Behavior is hard to fix. People say they’ve learned but they underestimate how much of their previous mistake was caused by emotions that will return when faced with the same circumstances.
Being good at something doesn’t promise rewards. It doesn’t even promise a compliment. What’s rewarded in the world is scarcity, so what matters is what you can do that other people are bad at.
People learn when they’re surprised. Not when they read the right answer, or are told they’re doing it wrong, but when their jaw hits the floor.
Most fields have only a few laws. Lots of theories, hunches, observations, ideas, trends, and rules. But laws--things that are always true, all the time--are rare.
Adam Smith identified five factors, which seem durable:
The five following are the principal circumstances which, so far as I have been able to observe, make up for a small pecuniary gain in some employments, and counterbalance a great one in others. First, the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves; secondly, the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them; thirdly, the constancy or inconstancy of employment in them; fourthly, the small or great trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them; and, fifthly, the probability or improbability of success in them.
My favorite subject to teach is electrical. No one is ambivalent; they're either completely on board or want no part of it. And students pay rapt attention. Well, at least if they don't, it's only once.
"See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember thinking “Man, I hope it’s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix.”"
When I've had the opportunity to talk with true experts in different fields, I was surprised to find that they tend to focus in very few factors, unlike books or other practitioners.
Wasn't Karate Kid training something like that? The master was only interested in a few exercises that were done doing repetitive tasks apparently unrelated to fight.
That’s probably because the experts are focused on their current task at hand, and most easily recalled the few things that are relevant to the task.
Movies and stories don’t portray real life experience, as they cannot juggle all the relevant factors of an expertise without confusing the audience.
I don’t know about martial arts. But at least in the few professions I do understand, you cannot just do a few exercises diligently for ten years and come out a master.
>I don’t know about martial arts. But at least in the few professions I do understand, you cannot just do a few exercises diligently for ten years and come out a master.
As a guy who did martial arts and competed in small tournaments, and as a recent fan of sumo, victories are more won by narrow experts. They learn the basics enough to not be surprised, find something that works for them, and then intensely focus on how to set up fights so their specialty works.
I have five or so software designs that I've implemented several times for practice. A database, a bytecode VM, a serverside web framework etc.
I'm not so much porting them, rather trying my best to reimagine them in a new context. It helps me see similarities and differences between languages/platforms and find better ways to solve problems.
I've been practicing software for 35 years, martial arts for 25; every day I become more convinced that mastery is a journey, not a goal.
I don't have 35 years of experience in software development, yet, so I may be totally out of depth here.
In this case, I think it's not the re-implementation that matters; rather, you have learned some new things and you applied the new knowledge into practice. You're actively comparing different contexts and tools. That's kinda different from what the original comment said about doing it the Karate Kid way.
Secondly, implementing a database/VM/frame work is not something I'd call practicing a skill. It's a pretty sizeable project, at least one semester worth for an undergraduate course. It takes a multitude of skills and knowledge to complete it.
Personally, I think my software development has benefit mostly from solving (real, not hypothetical) problems and reading how others have solved problems. I've hardly used repetition intentionally, except when I'm learning a new language/framework and need to get over the unfamiliarity.
I also practice the violin every day, but it's so much more than repeating of a few exercises. I can say confidently that no one can learn the violin by rote, to any level of success.
I've played some guitar, it's not so much rote learning I'm trying to describe as spontaneously playing riffs; whatever that means on a violin...
I enjoy every step of the way and I'll switch or drop any project without missing a beat as soon as they become boring for whatever reasons. I think a big part of the fear of starting projects is really issues with dropping things.
In a way my katas are the problems I'm currently grappling with, and have for some time; they're sort of where you end up when you've tried writing most kinds of code. And seeing them from different angles and starting over and over again is the most effective way I've found to figure them out.
Reality check is that real world martial arts are not taught like that. While there is repetition, focusing on few exercises and doing repetitive unrelated tasks will make you slightly better beginner. Then you will stop improving.
Karate kid is fantasy of getting victory with easy effort solely because who you are. (It is also fantasy of having sudden role model treating you with kindness)
The full context of the Wilson Newton/Darwin quote, from an obscure lecture (Worldcat has no record), is this:
The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick cooperation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day of specialization, but with a common task and purpose. Their cooperation is indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government without leadership or without the intimate, almost instinctive, coordination of the organs of life and action (pp. 56-57).
