HEURISTIC #1 When in doubt, chose the adventure. (Credit: Nietzsche)

HEURISTIC #2 What’s the right thing to do here, versus the comfortable one?

HEURISTIC #3 To make a thing inevitable, do as much as you can right now. For instance, to make it inevitable to take a letter to my office the next day, I put it inside my shoes. (Credit: BF Skinner)

HEURISTIC #4 If it’s popular and most people agree with it, walk on. Interesting and unfashionable is where the real fun is - and, likely, the values of tomorrow. (Credit: Peter Thiel, and, again, Nietzsche)

>>HEURISTIC #3 To make a thing inevitable, do as much as you can right now.

I have an another HEURISTIC, like do not put impossible clauses as preconditions in front of possible things, if you do- the possible now becomes impossible.

eg: Like deciding you will to get a gym membership when prices fall, this is a wrong way of thinking, instead if you can afford a membership(which almost always you can) go workout in the gym. Putting the discount clauses now only acts as a means preventing you from getting fit.

About heuristic #2: An interesting contrast comes to mind. Sometimes the right thing ends up being comfortable too. The problem with such a situation is, people use this heuristic to justify that the thing isn't right because it is too comfortable or they bring up a wrong thing that is complicated and use this heuristic as a defence (it is hard therefore it must be right)

Happens all the time in the workplace. For example take debates like using dynamically typed vs statically typed languages or turing-machine based approach vs lambda calculus (functional approach).

I find Peter Thiel's thinking absolutely fascinating despite controversial opinions in the circles here. I highly recommend listening to his interviews even if you disagree with him and possibly have made up the mind.

I came here thinking this was going to be a super boring thread, and realise now I'm wrong.

These are very provoking, thank you!

Definitely agree. One of the heuristics I use is NPC vs PC. If it feels like something NPCs do or is a fetch quest I avoid it, delegate it, outsource it, etc. If it's a PC thing, then I do it myself.

This seems like a quick path to losing respect from your team. Are you an IC or management?

I mean, I kind of get it, but I also believe that there's a sense of zen humility in, say, doing the dishes.

I think we should give the GP the benefit of the doubt and assume he's talking about not pulling work that he thinks is for an NPC. Presumably if he gets stuck with work for an NPC he'll do it.

Where I work, this routine stuff is handled by an ops team. But we have a saying that ops will have a different job scope every 6 months because it will be automated. The ops team gets plenty of respect and are probably the real PCs.

However phrasing it as PC/NPC work does seem insulting. Even games are evolving into forms where everyone is the PC. To mess with the analogy even more, it's usually low level PCs that are tasked with rat hunting and fetch quests.

I’m not trying to achieve zen. If I was I’d advise quitting tech, and going to a monastery.

Becoming a zen master is definitely a PC move. It’s just not mine (or isn’t currently, losing all my stuff and sleeping on a sleeping bag definitely raised my awareness of how irrelevant stuff is)

Teams generally like me, I’m always pushing boundaries and always willing to provide paperwork for them to CYA and blame it on me should it blow up.

It's better to be decent in a lot of areas than to be great in one area and terrible in another. If A, B, C, D is how much value you provide in different areas, you should try to maximize ln(A)+ln(B)+ln(C)+ln(D) rather than A+B+C+D. Also see "Law of diminishing returns", "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

In creative fields nobody knows what they're doing and most time and money is wasted. It's often as important to think about what thing to do as doing the thing. You will most likely provide great value to your company/work a few days of the year (the days where you implement some feature your customer really needs or where you fix some potential or ongoing big production problem) and most days you will provide break-even or negative value. Also see "Impostor syndrome".

Always automate manual or boring processes. Do not think too much about ROI calculations, they don't work because productivity in creative fields is very non-linear. Instant feedback is very important for concentration and morale.

If you're prone to anxiety, saving money and building skills allows you to act without fear of major setbacks. And most of the time it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Many scenarios the optimisation is exp(A) + exp(B) … in which case the expert wins over the generalist.

For example, being a fraction of a second slower at running is the difference between a career in running versus needing a side job to make ends meet.

I would say choose to be expert over the generalist for the big break throughs.

"It's better to be decent in a lot of areas than to be great in one area and terrible in another." - I disagree with this more the older I get.

https://fs.blog/multiplicative-systems/ is a compelling view on this.

But that's more like saying don't suck completely at anything, not necessarily be decent at all the things.

It's certainly not a one-size-fits-all kind of model, and there are indeed a lot of cases where being really good at one thing makes the difference.

What I'm suggesting is not that you should simultaneously learn to program, do accounting, lay bricks and repair shoes - but rather let's say that if you are a programmer, you should not only be good at backend programming, but also know a decent bit about frontend programming, server ops and team communications, and not be terrible at UI design, spreadsheets, and customer communications.

And there's nothing wrong with being a specialist - but I find that generally good teams need at least someone that can bridge across areas, even if that's not you.

Also, it's often easy or natural enough to not be terrible at something that you may not realize how bad things could be.

I am here with you on this one. I have been a programmer since I was 13, that made me a generalist developer who likes to jump into many different things, because building stuff was my "toy", my entertainment. And every toy gets old.

I am almost 30 now. I feel it gets tougher to be a generalist as any industry matures. Take Frontend / Backend development, versus Web Developer of the past.

Frontend Development alone has become more complicated than the total mental load a Web Developer would endure delivering both backend and frontend.

In that moment, as a generalist, as suggested above, you find yourself without a foundation, but rather crumbling ground. You better know how to fly.

If the job is too big for one person, then yeah you probably break out into more specialized teams, but I don't see frontend/backend being too much for one person to understand and do good work on.

Some systems are just too big for one person to make meaningful progress towards in a reasonable amount of time.

In today's world, almost all jobs are moving more and more toward specialization. Being great at something is how you work and make a difference. You can outsource many of your weaknesses, from the mundane (ex, spelling: spellcheckers) to the complex (ex, accounting: hire an accountant).

In contrast, my mental model is that it is only worth knowing a little or a lot. The middle ground is only useful when you are filling a gap.

* If you know a little, you know enough to reason about the topic and identify how you can outsource your needs. eg, you know enough about accounting to pick and manage an accountant. * If you know a lot, that's your value add and you can provide that service.

Where if if you know a "medium amount"... * you still need to outsource to an expert most of the time * or you can't find the right set of expertise to outsource to and you must fill the gap yourself.

My experience is the exact opposite. As a well-educated generalist, I’ve been able to drop into a number of different fields and find great opportunities.

By gaining “medium” competence in multiple areas, I have repeatedly been the only person in town who could bring three or four competencies together for a task.

I think one of the most obvious ways “jobs are moving” is towards self-sufficiency and small, flexible teams that can jump into new and rapidly changing situations.

Generalists wanted!

And how much does that pay? Being a generalist typically doesn't pay unless you do it as a manager. Compare that to a specialist in some domain in software engineering who make $500k a year. Companies looking for generalists tend to not pay a lot, they do it so they can hire fewer people and save money, paying a lot would go against that.

Mostly OK. I’ve done solo consulting and started up a few things. It’s never been about maximizing income, which always seemed to have too steep a price for my taste, rather about personal freedom and flexibility.

My early observation was that if you have a particularly valuable skill, you can easily find yourself on the clock in 6-minute increments and/or under someone else’s thumb.

As an inventor/promoter or solo consultant (entrepreneur, I guess) it’s possible to find a sweet spot where the money is enough and the pressure is minimized. I suppose a specialist could do that too, with help from an agent.

As an engineering generalist I have more opportunity and get paid better than most.

Agreed - being a specialist in my experience is far too limiting. I'm pretty good in a more than a few things, and have passing experience in a lot more. I can always find good paying work that interests me.

I think it depends on the job - the more advanced, sophisticated, the more specialisation; the less advanced, the more generalisation eg the neurosurgeon doesn't get asked to also do heart surgery - the barrier to jump from one to the other is too high, unlike painting a shed, cleaning a pool, mowing grass, carrying furniture. Tech has kernel and compiler experts who I think generally do little else, vs devops who are more generalist, have a more superficial knowledge of numerous technologies which often change. As I get older I feel my value as a generalist decreases when I look at the incredible depth of knowledge specialists have accrued over the years, and my knowledge is a year old and soon to expire - the eternal newbie, a dabbler, a dilettante. There's is some element of lack of identity in that, but it's too late at night to play Freud. This wasn't a bother when I was younger, and as sibling comments say generalists are in need, but I think that's mostly only in certain areas such as devops, sre, some dev. Personally, I'd rather be an expert, alas I'm not. I wonder if there's a connection to moving into management - with age, generalists are less able to jump around to new tech, so move into management? You certainly seem correct when looking at other roles such as AI, or data scientist - I worked alongside a computer vision, AR chap, and there was no way I was going to be jumping into that to help out. As technologies advance, there will be some abstraction, but increasing depth will require more specialists.

