Some quotes:
“Perhaps the single biggest barrier to opportunistic behaviors is a sort of puritanism drilled into us by most cultures that an outcome is not won fairly if it is won without an effort proportionate to its value. Gamblers are not respected in any culture. Not even smart gamblers who learn to count the cards at blackjack.”
“Burst. If all your work disciplines were acquired through a moral ethic and a sense of static work-life balance, you won’t be able to do this.
It’s really interesting that people’s relationship to “framing” tends to be dominated by either “how do I get unstuck” or “how do I keep from being manipulated.”
Obviously, this makes a lot of sense and resonates with John Vervaeke’s points about the development of rhetoric and the idea of bullshitting.
An interesting aside: Let’s take the idea of the Master and His Emissary, but equate right-hemispheric thinking with frame formulation and left-hemispheric thinking with operating within a frame, for sake of argument.
“By making clever choices in the company we keep and the cultures we engage, as adults we can insulate ourselves from the fullness of the world, and by doing so cut ourselves off from the need for further development.”
“Key to creating such a buffer against further psychological development is fear. Fear is like a fence, keeping a person “safe” by separating them from the things that would challenge their understanding of the world.
Don’t let an ugh field accumulate around something. Instead, learn to recognize and enjoy the feeling of agency that comes with preempting an ugh field. Even look forward to such “opportunities,” since agency isn’t possible when we’re comfortable with the normal flow of things.
When am I expecting myself to “do my best?” instead of trying to kick the soccer ball?
I actually find that I sometimes intentionally set my mindset to “do my best” in order to break down a mental barrier that I have around something. Like weightlifting. When just getting into weightlifting during a running hiatus, I was worried about injury and unpleasant/anxiety-inducing experiences like light-headedness and nausea associated with pushing myself very hard.
epistemic learned helplessness: for the layman, the convincingness of an argument has less to do with its correctness and more to do with the cleverness/art of the one crafting/delivering the argument. if I get burned enough times, I’ll realize this, and I’ll stop taking convincing arguments seriously.
One word: Covid
“Unfortunately, life is often like having a conversation with a foolish librarian, or like living for a year in Las Vegas. Nobody tells you that you’re only learning about one weird little non-representative sliver of reality. Often, this is because nobody __can __tell you. The truth is locked away in the realm of the ineffable, a place impervious to description. You can’t read about this place or see it on TV.
I guess I kind of skimmed this one. The most interesting idea to me was the idea that by acting as if a framework/model is true and trying to commit or stick with it, we can more readily find out where it does diverge from reality.
I think the author is probably saying more than this, but I’m not going to take the time to understand it for the moment.
There are some ways in which the idea that we take “sado-masochistic delight in our afflictions” resonates with my experience, but I feel like these fall short of what she is trying to convey
Being sad, depressed, or angry can feel good in a way, for a while. Feeling sorry for oneself can feel good. It can be relieving to experience a visible, external affliction that results in adjusted expectations for one’s performance or general sympathy and attention.
What a great article.
I wrote about similar ideas a number of years ago, but in reading vgr’s article, I realized that there were a few areas of my life (software development, lol), where I hadn’t fully connected the ideas. Having a clear, concise term for the concept is also extremely powerful.
Of the Ribbonfarm articles that I’ve read so far, this one resonated with me the least. A final note stated that it was just a repackaging of other articles in AI/ML language. But I’m not quite sure whether it adds anything to the ways of thinking that exist in these domains.
The article is concerned with establishing some kind of separation result (or lack thereof) between different classes of problems that humans or other autonomous agents can solve.
“I would be trading my self to build a relationship with any religion I have encountered, and much like in love, to trade in my self for a relationship is to preclude its true possibility.”
I personally think that this piece has some misconceptions about what language is and why it is helpful for thought.
Language serves an important function of carving nature at the joints, and much of the work in the formation of a language is the identification of these joints–the semantics. Obviously the sounds of the words, the grammar and syntax are all secondary.
Because of the curse of dimensionality, this kind of “tokenization” of the world is necessary for enabling complex thought.
This was one of the most provocative things that I’ve read recently. I loved the framing of life rules as ways of managing task-negative thinking, since task-positive thinking has its external, task-related feedback which does the job.
While this overall framing makes sense to me, I’m confused at what appears to me to be a divergence between how this framing would lead me to think about these rules and how I interpret the existing “life-rules” of which I’m aware–including the examples given in the blog post.
The characterization of conversational “takers” and “givers” matches my observations about some of the ways that people engage in conversation and some of the common frictions that arise.
The notion of conversational doorknobs is a very incisive observation about what can make someone an engaging conversationalist, whether or not they are a taker or a giver.
I think a little bit of practice with this notion would go a long way toward creating some better habits.
This is a useful observation. Most of the commentary is hung up on the toy example of navigating to a hotel along a linear stretch which uncertainty about which direction the hotel is in. I think the more relevant concern more be is how well this example generalizes to more common situations.
I’m wondering there’s another common scenario where uncertainty can equate to something somewhat like approaching something half-speed. It’s rare that there’s a single matter that have the privilege of our full attention–usually we’re balance our attention among a great number of different matters of varying priority.