Ideas That Changed My Life

https://www.perell.com/blog/50-ideas-that-changed-my-life

by Tomte • 6 years ago

422 158 6 years ago

adrianN• 6 years ago

The Second Law of Thermodynamics: The world tends towards disorder. That’s why your room becomes messier and messier over time

That's not how the second law works.

pontus• 6 years ago

This seems like a reasonable analogy. What about it do you feel is wrong?

clemParis• 6 years ago

You can tidy your room and the mess (that they mistake for entropy) would be reduced. The 2nd law of thermodynamics states that in an isolated system the entropy is always increasing (or at best constant), so the room analogy does not work.

lm28469• 6 years ago

The only reason your room gets messier and messier is because you are messy, there is no law and physics has nothing to do with it. It just makes you feel smarter because you can use "thermodynamic" in a sentence

jotm2• 6 years ago

Quantum Mechanics: stuff that takes form only when observed. That's why you can't find your keys or phone sometimes, or plug in a USB cable. :D

benjohnson3• 6 years ago

It's much simpler to simulate your universe if we only have to render what you're observing. I remember the days when we had to keep deleting telescopes and microscopes until we had enough processing power. Trains caused a lot of scenery to pop in before the new algorithm - we tried telling customers that the increased speed would kill them.

clairity• 6 years ago

the second law says that there are statistically (infinitely) many orders of magnitude more ways to be disordered than ordered, so the inescapable tendency is from order to disorder.

the same goes for a room. many orders of magnitude more ways of being disordered than ordered. it tends toward disorder without additional energy to keep it ordered.

Yajirobe• 6 years ago

Except there is a conscious entity driving the room towards an ordered state.

booleandilemma2• 6 years ago

I’ve noticed there’s been a trend of people capitalizing on teaching others about “thinking how to think”, more or less.

But does it really work, or does this stuff just make you better at winning an argument?

My concern is that people are going to go around collecting mental models and they’re going to use them to justify their stupid decisions.

Some examples that come to mind:

https://fs.blog/

https://jamesclear.com/feynman-mental-models

https://www.lesswrong.com/

lallysingh• 6 years ago

It's mostly intended to make people feel smarter by reading fancy clickbait.

capableweb• 6 years ago

they’re going to use them to justify their stupid decisions

I'm sorry, but isn't this the whole point of using mental models for your decisions? What's stupid is all up to you, but if I reasoned together some decision based on some model that I think works for me, it's hardy stupid for me.

I always saw the point of these mental models is to use them to justify my "stupid" decisions, and have some structured way of reaching that decision instead of just "because I wanted to".

Disclaimer: I don't really follow any mental models myself, except the model my organic brain comes up with on the fly, so don't let me tell you how others use these mental modals.

maxerickson3• 6 years ago

The argument is that it is a facade, that the structure isn't really guiding the decision.

coldtea4• 6 years ago

I'm sorry, but isn't this the whole point of using mental models for your decisions? What's stupid is all up to you

Parent assumes there's an objective reality, and that, (even judging by one's own purposes and goals, and not the other person's), one can make stupid BS decisions that work against themselves and their goals...

petra• 6 years ago

Well, mental models are basically the BuzzFeed of thinking tools. So no wonder it has become a trend.

MrBuddyCasino• 6 years ago

I've followed him for some time on Twitter. Now convinced he's a Bullshit Vendor, to put in Talebian terms.

smnrchrds• 6 years ago

He has at least one seminal article that I know of:

https://www.perell.com/blog/what-the-hell-is-going-on

Previously discussed with 220 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19413852

The first few paragraphs are not good and may be difficult to read through. But after that, things start falling into place and the rest of the article is absolutely great. But I agree that the other articles by the author may not have the same level of quality.

rwnspace• 6 years ago

The primary material on Lesswrong is a mixed bag, but certainly some of it is very interesting even to people with training in Philosophy.

Indeed you can thank Dennett's 'Intuition Pumps' for providing a source of legitimacy to those people who want to take the mental model stuff Very Seriously.

The same stuff can be mis-leading or well-leading. People will be people. Give it a few years and I half-expect a Mental-Models-cum-pseudo-Magickal Qabbalistic cottage industry to appear. Or at least a handy reference system, such as [Yudkowsky 24:10]...

jotm2• 6 years ago

Tbf self improvement content is as old as Web 2.0

TheSpiceIsLife8• 6 years ago

Way older than that. There's very little difference between the the modern concept of Self Improvement and religion.

Except, maybe, that people change mental models more frequently than they change underwear.

adverbly• 6 years ago

To me, it seems like a lot of these "systems" do actually work, and can lead to "good thinking". But, they all seem to suffer from the same flaw, which is that they seem to work better for the creator of the system than they do for adopters. "Good thinking" for many is still likely worse than what no system would yield.

