A corollary is when it feels like you've just wasted a bunch of time, when in fact you got a lot of work done. A common example of this is when you spend 18 hours trying a dozen solutions to a very hard problem, with none of them working. At the end of it all you tend to feel like a failure because nothing worked, but in reality you went through the very necessary process of narrowing your solution space and learning about the problem.
I guess in general our emotion mechanisms misfire a lot.
The "tortured academic" motif is especially problematic; academics are mostly employed to expand the sum total of all world knowledge, but it's often supremely frustrating.
This always frustrates me, if I try 3 different ways to do something of which 2 are dead ends and one works I feel that the 2 dead ends were wasted time because very little of them ended up in the final solution.
Worse is when you find those dead ends while working for somebody who doesn't understand software. I've seen consultants stiffed for weeks of billable hours for researching technologies they were specifically asked to research.
"In the end, it was faster to roll our own than integrate X, and we'll be able to move quicker in the future."
"Then why did you waste all that time playing with X???"
Even worse is when you know before you start that you are probably going to spend 2 days chasing dead ends because you don't know the problem space yet and need to try a bunch of different things. Battling procrastination in this situation takes a ton of will power.
I sense a bit of irony here: the guy who started HN is telling you not to waste your time by sitting around being unproductive... and you are seeing this article because you are on HN. :)
I do worry about this a lot, actually. HN is a huge time sink for me, and I worry that it is for other people too. It's way worse for me of course-- moderating a forum is exactly the sort of pseudo-work I'm talking about in the essay-- but I often think about whether HN is too engaging for users too, and whether there are things I could to make it less so.
It's an investment. I'm not being funny, despite the fact that's the obvious snap response. I compare where I would be in my personal development with and without HN (and programming.reddit when it was good, and some subreddits that still are good, and my RSS feeds), and net-net it's a good time investment as long as you don't go absolutely nuts.
We don't have technology that can filter news based entirely on "what is 'good' for me" for any non-trivial definition of good. "Interesting to me" we can at least pretend to have filters for, but not "good for me". The only solution is to have something a bit far-ranging like HN or a subreddit and just deal with the misses. The alternative, never get any hits, is worse.
Heck, I'm not even 100% sure which articles are good for me after I've completely read them. Often I can only make the call in retrospect, weeks later.
Your mental image of a well-rounded person probably includes a large library of books and a stack of newspapers. There are reasons for this, even though the newspapers and large libraries ultimately suffer the exact same problems for the exact same reasons, albeit being a little less addictive since the internet is interactive.
Problem is that it's virtually impossible to tell what's a good investment until well after the fact. In money as well as in time.
When I was in college, I wasted a lot of time on Harry Potter fanfiction. I justified it to myself as an investment. I figured that I'd learn how to write better. I was involved as a tech admin on one of the sites, so I figured I could polish my technical skills. After all, where else could a college student actually write code that faced real-world traffic from real-world users? And if nothing else, the fandom was 99.9% female, so I figured I might even end up with a girlfriend.
After about three years of this, I figured "Who the fuck am I kidding?" and realized that it wasn't an investment at all. The hard part of writing is coming up with a believable plot and characters, and fanfiction didn't exercise that at all. I was going into financial software, using Java and custom databases, and so my PHP/MySQL webapp was completely irrelevant to my professional experience. Nobody really respected fanfiction anyway, so it's not like it was a resume boost. And I still didn't have a girlfriend.
Except that in the end, it was an investment. Three years after that, after a couple years in the financial software startup and then a failed startup of my own, I ended up getting back in touch with one of my friends from the fandom , who had since started a job at Google. They were hiring. Partially on the strength of her referral, and partially on the web skills that I'd built up since my time with that fansite, I ended up getting a job there.
Anyone remember Steve Jobs' commencement address, the one with the calligraphy story? It's sorta like that. We keep trying to structure our lives so that everything leads up to achieving our goals, but oftentimes, the goals themselves aren't apparent until we've reached them. It's only in retrospect that we can put things together and say "I meant to do that, yeah really, I did."
I tend to engage in a lot of (sometimes unhealthy) introspection, and the only conclusion that I can draw is that all the little (and big) decisions we make about what to do with our time can have a wide range of impact on our lives, from "little to nothing" all the way up to "life-changing." And it's usually so hard to tell ahead of time whether or not those decisions will end up giving us a net positive or negative.
