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?
What cultural values does this wisdom and advice implicitly engender? That question bothers me a lot.
For some reason it strikes me that we don't think of a potato plant as needing life lessons. I doubt anyone here has moral compunctions about leaf structure or starch formation. People seem much the same way to me. Another part of me does instinctively model the inner world of people as small deviations from my own. Other parts of me think that is quaint.
It appears to me that the sense of clairty imparted by wisdom often looks like mere rigidity when seen from the outside. I have little doubt that your particular wisdom has been hard-earned, and at the same time, I think it is hopelessly myopic. The thing that gets me is that this also almost surely applies to my own wisdom, which is why I distrust them implicitly.
I think the world is so vast and our exposure so limited such that any Life Wisdom is hopelessly doomed to be a horrible overfit on the particulars of an individual.
Keep growing your idiosyncratic leaves though. I also genuinely think they're beautiful.
In your 20s and 30s, it's relatively easy to brute-force physical and mental health problems.
I didn't understand what the word "stress" even meant exactly until I got into my late 30s. Then I realized that I had been under extreme stress for most of my life but had not noticed it because I could just keep going despite constant exhaustion and borderline depression. Then, that suddenly stopped working.
I've lived pretty humbly. I think many folks, here, would sneer at my lifestyle (sneering at others, seems to be in fashion, these days), but it allowed me to be where I am, today. Also, I never really made a huge amount of money. There's kids coming right out of school, that are starting at more than I ever made, at the peak of my career.
I am mid 40s. Started working at a hyper scaler a couple years ago. I think you are overthinking it. All there is, is to be present and focus on what is important. And no one else can tell you what is important, you already know. Spend your time wisely with your family or on things that matter to you and not on trivial pursuit. There are no secrets in this. It is largely what you define.
When you ask this question of others, you are asking what am I forgetting? What will I regret? They can’t tell you. They can tell you what they regretted it and maybe you will regret those same things they did. But you have to decide. In 10 years. In 20 years. All you have to do is ask your future self what you’re gonna regret that you didn’t do. I had found that we already know the answers to those things.
E: think of it this way. And you don’t have to have a dog for these questions to work they’re metaphorical really, but also physical if you do have a dog. Did you walk your dog? Did you play ball with it? If they die tomorrow, will you look back and say that today was good? Did you do everything you could do with your dog? If not go do those things right now don’t leave them undone. That’s all there is. And the same thing works with everything in life. You know what you should’ve done in the day. If you do those things in 10 or 20 years, you won’t look back and say I wish I would’ve done those things cause you’ve done them.
I’m pretty tall. I find that mostly beneficial except for walking into things. I also don’t fit well in Miata and some convertibles and other small cars, which is a bit of a problem on occasion.
I was going to add more, but I kind of forgot. My post was a bit stream of consciousness about overthinking things, which I may have over over thought. Oh well. I’m kidding sort of. I was going to say that I see a lot of overthinking all over the place at work. Complex environments often lead people to assume that a complex solution is needed. Some of the time the complexity is unavoidable. Most of the time the complexity is avoidable. Our individual lives and affairs are no different.
> When you ask this question of others, you are asking what am I forgetting? What will I regret? They can’t tell you.
In one sense yes, but in another sense... humans are just so much alike. You can a learn a ton from your elders' common mistakes. Especially the ones where there's broad agreement. You're probably not an exception.
To use your dog metaphor (which I like), would you tell a dog looking for advice (if you could magically communicate with it) to just present and focus on the moment and he'll know what to do. Nah, we know a dog needs lots of walks, to be around other dogs, to eat the right foods, and so on.
The two approaches aren't mutually exclusive, but the practical one is... practical.
> If you do those things in 10 or 20 years, you won’t look back and say I wish I would’ve done those things cause you’ve done them.
My whole point is that you can't know that if your mind is clouded by ill health and ignorance - your predictions about what you'll regret are wrong, just as the decisions about what is important are wrong. Digging yourself out of that "what I think is important in this moment is important" mindset is a big part of it.
I was expecting you to actually say stuff you couldn't come back from, but all of those are recoverable in your 30s and 40s if you're a bit more flexible. It's never too late if you want those things, quite literally.
Heh... i wish i'd go for anything other than boxing 20 years ago.
Anyways, yes, weightlifting + something active (tennis, football, etc) is the way to go.
But weightlifting first. It is the only hralth-related hobby that teaches honest body control: muscle, gaining/losing weight, dieting basics, monitoring key body parameters over time.
