4 ms·

I actually changed my mind based on some simple ideas. Carol Dweck wrote a book called Mindset, which talks about two mindsets: a fixed mindset and a growth mi

by wenc 4y ago

I actually changed my mind based on some simple ideas. Carol Dweck wrote a book called Mindset, which talks about two mindsets: a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. The idea is super simple, and you don't even need to read the book to know what it is. But just knowing that idea changed my entire motivation to do things, and now I believe that even if I'm not talented at something, I can get surprisingly far. (for instance, I'm a deep introvert, but I'm able to socialize for long periods of time and talk to strangers easily now, but only after I kept practicing for a period of 2 years -- I discovered it's possible to "bend" your introversion if you don't put yourself in a box and are willing to make an effort) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset#Fixed_and_growth_mindsets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindset#Fixed_and_growth_minds... Arguably the science around fixed vs growth mindsets is fuzzy, but here's the other insight: sometimes you can blunder into the right by holding some vague ideas loosely (the rationalist crowd think that avoiding biases leads you to correct actions -- in real life I have found this to be false). There are two kinds of rationality: epistemic rationality (believing the right things) and instrumental rationality (believing in ideas that work to get you the ends desired, even if the ideas themselves are not 100% rational). In business and life, instrumental rationality is much more useful and works more of the time (this is why the LessWrong crowd isn’t good at stochastic domains like business because their models, though logical, are insufficient -- this is a realm where instrumental rationality leads to success). That's another idea that changed my life.