I would argue most jobs are moving to be more generalist. The jobs where you need a deep knowledge of a singular topic to push human knowledge are quite rare (especially in a fast moving industry like tech). Rather it is more common to be expected to be able to respond to a large variety of scenarios and be able to provide an acceptable solutions to be able to move on with the project. Most problems don't require the deep understanding, just the smart application of current knowledge and someone who knows where to start.

I would disagree and the deep knowledge is "non-existent" in this part of my life. But I don't have any statistics or anything else to back this up.

Me too. I feel like part of my identity depends on the things that I'm really good at. At the end of the day, I can safely tell myself I'm the best damn expert in my field and that's enough to give me peace of mind.

From: https://amaca.substack.com/p/how-to-become-a-millionaire-wit... “Specialise in something that every company likes a lot. Avoid niche tech, go for huge popular things (eg. AWS, JS, Python, React).”

Not disagreeing, specialisation is for bald apes.

I know too many people with great technical chops, but they are held back from reaching their goals by other non-technical skill deficiencies.

It is also more practical to aim to be top 20% in many areas than top 1% in one area. There are often genetic barriers and ridiculous sacrifices to being top 1% but top 20% is doable for someone with average genetics who just works hard without sacrificing everything else

- memento mori: we’re all worm food and likely to be forgotten by the world at large. None of us knows the hour and manner of our deaths. There is no earthly or cosmic justice, no just desserts, no reward or punishment beyond what life offers.

- revealed preferences: what people actually spend their time doing is a better indicator of their values than what they say they want.

- people are not internally consistent, nor should we be: logical-minded people can get really frustrated when someone says they believe XYZ, but have other hypocritical or conflicting beliefs or actions. You won’t cajole people into reconciling their beliefs into a cohesive elegant whole—and that includes yourself (hello Rationalists). Live with it.

> people are not internally consistent

There are those with cognitive dissonance, i.e. those who will actually verbalize contradicting thoughts. However there are also plenty of people whose thoughts are fully consistent and logical. That said, those people will still behave contradictory to their thoughts.

> You won’t cajole people into reconciling their beliefs into a cohesive elegant whole

Logical arguments won't work on persuading an illogical person, that's true. However you don't have to live with it. There are plenty of other options besides logical arguments. There's bribing, coercion, and manipulation. Emotional appeal being a really successful technique in the manipulation category.

> .. and that includes yourself

Indeed it does. Logical thinking is great, but primarily done by the left brain hemisphere. I often witness myself doing things while thinking to myself how this wasn't the plan and how I still don't agree with my actions. That's because my plan was made primarily by logical thinking with no extra steps. However there is plenty of manipulation I can do on myself. For example if I have cookies that I shouldn't eat, the more effective strategy is to throw them away the first chance I get (to increase friction, the right hemisphere seems to love laziness), as opposed to thinking that I can always keep myself from eating them with pure willpower.

It sounds like you describe being in a state where the "shoulding" part of yourself hasn't really say in counsel with the other parts of yourself. Reconciling your urges with your less affectual sensations can help you conserve your willpower immensely. For the rest of the space I find digging into the idealizations we devise and breaking them down covers a lot of distance.

Specifically with sweets, including cookies, I rarely ever want them. They are so simple and almost never as enjoyable and nuanced as a well cooked and seasoned vegetable.

> Reconciling your urges with your less affectual sensations can help you conserve your willpower immensely.

Could you provide an example from your experience and include the process?

Without spending too much time...

I had a friend that had some debts to pay off that she paid interest on and some spare cash during unused that she didn't need for any other purpose. She knew she was paying that interest and having the debt was costing her but she couldn't get herself motivated to pay it off.

Now, if she had an investment opportunity that reasonably safely paid a higher rate of return than the debt cost her, that may have been a more optimal choice. However, she had not reached that level of sophistication and the interest rate was high enough that paying the debts off made the most sense for her.

We talked about a variety of ways to look at it, from how paying it off she would have more money and flexibility over time and at the end of the term of the debt she would have a chunk of money she would not have. After looking at the many dimensions of the consideration she intellectually agreed paying the debt off was best. All those things seemed true but at the same time unimportant to her in the moment.

The conversation continued and I laid out the fact that every future moment is the rendering of all past actions in combination with the ongoing circumstances and happenings of life. That the payment today was choosing an immediately easier trajectory and more prosperous future to start immediately. This is just that future consideration moved into the current moment but it encoded making a choice that she understood to mean that her financial life would be not only easier but easier to make easier as she gained the ability to begin investing, seeing returns, and finding wealth growing and ever increasing rates.

This in frank terms meant she would be able to care less and less about money and more tightly focus on the things she did care about and paying off the debt was step one towards that viscerally improved life. She paid the debt off without any emotional effort the next day and has seen a mostly improving financial picture ever since.

The broad process was invoking the whole picture short and long term, increasingly integrating it into the moment where she was then in a way that connected to what she cared most about and aligned the outcome she agreed was most desirable with her current feeling states and preferences.

I offered vegetables and sweets. Do I care more about feeling awesome by default or having a moment of oral pleasure that is a bit flat and simple anyway? By actually integrating the full picture into my current moment my perspectives, preferences, and experiences have shifted over time. I still eat sweets every once in awhile and even binge a bit occasionally but it just reminds me that I really do like my kale and radicchio with mustard, sweet and spicy peppers, along with a little vinegar way more than sour peachy-os.

Anything seem glossed over our fuzzy still?

This is a very good write up. I love the concept of integrating the future into the current moment, so that you do get immediate gratification for something that doesn't normally offer it.

For your last point I have a nice catch phrase.

"The only constant thing is change and the only consistent thing is hypocrisy"

Accepting all of us are hypocrites at some level helps to deal quite a bit with frustration and depression.

>There is no earthly or cosmic justice, no just desserts, no reward or punishment beyond what life offers.

Hi Raskolnikov

I heard this recently from one of Justin Kan's YouTube videos and it's really shaped the way I think about my career.

"Work in your zone of genius [not your zone of competence]."

Simply put, it means to work on problems that:

1. you have a natural inclination towards

2. (and perhaps more importantly) give you energy

For example, I am good at full stack web development because that is the first job I got out of college. If I want to "optimize my career", it would be best to continue down this path and apply for roles that fit my experience. But, unfortunately for me, building web apps is not something that "gives me energy".

One thing that does give me energy is thinking about/playing video games. I've always spent my evenings watching GDC talks or game dev documentaries. After watching Justin's video, I decided to take a shot at making games[0] and it's been a very different experience from making web apps. Even after a full day of coding, I continued to think about how to make the game better!

The key insight is that you get better faster when you work on stuff you have a natural inclination towards, and that gives you energy to work harder on those problems.

The hard part is making the leap to work on these problems, even if the trade-off is super high. For example, should I continue down the FAANG path and have a good life with all those perks as a full stack developer, or do I follow my "zone of genius" and enter the gaming industry which is known for some extreme practices.

Who knows, with the way gaming is shaping up (Roblox, MineCraft, Unity, Fortnite, Meta, etc.) perhaps switching to this gaming industry is actually the more optimal solution :P

[0] https://github.com/SuboptimalEng/GameDev

>"Work in your zone of genius [not your zone of competence]."

This is from Gay Hendricks' books, "The Big Leap" and "The Genius Zone".

Can you share which of Justin's video you watched?

It was Justin's productivity video[0]. I linked the time stamp where he mentions this idea:

[0] https://youtu.be/d1vBNOiRyEI?t=594

Really loved this. Thanks for sharing.

Nice, thanks for sharing

thanks for sharing!

Never let a bad decision get in the way of a good story.

I'm always thinking about "Create vs. Consume" => make sure it's at least 50-50, aim for 80-20. Most men I've met on death beds regretted doing nothing.

Do I truly understand a problem space or am I just making a water-cooler level of abstraction? Dig deep, down the bolts, or shut up.

Are the kids happy? is the wife happy? Then I'm happy. People remember you by how you made them feel.

And this last one is controversial, even within me: prayers are not lost to the woods.

> prayers are not lost to the woods.

I'm what you'd describe as a weak agnostic.

Over the last few years I've heard some abstract arguments that "prayer" and "god" might be some very old, emergent ideas of early humanity's ability to bargain with the future.

I'm still not completely clear on it, and I still don't pray, but it's in the back of my mind.

What are your thoughts on "prayers are not lost to the woods"?

It's a tough topic to talk about, because I'm not religious myself although I was baptised and went through the motions of a young kid, going to church even through school.

That said my grandfather told me once this saying, and that shocked me to this day as it appears to be valid to me, and he was the most atheist person I've ever known.

