CEO & Founder at White Rabbit Express and Blackship.com
Max Hodges
Karma: 32
How honest are you really being if you’re coming up with silly logical scenarios to avoid answering a question truthfully? I just don’t see the point of being “technically honest” when you don’t want to reveal something? The only people who say, “I can neither confirm nor deny such and such” is when they are on trial and have a right against self-incrimination—not when they are talking to their friends.
So this all seems silly and unnecessary. If you don’t want your friend to know what you did, just change the subject or lie about it. Or tell them, “I’d rather not talk about it.” Let’s say I stay up doing cocaine with a male prostitute all night, but I don’t want to reveal this to my friend. If I say, “either I did or I don’t want to tell you” now you’ve created some suspicion which could involve some unwanted attention or scrutiny into your affairs, such as pressing forward with follow-up questions, or unwanted office gossip about your late night activities.
FRIEND: Did you get to sleep early last night?
Just lie and cover up the reason why you’re really tired.“Yes, I went to bed early, but then woke up at 5AM and couldn’t get back to sleep.”
Deflect
“Sure, how about you? Or did you stay up watching binge watching Netflix again?”
Subject Change:
“Oh hey! Can we talk about that upcoming dinner party?” (they were just making small talk anyway, so swap to something more important.)
Most people just don’t even try to believe correct things, and make major life decisions based on transparently bad logic.
That’s quite an assertion. What’s your source? Evidence? Or is this mere conjecture (here, in this sacred space!)? ;) You advise others to only say true things, but why are you sure this is true?
There is a lot of ambiguity around major life decisions. Many decisions aren’t a matter of rationally weighing all the facts, but more a matter of analyzing a bunch of compromises and then rolling the dice. Many major decisions can be reversed later anyway.
I think most people, most of the time, make the best decisions for themselves that they know how. If someone’s decision looks like transparently bad logic to you, why not ask them about it?
No one has “full knowledge and consciousness” (whatever that means to you). We’re complicated beings with a multitude of urges and impulses.
No one needs to be a rationalist to understand these pathologies, and no one needs to be a rationalist to recognize them. Think of all the people who start and don’t finish learning a new language, yet with clear intention at the beginning to make full use of time well spent. Do most of these people actually believe they will finish learning Chinese?
Failing to master a foreign language is a “pathology”? People experiment. They try things to see if they’ll enjoy them enough to stick with them. I’ve tried to learn how to draw at various time in my life, but never made it a habit for very long. I guess it wasn’t that important to me. I quit watching movies and Netflix serials before the end. I don’t finish a lot of books that I start, and I don’t view this as a failing. If I don’t feel I’m getting much value out of that book, I’ll pick up a different book.
There is only so much time in the day. It’s not pathological to change your goals and priorities. There is no shame in quitting something. I proudly quit things all the time. I trained intensely as a freediver. I met interesting people, and learned more than I ever imagined I would. It was very enriching on many levels. I learned to hold my breath for five-and-a-half-minutes, entered and won a competition, and ranked in the top 10 here in Japan where I live. Then I quit, just like that. I felt that I learned about as much as I was going to learn and decided to free up my time. Same with photography. I got intensely into photography for a few years. Had a studio with +$30K in equipment. My photos landed on Page One of the NY Times, twice. Then I quit and sold off all my photo equipment to make time for other activities. So what? I started studying Chinese for 6-weeks while living in Beijing, then I stopped because I was traveling a lot, moved back to the US, and never continued with it. Am I pathological? Irrational? Did I do something wrong?
Etsy as an organization, did not care or want to be correct at predicting what its users would want,
People have different skill-sets. Maybe math is your thing, maybe networking or operations management, culture building, or something else was the Etsy founder’s skill they got them started. You pick things up along the way. I’m been running a company for more than 10 years, and I’m only recently getting into doing a deeper analysis of our customer behaviors and fees. But they didn’t stop me from the success I’ve had up until now. You don’t have to be very intelligent to be successful in business. Look at Jack Ma.
