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)
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
Congratulations. You drew the intelligence card. You're right. This is all like one big board game where everything eventually goes back into the box. Your money, possessions, accomplishments, productions, ideas, thoughts, and feelings. Back to the box. So pick a character class compatible with what you rolled and don't forget to have fun.
Oh, and head up; you're going to suffer anyway, so make sure to maximize how much of it is by your own choosing.
Value is just some human made up currency after all. "Is it worth the time?" etc.
If I were to approach life with the mindset "well everyone I know is going to die some day and humanity will die out so what's the point?" I'm not going to have a very positive outlook to life.
But I figure I'm here. I get 90 years or so if I am lucky. I might as well enjoy them while this combination of atoms is me.
Doing nothing does that for me. Seriously. I'm regularly confronted with this feeling, and one thing I found over the years to consistently lift me out of that trough of meaninglessness is meditation. It boils down to "if nothing seems to matter, then just don't do anything". But I have to resist the temptation to just engage in some form of escapism and just sit there with that boredom. Initially it's hard, but after about half an hour to an hour the feeling of boredom and meaninglessness recedes, and my mind becomes more calm, focused and purposeful. It's as simple as that, at least for me.
One is to stay small - the things you do matter in your individual sphere.You don't take care of your body, you die. You don't exercise your brain, it atrophies. You can increase this sphere to friends, families, community etc till you can see the effects and have feedback. Of course as in all system, those might be a bit delayed, so it helps to have some context.
Or you can go meta, why should things matter. This innate drive that we have to find meaning in all things is very confusing. Things simply are - accept them.
And if nothing actually matters at all - then you have a blank canvas to paint what you want.
I've began to see nihilism as a memetic virus or disease. Once you begin wandering outside the boundaries where you were raised, you almost invariably end up catching the nihils. Some people have few symptoms and can easily continue living meaningful lives. However, other people are heavily affected by them, and become abated and purposeless. We know the symptoms to the nihils.
Then, it's a matter of taking care of yourself and antibodies will begin to build.
I know you are asking about this second part, and I'm sorry I can't give you a straightforward answer (a vaccine, could be said).
The most I can be confident to say is that, as every memetic phenomena, it has a strong subjetive charge. I don't think it is 100% subjective, as humans have more in common that we'd like to admit. And, most likely, the best vaccines for your case are already suggested and proven countless times before. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. Also, be wary of bullshitty alternatives to vaccines/medicine (superfluous and toxic feel-good coaching).
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
I came across the idea on this website (https://commoncog.com/start-here/), which I feel is far more "applied" than the Farnam Street 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 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)
I very much disagree. Some of the biggest changes in my life were driven by the reading or hearing of a few words which suddenly made everything click. These moments led to huge behavior changes.
I definitely relate to that. I only started saving money seriously (with proper planning) after reading about FIRE (financial independence retire early) in a blog. Reading about that idea completely changed my mind about the true purpose of putting money aside while I was still young.
Before reading about FIRE I thought the idea of retiring silly because I was 100% sure I'd never stop working, even after turning 65. So saving money never made sense to me.
The blog about FIRE explained with a total different point of view which is not about retiring really but it's about having the choice to do only the work you really want to and being independent to make your own choices regardless of needing a paycheck.
What's the point? What one person needs at one point in their life is very unlikely to be what another person needs - it might appear banal or unintelligible to another.
It would be interesting to hear grandparent’s perspective. We learn from the experience of others. Otherwise, schools, best practices, or forums like HN would be completely useless.
For me personally, I read a blog post about motivation — and a quite silly one at that. I was young and struggled a lot with ADHD and motivation in general. I had a hard time in school because I just physically couldn’t work on an assignment. I’d set it down in front of me and stare at it, unable to start. I had kinda decided that I wasn’t good at those sorts of things, which made it harder.
But I found this random post online one day which has some ideas about trying to do small annoying things for no reason, to train your brain to be better at doing hard things.
The blog gave an example: go on a walk, but go out of your way to take on a pointless task. Like at the beginning, set out to touch 50 flowers. Then go on your walk touching flowers. When you get to the end, you’ve gotten practice doing something that you didn’t want to and which was a bit annoying. But now you’ll have a bit more confidence to do something else in the future.
I got in a habit of taking on these pointless goals a lot for a few weeks. Eventually I was sitting down and looking at my homework, thinking “I spent two hours touching flowers for no reason, I can spend a few minutes doing this” and would make some progress.