One day I was very sad, very very distraught. And I prayed in tears, on my knees, and it somehow materialised. Again I'm not religious, I was lost, powerless and did the last thing I could possibly do. And I think it invoked a certain calm and focus which allowed me to follow through opportunities that led me out of the woods.

Like any beliefs in life, YMMV. But that stuck with me, your prayers don't get lost to the woods.

What a lovely personal anecdote. Thank you for sharing.

How many men on death beds have you met?

A few in my family sadly, and some friends. There is a certain clarity people have when their days are counted. I wish most us had such clarity. We'd get straight to the point.

Interestingly, sometimes if you're the creative type you can get so consumed in creating that you end up not consuming enough of the real world. I sometimes get so wrapped up in projects that I end up not doing things I wish I'd done, like traveling or socializing. A balance is always good.

Less is more.

C'mon, we're all dying here.

Finishing is a skill (per Derek Yu).

All measuring devices have noise.

Symmetry and continuity impart incredibly strong constraints on systems.

A dollar isn't worth a dollar to everyone.

I am probably overreacting or missing something.

Most of the value can be had by delivering less than 100%.

Many problems cannot be solved, simply changed into other problems.

If my team succeeds then I succeed.

> Finishing is a skill

I've also heard "it's better to finish something than to start something." At the same time, don't fall for the sunk cost fallacy. Finishing a dead idea only makes you feel good.

I'm didn't understand "Symmetry and continuity impart incredibly strong constraints on systems." Can you elaborate? Give an example if possible?

These relate to physics/modeling. I am going to hand wave a bunch.

If a system has to operate the same way under rotation/reflection, that strongly constrains what the system can be doing. Think crystals or isotropic forces or, in the day job, what should happen if you negate a feature going into a neutral network then retrain. Should it matter from which perspective you look at a thing?

If a system is continuous then smooth changes to inputs should cause smooth changes to outputs. The system probably will be robust to small perturbations because they will result in small output changes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbulence#Kolmogorov.27s_th... is something of an example.

Not the author of the comment, but I can give an example of how it's used in physics. The first law of thermodynamics states (in a simplified form) that the energy into a system is equal to the energy out. So it's a symmetrical process. This means a lot of times we can calculate half of a thermodynamic process, (i.e the heat flow into a system), and know that, over a long enough period of time, the heat flow out of the system will be equivalent.

Consider conservation of energy and momentum. Of course, one should operate within the limits of thermodynamics too.

Not OP, but I view this as a special case of "form over function"

> C'mon, we're all dying here.

What does this mean?

With every passing moment we are, every one of us, a moment closer to death.

Time is a finite resource for everyone. Savor it. And, respect the time of others.

Thanks!

It means everyone will die.

- Hanlon’s Razor: never ascribe to malice that which can be ascribed to ignorance or stupidity.

Or, more broadly:

- There is "what happened," and there is "the meaning you assign to what happened," and crucially, _they are not the same thing._

This one lesson underlies virtually every mindfulness and personal development practice in the world.

Similarly, never assume you know the context. I tend to apply this while driving a lot, when someone is speeding past me. "Idiot! But, maybe his wife is in the middle of birthing his son and he is rushing to the hospital?", helps me keep calm when others act like idiots.

There is also a funny video you can share with people to explain the same idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-9Gci8MuHw

Or: always focus on the intent. People do things for different reasons, but you should only judge them based on the intent.

For example, all lives matter, sounds good, but what is the intent behind that? Is it really to signal that all lives matter?

Intentions can be very nebulous. We are not always aware of why we’re doing something and tend to come up with explanations after the fact. These can even change over time. Ultimately we can only guess at what happens in other people’s minds.

Alternatively we can look at the effects of an action. To use your example, when someone says “all lives matter” it, among other things, alienates black people. IMO makes it a lot more clear cut.

Unfortunately whatever you say you’re always going to offend someone. That’s why I think intention is what matters most, otherwise you’re just following an angry crowd into cancelling someone for no good reasons.

> There is "what happened," and there is "the meaning you assign to what happened," and crucially, _they are not the same thing.

Also known as Brahman vs Maya:

https://www.yogapedia.com/brahman-and-maya-an-explanation-of...

Unfortunately, since these concepts are presented through a religious lens, Maya renders many people unable to even consider (and therefore falling back to binary heuristic thinking, not realized as such) the valid neuro-scientific concepts contained within.

A simpler, secular version of the same general idea:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

I don't understand the fish story in the context of the "meaning you assign to what happened". Can someone explain?

The fish are swimming because they are in water, that is what is actually happening. If they do not know they are in water, they ascribe some other meaning as to why they are moving their bodies (swimming).

My interpretation is that the lack of realization of the young fish that they are swimming in water is analogous to a lack of wisdom, that people tend to not realize that their perceptions of reality (that they consider to be reality itself) are actually just a clever illusion constructed by the subconscious mind, and are based on all sorts of inherited cultural and experiential axioms.

Interestingly, people tend to be very good at identifying lack of wisdom in other people (particularly the members of their outgroups), but are terrible at identifying it in themselves - the classic example is people laughing at the stupidity of Trump supporters, anti-vaxxers, etc.

However, smart people are also very vulnerable to the very same phenomenon, I think it can be seen in this thread (and you'd be hard pressed to find a group that takes thinking more seriously than Rationalists):

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/qz596o/why_...

Another lovely articulation of the same general idea:

Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?

- Frank Herbert

I absolutely hate Hanlon's Razor, it's an automatic pass for people acting with malice as long as they play the plausible deniability angle.

That requires a certain level of intelligence to pull off.

Think of how stupid the average person you know is, and realize that half the population are stupider than that (another mental model I ascribe to).

The difference between average "stupid" and average "smart" is nowhere near significant enough to make a practical difference. It's a question of how willing someone is to take advantage of their situation.

By maybe 3 years old, humans figure out they can lie about their ignorance of what's generally good or bad to get away with a ton and that will be taken advantage of until some sense of accountability and honor is learned, or there's some significant threat to their personal well-being. A lot of people don't get past that stage until their late teens, but young people don't have much opportunity to do a ton damage with that mindset, they don't tend to have much power. Some people never develop the sense of accountability and go on to test the limits of their feigned ignorance until they find the lines, and walk them as close as possible. As adults, on average, they may not "succeed" as much as "smart" people, but the problem is, people like that are more likely to seek a position that allow them to get away with it, and "smart" people keep letting them off with a look of disappointment, and the assumption that they've "learned from their mistake" and won't do it again, but what they've really learned is they're not as close to the lines as they thought and go a little further next time.

Wait, what?

You consider it malicious to not assume that everyone is out to get you unless proven otherwise?

Feelings wheel feelings wheel feelings wheel feelings wheel feelings wheel feelings wheel feelings wheel

The groupings of the finest emotions within the 2nd group are immensely helpful... for instance, "successful" and "confident" are in the proud category. And to feel successful, first trust in your own ability, then work for others and when they trust in your abilities too, you are successful.

Respected and valued are in the same subcategory. To feel respected, first value something, and if you can get an employee to value the same thing, then they truly respect you.

On the anger side, disrespected and ridiculed are in the same subcategory, and they are similar, but disrespected is when someone devalues your orders, and ridiculed is when they make fun of your form(body).

On the sad side, isolated and abandoned are grouped, isolated is when you're sad for being taken out of something(a group or a feeling), and abandoned is when you and the rest remain, but a person leaves it.

I've been reprocessing my whole life with finer emotional granularity, and I recommend it, highly so!

This sounds interesting and I've never heard about it. Is it just about categorizing feelings better? Any recommended links?

Never heard about it either, but probably https://feelingswheel.com/

I heard about it from Dr K on YouTube. The connections between how it's sorted I came up with myself.

- No one can make you feel inferior without your consent

- Do something every day that you're afraid of.

- Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.

- It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.

- Be confident, not certain.

- It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.

- You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with the best you have to give.

- You can often change your circumstances by changing your attitude.

(High five if you notice a pattern)

Thank you for these, quite a few were insightful. My favorites are 5th and 6th as I often fall into trap "you can't really _know_ anything for sure".

> Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.

Is this one to be taken as, if a person cannot even approve something, you are better off working around them instead?

Not necessarily.

- Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.

Really like this one. I'm finding I'm hitting this wall at work quite often. While not a safe way to handle things it's probably the better way to manage my sanity with some balance.

(These are all Eleanor Roosevelt, BTW)

I avoid 'mental models' altogether because I think this notion that there is some sort of model world different from lived reality is weirdly dualistic and fortune cookie like.

I think if you're faced with a problem the answer to that is having acquired proper integrated intuition through experience, not 'advice' in form of some model. Say if you're a runner, the better you get, the less you have a model like "I put the left foot in front of the right foot and breathe three times" you just learn what to do holistically.

