7 ms·

Three important steps in my maturation process

227 points by tdullien 1mo ago

paretolaw 1mo ago
One of rare articles here that is actually worth reading. 1st one requires that you actually care 2nd one relevance depends on what are you doing, not everyone works on airplane software 3rd one, novelty for me
roenxi 1mo ago
> The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think. There is an implication from this one that the article doesn't get into, which is whether you've picked a strategy of fail-safe or fail-disastrously. Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start. It is one of those ideas that sounds very simple to incorporate into your life and turns out to be hard. IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous. > The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic. He's technically right, but our instincts are not suitable for a complex 8-billion person global economy. We have a bunch of instincts calibrated so that a group of ~200 monkeys probably raises >200 descendants on average, just. We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment. It doesn't have to be a reason-emotion dichotomy, but there has to be something where effective people > destructive people in situations where our instincts don't trigger or push people in predictably bad directions.
- jaggederest 1mo ago
  I always phrase this as "Do you want to play zero-sum or negative sum games? Or would you rather play positive sum games where the world is better off even if you personally aren't 'the winner'?" > Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start I'm just going to quote that because it's a great statement of a truly astounding idea. Most people do not think like you do. Even inside the HN bubble, most people don't think like you do. The diversity in humanity is enormous, and I wish I'd known sooner how fallible and narrow a single person's view is, even when it's your own. Making the best choices you can possibly make does not guarantee success, and even if you succeed, there's no guarantee that it was the best idea or even a good idea.
- altmanaltman 1mo ago
  > IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous. Basically what Nietzsche said on morality. However, there is a counterfactual to this line of thinking as well and it doesn't map as easily. > We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment. This is where Immanual Kant's categorial imperative comes into play. Kant thinks there is absolutely an evidence-based principle to be moral. And he grounds it in reason and human beings themselves. His ideas make sense when you start thinking "okay lets say I am free to make my own values and must have a good relationship with my values, what is an objective way to evaluate this so I can be morally good?" Kant becomes a good starting point and he claims that you don't need any external objective way/method of evaluation other than the reason afforded to you by nature as a human being and then he spends a lot of pages elucidating how this type of a system would work. Both Nietzsche and Kant are worth reading if you want to understand morality in general, even though Nietzsche fundamentally disagreed with Kant that there can be an objectively correct mode of evaluation.
- SuoDuanDao 1mo ago
  That is a great point. We have such a 'bias for action' in popular culture, especially in places like Hacker News, that we overlook how much energy successful cultures have put into 'bias for restraint'. I very much like the bias for action mindset, but I don't have a great answer for the problem of 'what if the things you want are bad for the world?' Your mention of destructive people makes me think there might be an angle with bias for action being helpful if it's building - some people will build the torment nexus, but newly built things are so inherently fragile that maybe we can absorb a certain amount of harmful building without serious damage, in a way we can't absorb much harmful destruction. Does that ring true?
bigcat12345678 1mo ago
Here, you can find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constructed_emotion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constructed_emotion to be useful in articulating the following. > 3. The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic. Guessing: Essentially that's psychology. And Human psychology is itself emergent behavior cannot be directly traced back to neuroscience. Logic, that is another thing, which primarily is used for understanding and reconstruct retainable after emotional experiences.
- TheOtherHobbes 1mo ago
  It's not psychology, it's just wrong. You can point to the parts of the brain (more accurately the body and brain) that handle reason and emotions, and they're physically distinct. Also, reason is essentially a combination of pattern recognition and abstraction, and emotion is a set of spontaneous limbic responses. Which is not to say there's no relationship between them, or that the grey area where they overlap isn't unusually interesting. But it's a wild overreach to say the distinction is a cultural construct and not grounded in (largely) mammalian biology. Points 1 and 2 are also questionable. They're not novel opinions, they have philosophical names (more or less consequentialism vs deontology, with some wrinkles), and they can be - and have been - hotly debated. I don't see them as evidence of maturity or of immaturity, more of a considered moral position that not everyone agrees with.
  - disgruntledphd2 1mo ago
    Our measurements of the brain are derived from small samples, have a bunch of weird priors encoded in them and are mostly correlational, so I don't think we can make strong statements like in your first paragraph.
- layer8 1mo ago
  The theory of constructed emotion doesn’t say anything about the relation of emotions to reasoning.
  - 1mo ago
hankbond 1mo ago
Dang these are really not at all common advice/reflections. > 1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think. I think certainly your actions are maybe that paramount to the world because it has so many actors, but they are certainly important to you. The actions that we take on a daily basis nudge nudge nudge us to becoming something else. I think its something worth focusing on but not to the point it makes you anxious. Thanks for the thoughtful piece.
kazinator 1mo ago
> Monocausal determinism is an illusion, and largely does not exist outside of computer debugging. Also: quite often does not exist inside computer debugging, either.
kazinator 1mo ago