metisto 4y ago
Great insight about different kinds of rationality! Any recommendations to dive deeper into instrumental rationality topic?
- wenc 4y ago
  I came across the idea on this website (https://commoncog.com/start-here/ https://commoncog.com/start-here/), which I feel is far more "applied" than the Farnam Street blog (https://fs.blog/ https://fs.blog/). The latter is a distillation of essentially rationalist type mental models that sound good but often don't work in real life without a specific context (context really matters in real life). The specific part about rationality is here: https://commoncog.com/putting-mental-models-to-practice-part-2-introduction-to-rationality/ https://commoncog.com/putting-mental-models-to-practice-part... The author of Commoncog actually puts stuff into practice and allows reality be the teacher. He also talks about "concept instantiation" in ill-structured domains. Most of our learning in school is geared toward structured domains where things behave in known ways. Our education system is based around abstract and principles based thinking, where a + b = c. And to be fair, this kind of thinking works very well.... in structured domains. However, when you get into unstructured domains with lots of higher order effects like say, business or the battlefield or love, those ideas no longer work. First principles reasoning no longer gets you success -- instead you actually have to do the opposite, which is to reason analogically and "instantiate concepts" by assembling context fragments, not principles (e.g. "this has been done before under this context, which is similar to my context in these ways but different in these ways"). That's another insight that changed how I reasoned about ill-structured domains (note: only ill-structured domains! First-principles reasoning still works really well in structured domains so don't make the mistake of abandoning it... only know when to switch to analogical reasoning when you're in the realm of the ill-structured) https://commoncog.com/cognitive-flexibility-theory-the-rules/ https://commoncog.com/cognitive-flexibility-theory-the-rules...
  - kirso 4y ago
    Yep, its the only resource known to me that delves into these topics with a lot of ins & outs and its not just white & black business advice.
calculated 4y ago
This Wikipedia article was great. Thank you very much for sharing it.
ulnarkressty 4y ago
How do you get past the feeling that nothing you do actually matters?
- wenc 4y ago
  Can I ask where you're coming from with this question? (just want to understand the context before I answer)
  - ulnarkressty 4y ago
    It's something that inevitably pops in my head whenever I try to do something without an immediate benefit. Sometimes I try just for the hell of it to follow through, weeks or months. In the end it's just not fulfilling enough and I lose interest. After doing this for a while, now every time I see one of these 'better yourself' ideas I just think what's the point? But there has to be something else, since you and others swear that it somehow changed your life. Hence my question. To the person talking about therapy, the above also applies to that.
    - Mezzie 4y ago
      To train your brain to handle being able to do things that aren't fulfilling. It's basically the neurological version of working out and keeps your willpower at a point where if you need to exercise it, you can. As an extreme, imagine someone who doesn't have the willpower to fast being confronted with medical tests that require it. If the 'exercise' is necessary for health, might as well pick exercises with long term benefits.
- SanderNL 4y ago
  Therapy and lots of it.
- taneq 4y ago
  If nothing matters then there’s no reason not to.
- thanatos519 4y ago
dcl 4y ago
It's great you've found techniques that work for you and you are correct the science is fuzzy... From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism > Timothy Bates, a psychology professor at the University of Edinburgh, has been trying for several years to replicate Dweck's findings, each time without success, and his colleagues haven't been able to either.[23] The statistics in Dweck's papers also fail the GRIM test which is a potential indicator of fraud (fake/false statistical values).
- afpx 4y ago
  You just blew my mind. Dweck's theories are used all over the corporate-sphere. Here's the article (the wikipedia link 404d): https://web.archive.org/web/20210216192213/https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-myth-that-keeps-growing-and-growing https://web.archive.org/web/20210216192213/https://www.spect...
  - digilypse 4y ago
    This seems to be focused on general intelligence. I always assumed it was more about the ability to learn skills and abilities rather than increasing IQ.
  - abacadaba 4y ago
    yes the corporate-sphere is.. how to say.. very dumb.
    - blowski 4y ago
      Corporations are the aggregation of thousands of individual agendas being compromised semi-publicly as you watch. Having some scientific-sounding bullshit support your agenda often works.
- wenc 4y ago
  So for me, it's all about instrumental rationality -- do the thing that works, not the thing that ought or ought not to work. It's important to put things into practice. Social science is full of hypotheses that are difficult to measure scientifically. Some are straight out wrong. Others are instrumentally rational -- they are correct enough of the time if done in the right context (which may not always arise, but when they do, you're golden). The latter are the stuff we need to try out. Growth vs fixed mindset is a heuristic -- this means it's not always right, but it's useful enough that when applied you can often see meaningful results.
F-W-M 4y ago
> for instance, I'm a deep introvert, but I'm able to socialize for long periods of time and talk to strangers easily now, but only after I kept practicing for a period of 2 years -- I discovered it's possible to "bend" your introversion if you don't put yourself in a box and are willing to make an effort How did you practice?
- wenc 4y ago
  I went to Meetups and talked to strangers. I want to say I had a specific practice routine, but the fact is I just went out and did it. At first it was awkward and tiring, but because I truly wanted to get better at being a conversationalist, I kept doing it. I picked up a few conversation starters like "what keeps you busy these days?" but a lot of it is just reading the person and coming up with the right questions. And there were definitely ups and downs but now I'm able to walk into a room and have an easy conversation with a stranger (most of the time). It does help that I can read social cues very well, an ability without which would have made it much harder. But we are all dealt a different deck of cards, and the idea of growth mindset is not to achieve some specific goal (we all have limits), but knowing that it's possible to get a lot better from where we started. That change of mindset is huge -- I've often been surprised by how far I'm able to push myself by not allowing myself to be put in boxes. Introversion is not a binary setting. It's a social energy tank. And I've discovered the size of that tank can grow with practice. I've also discovered that introversion and antisocial tendencies are orthogonal concepts. Many introverts who have learned to grow their tank can be very social people. Their tanks drain much slower than unpracticed introverts.
- taneq 4y ago
  Get out of your box. Go to a foreign city, take public transport, wander around public places, and just talk to strangers.
MrPatan 4y ago
> In business and life, instrumental rationality is much more useful and works more of the time (this is why the LessWrong crowd isn’t good at stochastic domains like business because their models, though logical, are insufficient. One of the ideas that helped me there comes actually from them: "Rationality wins". Which is the old: "If you're so smart why aren't you rich?". Not easy to apply for anybody, it's much easier to be a smart loser.
sharemywin 4y ago
I think the parent comment was pointing out ideas without habits(or you called it practice) won't really get you very far.
- wenc 4y ago
  So habits are different from practice (I meant it in the sense of “application”, not so much in the sense of practicing the piano). Habits refer to repetition, which implies you already know what to do so you’re just trying to get better at it. This works in closed domains where there is already a body of knowledge or pedagogy. What I meant by practice is more about “applying” something — which means lots of experimentation to figure out what works. (In other words being a practitioner of ideas, rather than just a knower of them) A lot of ideas that sound nice often fail when the rubber meets the road, which is why you have to subject them to the crucible of the real world through practice.