Or if you get better at chess, the less you rely on generic advice like 'the pawn is worth 1 point, the bishop 3", and the more you get a sense of a position that you can't express as some verbal model. The very best players can play 'without thinking'.

It sounds like what you're describing is the end goal in the "hierarchy of competence", where "unconscious competence" is the last step. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

That is the ideal goal, but I don't think the two ideas are exclusive. Take the case of learning a new skill like Chess. At the start you employed some sort of system to learn; that system is your own personal 'mental model' that you've constructed (whether consciously or not) to learn this new thing.

How long does it take you to reach unconscious mastery in chess? Once you reach that level of mastery, looking back would you say there was a different system you could have employed to reach that goal faster? What if you shared this new system with a beginner and told them "use this model to learn, not the one that seems intuitive to you now".

I think that's all a mental model is: recognising that other people who are better at the thing you're trying to do, have come up with a way to learn it faster than you're capable of intuiting as a beginner. I think it would be quite hubristic to assume you couldn't save any time by employing these ideas, or that your initial ideas are so close to the best approach that learning about another model is a waste of time.

I posit that sufficiently advanced "properly integrated intuition through experience" is indistinguishable from a mental model.

I consider mental models more to be good decisions made in bulk (though not necessarily the best decisions). Of course you'll break the model when it's convenient or when you know better, but when you're taking your day on autopilot it'll keep you moving towards your goals. Like in the runner example, the mental model of "put one foot in front of the other" may not help, but a "I run for an extra 90 seconds after I get tired" might keep you pushing to always improve. Maybe this is just a difference of definition of "mental model". I saw it being complained about elsewhere, but the thread seems to generally be defining it as "rules of thumb".

You do have a good point that folks tend to have a lot of difficulty breaking mental models they used as crutches while learning. In playing guitar, I've found folks who rely heavily on things like the box model or pentatonic scale who plateau and get "stuck" at a certain skill level because of it. So it raises the question - Is it better to use a model that provides quick wins and a notable plateau, or risk never getting traction but having an easier time at the high level? Of course that all depends on the specifics of each scenario, but my rule of thumb is to do the more fun thing and re-evaluate when my skills plateau.

This seems costly in learning / addressing new situations.

Mental models can help avoid a lot of pain or give you options to approach new situations that you might not otherwise consider without trial and error.

Sometimes watching a YouTube video makes a lot more sense than acquiring proper integrated intuition through experience. I don’t want my surgeon to perform my routine procedure using mental models. If things go wrong, I absolutely want her to apply mental models as she troubleshoots the issue.

I think it is costly but I'm just very skeptical about how much cost and trial and error you really can avoid when actually doing / building something. For example with the surgeon I would say it's really important that she is quick, pays attention and is calm and reacts to new problems. Speed itself is a huge thing because thinking doesn't help you if the world moves on while you're thinking. I think people underestimate how tactile and sensory most problems are, even 'intellectual' ones.

Another example is John Carmack recently pointing out how useless it is to talk about the 'metaverse' in abstract terms. When really you need to understand how the nuts and bolts and gears are engineered and hang together. The people who really build things often stay intentionally away from generalized wisdom.

Fermi method (1), sometimes called a Fermi estimate, is one of the most useful ways to improve the accuracy of our brains natural reasoning processes for both technical and non technical topics. It's actually a form of Bayesian estimation (2) and habituating the problem solving method helps enhance our brains in built inference systems.

We all get an intuition of how things work and "feel", and by decomposing those feelings and intuitions into smaller pieces and rationally considering the likelihoods of those pieces we can improve them. By habitually doing this we can improve the brains natural estimation processes which improves our decision making ability.

Lastly but importantly, the detail that separates the Fermi method from regular reasoning/socratic method/etc is estimation of the uncertainty of various assumptions. This can be used to figure out how to quickly get specific knowledge to drastically improve the estimation with minimal effort/time.

Fermi used that last bit at the first nuclear explosion test to realize that dropping a few pieces of paper and seeing the distance they blew would give him enough info to get an accurate order of magnitude estimate of the yield onsite (3). He got 10 kilotons of tnt vs the official 21.

1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PsEppdvgRisz5xAHG/fermi-esti... 2: https://www.roma1.infn.it/~dagos/history/FermiBayes.pdf 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem#Historical_backg...

Some heuritsics I use:

- play to your strengths, being balanced sounds nice but end up being really unproductive / un-pleasant

- be nice / kind / non-jugemental to people

- spend time on the things you like, as time and practice pile up you will end up skilled in those domain

- go for the things that are of interest to you, not for the trendy ones

- time spend automating tasks is usually time well spent

- taking a break to gather knowledge on something vaguely connected to the thing you are doing is never time lost

- when you have been procrastinating something for most of the day, declare that you will not do it today and that it is okay, it will free your mind to do other things instead of leaving you stuck

- try and do one, single and quantifiable, thing a day. With time they pile up and you end up doing a lot of things

- the mind is good at critisizing something but bad at doing something from scratch: instead of trying to produce perfection, do a rough draft and then improve on it incrementaly

> when you have been procrastinating something

I find that it helps to just clean your environment and set it up for the next day. It helps you start on the right foot.

- KISS

- YAGNI

- Test what you ship and ship what you test

- Either learn a new technology or a new domain. Don't try to learn both at once.

- Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good

- Just keep breathing, that's the key

- Everything is fine

- If a test isn't automated, it's not test

- It's better to do something poorly than not do it at all

> - It's better to do something poorly than not do it at all

While I agree, not sure if a psychological effect or not but given two students in the same classes:

   - Alice, took 3 classes and had 3 As. 
   - Bob, also had 3 As in those 3 classes _plus_ he got a C in an extra class.

A lot of people would choose Alice as the better student ("all As") even if Bob "objectively" did more.

For context, I say it to myself because of my severe adhd. It's quite frequently the case that I'm inclined to not do anything at all...in which case, I use it as a mantra to help me just get something done.

e.g., it's better to spend 10 minutes doing a workout than not at all. It can be easier to convince myself to do 10 minutes than 30 minutes. 5 minutes is also better than not at all. Still not feeling it? 2.5 minutes. Still better than not at all.

I haven't really explored the thought in the context of over achievement or not. I'd be curious why bob got a C instead of an A? was he over extended and stressed? was he simply challenged by the material?

Certainly living within one's capacity is a limiting factor of the mantra. It is after all just a saying that I use to help me live a healthy life in an area I often have difficulty. YMMV :)

Really just highlights how GPA is a poor way to judge students. In business Bob will win though.

> Either learn a new technology or a new domain. Don't try to learn both

I like that one, I'd never heard of it. Thanks! Is this attributed to someone in particular? Where did you come across it?

As far as I know, I coined it for myself. It's possible I read it somewhere that I've forgotten and am not properly attributing it.

It's something that I've had to learn the hard way, but has recently really been instilled in me. For a long time I'd jump to trying to learn a technology designed to work in a domain (e.g., learn erlang to try and write a distributed system), and I'd wind up just spinning my wheels, because I'd be trying to figure out too much all at once.

Somewhat recently however, I wanted to get into ray tracing, and decided to use Go for my first attempt (a language I'm very familiar with, but not necessarily the best for the domain...though, it did make some parts of it easier!)

If I'd jumped right into trying to use cuda, I'd never have gotten anywhere with it, because I'd just be lost in trying to figure out all of cuda's idiosyncrasies.

Instead I was able to get pretty far with go, making a bvh tree, triangle meshes, textures, area lights, convolutional filtering. Once I'd gotten pretty far with it, I wanted to get some experience with k8s, and so I modified it to be able to run an arbitrary number of worker pods and send samples to an aggregation pod.

Now that I've gotten some good experience in the domain, I've started to rewrite it in c++/cuda, where I can now make some more educated decisions, because I spent the time learning the domain first -- I know roughly what I'm building.

Long winded way of saying I arrived at the saying because it's the only thing that's been effective for me.

That's the source of many questions on Stack Overflow: "I want to implement a [insert ML task here] but I don't understand [insert Python syntax here]".

Sometimes it is inevitable though, as in the example above. If you want to start with ML it makes more sense to start by learning Python.

I don't think that's strictly true. There are books/projects that one can do in other languages to get acquainted with ML -- there's nothing that _strictly_ ties it to python, at all.

Would it open doors? sure! -- and it may make more sense to invest in learning python first. But it probably makes sense to do that learning in some domain that you already know, so you can gauge how effective/correct you're being.

I'm sure there's some adversarial combination to be found where the mantra doesn't apply, but in practice, it's done me a world of good.

The trick is that you should learn either enough ML or enough Python first, so you can identify where the problem lies.