> The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic. Hard disagree with part of this. Reason is an intellectual construct, that has a basis in logic. (Neuroscience not finding a division: sure. Just like electrical engineering doesn't see a dichotomy between Microsoft Word and Firefox.) Reasoning isn't separated from emotion because reasoning needs inputs. Some inputs are secondary: the result of other reasoning. Some are non-negotiable facts from the world. But some primary inputs that go into reasoning are determined by values and desires. E.g. "I feel it would be nice obtain such and such a result in the world" (hard reasoning on how to get it ensues).
- jdlshore 1mo ago
  I don’t have the link right now, but I recall a study of some sort that examined brain activity and decision making. The “emotion” part lit up first, then the “reasoning” part. Essentially, we make decisions based on emotion, then come up with an explanation for the decision that was already made. We form a memory that says the explanation was why we made the decision, but it was actually the emotion. In other words, by default, we’re rationalizing, not rational.
  - tekne 1mo ago
    I think the issue is precisely the rationalising part. Let's assume I have pre-decided something: if the fruit weighs over 100g, I'll buy it, otherwise I won't. I can then measure and find out. My emotions -- based on looking at the fruit -- may mislead me here. Now what about "likely to weigh more than 100g"? Here it's really easy to lie to yourself. But if you set conditions for what counts as likely before you know what they'll be used for, and you stick to them, you can make a decision based on reason. There is no way to decide 100g is the threshold divorced from emotion, however -- unless it's rationally derived from something else emotionally based. The "rationalisation" bit comes from us not making decisions for the reasons we think we are -- or in the way we claim to be.
  - disgruntledphd2 1mo ago
    To quote a 17c vulgarity, reason is a whore.
drzhouq 1mo ago
Being able to detach from your thinking while you are thinking, that's difficult and indeed very useful. I found that more often in llm than human beings.
CTDOCodebases 1mo ago
3. Emotion motivates everything that we do. It's just a question of what emotions are you considering and what emotions are you prioritizing. Reasoning is taking all emotions into context and focusing on actions that align with certain emotions.
BeetleB 1mo ago
When I read titles like these, I expect a relatively low value article. This has probably been the highest value such article I've read in years. You've phrased item 3 better than I have been trying to for years after my own journey in realizing this. Thank you.
bbor 1mo ago
The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic. This is a nice, thoughtful piece, but the final point oversteps while chasing a noble heuristic, I think. To touch on a few fields off the top of my head: 1. All serious cognitive philosophy since at least Kant has supported the idea of separate faculties -- in his case, specifically the four chambers [`--` quantitative sensitivity, `-+` qualitative perceptivity, `+-` causal judgement, `++` modal reason].[1] This is also at the root of the induction vs. deduction [vs. abduction] debate, which had been raging for at least 2,200 years before Kant. 2. Even our pre-gallilean understanding of neuroscience arrived at the same conclusion, though in hilariously abstract terms: 'fast thinking' vs. 'slow thinking'. Popularized primarily by a popsci book (?) that frames it like this: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. 3. Psychologically the clearest paradigm is Freud's `- Id`/`+ Ego`/`* Super-Ego`, which is not nearly as discredited as his famous theories about parental lust would imply. If you asked your psychiatrist(/local research psychologist) about it today, they'd ofc use less medieval words for the same concepts -- roughly 'unconscious', 'cognition', and 'executive', in order.[2] 4. In cognitive science more broadly, a lot of the binaries discussed on Wikipedia's Mathematical Model article[3] are getting at this delineation. 5. Eastern philosophy has plenty of stuff on this dichotomy; in fact, I'd argue their discussion of it is predicated upon its existence and the various harmful states it can create if left unexamined. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_logico-epistemology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_logico-epistemology On a 'logical' level, the case for a separation of at least two types of thinking seems clear: any cognitive activity can either call the 'lightweight' model to guess what's happening (and be right 95% of the time), or call the 'superheavy' model to iteratively reason through webs of beliefs. Sure, any call probably uses more than 0.0001% of both so they're not mutually exclusive, but I think the qualitative diffence is clear. The sentiment is true in a bit more subtle of a way, I will admit... It's hard to articulate in brief (/at all), but I've become fascinated with the way the presence of the higher faculties sometimes seems to completely transform the lower ones, unlocking whole new affordances. Like the existence of a new structure of a higher level of complexity completely changing the behavior of nearby cellular automata. If you'll excuse the anthropomorphization of abstract patterns for moment: it reminds me of how a competent leader can unlock whole new affordances for the individuals on their team without actually directly changing the individuals themselves. Like, consider how we have have tons of both instincts & intuitions related to language use -- speaking, writing, listening, etc. Chimpanzees & bonobos share many of our incredibly advanced intuitive abilities (e.g. manual dexterity, social 'theory of mind'/empathy, etc.), but they are categorically unable to pick those up. In this way the super-ego didn't add funtionality to our species, and it didn't even really multiply it geometrically (?) -- it seems much closer to an exponentiation of capability.[4] TL;DR: Acknowledging the fallibility and inherently-subconscious basis of reason is a noble goal, but abandoning the Idea altogether is misleading. IMHO! [1]: http://staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk/ppp/ksp1/toc.html http://staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk/ppp/ksp1/toc.html [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_therapy#Basis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_therapy#Basis [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_model#Classifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_model#Classificat... [4]: Here's to hoping that this fourth rung is the last one, at least for a while! Cause if there's a fifth one, and AI discovers and produces it... yikes. Truely alien ASI would follow, rather than just ASI-as-huge-but-fundamentally-grokkable-AGI.)
newsomix9xl 1mo ago
Greybeard is not sexist.
65 1mo ago
