8 ms·

On limitations that hide in your blindspot

215 points by jger15 3y ago

koliber 3y ago
This is one of the most powerful things you can learn to do. Question your own assumptions, with the goal of seeing what is holding you back. It literally unblocks you and allows you to do things you never considered doing before. Recently I had an insight about this with my kids and wrote an article about it: https://koliber.com/articles/breakthrough-thinking https://koliber.com/articles/breakthrough-thinking
- suction 3y ago
  [dead]
082349872349872 3y ago
> Point of view is worth 80 IQ points —ACK I currently like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_space antimatroid model; think of it as a graph, or like tech/skill-trees in video games. Sometimes you can unlock a new skill simply by combining (taking the meet of) two skills you already have mastered (X ∨ Y = Z); other times the only way to get to a (join irreducible?) new skill is to make some sort of 'leap' from a single existing skill; these are much more difficult because (Y ∨ Y = Y) so you need inspiration to get from Y to Z.
- thatsmenownot 3y ago
  [flagged]
benreesman 3y ago
I really enjoyed this essay (and have made a note in my little Moleskin I carry everywhere to pay more attention to Escaping Flatland). It’s full of observations and insights I’ll be chewing on for days at least but what strikes me immediately is the exhilaration of the love story: certainly I’ve known for a long time that I wanted something like that even if I wouldn’t have used those words. And I applied a crude heuristic: I only got seriously involved with partners who were in some important sense smarter than I am, but I think this essay has given me words for something I intuited long ago but never quite got by the scruff, which is that only once or twice if that did that represent a person who made me better at becoming better, and it was long enough ago I didn’t realize the gravity of that in time to make the necessary choices. The exhilaration derives from remembering what a game changer that represents when you encounter it, and for me at least how all the brighter colors and incandescent bliss and endless possibility and so many other unpronounceable intangibles that falling truly in love represented. There’s something magical here and the authors have succeeded in setting at least one pen to paper (and physical paper at that) trying to pull on a thread long neglected.
- w10-1 3y ago
  > a person who made me better at becoming better True that. The article has its own blindspot, which is to understand the problem as a blindspot - as a lack of information due to some (remediable) deficiency. But the story showed it was instead a matter of will, or agency. His girlfriend obviously knew she could learn; she just needed to decide that it was her job to learn instead of depending on others to teach. Indeed, nearly every story on point (like the comment about Bridgewater practices) purports to be about information (delivering unwanted news), but is in fact about the will to change. This is important because there's a ton of advice out there, and people who feel that giving advice is how they can help. But often that makes things worse: the person already feels disabled, and advice not taken basically conveys that they're faulty - disabled. Greek philosophers argued about the phenomenon of akrasia (weakness of will), generally falling into the same trap that we do, thinking knowledge will somehow solve it. But there's actually plenty of evidence that more knowledge constrains your sense of possibility. Mechanistic psychologists might argue for impedance-matching: challenging people without breaking them, so they achieve a rate of change above their expectations - but then expectations change. (Successful and powerful people are notoriously unhappy that their trajectories are not increasing.) Conversely, buddhists say to expect nothing and accept everything; then people become happy but low-achieving. Sometimes what really helps is to show someone that they can change. As the story suggests, love itself, and bringing someone out of a small town, helps. As the Bridgewater comment and the 2010's workplace suggests, joining some group where peers are humble and activated can be inspiring. Therapy suggests realizing that all your fears are self-generated delusions that disappear when you stop pumping energy into them. (Nietzsche's spirit of gravity is a monkey on the shoulder, that eventually hops off.) So perhaps the best of all is the advice above, to notice whether you're more yourself when with certain people. Those people Aristotle would call your friends; in the Nichomachean ethics friendship is the highest form of happiness because we're most actualized among those who get/demand/expect/elicit the most from us.
parasti 3y ago
This is very well written. Aside from the topic at hand, I had a realization that an essay written in this manner (from the context I assume with input from at least two people) feels as if written by superhuman, combining the individual insights of each into a greater, more insightful whole. It's obvious, I suppose, but this idea had never crystallized for me before reading this.
xyzelement 3y ago
One of the main things that attracted me to working at Bridgewater is the company culture geared explicitly at helping you discover your blind spots. A lot of the discomfort that people associate with the company has to do with that: the recorded meetings, the “brutal” feedback etc are all designed to make you see what you have been resisting seeing. There is a part of us that wants to grow and there’s a part of us that resists the pain of growth. Being someone who values growth and is willing to go through the discomfort doesn’t make the process itself easier for you - you still have to do the work. It’s challenging but in retrospect you look at the kind of person you are a year or five years down the line and you feel good about it.
- bumby 3y ago
  I do think there's a downside to this culture, or at least something to guard against. It works when there is a clear intention to improve, but there can also be a tendency towards negativity and downright cynicism. Sometimes, "brutal" feedback becomes a mechanism of maintaining the status quo rather than fostering growth. It reminds me of the Oscal Wilde quote to the effect of "a cynic is someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing." It creates a lack of psychological safety, where people are afraid to speak up with different ideas and the culture stagnates.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    I have a hard time imagining that it's truly brutal in both directions. Is the executive team really made to justify a large bonus for themselves when the rest of the staff is asked to accept lower than inflation adjustments, as an example? I'd bet it's "brutal" but with a lot of information asymmetry preventing the sorts of feedback I described.
    - xyzelement 3y ago
      Sure. Ray Dalio got public negative feedback all the time.
      - 3y ago
BrokerHans 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
a_c 3y ago
Knowing is one thing, wanting is another, and then there is acting. Sometimes it is peaceful to embrace who you are. Sometimes it is liberating to push to your limits. Most of the time, I'm giving myself excuse to be lazy
vmoore 3y ago
I swing between my comfort zone, and growth mindset. Sometimes projects just become maintenance mode for a while, other times I expand my knowledge, try new things, learn from mistakes. You have to have a beginner's mind, and be willing to look pathetic on your first try and leave ego at the door. Become vulnerable.
Mawr 3y ago
> When I met Johanna, far from there, in a university town, she made a deep and perplexing impression on me: the precision of her attention and the intensity of her curiosity were unlike anything I had seen, and yet, despite this, she was almost completely ignorant. If I mentioned the First World War, she would say, “When was that?” But if I explained an area I was researching, it would take her five minutes to cut through to the deep, underlying question that had eluded me for months. Knowledge and intelligence are orthogonal concepts. It's important not to conflate them.
highfrequency 3y ago
Great essay. > The pain point I wanted to ignore reveals itself as a source of insight.