The first thing that came to mind for me is that this perspective, while probably in the range of normal experience for software developers, is rooted in middle class expectations.
I have ADHD and OCD and grew up in total poverty and violent child abuse in a rural area with no economic opportunity, and was homeless from 16 to my early 20s.
While hindsight makes clear many of my own errors and shortcomings, a lot of the residual issues I face today, some of those shortcomings included, are the result of neglectful, ignorant or malicious choices from the adults in my early life. I have several physical health issues that were not addressed when they should have been, including lifelong gout and very likely fibromyalgia. I had a full-ride scholarship and campus job and lodging lined up that I worked very hard for in high school despite being homeless, and a malicious teacher illegally modified my grade out of spite to prevent me from graduating with the required credits. The administration did nothing and I had no family in my life to help me pressure the school board or file a lawsuit.
I also faced a gross mistrial after having a small town officer literally plant marijuana on me after a traffic accident, and the judge illegally sentenced me despite a total lack of evidence, and my defense attorney was corrupt and refused to submit a motion to quash or let me appeal the decision because "the judge is my boss and he will make my life hell." Six months jailtime for a first time criminal offense for a homeless seventeen year old. My whole life so far has been playing catch-up.
Your advice probably wasn't meant for me, but you were interested in hearing other perspectives so I figured you'd be interested to hear mine. I always find it interesting when casual conversation with other engineers reveals the gaps between our experiences and expectations. Lots of interesting and unique paths through our unique profession.
My friend has a diagnosis and has a prescription for Amitriptyline.
While that works, getting exercise also works wonders.
I have seen it backfire when she did too much, but exercising well within your capabilities - on 30% of the maximum force you can exert - can greatly reduce the symptoms.
This is a journey for sure, finding out what your body can handle, but it's worth it in the end.
Honestly I think it's even more important for people with tough childhoods and bad breaks to focus on taking care of themselves. I regret that, in the US at least, the safety net is nonexistent and makes that almost impossible, as you say. I hope you find a little peace and maybe some upward momentum.
I agree, and I think it's important advice that really does need to be drilled into people. Even if medical care is out of reach for some, we do have the internet and now even personal agents who can help teach us good habits and hold us accountable.
Things like good posture, exercise, and eating non-processed foods are within reach for the majority of us; and for those whose issues make exercise difficult, it's only even more important to try and double down if at all possible and close the gap.
Sleep should also be a top priority. I have had chronic insomnia since I was a toddler, sometimes staying up for days at a time unable to sleep, and honestly lack of sleep is destroying my mind and body faster than anything else. It's preventing me from maintaining a healthy weight, since fat burning is heavily impacted by irregular sleep.
I have tried everything under the sun, most recently I am re-experimenting with magnesium in the form of magnesium l-threonate because my magnesium deficiency might actually be causing me to have a very high "gain" in my CNS, meaning the smallest things wake me up or get me excited. It's still too early to rule out coincidence or placebo, but I think I'm noticing several differences since being on magnesium l-threonate, including better sleep.
Point being, leave no stone unturned when it comes to your health. Sometimes the solutions to complex issues might themselves be quite simple.
Thank you for your perseverance. We need testimonials like this to remind that our life isn't hard compared to this; And yet you have surprisingly chosen peace so far (congrats, and thank you).
I appreciate your kind words. It also helps for me to remind myself how much worse things could be.
I'm in a lot of pain all of the time, and recently, thanks to an abusive family member, I experienced an absolutely devastating life event that might completely derail my life, leave me with a permanent disability and end my career, but I'm keeping my chin up and counting my limbs and senses. Eyes on the prize. I am driven to succeed so that I might help the less fortunate. I think any of us in a position to do so have a duty to do so.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Did you include meeting with a therapist? The problem is that they have to reveal you things you don't generally want to admit, so it takes a bit of time (time which I find absolutely wasted) and depending on the therapist, they might not tell you immediately about your inconsistencies.
The problem I have with modern therapy is it that it operates completely within the frame of oneself. They will very carefully walk with you inside of your own narrative, bringing you to a better place of operation within that framework of the self.
Having thought about it some, I have been concluded that there’s only so far one can get when operating within that narrative. There’s only so much they can help with until you yourself can see that the “I” is it itself a machine generating the narrative, but also something else and more than just that narrative that is constantly running in our brains. It is something that can be observed. The observer is the observed as Krishnamurti would say.