I don't particularly disagree with what the author has written about, but the jargon and complex wording is really annoying to read. If this were written on a single subject, like engineering philosophy, then fine. But writing a multi-subject article requires simpler language so those who may be familiar with one thing but not the other can understand everything. I find it hard to trust the intelligence of someone who uses words like "dichotomy", "meta-cognition", and "monocausal determinism" - language like this is purely performative. Let's not be performative, who are you trying to impress with your big words?
- JSR_FDED 1mo ago
  The thing is, these words are both incredibly precise and compact. So I’m very happy that the author uses them, as it means I can get the meaning without lowest common denominator fluff or volume. Have I always known what these words meant? No, but it’s the reward for a habit of right-clicking every word and looking up the definition - which also stretches your cognitive capacity over time so it’s worth doing for purely selfish reasons.
- armitron 1mo ago
  Your particular interpretation of the author's choice in words tells us more about your psychological makeup than the author. Take the "meta-cognition" advice to heart and perform some self-debugging in order to determine what exactly in your psyche made you react in this way.
- grey-area 1mo ago
  You appear to define words you don’t immediately understand at this point in time as ‘performative’, ie used only to show off. An odd position to take. If you don’t know a word just look it up, you may well learn something.
  - 65 1mo ago
    I know what all of these words mean. My point is that these are esoteric words that don't fit into the article's purpose or for the article's audience. The author would have gotten his point across far easier if he were to have first contextualized these words, or defined them himself. Pedagogy is very important in writing. Without care for the reader, these words come off as performative.
0sake_rs 1mo ago
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jaggederest 1mo ago
To give other maturation advice to those not yet in their 40s: It's quite likely that you have significant issues you haven't addressed yet. Getting into good medical care, therapy, exercise, and supportive e.g. nutrition, etc is likely more important than virtually anything else you'll do in your life, with a reasonable exception for choosing the right person to spend your life with and having a family. But having a good social life is a hell of a lot easier if you're in great physical and mental shape. I took all of those things very seriously, and I probably did not put enough value into any of those things, even given that orientation. That leads right into: The only thing you can truly exert control over is yourself, and it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices, either indirectly through the environment you live in or directly through the actions you take. Humility is drastically underrated, and being healthy plays into this enormously as well. That being said, I'd love to hear a perspective from some of the older HN folks - what am I missing as a mid-40s person that I should absolutely be paying attention to?
- bitexploder 1mo ago
  I am mid 40s. Started working at a hyper scaler a couple years ago. I think you are overthinking it. All there is, is to be present and focus on what is important. And no one else can tell you what is important, you already know. Spend your time wisely with your family or on things that matter to you and not on trivial pursuit. There are no secrets in this. It is largely what you define. When you ask this question of others, you are asking what am I forgetting? What will I regret? They can’t tell you. They can tell you what they regretted it and maybe you will regret those same things they did. But you have to decide. In 10 years. In 20 years. All you have to do is ask your future self what you’re gonna regret that you didn’t do. I had found that we already know the answers to those things. E: think of it this way. And you don’t have to have a dog for these questions to work they’re metaphorical really, but also physical if you do have a dog. Did you walk your dog? Did you play ball with it? If they die tomorrow, will you look back and say that today was good? Did you do everything you could do with your dog? If not go do those things right now don’t leave them undone. That’s all there is. And the same thing works with everything in life. You know what you should’ve done in the day. If you do those things in 10 or 20 years, you won’t look back and say I wish I would’ve done those things cause you’ve done them.
m463 1mo ago
> 1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think. maybe not 0day stuff, but breaking the build is something that mature people have learned not to do. What are the rewards for move fast and break things for people?
thin_carapace 1mo ago
I agree with a lot of the first point but the expression does seem to lend an air of futility to caring about your impacts which I hope wasn't the intention. I do whole heartedly disagree with everyone believing they are the hero of their own story - while there sure are a subset of people who will justify screwing others (or at least bury their heads in the sand), there's also a subset of people that are happy to revel in schadenfreude. all that aside, the author's beliefs probably do apply to his target audience.
vlan0 1mo ago
Ahh these are fun. They come up often when thinking about consciousness. If you like these, you might be interested in the book, I Am A Strange Loop
bitexploder 1mo ago
What I have learned about neuroscience and philosophy is this: most people are not willing to invest as much time in small pursuits versus understanding the machinery of their mind and what will actually let them understand themselves with more clarity. Understanding the self loop. The strange self loop. Seeing that the thing that is doing the observing inside of us is the whole and that from within our own system, we cannot completely reason about ourselves. The incompleteness theorem. We have named it we call it the default mode network. It is essentially a recursive predictive machine. It only stops when we die. It is essentially making predictions about reality constantly. It is retrieving previous state and associating at the current state to make decisions. What it associates with previous memory and current state are encoding of our hormonal state and mental state at that point in time. You can call it emotions. You can try and reason about it. It just exists. At some level, you just have to learn to let it be. All of the sophisticated words of psychology and trying to describe the machinery from within the machinery. It’s useful, you need a guide to live life. To keep the machinery and coding clean and not over, indexing on states that aren’t useful. But it all boils down to some pretty simple things. And when you see that the observer is the observed, and that it is all a part of the whole of the self, things become more manageable, for me, at least. Take grief for example. What is grief? It is a prediction error. An expectation of some past state that the prediction machinery keeps expecting to come up one way, but it comes up another. And when it does come up as an error it hurts. It’s OK to experience it and to embrace it even. But it’s also OK to see it for what it is. We can’t escape the machine. But we can step outside of it briefly and watch it at work and acknowledge what it actually is.
