point.
tatrajim 3y ago
Learning foreign languages as an adult is valuable for facilitating thinking about the world in very different ways. In my case, learning Korean in my 20s helped me understand group dynamics and hierarchies (they are built into the verbs themselves) in a way my English-language background never could. Classical Chinese gave me conceptual gifts, such as "principle" 理 vs. "material force" 氣 , and Japanese (very similar to Korean, but with important differences in nuance) the power of understatement and indirection.
archagon 3y ago
In what ways was this person’s life changed by these ideas?
sharemywin 3y ago
I found this article very useful as much for the comments as the article. HN does have some really smart and insightful people.

289 points by carltheperson 3y ago

> People lie about their true opinions and conform to socially acceptable preferences instead. In private they’ll say one thing. In public, they’ll say another. Especially when your livelihood is on the line.

CraigJPerry 3y ago

> 3. Theory of Constraints: A system is only as strong as its weakest point. Focus on the bottleneck. Counterintuitively, if you break down the entire system and optimize each component individually, you’ll lower the effectiveness of the system. Optimize the entire system instead. This underpins a lot of what we call DevOps (i mean the actually useful interpretation of DevOps, not all the shit that gets a DevOps label in an attempt to sell something). Despite working with this idea every day for over a decade, the idea itself still blows my mind. Despite being theoretically quite succinct, it has so much practical depth that i struggle to see myself getting bored of applying the learnings from it. Anecdote: i landed in a role in a part of a big org that was on fire, but the fire wasn’t due to stupidity. The team was huge with genuinely no lemons on it (i later found out this was no accident - the head had been given permission to cherry pick staff from across the org and he took a lot of flak for causing brain drain in other parts of the org). They had a software component that everyone relied on in production but technically no one really owned. Everyone was maxed out, growth wasn’t the problem but an externally driven change in how the business worked was. The pace was non-negotiable. This component “worked” as far as we could tell. Volumes and the fact that some theoretical failure modes would be hard to detect in practice at that time, meant it was not possible to be confident that it was fully working correctly, but it was at least mostly working. The problem: no one could release changes to this component reliably but changes were often needed. Over 80% of releases were rolled back. On average it took 2-point-something releases to successfully get a change out to this component that didn’t need to be rolled back. Lots of optimisations had been applied to this component. This was not a stupid team and it did not suffer this pain willingly. There were software optimisations applied - mostly tools to abstract changes to be simpler to deal with. For example, one source of complexity was a bunch of rules that had to be dealt with but these could be handled in software allowing the human to just specify mostly the desired behaviours. That improved the situation but only slightly, also the continuously changing landscape meant this tooling itself became a moving target and a source of bugs. There were special review processes for changes, there were 3 experts in this huge org who reviewed everyone elses changes - this review process was excruciating to perform and involved examining a gargantuan model representation in excel. Still the failed releases ticked up. No other part of the system suffered in this way. There was popular thinking at the time was that this system just needed an owner. Of course no one wanted that thankless poisoned chalice. Applying ToC to this resulted in a system that needed no owner long term, the tools that been created were all disbanded, the review board too. The result was that newbies to the team pairing on a deliverable would be given responsibility to change that component as a way of flexing their solo skills.

flappyeagle 3y ago

We would all benefit from remembering this one > 23. Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

discarded1023 3y ago
Indeed! Gall's SYSTEMANTICS [1] is worth a read in its entirety. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics
ranting-moth 3y ago
Let me present the Paige Compositor. A typesetting machine if you like, made from 18,000 precision made parts in 1877. Well, 1877 is the start year of the contract. The project went on for about 15 years. 6 machines were ever made (out of 4,000 ordered). They kept failing. Meanwhile, a much more limited (initially) machine arrived on the scene, the Linotype machine. It was successfull and did run the world's news and magazine press for the next 100 years. It's really a fascinating read: https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2023/03/the-machine-that-bankrupted-mark-twain/ https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2023/03/the-machine...
- ctxc 3y ago
  Really enjoyed the read, thank you!
lll-o-lll 3y ago
Incremental approaches are limited. A basic example of this is scaling. A chemical process worked out in a lab cannot be incrementally scaled for effective production with bigger test tubes. The entire production process must be designed again from scratch. Incremental approaches to designing a control system with many if statements will never evolve into a PID controller. Nor will a PID controller be evolved into being able to handle non-linearities. Scrum may be effective as an organisational process at a team level, but will fail utterly if it is applied to the entire organisation. Incremental approaches optimise, but that’s all they can do.

