“While there are problems with what I have proposed, they should be compared to the existing alternatives, not to abstract utopias.”
Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future (page number not provided by e-reader)
Torello
Karma: 483
Reading habits/techniques/strategies (second post on the topic)
Robin Hanson defines “viewquakes” as “insights which dramatically change my world view.”
Are there any particular books that have caused you personally to experience a viewquake?
Or to put the question differently, if you wanted someone to experience a viewquake, can you name any books that you believe have a high probability of provoking a viewquake?
Accident, n. An inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.
Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary, complied and edited by Ernest J. Hopkins
“Put simply, the truth about all those good decisions you plan to make sometime in the future, when things are easier, is that you probably won’t make them once that future rolls around and things are tough again.”
Sendhil Mullaainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity, p. 215
Not really what you’re looking for, but I feel obligated:
Move or get a different job. Reduce your commute by 1 or 1.5 hours. This is the best way to increase the productivity of your commute.
I read (can’t remember source) that commuting was the worst part of the people’s day (they were unhappy, or experienced the lowest levels of their self-assess subjective well being).
No matter how dissatisfied people are with the results they are getting, they rarely question their way of trying to get results. When what we are doing is not working, we do not try doing something totally different. Instead, we try harder by doing more of what seems self-evidently the right way to proceed.
Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand, p. 186
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill
Basically what Lumifer said.
This seems like an elegant and funny take on Ben Franklin’s wisdom.
Walter Sobchak: “Am I wrong?”
The Dude: “No you’re not wrong.”
Walter Sobchak: “Am I wrong?”
The Dude: “You’re not wrong Walter. You’re just an asshole.”
-The Big Lebowski, Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 1998
Every 100 million years or so, an asteroid or comet the size of a mountain smashes into the earth, killing nearly everything that lives. If ever we needed proof of Nature’s indifference to the welfare of complex organisms such as ourselves, there it is. The history of life on this planet has been one of merciless destruction and blind, lurching renewal.
Sam Harris, Mother Nature is Not Our Friend, in response to the Edge Annual Question 2008
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/the-edge-annual-question-20081#sthash.IBMyMOQN.dpuf
Mental Subvocalization—”Saying” Words In Your Mind As You Read
Please share your reading habits/techniques/strategies
In reply to both Nancy and Thomas:
“For Taleb, then, the question why someone was a success in the financial marketplace was vexing. Taleb could do the arithmetic in his head. Suppose that there were ten thousand investment managers out there, which is not an outlandish number, and that every year half of them, entirely by chance, made money and half of them, entirely by chance, lost money. And suppose that every year the losers were tossed out, and the game replayed with those who remained. At the end of five years, there would be three hundred and thirteen people who had made money in every one of those years, and after ten years there would be nine people who had made money every single year in a row, all out of pure luck. Niederhoffer, like Buffett and Soros, was a brilliant man. He had a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. He had pioneered the idea that through close mathematical analysis of patterns in the market an investor could identify profitable anomalies. But who was to say that he wasn’t one of those lucky nine? And who was to say that in the eleventh year Niederhoffer would be one of the unlucky ones, who suddenly lost it all, who suddenly, as they say on Wall Street, “blew up”?
-Malcom Gladwell
A magician named Derren Brown made a whole program about horse racing to illustrate the point of the above story. It’s kinda interesting, but wastes more time than reading the story above.
Having a work ethic might help you accomplish more things than you would without one.
It’s a good reputation boost. “A highly-skilled, hard-working x” might be more flattering than “a highly skilled x.”
Work ethic might be a signal/facet of conscientiousness, a desirable trait in many domains.
“Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.”
-Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
My dad used to tell me a very lame story in this vein:
It was a dark and stormy night, and the captain said to the mate, “Mate, tell me a story.” And the mate said, “It was a dark and stormy night...” There was no variation in it. I usually experienced this story with a mixture of genuine frustration, at the lack of creativity, and genuine pleasure, imagining the infinite regress of progressively “smaller” storms, ships, captains, and mates contained inside of the heads (imaginations) of each character, like Russian dolls.
Here’s an idea taken from Steven Pinker’s proof of language’s immense/endless possibilities; just add “he said” and build up the story. This could be an especially fun way for kids to think of all their family members: Grandpa said that Mom said that Dad said that Brother said that Greg (name of the child reciting the story) is a really smart kid. Add a family member with each “generation” of the story. I did something similar to this in a elementary classroom, to great success.
Time-logging programs and/or spreadsheets
Link to my notes/summary of “The Dictator’s Handbook”.
Probably of interest to people here thinking about the dynamics that govern political behavior in nation states, companies, etc.
There’s also a deep dive LessWrong post on the topic:
“In 1971, John Rawls coined the term “reflective equilibrium” to denote “a state of balance or coherence among a set of beliefs arrived at by a process of deliberative mutual adjustment among general principles and particular judgments”. In practical terms, reflective equilibrium is about how we identify and resolve logical inconsistencies in our prevailing moral compass. Examples such as the rejection of slavery and of innumerable “isms” (sexism, ageism, etc.) are quite clear: the arguments that worked best were those highlighting the hypocrisy of maintaining acceptance of existing attitudes in the face of already-established contrasting attitudes in matters that were indisputably analogous.”
-Aubrey de Grey, The Overdue Demise Of Monogamy
This passage argues that reasoning does impact ethical behavior. Steven Pinker and Peter Singer make similar arguments, which I find convincing.
[Charles] Darwin wrote in his autobiography of a habit he called a “golden rule”: to immediately write down any observation that seemed inconsistent with his theories—”for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favorable ones.”
-Robert Wright, The Moral Animal, p.280