Have you ever run a fast-growing startup? There are a metric-shit-ton of things you could be working on. Multiple fires are burning. No one has the time or the resources to do all the things they could be doing. You also have to to look at all the things Etsy did instead of A/B testing, like working on their platform, building their company culture, fund-raising, etc. I’m running multiple e-commerce companies with a team of 20. I’ve never done a proper A/B ever, yet I’ve served tens of thousands of customers in 100+ countries. I could get to work right away on those A/B tests, but everything comes with opportunity costs. Time I spend on the A/B test project is time I could spend doing R&D for our new data model, mentoring other managers, doing financial analysis, streamlining operations, or trying to give advice to some stranger on Less Wrong. What’s the most important thing I should be doing this very moment? Maybe we should ask Jack Dorsey. He seems to have his priorities and daily schedule all sorted out, but then he has the personality of a wet towel, so maybe we shouldn’t ask him ;) (And maybe being extremely-efficient all the time isn’t the best way develop as a human.)
You could go to any company and tell them 10 things they should be doing, and they will probably tell you, “I have a list of hundreds of things I should be doing. But I only have so many resources and so many hours in the day. Having a strategy is about what you will not do as much as what you will do.
You know, there really is nothing in my brain that changes the dynamics of the choice I’m about to make. No matter what I say to myself about the impeding circumstances, if I don’t somehow exercise today, I’m going to be very slightly physically weaker by tomorrow and have a very slightly shorter life expectancy.
I pretty much work out as often and as intensely as I figure is aligned with my goals now. I just do it, because I know working out is a good idea and I know it’s usually still a good idea regardless of the weather that day. It’s amazing the quality of life increases I have made by merely not trying my damnedest to believe incorrect things.
I don’t follow this line-of-argument. Are you saying you didn’t know that you’d be weaker if you stopped working out? Surely you knew that. Your story doesn’t sound like an a matter of “having correct information,” but an issue of resolve. Motivation is complex. We can’t just reach into our brains and flip a switch—and that’s a good thing. It’s how nature prevents one part of the mind from shutting down all the other parts. Instead, when motivating oneself, we have to rely on some of the same strategies and tactics we use when motivating others.
The domain name of this website would lead me to believe most of you are attempting the same, but I don’t see a lot of the discussion about this that I would expect. I don’t see people discussing the same problems that I fight. The books and skills I pour hours and hours into, then forget; the university I study at because a friend I no longer hang out with decided to attend; the job I take without applying anywhere else, researching salary or internship expectations, or learning any negotation or marketing strategies. How distant and conceptual the prediction market is in the face of my absurd self-sabotage. How foreign timeless decision theory. Am I so unique? I refuse to believe it.
If you want some input on specific topics like this, perhaps they work better as individual posts.
I could share my process for getting the most value out of the books I read. Maybe post that question separately and send me a link.
But reading over that list, it sounds like the general issue is a matter of setting clear priorities. Not everything can be a priority. So perhaps decide your top priorities for the next six weeks, and don’t beat yourself up about all things that you didn’t make a priority. I recommend taking some quiet time. Take long walks to clear your head. Mindfulness meditation is also a great way to clear your head. Start journaling. Write for 15 minutes a day in a notebook with a pen (not on your iPad or mobile phone). It doesn’t matter if you’re handing writing is terrible—you never really go back and read the stuff. It more about cultivating a habit of making time to think deliberatively and self-reflect.
Some starter topics you could journal about (+15 minutes each)
What’s your current context? Write a snapshot of your life at the moment.
What excites you about life? What brings you alive? When do you experience flow? What are you passionate about?
What do you love? What are the things you couldn’t live without? What are your favorite things? What flavors/sights/sounds/textures do you love? What lights you up, turns you on? What delights you?
How do you celebrate life? Maybe you have rituals or traditions? What do you do to rest or play and honor yourself?
What’s important to you? Why?
What do you need for self-care to keep you resourced / healthy / fit / resilient?
Describe who you are when you’re in flow? What is life like? How do you treat others? How easy is it to accomplish things?
What would someone write about you in a letter of recommendation? What do other people appreciate about you?
What are you doing that you should stop doing?
What am you not doing that you should start doing?
Write a letter to your future self one-year from now.
