Something practical is something that helps you achieve your ends, right? Well, I’ve very recently had the thought that the vast majority of the population shares the same two terminal values, or terminal virtues, of happiness (some combo of pleasure + satisfaction) and goodness (concern for the happiness of others) in varying ratios, whether they are conscious of this or not. (I’ll probably write more and share this idea here soon.)
So in my case, the biggest practical value I got out of reading the content of these sequences was an increase in happiness; I felt personally satisfied after reading them. They clearly articulated a lot of intuitions I had in the past. I liked the ideas. They made sense. Basically, this sounds really cheesy, but they brought me joy, which I consider an end in itself.
I’m about 40% through the ebook now, and I’m learning tons and tons of new facts about evolution and neurology and hearing many new ideas that will probably change my life. I don’t think that this section itself will really change my life though, only because I feel like I knew these concepts intuitively and already applied them pretty well on a day to day basis. That said, having read this section, I can now express these ideas much more clearly to others, so people who don’t naturally think like this can learn to, too :)
Actually, upon reading the summaries you wrote (big thanks for that) there was one bias that I didn’t intuitively understand or catch very well in my day to day thinking, and that’s #5, availability. I’m going to re-read that one and see if I can think of any good examples to share.
Something practical is something that helps you achieve your ends, right? Well, I’ve very recently had the thought that the vast majority of the population shares the same two terminal values, or terminal virtues, of happiness (some combo of pleasure + satisfaction) and goodness (concern for the happiness of others) in varying ratios, whether they are conscious of this or not. (I’ll probably write more and share this idea here soon.)
So in my case, the biggest practical value I got out of reading the content of these sequences was an increase in happiness; I felt personally satisfied after reading them. They clearly articulated a lot of intuitions I had in the past. I liked the ideas. They made sense. Basically, this sounds really cheesy, but they brought me joy, which I consider an end in itself.
I’m about 40% through the ebook now, and I’m learning tons and tons of new facts about evolution and neurology and hearing many new ideas that will probably change my life. I don’t think that this section itself will really change my life though, only because I feel like I knew these concepts intuitively and already applied them pretty well on a day to day basis. That said, having read this section, I can now express these ideas much more clearly to others, so people who don’t naturally think like this can learn to, too :)
Actually, upon reading the summaries you wrote (big thanks for that) there was one bias that I didn’t intuitively understand or catch very well in my day to day thinking, and that’s #5, availability. I’m going to re-read that one and see if I can think of any good examples to share.