And to make matters worse (or better, depending on how you think about it), the effects might not even be related to the "good thing" you expected. Like in your example, you ended up getting a referral at a new job, which was probably not what you expected. I think so far in my short life I've figured out that the biggest bang for your buck comes from forming relationships and connections with other people. All that, "it's not what you know, it's who you know," cliched stuff that we smile-and-nod at but rarely really think about, but is so ridiculously true.
We'll See...
There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit.
"Such bad luck," they said sympathetically.
"We'll see," the farmer replied.
The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses.
"How wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed.
"We'll see," replied the old man.
The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.
"We'll see," answered the farmer.
The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.
Exactly. The oddest things can lead in the oddest places. I got my current awesome job because I dabbled in Erlang a bit, a language I would only have heard of via various Internet sites. That one hit alone is worth a lot of misses. (And I got that job because of other things I found on the Internet, and, well, actually all the way back to my very first real job.)
With no offense intended to pg, it's not really anybody's place to decide what is good or not good for me when I can't even tell until years later.
While we were developing Reddit, we always used to run into people who’d recognize us and come up to say hi. “Oh, wow,” they’d say to us. “I can’t tell you how much your site has killed my productivity. I check it a hundred times every day.” At first, we just laughed these comments off. But after a while, I begun to find them increasingly disturbing. We’d set out to make something people want — but what if they didn’t want to want it?
Last year I actually dumped HN and reddit and instead read a weekly digest someone from the coding subreddit created[1]. It was very well curated. Unfortunately, he abandoned it after several weeks.
I am planning on writing up a "Tell HN" post tomorrow, but with the topic so close I figure I would mention it here. I'm working on a weekly newsletter that will allow users to quickly get the best articles on HN each week. I've been wanting to do something newsletter related and thought this would be a great chance plus after seeing Lim's Hacker Monthly I was sold that alternative formats work for the great content on HN.
Thanks for sharing that site. I was checking out the ten issues he published and they looked promising. I won't be relying 100% on just votes, as I think a lot of articles get skewed (which, by social nature, makes sense for HN), but maybe a happy middle ground compared to foldl.org so that I can keep it going.
I'm the guy from foldl. Thanks for your kind words. I do still want something like foldl, but I don't have time to create it - I got started because I wanted to read less, not more!
I don't think that you can produce a good newsletter/digest just relying on total up/downvotes. I hoped to find time to apply machine learning to the problem, but never have.
I think it is dangerously engaging for me, unfortunately. The danger lies in the fact that its so easy to rationalize my time here as being good (for my career, for my brain, etc).
It's an extreme idea, and I don't know of any other website that does it, but I think HN might be addictive enough that the only surefire way you could keep me off it is by actually switching it off at certain times of day!
Well then, the solution is to make it look less like work, so your brain isn't fooled.
Get rid of the tasteful orange-and-grey colour scheme, and go for a purple-and-black design inspired by videogame forums. Set the font to Comic Sans. Add user avatars, dancing hamsters, a "funny sound effect of the day" button, and rename the site from Hacker News to "Chat About Random Crap With Strangers From The Internet".
I think user generated tags go a long way in filtering out which stories I'd like to read/explore. (I used to read Slashdot until I found HN a few weeks ago). For now I just use the number of comments as good first approximation.
I've considered doing that. What if we just shut down HN e.g. from 11 am to 1 pm Pacific = 2 to 4 pm Eastern? This feature wouldn't be much use for people Australia, but at least it would be helpful for some users.
I'd like a 'timeslot' feature that I could set myself eg. block my account all day except between 10pm and 11pm. This actually occurred to me previously when I activated the noprocrast feature, which was good also
Another idea that would make this work even better might be to have any changes in your blocking settings only take effect a week after you make the changes. It's hard to have discipline about settings for right now, but it's easy to have discipline about settings next week.
I like this idea a lot, except knowing me, I'd clear my cookies and cache and just read HN not logged in until I could login.
Maybe a way to get around this is to remove the links (not the text of the links, but the link functionality itself) unless you have an account and are logged in.
I guess in the end, if you don't have the self-control needed not to throw away your time reading about things (instead of doing things), you probably aren't going to benefit from being blocked from HN. You'll find something else equally unproductive to fill that hole.