Marx is closer to Darwin (evolutionary system) than Newton (mechanistic) in this context.
Marx is also responding to social Darwinism, notably Malthus and Spencer. For the latter, the insistance that all behaviour and selection occurs at the level of the individual rather than larger aggregates (family, community, tribe, population). Which is widely seen now as a very incomplete model. Though it's similarly possible to go wrong in invalid group-assimilation theory as with tribalism and nationalism's more sinister variants.
> Median family income adjusted for inflation was $29,000 in 1955. In 1965 it was $42,000. Today it’s just over $62,000. We think of the 1950s and 1960s as the golden age of middle-class prosperity. But the median household today has roughly twice the income as the median family of 1955.
I mean, sure, but I'm pretty sure the median household income today is from 2 working adults, where 1955 and 1965 are a single working adult.
There's also purchasing power, which isn't touched on here. Yes, TVs and such are super cheap compared to that era, but owning a house is nearly out of reach for a family living off $62k/year. In 1955 and 1965 it was completely normal for a single-income family to own a home with a yard, etc.
I don't think that owning a house is nearly out of reach for a family making $62k/yr. Standard advice is that one can afford a house costing 2.25 times one's annual income. That means the median family can afford a $140k house.
Briefly checking my city, paying $140k for a house in my city is enough for a 3 bedroom detached house with a large yard, in the suburbs, with a 15 minute drive to downtown.
What the heck where do you live? $140k gets you a beat up garage everywhere I’ve ever checked.
The 2.25 advice is interesting. By that logic me and my girl can afford $750k which juuuust about starts to get you in the starter fixerupper homes here in SF. But we can’t afford the downpayment. And to make it worth buying, we’d have to stay there for 10+ years and then suddenly a starter 1.5bedroom becomes a little small when you consider what usually happens to couples in our age group on a 10 year timeline.
The 2.25 thing seems like it's very conservative. The general advice is that the most you should spend on rent in a given year is 30% of your salary, but let's bring it down to 20% to be conservative. Let's say we get a shitty mortgage rate of 4% over 30 years. Assuming your income won't change at all over the course of the 30 year mortgage and spending the equivalent of 30% of your salary per year, you end up spending 9 times your income on the house. Going off of Google's mortgage calculator, the cost of the mortgage is about 172% the cost of the loan for 30 yr/4% so that means you could buy a house that's ~5.25x your income to be equivalent to the money spent on rent.
Obviously this is ignoring a lot of things like HOA fees and taxes, but if even if you're mortgage payment is 50% of your monthly housing expenses you could still pay for something that's more than 2.25x your salary.
I believe that the 2.25x estimate comes from a time where a mortgage rate of 4% would not be considered shitty but rather impossibly low. Lower interest rates have increased the home value that people can afford for the same monthly payment, and thus has been also a factor in driving up home prices.
The 50s and 60s were a golden age of middle class prosperity, because median family income went from $29K to $42K with only one adult working. If you were living through it, it must have been amazing.
I took it as a quick opportunity to stop reading, since I wasn't surprised at any point.
But now I'm thinking: in the morning I found out that "la hoja" is "the sheet [of paper, etc]" in Spanish. How do I still know it in the afternoon if my jaw didn't meet the floor at any point?
Re. "la hoja" - try auto spaced repetition. Embrace the fact that these are pretty mundane realizations! Something like jointoucan.com, which repeatedly generates these moments (no affiliation, just a happy user).
I can't confirm that. I've just looked at it with Firefox+uBlock Origin on Linux and it renders fine. of course, I don't know if its supposed to look like that, but the content is there.
It’s not my fave site. They play some games to try to force visitors to click, and their ad network gets hijacked by malware on a regular basis, but it’s usually working for me.
Here are a couple of direct links to the images (CDNs, so not sure how long they'll last):
Great observations IMO. The points about telling the most compelling story and telling people what they want to hear resonate especially well with the current international stage.
Or even established companies talking about their "efforts" to go green, be more eco-friendly, reduce animal cruelty, etc, when the only effort they're really making is marketing themselves as such.
> Don’t expect balance from very talented people. People who are exceptionally good at one thing tend to be exceptionally bad at another, due to overconfidence and mental bandwidth taken up by the exceptional skill.
Also because of cross-compensation. Sometimes talent can compensate for the lack of another skill, thus allowing the person to be worse at that other skill and still succeed.
Very thought provoking, they remind me of the 48 Laws of Power.