It's similar to "take technical risk or product risk, not both" with respect to starting a company. It's incredibly stupid to take both risks.

Inversion.

When the answer to a question is hazy, just flip the question around.

Question: How do I succeed in my career?

Inversion: How do I completely fail in my career? Now I know exactly what not to do.

Question: How do I manage my team well?

Inversion: How can I manage my team terribly?

I do that when I wind up in some short-term gig at a really badly run company. I take note of whatever it is they do, and then do the opposite elsewhere.

That could make for some interesting blog posts

Nobody here seems to know what a "mental model" means. Wikipedia has it as "an explanation of someone's thought process about how something works in the real world", which I think is a good and succinct definition. Anyway, the important part here is "how something works". I am reminded of being in the 4th grade (about 10 years old) when a student made a comment about being fat meaning that a person eats too much food and it just collects in their belly - such an idea makes sense of the idea of someone being fat, but it isn't accurate. The real science behind being overweight involves a lot more. In technology, inaccurate mental models abound because these days most people use technology while few are completely familiar with how the technology works

Browsing through the top comments though, it seems most here don't know or don't care what a mental model is. Or maybe they just followed OP's lead, which is more like a personal philosophy or a personal code of ethics, rather than a mental model. Ethics is a valuable pursuit in its own right, but I was rather disappointed to come in here expecting some interesting mental models of different technologies, just to be met with a discussion of ethics.

Have a couple in random order:

Be intentional about who you spend time with, who you work with, who you serve, and who you listen to. (March 2019, Patrick McKenzie, @patio11)

Dreams don't work unless you do (April 2019, Sara Dietschy)

The failure mode of clever is 'asshole' (John Scalzi, 2010)

Just because you love the mountains doesn't mean they love you. (Lou Whittaker, Rainier mountain guide)

Show me your calendar and I will tell you your priorities. Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you where you’re going. (April 2021, https://kk.org/thetechnium/99-additional-bits-of-unsolicited...)

Feedback is nutrition. Everyone goes for the sugar and positive feedback, but you need your greens too. (Oct 2014, Morten Heuing)

Not if sure if this counts as a mental model or not.

There are basic concepts in CBT that really helps, like learning that bad mode is like a wave, you need to learn how to work through it. https://clip.cafe/batman-gotham-knight-2008/are-in-pain-s1 - sorry, just kidding.

Also trying to dig deeper into the reasons that cause your dysfunctionality, I mean the unconscious reasons.

And there are some congnitive distortions that are common, knowing them is very useful.

I don't like self-help books, but after going through a lot of them, I found two that are good: "Feeling Good", and "Rewire _ Change Your Brain to Break Bad Habits, Overcome Addictions, Conquer Self-Destructive Behavior"

Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast.

This saved me so much time dwelling on yak-shaving and premature optimization.

Eisenhower's Urgent/Important Principle. I use it every morning to figure out the right things to work on.

- Everyday, I work on the things with clear deadlines and consequences for not taking immediate action.

- Plan and schedule those things that are not urgent but important according to priority and criticality.

- Delegate the things that are urgent not not important.

- Remove the things that are not urgent nor important. It's distraction.

Knowing what we need to win an Oscar for. Used like “we don’t need to win an Oscar for that”. An area where extra effort doesn’t target the outcome you need. Put extra time into the area where you need to win the Oscar.

What gets us into the newspapers. Don’t fuck that up.

Add an interface. Where you know you need an answer, create the interface and a simple implementation. Come back later when you need it implemented better, now you know where that has to be and it’s already lined up to use the better version. Sometimes simple version is enough and you’ve saved the time.

You don’t need a phd in that. Same as Oscar. Know where to focus learning.

CAP theorem. Often people choose consistency without knowing they have. Or insist on unnecessary availability when consistency is crucial. You’re always choosing so make it conscious and make sure the view is shared.

Specialisation is for insects. Learn D3 and ML and Kafka and PowerPoint and marketing.

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." - Maya Angelou

“The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.” - John Wooden

'The end justifies the means' is the purest statement of evil. Maybe your goal is worth it or maybe it was the 'only' way, but you're still evil and the result is tainted. Make sure you can live with that.

"Kicked butt, had fun, didn't cheat, loved our customers, changed computer forever." Scott McNealy eulogy of Sun sounds like the right way to run a business.

One thing that has immensely helped me a lot in the last decade is to cross the bridge when you reach it.

May be the most obvious thing to most, but I had this thing where I would sometimes argue or worry about things way into the future, like a month or months into the future.

Maybe it was an advice or maybe I discovered it on my own but I see a lot of things don't happen anyway or just take care of themeselves or don't bother you as much as I thought at the time (also you could never predict pandemics in advance).

The other thing is people say a lot of things and I just say sure and carry on even if it's something I don't fully agree with at the time. It's only when a person repeatedly asks me about it do I start taking it seriously and give it any thought.

I think this small mental model has contributed greatly to my happiness

> cross the bridge when you reach it.

This requires faith in things turning out alright. I have such faith and I tend to take more risk as a result.

Some people have a much greater fear of the unknown.

- The concept of "recruitment". The body recruits muscles to integrate them into motions, the brain recruits networks to execute cognitive tasks, humans recruit stereotypes and concepts from shared awareness to back their words up.

- Evolution and gradient descent. Systems, including humans and society, evolve to maximize the value functions acting upon them. Whether that's income or getting along with others.

- All linguistically-based mental models are just approximations, and there's countless valid ones. Optimize yourself to use the ones that are the most flexible, and benefit you the most. When you rephrase another person's words, you're setting up the stage for offering them an alternative model in your next sentences.

- Socialization is a scaffold for the self, and closeness is the inclusion of others into our self-concept. You can't fix yourself alone, and the wrong people can easily break you.

- Awareness of something is enough to incorporate it into your information processing. This goes for both metaknowledge and for psychosocial dynamics.

I think I made this up: In order to get to where you're going, you gotta start with where you are.

Also, form versus content in general.

A bit of Bayesianism, enough to feel glad when I'm wrong as an opportunity to better update my own understand.

And inspired by Claude Shannon's "surprise is information" insight, trying to notice whenever something surprises me as something that gives me valuable information. Helps a lot with debugging problems, where oftentimes a seemingly irrelevant "well that was weird" ends up being the vital clue toward understanding the system.

My summary of the advice on this page:

#1 Just do it - You are going to die. Life is short. Regret comes from the things you didn't try so just go, do the thing, climb the wall, do the hard thing, don't be comfortable. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

#2 Seek novelty and your own curiosity - Interesting and unfashionable is where the real fun is.

Seems to be an argument between whether you want to double down on strengths or be decent in a lot of areas. I think Scott Adams advice is best here I think you want to combine two or three things you are top 10% at into one thing you are the best at.

Some interesting one liners:

- people are not internally consistent look for revealed perferences by what people actually do

- Finishing is a skill (per Derek Yu).

- I am probably overreacting or missing something. (I'd call this Hanlons Razor)

- "All things are ready, if our minds be so." - Shakespeare

- Praise in public, criticise in private

- Practice Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA Loop)

- Quantity first eventually results in higher quality.

The concept of 'sharpening the saw', which I (rightly or wrongly, but it works for me) take to mean taking time to stop and think alone about where I am with a [usually work-related] project/mission/goal, draw a line under progress to date, and think about where I'm going now and what's most effective at this stage given present circumstances. Related is the phrase "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything" (attributed to US General MacArthur). Take time to stop, recap, take stock, and plan your next moves. Refresh your thinking.

The other model/technique I've used successfully over the years (or, at least, I think it contributed to the successes, but it's difficult to say with certainty) is affirmations, as brought into common discourse probably most effectively and controversially by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame.

Also! Sorry, but I have to add this one because I find it factors in quite often (unfortunately):

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." (Bertrand Russell nailing it.)

That can be overstated. Also Russell was a eugenicist, at least for a while. That puts an unpleasant spin on that.

I prefer the somewhat related "everyone is a conservative about what they know best"

Sorry to be pedantic, but the wonderful “planning” quote is actually from Dwight Eisenhower (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dwight_D._Eisenhower#From_the_...).

Thanks, didn't know that.

Failing to prepare is preparing to fail (e.g. business meetings, important decisions, getting ready for the next day in the evening)

Pick your battles (invaluable when raising children!)

Be kind (also to yourself)

* Time is money.

* Don't lie to the person in the mirror. Accept your shortcomings as they are.

* Having few good work partners is better than a dozen work friends.

* Trust is non-negotiable & irreparable.

* Always have a plan B if you want to complete something.

* Always remember Plan B shouldn't become your Plan A by default - stay ambitious.