Well usually good ol' fashion self-discipline comes with physical barriers between you and time-wasting opportunities. For instance going to the library every day to study - does that show self-discipline, or a chronic lack of self-control (that would allow one to study at home)? When you do your work on a computer, or worse, on the internet, infinite distractions are only a mouse-click away. Even the thought of this can be distracting.
This would be like a drug dealer not dealing for certain part of his regularly scheduled day. I can only imagine that this would make it worse because your cutting off supply and thus increasing demand.
You'll probably increase traffic :).
Seriously, this is a nice gesture, but like most other forms of social welfare, I don't think you can save people from themselves through things like this.
Perhaps some tweaks could be made to encourage more valuable content on Hacker News. For example, a link to a new Ruby gem that may solve a problem I have makes me more productive. Links about Facebook, Google, Apple, TechCrunch, etc. drama is junk food.
Maybe an inline comment targeted at the user - in red or otherwise highlighted - saying: "you've been reading HN for X hours today, maybe it's time to enjoy some sunlight?" or similar text :)
That's a scary thought. I think the HN community is very aware of time wasting. There appears to be a constant stream of don't-waste-time encouragement.
HN is a good personal investment if you don't take the "fake work" bait[1]. Any non-fiction book is the same - you can spend hours reading every word/sentence/paragraph/page, or scan and focus with a purpose. It's easy to fall into passivity.
[1] Perhaps there is a better system to bring "good investment posts" to the top.
I think a slightly customizable version of this would be useful, though too much customization can lead to people developing instinctive defenses against the scheduled shutdown (like I sometimes do with maxvisit/minaway by opening enough tabs all at once to occupy me for the minaway duration).
If you were to shut off HN during a set time period everyday, don't do it during lunch time. Eating lunch and reading HN is something I do that is _actually_ productive, or at least more productive than eating lunch and not reading.
Pseudo work is the lottery of productivity. And yet, because people spend so much time doing it, the odds eventually come up that they'll reap some sort of reward. That said, I have found a rule of thumb for myself: the more that pseudo work is done in isolation, the less likely it is to yield results. So, my alarm revolves around how long it's been since I've interacted with somebody.
I think that's a very good point. I got more done when living in a dorm room than any other time in my life. Even if it's just screwing around with a project idea at a dev house meetup, I get tons more work done (and have a lot more fun) than if I was at home.
Maybe there's some way to harvest the chaotic energy of HN so that people aren't just wasting time, but rather contributing to something. Maybe if there were some way to do massive collaborative projects that could be embedded into HN, where users could each contribute to building part of a larger system or structure. I don't think this is a new idea, but it's really only ever worked when started organically via sites like reddit or 4chan; maybe it can be done in a structured form.
I dunno...I think it may be more that doing it alone increases the risk that a project may fail, but also increases its innovativeness if it succeeds. I'm reminded of Steve Wozniak's "Work alone" quote:
It seems that basically all truly innovative projects either came out of a single mind or of a small team that worked so closely together that they might as well have been one mind. There seems to be a regression-to-the-mean effect as you add more people to a project: you eliminate truly bad ideas, but you also eliminate some truly good ones too. Many ideas that look bad are really just different.
In some ways, I think this unfortunate, because working on a team is a lot more fun, IMHO, than working solo. But that seems to be the tradeoff.
I think you would get the same effect. It's not because of direct interference: I've seen it happen even when the extra "cooks" do everything they can to encourage innovation. It's because there's a natural tendency to self-censor your more "out there" ideas when you know there are people watching. In order to let them bloom, you usually need a safe, private environment where you can try out lots of things that don't work before you condense on one that does.
I really like the "watercooler" idea floated a while back: switching HN off for most of the day, and only have it on for (say) half an hour every four hours (around the clock, for all-night hacking and overseas users).
It would increase simultaneity of use, and hopefully therefore interaction, giving better chances for ideas to bounce and gel, teams to form and so on.
This crazy idea of underusing technology to solve a problem is probably something that only the earliest of early adopters/innovators would consider (reminds me of rms's server that emails webpages to him - psuedo-neo-luddite). But whether a good idea or not, you have to admit it would make HN less engaging.