by wenc 4y ago

metisto 4y ago

Great insight about different kinds of rationality! Any recommendations to dive deeper into instrumental rationality topic?

wenc 4y ago
I came across the idea on this website (https://commoncog.com/start-here/ https://commoncog.com/start-here/), which I feel is far more "applied" than the Farnam Street blog (https://fs.blog/ https://fs.blog/). The latter is a distillation of essentially rationalist type mental models that sound good but often don't work in real life without a specific context (context really matters in real life). The specific part about rationality is here: https://commoncog.com/putting-mental-models-to-practice-part-2-introduction-to-rationality/ https://commoncog.com/putting-mental-models-to-practice-part... The author of Commoncog actually puts stuff into practice and allows reality be the teacher. He also talks about "concept instantiation" in ill-structured domains. Most of our learning in school is geared toward structured domains where things behave in known ways. Our education system is based around abstract and principles based thinking, where a + b = c. And to be fair, this kind of thinking works very well.... in structured domains. However, when you get into unstructured domains with lots of higher order effects like say, business or the battlefield or love, those ideas no longer work. First principles reasoning no longer gets you success -- instead you actually have to do the opposite, which is to reason analogically and "instantiate concepts" by assembling context fragments, not principles (e.g. "this has been done before under this context, which is similar to my context in these ways but different in these ways"). That's another insight that changed how I reasoned about ill-structured domains (note: only ill-structured domains! First-principles reasoning still works really well in structured domains so don't make the mistake of abandoning it... only know when to switch to analogical reasoning when you're in the realm of the ill-structured) https://commoncog.com/cognitive-flexibility-theory-the-rules/ https://commoncog.com/cognitive-flexibility-theory-the-rules...
- kirso 4y ago
  Yep, its the only resource known to me that delves into these topics with a lot of ins & outs and its not just white & black business advice.

calculated 4y ago

This Wikipedia article was great. Thank you very much for sharing it.

ulnarkressty 4y ago

How do you get past the feeling that nothing you do actually matters?

wenc 4y ago
Can I ask where you're coming from with this question? (just want to understand the context before I answer)
- ulnarkressty 4y ago
  It's something that inevitably pops in my head whenever I try to do something without an immediate benefit. Sometimes I try just for the hell of it to follow through, weeks or months. In the end it's just not fulfilling enough and I lose interest. After doing this for a while, now every time I see one of these 'better yourself' ideas I just think what's the point? But there has to be something else, since you and others swear that it somehow changed your life. Hence my question. To the person talking about therapy, the above also applies to that.
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    To train your brain to handle being able to do things that aren't fulfilling. It's basically the neurological version of working out and keeps your willpower at a point where if you need to exercise it, you can. As an extreme, imagine someone who doesn't have the willpower to fast being confronted with medical tests that require it. If the 'exercise' is necessary for health, might as well pick exercises with long term benefits.
SanderNL 4y ago
Therapy and lots of it.
taneq 4y ago
If nothing matters then there’s no reason not to.
thanatos519 4y ago

dcl 4y ago

It's great you've found techniques that work for you and you are correct the science is fuzzy... From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism > Timothy Bates, a psychology professor at the University of Edinburgh, has been trying for several years to replicate Dweck's findings, each time without success, and his colleagues haven't been able to either.[23] The statistics in Dweck's papers also fail the GRIM test which is a potential indicator of fraud (fake/false statistical values).