Further reading:
What’s All This About Journaling?
One of the more effective acts of self-care is also, happily, one of the cheapest.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/style/journaling-benefits.html
When setting your priorities, for each thing you decide to do, take a sheet of paper and write down all the reasons why you’ve chosen this thing as a priority. How does it fit in with your goals and values?
I hope this helps
The most important investment that people can make is not to learn a particular skill—”I’ll learn how to code computers,” or “I will learn Chinese,” or something like that. No, the most important investment is really in building this more flexible mind or personality.
https://www.gq.com/story/yuval-noah-harari-tech-future-survival
Minsky writing in Society of Mind might bring some light here (paraphrasing):
How can a box made of six boards hold a mouse when a mouse could just walk away from any individual board? No individual board has any “containment” or “mouse-tightness” on it’s own. So is “containment” an emergent property?
Of course, it is the way a box prevents motion in all directions, because each board bars escape in a certain direction. The left side keeps the mouse from going left, the right from going right, the top keeps it from leaping out, and so on. The secret of a box is simply in how the boards are arranged to prevent motion in all directions!
That’s what containing means. So it’s silly to expect any separate board by itself to contain any containment, even though each contributes to the containing. It is like the cards of a straight flush in poker: only the full hand has any value at all.
“The same applies to words like life and mind. It is foolish to use these words for describing the smallest components of living things because these words were invented to describe how larger assemblies interact. Like boxing-in, words like living and thinking are useful for describing phenomena that result from certain combinations of relationships. The reason box seems nonmysterious is that everyone understands how the boards of a well-made box interact to prevent motion in any direction. In fact, the word life has already lost most of its mystery — at least for modern biologists, because they understand so many of the important interactions among the chemicals in cells. But mind still holds its mystery — because we still know so little about how mental agents interact to accomplish all the things they do.”
Answering the question of who is experiencing the illusion [of self] or interpreting the story is much more problematic. This is partly a conceptual problem and partly a problem of dualism. It is almost impossible to discuss the self without a referent in the same way that is difficult to think about a play without any players. Second, as the philosopher Gilbert Ryle pointed out, in searching for the self, one cannot simultaneously be the hunter and the hunted, and I think that is a dualistic problem if we think we can objectively examine our own minds independently, because our mind and self are both generated by the brain. So while the self illusion suggests an illogical tautology, I think this is only a superficial problem.
-Bruce Hood
The high-level behaviour of a mechanism is always reducible to its the behaviour of its parts, because a mechanism is built up out of parts, and reduction is therefore, literally, reverse engineering.
This characterization isn’t universally accepted. What you if simple can’t anticipate or compute the high-level effect due to the shear complexity and lack of total knowledge? For instance, the experience of pain can alter human behaviour, but the lower-level chemical reactions in the neurons that are involved in the perception of pain are not the cause of the altered behaviour, as the pain itself has causal efficacy. According to the principles of emergence, the natural world is divided into hierarchies that have evolved over evolutionary time (Kim, 1999; Morowitz, 2002). Reductionists advocate the idea of ‘upward causation’ by which molecular states bring about higher-level phenomena, whereas proponents of emergence accept ‘downward causation’ by which higher-level systems influence lower-level configurations (Kim, 1999).
Have a read:
Reductionism and complexity in molecular biology
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299179/
Some highlights
The constituents of a complex system interact in many ways, including negative feedback and feed-forward control, which lead to dynamic features that cannot be predicted satisfactorily by linear mathematical models that disregard cooperativity and non-additive effects...
An additional peculiarity of complex biological systems is that they are open—that is, they exchange matter and energy with their environment—and are therefore not in thermodynamic equilibrium...
In the past, the reductionist agenda of molecular biologists has made them turn a blind eye to emergence, complexity and robustness, which has had a profound influence on biological and biomedical research during the past 50 years.