- selestify 1mo ago
  Very good in theory. In practice, how do you actually understand yourself? I have done plenty of meditation and plenty of reading on mental health and psychology. I still don't understand why I specifically act the way I do.
  - eastbound 1mo ago
    Did you include meeting with a therapist? The problem is that they have to reveal you things you don't generally want to admit, so it takes a bit of time (time which I find absolutely wasted) and depending on the therapist, they might not tell you immediately about your inconsistencies.
burnto 1mo ago
Wonderfully written. I’m intrigued by the section about emotion. It seems like no coincidence that it follows the section about seeing beyond monocausal determinism.
burnto 1mo ago
As a mid 40s person also, my advice: drink plenty of water, clean the kitchen every night, don’t try to time the market, forgive your past self for being an idiot.
- simonebrunozzi 1mo ago
  Short but brilliant. Well done. I'd add: try to sleep well. It adds up.
  - krn1p4n1c 1mo ago
    So much to do and so little time. But you’re right, it’s so important.
- amunozo 1mo ago
  I keep thinking about cleaning the kitchen every night (I just turned 30). The more I think about it, the more I think it's a good advice. I still need to forgive my past self for being an idiot, though :)
- bossyTeacher 1mo ago
  > clean the kitchen every night Is this a metaphor?
tecoholic 1mo ago
The Old-guard is a good alternative to greybeards, no?
bambax 1mo ago
> If you were asked: “Would it be good if this 0day was used to apprehend a terrorist?” you would probably say “this is good”. If you were asked “would it be good if this 0day is used to arrest someone and then torture and waterboard him 183 times?”, you would probably say “this is bad”. So if your 0day was used to capture KSM, it is probably good? Or bad? Things get very complicated very quickly. This is a version of the very classic problems "does the end justify the means" (should one torture a terrorist to prevent other terrorist acts). Much to the chagrin of utilitarians everywhere, the answer to that question is NO, because answering yes leads to a bottomless hole of infinite evil.
- stackbutterflow 1mo ago
  US TV shows in the years after 9/11 are hard to watch now because they're plagued with pro torture scenes. I don't know when exactly but it seemed to have disappeared.
- albumen 1mo ago
  This is too simplistic an argument re utilitarianism. It assumes torture definitely works, and that there’s no further consequences. Many utilitarians might say “no” too, given that there is no persuasive evidence that torture is a superior intelligence-gathering method to well-conducted non-coercive interrogation; and that it’s likely to produce unreliable information alongside whatever truths it elicits. It’s a decidedly grey world.
maCDzP 1mo ago
I agree fully with the point about integrating emotion in your decision making. Earlier I used to get stuck in decisions since I had the need to be rational. Which is in it self an emotion I guess - since need is an emotion? Now my life is much simpler.
datagreed 1mo ago
I cannot be the only one who read the title wrong
- abanana 1mo ago
  You're not, I'm sorry to say! I was only quickly scanning the HN front page, but still. Does that say something about steps required in our own maturation processes?
iamflimflam1 1mo ago
As someone who is now skewing towards the older side of the tech world (55 this year). It’s a journey. There isn’t some point where you’ll suddenly find you are now “wise” and understand yourself. Those moments do appear - but a few years later you’ll likely realise that it was only relevant for that time of your life and things have changed. What might have worked and served you well then may not be the right thing for now. Getting locked into a way of thinking or behaving is a recipe for being old before your time. Try and apply the agile principles - do a retro - is it still working, what should keep doing, what should you stop doing? And - the best time to start doing something good is now. Doesn’t matter if you should have done it 20 years ago. Regret can be disabling. Try and be nice to people. We don’t know what is happening in other people’s worlds. [edit] And be kind to yourself. Self compassion is underrated. Forgive yourself. You are human. Not perfect. And you don’t need to be. Show yourself some love.
ekjhgkejhgk 1mo ago
> Monocausal determinism is an illusion, and largely does not exist outside of computer debugging. I work in trading with a lot of software engineers, and one thing I noticed is that these cannot reason about uncertainty if their lives depended on it. Their way to approach any problem is like you debug code: there must be a specific code path that was followed that led to that outcome. But markets aren't like this, and things happen for no reason, or are better modelled as if happening for no reason. This is also the reason why I don't really think "software engineers" are real engineers, because real engineers can reason about uncertainty. You are what you do, I think it's expected that if you spend your life reasoning in one framework, atrophies your practice at any other framework.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]
killingtime74 1mo ago
The title made me think the author is some kind of whisky
andai 1mo ago
Why does this supremely valuable extra information my body is feeding me tell me to stop running, sit down and eat ice cream while watching 400 short videos? Like, that's much worse advice than I get from flipping a coin!
isoprophlex 1mo ago
> ... the scientific method is a classifier that is intentionally biased against accepting something as true - so that we only accept things as true that are beyond any reasonable doubt true. > A somewhat fascinating corollary of this is that there exists a large class of true things that will never be scientifically shown as true. Wild shit. Gödel's undecidability at an institutional, societal level.