EDIT it could be trialled with a copy of HN, linked to from the front-page (with "open in $n minutes"), and populated with the same new stories. This would keep votes and comments separate. note: I don't it's going to happen, but I'm curious about whether it would work or not. Has anything like this been tried before?
HN is like alcohol in that it serves some social purpose, but can also be abused. Since it's a lot more novel, I think we're still evolving, as a community, to find the balance for "socializing responsibly" on the web.
I think it's a mistake to worry about how other people use their time. HN is a valuable resource; so is time. One of the most valuable skills that entrepreneurs/would be entrepreneurs need is time management. They can't delegate that to someone else!
I know that I suffer from the "I should really get off HN and back to work" guilt. And when it hits, that's exactly what I do.
I'm sure HN is a huge time sink for you, but I don't believe that, taken as a whole, moderating and interacting here is a low value activity for you. I suspect HN is a very important marketing tool for YC.
That said, I wish you'd spend a bit more time refining Arc. We could use better debugging tools. I'd love to be able to look at the stack when I get an error, for example.
Part of the problem is that HN is extremely time sensitive. You see different stories an hour or two later. Adding a comment behaves differently depending when it's added. Anything that would make participating a day later just like participating immediately would make it much easier not to refresh.
Except HN is valuable. You've obviously created something people want here, even if you're not charging for it. Now, there's certainly a way to spend too much time here, but you creating this forum pays off in a way that responding to emails doesn't. At least, I assume it does.
There's an interesting duality where it's "useful" to spend your time creating a site like this, but less useful to spend your time reading a site like this. Although the same argument could probably be made for writing/reading a book.
It's often a poor investement, but otherwise everyone would be on slashdot, reddit, stackoverflow, some random forum, usenet, a mailing list ... there's possibly millions of bad investments on the web.
The only real solution is to make real work easier - by having a better (more lean) workflow, so starting work is as almost as easy as hitting a HN link.
Honestly Paul, I wouldn't worry about how others spend their time too much. It's true that social media encourages "consumption" instead of "production" but people learn to moderate themselves over time. Or they get fired, go into poverty and can't afford an internet connection anymore - one or the other.
However, if it's a fun problem to solve, then by all means try to. What would work for me is seeing how much time I spend on HN. Having the hours stare me in the face would have the same effect as having the calories I consume stare me in the face (while I'm standing in line to get a buttery, ginger scone for mid-morning snack).
Things that are useful sometimes displace those that are useful right now. news.yc definitely falls in that category for me sometimes. Its also easy to be blindsided when what you are reading seems to have a high payoff at some arbitrary point in the future (with low odds) , and what you are working on is something with a low immediate payoff (with high odds). In short enticing articles about haskell and llvm sometimes keep me from doing the routine things that matter on a daily basis. I would like to believe that this self corrects after a while but I havent collected any data to support this notion.
Add a 8 hour delay before a poster can see his karma points from a post. Let other users see how many karma posts have but do not let the poster see the points. It takes away the instant gratification aspect to karma.
Like that famous quote about advertising expense...
I think about half of the time I spend here is wasted and half extremely valuable. The problem is that it's usually not clear which is which until after I've sunk the time.
When I first discovered HN it was very low-traffic and I could check it once a week and not miss anything. Now I can check it twice daily and still miss a lot. But it seems this is the way of all social networks. The only solution I can think of is to continuously find smaller niches and avoid the large social gathering places.
One could make HN less of a time sink my making HN 'slower'. If only 5 articles appeared in a day, it would hopefully consume far less time and one way of reducing the number of articles would be to impose a 'karma' cost on each submission. If it costed 10 points to make each submission, folks might be a tad more prudent.
Ah, but we come to Hacker News because there's a higher signal to noise ratio. Otherwise, many of us would be wasting time trying to parse the internet for something worth reading.
Hacker News is actually helpful to me. I've limited a lot of my reading to here, which has saved me loads of time, to be sure.
I would have to say that on the whole the time I spend on HN is worth it. I've been able to improve my design, programming, and business knowledge due to the focused content here in a way that I don't think is possible on any other forum.
I think /best and /bestcomments go a long way. It would be really nice to have RSS feeds for them and a way to change the time horizon (per month perhaps)!
Haha - quite true. Though it must be said that, after a streak of productivity, a break is prudent. HN is some of the most productive downtime I get to enjoy.