The number of new drugs that are approved by the US Food and Drug Administration has declined steadily from more than 50 drugs per annum 10 years ago to less than 20 drugs in 2002. This worrying trend has persisted despite continuous mergers and acquisitions in the industry and annual research and development expenditures of approximately US$30 billion. Commentators have attributed this poor performance to a range of institutional causes . . . However, there is probably a more fundamental reason for these failures: namely, that most of these approaches have been guided by unmitigated reductionism. As a result, the complexity of biological systems, whole organisms and patients tends to be underrated (Horrobin, 2001). Most human diseases result from the interaction of many gene products, and we rarely know all of the genes and gene products that are involved in a particular biological function. Nevertheless, to achieve an understanding of complex genetic networks, biologists tend to rely on experiments that involve single gene deletions. Knockout experiments in mice, in which a gene that is considered to be essential is inactivated or removed, are widely used to infer the role of individual genes. In many such experiments, the knockout is found to have no effect whatsoever, despite the fact that the gene encodes a protein that is believed to be essential. In other cases, the knockout has a completely unexpected effect (Morange, 2001a). Furthermore, disruption of the same gene can have diverse effects in different strains of mice (Pearson, 2002). Such findings question the wisdom of extrapolating data that are obtained in mice to other species. In fact, there is little reason to assume that experiments with genetically modified mice will necessarily provide insights into the complex gene interactions that occur in humans (Horrobin, 2003).
Another defect of reductionist thinking is that it analyses complex network interactions in terms of simple causal chains and mechanistic models. This overlooks the fact that any clinical state is the end result of many biochemical pathways and networks, and fails to appreciate that diseases result from alterations to complex systems of homeostasis. Reductionists favour causal explanations that give undue explanatory weight to a single factor.
Unmitigated reductionism has had a detrimental effect on drug discovery and vaccine development
We simply can’t anticipate or compute some interactions and effects due to the sheer complexity of living organisms in thermodynamic interaction with their environment. For instance, the experience of pain can alter human behaviour, but the lower-level chemical reactions in the neurons that are involved in the perception of pain are not the cause of the altered behaviour, as the pain itself has causal efficacy. According to the principles of emergence, the natural world is divided into hierarchies that have evolved over evolutionary time (Kim, 1999; Morowitz, 2002). Reductionists advocate the idea of ‘upward causation’ by which molecular states bring about higher-level phenomena, whereas proponents of emergence accept ‘downward causation’ by which higher-level systems influence lower-level configurations (Kim, 1999).
Have a read:
Reductionism and complexity in molecular biology
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299179/
Some highlights
The constituents of a complex system interact in many ways, including negative feedback and feed-forward control, which lead to dynamic features that cannot be predicted satisfactorily by linear mathematical models that disregard cooperativity and non-additive effects...
An additional peculiarity of complex biological systems is that they are open—that is, they exchange matter and energy with their environment—and are therefore not in thermodynamic equilibrium...
In the past, the reductionist agenda of molecular biologists has made them turn a blind eye to emergence, complexity and robustness, which has had a profound influence on biological and biomedical research during the past 50 years.
The number of new drugs that are approved by the US Food and Drug Administration has declined steadily from more than 50 drugs per annum 10 years ago to less than 20 drugs in 2002. This worrying trend has persisted despite continuous mergers and acquisitions in the industry and annual research and development expenditures of approximately US$30 billion. Commentators have attributed this poor performance to a range of institutional causes . . . However, there is probably a more fundamental reason for these failures: namely, that most of these approaches have been guided by unmitigated reductionism. As a result, the complexity of biological systems, whole organisms and patients tends to be underrated (Horrobin, 2001). Most human diseases result from the interaction of many gene products, and we rarely know all of the genes and gene products that are involved in a particular biological function. Nevertheless, to achieve an understanding of complex genetic networks, biologists tend to rely on experiments that involve single gene deletions. Knockout experiments in mice, in which a gene that is considered to be essential is inactivated or removed, are widely used to infer the role of individual genes. In many such experiments, the knockout is found to have no effect whatsoever, despite the fact that the gene encodes a protein that is believed to be essential. In other cases, the knockout has a completely unexpected effect (Morange, 2001a). Furthermore, disruption of the same gene can have diverse effects in different strains of mice (Pearson, 2002). Such findings question the wisdom of extrapolating data that are obtained in mice to other species. In fact, there is little reason to assume that experiments with genetically modified mice will necessarily provide insights into the complex gene interactions that occur in humans (Horrobin, 2003).