* No question is a bad question - (sometimes questioning the status quo makes a big dent)

Also, something I always cherish from my advisor (translated from his native Japanese):

"You relish your sucess when your mind is paired with immense hardwork, dogged determination, indomitable grit and the acceptance of possible failure at each step of the way. Achievements are divine but it makes us better humans to understand the journey, not the destination"

Acknowledge your shortcomings and then refuse to accept them.

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference".

Most people are wrong about most things.

Most people are average at their jobs. If they were really good at them, they’d have better jobs.

Not quite a subscriber to the Peter Principle then...

These two things are subtly different. If most people are incompetent in their roles, then both statements can hold.

As a trained economist, I feel every decision made should have expected value and include opportunity cost at least at a mental or back of napkin calculation. Everything compounds so make the highest EV decisions today. What this really drives home is how much effort to put into your full-time job where progression (and the rewards) are heavily influenced by thing you cannot control like office politics or the broader economy. Even if I don't get a promotion, a job switch should yield 20% every couple of years. I'll do the the bare minimum advised by my boss to get him to recommend a promotion, everything else is spent on my side projects which have potential to replace my job and multiple promotions. Live life too so block out time for leisure or recreation. Don't use this to analyse if you should watch a movie with your friends on the weeked or do work. Generally:

EV = Probability of Outcome x Value of Outcome

Cost = $ or time/labour/effort

EV of next best opportunity (choice) forgone

"If one human can do it, so can another". For when a task or acquiring new knowledge/skills seems like a monumental feat.

"Success is the best form of revenge". Having never felt like I really fit in anywhere (except maybe at art school) throughout life, having people say I'd amount to nothing, people laughing at my shared thoughts/perspectives, being told what I'm doing is the wrong way, that my take on something is stupid even if I spent time researching and/or combined held knowledge/experience, finding out others think I'm weird for my takes and/or for being quiet... this comes across as angsty but it's been my reality for the last 32 years, and it's never fun or a good feeling to face. But boy does it feel good to have surpassed those low held bars and the high ones I've set for myself. Additionally, it feels good to say "I told you so" without ever saying it. Never seek revenge, just better yourself. It's more worthwhile.

"Never chase". Whether it's money, someone you're interested in, and especially assets, among other things. If you're chasing, it's either too late or wasn't meant to be.

"Do things from the heart and with a clear mind, never for luxury or money". If it feels right, is something you have interest or passion in, and reasoning says it's good to pursue, do it. Benefits will follow, whether that's money or otherwise.

"Anything is possible, but nothing is perfect". Paradoxical, but a reminder to self that you can achieve more than you limit yourself to, but also a reminder that perfection is impossible.

"Be kind, but not a pushover". "Be too nice and people will take you for a dummy". Manners, kindness, being polite, etc are important imo, but people will take advantage of that until you put your foot down.

the second para is killer. kudos to you man.

This thread is exactly a great example of why I love HN. I am really enjoying reading all this replies. These are the kind of points I miss reading on HN. Some of these, I would say, I learnt and applied on HN throughout years. But this thread reads like a reminder of the experiences that HN community shares. I like it.

Here's three:

1) "All things are ready, if our minds be so." - Shakespeare

2. Holon para ta moria (ὁλον παρα τα μορια). From Aristotle's Metaphysics. The whole is something beyond the parts. Commonly mistranslated as "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts" -- which misses the point completely. Mathematical understanding and metaphor is only one type of thinking, one way to understand a complete system. Valuable, for sure, but incomplete. The whole system -- e.g. a human, a team, an entrepreneurial opportunity with all its moving parts -- in its full expression and action, is beyond mathematics. Only your whole human mind can hope to comprehend it.

3) Companies tend to die -- but people tend to survive. People matter infinitely more. The most valuable thing of all is human relationships.

Climb the wall.

Written white on black on my desktop background. It's kind of funny, how sometimes random stuff you see on the web sticks to your head. I think it was one of those procrastination links on Hacker News which somehow brought me to this weird video [1] about how to "Climb the wall of awful". I was a hobby climber before and it somehow made sense to me at that time.

Another thing I like to say to myself is "Just do it" at moments when I read Hacker News, Reddit, Twitter and come back to Hacker News for another round. [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo08uS904Rg

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXsQAXx_ao0

I really like those 2, thank you for sharing.

Sometimes I feel like the biggest struggle is with remembering to get out of that zombie state. A wallpaper sounds good or maybe `notify-send "Climb that wall. Just do it."` called randomly a few times a day. As long as it does not get ignored all the time.

I always use Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is the likeliest. It's one of the foundations of how I think. I often see people spinning off with increasingly improbable theories as to why something happened, and I try to explain this principle, but it's surprisingly difficult to teach. It's a sort of circuit breaker that helps you think straight.

I also use "assume good intent." This is similar to Hanlon’s Razor referenced elsewhere in this thread, it's a bit simpler though. Most people are trying their best. The modern world is extremely complicated. The result of "assume good intent" is that you have a bit more patience and empathy when working with others.

A couple of things I try to remember, when I work on things: (I didn't coin either of these)

"'done' is better than perfect"

It's easy to get caught in a trap of trying to "perfect" something. If it's good enough to call done, you can always improve it later if necessary. You do need to have some clear definitions for what "done" means for you though.

"make it work, make it pretty, make it fast"

This is adjacent to the first saying. I sometimes find myself trying to optimise something prematurely. This is a good reminder to wait until the [unit of work] is "complete" before I try to optimise it.

I heard a variation of this in a podcast comparing the difference between various language learning apps:

Easy things feel fast, hard things feel slow, but in the long run you'll get more from doing the hard thing.

In the context of language learning, they were comparing apps like Duolingo to WaniKani (for learning kanji). In summary, your brain can sucker you into thinking it's learning something, when in reality you're not being challenged at all. Doing 100 multiple choice in a day can FEEL like you're learning a lot in a short amount of time, but picking an answer when it's in front of you doesn't test your recall. Being forced to recall 10 kanji from memory over 10 days will help you learn them more reliably.

I think this lesson extends to almost any domain. You can fall into a trap thinking "I understand how to do X in theory, but actually doing it will take so much longer. It would be a waste of time for me to do something I already understand how to do." But in almost every case where you've thought that, once you dig in and actually do the thing, you will hit roadblocks that you have to work around, you'll feel discouraged and confused about why it wasn't straight forward, you'll commit things to memory because you're forced to, and when it's all said and done you will have a much deeper understanding than if you had optimized that task out.

> Easy things feel fast, hard things feel slow, but in the long run you'll get more from doing the hard thing.

Yes! These are called desirable difficulties in the book 'Range'.

You greatest strength will be the cause of your greatest weakness. Variations of this can be used if one quibbles on the use of 'cause', sometimes I just put it directly as your greatest strength is your greatest weakness assuming people will make the logical connections.

The most easy to see example of this is in physical traits such as muscle mass, speed etc. Strengthening one trait invariably is the cause of weakening another. The same principle can be observed in organization, mental processes and so forth.

One idea I employ often is to "increase the temperature" of the system, non-essential complexity, bureaucracy, excessive variation of materials, etc becomes more apparent through a lens of being more demanding than necessary so that the physical limits of the problem dominates the solution.

Another idea I use is to mentally time travel and try to visualize how context-sensitive my decision/design/process is. Decisions that require a "superior" (or even accurate for that matter) understanding of the context I'd frown upon. Even if they are not mistaken and biased, to me, they promote a dynamic of continued survival through non-obvious and increasingly complex actions, rather than forcing a simple and obvious environment.

Another is engineering with a bias for optimizing recovery first then reliability (sort of a minimax).

So for example combined I would rather have a way to recover from broken code and produce a teaching moment than I'd try to prevent a developer from merging said code in the first place.

I'd try to exercise a process to recover all data from backups in a timeline that the company would survive first rather than dedicate resources first for redundancy and leave said scenario for later due to its low probability.

Take all of this in a "while there is value on the other thing, I value this more" wrap.

I like models that would force the space to be simpler and more obvious.

Don’t let perfect become the enemy of good.

As a perfectionist, this line of thinking has been life changing for me... but I still regularly forget to follow it. Another variant I like is:

"Good enough, is good enough".

Love this one

Some I try to live by:

- Praise in public, criticise in private

- You could leave life right now

- Fix yourself first

- Be honest

“Do no harm, but take no shit.”

If I could distill my approach to life into one sentence it is this.

When evaluating whether to buy something: is it worth the amount of hours of work that took me to be able to afford it? I know roughly how much money I make per hour (money into my bank account every year / how many days I work every year / how many hours per day I work). So, say that something costs 100£ and it takes me 3 hours to make that money; would I work 3 hours to buy it?

Also when buying something: sometimes I feel like under a spell, really wanting to make a purchase. Then I just sleep on it. Usually the day after the spell is gone, and I can better understand if I really want to buy that something or not.

