norswap
Most of my mantras are quotes, but I’ll be eliding the author (you can find him/her easily enough).
I have a truckload of them, but I’ll try to make an informed selection.
Take a simple idea and take it seriously.
Often we know things that would good but we do not apply them, or apply them enough (more dakka!).
The unexamined life is not worth living.
I dread thinking what my life would have been if I did not have an introspective bend.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
I think about this when I get instagram-envy.
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.
One of many quotes about applying what we know.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Worth pursuing; and it’s also worth remembering that if something seems too simple, it may have taken a lot of work to get there.
Research your own experience. Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless and add what is essentially your own.
Crucially, there is something that is essentially your own.
Above all, try something.
There is one rule, above all others, for being a man. Whatever comes, face it on your feet.
Don’t give up, don’t let the circumstances do the choosing for you.
To be free is nothing, to become free is everything.
Everything is more meaningful when it’s been wrangled from life’s cold fingers. We’re all born in invisible chains we must rid ourselves of.
What is the mark of liberation? No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.
Shame is the motivation-killer.
Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt.
I have a tendency to give many things or people the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes, and in some provinces, you don’t want to do that.
The second principle of Design is Amortization: pay up-front costs now to save attention in the long run.
I do this, a lot. More precisely, as soon as I think of something that can improve my lot, or that I should try, or that I should do in general—given I don’t plan it taking more than say 30 minutes—I tend to add it to my todo for the day and do it in the evening. Aaand, it’s not all rosy. The problem is if you do this at high volume enough, important but not urgent stuff (cf. the Eisenhower matrix) go onto the backburner.
I’m not too sure yet what the countermeasure to these “amortization traps” are. One thing that’s been recommended is doing small tasks in batches. Another is to increase the periodicity on non-essential things (e.g. why shave your beard twice a week if once will do?).
The wind blows below the willow tree, and I ask myself; why. Why do I do the things I do?
Doesn’t anything go on your own blog?
Also, made me smile :)
Minor nitpick, but I find it hard to believe no one would have found the trick when the HP are literally hovering over one of your limbs, esp. since people have little to do.
This is a great initiative, too bad there aren’t more answers!
As for my contribution, two mythology-inspired personifications:
Moloch: A personification of the system, or rather of the mechanisms that perpetuate the system, even though nobody likes it. It’s the avatar of the tragedy of the commons and the non-iterated prisoner dilemma.
Ra: A personification of the malign establishment, of the attitude of idealizing vagueness and despising clarity.
The Establishment is primarily an upper-class phenomenon, that it is more about social and moral legitimacy than mere wealth or raw power, and that it is boringly evil — it produces respectable, normal, right-thinking, mild-mannered people who do things with very bad consequences.
The worship of Ra involves a preference for stockpiling money, accolades, awards, or other resources, beyond what you can meaningfully consume or make practical use of; a felt sense of wanting to attain that abstract radiance of “bestness”.
Feel free to add to those definition if you think a crucial aspect is missing!
Which means changes to that should pop even more, I think.
It’s not rare for me to lie with eye closed for a few minutes, and even more so on holidays or when tired. If you have X people over 100 days—and they have nothing better to do than lounge about, do they really not figure it at some point?
(But really, nitpick as I said.)
I actually had my own term before I encountered Ra, which was “business creepy” (definitely should have been “business cheesy”, but creepy stuck). It was about all the empty words and discourses, the business-looking stock photographs , anytime anyone mentioned the term “excellence”. This was bullshit paramount for me, and yet very few people ever thought anything about it.
As I got professional experience, the term grew to encompass completely unjustified cheerleading beliefs of the “we’re the best and the other suck” variety.
If you try to challenge these narratives of excellence or false superiority, even using due diplomacy, you get the reaction that Sarah describe: confusion, incoherence, then anger.
For me these are beliefs held by individuals, but promoted by the institution, and they’re tribal in nature. To challenge them is to challenge a shared identity. A bit like “company culture”.