Why is this the case? I think a good guess at the reason might be

1) The very act of creating a system is itself a meaningful practice which improves thinking

2) People document systems which they found natural to themselves, and therefore are a better fit for themselves than others.

Until I see someone "invent" a system which has broad success that goes beyond the inventor's own success, I'm not going near any of these systems with any degree of seriousness.

toyg4• 6 years ago

3) people who adopt someone else's thought-system are effectively admitting they are bad at thinking. They will likely continue to be bad, no matter how refined the system is.

You can get Leo Messi to teach me football but my first touch will still be sub-par.

oh_sigh• 6 years ago

Couple that with so much advice that encourages people towards action with their current worldview and not introspection and then action, and it isn't too surprising that we end up with discussion-via-screaming-match as the standard in a public forum.

11thEarlOfMar4• 6 years ago

It was literally true that my mother had taught her children that emotion should play a major role in making decisions. That generally meant identifying wants and then pursuing them, regardless of whether we should.

I led my life with that approach until I had an epiphany about 10 years ago. It was inspired by my exposure to 2 people[0].

Between 2009 and 2012, I encountered several people who were very smart, but expressed their intelligence in a different way than I was familiar with. One I met personally, the other through media (YouTube, etc.) I realized at one point that what they had in common was this: their explanations and reasoning were precisely sufficient. They expressed themselves with exactly the right amount of evidence, logical flow and correct reasoning such that virtually everything they claimed was unassailable. I found myself strongly attracted to this type of thinking and in a short time, started second guessing all of my analysis and decision making and discarding any points that were not clear thought. It wasn't just emotional wants that were discarded, but in many cases, incorrectness as well.

One area that benefited quite a bit from this was in my investments. The best performing investments I've made were executed since that epiphany.

[0] (I prefer not to name them, lest I be disregarded as a fanboy, but the clues are in the comment)

hackingthenews2• 6 years ago

I honestly can't tell who you are talking about. And I really want to know...

vikiomega9• 6 years ago

There are steps to learning and copying is one of them, and if someone is willing to acknowledge this that's a win. The problem is when people decide someone else has done the heavy thinking for them and they just have to copy-paste mental models, as you're alluding to.

dahart4• 6 years ago

My concern is that people are going to go around collecting mental models and they’re going to use them to justify their stupid decisions.

If I look beyond blog posts about how to think, your sentence seems like an accurate description of human behavior. Isn't this what has always happened, haven't people always used mental models they've collected to justify stupid decisions?

I'd be curious to hear more about the alternatives, or how and where to find balance. And I mean this seriously and expect it's a hard-to-possibly-unanswerable question. We have a limited ability and time to construct our own mental models about everything, and we are exposed to other's mental models at all times through communication. It's not possible to be completely independent about ideas. It's only possible to build on, practice, and prove out maybe a few ideas that came from others during a lifetime.

"Does it really work?" I think is a great and essential question, and for many of these items in the list, the answer has to be yes for someone in some context. Maybe the question is when do they work, and will they work for me?

deegles• 6 years ago

Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:

“So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” - Ben Franklin

lcuff• 6 years ago

I stopped subscribing to the Farnham street blog because it was too overwhelming, frankly. There are a ton of good ideas out there. Using the 80/20 rule (Pareto principle), I grabbed one: Charlie Munger says "I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don't know the other side's argument better than they do." Applying it to current events, I (very intermittently) tap into broadcast news, but watch both CNN and Fox News. Then I fact-check them both. It's pretty interesting. I personally have limited bandwidth learning and applying better thinking techniques. It's a slow process to learn new ones.

quietthrow4• 6 years ago

I am big (closet?) fan of Farnam street blog and came across it many years ago as it was connected to munger and buffet (who I still remain a fan of). The funny thing is I know FS has good content and I subscribe to the free newsletters for years now but I have never really read them except for the occasional one here and there. They just go into a special folder with my hopes that I will get to it and I don’t want to lose out (fomo!). What follows may be poorly articulated but will try anyway as I could use help with this.

I don’t read FS cos I feel like I need to spend proper time behind it to read and learn what is has to share. It’s like studying read it and then perhaps take some notes and keep them handy to reference later. Then on top of this it has so many articles I feel I have no strategy to keep up. And then there is the whole when will I really use it if I need to go look it up / reference it In order to use it. This whole approach sounds twisted to me. And as someone on this thread said it’s essentially me learning how to think Which may be subconsciously tells me I am bad at thinking. I can say thst for the last decade i feel like I am on a quest to improve myself so that then I can be “smart”. In a way this had lead for me for the last decade or so to pursue reading / finding content on the web (largely through ask hn and the likes) that is about optimizing or making myself better. And I find that I have consumed a lot but may have not really realized it’s gains from a career or other tangible perspective.