As long time meditator, I find that there is nothing that is hidden from ourselves if we look. Meditation is one of the few ways to begin to access the whole and step outside of the narrative loop. You can also try psychedelics, but that’s riskier. A good trip might save you a decade of therapy. A bad one might genuinely imbalance your brains machinery. In some sense, the time is wasted. However, if you genuinely spend this time learning to observe yourself, this is very much a way of being that is not wasted in my opinion.
A therapist is generally going to work with you inside of a particular framework and way of stepping towards a particular way of operating. It sort of like the long or hard way of solving a math problem before you learned underlying theory of whatever problem you were working on.
You put very well into words why therapy felt off for me. I haven't been meditating for too long, but the perspective definitely shifts once you start turning the attention inwards, instead of following the narrative that the mind creates.
My recommendation to any of those interested: The Mind Illuminated by John Yates. Great intro to the meditation practice. Once you have some understanding of the general technique Goenka's 10 day vipassana courses is a great opportunity for deep introspective work.
True, I have not fully understood the direction therapists go to, apart from expliciting your thought process.
My interpretation of therapy is that it helps you feel aligned with you. It will remove the surface contradictions and counter-actions. But if your deeper you has concluded that you should be evil (assuming there is no contradictions in this view - and there always is), therapy will probably help you too. As long as you are aligned with yourself.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
I think the issue is precisely the rationalising part.
Let's assume I have pre-decided something: if the fruit weighs over 100g, I'll buy it, otherwise I won't.
I can then measure and find out. My emotions -- based on looking at the fruit -- may mislead me here.
Now what about "likely to weigh more than 100g"?
Here it's really easy to lie to yourself.
But if you set conditions for what counts as likely before you know what they'll be used for, and you stick to them, you can make a decision based on reason.
There is no way to decide 100g is the threshold divorced from emotion, however -- unless it's rationally derived from something else emotionally based.
The "rationalisation" bit comes from us not making decisions for the reasons we think we are -- or in the way we claim to be.
> 3. The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
Guessing: Essentially that's psychology. And Human psychology is itself emergent behavior cannot be directly traced back to neuroscience. Logic, that is another thing, which primarily is used for understanding and reconstruct retainable after emotional experiences.
It's not psychology, it's just wrong. You can point to the parts of the brain (more accurately the body and brain) that handle reason and emotions, and they're physically distinct.
Also, reason is essentially a combination of pattern recognition and abstraction, and emotion is a set of spontaneous limbic responses.
Which is not to say there's no relationship between them, or that the grey area where they overlap isn't unusually interesting.
But it's a wild overreach to say the distinction is a cultural construct and not grounded in (largely) mammalian biology.
Points 1 and 2 are also questionable. They're not novel opinions, they have philosophical names (more or less consequentialism vs deontology, with some wrinkles), and they can be - and have been - hotly debated.
I don't see them as evidence of maturity or of immaturity, more of a considered moral position that not everyone agrees with.
1. Emotion has no biological marker, which refute the idea of mechanical connection between brain (and other body parts) to emotion
2. Reasoning, by general feeling, is a mental process carried out by brain primarily, but has a seemingly much stronger connection to biological signals
3. What I was inferring from the theory of constructive emotion, is that emotion really is a form of higher level reasoning. It's higher than the typical reasoning, so that it's connection with biological signals are extenuated and more indirect
I don't remember the words of the book.
This connection between reasoning and emotion is primarily my own rudimentary idea. Can be seen as an expolation of the theory.
I agree fully with the point about integrating emotion in your decision making. Earlier I used to get stuck in decisions since I had the need to be rational. Which is in it self an emotion I guess - since need is an emotion?
Now my life is much simpler.
> 1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.
maybe not 0day stuff, but breaking the build is something that mature people have learned not to do. What are the rewards for move fast and break things for people?
Wonderfully written. I’m intrigued by the section about emotion. It seems like no coincidence that it follows the section about seeing beyond monocausal determinism.
> 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.
Being able to detach from your thinking while you are thinking, that's difficult and indeed very useful. I found that more often in llm than human beings.
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?
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.
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.
I agree with a lot of the first point but the expression does seem to lend an air of futility to caring about your impacts which I hope wasn't the intention. I do whole heartedly disagree with everyone believing they are the hero of their own story - while there sure are a subset of people who will justify screwing others (or at least bury their heads in the sand), there's also a subset of people that are happy to revel in schadenfreude. all that aside, the author's beliefs probably do apply to his target audience.
