Ideas That Changed My Life

I found the biases revealed by some of the examples fascinating, for example:<p>&gt; 16. Russell Conjugation: Journalists often change the meaning of a sentence by replacing one word with a synonym that implies a different meaning. For example, the same person can support an estate tax but oppose a death tax<p>Why did they choose “journalists” when the “death tax” narrative was created by politicians, a much better example group for this conjugation.<p>&gt; 18. Overton Window: You can control thought without limiting speech. You can do it by defining the limits of acceptable thought while allowing for lively debate within these barriers. For example, Fox News and MSNBC set limits on what political thoughts they consider acceptable, but in the grand scheme of things, they’re both fairly conventional.<p>While this is true of MSNBC, Fox News is clearly swinging to the right more and more.<p>&gt; 41. The Invisible Hand: Markets aggregate knowledge. Rising prices signal falling supply or increased demand, which incentivizes an increase in production. The opposite is true for falling prices. Prices are a signal wrapped in an incentive.<p>More recently, the invisible hand has been shown to have its thumb on the scale.

One idea that changed my life is stop believing that other people have changed their lives based on ideas.<p>The only way of change is by habit.

We would all benefit from remembering this one<p>&gt; 23. Gall’s Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Sorry for being rude.<p>The above article sounds like written by GPT. Also, the author&#x27;s tweets look like this:<p>&quot;If you really wanna learn about somebody, skip the 60 minute interview and have them drive you through New York City for 15 minutes.&quot;<p>And then this person calls himself &quot;The Writing Guy&quot; on his twitter bio and unironically sells a writing course.

Another good idea that will change your life is to keep things short and simple. 51 ideas is like 43 too many :)

hmm, starting with these two so high in the list makes it difficult to properly read the rest.<p>&gt; 2. Doublespeak: People often say the opposite of what they mean<p>&gt; 4. Preference Falsification: People lie about their true opinions<p>Are we supposed to apply these to the 48 other ideas that he pitches as his guiding lights ?<p>Otherwise I think more than the ideas themselves, it&#x27;s a good reminder that anyone having seen enough paradigms will have a prism of often contradicting ideas to look through any specific issue. None of these ideas would make sense on their own, nor has much value outside of being another perspective to complete the others.<p>This is often lost when trying to pigeon hole a real situation into a single well-know pattern or single idea.

This post is right from ChatGPT. Like, “tell me 50 life wisdoms which can be earned through time” or something. We arrived the end of internet as we know it. I hate this.

I&#x27;ll add one by collabfund that might be relevant for the crowd here:<p>*Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking.* There is [little correlation between](<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;climatescience.oxfordre.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;10.1093&#x2F;acrefore&#x2F;9780190228620.001.0001&#x2F;acrefore-9780190228620-e-305" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;climatescience.oxfordre.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;10.1093&#x2F;acrefore&#x2F;978...</a>) climate change denial and scientific literacy. But there is a strong correlation between climate change denial and political affiliation. That’s an extreme example, but everyone has views persuaded by identity over pure analysis. There’s four parts to this:<p>• Tribes are everywhere: Countries, states, parties, companies, industries, departments, investment styles, economic philosophies, religions, families, schools, majors, credentials, Twitter communities.<p>• People are drawn to tribes because there’s comfort in knowing others understand your background and goals.<p>• Tribes reduce the ability to challenge ideas or diversify your views because no one wants to lose support of the tribe.<p>• Tribes are as self-interested as people, encouraging ideas and narratives that promote their survival. But they’re exponentially more influential than any single person. So tribes are <i>very</i> effective at promoting views that aren’t analytical or rational, and people loyal to their tribes are <i>very</i> poor at realizing it.

&gt; The world always makes sense. But it can be confusing.<p>I just don&#x27;t agree with this at all. I think its folly to assume the world will always make sense. As humans we seek to make sense of things, but not everything fits into our cognitive little boxes.

&gt; 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.<p>Freakonomics argues it can have the opposite effect, of &quot;licensing&quot; undesired behavior by those who can afford to pay the cost. Something to think about when it comes to carbon credits, etc..<p>Here&#x27;s an idea which will hopefully change someone&#x27;s life:<p>If you take the best parts of in silico computing and the best parts of synthetic biology, you can make transformative hybrid devices much faster than trying to make just making tinier and tinier computers or smarter and smarter cells.<p>Example:<p>Mimee, M., N. Nadeau, T. J. Hayward, S. Carim, C. A. Flanagan, J. Jerger, S. Collins, T. R. McDonnell, R. N. Swartwout, W. C. Citorik, S. H. Bulovic, R. Langer, and G. Traverso. 2018. An ingestible bacterial-electronic system to monitor gastrointestinal health. Science 360: 915-918. doi: 10.1126&#x2F;science.aas9315. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC6430580&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC6430580&#x2F;</a>

&gt; 9. Competition is for Losers<p>This one is weird. First of all, competition can be very healthy and good for everyone. Sure, there&#x27;s toxic games you can play in life, but anyone who&#x27;s ever actually competed at something knows the difference.

&gt;Horseshoe Theory: Extreme opposites tend to look the same. For example, a far-right movement and a far-left movement can be equally violent or desire a similar outcome.<p>This is terrible political ignorance disguised as &quot;advice&quot;. Violence is the most fundamental form of influence, and is not owned by any particular political party or position, nor does the willingness to use violence communicate anything except that group&#x27;s lack of commitment to pacifism.<p>This is akin to saying that serial killers and carpenters are basically the same because they both use sharp objects. In fact, you can equate any political position to any other, or literally any sovereign group of people, when you account for the fact that all of them have gone to war or committed some other act of violence to further their interests.<p>In fact, this is the Fox News&#x2F;neocon Republican talking point: &quot;anti-fascists are the same as fascists, because they harm fascists&quot;<p>Does the author really think in such simplistic terms?