Is anybody else in a similar boat? Sometimes I feel these are all time wasters disguised as things that can be helpful. May be a better approach is to just do things and then when you are stuck on a problem then go consult there types of sites to see if they have a solution to your problem. In that is where real growth might happen. I feel like the approach I current have is the other way around - let me find all the “general solutions” and (become “smarter” ) and then apply it to whatever I do.

Am I wrong here in think thst is whole chasing after self improvement is a real discretion from doing real things thst will actually make me “smarter”?

rajlego2• 6 years ago

I think the problem comes down to: there is no good way to retain the information. And writers don't think about it either.

Most writers will say you need to "practice" and "apply" whatever you read while being very vague on the how. I'm interested in a habit creation system for methodologically allowing you to get good at applying say a mental model, but aside from that I think the best alternative is incremental reading/spaced repetition. (https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading)

tl;dr: while it can't give you procedural/neurally honed representations of the models you would get from practice, it gets close by allowing you to memorize declarative info.

I've found it at least partially functional for being able to sort of apply mental models, though there is still a large gap between knowing and applying.

dotandgtfo2• 6 years ago

I'm not going to expand too much on this because I haven't made up my own mind about it either, but you strike me as being in the same position.

I've grown up online, constantly consuming information and thus building up what to me seemed like a large body of useful knowledge on topics from comp. sci, data science, history, psychology, business, marketing and more.

The issue is that just constantly reading articles, books and consuming information has made me think I'm knowledgable, but in reality that knowledge is superficial, shallow, fleeting and hard to act on. Anything I think I know takes way longer to do because of unknown unknowns and a myriad of other factors you just don't get exposed to.

To use knowledge you need to internalize and create mental connections and the only way of doing so is by actually doing - not consuming. You may feel smart when you recall something you read months or years ago and share it in a relevant situation - but that's just a tiny fraction of what you've consumed. People don't learn by reading, they learn by doing.

The question: "why am I spending so much time consuming instead of acting" is an important question to ask oneself and for me the answer is that doing is boring. My brain has been hijacked by easy dopamine from games, forums (like HN and Reddit), YouTube and even Spotify. All of these easy, on-demand sources of digital dopamine have made all other activities harder to do without getting bored out of my mind. For instance I was learning Ansible 20 minute ago, but I got bored and started wasting time on HN instead.

Anyways, while I do enjoy FS, lesswrong, and a handful of other industry bloggers, blogs and aggregators I came to the realization that reading isn't furthering my goals. Only directed attention, effort and completing discrete projects will bring me to where I want to be.

More reading: Deep Work - Cal Newport. "Digital Detox" https://www.reddit.com/r/nosurf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqlfWDyS1Io

Ps. It's easy to waste time reading about this too. My biggest realization has been that using any forms of digital feeds in the morning wrecks my attention span most of the day.

coldtea4• 6 years ago

I’ve noticed there’s been a trend of people capitalizing on teaching others about “thinking how to think”, more or less. But does it really work, or does this stuff just make you better at winning an argument?

Depends. There's stuff you learn by experience, and there's stuff that you learn by studying.

Thinking how to think is somewhere in between - you learn a lot of it by experience (e.g. when you get duped in a certain way, you learn to recognize the pattern and avoid it), but you miss a lot too. And even the things you learn, you might merely apply subconsciously or practically, without really understanding them.

So having some kind of teacher / book / course into it makes sense, as much and in the same way it makes sense for math or chemistry or driving.

Generally any subject in which someone can be much better at it than you, and the principles of which can be communicated, makes sense to be taught...

That said, there are all kind of crap teachers online, people who make those mental models into some rigid dogma (either teachers or students), people who discovered/came up with some thinking models / mental guidelines and think they're the next Aristotle, and so on. If they make money off of ads or selling courses, I'ld stay well away...

One particular pet peeve is how people discover the "logical fallacies" and force them upon any conversation, when part of mastering conversing with humans is to know when and how to apply or break strict logical consistency - and understand context and applicability.

When someone a friend tells you not to go with X's proposition because they're not trustworthy, they're a criminal, etc, their talk might be an "ad hominen" and the proposition might be great in itself.

But the result of trusting X might still be bad (e.g. they might use what's a great proposition to their advantage to dupe you), and that's the point your friend tries to convey.

loughnane• 6 years ago

I think it was Jefferson who said something to the effect of “if you want to know what’s true, look at what all the great religions agree on”

Similarly, people have been writing about thinking for a looong time, so rather than jumping from framework to framework it’s good to read a few old books and see what the authors agree on.

I’m not an expert on what those agreements are, but off the top of my head:

-be more prepared than your competitor -master principles and you can select your methods -don’t have rigid tactics, things always change so adapt accordingly. -chain is as strong as its weakest link - etc

ThomPete• 6 years ago

You can't teach people how to think. Like everything else only once it gets applied to do learn how to use it i.e. like everything else if you don't practice it's mostly useless because you have developed the intuition for using it (and even when you do it's still a lot of practice and you will still get it wrong.