When doing something new: I'm the kind of person that - when learning to draw - spends more time looking at the perfect paper and pencils than actually drawing. I'm sure some of you can relate. I enjoy this process, but the truth is that to learn to draw you don't need anything else than any piece of paper and any working pen/pencil. So, learn to recognise when you go too far off track and go back to actually learning how to draw. There will be a time to hunt for the perfect paper. If you don't want to go back drawing, maybe you didn't want it that much to begin with.

When spending money: spending money on things (objects) is almost always less worth than it feels. Unless it's a tool that you use (e.g. a DIY tool, or a kitchen knife, etc). Spending money on experiences (traveling, concerts, etc) and learning (books, courses, etc) is almost always more worth than it feels. Especially, as an introvert, there is something inside of me that tends to dodge "experiences".

To be happy: I learned this recently from the Dalai Lama. You should learn the difference between happiness and pleasure/desire, and prioritise the former. E.g. when looking for a job how ethical a company is and how good you'd fit is more important than the salary, job title, and prestige of a company.

Most stuff I desire nowadays, are pretty cheap. I work as a consultant and self-employed. I don't know if I am making too much or I am happy with small things (e.g. a Mechanical Keyboard, some new 3D printing resin) which has a cost less than an hour for me.

This presented with me a different problem. I have to instead look at life quality improvement it provides purely. Most products in market, are never absolutely perfect. One brand will offer you X but not Y, while other will do opposite. Then you end up not buying anything, but be burdened by thinking about it for some time. Then eventually, you just buy it to save yourself from mental tax.

I also found it more rewarding to spend money on experiences; a new sport, a new hobby etc.

Your memories are inaccurate and you can't predict the future so the only thing you can be sure of is the present.

> since I can only ever build on strength. I fix my weaknesses where I can, but I don't pay my weaknesses too much attention.

I think Warren Buffett calls this "Circle of competence" He tries to stay in that circle and avoids things outside the circle but also working on making the competent circle bigger.

Awesome thread!

1: Don't seek the easy path; grow your strength/knowledge/etc. to seek the harder one. (credit: Bruce Lee)

2: Don't be lazy; prepare.

3: Before I say this, do I intend to improve the situation? If not, don't say it.

4: Conflict is opportunity and a moment for deep connection.

5: Acquire the perspective to appreciate even the things I don't like.

Happiness for me is building the future: learning new material, meeting other interested people, and working on my goals.

On the other hand, I must live in the present. Thinking about the future makes me stressed, and thinking about the past makes me angry.

So I experience the present while working on the future I desire.

- Time well spent. I have a habit of debriefing at the end of every day. I ask myself if this day was sustainable. If I'd be satisfied with 100 more days like this one, it was a good day.

- Giving to your future self. When I'm too tired to start something, I'll prepare my workspace and "ingredients" for the next day, a bit like a cook's mise en place.

- A position of "fuck you". Free time and disposable income give you independence of thought and action. Peace of mind is the best thing money can buy.

- Money as time. Measuring spending in "time at the office" makes you question what's really worth your money.

- Evolution through mutation. Progress comes from experimentation. Try new things. Better risk an occasional bad meal than eat chicken nuggets for the rest of your life.

Avoid tail risks.

In other words, try to avoid circumstances that can kill you or severely harm you, even if the risk is small.

Means no riding bicycles, taking medicines with horrific side effects (unless I'm actively dying), surgeries (unless absolutely needed), skydiving, helicopters, and walking next to traffic.

I don't think this is particularly sustainable because the whole thing that makes them tail risks in their uncommonness.

I can think of enough unlikely ways to be tortured an incredible amount that it's computationally infeasible that I can figure out how to avoid 1/3 of them.

It's the same reason you wear a seatbelt, even though most people don't get into more than 3 or 4 accidents over their entire lifetime.

The point either isn't avoiding all tail risks, since you can't foresee them all by definition, but by reducing exposure such that you won't be ruined if/when they do happen.

Yes, but tail risks definitionally include the WHOLE TAIL, which is infinitely long (including stuff like Quantum gibberish turning you into salmon while you read this).

It's why we plan for risks, not tail risks, but the category Tail Risks is simply the category Risks with the most common ones subtracted out!

I lean on my default mode network to find solutions and scrutinise my ideas.

This means that I avoid committing to important decisions until I've at least had a chance to sleep on them. The next day I normally have a lot more clarity and confidence in the decision when it's right, or what is wrong when it isn't.

I also don't stress if I can't find the answer to a problem. I try to keep the problem at the front of my mind but don't pressure myself to activally solve it. Very often, this results in what feels like an epiphiny, a shower thought, or the answer will come to me in a dream. Activally working to find those solutions would be difficult and success would be hit and miss, it's low stress and gives me space to work on something else in the meantime.

A few more (edit window is gone)

  1. Good things cost money; if you use something daily/frequently then get the best tool money could buy. Corollary: Don't cheap out on tools when you hire a good craftsperson.
  2. Optimise for time, not money. One is finite, other is not.
  3. Money is means to lead a good life; don't continue to accumulate money just for the sake of it.
  4. Resilience is a skill that can be developed. Seek risk, fail often to develop resilience.
  5. Doing >> Talking a.k.a. "Talk is cheap show me the code."
  6. Creation, by definition, requires breaking (or disregard) the rules.
  7. Entropy always increases. You need to spend energy to just keep things in order.

> Money is means to lead a good life; don't continue to accumulate money just for the sake of it.

Don't beat the final boss without touching your health potions.

How do you define mental models in the first place? It seems the examples given by you and other commenters mostly fall into the category of sayings, as you rightly pointed out, which are (sometimes) useful but overly general and unfalsifiable claims.

A lot of my mental models are defined as hard coded rules: https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/focusing/rules

This wiki is a treasure trove. Thank you for publishing it!

When debugging: Somebody is always lying.

I found that most of the time, a bug is the result of a misunderstanding. Once I've ruled out the most obvious things that could go wrong, I assume that every line of code is a lie.

Doing x + y => print x, print y and print x + y (oh oh here is an overflow) Sending a parameter to a function => print arguments before the call and within the call (oh oh somebody is messing with memory and I'm reading garbage)

This helps catching silent failures which causes problems down the line.

The Epistemic - Metaphysical distinction: being clear about the difference between something being true, and a particular person of group of people knowing that that thing is true.

I think that "mental models" is not what you imply and others in this thread talk about. A more appropriate term would be [life | work | other] "principles".

Strong agreement here.

A mental model is a model you hold in your mind of how something works, and informs you of its usage, how it can fail, and how to fix it when it does. Mental models are about specific systems and are built over time as you interact with the system; it may not be a perfect representation of the internals but as a model it's good enough to use the thing.

A simple example might be turning the wheel of a car in order to turn the vehicle. How far can you turn it? How fast do you need to turn it to make a given turn? How fast can you be going / how much do you have to slow down to make the turn safely? How about keeping going straight on the road, is holding the wheel still sufficient? When making a turn, do the wheels in the back of the vehicle follow the same tracks as the front wheels?

I'm happy that we agree on this. Having said that, I would note that your example, while certainly valid, is IMHO of a too small scale (literally and figuratively - the latter with regard to complexity) to comprehensively illustrate the "mental models" concept. When I think about mental models, I'm thinking more about analysis frameworks typically applied to much larger and usually much more complex systems than technical ones, mostly sociotechnical and socioeconomic systems (e.g., open source ecosystem, startup ecosystem, innovation, science, corporations, stock market, finance, economy, policies, politics, society, history).

Yeah, it was the only thing that came to mind that I could be reasonably sure everyone would have experience with, and that I could just dump examples of the learned/built-by-use aspect.

(handshake)

I maintain a large collection of pithy quotes on such matters: https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

Less in the self-help context, more in the process context, one I often appreciate for its simplicity is this:

There are two models of reality that I find to be the most useful ones, especially when writing programs. The first is functions, and the second is sequences of states. - Leslie Lamport

This is my best.

If you have a habit of seeing yourself as capable of more than you typically (or ever) do, you’re likely to continue at that lower level of performance because you can take comfort in your elevated self image. By believing that your best isn’t a hypothetical, but just an observation of what you’re doing, you have to accept the lower performance or actually try harder and achieve what you believe you can.

This mindset helps me both push myself in all areas, and be more humble as well.

coming in late but thank you. it's missing a one liner so I thought of one:

"Taking comfort in your potential prevents you from living up to it. It's either an illusion or you're not trying hard enough"

If we are talking about success, I think it is important to consider for whom you want to look successful.

If you are in the wrong environment success might be meassured by your salary, your job title, the car you are driving or other silly things like that.