Besides, PG put the "procrastination settings" in here for a reason ;-)
noprocrast is the switch that turns it on and off, maxvisit minites is the longest you're allowed to look before you get kicked off for minaway minutes. I forget what delay does.
Delay is the amount of time (in minutes) between when you hit submit and when the comment is posted, its for people (like me) who post something than immediately decide to edit it.
...There's a new "delay" field in your profile that lets you specify the delay (in minutes) between when you create a comment and when it's visible to others; this was added because many users edit comments immediately after posting them.
Also
7 Nov: Anti-procrastination features
Like email, social news sites can be dangerously addictive. So the latest version of Hacker News has a feature to let you limit your use of the site. There are three new fields in your profile, noprocrast, maxvisit, and minaway. (You can edit your profile by clicking on your username.) Noprocrast is turned off by default. If you turn it on by setting it to "yes," you'll only be allowed to visit the site for maxvisit minutes at a time, with gaps of minaway minutes in between. The defaults are 20 and 180, which would let you view the site for 20 minutes at a time, and then not allow you back in for 3 hours. You can override noprocrast if you want, in which case your visit clock starts over at zero.
Like anything, it depends on how you use it. I spend quite a bit of time here, but it's worthwhile and enjoyable investment (I hate using that term in this case). I learn a lot and have met some awesome people through here. I would not trade a single minute of it back.
Playing devil's advocate: the guy who started HN did it to increase productivity in seed applications screening. That's us who took it onto the dark side :)
> The most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types.
The flip-side is true, too: Many of us enjoy coding so much that it feels self-indulgent, tripping the alarm incorrectly. I've often guilted myself out of coding -- out of getting real work done -- because I enjoy it so much. So while we need to watch out for pseudo-work masquerading as real work, we also need to watch out for real work seeming like too much fun.
Unfortunately, coding can be a non-productive use of time. If you're not taking active steps against it becoming so, it is probably a non-productive use of time. This is one of the core insights of the Lean Startup folks that is valuable to all of us: building stuff does not necessarily move the needle for the business, and the difficulty of building stuff bears no relation whatsoever to the business benefits realized by building it.
Sometimes I wonder, though, if methods like Lean Startup aren't solidifications of this very illusion: that just building something awesome and slightly gonzo is too much fun to be trusted. Lean Startups tend to miss things people don't know they want, or that yield negative results when market-tested with crappy prototypes. It's like "Design by Focus Group". It's probably safer. The success rate is probably higher. But I think you pay for it in loss of craziness. At any rate, startups either don't need to hear this, or shouldn't listen to it.
If something is hard to build, it's probably going to be more scarce. That would tend to make the thing more valuable. Your point is good, but "no relation whatsoever" seems a bit too strong.
This post reminds me of the story I read of a Canadian billionaire who overcame this issue. Before he made big decisions, he wrote out on the notepad pros/cons and weighted each point with a number from 1-5, depending on how important each was to him. Then he would total it, and the side with the highest number wins. He did this from broke to billionaire and the story says he uses it to this day.
What are some HN'ers methods for keeping time & money?
I often write out the pros and cons, weight them, do out the calculations, and then ignore them and go with my gut instinct.
There's some evidence that this is more effective than going strictly with the numbers. Our unconscious minds are often able to process more information than our conscious minds are: there're details that we're aware of, but don't know that we're aware of. They get missed in the calculation, but get included by a gut check.
The reason for writing out all the pros and cons, even if you throw them away later, is to force yourself to think about all the relevant facts that you can. There's a difference between issues you've never thought about and issues that you've thought about but can't hold in your head all at once. Plans are useless, but planning is essential.
Frequently, when I'm uncertain or ambivalent about a binary decision, I'll flip a coin. When the coin lands, I feel that moment of happiness or annoyance at the result. I then use that feeling to make my decision. If I realize that I really don't care, I just go with the result of the coin flip.
Works for food too. Even if you completely avoid any obviously unhealthful food (cake, ice cream, candy), it's quite easy to get overweight eating large portions of normal food.
That's only because people don't realize all the obviously unhealthful foods and mistakenly believe many healthy foods are bad for you because they contain dietary fat. A baked potato is practically as bad for you as cake, weight-wise. On the other hand, it would be extremely difficult for most people to get fat eating large portions of pure meat because any sort of meat has such a low glycemic index.