Vagueness and unspecificity are the only way these beliefs can possibly stay in place.
There’s a slew of perverse incentives against removing these beliefs. If you start counting what really matters, you might come to the conclusion that you don’t matter. Drastic improvement means you were doing things wrong all along, again a threat to identity and a sense of self-worth.
Bureaucracy is peak Ra for me. You’ve got completely screwed up beliefs, cult-like rituals that are their own justification. Anyone that (quite rightly) criticizes them is a hated heathen which must be ostracized for lack of respect to Ra’s priests. There is also a prevalence of premade opaque formulations (jargon) that makes your interaction with the bureaucracy even harder, yet employees treat these formulations as somewhat sacred.
To answer your first question: I’m not sure. First, I’m not sure goals are necessarily the focal point, although losing sights of the real goals is certainly a potent symptom of Ra.
I haven’t thought much about how these beliefs arise, but I haven’t felt very compelled to seek for a complicated explanation besides the usual biases. Saying we’re the best will usually be met with approval. And the more “reasonable doubt” that this might not be the case, the more it becomes necessary to affirm this truth not to break the narrative.
You seem to imagine pure founders and then a degradation of values, but very often the founders are not immune to this problem, or are in fact its very cause. Even when the goals are pretty clear—such as in a startup, where it could be to break even at first—people adopt false tribal beliefs. The bullshit can manifest itself in many places: what they say of their company culture, hiring practices, etc.
That being said, I’m not sure my own understanding of the matter matches that of the original author. But it certainly immediately pattern-matched to something I found to be a very salient characteristic of many organizations.
This continues to be excellent, can’t wait for the rest!
I love how this story always goes where I didn’t expect it to :)
The premise that “human-level AI” must be built around some form on some form of learning (and the implication that learning is what needs to be improved) is highly dubious (not evidenced enough, at all, and completely at odds with my own intuitions besides).
As it is, deep learning can be seen “simply” as a way to approximate a mathematical function. In the case of computer vision, own could see it as a function that twiddles with the images’ pixels and outputs a result. The genius of the approach is how relatively fast we can find a function that approximates the process of interest (compared to say classical search algorithms). A big caveat: human intuition is still required in finding the right parameters to tweak the network, but it’s very conceivable that this could be improved.
Nevertheless, we don’t have human-level AI here. At the very best we can hope for, we have it’s pattern matching component. Which is an important component to be sure, but we still don’t have an understanding of “concepts”, there is no “reflection” as understood in computer science (a form of meta-programming where programming language concepts are reified and available to the programmer using the language). We need the ability to form new concepts—some of which will be patterns, but also to reason about the concepts themselves, to pattern-match on them. In short, to think about thinking. It seems like in that regard, we’re still a long way.
Feels real and definitely reminds of me of some dynamics in which I’ve participated or that I have observed.
This is what causes people like Robert Greene (The 48 Laws of Power) to have a law that says “Infection: Avoid The Unhappy & Unlucky”. Of course this is very cynical and I do not endorse it. Nevertheless, it seems like avoiding misery pits is a good idea, and I think one can tell after observing a person for a little while.
Tells: (1) Does the person make efforts? Are these efforts designed to make a change, or just for show? -- It can sometimes be hard to tell, but when you break it down into simpler and simpler directives, it may become very clear. I once had a person who would not follow simple instructions that a 5 years old could follow, that would have helped her to solve a class problem.
(2) Attitude. Does the person always make excuses for her failings? Or worse, non-excuses: self-flagellation, “I’m like this”. Does she always have a reason why it won’t work? Again, hard to tell. Sometimes, very much, if the person simply has a very different worldview. I do not recommend using this heuristic in general, but for potential misery pits it can be quite telling if the person has tons of problems and if for all of them there is learned helplessness.