DecayingOrganic• 6 years ago

I've realized that the biggest obstacle in my life isn't about knowing what to do but mustering the will to do it. Nearly everyone knows a thing or two that they can do to improve their life or to maximize the chance of reaching their goals. But they don't do it. Not even after reading countless self-help books that always promises to solve this exact problem!

I think it is fair to accept the fact that we do _not_ have the full privileges of the system, and sometimes what we want to do gets overridden by other primal behaviors.

mmcconnell1618• 6 years ago

Here's a good TED talk on behavioral change. Short answer is that knowledge doesn't change behaviors as you pointed out. Knowing the right thing to do and actually doing it are very different things.

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_how_to_change_your_beha...

xyzzy2020• 6 years ago

I think these are closer to aphorisms than "models of thinking". In that sense take them or leave them if the are applicable to your life.

I don't read too deeply into stuff like this..maybe that is talked about in one of these ideas that I haven't finished reading.

rajlego2• 6 years ago

I've read all 3 of those and have found some interesting stuff but I'm not sure how much they actually changed my life because none of them think much about the most important aspect of teaching: how to get people to retain and apply stuff.

lunias• 6 years ago

Here in my garage, just bought this new Lamborghini here. It’s fun to drive up here in the Hollywood hills. But you know what I like more than materialistic things? Knowledge. In fact, I’m a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold two thousand new books that I bought. It’s like the billionaire Warren Buffett says, “the more you learn, the more you earn.”

gofreddygo• 6 years ago

Intellectual Porn, that's what all this is.

bonoboTP• 6 years ago

Well, to go meta, you get about 80% of the way with 20% of "insight porn". After a while it's just repetition, rephrasing and marketing. Self help and business growth mindset etc whatever we call this can become a trap in itself. Go out, do something boring and you'll learn more through that than reading little enlightening maxims. Sure some of it is helpful. Read some Kahnemann, some Taleb, some Marcus Aurelius, some classic novels etc. Reading can be good, you don't have to learn everything on your own example. But it's often the case that these lessons are only intelligible in hindsight. You may feel like you intellectually understood it and got some insight orgasm from it, but getting some actual stuff done then becomes more beneficial. Advice always depends on where you are now. It's never generic.

These materials also put a lot of emphasis on the weird, the counterintuitive, the quirky, the paradoxical. But what you actually need to know first is the solid default normal way the world works. This can be learned from "boring" old textbooks, not from shiny new strange theories. Whenever you read something new about a surprising new discovery about the brain or physics or AI or whatever, think about whether you even know what the straightforward, non-counterintuitive result would have been. Do you even know the basics, the foundations or just have a large collection of curious bits and pieces of nice cocktail party did-you-know material?

jacknews• 6 years ago

I don't mean to be too cynical, but I would like to know HOW these 50 buzz-phrases changed the author's life.

Perhaps the key to change is actually this blog post. If it generates enough traffic.

amelius2• 6 years ago

Yes. Title should be more like "fortune cookies that I've read" or "collected quotes" or something.

TheSpiceIsLife8• 6 years ago

I have a text file I've been keeping since 2003 full of "things other people said."

One day, maybe, I'll get around to tizzy it up and start a blog with some witty as fuck domain name and retire on the shoulders of every else's hard work.

hn_throwaway_99• 6 years ago

Now I feel like there's a good automated "Inspirational Advice Blog Generator" to be made, a la http://hkessner.com/wats1020-dom-basics/

quietthrow4• 6 years ago

Totally agree. This is a classic clickbait title. Few months ago I came across a good resource that deconstructed the syntax of click bait sentences. Can’t find it now but came across this which you can try it for yourself https://www.contentrow.com/tools/link-bait-title-generator (I tired “mental models” and got pretty good results).

pomatic• 6 years ago

One motto I have: never trust an author that does not honour an unsubscribe link.

motohagiography• 6 years ago

Regarding 8, cultivating talent vs. genius - I'd argue an increasing majority of what we call genius nets out when we control for the effect of crazy meeting survivor bias.

As someone familiar with all of the listed ideas, I get the sense these contrarian proverbs form a kind of modern hacker subculture tribal knowledge. What I've noticed is that none of the most (or least) successful people I know think this way, it's like a view from the outside or the middle.

Maybe the co-incidence of financial success and a mind full of gnomic aphorisms is no better than random too?

hliyan• 6 years ago

Not sure why some commenters have been put off by this. I actually learned a few things (and was reminded of a few other things I had forgotten) while going through this list. The stuff I disagreed with, I just skipped over.