The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
This is a nice, thoughtful piece, but the final point oversteps while chasing a noble heuristic, I think. To touch on a few fields off the top of my head:
1. All serious cognitive philosophy since at least Kant has supported the idea of separate faculties -- in his case, specifically the four chambers [`--` quantitative sensitivity, `-+` qualitative perceptivity, `+-` causal judgement, `++` modal reason].[1] This is also at the root of the induction vs. deduction [vs. abduction] debate, which had been raging for at least 2,200 years before Kant.
2. Even our pre-gallilean understanding of neuroscience arrived at the same conclusion, though in hilariously abstract terms: 'fast thinking' vs. 'slow thinking'. Popularized primarily by a popsci book (?) that frames it like this: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
3. Psychologically the clearest paradigm is Freud's `- Id`/`+ Ego`/`* Super-Ego`, which is not nearly as discredited as his famous theories about parental lust would imply. If you asked your psychiatrist(/local research psychologist) about it today, they'd ofc use less medieval words for the same concepts -- roughly 'unconscious', 'cognition', and 'executive', in order.[2]
4. In cognitive science more broadly, a lot of the binaries discussed on Wikipedia's Mathematical Model article[3] are getting at this delineation.
5. Eastern philosophy has plenty of stuff on this dichotomy; in fact, I'd argue their discussion of it is predicated upon its existence and the various harmful states it can create if left unexamined. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_logico-epistemology
On a 'logical' level, the case for a separation of at least two types of thinking seems clear: any cognitive activity can either call the 'lightweight' model to guess what's happening (and be right 95% of the time), or call the 'superheavy' model to iteratively reason through webs of beliefs.
Sure, any call probably uses more than 0.0001% of both so they're not mutually exclusive, but I think the qualitative diffence is clear.
The sentiment is true in a bit more subtle of a way, I will admit... It's hard to articulate in brief (/at all), but I've become fascinated with the way the presence of the higher faculties sometimes seems to completely transform the lower ones, unlocking whole new affordances. Like the existence of a new structure of a higher level of complexity completely changing the behavior of nearby cellular automata. If you'll excuse the anthropomorphization of abstract patterns for moment: it reminds me of how a competent leader can unlock whole new affordances for the individuals on their team without actually directly changing the individuals themselves.
Like, consider how we have have tons of both instincts & intuitions related to language use -- speaking, writing, listening, etc. Chimpanzees & bonobos share many of our incredibly advanced intuitive abilities (e.g. manual dexterity, social 'theory of mind'/empathy, etc.), but they are categorically unable to pick those up. In this way the super-ego didn't add funtionality to our species, and it didn't even really multiply it geometrically (?) -- it seems much closer to an exponentiation of capability.[4]
TL;DR: Acknowledging the fallibility and inherently-subconscious basis of reason is a noble goal, but abandoning the Idea altogether is misleading. IMHO!
[4]: Here's to hoping that this fourth rung is the last one, at least for a while! Cause if there's a fifth one, and AI discovers and produces it... yikes. Truely alien ASI would follow, rather than just ASI-as-huge-but-fundamentally-grokkable-AGI.)
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?
What cultural values does this wisdom and advice implicitly engender? That question bothers me a lot.
For some reason it strikes me that we don't think of a potato plant as needing life lessons. I doubt anyone here has moral compunctions about leaf structure or starch formation. People seem much the same way to me. Another part of me does instinctively model the inner world of people as small deviations from my own. Other parts of me think that is quaint.
It appears to me that the sense of clairty imparted by wisdom often looks like mere rigidity when seen from the outside. I have little doubt that your particular wisdom has been hard-earned, and at the same time, I think it is hopelessly myopic. The thing that gets me is that this also almost surely applies to my own wisdom, which is why I distrust them implicitly.
I think the world is so vast and our exposure so limited such that any Life Wisdom is hopelessly doomed to be a horrible overfit on the particulars of an individual.
Keep growing your idiosyncratic leaves though. I also genuinely think they're beautiful.
In your 20s and 30s, it's relatively easy to brute-force physical and mental health problems.
I didn't understand what the word "stress" even meant exactly until I got into my late 30s. Then I realized that I had been under extreme stress for most of my life but had not noticed it because I could just keep going despite constant exhaustion and borderline depression. Then, that suddenly stopped working.
I wish I'd realized this a decade or two earlier.
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.
I “retired” at 55. The scare quotes, are because I didn’t have a choice. No one wanted to hire me.
Back in the 1980s, when I was just getting started, I was told to save everything I could.