smitty1e 3y ago

> 24. Hock Principle: Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior. "Complexity is a subsidy."--Jonah Goldberg

hettygreen 3y ago

Another good idea that will change your life is to keep things short and simple. 51 ideas is like 43 too many :)

elevaet 3y ago
Totally, I came hoping for about 3-8 ideas that might change my life too. I can't be changing my life 51 times in one reading!
- layer8 3y ago
  Maybe take one per week over the course of a year. ;)
mdp2021 3y ago
Offer your regards to wealth, and be grateful. Edit: practically, in fact, some of the points presented are stubs - and require more elaboration, on the contrary. Edit2: not to mention that Perell also expresses falsities just to bargain on words (like quantifiers).
m463 3y ago
- get enough sleep - don't eat junk - get out and exercise 6 days a week - commit - don't overcommit - forgive yourself - be sovereign
- mdp2021 3y ago
  > Eric Idle: «Now, here's the meaning of life. (Thank you, Brigitte.) M-hmm. Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations» ~~~ Monty Python, The Meaning of Life
  - m463 3y ago
    very very misguided view of life. avoid eating sugar!

makeitdouble 3y ago

hmm, starting with these two so high in the list makes it difficult to properly read the rest. > 2. Doublespeak: People often say the opposite of what they mean > 4. Preference Falsification: People lie about their true opinions Are we supposed to apply these to the 48 other ideas that he pitches as his guiding lights ? Otherwise I think more than the ideas themselves, it's a good reminder that anyone having seen enough paradigms will have a prism of often contradicting ideas to look through any specific issue. None of these ideas would make sense on their own, nor has much value outside of being another perspective to complete the others. This is often lost when trying to pigeon hole a real situation into a single well-know pattern or single idea.

sdwr 3y ago
#2 is the truest statement ever stated. Other examples of the form are "people say things about themselves that are really about you", or "things about someone else that are really about themselves". Indirection (and proxies!!) are cornerstones of human communication. I've found it reasonably helpful to test all strong statements through those 3 lenses.
- kaoD 3y ago
  I don't think this is a human trait but rather something ingrained in your particular culture. This doesn't feel right at all from my culture's perspective. We are not indirect at all.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  I need to find a way to deal with it (in me and others) beside avoiding social interactions :)

kelseyfrog 3y ago

It's funny that both Overton Window and Horseshoe Theory are both listed. They tend to contradict each other.

mif 3y ago

One idea that changed my life is stop believing that other people have changed their lives based on ideas. The only way of change is by habit.

haswell 3y ago
Ideas and habit change are rather intertwined. Habit change is itself just an idea until someone chooses to actually do it.
nequo 3y ago
> The only way of change is by habit. That’s a compelling idea. Maybe I’ll adopt it and get into a habit.
- sdwr 3y ago
  This is why I try not to think anything, for any reason, to anyone, for any reason at all, ever.
- swyx 3y ago
  did... did you just change your life based on an idea
aik 3y ago
One category of idea is a tool-in-a-toolbox idea. Many on this page is of that type. A lot of ideas in economics is this, for example. They become thinking tools that are easily synthesized into the brain as they are super easy conceptual ideas. So as you go about your day and come across a problem, your brain can pull from that toolbox to better solve the problem. I love sites full of wisdom like this. Sometimes there’s a tool buried deep in my toolbox that my brain forgot I had and this brings it back to the surface. And sometimes there’s a new tool I can grok/incorporate in seconds. And inevitably there will be a tool I don’t care about or agree with and simply discard it. Big win for very minimal investment of time.
jrm4 3y ago
This is so important. Over the years as someone who's constantly trying new note-taking mind mappy things, interacting with my own thoughts in the past, it took an embarrassingly long time to realize that one of the the fundamental differences between me and the computer is that I require multiple writes. (The other is that graphy mind-mappy tools on the computer are often pointless, because this is the thing that human brains are WAY BETTER AT than the computer. What the computer is good at is "perfect recall of specifics in the form of words")

irishloop 3y ago

> The world always makes sense. But it can be confusing. I just don't agree with this at all. I think its folly to assume the world will always make sense. As humans we seek to make sense of things, but not everything fits into our cognitive little boxes.