That being said… take everything with a grain of salt (as you should always). For contrast, I was (and I guess still am) deeply in love with a misery pit who ended up leaving me after two years spent together. There is something there I don’t quite understand, but I like to think that her redeeming qualities make up for the misery pit quality. But when all is said and done, I’m happy I didn’t take Robert Greene’s advice. But this was also not “another stranger on the internet”.
What kind of issues are being caused? Normally Markdown parsing is fairly standard and well understood, if a parser causes issues, couldn’t you swap it out for another? (I use https://github.com/markedjs/marked in my own website and I’ve had no issues, but of course that’s not a guarantee)
Counterpoints:
1) Yes, everyone’s after your time and energy. But what is it for? You got to decide—you can’t really hoard it, you must give it somewhere. As long as you’re making the decision, it’s okay to give it to people or activities clamoring for it.
2) I don’t like the idea at all. Big problems in your field are usually big for a reason. By all means, don’t just accept that: study them, think about them. Either you’ll understand why they’re hard, or you’ll come up with something interesting. But most often, you’ll understand why they’re hard. It’s probably a better use of your time to go after paths of least resistance with low(er) hanging fruits.
Going after these problems usually makes for shitty motivation. Go after something fun, go after something you like. Then you might see it through the end. If we’re using physicists as examples, Feynman is famous for investigating wobbly plates movements after Los Alamos, a direction that eventually netted him the Nobel. He did it because it felt fun.
3) Satisficing is very often useful. Especially if you’re a perfectionist. You clarified in the comment above that you were thinking about situations where you are stuck with the outcome already decided. Then it’s indeed fine to make the most of your time there, but that’s not clear from the article.
Like others, I’m not too fond of this.
It feels like signalling the superiority of people who are striving / trying to improve over people who are comfortably striving.
That’s maybe something a lot of people may agree with, but for me there are a lot of things to be said for comfortable **mindful** striving as opposed to running in circle / running nowhere.
My main issue is that using people I know, I wouldn’t really put the “living” people as better off than the “dead” people, at least in terms of their own life satisfaction and how much I would seek their companionship—admiration is more of a tie, but I’m afraid I tend to over-admire people with masochistic tendencies and not much to show for it.
I love Tiago, with whom I have talked on occasions, but the title of his article is misleading. He is most definitely *not* a skeptic. He tends in the opposite direction actually: accept things as presented and see what benefits can be had from immersing yourself in the mindset. It’s not an issue, but you have to be aware of that.
That’s a nitpick. He said you’d **probably** have cause to pity him, and indeed, except in rare ubermensch I think that would be the case.
It’s been a long time since I thought along those lines, but it makes a lot of sense, thanks for writing this.
(If I really want to be my usual grudging self, I must add I think you probably gain very little from fast typing—thinking is by far the bottleneck and you can think as you type.)
First off, I have nothing to do with Berkeley, and I’m just a newcomer to the community.
But your post leaves me with multiple questions:
First off, what are you trying to achieve? What I could guess: try to attract the attention of the Berkeley people in another fashion, after talking to some of them in the flesh already. Another option: warn the rational community at large that this kind of thing can happen and attention must be paid.
But what kind of things? That’s really what I am missing from this story. Someone was “giving you bad vibes” and “their practices was giving you the jeebies”. Could you not expand on that without deanonymizing anyone? I mean, the people you’ve complained to already know who you are, so this is not a concern. If the “bad practice” will deanonymize the person, then maybe it’s not a concern to them that this thing stay hidden (just don’t name them).
As for body language, I can imagine the following scenario: if someone told me that a friend was bad along some axis and that I had never noticed that personally, it’s likely my body would instinctively react in the same fashion. Nevertheless it doesn’t mean I would dismiss you out of hand after hearing you out.
How far have you taken these discussions? After making the nature of the problem clear, what was these people’s response? Your post makes it seem as though, feeling the problem wasn’t taken seriously, you didn’t press the issue.