I thought it was silly advice, but I took it, starting in 1990, when I started my final job, which lasted until 2017.
Good thing, too.
I’m not rich, but I was able to retire, and it’s one of the best things that ever happened to me (although I didn’t think so, at the time).
I have enough to afford decent tools, and work hard, every single day, on stuff I always wanted to, but my management never let me.
I did quite the opposite.
Ignored all the sage advice, lived a rather tumultuous life, but lived it fast.
Diagnosed ADHD at 45 was a bit of an aha moment!
So I'm stuck on the treadmill for quite a few years yet.
Envious of where you've ended up, but imagine the path there wasn't easy.
All the best with retirement!
I've lived pretty humbly. I think many folks, here, would sneer at my lifestyle (sneering at others, seems to be in fashion, these days), but it allowed me to be where I am, today. Also, I never really made a huge amount of money. There's kids coming right out of school, that are starting at more than I ever made, at the peak of my career.
That can't afford a house.
Crazy times.
I am mid 40s. Started working at a hyper scaler a couple years ago. I think you are overthinking it. All there is, is to be present and focus on what is important. And no one else can tell you what is important, you already know. Spend your time wisely with your family or on things that matter to you and not on trivial pursuit. There are no secrets in this. It is largely what you define.
When you ask this question of others, you are asking what am I forgetting? What will I regret? They can’t tell you. They can tell you what they regretted it and maybe you will regret those same things they did. But you have to decide. In 10 years. In 20 years. All you have to do is ask your future self what you’re gonna regret that you didn’t do. I had found that we already know the answers to those things.
E: think of it this way. And you don’t have to have a dog for these questions to work they’re metaphorical really, but also physical if you do have a dog. Did you walk your dog? Did you play ball with it? If they die tomorrow, will you look back and say that today was good? Did you do everything you could do with your dog? If not go do those things right now don’t leave them undone. That’s all there is. And the same thing works with everything in life. You know what you should’ve done in the day. If you do those things in 10 or 20 years, you won’t look back and say I wish I would’ve done those things cause you’ve done them.
> I am mid 40s. Started working at a hyper scaler a couple years ago. I think you are overthinking it.
What does working at a hyper scaler have to do with the rest of the post? Do you want to mention your total comp or height while you’re at it?
I’m pretty tall. I find that mostly beneficial except for walking into things. I also don’t fit well in Miata and some convertibles and other small cars, which is a bit of a problem on occasion.
I was going to add more, but I kind of forgot. My post was a bit stream of consciousness about overthinking things, which I may have over over thought. Oh well. I’m kidding sort of. I was going to say that I see a lot of overthinking all over the place at work. Complex environments often lead people to assume that a complex solution is needed. Some of the time the complexity is unavoidable. Most of the time the complexity is avoidable. Our individual lives and affairs are no different.
I mean clearly it's what matters to them and not a trivial pursuit;)
To me that phrase added useful context how to treat the advice...
> When you ask this question of others, you are asking what am I forgetting? What will I regret? They can’t tell you.
In one sense yes, but in another sense... humans are just so much alike. You can a learn a ton from your elders' common mistakes. Especially the ones where there's broad agreement. You're probably not an exception.
To use your dog metaphor (which I like), would you tell a dog looking for advice (if you could magically communicate with it) to just present and focus on the moment and he'll know what to do. Nah, we know a dog needs lots of walks, to be around other dogs, to eat the right foods, and so on.
The two approaches aren't mutually exclusive, but the practical one is... practical.
> If you do those things in 10 or 20 years, you won’t look back and say I wish I would’ve done those things cause you’ve done them.
My whole point is that you can't know that if your mind is clouded by ill health and ignorance - your predictions about what you'll regret are wrong, just as the decisions about what is important are wrong. Digging yourself out of that "what I think is important in this moment is important" mindset is a big part of it.
There are some things you cannot easily come back from - or at all - later in life eg poor health decisions, bad finances, not having children.
I was expecting you to actually say stuff you couldn't come back from, but all of those are recoverable in your 30s and 40s if you're a bit more flexible. It's never too late if you want those things, quite literally.
Early 40s here. I really wish I had started weightlifting 20 years ago.
This. I (41) joined a gym last year. Did wonders for my physical and mental health.
As you get older you need more and more protein to build muscles. I need to get 150 grams of protein per day. That is difficult.
And you need more recovery time.
I have friends who never went to the gym. They develop more back issues.
Heh... i wish i'd go for anything other than boxing 20 years ago.