Any time my brother wants to lose weight, he goes to an all-bacon explosion diet[1] and the weight just melts off. Several people at my work went on the so-called paleo diet together and immediately started losing significant weight.
If you look at most popular diets, they generally have the core effect of deemphasizing high glycemic foods from one's diet, usually by shifting calories to meat and/or vegetables.
Personally, I prefer to shift the calories to meat because it's easier to build strength and muscle, when paired with an appropriate physical regimen. In my view, physical strength is an underappreciated and core component of modern fitness.
FWIW, "The China Project," documented in the eponymous book, appears to show a dangerously strong correlation between meat intake/animal protein intake and cardiovascular problems, cancer, and dementia. This is possibly not true when the protein is going to work building flesh, but most americans consume vastly more protein in the diet than necessary.
I realize most people aren't terribly fit, but in what sense do you think physical strength is underappreciated? I think most people are well aware of the benefits, they just don't care enough to bother.
To a point. It's a whole lot easier to get overweight eating lots of calorie-laced, nutritionally poor junk food, like pizza, junk burgers, sodas, fries, and the like, than to do so eating large quantities of freshly cooked vegetables.
I just started eating more and more food. I usually try to go healthy, but in a pinch I'll get a Mars bar from our vending machine. (I even trained myself to drink milk and eat bananas. Things that I did not like before.)
Since I started weightlifting, I need the extra energy to keep my weight, and perhaps even gain some.
Running with the food example. Earlier this year I started cooking food instead of eating out every single say, I saved some money and I am much more conscious about my eating habit.
I am pretty sure you would have to do no exercise at all for that to be true.
One of the benefits of exercising is that once you start doing it regularly, you start to miss it when you stop it. If I don't go for a run every day, I feel it, despite the fact that I hate running.
There's a cognitive load -- an amount of brain-work -- that we have today that we didn't have even 30 years ago. Let me explain.
Paul uses the day-spent-emailing example. The crazy thing is, I don't know if spending a day emailing is a good use of a person's time or not -- although I get his point.
Selling life insurance? Maybe 8 hours on email nets you a dozen leads. Could be a great use of time. Swapping smalltalk with 40 people you haven't seen in a year? Maybe yes. Maybe no. Sad fact is, the thing you are doing -- emailing, Facebooking, blogging, writing an essay, etc -- is not a great descriptor anymore of whether it's actually useful to you or not.
You sit on the couch and play video games or watch TV for 10 years, and (in my opinion) you've wasted time. But if you don't email, don't communicate, don't participate electronically -- you've also wasted time.
I've had a lot of questions about time management lately. I find it's a much more complicated subject than money management. With money, there is a number you can look at. Did you make more money? Did you spend a lot? With time, it just keeps flowing along, and it seems like you're always trying to maximize it before it's gone. But I'm not really sure there is such a thing as "maximize"
Covey had a great book on time management a decade or so ago. Need to dig that up and take another look at it.
EDIT: Wow - did anybody that downvoted me actually read the article?
The conclusion of the article is 100% that we need to get better about managing our time.
Time slips away like CRAZY - I am a RescueTime user, a fan, and nothing more - it's a great service in the right direction for what the article just underlined as a critical problem!
I didn't downvote, but I think that RescueTime is of little help with what he describes here, at least in some situations. I remember Eric Ries describing his implementing a ton of features for their chat-thing, only to find no market for it. Realizing that he might as well have been on vacation was pretty hard for him.
My personal experience: Sometimes you catch yourself in a state where you keep getting stuck in "fake work" mode no matter how hard you try to be productive. When this happens, take it as a sign that you may be approaching burnout (especially for those who try to cram insane amounts of work into the day), and GO RELAX / HAVE FUN (and don't feel guilty about it). Either way you're going to lose some "real work" time, but at least this way you'll be doing something that will help you refocus and be more productive the next time you sit down to work.
I couldn't see it either for 15-20 seconds. Must be a bug in human vision with this typeface. I wonder how many letters can be flipped while maintaining readability.
Aoccdrnig to rseearch, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
I wish I could find the article I read debunking that. It really only works for short, common words. For an n-letter word, there are only (n-2)! permutations that fix the first and last letters. If your words average only 4.3 characters, you are nowhere near cmnioiaaortbl epsiloxon ttrrreioy.