227 points by tdullien 1mo ago

One of rare articles here that is actually worth reading. 1st one requires that you actually care 2nd one relevance depends on what are you doing, not everyone works on airplane software 3rd one, novelty for me

roenxi 1mo ago

> The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think. There is an implication from this one that the article doesn't get into, which is whether you've picked a strategy of fail-safe or fail-disastrously. Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start. It is one of those ideas that sounds very simple to incorporate into your life and turns out to be hard. IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous. > The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic. He's technically right, but our instincts are not suitable for a complex 8-billion person global economy. We have a bunch of instincts calibrated so that a group of ~200 monkeys probably raises >200 descendants on average, just. We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment. It doesn't have to be a reason-emotion dichotomy, but there has to be something where effective people > destructive people in situations where our instincts don't trigger or push people in predictably bad directions.

jaggederest 1mo ago
I always phrase this as "Do you want to play zero-sum or negative sum games? Or would you rather play positive sum games where the world is better off even if you personally aren't 'the winner'?" > Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start I'm just going to quote that because it's a great statement of a truly astounding idea. Most people do not think like you do. Even inside the HN bubble, most people don't think like you do. The diversity in humanity is enormous, and I wish I'd known sooner how fallible and narrow a single person's view is, even when it's your own. Making the best choices you can possibly make does not guarantee success, and even if you succeed, there's no guarantee that it was the best idea or even a good idea.
altmanaltman 1mo ago
> IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous. Basically what Nietzsche said on morality. However, there is a counterfactual to this line of thinking as well and it doesn't map as easily. > We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment. This is where Immanual Kant's categorial imperative comes into play. Kant thinks there is absolutely an evidence-based principle to be moral. And he grounds it in reason and human beings themselves. His ideas make sense when you start thinking "okay lets say I am free to make my own values and must have a good relationship with my values, what is an objective way to evaluate this so I can be morally good?" Kant becomes a good starting point and he claims that you don't need any external objective way/method of evaluation other than the reason afforded to you by nature as a human being and then he spends a lot of pages elucidating how this type of a system would work. Both Nietzsche and Kant are worth reading if you want to understand morality in general, even though Nietzsche fundamentally disagreed with Kant that there can be an objectively correct mode of evaluation.
SuoDuanDao 1mo ago
That is a great point. We have such a 'bias for action' in popular culture, especially in places like Hacker News, that we overlook how much energy successful cultures have put into 'bias for restraint'. I very much like the bias for action mindset, but I don't have a great answer for the problem of 'what if the things you want are bad for the world?' Your mention of destructive people makes me think there might be an angle with bias for action being helpful if it's building - some people will build the torment nexus, but newly built things are so inherently fragile that maybe we can absorb a certain amount of harmful building without serious damage, in a way we can't absorb much harmful destruction. Does that ring true?

bigcat12345678 1mo ago

Here, you can find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constructed_emotion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constructed_emotion to be useful in articulating the following. > 3. The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic. Guessing: Essentially that's psychology. And Human psychology is itself emergent behavior cannot be directly traced back to neuroscience. Logic, that is another thing, which primarily is used for understanding and reconstruct retainable after emotional experiences.

TheOtherHobbes 1mo ago
It's not psychology, it's just wrong. You can point to the parts of the brain (more accurately the body and brain) that handle reason and emotions, and they're physically distinct. Also, reason is essentially a combination of pattern recognition and abstraction, and emotion is a set of spontaneous limbic responses. Which is not to say there's no relationship between them, or that the grey area where they overlap isn't unusually interesting. But it's a wild overreach to say the distinction is a cultural construct and not grounded in (largely) mammalian biology. Points 1 and 2 are also questionable. They're not novel opinions, they have philosophical names (more or less consequentialism vs deontology, with some wrinkles), and they can be - and have been - hotly debated. I don't see them as evidence of maturity or of immaturity, more of a considered moral position that not everyone agrees with.
- disgruntledphd2 1mo ago
  Our measurements of the brain are derived from small samples, have a bunch of weird priors encoded in them and are mostly correlational, so I don't think we can make strong statements like in your first paragraph.
layer8 1mo ago
The theory of constructed emotion doesn’t say anything about the relation of emotions to reasoning.
- 1mo ago

hankbond 1mo ago

Dang these are really not at all common advice/reflections. > 1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think. I think certainly your actions are maybe that paramount to the world because it has so many actors, but they are certainly important to you. The actions that we take on a daily basis nudge nudge nudge us to becoming something else. I think its something worth focusing on but not to the point it makes you anxious. Thanks for the thoughtful piece.

kazinator 1mo ago

> Monocausal determinism is an illusion, and largely does not exist outside of computer debugging. Also: quite often does not exist inside computer debugging, either.

kazinator 1mo ago

> The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic. Hard disagree with part of this. Reason is an intellectual construct, that has a basis in logic. (Neuroscience not finding a division: sure. Just like electrical engineering doesn't see a dichotomy between Microsoft Word and Firefox.) Reasoning isn't separated from emotion because reasoning needs inputs. Some inputs are secondary: the result of other reasoning. Some are non-negotiable facts from the world. But some primary inputs that go into reasoning are determined by values and desires. E.g. "I feel it would be nice obtain such and such a result in the world" (hard reasoning on how to get it ensues).