For me success is only meassured by my own standards, namely: am I working on things that I like working on? Am I able to do them the way I want? Am I making the world a better place by doing so? Am I getting better at what I am doing?

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.

„Reduce complexity“ / „minimize balls you juggle at once“

That‘s very broad, but some examples: Keep the number of distributed PRs low. e.g. merge a PR that adds an aws policy via terraform early, so you can absolutely stop thinking about it. Finish easy, fast tasks first so you reduce the amount of things you need to think about. Actively decide against working on a semi-urgent task now/today, focus on it tomorrow morning or if your current task is fully done.

Sayings I remind myself recently: - Do not be overheard complaining, even to yourself. - Look at what people actually do, not what they say.

What is the default choice and why does the company, studio, or product have this default?

This is especially relevant because most places will go to extraordinary lengths to confirm their priors for the default choice, but 90% of the time they probably are choosing correctly even without good analysis! So to reverse it, changes to the default need to be low risk or have amazing upside.

Commented this elsewhere on HN not that long ago, but...

One issue is what to say and not say, to solve this the three gates[0] are what I try (and admittedly fail miserably) to implement, though not in their original form.

I generally try for "Is it true", "Is it useful", "Is it kind" - in that order of precedence if they can not all be met.

[0] Is it true, is it necessary, is it kind.

For the play to your strengths thing, that only works when you're in a market where you get to play to your strengths. Playing to your strengths vs not fixing your weakness is the classic exploitation-exploration trade-off, you might want to lookup the issues with constant exploitation. Having said that, its actually a pretty good idea to follow.

1. imitate to understand the rules

2. create following the rules

3. break the rules

In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioner - Camus

This is more on thinking about current social / ethical topics. I know it might not be helpful for many, but I find I try to stop and think about it whenever I'm shaping my opinions.

Not a mental model or saying, but still I remind myself several times a day.

Breathe, ~5 seconds in, ~5 seconds out. James Nestor style.

If choosing between A and B, is it possible to later move from A to B or vice versa, and if it is, which one is harder? If it's trivial to go from A to B but not the other way around, I'd have to have very compelling reasons to choose B. I use this just aboute very week in software development.

The most important for me are

1. Do I really need to do this or alternatively you can ask will this activity create value (for you, your family, your company, your customers).

2. Who is likely to be benefit from an action (this helps to filter the news).

3. Is this event worth getting upset over (helps with people who have kids who will mess up a lot).

Only paying attention to those who survive or succeed can mislead you.

Mental model exercises I wrote a few months ago:

https://newsletter.decisionschool.org/p/decision-making-bias...

Not every day but I often use the following.

  1. Regret minimisation framework.
  3. Interesting and novel things happen at the edges; stay close to it and don't spend much time in the comfort zone.
  2. Don't optimise for happiness; look for novelty, and contentment.

"You never know what is going to happen."

For better or worse, tomorrow could be a good or bad surprise. If life sucks today, something great might happen out of the blue tomorrow so don't give up! If times are good, live for the moment because something might go to shit tomorrow.

The best tools for understanding are zooming in, zooming out, speeding time up, and slowing it down.

Similar to the heuristic mentioned by op.

For those who grew up in the “you can do anything you put your mind to” era.

As self evident as this sounds, Accept your strengths and weaknesses.

If something takes little to no effort, that’s a real good sign that it’s a strength if it takes a lot of effort, it’s probably not :)

I use the DISC personality model a lot. Sure, it’s a simplification but a very useful one. It’s about four personality types: Dominant Influentual Steady Compliant It helps a lot in understanding the behavior of people who have a different personality than yourself

If you use Kiss keep it simple stupid. Simple system simple to fix, complex system complex to fix.

Kiss priniciple https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

“The efficiency paradox”[0], saw a TEDx talk as part of agile training, and this really hammered in the fact that it’s more important to get stuff done than to be busy, or “efficient” with your time. If you focus on finishing a few things you’ll get more done than if you make sure you’re busy with something all the time.

This really has changed how I approach a lot of things in my everyday life, both inside and outside of work. Simple things like doing a load of washing here and there, and getting it done rather than trying to do a massive amount on the weekend, or washing some dishes as they come up rather than being efficient and washing all of them at the same time. In a work context, I guess it is more about not committing to too much work in a sprint, and ensuring there’s a bit of slack time so that multiple people can work on any items that get stuck, take more time than expected or similar. Developers helping out with testing where needed, ensuring quick code reviews, some extra pair programming and so on.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGJpez7rvc0

"What's an example" - IMO the #1 most useful and underrated thinking tool

and a small one at that - less to think about trying to show idea

"So long I have not found a bug in a piece of code, I have not tested enough." As a developer, it always worked for me. Also works when reviewing letters or exams: "so long I have not found a typo/error ..."

The last bit from The Martian (movie) about how you just need to start solving problems: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mDYCLFE86Po

- Never let a good crisis go to waste (There are opportunities in every calamity)

- Practice Observe, Orient, Decide, Act (OODA Loop)

- Understand the business, the shareholders, the senior stakeholders, and the technology - in that order.

Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.

The best revenge is a life well lived.

Good enough is always good enough.

Fortune favors the bold.

The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

20% of the work can lead to 80% of results

law of diminishing returns (the logarithmic curve)

you don't know as much as you think (dunning-kruger effect)

In an emergency, first, wind your watch. - Ernest K. Gann

"I'm in a loop" -> To help escape indecision and pick something to try out

"View it from the balcony" -> To force myself to step back and think of the big picture

Bayes Theorem

"When applied, the probabilities involved in the theorem may have different probability interpretations. With Bayesian probability interpretation, the theorem expresses how a degree of belief, expressed as a probability, should rationally change to account for the availability of related evidence."

Well, that's a mouthful.

The most important part of Bayes rule is the concept of Prior knowledge and Bayesian updating - new data should always be combined with your existing knowledge (starting with the "base rate"), based on levels of uncertainty.

Closely related is the concept of conditional probability - how does the probability of something change as you include other information.

It takes some studying to understand probability theory well, but it is very powerful once you start to think that way. Most of the garbage science reporting in the media would be fixed if reporters actually thought this way and honestly applied it.

You can't direct the wind, but you can adjust your sails.

If you chase two rabbits, you will lose them both.

Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.

All of the above in Lenord Nimoy's voice.

Adjoints, norms and fixed points.

https://github.com/adamnemecek/adjoint

"Doing is better than thinking of doing"

Don't remember where I saw it. This helps me to get started on some of the items from the never ending todo list.

"sometimes, it takes eight miles" - reminder that sometimes the grind is real, and the best or fastest way to get certain things done

Luck is a large factor in most successes. Luck can be harnessed by frequent sampling. Try many things, revisit rejected ideas and try again.

Budget: how many are working on the project? Features: what should the project do? Timeliness: when do you want the project done?

You get to choose only two.

* At the root of jealousy is a goal that can inspire me

* Feeling guilt indicates something I can be grateful for

* Fear can also be a challenge to learn something new

I'm intrigued by the second point - could you share some more of your thoughts or examples with that?

If I am tired and snap at my daughter then I feel guilty to hurt her feelings but that's because I love her and I'm grateful she is in my life it reminds me to focus on and share the love and gratitude. Guilt is the indication there is something I value that I am not appreciating or respecting enough. The idea being instead of the feeling dragging me down it moves me forward.

> Guilt is the indication there is something I value that I am not appreciating or respecting enough.

This drove it home for me; thanks for your reply!

Don’t assume malevolence when working with someone else but rather that they’re acting in their own self interest

The 10/80/10 rule. 10% of the things are harmful 80% of the things are agnostic 10% of the things are helpful.

asking "what's happening right now?", especially in social situations like meetings. it reminds me to look beyond what is being said, as opposed to why things are being said. It's also a good way to gain perspective on any rapidly changing situation where you could get caught up in the moment

many, depending

one of the most common tools/models I use is the Bayesian inference graph. I maintain an informal Bayesian inference graph for tons of things in my everyday experience. update it as I go along. leverage it when it applies. I suspect nearly everybody else does too, even when they do not realize it explicitly.

This is interesting. Can you please give an example of how this is done?

Honour the eternal newbie by Rewinding your perceptions through rewinding and choosing what scares you the most.

Quantity first eventually results in higher quality.

Selection effects rule everything around me.

Look for useful but anti-correlated pairings.

please elaborate

I just follow habit stacking from the book Atomic Habits. It has been very effective so far.

Never ask for permission to do the right thing

Credit: Juval Lowy (not sure if he was quoting someone else)

Ignore strategies and tactics for the future. Employ techniques in the present...

I'm using the search-interferance model and the recognition primed model.

Hylomorphism. One of the most useful mental tools I've ever acquired.

There are exceptions to every rule, and there are rules to every exception.