Looking back it seems ridiculous, but it was the advice I needed at the time, and it actually helped me make some changes in life. That whole process made me get into a habit of thinking about the end goal & how small little steps can help you do big things. And actually practicing and seeing that, took me out of the headspace of “I can never do that” to “maybe I can”.
And more interesting, I wrote about this on a forum back then, and more than a month after writing it I received a message from someone who said “hey, I just wanted to let you know that I started doing the annoying-little-task strategy after reading your post, and I feel it’s helped me a lot so thank you”
Maybe tomorrow I will touch 20 flowers on my daily walk. (50 seems like too much.)
Thanks for the idea.
I don't know if this is really similar, but maybe it's a bit related. One of my friends and I decided to write 100 words a day for 30 days. Two other friends ended up joining our little project. I kept it up for about 100 days, and it made writing much easier for me. Also, about 2 months ago, I decided to spend about 30 minutes a day writing. It is amazing how much easier writing became for me. (When I was young, I found writing to be very painful. The only C's I got in college were in English. Nowadays, I think of my self as a writer --- not a good writer, but a writer.)
A very basic one would be the realization that everyone else is more unlike you than like you.
Once this idea sinks in, it generally promotes empathy because you stop judging others by the "golden rule" (do unto others as you would have them do unto you), and start thinking about the (perfectly sane and logical) mindset and circumstance that could lead to a particular action or idea. Once you go deep enough you start to recognize the patterns within patterns.
It allows you to take others as they are, rather than as an imperfect you.
One could read the comment summarised by "what's the point?" as itself an idea that could change a life.
Towards the negative mainly but also maybe towards stopping negative behaviour or thoughts. "Why care?"
Nihilism is an idea that has changed the world.
The rest of the comment is more of a modern idea where no one is able to know anyone else, prioritising the individual over all. This is most common in identity politics today.
It's worse than nihilism and it also changes societies and people as it encourages and demands the rejection of understanding and empathy.
No, that’s not what I meant. I’m talking about reading books and lasting life changing things from them, and GP is right, I can guarantee the thing I have in mind probably won’t mean anything to you.
One category of idea is a tool-in-a-toolbox idea. Many on this page is of that type. A lot of ideas in economics is this, for example. They become thinking tools that are easily synthesized into the brain as they are super easy conceptual ideas. So as you go about your day and come across a problem, your brain can pull from that toolbox to better solve the problem.
I love sites full of wisdom like this. Sometimes there’s a tool buried deep in my toolbox that my brain forgot I had and this brings it back to the surface. And sometimes there’s a new tool I can grok/incorporate in seconds. And inevitably there will be a tool I don’t care about or agree with and simply discard it. Big win for very minimal investment of time.
This is so important. Over the years as someone who's constantly trying new note-taking mind mappy things, interacting with my own thoughts in the past, it took an embarrassingly long time to realize that one of the the fundamental differences between me and the computer is that I require multiple writes.
(The other is that graphy mind-mappy tools on the computer are often pointless, because this is the thing that human brains are WAY BETTER AT than the computer.
What the computer is good at is "perfect recall of specifics in the form of words")
> me and the computer is that I require multiple writes
Remarkable in times in which we study "one shot learning" for machines.
Edit: incidentally, this human detail reveals precisely what seems to be crucially missing in machine learning, current stage: ideas do propagate change through internal elaboration, in an organic process - ideas fine-tune models, through internal work.
One of my life-changing ideas was "work with yourself instead of against it when possible." I also require multiple 'writes', so anything important is written or displayed somewhere that I see it multiple times a day.
It takes about 6 weeks of repetition to establish a habit. With 9 such intervals a year, and 90 in a decade, I think given how few people apply they could be forgiven for referring to the few which stick as ideas rather than habituation?
The idea is the trigger. Doing it, to achieve lasting change requires habit forming.
I can't rub my tummy in a circle and put my head precisely because I can't acquire two skills at once. Chewing gum followed walking. But perhaps I could learn to overlap these brief attempts at habit forming. It might take six weeks or so...
For some things yes. For others, nope. The realisation that, when you pour a full long-life milk tetrapak, the opening goes at the top not the bottom of the top face? That changed my life instantly. I mean, it’s not earth shattering but it’s had a permanent and measurable impact on me, and I’ve passed it on to a few people with similar results.
Likewise a friend once pointed out that swinging a closed sauce bottle to get the sauce to the top is way more effective than shaking it linearly. That was 15 years ago and I still think of him every time I use this trick.
The only way of change is by habit.