What I liked:

19. Planck’s Principle

20. Bike-Shed Effect (had almost forgotten this)

21. Table Selection

23. Gall’s Law (worth a reminder)

24. Hock Principle

39. The Paradox of Consensus

49. The Paradox of Abundance

specialist• 6 years ago

TLDR: These items are conversation starters, questions to ask oneself (and each other) when considering something.

Ya, I liked this list. It has some personal faves, which drew me in to read the whole list. So that worked.

These are cliches, parables, observations, open ended questions. They're barely descriptive, much less prescriptive.

Just more tools for the mental toolbox. No different than 48 Laws of Power (which most definitely are not "Laws", but marketing FTW) and the like.

paulcole• 6 years ago

The stuff I disagreed with, I just skipped over.

Guaranteed a podium spot in this year’s HN Accidental Slogan contest.

ehnto• 6 years ago

For example, raise the price of a product and fewer people will buy it. Lower the price and more people will buy it. Economics 101.

There are of course exceptions, and knowing your demographic is important. I worked for a company that released a skincare product at an affordable price point, and no-one bought it. They raised the price, and people started buying. It was because they were in a premium product niche, so being affordable made the product look bad in comparison to other products on the shelf, and people looking to buy that product used price to qualify the products quality.

qznc2• 6 years ago

50. The Map Is Not the Territory: Reality will never match the elegance of theory. All models have inconsistencies, but some are still useful. Some maps are useful because they’re inaccurate. If you want to find an edge, look for what the map leaves out.

This applies to all these 51 points.

ColinWright3• 6 years ago

From the page source:

    <!-- This site is converting visitors
         into subscribers and customers
         with OptinMonster -
         https://optinmonster.com
         -->

Well, maybe not.

chance_state• 6 years ago

What does this have to do with this post?

ColinWright3• 6 years ago

It gives the sense that the whole thing is click-bait, designed to draw in the reader and then get them to sign up for for his mailing list. As I read the list I was thinking "This feels pretty content-free ... there are a few nuggets, but mostly it feels really fluffy."

Then there's the sign-up form, and everything became clearer. Colour me cynical[0], but it's the reaction the post provoked in me, so I thought I'd share it with other readers here in case they felt the same way.

I guess you didn't.

[0] The power of accurate observations is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it. -- George Bernard Shaw

cryptica3• 6 years ago

> The world always makes sense. But it can be confusing. When it is, your model of the world is wrong.

That was my mistake when I first heard about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

I was assuming that the economy was efficient and relatively fair and that made me see Bitcoin as a bubble. My assumption about economic efficiency was very wrong... Then I took the time to learn everything I could about the Federal Reserve Bank and money printing. I'm not going to make that mistake again.

benjohnson3• 6 years ago

Something I've noticed: There's been some things that I initially thought were bubbles. But they seemed to work - I even started doubting myself. Turns out they were just longer lasting bubbles.

cryptica3• 6 years ago

This is definitely something that I keep at the back of my mind. That said, my current world view is that the entire fiat monetary system itself is a bubble. In that context, cryptocurrencies are a lesser bubble and by virtue of their limited supply, they will continue going up in value as they are constantly propped up by an infinite supply of newly printed credit from banks. The cryptocurrency community's ability to continuously buy politicians and journalists also helps ensure continued dominance.

Everything that's happening around the world now perfectly aligns with my world view. Guess who is going to benefit from the Fed's massive covid-19 fiat injections?

mbrock2• 6 years ago

“This is how to contemplate our conditioned existence in this fleeting world:”

“Like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream; Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.”

“So is all conditioned existence to be seen.”

oldsklgdfth2• 6 years ago

Overall interesting ideas, but I think he did a disservice to this one.

47. The Medium Is the Message: We pay too much attention to what is being said. But the medium of communication is more impactful. For example, the Internet’s impact on humanity has a bigger influence than anything that’s said on the Internet.

The concept here is that the character of the medium defines the types of ideas that can be transmitted through it. An example is how writing promotes logical and structures ideas, where television invokes emotion.

For more info, check out the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

EDIT: a relevant example is comparing HN and fb. The are both internet-based and have high-speed responses. However, HK is text based and all ideas must be written in a way that is clear to the reader. FB has text, but also has the like/heart/laugh/hate button. I think this encourages "a response", whether you can articulate it or not. Also fb has images. Memes can be used, which are quite ambiguous and not a structured, logical statement. The different environments are a consequence of the rules that define the medium.

toyg4• 6 years ago

It's not just a disservice, he flatly got the concept wrong (or misrepresented it).

oldsklgdfth2• 6 years ago

It's a very subtle concept. I do a pretty poor job explaining it to friends all the time. I think of it as an extension of "to a person with a hammer, everything is a nail". There's only so many ways to use a hammer. There's only so many ways to use smoke signals, or twitter or a picket sign or a sitcom to convey an idea. The main takeaway is that they are all tools, each with their specific use.