afpx 4y ago
You just blew my mind. Dweck's theories are used all over the corporate-sphere. Here's the article (the wikipedia link 404d): https://web.archive.org/web/20210216192213/https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-myth-that-keeps-growing-and-growing https://web.archive.org/web/20210216192213/https://www.spect...
- digilypse 4y ago
  This seems to be focused on general intelligence. I always assumed it was more about the ability to learn skills and abilities rather than increasing IQ.
- abacadaba 4y ago
  yes the corporate-sphere is.. how to say.. very dumb.
  - blowski 4y ago
    Corporations are the aggregation of thousands of individual agendas being compromised semi-publicly as you watch. Having some scientific-sounding bullshit support your agenda often works.
wenc 4y ago
So for me, it's all about instrumental rationality -- do the thing that works, not the thing that ought or ought not to work. It's important to put things into practice. Social science is full of hypotheses that are difficult to measure scientifically. Some are straight out wrong. Others are instrumentally rational -- they are correct enough of the time if done in the right context (which may not always arise, but when they do, you're golden). The latter are the stuff we need to try out. Growth vs fixed mindset is a heuristic -- this means it's not always right, but it's useful enough that when applied you can often see meaningful results.

F-W-M 4y ago

> for instance, I'm a deep introvert, but I'm able to socialize for long periods of time and talk to strangers easily now, but only after I kept practicing for a period of 2 years -- I discovered it's possible to "bend" your introversion if you don't put yourself in a box and are willing to make an effort How did you practice?

wenc 4y ago
I went to Meetups and talked to strangers. I want to say I had a specific practice routine, but the fact is I just went out and did it. At first it was awkward and tiring, but because I truly wanted to get better at being a conversationalist, I kept doing it. I picked up a few conversation starters like "what keeps you busy these days?" but a lot of it is just reading the person and coming up with the right questions. And there were definitely ups and downs but now I'm able to walk into a room and have an easy conversation with a stranger (most of the time). It does help that I can read social cues very well, an ability without which would have made it much harder. But we are all dealt a different deck of cards, and the idea of growth mindset is not to achieve some specific goal (we all have limits), but knowing that it's possible to get a lot better from where we started. That change of mindset is huge -- I've often been surprised by how far I'm able to push myself by not allowing myself to be put in boxes. Introversion is not a binary setting. It's a social energy tank. And I've discovered the size of that tank can grow with practice. I've also discovered that introversion and antisocial tendencies are orthogonal concepts. Many introverts who have learned to grow their tank can be very social people. Their tanks drain much slower than unpracticed introverts.
taneq 4y ago
Get out of your box. Go to a foreign city, take public transport, wander around public places, and just talk to strangers.

MrPatan 4y ago

> In business and life, instrumental rationality is much more useful and works more of the time (this is why the LessWrong crowd isn’t good at stochastic domains like business because their models, though logical, are insufficient. One of the ideas that helped me there comes actually from them: "Rationality wins". Which is the old: "If you're so smart why aren't you rich?". Not easy to apply for anybody, it's much easier to be a smart loser.

sharemywin 4y ago

I think the parent comment was pointing out ideas without habits(or you called it practice) won't really get you very far.

wenc 4y ago
So habits are different from practice (I meant it in the sense of “application”, not so much in the sense of practicing the piano). Habits refer to repetition, which implies you already know what to do so you’re just trying to get better at it. This works in closed domains where there is already a body of knowledge or pedagogy. What I meant by practice is more about “applying” something — which means lots of experimentation to figure out what works. (In other words being a practitioner of ideas, rather than just a knower of them) A lot of ideas that sound nice often fail when the rubber meets the road, which is why you have to subject them to the crucible of the real world through practice.