Money is a social obligation that can be precisely quantified.<p>This succinct nugget of a concept which appears at the end of David Graeber’s magnum opus, Debt: The First 5000 Years, has completely transformed the way I look at and understand the world. It’s as if I was waiting all my life for that exact book.

I hate when authors include their own ideas inside a list of very notable ones while not including the original ideas they used. It comes off so pompous.<p>Not that we can&#x27;t stand on the shoulders of giants, but come on. Do you really need to include your unoriginal &quot;ideas&quot; in the same list and claim you came up with it?<p>&quot;The Never-Ending Now&quot; - Also just known as novelty bias or &quot;shiny object syndrome&quot;. Or simply put, neomania. Life has gone through 24 hour news cycles for millennia, this isn&#x27;t an unique idea although the author has obviously claimed the phrase on the internet already.

Learning foreign languages as an adult is valuable for facilitating thinking about the world in very different ways.<p>In my case, learning Korean in my 20s helped me understand group dynamics and hierarchies (they are built into the verbs themselves) in a way my English-language background never could. Classical Chinese gave me conceptual gifts, such as &quot;principle&quot; 理 vs. &quot;material force&quot; 氣 , and Japanese (very similar to Korean, but with important differences in nuance) the power of understatement and indirection.

I really like this idea &quot;Optimism in the face of uncertainty&quot;. I love that the idea arises from real mathematical theorems.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;abs&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S030326471730268X" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sciencedirect.com&#x2F;science&#x2F;article&#x2F;abs&#x2F;pii&#x2F;S03032...</a><p>See also<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Multi-armed_bandit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Multi-armed_bandit</a>

Site is taking long to load: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Hzmcu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;Hzmcu</a>

It&#x27;s funny that both Overton Window and Horseshoe Theory are both listed. They tend to contradict each other.

&gt; 6. Mimetic Theory of Desire: Humans are like sheep<p>Not quite.. We have mirror neurons, we imitate to learn (in fact just watching is sufficient) but this behavior can be overridden (thanks to prefrontal cortex) but most don&#x27;t apparently

&gt; 24. Hock Principle: Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behavior. Complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behavior.<p>&quot;Complexity is a subsidy.&quot;--Jonah Goldberg

Can anybody elaborate on the overlap between this and the Great Mental Models (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fs.blog&#x2F;tgmm&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fs.blog&#x2F;tgmm&#x2F;</a>)?

&gt; People lie about their true opinions and conform to socially acceptable preferences instead. In private they’ll say one thing. In public, they’ll say another.<p>Especially when your livelihood is on the line.

I found this article very useful as much for the comments as the article. HN does have some really smart and insightful people.

In what ways was this person’s life changed by these ideas?

Those are great! I think I should read them once a week.

&gt; 3. Theory of Constraints: A system is only as strong as its weakest point. Focus on the bottleneck. Counterintuitively, if you break down the entire system and optimize each component individually, you’ll lower the effectiveness of the system. Optimize the entire system instead.<p>This underpins a lot of what we call DevOps (i mean the actually useful interpretation of DevOps, not all the shit that gets a DevOps label in an attempt to sell something).<p>Despite working with this idea every day for over a decade, the idea itself still blows my mind. Despite being theoretically quite succinct, it has so much practical depth that i struggle to see myself getting bored of applying the learnings from it.<p>Anecdote: i landed in a role in a part of a big org that was on fire, but the fire wasn’t due to stupidity. The team was huge with genuinely no lemons on it (i later found out this was no accident - the head had been given permission to cherry pick staff from across the org and he took a lot of flak for causing brain drain in other parts of the org). They had a software component that everyone relied on in production but technically no one really owned. Everyone was maxed out, growth wasn’t the problem but an externally driven change in how the business worked was. The pace was non-negotiable.<p>This component “worked” as far as we could tell. Volumes and the fact that some theoretical failure modes would be hard to detect in practice at that time, meant it was not possible to be confident that it was fully working correctly, but it was at least mostly working.<p>The problem: no one could release changes to this component reliably but changes were often needed. Over 80% of releases were rolled back. On average it took 2-point-something releases to successfully get a change out to this component that didn’t need to be rolled back.<p>Lots of optimisations had been applied to this component. This was not a stupid team and it did not suffer this pain willingly. There were software optimisations applied - mostly tools to abstract changes to be simpler to deal with. For example, one source of complexity was a bunch of rules that had to be dealt with but these could be handled in software allowing the human to just specify mostly the desired behaviours. That improved the situation but only slightly, also the continuously changing landscape meant this tooling itself became a moving target and a source of bugs. There were special review processes for changes, there were 3 experts in this huge org who reviewed everyone elses changes - this review process was excruciating to perform and involved examining a gargantuan model representation in excel.<p>Still the failed releases ticked up. No other part of the system suffered in this way.<p>There was popular thinking at the time was that this system just needed an owner. Of course no one wanted that thankless poisoned chalice.<p>Applying ToC to this resulted in a system that needed no owner long term, the tools that been created were all disbanded, the review board too.<p>The result was that newbies to the team pairing on a deliverable would be given responsibility to change that component as a way of flexing their solo skills.