Another defect of reductionist thinking is that it analyses complex network interactions in terms of simple causal chains and mechanistic models. This overlooks the fact that any clinical state is the end result of many biochemical pathways and networks, and fails to appreciate that diseases result from alterations to complex systems of homeostasis. Reductionists favour causal explanations that give undue explanatory weight to a single factor.
OK I’ve taken your advice. I toned it down and elaborated. Thanks
Hi, I’ve updated my post, toned it down, and added some new content. Hope that helps.
Regarding the way Etsy was prioritizing development, it sounds like even their late stage “idea > validate > prototype” cycle is wrong. How can you “validate” before you have a prototype to get feedback on? Where did the idea come from? I’d recommend starting with customer discovery talks. Read “The Mom Test” to learn how to talk to customers about their problems. Then you can take those ideas into a design sprint to mock-up and prototype a feature so that you have something you can get feedback on.
But just because Etsy lacked some better ideas about how to optimize their product doesn’t mean they didn’t get important shit done. Within one year of its initial release, Etsy had gained 10,000 artists (craft makers), pitching 100,000 items, and had a market of approximately 40,000 buyers.
Etsy as an organization, did not care or want to be correct at predicting what its users would want,
In a word, I’d say it’s probably not that Etsy didn’t care about how to do these things better. The person in charge of development probably just didn’t know how to do these things better. I’m certainly doing things differently today than I did 5 years ago. We live, we learn. It’s a process.
Regarding learning a foreign language, I’m not sure what I can say. I speak Japanese, and I run a company which makes some top selling Japanese language learning products. So I know something about this topic. You’re right, learning a foreign language is a big commitment. So isn’t it obvious that the longer the required commitment, the most likely it is that people will drop out? The same is true for college:
According to College Atlas, 70% of Americans will study at a four-year college, but less than two-thirds will graduate with a degree, and 30% of first-year students drop out after their first year of school.
In the case of learning a foreign language, maybe over time the quitter just decided that the effort was no longer worth it. Maybe that want to prioritize other hobbies and interests. Or maybe they just don’t enjoy memorizing hanzi. Maybe the idea moving to China or the important of talking to people in Chinese has lost its luster. What’s wrong with changing your mind about these things?
If you study a foreign language because you think it will be useful or cool, and then don’t end up speaking it to a degree that makes up for the time invested, then yes, that is a mistake in hindsight.
That’s one way to look at it. But could you been letting sunk costs fallacy get the best of you? Here’s another way to look at it: what if our beginner or intermediate student of Chinese decides that speaking Chinese is no longer an important goals of theirs? From that point on, even moment they continue to spend learning Chinese is a waste of time and a mistake.
Also, maybe a lot of people don’t realize how much of a commitment learning a language really is. The internet is full misleading information and false promises perpetuated by get-rich-quick schemes and douche bags like Tai Lopez and Jim Kwik who try to separate people from their money at an industrial-scale with claims like “how I learned 5 languages in a year” and promises that you too can “take your dream trip and actually be able to speak fluently” normally for 5 easy payments of $79.99, now for the low price of $39.95! ;)
My point with the anecdote is that much of the time this is nonsense. I spent so much time twisting my brain into an M.C. Escher painting to try and push myself to take actions I knew were good for me, that I often forgot to try honestly bringing the costs and benefits of the thing to the forefront of my mind and seeing if that would be enough. It turns out, quite often enough it is, and even further sometimes I realize that I don’t actually value the thing I’m trying to convince myself to do enough to do it.
This sounds like valuable progress in your thinking! Probably just writing about it has helped you see things more clear. I hope you’ll go back to my edited post. I shared some ideas about starting a journaling habit for precisely this reason!
Your characterization is far from universally accepted.