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan [0] is where the phrase is first seen, but it's a dense book and tough to read at times. It's quite theoretical, kinda like he's developing an information theory of communication mediums.

Amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman[1] is more specific to written text and tv, but is a much easier read and very eye-opening.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

m4632• 6 years ago

I'm reminded of that scene from Annie Hall...

ALVY: Well, that's funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here. So ... so, here, just let me-I mean, all right. Come over here ... a second.

(Alvy gestures to the camera which follows him and the man in line to the back of the crowded lobby. He moves over to a large stand-up movie poster and pulls Marshall McLuban from behind the poster.)

MAN IN LINE: Oh.

ALVY: (To McLuhan) Tell him.

MCLUHAN: (To the man in line) I heard what you were saying. You-you know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.

cryptica3• 6 years ago

> Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available. People don’t want to look like they’re lazy, so they find extra tasks to tackle, even if they’re trivial.

This can easily be fixed with the right project management approach and incentives. This problem is mostly relevant in corporate settings where there are no clear individual incentives for delivering results.

booleandilemma2• 6 years ago

Also, at least at the places I've been, finishing a task early just means you're "rewarded" with more work.

qznc2• 6 years ago

Working in a corporate setting. I think my management tries to actively counter that with arbitrary deadlines. That strategy does not work well either.

kaybe• 6 years ago

I think work is a gas. It expands to fill all available time, and you can compress it but the the pressure will rise.

sidcool• 6 years ago

I like most of the ideas. But unsure which are pragmatic. Like avoiding competition. I don't get it. ELI5 anyone?

saucymew• 6 years ago

It reminds me of Thiel's "Zero to One" that competition is for suckers, aim for true monopoly power.

relaxing3• 6 years ago

Instead of fighting with an established contender, create a new space where there’s no one to fight at all.

meagher• 6 years ago

Mental models are useful when you use them. Not so much when you talk about them.

The idea of having a favorite mental model is fine if you are talking about them abstractly.

But I envision a whole bunch of people using the wrong models in loads of situations simple because they like the idea of them.

Your brain more often than not picks a pretty good one without having to even think about it.

curation• 6 years ago

The concept of Differend -> A wrong or injustice that arises because the discourse in which the wrong might be expressed does not exist. This technology of Western Civilization retains coherence via a white supremacist patriarchal order based economic system. Racism is deciding what dies, guaranteeing profits. All meaning has been surgically drained over centuries of enmity leaving only the calculable.

archived22• 6 years ago

50 is too much. Reading about yoga these days. Seems like following 5 Yamas & 5 Niyamas or noble eightfold path may keep clear from most of the troubles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niyama

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Eightfold_Path#The_Eight...

nzealand• 6 years ago

The Pareto Principle is key for scaling a business.

80% of the revenue comes from 20% of the customers.

Segment your customers to shift low revenue customers to low cost channels.

And it scales, depending on your unique Pareto Curve.

4% of your customers generate 64% of your profits.

elchin• 6 years ago

Peter Thiel’s Zero to One makes a good case for #10

dghf4• 6 years ago

20. Bike-Shed Effect: A group of people working on a project will fight over the most trivial ideas. They’ll ignore what’s complicated. They’ll focus too much on easy-to-understand ideas at the expense of important, but hard to talk about ideas. For example, instead of approving plans for a complicated spaceship, the team would argue over the color of the astronaut's uniforms.

That's not quite what I understood by the bike-shed effect. In the version I heard, although the approval committee would indeed descend into endless arguments over the colour of the astronauts' uniforms, the complicated spaceship would get passed through on the nod: no one on the committee understands the technical details of the latter, so they defer to the experts, while they all grasp, and can make a contribution to, a decision on the former (or at least think they can).

m4632• 6 years ago

Your explanation seems to agree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

hirundo• 6 years ago

"8. Talent vs. Genius: Society is good at training talent but terrible at cultivating genius. Talented people are good at hitting targets others can’t hit, but geniuses find targets others can’t see."

If you can find targets others can't see, you may be a genius. Or delusional. Check your prescription interactions for clues.

atsaloli• 6 years ago

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer

See also blog post on this (talent vs genius) at https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/06/29/schopenhauer-genius...

weinzierl• 6 years ago

"36. Creativity Begins at the Edge: Change starts away from the spotlight. Then, it moves towards the center. That’s why the most interesting ideas at a conference never come from the main stage. They come from the hallways and the bar after sunset"

Made me think that, when in times of Corona lock-down where most conferences have gone online, there is no real place away from the spotlight anymore, no hallway talk and no meeting at the bar after sunset. We should have a replacement for that, but Discord chatter isn't it.

randcraw• 6 years ago

48 is wrong without qualification. A resource-rich country indeed can become both economically powerful and it's people empowered -- look at the US.