jdlshore 1mo ago
I don’t have the link right now, but I recall a study of some sort that examined brain activity and decision making. The “emotion” part lit up first, then the “reasoning” part. Essentially, we make decisions based on emotion, then come up with an explanation for the decision that was already made. We form a memory that says the explanation was why we made the decision, but it was actually the emotion. In other words, by default, we’re rationalizing, not rational.
- tekne 1mo ago
  I think the issue is precisely the rationalising part. Let's assume I have pre-decided something: if the fruit weighs over 100g, I'll buy it, otherwise I won't. I can then measure and find out. My emotions -- based on looking at the fruit -- may mislead me here. Now what about "likely to weigh more than 100g"? Here it's really easy to lie to yourself. But if you set conditions for what counts as likely before you know what they'll be used for, and you stick to them, you can make a decision based on reason. There is no way to decide 100g is the threshold divorced from emotion, however -- unless it's rationally derived from something else emotionally based. The "rationalisation" bit comes from us not making decisions for the reasons we think we are -- or in the way we claim to be.
- disgruntledphd2 1mo ago
  To quote a 17c vulgarity, reason is a whore.

drzhouq 1mo ago

Being able to detach from your thinking while you are thinking, that's difficult and indeed very useful. I found that more often in llm than human beings.

CTDOCodebases 1mo ago

3. Emotion motivates everything that we do. It's just a question of what emotions are you considering and what emotions are you prioritizing. Reasoning is taking all emotions into context and focusing on actions that align with certain emotions.

BeetleB 1mo ago

When I read titles like these, I expect a relatively low value article. This has probably been the highest value such article I've read in years. You've phrased item 3 better than I have been trying to for years after my own journey in realizing this. Thank you.

bbor 1mo ago

The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic. This is a nice, thoughtful piece, but the final point oversteps while chasing a noble heuristic, I think. To touch on a few fields off the top of my head: 1. All serious cognitive philosophy since at least Kant has supported the idea of separate faculties -- in his case, specifically the four chambers [`--` quantitative sensitivity, `-+` qualitative perceptivity, `+-` causal judgement, `++` modal reason].[1] This is also at the root of the induction vs. deduction [vs. abduction] debate, which had been raging for at least 2,200 years before Kant. 2. Even our pre-gallilean understanding of neuroscience arrived at the same conclusion, though in hilariously abstract terms: 'fast thinking' vs. 'slow thinking'. Popularized primarily by a popsci book (?) that frames it like this: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. 3. Psychologically the clearest paradigm is Freud's `- Id`/`+ Ego`/`* Super-Ego`, which is not nearly as discredited as his famous theories about parental lust would imply. If you asked your psychiatrist(/local research psychologist) about it today, they'd ofc use less medieval words for the same concepts -- roughly 'unconscious', 'cognition', and 'executive', in order.[2] 4. In cognitive science more broadly, a lot of the binaries discussed on Wikipedia's Mathematical Model article[3] are getting at this delineation. 5. Eastern philosophy has plenty of stuff on this dichotomy; in fact, I'd argue their discussion of it is predicated upon its existence and the various harmful states it can create if left unexamined. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_logico-epistemology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_logico-epistemology On a 'logical' level, the case for a separation of at least two types of thinking seems clear: any cognitive activity can either call the 'lightweight' model to guess what's happening (and be right 95% of the time), or call the 'superheavy' model to iteratively reason through webs of beliefs. Sure, any call probably uses more than 0.0001% of both so they're not mutually exclusive, but I think the qualitative diffence is clear. The sentiment is true in a bit more subtle of a way, I will admit... It's hard to articulate in brief (/at all), but I've become fascinated with the way the presence of the higher faculties sometimes seems to completely transform the lower ones, unlocking whole new affordances. Like the existence of a new structure of a higher level of complexity completely changing the behavior of nearby cellular automata. If you'll excuse the anthropomorphization of abstract patterns for moment: it reminds me of how a competent leader can unlock whole new affordances for the individuals on their team without actually directly changing the individuals themselves. Like, consider how we have have tons of both instincts & intuitions related to language use -- speaking, writing, listening, etc. Chimpanzees & bonobos share many of our incredibly advanced intuitive abilities (e.g. manual dexterity, social 'theory of mind'/empathy, etc.), but they are categorically unable to pick those up. In this way the super-ego didn't add funtionality to our species, and it didn't even really multiply it geometrically (?) -- it seems much closer to an exponentiation of capability.[4] TL;DR: Acknowledging the fallibility and inherently-subconscious basis of reason is a noble goal, but abandoning the Idea altogether is misleading. IMHO! [1]: http://staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk/ppp/ksp1/toc.html http://staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk/ppp/ksp1/toc.html [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_therapy#Basis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_therapy#Basis [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_model#Classifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_model#Classificat... [4]: Here's to hoping that this fourth rung is the last one, at least for a while! Cause if there's a fifth one, and AI discovers and produces it... yikes. Truely alien ASI would follow, rather than just ASI-as-huge-but-fundamentally-grokkable-AGI.)

newsomix9xl 1mo ago

Greybeard is not sexist.