moosedev 3y ago
I agree with your disagree. The very idea of "making sense" is a human construct. The universe doesn't care about making sense - to us or otherwise, except to the extent that we are part of it, and some of us care. There's no magical rule that says "the world" should, will, or even can "make sense". (IMO :)
- aik 3y ago
  The universe doesn’t have to care about making sense to us for us to make sense of it. I tend to think the only reasonable and scientific viewpoint is that it’s possible to make sense of everything. Anything else is defeatist.
- _throwawayaway 3y ago
  But this magical rule does exist, it is a human construct called 'making sense' :)
AmericanChopper 3y ago
I agree with it fully, it’s only based on the assumption that all decisions a person makes are made for a reason. Which is almost certainly true. If you say that somebody’s decision making doesn’t make sense, the only actual explanations for that are either that you don’t understand their rationale, or that you’re making a value judgement that their rationale is bad. Neither of those things involve a lack of making sense. The claim “this doesn’t make sense…” is always associated with an implicit “…to me”. The same thing applies to anything that emerges from a system of multiple people making multiple decisions, or from any observation about nature. The only thing that changes is the complexity of what you’re trying to understand.
3y ago

kennethologist 3y ago

Site is taking long to load: https://archive.is/Hzmcu https://archive.is/Hzmcu

keyle 3y ago

Those are great! I think I should read them once a week.

BugsHack 3y ago

This post is right from ChatGPT. Like, “tell me 50 life wisdoms which can be earned through time” or something. We arrived the end of internet as we know it. I hate this.

INeedMoreRam 3y ago
[dead]
_throwawayaway 3y ago
I imagine for a human creator this might sound like an insult. Care to share some proof?
Barrin92 3y ago
>This post is right from ChatGPT It's a self-help blog post, they had the ChatGPT prose style down before ChatGPT existed. For all the people who are convinced that humans are just running on autocomplete, with this particular genre they may actually have a point.
majewsky 3y ago
No, it's the reverse. Posts like this are a dime a dozen, so they are probably over-represented in GPT's training set.

vishnugupta 3y ago

Money is a social obligation that can be precisely quantified. This succinct nugget of a concept which appears at the end of David Graeber’s magnum opus, Debt: The First 5000 Years, has completely transformed the way I look at and understand the world. It’s as if I was waiting all my life for that exact book.

owenpalmer 3y ago

> 9. Competition is for Losers This one is weird. First of all, competition can be very healthy and good for everyone. Sure, there's toxic games you can play in life, but anyone who's ever actually competed at something knows the difference.

satvikpendem 3y ago
I wonder if it's the Peter Thiel meaning of the phrase. His entire book Zero to One is about how one should strive to do things no one else has done, for true capturing of the market. Of course, that's much easier said than done.
- sharemywin 3y ago
  There's still competition your just playing with a stacked deck.
rapnie 3y ago
It is maybe too strongly phrased and not universally applicable (where would sports be without competition?). But it is an interesting idea nonetheless. In general we are so deeply instilled with the notion that we should be competitive at all things. Our whole society is based on hyper competitiveness. And look where that gets us. We say that competition is a law of nature, survival of the fittest, etc. But there are a lot of synergetic, collaborative processes in nature. And, while there's competition on micro scales, don't ecosystems find their balance in what species leave for others to thrive on? Is competition the best way, in all those cases we think it is? Or is it just the easiest, low-friction way for an individual to gain advantage? And not so much benefiting the collective. Are coopetition, collaboration, cross-pollination more advanced and sophisticated mechanisms of evolution? Maybe requiring higher levels of civilization than mankind can bring to the table right now.
m463 3y ago
I've alway shied away from sort of personal competition. On the other hand, I have tried to "play to win" with stuff I do, which is giving it everything to succeed. Just not with the intent to make someone else lose. I've never really enjoyed pvp games. Can someone explain healthy competition in their words?