A guy I know has a form of dyslexia (though I'm not sure this is the correct word) that makes him initially unaware (for a few seconds) of the difference between E and ∃ (and other vertically mirrored characters)
Imagine the horror of graph theory for him (e.g. ∃x,y E(x,y), etc.)
In the first alphabets, the letters didn't have a particular orientation. There was even this strange (to us) writing system of writing every other line as a mirror image. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon
Wow, that actually seems more sensible than our style. It would save time scanning back to the beginning of the next line, and it would make it harder to end up on the wrong line, since different lines would be going different directions.
> Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an eye.
> ...
> Investing bypasses those alarms. You're not spending the money; you're just moving it from one asset to another. Which is why people trying to sell you expensive things say "it's an investment."
"Investing" in derivatives is like buying million dollars in lottery tickets.
Same way you could "invest" in forex or short do stock trading daily.
You are not investing while doing those things. You just happily buy risk who someone with more wit and better ways of estimating it is selling.
If I were to say how fortunes are lost I'd point to gambling. And, yes, gambling includes "investing" in risky things you actually know about no more than the person who is selling them. And I'm talking about actual knowledge, not about your gut feeling and things you think you know better.
I don't know if you can differentiate between gambling and investing in real life. Both activities involve making bets with certain payoff and certain probability in mind.
It's often really difficult to know the actual risk you were exposed to and whether your probability assessments were reasonably accurate.
I agree with you that there is a spectrum of risk taking from gambling to investing. Nevertheless both involve taking risk and expecting payoff sometime in the future. Both the estimate of risk and estimate of payoff could be wrong or could change dynamically. I wouldn't be surprised if some argue that US government bonds are more risky than investing a diversified portfolio of forex today.
I guess you could equate them by saying investing in government bonds is like betting on a team paying $1.01 to win. The odds are vastly in your favour to gain from the investment but it's not certain.
The point about the lack of "alarm bells" raised while doing busy work really resonates with me. Its so easy to get in the habit of context switching between multiple inputs (email, twitter, …) that if you don't strictly time box it you can easily lose a few hours.
>But the world has gotten more complicated: the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types.
That really resonated with me. Regularly looking at my phone and similar devices for news/stock/random updates provides me an illusion of productivity when it is not much more than self-indulgence.
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
-Rudyard Kipling
I've recently seen this as a challenge to keep pushing forward even after you've had great success. This is similar to PG's challenge of investing his hard earned money. He had a heap of his winnings. He could store the cash in a bank and forget it or risk it (intelligently of course). The author IMO implies by saying to start over undeterred by loss or defeat that it's better to take the chance than to hang on the sidelines. I do doubt that Paul would "never breathe a word of his loss" after all they didn't have the internet back then :) Thanks for the essay.
It is hard to know exactly what fake work is looking forward, but it is easy looking backwards. Which means you must test your assumptions continually over time. As what was real work in the past can easily turn into fake work. PG's "Alarm Bells" idea seems to be a good start.
I don't think anything is really ever lost so long as you support the system by remaining a US citizen. Losses in the financial markets and in business just get carried forward, at the very least in terms of experience. It feels like time is being wasted but I think that's just an illusion from the Obama doctrine of spreading the wealth around; at some point down the line, money will be made again hand over fist to both confirm the system is in play and that people are being taken advantage of.
Actually my thought is that the "fake" work is just part of life. What are real work and what are fake work? If real work means the work that supports the bare minimum you need to survive, then everything else are fake. All the extra money, fame, and success are just there to stoke your ego. People got their ego stoked by playing Farmville. Are those fake work?
I would say just enjoy life, every part of it, fake or real.
The most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more virtuous types.
I quit playing all Facebook games when I realized why they are so bad for me: so many of them are glorified work simulators (virtual farms, restaurants, crime empires, etc.) that falsely satisfy that part of the brain that wants to get some work done!
Maybe our most effective strategy is pre-emptive avoidance? I've never played any of those Facebook games, in fact I never joined a social networking site at all for years, because I KNEW it would be a time sink. I like computer games but i've sworn never to even TRY World of Warcraft. I felt pretty stupid about trying EVE Online (I was intrigued by the business aspects) but turns out it's very boring anyway.