A lot of these are intuitive or things I've experienced/seen before, but I've never seen them formalized.
My favourite three, though I think almost all of them are great:
- The person who tells the most compelling story wins. Not the best idea. Just the story that catches people’s attention and gets them to nod their heads.
- Henry Luce said, “Show me a man who thinks he’s objective and I’ll show you a man who’s deceiving himself.” People see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear, and view the world through the lens of their own unique life experiences.
- Simple explanations are appealing even when they’re wrong. “It’s complicated” isn’t persuasive even when it’s right.
Morgan Housel consistently writes great essays. Crazy to me how much he puts out at such a high quality level. I have submitted a few and upvoted a few but think this is one of the first ones to make it to the front page.
"The only thing worse than thinking everyone who disagrees with you is wrong is the opposite: being persuaded by the advice of those who need or want something you don’t."
Also, the things you or they want don't have to be right.
Take software choices.
Their users all got their own reason why they prefer one over the other and all could be wrong.
Which leads us to another rule.
"Logic is an invention of man and may be ignored by the universe"
If everyone of them can be doing things for the wrong reason; arguing if their choice does or does not support their reasoning doesn't help.
I'm really tired of people not noticing how a certain phone/OS/editor/food/whatever can be a great choice for themselves, but not for everyone, because everyone makes the choice theirselves.
> Self-interest is the most powerful force in the world. Which can be great, because situations where everyone’s interests align are unstoppable; bad because people’s willingness to benefit themselves at the expense of others is so seductive.
No way. Self-interest is useful enough for day-to-day interactions, but for the stuff that truly matters it is not even in the top five.
Love, trust / faith, goodness, thoughtfulness, so many other things are more powerful that mere self-interest.
> History is deep. Almost everything has been done before. The characters and scenes change, but the behaviors and outcomes rarely do.
I think about this multiple times in a day. Whenever I am presented with seemingly impossible tasks/deadlines, I ponder that the history must have witnessed atleast one person with the same circumstances as I am. Most of my problems are not so unique and there could be plenty of examples to emerge successfully. Sometimes that keeps me going.
"Something can be factually true but contextually nonsense."
This strikes me as the problem with most "news" organizations these days: They give facts about something that happened, but they place it in the context of their (the news organization's) narrative. This is true both of Fox and of CNN. And so they tell true things, but they don't tell the truth. Instead, they use true things to tell their story.
Behaviors and outcomes rarely change, but history is driven by surprising events...? I admit that this juxtaposition of the listed rules confuses me. The first part/rule would seem to indicate that history is driven by predictable, probable, or otherwise bell-curvy events.
The author may have been thinking along similar lines to Shaw's aphorism, which goes something like: The reasonable man changes himself to fit the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to change the world to fit himself; therefore all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.
Civil rights movement was started by Rosa Park sitting on the bus. It was surprising big event. Most characters in that story kept going by same scripts as before, with only slight variations and only little bit of learning from previous experiences.
Claudette Colvin [1] did “the bus refusal” nine months earlier. Alas Claudette was not a sympathetic public figure (she had an affair with a married white man), so the NAACP engineered a re-enactment with Rosa.
I think what Colvin did took much more bravery. And in providing inspiration for Parks’s actions, she’s an under-appreciated hero of the civil rights movement.
I mean, Colvin did not had to pay price Parks paid. And Parks knew what it will cost.
And no Parks sit in was not engineered by NAACP. It was her own decision at the moment. It would be pretty hard to stage that situation. It even seem she had legal right to stay sit, the driver did not had to press for charges and the bus did not had to be full...
Besides, the massive protests after surprised everyone including Parks. And someone else staying too just proves that people were repeating patterns.
Loosing the job and impossibility to get new employment in the city. She lost all white clients except one which was big hit financially. Being very low on money having to accept help.
Being hated in the city. Getting harassment and tons of hate calls. Those impacting her husbands mental health a lot.
Effectively life became much harder for her and later she had to move away. Neither her nor her husband nor her mom gained anything personal but lost a lot.
Colvim herself once commented on that too and on pressure she seen Parks under after. She was ressentful they did not trusted her, but glad she was not in Parkers place. They knew each other.
It is not like Colvin and Parks were first blacks defiant in the bus. But Parks was using Colvins story for months and Colvin joined her group.
You basically described circumstances that applied to both women. They both wound up moving North due to the extreme negative pressure. I fail to see your point.