See Mechanisms in Science, Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-mechanisms/#ProUndMai
Speaking to the larger issue you raise, yes, anyone who thinks we are purely rational creatures is deluding themselves:
. . . they failed to appreciate that the self illusion explains so many aspects of human behavior as well as our attitudes toward others. When we judge others, we consider them responsible for their actions. But was Mary Bale, the bank worker from Coventry who was caught on video dropping a cat into a garbage can, being true to her self? Or was Mel Gibson’s drunken anti-Semitic rant being himself or under the influence of someone else? What motivated Congressman Weiner to text naked pictures of himself to women he did not know? In the book, I consider some of the extremes of human behavior from mass murderers with brain tumors that may have made them kill, to rising politicians who self-destruct. By rejecting the notion of a core self and considering how we are a multitude of competing urges and impulses, I think it is easier to understand why we suddenly go off the rails. It explains why we act, often unconsciously, in a way that is inconsistent with our self image – or the image of our self as we believe others see us.
That said, the self illusion is probably an inescapable experience we need for interacting with others and the world, and indeed we cannot readily abandon or ignore its influence, but we should be skeptical that each of us is the coherent, integrated entity we assume we are.ref:
and I think “akrasia” is better explained by “rejecting the notion of a core self and considering how we are a multitude of competing urges and impulses.”
Thanks. But why does he dismiss each idea?
Emergence as the existence of properties of a system that are not possessed by any of its parts.
That sounds true to me, but he says it’s too ubiquitous “so this is surely not what we mean.” Uh, why discredit something because it explains a lot of things??
Oddly, he systematically discredits each idea because they don’t suit his tastes.
I think you’re missing the point. To say, “life emerges from the activities of cells” or that “intelligence emerges from non-intelligence” is not simply to make empty statements devoid of meaning. The first is an assertions that “life” isn’t a *thing* which one should seek to find somewhere, materially, in nature—like some yet-to-be-cataloged bird of paradise. It’s a property of complex cellular processes. There are people who think that brain contains a “core self,” as if it were a kind of organ. It might be so obvious to you that it’s not, that you find the word emergent here to be redundant. But to say that “the self, or intelligence, is an emergent property of our brain activity” is to make it clear that it emerges as a kind of byproduct and is not a specific *thing* or essence. There are other ideas about intelligence going around. Not everyone agrees or understands how intelligence can emerge from the activities of non-intelligent “agents” or resources. So the notion of “emergence”, while not explaining the details, can at least assert a stance on the matter.
So I don’t see these terms as totally meaningless (nor “fun”to strip out of our language.)
beautifully stated!
not exactly. I’m fond of @ryleah’s contribution: “Emergence as a term doesn’t add a reason for a thing, but it does rule some out.”
I think you’ll find some interesting ideas which address your first point in this Tim Keller talk, especially the points about “recipes vs understanding,” seeking first principles, and the point that 99% of what you think is wrong and you only have the remaining 1% to deal with that situation. I see meditation as a process to strength and expand that 1% part.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA
On the second point, Robert Wright’s book “Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment” does a pretty good job.
I find your brickwork bridge overly complex. I propose a more simple example (borrowed from Minsky’s SOM): How can a box made of six boards hold a mouse when a mouse could just walk away from any individual board? No individual board has any “containment” or “mouse-tightness” on it’s own. So is “containment” an emergent property?
Of course, it is the way a box prevents motion in all directions, because each board bars escape in a certain direction. The left side keeps the mouse from going left, the right from going right, the top keeps it from leaping out, and so on. The secret of a box is simply in how the boards are arranged to prevent motion in all directions!
That’s what containing means. So it’s silly to expect any separate board by itself to contain any containment, even though each contributes to the containing. It is like the cards of a straight flush in poker: only the full hand has any value at all.
“The same applies to words like life and mind. It is foolish to use these words for describing the smallest components of living things because these words were invented to describe how larger assemblies interact. Like boxing-in, words like living and thinking are useful for describing phenomena that result from certain combinations of relationships. The reason box seems nonmysterious is that everyone understands how the boards of a well-made box interact to prevent motion in any direction. In fact, the word life has already lost most of its mystery — at least for modern biologists, because they understand so many of the important interactions among the chemicals in cells. But mind still holds its mystery — because we still know so little about how mental agents interact to accomplish all the things they do.”
-Minsky