So my point is, recognize in advance the time-wasting potential of prospective activities, and that will save you some grief. Another strategy: treat these activities like tradable items, like currently I'm considering "Buy: iPad, Sell: Xbox 360" and then the net effect of a new gizmo should be nullified.
I still remember how much time I spent playing the first generation of RPG, like Bard's Tales and Ultima 1/2/3. After a couple of these episodes, I tended to avoid these kinds of games because of the huge time commitment. It felt like a pain to start learning and playing huge time-sink games. I have been cured since then.
Now that is a brilliant idea! A friend once had a project proposal to do that for team management (transferring football manager simulators to real life, essentially) but it never got funded.
"the alarms that prevent you from overspending are so basic that they may even be in our DNA"
"avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you. It probably was enough to protect hunter-gatherers, and perhaps all pre-industrial societies"
These feelings of wasting time and avoiding pleasure are probably more due to culture than genetics. They sound like a description of the Puritan Work Ethic.
That's something I've been thinking about a lot. I don't have millions, but what I have I want to a) not lose and b) make it grow.
There's always a tension between these two things, and I'm afraid that if I take too many risks trying to do good on b), I might end up doing badly on a). It's hard to decide how much risk you should be taking...
The other similarity between time and money is uncertainty. It is not usually apparent (especially for those self-employed) where to sink their available time so that it is most productive. Do I learn language X or Y? Project A or B? etc.
Why not try to capture some of the Hacker News talent and create a crowd sourced Hacker News project? I little bit of everyone's time could add up to something interesting, and perhaps useful.
And surfing in the internet for the latest and greatest is one my biggest time waster. Although knowing it trying to avoid it, somehow time just clicks by so quickly reading too many articles.
I was kinda surprised because I thought the article was going there, with some basic advice about how not to lose it in investments. But it took a turn in focus.
I wonder if cooking falls under this category. I feel like I should do it to save money, but I wonder if I spent the time doing something better, I would have a net win.
So do it for fun, and stop treating it like something that needs justification. If it's not fun, figure out why, and either start having fun or stop doing it.
"With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you."
I think Paul Graham is an amateur philosopher and the problem with philosophy is that it is not actually easy to do. This is so as it is very easy to speak of a truth in one particular focused narration, which very much contradicts with other circumstances. The quote above being an example in point.
Why would anyone want to avoid pleasure, let alone be protected from it? I think watching telly for two hours can be pleasure, it is more difficult however to find out of when it becomes not self indulgment but not pleasure.
The riches of the world are useless entirely if they do not grant you access to pleasure. The entire point of existence is pleasure. Making money is pleasure, disciplining yourself to not waste time is done so as to gain more pleasure later than very little now, spending a lot of money is pleasure, as is making them, and of course the greatest pleasure of them all is sex so have plenty of it :P
My point Paul is that we do not need protection for pleasure. To the contrary, we need protection from non pleasure. It is however extremely hard firstly to identify what is pleasurable and secondly to acquire it. Investment for example can be pleasurable but only if you make a profit out of it and you feel comfortable with making the investment. That is, you can afford to loose what you invest and thus can only gain pleasure either way. When, however, large sums of money are invested, outside of that comfort zone, you are not protecting yourself from pleasure, you are instead denying yourself pleasure and giving in to its enemies, such as envy, irrational hope, lack of discipline, too much confidence in yourself or others while the alarm bell inside does ring so very softly that this might really not be right.
Thus perhaps, time and money should not be our currency, but pleasure.
I would also like to point out that I feel pleasure after working through a day in a disciplined way that doesn't waste time. So "disciplining yourself not to waste time" isn't always to gain pleasure later, but can also generate direct pleasure. At least for me. (my $0.02)
"... avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you"
I think that can not reasonably be interpreted but to suggest that avoiding pleasure is a way of protection. That is, that we need protection from pleasure.
However, I would be interested to know how do you think that Paul was saying exactly that which you quoted?
P.S. I must say that the behaviour of individuals in this community is very interesting and perhaps predictable. I have seen time and again before a comment being upvoted until someone makes a contrary comment, at which point, the original comment begins being downvoted. It is strange and perhaps makes me naively think that people's opinion can be so very easily entirely changed let alone influenced, even "intelligent" individual's opinion.
I guess in general our emotion mechanisms misfire a lot.