> It is not like Colvin and Parks were first blacks defiant in the bus. But Parks was using Colvins story for months and Colvin joined her group.
You got there them knowing each other, you got there historical context and you got there reasons why Parks was seen as reliable and tough. You also got there how Colwin case influenced WPC and Parks herself. Fun fact: Parks forced Colvin to retell arrest story at each youth meeting.
Even wiki you referenced has Colvin commenting on Parks and vice versa. You think it is possible without them knowing each other? The wiki you posted had Colvin being sexually assaulted by cops, you think it was outlier bad apple cops? Oh, and besides Colvin and Parks there was yet another teenager bus arrest case prior considered, through I forgot the name.
Or picjlk really any other detailed book on topic.
Also Colvin was not pregnant at time of refusing to stand up, that happened slightly later and I did not read about her partner being white. Just him being much older.
I think it's much earlier. It should at least be dated from founding of NAACP in 1909. Rosa Parks was not a random person. she was elected Secretary of the Montgomery Alabama NAACP chapter in 1943.
Who was not surprised by bus boycott happening? Because i read about that lately and Parks herself was long term frustrated by passivity of general public. Yes she was activist, but one of few and precisely her experience of activism make her not expect anything big happening.
She experienced failure after failure, hoping merely for next generation to achieve something.
That does not make Parks refusal story telling at all? That is just somebody else also defiantly refusing to stand up?
No part of Claudette story contradits anything I wrote. No part of detailed Parks story co tradicta none of that either.
Neither of the two were the first black arrested on the bus. Arrests, beatings, occasional murders or rape happened before the two. The segregation was not keeping itself magically before. But yes, Parks and also women political council and also NAACP were all influenced by Colvin (who became member of Parks youth group). And Colvin was influenced by priors too.
You seem to ce conflating "story telling" with "fabricated incident with no basis in reality". That is not what it means, at least not in all cases.
Rather, story telling includes relating true actual events in a form that creates sympathy and interest from the audience and public. Disintermediating elements of luck, randomness, or familiarity by repetition can be hard. The point remains that Parks was seen by Black civil rights activists and the NAACP, and at least arguably demonstrated by the 1950s US press and public to be a compelling narrative.
There's no claim that Parks was the first refuser or arresstee (she clearly was not), or that her story is false. Those are all red herrings. The point is that the story was sympathetic and compelling.
I'd think this might be more clearly apparent in fewer than four explanations. I won't attempt a fifth.
Except that I did not said any compelling story at all.
OP: Behaviors and outcomes rarely change, but history is driven by surprising events...?
Me: Civil rights movement was started by Rosa Park sitting on the bus. It was surprising big event. Most characters in that story kept going by same scripts as before, with only slight variations and only little bit
of learning from previous experiences.
(The civil rights movement as a thing lead by King which was different operation then NAACP was something no one expected to happen. No one was expecting year long heavily written about boycotts with few bombings mixed in either.)
You: This better fits the "compelling narrative" rather than "surprising events" mode. Perhaps combining them.
Me: In fact, Rosa Parks being arrested was surprising to everyone who knew her. The first protests organized by WPC were surprising to Rosa Parks and whole bunch of other people who considered Mongotmery blacks rather passive and disunited. Rosa Parks standing up for herself refusing humiliation was completely in character for her. Bus driver demanding her arrest was normal behavior for him. No one did sudden 180, they all went by the same scripts. The general track record of activism in Mongotmery was to not achieve anything and being only few in numbers.
So again, how exactly does this not fit simultaneously "surprising events" and "behaviors and outcomes rarely change". You can make story out of it, but I did not.
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Colvin case not being publicized by leaders does not make reaction to Parks case less surprising. It also does not show abrupt change in anyone's behavior. That case does not disprove neither "surprising events" nor "behaviors and outcomes rarely change".
Behavior is hard to fix. People say they’ve learned but they underestimate how much of their previous mistake was caused by emotions that will return when faced with the same circumstances.
Being good at something doesn’t promise rewards. It doesn’t even promise a compliment. What’s rewarded in the world is scarcity, so what matters is what you can do that other people are bad at.
People learn when they’re surprised. Not when they read the right answer, or are told they’re doing it wrong, but when their jaw hits the floor.
Most fields have only a few laws. Lots of theories, hunches, observations, ideas, trends, and rules. But laws--things that are always true, all the time--are rare.