pazimzadeh 3y ago

> Penny Problem Gap: Economists assume demand is linear, but people’s behavior totally changes once an action costs money. If the inventors of the Internet had known about it, spam wouldn’t be such a problem. If sending an email cost you $0.001, there’d be way less spam. Freakonomics argues it can have the opposite effect, of "licensing" undesired behavior by those who can afford to pay the cost. Something to think about when it comes to carbon credits, etc.. Here's an idea which will hopefully change someone's life: If you take the best parts of in silico computing and the best parts of synthetic biology, you can make transformative hybrid devices much faster than trying to make just making tinier and tinier computers or smarter and smarter cells. Example: Mimee, M., N. Nadeau, T. J. Hayward, S. Carim, C. A. Flanagan, J. Jerger, S. Collins, T. R. McDonnell, R. N. Swartwout, W. C. Citorik, S. H. Bulovic, R. Langer, and G. Traverso. 2018. An ingestible bacterial-electronic system to monitor gastrointestinal health. Science 360: 915-918. doi: 10.1126/science.aas9315. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6430580/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6430580/

hiharryhere 3y ago
Anecdotally a similar effect happened with a friend’s childcare center. They were sick of parents showing up late to pick their kids up so they instituted a penalty of $x for every minute a parent was late. More parents ended up being late because they felt less guilty knowing they could just pay the penalty. The social pressure to be on time was replaced by a financial one.
- schoen 3y ago
  See also "A Fine is a Price": https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/468061 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/468061
  - hiharryhere 3y ago
    Ha! Perhaps I read about that some time ago and my brain decided to file it away as a memory of my own. Thanks for sharing.
- 3y ago

irchans 3y ago

I really like this idea "Optimism in the face of uncertainty". I love that the idea arises from real mathematical theorems. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030326471730268X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03032... See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit

tunnuz 3y ago

Can anybody elaborate on the overlap between this and the Great Mental Models (https://fs.blog/tgmm/ https://fs.blog/tgmm/)?

Ensorceled 3y ago

I found the biases revealed by some of the examples fascinating, for example: > 16. Russell Conjugation: Journalists often change the meaning of a sentence by replacing one word with a synonym that implies a different meaning. For example, the same person can support an estate tax but oppose a death tax Why did they choose “journalists” when the “death tax” narrative was created by politicians, a much better example group for this conjugation. > 18. Overton Window: You can control thought without limiting speech. You can do it by defining the limits of acceptable thought while allowing for lively debate within these barriers. For example, Fox News and MSNBC set limits on what political thoughts they consider acceptable, but in the grand scheme of things, they’re both fairly conventional. While this is true of MSNBC, Fox News is clearly swinging to the right more and more. > 41. The Invisible Hand: Markets aggregate knowledge. Rising prices signal falling supply or increased demand, which incentivizes an increase in production. The opposite is true for falling prices. Prices are a signal wrapped in an incentive. More recently, the invisible hand has been shown to have its thumb on the scale.

blowski 3y ago
The Overton Window works as a concept when we all talk to each other. But we now have three separate echo chambers - "Left", "Right", "Center" - and they each have their own Overton Window.
- tpoacher 3y ago
  That's because what was described above isnt the overton window. It's a quote by Noam Chomsky. The actual definition of the Overton window exactly predicts what you both describe. See wikipedia for a better description.
- jutrewag 3y ago
  I wish there was a sizable center echo chamber, unfortunately there isn’t really one.
  - zaccusl 3y ago
    That's because the center doesn't work for many things. If you support individual patients making their own healthcare decisions with their doctors, how do you find the center with someone who wants to take that right away for reasons that have zero effect on them? If you support a consenting adults right to love and marry whichever consenting adult they want, how do you find the center with someone who wants to tell people which consenting adults they can and can't marry? If you think people should not be denied jobs or housing based solely on what's in the their pants, how do you find the center with people who think it's okay to deny people jobs and housing based on what's in their pants? How do you find the center with the Nazi party? The center is meaningless for most issues that actually matter.

prakhar897 3y ago

Sorry for being rude. The above article sounds like written by GPT. Also, the author's tweets look like this: "If you really wanna learn about somebody, skip the 60 minute interview and have them drive you through New York City for 15 minutes." And then this person calls himself "The Writing Guy" on his twitter bio and unironically sells a writing course.