Anyways, yes, weightlifting + something active (tennis, football, etc) is the way to go.
But weightlifting first. It is the only hralth-related hobby that teaches honest body control: muscle, gaining/losing weight, dieting basics, monitoring key body parameters over time.
I am 54 and my response to your 40s insight is, "Amen".
The first thing that came to mind for me is that this perspective, while probably in the range of normal experience for software developers, is rooted in middle class expectations.
I have ADHD and OCD and grew up in total poverty and violent child abuse in a rural area with no economic opportunity, and was homeless from 16 to my early 20s.
While hindsight makes clear many of my own errors and shortcomings, a lot of the residual issues I face today, some of those shortcomings included, are the result of neglectful, ignorant or malicious choices from the adults in my early life. I have several physical health issues that were not addressed when they should have been, including lifelong gout and very likely fibromyalgia. I had a full-ride scholarship and campus job and lodging lined up that I worked very hard for in high school despite being homeless, and a malicious teacher illegally modified my grade out of spite to prevent me from graduating with the required credits. The administration did nothing and I had no family in my life to help me pressure the school board or file a lawsuit.
I also faced a gross mistrial after having a small town officer literally plant marijuana on me after a traffic accident, and the judge illegally sentenced me despite a total lack of evidence, and my defense attorney was corrupt and refused to submit a motion to quash or let me appeal the decision because "the judge is my boss and he will make my life hell." Six months jailtime for a first time criminal offense for a homeless seventeen year old. My whole life so far has been playing catch-up.
Your advice probably wasn't meant for me, but you were interested in hearing other perspectives so I figured you'd be interested to hear mine. I always find it interesting when casual conversation with other engineers reveals the gaps between our experiences and expectations. Lots of interesting and unique paths through our unique profession.
> fibromyalgia
My friend has a diagnosis and has a prescription for Amitriptyline.
While that works, getting exercise also works wonders.
I have seen it backfire when she did too much, but exercising well within your capabilities - on 30% of the maximum force you can exert - can greatly reduce the symptoms.
This is a journey for sure, finding out what your body can handle, but it's worth it in the end.
Have patience with your body.
Honestly I think it's even more important for people with tough childhoods and bad breaks to focus on taking care of themselves. I regret that, in the US at least, the safety net is nonexistent and makes that almost impossible, as you say. I hope you find a little peace and maybe some upward momentum.
I agree, and I think it's important advice that really does need to be drilled into people. Even if medical care is out of reach for some, we do have the internet and now even personal agents who can help teach us good habits and hold us accountable.
Things like good posture, exercise, and eating non-processed foods are within reach for the majority of us; and for those whose issues make exercise difficult, it's only even more important to try and double down if at all possible and close the gap.
Sleep should also be a top priority. I have had chronic insomnia since I was a toddler, sometimes staying up for days at a time unable to sleep, and honestly lack of sleep is destroying my mind and body faster than anything else. It's preventing me from maintaining a healthy weight, since fat burning is heavily impacted by irregular sleep.
I have tried everything under the sun, most recently I am re-experimenting with magnesium in the form of magnesium l-threonate because my magnesium deficiency might actually be causing me to have a very high "gain" in my CNS, meaning the smallest things wake me up or get me excited. It's still too early to rule out coincidence or placebo, but I think I'm noticing several differences since being on magnesium l-threonate, including better sleep.
Point being, leave no stone unturned when it comes to your health. Sometimes the solutions to complex issues might themselves be quite simple.
Thank you for your perseverance. We need testimonials like this to remind that our life isn't hard compared to this; And yet you have surprisingly chosen peace so far (congrats, and thank you).
I appreciate your kind words. It also helps for me to remind myself how much worse things could be.
I'm in a lot of pain all of the time, and recently, thanks to an abusive family member, I experienced an absolutely devastating life event that might completely derail my life, leave me with a permanent disability and end my career, but I'm keeping my chin up and counting my limbs and senses. Eyes on the prize. I am driven to succeed so that I might help the less fortunate. I think any of us in a position to do so have a duty to do so.
Mounjaro, TRT, Lexapro, statins if you need them, and much less alcohol.
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.
Short but brilliant. Well done.
I'd add: try to sleep well. It adds up.
So much to do and so little time. But you’re right, it’s so important.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Nonjudgemental self observation is table stakes. And I mean as much of the time as you can manage (Eventually all the time).
Did you include meeting with a therapist? The problem is that they have to reveal you things you don't generally want to admit, so it takes a bit of time (time which I find absolutely wasted) and depending on the therapist, they might not tell you immediately about your inconsistencies.
