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- Hacker News
- When I read titles like these, I expect a relatively low value article.
This has probably been the highest value such article I've read in years. You've phrased item 3 better than I have been trying to for years after my own journey in realizing this.
Thank you.
by BeetleB - One of rare articles here that is actually worth reading.
1st one requires that you actually care
2nd one relevance depends on what are you doing, not everyone works on airplane software
3rd one, novelty for me
by paretolaw - > Monocausal determinism is an illusion, and largely does not exist outside of computer debugging.
I work in trading with a lot of software engineers, and one thing I noticed is that these cannot reason about uncertainty if their lives depended on it. Their way to approach any problem is like you debug code: there must be a specific code path that was followed that led to that outcome. But markets aren't like this, and things happen for no reason, or are better modelled as if happening for no reason.
This is also the reason why I don't really think "software engineers" are real engineers, because real engineers can reason about uncertainty.
You are what you do, I think it's expected that if you spend your life reasoning in one framework, atrophies your practice at any other framework.
by ekjhgkejhgk - I don't particularly disagree with what the author has written about, but the jargon and complex wording is really annoying to read.
If this were written on a single subject, like engineering philosophy, then fine. But writing a multi-subject article requires simpler language so those who may be familiar with one thing but not the other can understand everything.
I find it hard to trust the intelligence of someone who uses words like "dichotomy", "meta-cognition", and "monocausal determinism" - language like this is purely performative. Let's not be performative, who are you trying to impress with your big words?
by 65 - Your particular interpretation of the author's choice in words tells us more about your psychological makeup than the author.
Take the "meta-cognition" advice to heart and perform some self-debugging in order to determine what exactly in your psyche made you react in this way.
by armitron - The thing is, these words are both incredibly precise and compact. So I’m very happy that the author uses them, as it means I can get the meaning without lowest common denominator fluff or volume.
Have I always known what these words meant? No, but it’s the reward for a habit of right-clicking every word and looking up the definition - which also stretches your cognitive capacity over time so it’s worth doing for purely selfish reasons.
by JSR_FDED - You appear to define words you don’t immediately understand at this point in time as ‘performative’, ie used only to show off.
An odd position to take.
If you don’t know a word just look it up, you may well learn something.
by grey-area - We use specific words in writing to mean specific things; there is no exact synonym for 'dichotomy' in the English language. The word is very common in academic and non-academic literature.
Meta-cognition is a compound word, where both parts are widely known, and the combination should be pretty obvious.
'Monocausal determinism' is different, very specific, and probably only known to a minority of readers. Determinism, the idea that everything within a system happens exactly according to cause and effect, comes from ontology, which is the study of existence and our place in the world. Mono derives from old greek single. Monocausal determinism is the idea that everything within a system derives from a single cause.
It is not a writers duty to be understood by everyone. Sure is nice, but more difficult to pull of, and often futile.
by arw0n - > The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
Hard disagree with part of this. Reason is an intellectual construct, that has a basis in logic. (Neuroscience not finding a division: sure. Just like electrical engineering doesn't see a dichotomy between Microsoft Word and Firefox.)
Reasoning isn't separated from emotion because reasoning needs inputs. Some inputs are secondary: the result of other reasoning. Some are non-negotiable facts from the world. But some primary inputs that go into reasoning are determined by values and desires. E.g. "I feel it would be nice obtain such and such a result in the world" (hard reasoning on how to get it ensues).
by kazinator - I don’t have the link right now, but I recall a study of some sort that examined brain activity and decision making. The “emotion” part lit up first, then the “reasoning” part.
Essentially, we make decisions based on emotion, then come up with an explanation for the decision that was already made. We form a memory that says the explanation was why we made the decision, but it was actually the emotion. In other words, by default, we’re rationalizing, not rational.
by jdlshore - As someone who is now skewing towards the older side of the tech world (55 this year).
It’s a journey. There isn’t some point where you’ll suddenly find you are now “wise” and understand yourself.
Those moments do appear - but a few years later you’ll likely realise that it was only relevant for that time of your life and things have changed. What might have worked and served you well then may not be the right thing for now.
Getting locked into a way of thinking or behaving is a recipe for being old before your time.
Try and apply the agile principles - do a retro - is it still working, what should keep doing, what should you stop doing?