215 points by jger15 3y ago

This is one of the most powerful things you can learn to do. Question your own assumptions, with the goal of seeing what is holding you back. It literally unblocks you and allows you to do things you never considered doing before. Recently I had an insight about this with my kids and wrote an article about it: https://koliber.com/articles/breakthrough-thinking https://koliber.com/articles/breakthrough-thinking

suction 3y ago
[dead]

082349872349872 3y ago

> Point of view is worth 80 IQ points —ACK I currently like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_space antimatroid model; think of it as a graph, or like tech/skill-trees in video games. Sometimes you can unlock a new skill simply by combining (taking the meet of) two skills you already have mastered (X ∨ Y = Z); other times the only way to get to a (join irreducible?) new skill is to make some sort of 'leap' from a single existing skill; these are much more difficult because (Y ∨ Y = Y) so you need inspiration to get from Y to Z.

thatsmenownot 3y ago
[flagged]

benreesman 3y ago

I really enjoyed this essay (and have made a note in my little Moleskin I carry everywhere to pay more attention to Escaping Flatland). It’s full of observations and insights I’ll be chewing on for days at least but what strikes me immediately is the exhilaration of the love story: certainly I’ve known for a long time that I wanted something like that even if I wouldn’t have used those words. And I applied a crude heuristic: I only got seriously involved with partners who were in some important sense smarter than I am, but I think this essay has given me words for something I intuited long ago but never quite got by the scruff, which is that only once or twice if that did that represent a person who made me better at becoming better, and it was long enough ago I didn’t realize the gravity of that in time to make the necessary choices. The exhilaration derives from remembering what a game changer that represents when you encounter it, and for me at least how all the brighter colors and incandescent bliss and endless possibility and so many other unpronounceable intangibles that falling truly in love represented. There’s something magical here and the authors have succeeded in setting at least one pen to paper (and physical paper at that) trying to pull on a thread long neglected.