65 1mo ago

I don't particularly disagree with what the author has written about, but the jargon and complex wording is really annoying to read. If this were written on a single subject, like engineering philosophy, then fine. But writing a multi-subject article requires simpler language so those who may be familiar with one thing but not the other can understand everything. I find it hard to trust the intelligence of someone who uses words like "dichotomy", "meta-cognition", and "monocausal determinism" - language like this is purely performative. Let's not be performative, who are you trying to impress with your big words?

JSR_FDED 1mo ago
The thing is, these words are both incredibly precise and compact. So I’m very happy that the author uses them, as it means I can get the meaning without lowest common denominator fluff or volume. Have I always known what these words meant? No, but it’s the reward for a habit of right-clicking every word and looking up the definition - which also stretches your cognitive capacity over time so it’s worth doing for purely selfish reasons.
armitron 1mo ago
Your particular interpretation of the author's choice in words tells us more about your psychological makeup than the author. Take the "meta-cognition" advice to heart and perform some self-debugging in order to determine what exactly in your psyche made you react in this way.
grey-area 1mo ago
You appear to define words you don’t immediately understand at this point in time as ‘performative’, ie used only to show off. An odd position to take. If you don’t know a word just look it up, you may well learn something.
- 65 1mo ago
  I know what all of these words mean. My point is that these are esoteric words that don't fit into the article's purpose or for the article's audience. The author would have gotten his point across far easier if he were to have first contextualized these words, or defined them himself. Pedagogy is very important in writing. Without care for the reader, these words come off as performative.

0sake_rs 1mo ago

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jaggederest 1mo ago

To give other maturation advice to those not yet in their 40s: It's quite likely that you have significant issues you haven't addressed yet. Getting into good medical care, therapy, exercise, and supportive e.g. nutrition, etc is likely more important than virtually anything else you'll do in your life, with a reasonable exception for choosing the right person to spend your life with and having a family. But having a good social life is a hell of a lot easier if you're in great physical and mental shape. I took all of those things very seriously, and I probably did not put enough value into any of those things, even given that orientation. That leads right into: The only thing you can truly exert control over is yourself, and it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices, either indirectly through the environment you live in or directly through the actions you take. Humility is drastically underrated, and being healthy plays into this enormously as well. That being said, I'd love to hear a perspective from some of the older HN folks - what am I missing as a mid-40s person that I should absolutely be paying attention to?

bitexploder 1mo ago
I am mid 40s. Started working at a hyper scaler a couple years ago. I think you are overthinking it. All there is, is to be present and focus on what is important. And no one else can tell you what is important, you already know. Spend your time wisely with your family or on things that matter to you and not on trivial pursuit. There are no secrets in this. It is largely what you define. When you ask this question of others, you are asking what am I forgetting? What will I regret? They can’t tell you. They can tell you what they regretted it and maybe you will regret those same things they did. But you have to decide. In 10 years. In 20 years. All you have to do is ask your future self what you’re gonna regret that you didn’t do. I had found that we already know the answers to those things. E: think of it this way. And you don’t have to have a dog for these questions to work they’re metaphorical really, but also physical if you do have a dog. Did you walk your dog? Did you play ball with it? If they die tomorrow, will you look back and say that today was good? Did you do everything you could do with your dog? If not go do those things right now don’t leave them undone. That’s all there is. And the same thing works with everything in life. You know what you should’ve done in the day. If you do those things in 10 or 20 years, you won’t look back and say I wish I would’ve done those things cause you’ve done them.

m463 1mo ago

> 1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think. maybe not 0day stuff, but breaking the build is something that mature people have learned not to do. What are the rewards for move fast and break things for people?

thin_carapace 1mo ago

I agree with a lot of the first point but the expression does seem to lend an air of futility to caring about your impacts which I hope wasn't the intention. I do whole heartedly disagree with everyone believing they are the hero of their own story - while there sure are a subset of people who will justify screwing others (or at least bury their heads in the sand), there's also a subset of people that are happy to revel in schadenfreude. all that aside, the author's beliefs probably do apply to his target audience.

vlan0 1mo ago

Ahh these are fun. They come up often when thinking about consciousness. If you like these, you might be interested in the book, I Am A Strange Loop

bitexploder 1mo ago

What I have learned about neuroscience and philosophy is this: most people are not willing to invest as much time in small pursuits versus understanding the machinery of their mind and what will actually let them understand themselves with more clarity. Understanding the self loop. The strange self loop. Seeing that the thing that is doing the observing inside of us is the whole and that from within our own system, we cannot completely reason about ourselves. The incompleteness theorem. We have named it we call it the default mode network. It is essentially a recursive predictive machine. It only stops when we die. It is essentially making predictions about reality constantly. It is retrieving previous state and associating at the current state to make decisions. What it associates with previous memory and current state are encoding of our hormonal state and mental state at that point in time. You can call it emotions. You can try and reason about it. It just exists. At some level, you just have to learn to let it be. All of the sophisticated words of psychology and trying to describe the machinery from within the machinery. It’s useful, you need a guide to live life. To keep the machinery and coding clean and not over, indexing on states that aren’t useful. But it all boils down to some pretty simple things. And when you see that the observer is the observed, and that it is all a part of the whole of the self, things become more manageable, for me, at least. Take grief for example. What is grief? It is a prediction error. An expectation of some past state that the prediction machinery keeps expecting to come up one way, but it comes up another. And when it does come up as an error it hurts. It’s OK to experience it and to embrace it even. But it’s also OK to see it for what it is. We can’t escape the machine. But we can step outside of it briefly and watch it at work and acknowledge what it actually is.