punnerud 3y ago
ChatGPT/OpenAIs detector does not agree: “The classifier considers the text to be very unlikely AI-generated.” I pasted first half of the article into it. https://platform.openai.com/ai-text-classifier https://platform.openai.com/ai-text-classifier
- suddenclarity 3y ago
  That's the tool that only can correctly classify 26% of AI written text?
- prakhar897 3y ago
  Here's one written by ChatGPT. https://sharegpt.com/c/cjnFahj https://sharegpt.com/c/cjnFahj 2 in the top 5 matches the handwritten article.
zmxz 3y ago
Could you explain how's that related to 51 ideas that are listed on the link? I'm struggling to see the connection you are seeing, can you clarify? Are the ideas mentioned worth less because you found a potential way to discredit the person listing them?
- pcthrowaway 3y ago
  Opportunity cost. We'd do better to discuss something that wasn't GPT vomit. Especially this GPT vomit, which is not very good
  - 3y ago

thenerdhead 3y ago

I hate when authors include their own ideas inside a list of very notable ones while not including the original ideas they used. It comes off so pompous. Not that we can't stand on the shoulders of giants, but come on. Do you really need to include your unoriginal "ideas" in the same list and claim you came up with it? "The Never-Ending Now" - Also just known as novelty bias or "shiny object syndrome". Or simply put, neomania. Life has gone through 24 hour news cycles for millennia, this isn't an unique idea although the author has obviously claimed the phrase on the internet already.

emrah 3y ago

> 6. Mimetic Theory of Desire: Humans are like sheep Not quite.. We have mirror neurons, we imitate to learn (in fact just watching is sufficient) but this behavior can be overridden (thanks to prefrontal cortex) but most don't apparently

kirso 3y ago

I'll add one by collabfund that might be relevant for the crowd here: *Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking.* There is [little correlation between](http://climatescience.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228620-e-305 http://climatescience.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/978...) climate change denial and scientific literacy. But there is a strong correlation between climate change denial and political affiliation. That’s an extreme example, but everyone has views persuaded by identity over pure analysis. There’s four parts to this: • Tribes are everywhere: Countries, states, parties, companies, industries, departments, investment styles, economic philosophies, religions, families, schools, majors, credentials, Twitter communities. • People are drawn to tribes because there’s comfort in knowing others understand your background and goals. • Tribes reduce the ability to challenge ideas or diversify your views because no one wants to lose support of the tribe. • Tribes are as self-interested as people, encouraging ideas and narratives that promote their survival. But they’re exponentially more influential than any single person. So tribes are very effective at promoting views that aren’t analytical or rational, and people loyal to their tribes are very poor at realizing it.

CapstanRoller 3y ago

>Horseshoe Theory: Extreme opposites tend to look the same. For example, a far-right movement and a far-left movement can be equally violent or desire a similar outcome. This is terrible political ignorance disguised as "advice". Violence is the most fundamental form of influence, and is not owned by any particular political party or position, nor does the willingness to use violence communicate anything except that group's lack of commitment to pacifism. This is akin to saying that serial killers and carpenters are basically the same because they both use sharp objects. In fact, you can equate any political position to any other, or literally any sovereign group of people, when you account for the fact that all of them have gone to war or committed some other act of violence to further their interests. In fact, this is the Fox News/neocon Republican talking point: "anti-fascists are the same as fascists, because they harm fascists" Does the author really think in such simplistic terms?

sharemywin 3y ago
outside of the political analogy. this seems like a symmetry argument, which can have applications like realizing tic tac toe can be reduce by using rotational and mirror symmetry. I'm sure math people have better names but you get the point.

tatrajim 3y ago

Learning foreign languages as an adult is valuable for facilitating thinking about the world in very different ways. In my case, learning Korean in my 20s helped me understand group dynamics and hierarchies (they are built into the verbs themselves) in a way my English-language background never could. Classical Chinese gave me conceptual gifts, such as "principle" 理 vs. "material force" 氣 , and Japanese (very similar to Korean, but with important differences in nuance) the power of understatement and indirection.

archagon 3y ago

In what ways was this person’s life changed by these ideas?

sharemywin 3y ago

I found this article very useful as much for the comments as the article. HN does have some really smart and insightful people.