w10-1 3y ago
> a person who made me better at becoming better True that. The article has its own blindspot, which is to understand the problem as a blindspot - as a lack of information due to some (remediable) deficiency. But the story showed it was instead a matter of will, or agency. His girlfriend obviously knew she could learn; she just needed to decide that it was her job to learn instead of depending on others to teach. Indeed, nearly every story on point (like the comment about Bridgewater practices) purports to be about information (delivering unwanted news), but is in fact about the will to change. This is important because there's a ton of advice out there, and people who feel that giving advice is how they can help. But often that makes things worse: the person already feels disabled, and advice not taken basically conveys that they're faulty - disabled. Greek philosophers argued about the phenomenon of akrasia (weakness of will), generally falling into the same trap that we do, thinking knowledge will somehow solve it. But there's actually plenty of evidence that more knowledge constrains your sense of possibility. Mechanistic psychologists might argue for impedance-matching: challenging people without breaking them, so they achieve a rate of change above their expectations - but then expectations change. (Successful and powerful people are notoriously unhappy that their trajectories are not increasing.) Conversely, buddhists say to expect nothing and accept everything; then people become happy but low-achieving. Sometimes what really helps is to show someone that they can change. As the story suggests, love itself, and bringing someone out of a small town, helps. As the Bridgewater comment and the 2010's workplace suggests, joining some group where peers are humble and activated can be inspiring. Therapy suggests realizing that all your fears are self-generated delusions that disappear when you stop pumping energy into them. (Nietzsche's spirit of gravity is a monkey on the shoulder, that eventually hops off.) So perhaps the best of all is the advice above, to notice whether you're more yourself when with certain people. Those people Aristotle would call your friends; in the Nichomachean ethics friendship is the highest form of happiness because we're most actualized among those who get/demand/expect/elicit the most from us.

parasti 3y ago

This is very well written. Aside from the topic at hand, I had a realization that an essay written in this manner (from the context I assume with input from at least two people) feels as if written by superhuman, combining the individual insights of each into a greater, more insightful whole. It's obvious, I suppose, but this idea had never crystallized for me before reading this.

xyzelement 3y ago

One of the main things that attracted me to working at Bridgewater is the company culture geared explicitly at helping you discover your blind spots. A lot of the discomfort that people associate with the company has to do with that: the recorded meetings, the “brutal” feedback etc are all designed to make you see what you have been resisting seeing. There is a part of us that wants to grow and there’s a part of us that resists the pain of growth. Being someone who values growth and is willing to go through the discomfort doesn’t make the process itself easier for you - you still have to do the work. It’s challenging but in retrospect you look at the kind of person you are a year or five years down the line and you feel good about it.

bumby 3y ago
I do think there's a downside to this culture, or at least something to guard against. It works when there is a clear intention to improve, but there can also be a tendency towards negativity and downright cynicism. Sometimes, "brutal" feedback becomes a mechanism of maintaining the status quo rather than fostering growth. It reminds me of the Oscal Wilde quote to the effect of "a cynic is someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing." It creates a lack of psychological safety, where people are afraid to speak up with different ideas and the culture stagnates.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  I have a hard time imagining that it's truly brutal in both directions. Is the executive team really made to justify a large bonus for themselves when the rest of the staff is asked to accept lower than inflation adjustments, as an example? I'd bet it's "brutal" but with a lot of information asymmetry preventing the sorts of feedback I described.
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    Sure. Ray Dalio got public negative feedback all the time.
    - 3y ago

BrokerHans 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

a_c 3y ago

Knowing is one thing, wanting is another, and then there is acting. Sometimes it is peaceful to embrace who you are. Sometimes it is liberating to push to your limits. Most of the time, I'm giving myself excuse to be lazy

vmoore 3y ago

I swing between my comfort zone, and growth mindset. Sometimes projects just become maintenance mode for a while, other times I expand my knowledge, try new things, learn from mistakes. You have to have a beginner's mind, and be willing to look pathetic on your first try and leave ego at the door. Become vulnerable.

Mawr 3y ago

> When I met Johanna, far from there, in a university town, she made a deep and perplexing impression on me: the precision of her attention and the intensity of her curiosity were unlike anything I had seen, and yet, despite this, she was almost completely ignorant. If I mentioned the First World War, she would say, “When was that?” But if I explained an area I was researching, it would take her five minutes to cut through to the deep, underlying question that had eluded me for months. Knowledge and intelligence are orthogonal concepts. It's important not to conflate them.

highfrequency 3y ago

Great essay. > The pain point I wanted to ignore reveals itself as a source of insight.