selestify 1mo ago
Very good in theory. In practice, how do you actually understand yourself? I have done plenty of meditation and plenty of reading on mental health and psychology. I still don't understand why I specifically act the way I do.
- eastbound 1mo ago
  Did you include meeting with a therapist? The problem is that they have to reveal you things you don't generally want to admit, so it takes a bit of time (time which I find absolutely wasted) and depending on the therapist, they might not tell you immediately about your inconsistencies.

burnto 1mo ago

Wonderfully written. I’m intrigued by the section about emotion. It seems like no coincidence that it follows the section about seeing beyond monocausal determinism.

burnto 1mo ago

As a mid 40s person also, my advice: drink plenty of water, clean the kitchen every night, don’t try to time the market, forgive your past self for being an idiot.

simonebrunozzi 1mo ago
Short but brilliant. Well done. I'd add: try to sleep well. It adds up.
- krn1p4n1c 1mo ago
  So much to do and so little time. But you’re right, it’s so important.
amunozo 1mo ago
I keep thinking about cleaning the kitchen every night (I just turned 30). The more I think about it, the more I think it's a good advice. I still need to forgive my past self for being an idiot, though :)
bossyTeacher 1mo ago
> clean the kitchen every night Is this a metaphor?

tecoholic 1mo ago

The Old-guard is a good alternative to greybeards, no?

bambax 1mo ago

> If you were asked: “Would it be good if this 0day was used to apprehend a terrorist?” you would probably say “this is good”. If you were asked “would it be good if this 0day is used to arrest someone and then torture and waterboard him 183 times?”, you would probably say “this is bad”. So if your 0day was used to capture KSM, it is probably good? Or bad? Things get very complicated very quickly. This is a version of the very classic problems "does the end justify the means" (should one torture a terrorist to prevent other terrorist acts). Much to the chagrin of utilitarians everywhere, the answer to that question is NO, because answering yes leads to a bottomless hole of infinite evil.

stackbutterflow 1mo ago
US TV shows in the years after 9/11 are hard to watch now because they're plagued with pro torture scenes. I don't know when exactly but it seemed to have disappeared.
albumen 1mo ago
This is too simplistic an argument re utilitarianism. It assumes torture definitely works, and that there’s no further consequences. Many utilitarians might say “no” too, given that there is no persuasive evidence that torture is a superior intelligence-gathering method to well-conducted non-coercive interrogation; and that it’s likely to produce unreliable information alongside whatever truths it elicits. It’s a decidedly grey world.

maCDzP 1mo ago

I agree fully with the point about integrating emotion in your decision making. Earlier I used to get stuck in decisions since I had the need to be rational. Which is in it self an emotion I guess - since need is an emotion? Now my life is much simpler.

datagreed 1mo ago

I cannot be the only one who read the title wrong

abanana 1mo ago
You're not, I'm sorry to say! I was only quickly scanning the HN front page, but still. Does that say something about steps required in our own maturation processes?

iamflimflam1 1mo ago

As someone who is now skewing towards the older side of the tech world (55 this year). It’s a journey. There isn’t some point where you’ll suddenly find you are now “wise” and understand yourself. Those moments do appear - but a few years later you’ll likely realise that it was only relevant for that time of your life and things have changed. What might have worked and served you well then may not be the right thing for now. Getting locked into a way of thinking or behaving is a recipe for being old before your time. Try and apply the agile principles - do a retro - is it still working, what should keep doing, what should you stop doing? And - the best time to start doing something good is now. Doesn’t matter if you should have done it 20 years ago. Regret can be disabling. Try and be nice to people. We don’t know what is happening in other people’s worlds. [edit] And be kind to yourself. Self compassion is underrated. Forgive yourself. You are human. Not perfect. And you don’t need to be. Show yourself some love.

ekjhgkejhgk 1mo ago

> Monocausal determinism is an illusion, and largely does not exist outside of computer debugging. I work in trading with a lot of software engineers, and one thing I noticed is that these cannot reason about uncertainty if their lives depended on it. Their way to approach any problem is like you debug code: there must be a specific code path that was followed that led to that outcome. But markets aren't like this, and things happen for no reason, or are better modelled as if happening for no reason. This is also the reason why I don't really think "software engineers" are real engineers, because real engineers can reason about uncertainty. You are what you do, I think it's expected that if you spend your life reasoning in one framework, atrophies your practice at any other framework.

deleted 1mo ago

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killingtime74 1mo ago

The title made me think the author is some kind of whisky

andai 1mo ago

Why does this supremely valuable extra information my body is feeding me tell me to stop running, sit down and eat ice cream while watching 400 short videos? Like, that's much worse advice than I get from flipping a coin!

isoprophlex 1mo ago

> ... the scientific method is a classifier that is intentionally biased against accepting something as true - so that we only accept things as true that are beyond any reasonable doubt true. > A somewhat fascinating corollary of this is that there exists a large class of true things that will never be scientifically shown as true. Wild shit. Gödel's undecidability at an institutional, societal level.