And - the best time to start doing something good is now. Doesn’t matter if you should have done it 20 years ago. Regret can be disabling.
Try and be nice to people. We don’t know what is happening in other people’s worlds.
[edit] And be kind to yourself. Self compassion is underrated. Forgive yourself. You are human. Not perfect. And you don’t need to be. Show yourself some love.
by iamflimflam1 - Dang these are really not at all common advice/reflections.
> 1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.
I think certainly your actions are maybe that paramount to the world because it has so many actors, but they are certainly important to you. The actions that we take on a daily basis nudge nudge nudge us to becoming something else. I think its something worth focusing on but not to the point it makes you anxious.
Thanks for the thoughtful piece.
by hankbond - > If you were asked: “Would it be good if this 0day was used to apprehend a terrorist?” you would probably say “this is good”. If you were asked “would it be good if this 0day is used to arrest someone and then torture and waterboard him 183 times?”, you would probably say “this is bad”. So if your 0day was used to capture KSM, it is probably good? Or bad? Things get very complicated very quickly.
This is a version of the very classic problems "does the end justify the means" (should one torture a terrorist to prevent other terrorist acts). Much to the chagrin of utilitarians everywhere, the answer to that question is NO, because answering yes leads to a bottomless hole of infinite evil.
by bambax - This is too simplistic an argument re utilitarianism. It assumes torture definitely works, and that there’s no further consequences. Many utilitarians might say “no” too, given that there is no persuasive evidence that torture is a superior intelligence-gathering method to well-conducted non-coercive interrogation; and that it’s likely to produce unreliable information alongside whatever truths it elicits. It’s a decidedly grey world.by albumen
- US TV shows in the years after 9/11 are hard to watch now because they're plagued with pro torture scenes. I don't know when exactly but it seemed to have disappeared.
- What I have learned about neuroscience and philosophy is this: most people are not willing to invest as much time in small pursuits versus understanding the machinery of their mind and what will actually let them understand themselves with more clarity.
Understanding the self loop. The strange self loop. Seeing that the thing that is doing the observing inside of us is the whole and that from within our own system, we cannot completely reason about ourselves. The incompleteness theorem.
We have named it we call it the default mode network. It is essentially a recursive predictive machine. It only stops when we die. It is essentially making predictions about reality constantly. It is retrieving previous state and associating at the current state to make decisions. What it associates with previous memory and current state are encoding of our hormonal state and mental state at that point in time.
You can call it emotions. You can try and reason about it. It just exists. At some level, you just have to learn to let it be. All of the sophisticated words of psychology and trying to describe the machinery from within the machinery. It’s useful, you need a guide to live life. To keep the machinery and coding clean and not over, indexing on states that aren’t useful. But it all boils down to some pretty simple things. And when you see that the observer is the observed, and that it is all a part of the whole of the self, things become more manageable, for me, at least.
Take grief for example. What is grief? It is a prediction error. An expectation of some past state that the prediction machinery keeps expecting to come up one way, but it comes up another. And when it does come up as an error it hurts. It’s OK to experience it and to embrace it even. But it’s also OK to see it for what it is. We can’t escape the machine. But we can step outside of it briefly and watch it at work and acknowledge what it actually is.
by bitexploder - Very good in theory. In practice, how do you actually understand yourself? I have done plenty of meditation and plenty of reading on mental health and psychology. I still don't understand why I specifically act the way I do.by selestify
- > The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.
There is an implication from this one that the article doesn't get into, which is whether you've picked a strategy of fail-safe or fail-disastrously. Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start. It is one of those ideas that sounds very simple to incorporate into your life and turns out to be hard.
IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous.
> The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
He's technically right, but our instincts are not suitable for a complex 8-billion person global economy. We have a bunch of instincts calibrated so that a group of ~200 monkeys probably raises >200 descendants on average, just. We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment.
It doesn't have to be a reason-emotion dichotomy, but there has to be something where effective people > destructive people in situations where our instincts don't trigger or push people in predictably bad directions.
by roenxi - I always phrase this as "Do you want to play zero-sum or negative sum games? Or would you rather play positive sum games where the world is better off even if you personally aren't 'the winner'?"
> Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start
I'm just going to quote that because it's a great statement of a truly astounding idea. Most people do not think like you do. Even inside the HN bubble, most people don't think like you do. The diversity in humanity is enormous, and I wish I'd known sooner how fallible and narrow a single person's view is, even when it's your own. Making the best choices you can possibly make does not guarantee success, and even if you succeed, there's no guarantee that it was the best idea or even a good idea.
by jaggederest - That is a great point. We have such a 'bias for action' in popular culture, especially in places like Hacker News, that we overlook how much energy successful cultures have put into 'bias for restraint'.
I very much like the bias for action mindset, but I don't have a great answer for the problem of 'what if the things you want are bad for the world?' Your mention of destructive people makes me think there might be an angle with bias for action being helpful if it's building - some people will build the torment nexus, but newly built things are so inherently fragile that maybe we can absorb a certain amount of harmful building without serious damage, in a way we can't absorb much harmful destruction. Does that ring true?
by SuoDuanDao - > IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous.
Basically what Nietzsche said on morality. However, there is a counterfactual to this line of thinking as well and it doesn't map as easily.
> We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment.
This is where Immanual Kant's categorial imperative comes into play. Kant thinks there is absolutely an evidence-based principle to be moral. And he grounds it in reason and human beings themselves. His ideas make sense when you start thinking "okay lets say I am free to make my own values and must have a good relationship with my values, what is an objective way to evaluate this so I can be morally good?" Kant becomes a good starting point and he claims that you don't need any external objective way/method of evaluation other than the reason afforded to you by nature as a human being and then he spends a lot of pages elucidating how this type of a system would work.
Both Nietzsche and Kant are worth reading if you want to understand morality in general, even though Nietzsche fundamentally disagreed with Kant that there can be an objectively correct mode of evaluation.
by altmanaltman - As a mid 40s person also, my advice: drink plenty of water, clean the kitchen every night, don’t try to time the market, forgive your past self for being an idiot.by burnto
- > clean the kitchen every night
Is this a metaphor?
by bossyTeacher - Short but brilliant. Well done.
I'd add: try to sleep well. It adds up.
- I keep thinking about cleaning the kitchen every night (I just turned 30). The more I think about it, the more I think it's a good advice. I still need to forgive my past self for being an idiot, though :)by amunozo
- To give other maturation advice to those not yet in their 40s:
It's quite likely that you have significant issues you haven't addressed yet. Getting into good medical care, therapy, exercise, and supportive e.g. nutrition, etc is likely more important than virtually anything else you'll do in your life, with a reasonable exception for choosing the right person to spend your life with and having a family. But having a good social life is a hell of a lot easier if you're in great physical and mental shape. I took all of those things very seriously, and I probably did not put enough value into any of those things, even given that orientation.
That leads right into: The only thing you can truly exert control over is yourself, and it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices, either indirectly through the environment you live in or directly through the actions you take. Humility is drastically underrated, and being healthy plays into this enormously as well.
That being said, I'd love to hear a perspective from some of the older HN folks - what am I missing as a mid-40s person that I should absolutely be paying attention to?
by jaggederest - Mounjaro, TRT, Lexapro, statins if you need them, and much less alcohol.by petesergeant
- Early 40s here. I really wish I had started weightlifting 20 years ago.by ryanjshaw
- A bit of financial acumen goes a long way over the long term.
Anything that compounds is better off started early.
It's not about the money at the high level, but relative comfort frees you up to be your best self.
Or so I'm told.
by _puk - > Getting into good medical care, therapy, exercise,
These are very different classes of things. Good medical care, of course, if there is a problem, get it fixed by somebody who knows what they are doing. Good exercise, of course, get your physique in shape, for well being, for health and for confidence. But therapy? If there is a problem and therapy is treatment, of course. But where does this desire in the western world come from to just by default having to go to some kind of psychotherapy? I refuse to believe that a happy life requires therapy. If it ain't broken etc.
> it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices
That's a position that must be deeply rooted in privilege. There are countless folks out there who don't have it easy because of conditions they didn't create, and saying it's because of their own choices is extremely ignorant, maybe even arrogant. Many could, theoretically, so sth about it, at least improve their situation marginally, but it would require extreme steps which they are just not able to take. It too simplistic to dump it all on the "well it was their choice". No need to blindly victimize folks, but the other extreme is just not helpful either.
by teiferer