The problem I have with modern therapy is it that it operates completely within the frame of oneself. They will very carefully walk with you inside of your own narrative, bringing you to a better place of operation within that framework of the self.
Having thought about it some, I have been concluded that there’s only so far one can get when operating within that narrative. There’s only so much they can help with until you yourself can see that the “I” is it itself a machine generating the narrative, but also something else and more than just that narrative that is constantly running in our brains. It is something that can be observed. The observer is the observed as Krishnamurti would say.
As long time meditator, I find that there is nothing that is hidden from ourselves if we look. Meditation is one of the few ways to begin to access the whole and step outside of the narrative loop. You can also try psychedelics, but that’s riskier. A good trip might save you a decade of therapy. A bad one might genuinely imbalance your brains machinery. In some sense, the time is wasted. However, if you genuinely spend this time learning to observe yourself, this is very much a way of being that is not wasted in my opinion.
A therapist is generally going to work with you inside of a particular framework and way of stepping towards a particular way of operating. It sort of like the long or hard way of solving a math problem before you learned underlying theory of whatever problem you were working on.
You put very well into words why therapy felt off for me. I haven't been meditating for too long, but the perspective definitely shifts once you start turning the attention inwards, instead of following the narrative that the mind creates.
My recommendation to any of those interested: The Mind Illuminated by John Yates. Great intro to the meditation practice. Once you have some understanding of the general technique Goenka's 10 day vipassana courses is a great opportunity for deep introspective work.
True, I have not fully understood the direction therapists go to, apart from expliciting your thought process.
My interpretation of therapy is that it helps you feel aligned with you. It will remove the surface contradictions and counter-actions. But if your deeper you has concluded that you should be evil (assuming there is no contradictions in this view - and there always is), therapy will probably help you too. As long as you are aligned with yourself.
They prioritize you. Not the others.
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.
I cannot be the only one who read the title wrong
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.
> 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).
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.
I think the issue is precisely the rationalising part.
Let's assume I have pre-decided something: if the fruit weighs over 100g, I'll buy it, otherwise I won't.
I can then measure and find out. My emotions -- based on looking at the fruit -- may mislead me here.
Now what about "likely to weigh more than 100g"?
Here it's really easy to lie to yourself.
But if you set conditions for what counts as likely before you know what they'll be used for, and you stick to them, you can make a decision based on reason.
There is no way to decide 100g is the threshold divorced from emotion, however -- unless it's rationally derived from something else emotionally based.
The "rationalisation" bit comes from us not making decisions for the reasons we think we are -- or in the way we claim to be.
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
Here, you can find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constructed_emotion to be useful in articulating the following.
> 3. The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
Guessing: Essentially that's psychology. And Human psychology is itself emergent behavior cannot be directly traced back to neuroscience. Logic, that is another thing, which primarily is used for understanding and reconstruct retainable after emotional experiences.
It's not psychology, it's just wrong. You can point to the parts of the brain (more accurately the body and brain) that handle reason and emotions, and they're physically distinct.
Also, reason is essentially a combination of pattern recognition and abstraction, and emotion is a set of spontaneous limbic responses.
Which is not to say there's no relationship between them, or that the grey area where they overlap isn't unusually interesting.
But it's a wild overreach to say the distinction is a cultural construct and not grounded in (largely) mammalian biology.
Points 1 and 2 are also questionable. They're not novel opinions, they have philosophical names (more or less consequentialism vs deontology, with some wrinkles), and they can be - and have been - hotly debated.
I don't see them as evidence of maturity or of immaturity, more of a considered moral position that not everyone agrees with.
The theory of constructed emotion doesn’t say anything about the relation of emotions to reasoning.
My read:
1. Emotion has no biological marker, which refute the idea of mechanical connection between brain (and other body parts) to emotion
2. Reasoning, by general feeling, is a mental process carried out by brain primarily, but has a seemingly much stronger connection to biological signals
3. What I was inferring from the theory of constructive emotion, is that emotion really is a form of higher level reasoning. It's higher than the typical reasoning, so that it's connection with biological signals are extenuated and more indirect
I don't remember the words of the book.
This connection between reasoning and emotion is primarily my own rudimentary idea. Can be seen as an expolation of the theory.
I agree fully with the point about integrating emotion in your decision making. Earlier I used to get stuck in decisions since I had the need to be rational. Which is in it self an emotion I guess - since need is an emotion? Now my life is much simpler.