48 is true only when two more constraints apply: 1) when the natural resources are few (like only oil or diamonds), and 2) when the resource is dominated by monopoly, especially when abetted by the gov't, like Saudi Arabia or Russia, or 1970's South Africa.

zeroxfe• 6 years ago

They say "tend to have less economic growth", not "always have less economic growth".

superkuh• 6 years ago

40. Penny Problem Gap: Economists assume demand is linear, but people’s behavior totally changes once an action costs money. If the inventors of the Internet had known about it, spam wouldn’t be such a problem. If sending an email cost you $0.001, there’d be way less spam.

Or, more likely, the internet as we know it would not exist and it'd just be some crappy failed commercial venture where everything cost money and it never took off. Building commerce into protocols is a terrible idea.

gxon• 6 years ago

And yet, we desperately want to find a better model so we can stop feeding the ad demon.

dghf4• 6 years ago

12. Demand Curves Slope Down: The harder something is to do, the fewer people will do it. For example, raise the price of a product and fewer people will buy it. Lower the price and more people will buy it. Economics 101.

Not always as true as you might think. There are Veblen goods [0], luxury status symbols for which the high price is part of the attraction.

More controversially, there may be Giffen goods [1]. Imagine a poor part of the world, where an average family spends half of its food budget on some cheap staple -- bread or rice or whatever -- and half on meat and fresh fruit and vegetables, but the staple part of the diet provides three-quarters of their calories. If the price of the staple rises , then their food budget will no longer provide enough calories. The only way they can make up the deficit is by buying less meat/fruit/veg and more of the staple: in other words, as the price of the staple rises, so demand for it goes up.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good

harryposner• 6 years ago

My favorite part of the paper that used field experiments to demonstrate that rice in Hunan is a Giffen good for the poorest consumers [0] is the cheeky inclusion of this quote from George Stigler:

Perhaps as persuasive a proof [of the “Law of Demand”] as is readily summarized is this: if an economist were to demonstrate its failure in a particular market at a particular time, he would be assured of immortality, professionally speaking, and rapid promotion while still alive. Since most economists would not dislike either reward, we may assume that the total absence of exceptions is not from lack of trying to find them.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2964162/

bobwernstein3• 6 years ago

as the price of the staple rises, so demand for it goes up.

in $ terms, sure, but only because the price went up. In absolute units? No.

aidenn0• 6 years ago

In absolute units it goes up.

Simplest model: peasants get 90% of their calories from cheap grain, and the balance from expensive meat. The price of grain goes up, so now they can't afford meat and have to eat more grain to meet their caloric needs.

dghf4• 6 years ago

Yes, in absolute units (according to the theory).

If you buy exactly the same amount of kg of staple as before, you won't have enough money to buy the same amount of other food stuffs as before, so you'll be short of calories. Assuming you can't spend more money on food, your only options are to go without or to buy more of the staple (and even less of the other foodstuffs).

Some made-up figures:

* Staple costs $1/kg, and provides 1500 calories/kg

* Other stuff costs $2/kg and provides 1000 calories/kg

Out of every dollar in your food budget, you spend:

* $0.50 on 0.5kg of staple for 750 calories

* $0.50 on 0.25kg of other stuff for 250 calories

for a total of 1000 calories for every dollar spent on food.

Then the price of staple goes up to, say, $1.20/kg.

If you stick to buying the same absolute amount of staple as before, your spending looks like this:

* $0.60 on 0.5kg of staple for 750 calories

* $0.40 on 0.2kg of other stuff for 200 calories.

You're 50 calories short.

You can get back up to 1000 calories per dollar by spending like this:

* $0.67 on ~0.56kg of staple for 833 calories

* $0.33 on ~0.17kg of other stuff for 167 calories

That's an absolute increase in staple consumption from 0.5kg to 0.56kg for every dollar spent on food -- a bit more than an 11% rise.

sleavey• 6 years ago

What's the controversy over whether these types of good exist?

Is it over whether the family would truly choose to buy more staple food and less luxury food based solely on cost and not some other figure of merit such as nutrition? For example, I could see a situation where a family might still choose to purchase luxuries in the event the staples went up in price in order to maintain the wider variety of nutrients they would get from the varied diet than what they would get from eating just the staple.

Obviously there is some limit to this, where the need for simple calories outweighs the need for a wide variety of nutrients, at least over short periods.

dghf4• 6 years ago

I believe the controversy is whether an example of this happening in real life has been found. Several possible instances have been pointed at -- e.g. during the Great Famine in Ireland -- but none has yet been fully accepted.

paulorlando• 6 years ago

I've been slowly working my way through understanding a tiny fraction of systems that reveal the world. Doing it partly from a humanities perspective, where I look into examples from history and art as much as tech and business. It's incredibly overwhelming and wonderful. This is the way I spend my early mornings and walks. I know what you mean about the "how to think" blogs though. I'm just trying to teach myself how to think or at least notice underlying systems. (This is what I've been writing: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/blog/)

Havoc• 6 years ago

Weird how many times I've heard people mention the overton window in the past week. Don't recall ever hearing about it before

taylorlapeyre• 6 years ago

makes sense though, have you seen twitter recently?

kgin2• 6 years ago

All of a sudden, I've been seeing people mentioning the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon everywhere

kgin2• 6 years ago

48. Resource Curse

I've seen this at work in people (including myself) as well. Wherever people have a natural, unusual strength that starts at a young age, they often have many underdeveloped abilities due to relying on their strength. (ex: smart kids never learn how to study and hit a wall in college)

blickentwapft• 6 years ago

>> Robustness Principle: Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. It’s a design guideline for software and a good rule for life:

My understanding is this is flat out wrong and bad for software development. Design software that is rigid in both what it accepts and sends. Loose standards lead to incompatiblities and chaos. Tightly define. This is not to say that your design should be inflexible, but for example a specification for data interchange should not accommodate loosely or incorrectly structured data.

mongol• 6 years ago

This is also called Postel's Law after Jon Postel who worked on designing TCP. I think it has merit.

relaxing3• 6 years ago

The success of email and HTML disagree with you. Also most human interactions.

The standards definitions aren’t loose. But the network effect means everyone benefits when more nodes can exchange data because the individual implementations are forgiving of misformatted messages.

WalterBright• 6 years ago

I read some stuff about how various cognitive biases produce poor investment decisions, like "fear of loss" and "sunk cost". I recognized that I fell prey to them.

I thought "how would I invest if I was investing Monopoly money just to win a board game?" and realized that my decisions would be completely different. With that gedanken experiment I was able to make better investment decisions, though I still can't entirely overcome the biases.

andrewnc• 6 years ago

That's an interesting paradigm shift, thanks for sharing.

pedalpete• 6 years ago

Can somebody elaborate on the "go-for-it window"? > . The Go-For-It Window: Large gaps between accelerating technologies and stagnating social norms create lucrative new business opportunities. But they are only available for a short time when people can capitalize on the difference between the real and perceived state of the world. For example, 2007 was the perfect time to launch the iPhone, but Google Glasses launched too early.

What was the "stagnantig social norms" in that benefited the iPhone era, yet left Google Glasses in the dustbin?

jagannathtech• 6 years ago

The answer is 'hindsight is 2020'

relaxing3• 6 years ago

They’re two different norms.

The iPhone capitalized on the public’s willingness to spend $500 on a fragile slab of glass with no keyboard.

Google Glass ran into the social norm of not looking like a creep.

haltingproblem• 6 years ago

Interestingly I was reading Charlie Munger's Biography - Poor Charlie's Almanac - over the weekend. My recollection is that it took Munger almost a couple of decades of living, reading and contemplating to start formulating his system of models and it did not gell for another 10-20 years.

He uses them not on the spur of the moment but in analyzing investments and this process can take a while (think weeks or months and not days).

These systems of mental models sound fascinating but I fear that unless the model has come from lived experience it will just be intellectual junk found - eaten, digested and out the rear rather fast with the only effect being intellectual blubber in your cerebral cortex. What one needs is a system of tutelage that might take a few years during which you can try out and codify these models one-by-one. Your list might be different than Munger or whomever but it will be tailored to your context and enable you to draw upon it with fluidity akin to a muscle reflex.

On a related note, I recall, from a Buddhist class on ethics, that Buddhist monastics have hundreds of rules that they have to observe. The story goes that when the historical Buddha formulated the order of monastics - there were no rules. Overtime in response to various incidents the rules were formulated and those incidents are recorded. The monastics are taught those stories that lie behind each rule to inculcate some notion of lived experience and a guideline for when/why that rule is to be used.

A list of rules is useless sans lived experience or a tradition that creates them is rather useless. You are better of throwing away the list and trying on your own supplemented by good reading. Charlie Munger His speeches and his reading recommendations are a good place to start.

jesterson2• 6 years ago

You may also like Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger. Pretty much same ideas but aligned in more memorable way. Liked it way better than Poor Charlie's Almanac.

bedobi• 6 years ago

Great. Yet another online psuedo-intellectual "guru" with pretentious posts full of meaningless, vague trueisms. Why are posts like these so popular on Hacker News?

jesterson2• 6 years ago

People are attracted with articles with pseudo-intellectual discussions, especially if they are filled with well-sounding buzz-terms like faustian bargain or overton window.

jose-cl• 6 years ago

I think not all people do Preference Falsification and Doublespeak, and they just happen on toxic environments (edit: grammar)

RMPR• 6 years ago

If sending an email cost you $0.001, there’d be way less spam.

Less spam, probably. More elaborated spam, definitely.

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