The title made me think the author is some kind of whisky
> 1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.
maybe not 0day stuff, but breaking the build is something that mature people have learned not to do. What are the rewards for move fast and break things for people?
Wonderfully written. I’m intrigued by the section about emotion. It seems like no coincidence that it follows the section about seeing beyond monocausal determinism.
> 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.
3. Emotion motivates everything that we do. It's just a question of what emotions are you considering and what emotions are you prioritizing.
Reasoning is taking all emotions into context and focusing on actions that align with certain emotions.
Ahh these are fun. They come up often when thinking about consciousness.
If you like these, you might be interested in the book, I Am A Strange Loop
Being able to detach from your thinking while you are thinking, that's difficult and indeed very useful. I found that more often in llm than human beings.
The Old-guard is a good alternative to greybeards, no?
> Monocausal determinism is an illusion, and largely does not exist outside of computer debugging.
Also: quite often does not exist inside computer debugging, either.
Greybeard is not sexist.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I agree with a lot of the first point but the expression does seem to lend an air of futility to caring about your impacts which I hope wasn't the intention. I do whole heartedly disagree with everyone believing they are the hero of their own story - while there sure are a subset of people who will justify screwing others (or at least bury their heads in the sand), there's also a subset of people that are happy to revel in schadenfreude. all that aside, the author's beliefs probably do apply to his target audience.
1. All serious cognitive philosophy since at least Kant has supported the idea of separate faculties -- in his case, specifically the four chambers [`--` quantitative sensitivity, `-+` qualitative perceptivity, `+-` causal judgement, `++` modal reason].[1] This is also at the root of the induction vs. deduction [vs. abduction] debate, which had been raging for at least 2,200 years before Kant.
2. Even our pre-gallilean understanding of neuroscience arrived at the same conclusion, though in hilariously abstract terms: 'fast thinking' vs. 'slow thinking'. Popularized primarily by a popsci book (?) that frames it like this: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
3. Psychologically the clearest paradigm is Freud's `- Id`/`+ Ego`/`* Super-Ego`, which is not nearly as discredited as his famous theories about parental lust would imply. If you asked your psychiatrist(/local research psychologist) about it today, they'd ofc use less medieval words for the same concepts -- roughly 'unconscious', 'cognition', and 'executive', in order.[2]
4. In cognitive science more broadly, a lot of the binaries discussed on Wikipedia's Mathematical Model article[3] are getting at this delineation.
5. Eastern philosophy has plenty of stuff on this dichotomy; in fact, I'd argue their discussion of it is predicated upon its existence and the various harmful states it can create if left unexamined. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_logico-epistemology
On a 'logical' level, the case for a separation of at least two types of thinking seems clear: any cognitive activity can either call the 'lightweight' model to guess what's happening (and be right 95% of the time), or call the 'superheavy' model to iteratively reason through webs of beliefs.
Sure, any call probably uses more than 0.0001% of both so they're not mutually exclusive, but I think the qualitative diffence is clear.
The sentiment is true in a bit more subtle of a way, I will admit... It's hard to articulate in brief (/at all), but I've become fascinated with the way the presence of the higher faculties sometimes seems to completely transform the lower ones, unlocking whole new affordances. Like the existence of a new structure of a higher level of complexity completely changing the behavior of nearby cellular automata. If you'll excuse the anthropomorphization of abstract patterns for moment: it reminds me of how a competent leader can unlock whole new affordances for the individuals on their team without actually directly changing the individuals themselves.
Like, consider how we have have tons of both instincts & intuitions related to language use -- speaking, writing, listening, etc. Chimpanzees & bonobos share many of our incredibly advanced intuitive abilities (e.g. manual dexterity, social 'theory of mind'/empathy, etc.), but they are categorically unable to pick those up. In this way the super-ego didn't add funtionality to our species, and it didn't even really multiply it geometrically (?) -- it seems much closer to an exponentiation of capability.[4]
TL;DR: Acknowledging the fallibility and inherently-subconscious basis of reason is a noble goal, but abandoning the Idea altogether is misleading. IMHO!
[1]: http://staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk/ppp/ksp1/toc.html
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_therapy#Basis
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_model#Classificat...
[4]: Here's to hoping that this fourth rung is the last one, at least for a while! Cause if there's a fifth one, and AI discovers and produces it... yikes. Truely alien ASI would follow, rather than just ASI-as-huge-but-fundamentally-grokkable-AGI.)
The PopSci book you're thinking of is "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman