To give other maturation advice to those not yet in their 40s:
It's quite likely that you have significant issues you haven't addressed yet. Getting into good medical care, therapy, exercise, and supportive e.g. nutrition, etc is likely more important than virtually anything else you'll do in your life, with a reasonable exception for choosing the right person to spend your life with and having a family. But having a good social life is a hell of a lot easier if you're in great physical and mental shape. I took all of those things very seriously, and I probably did not put enough value into any of those things, even given that orientation.
That leads right into: The only thing you can truly exert control over is yourself, and it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices, either indirectly through the environment you live in or directly through the actions you take. Humility is drastically underrated, and being healthy plays into this enormously as well.
That being said, I'd love to hear a perspective from some of the older HN folks - what am I missing as a mid-40s person that I should absolutely be paying attention to?
> Getting into good medical care, therapy, exercise,
These are very different classes of things. Good medical care, of course, if there is a problem, get it fixed by somebody who knows what they are doing. Good exercise, of course, get your physique in shape, for well being, for health and for confidence. But therapy? If there is a problem and therapy is treatment, of course. But where does this desire in the western world come from to just by default having to go to some kind of psychotherapy? I refuse to believe that a happy life requires therapy. If it ain't broken etc.
> it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices
That's a position that must be deeply rooted in privilege. There are countless folks out there who don't have it easy because of conditions they didn't create, and saying it's because of their own choices is extremely ignorant, maybe even arrogant. Many could, theoretically, so sth about it, at least improve their situation marginally, but it would require extreme steps which they are just not able to take. It too simplistic to dump it all on the "well it was their choice". No need to blindly victimize folks, but the other extreme is just not helpful either.
I believe everyone can benefit from therapy, just like everyone can benefit from physical therapy. The "if it ain't broke" mentality has value, but it has a fatal flaw: most people are unbelievably bad at gauging their own deficiencies. Most destructive patterns of behavior are fueled by an inability to recognize them. Meaning, the people who most need therapy are often the ones to also believe they do not need it. Because, having such a belief is what allows them to engage in self-destruction in the first place. People who are self-aware and introspective are already in therapy, or at least recognize it can benefit them.
That's not to say therapy is universally good. There are bad therapists. But ultimately the point of therapy is to encourage introspection, and defeat ignorance of the self. Ignorance of the self is a vital tool to people because it allows them to believe just about anything. Problems no longer exist, in your mind, if you cannot identify them.
But the proof is in the pudding. You have to analyze your behaviors, your relationships. If things are constantly going south, that's a sign even if you can't identify why. That's when therapy has value, it can help you identify why.
You have a point above in which I acknowledge that some people might be in dire eed of therapy but don't think so, so will never seek it. Though you won't reach those by recommending it to everybody. In contrast, I consider it problematic that the self-improvement movement instills feelings of being insufficient unless everything is tried to improve (like therapy). I would claim that there are enough people perfectly happy and introspective, all without therapy, and creating a culture where it's seen as a flaw to not have regular therapy is hurtful.
> People who are self-aware and introspective are already in therapy, or at least recognize it can benefit them.
I don't agree. I know tons of folks who are introspective and very balanced and ever have been to therapy nor do they have the need.
> just like everyone can benefit from physical therapy.
I wouldn't agree here either. Everybody arguably benefits from physical exercise. That's different from physical therapy. The former is sth preventative, you can do yourself, no personal trainer needed, just go for a run or play some squash or push some weights. Physical therapy you need when you had an injury or need to correct an issue limiting your health. That's corrective, not preventative.
Similar with mental exercise (some introspection or meditation or philosophising you can do alone or with friends or strangers on the internet, or with a therapist/professional, why not) versus mental therapy (an issue needs to be addressed and that should be done with a professional).
A key question is maybe whether the risk of an undiagnosed issue left untreated is too high to take. That's where the self-improvement movement is going to far, I think. We all have our wrinkles, and that's ok. Not every personality quirk needs correction, just like not all odd movement pattern needs a fix nor ever wrinkle in the face needs plastic surgery. The latter has been driven much too far in western culture (particularly american), and I'm basically arguing that the same seems to be happening with mental therapy too.
> But therapy? If there is a problem and therapy is treatment, of course. But where does this desire in the western world come from to just by default having to go to some kind of psychotherapy?
I suspect you're exactly the kind of person I'm talking to when I say therapy is a valuable thing for everyone. You will experience stressors, grief, loss, and strife in your life, being psychologically healthy and having your coping skills in order is absolutely something you want to do in advance, and is something everyday people can and should do before they actively have any specific disorder or problem.
It's one thing to say therapy is helpful. It's another thing to say it's just what you need to get over yourself in life. I have friends that cannot just "be psychologically healthy". They had sexual abuse and emotional abuse for decades of their early life. Every would-be friend betrayed them. They have too many illnesses and disorders to count. They're disabled, unimaginably neurodivergent, and impossibly complex. Therapy is not the solution to this. This is not as simple as "being psychologically healthy". Life for people in these sorts of situations is a life of such difficult tradeoffs that there simply is no right answer. Everything they do just digs them deeper into some hole, even if it was supposed to get them help. I did encourage one to try therapy, but the therapist spilled everything from their sessions to abusers. Their living situation became measurably worse and has not improved since. It is not their fault. They've been emotionally beaten to a pulp, and it's not their choices that brought them here. They arrived here by process of elimination, where everything else they've ever tried was met with extreme punishment. External assistance is often the only possible out for them. Not external assistance from a professional or therapist. External assistance from someone who knows them and their situation better than anyone else ever could, who's seen too much of their life day-in and day-out for years. You can't select for that. You can't even hope for that. You certainly can't choose that.
To think one's own choices can impact matters like this is such a disgusting level of privilege I can't even imagine. There are too many people that can't simply choose to escape their situation, and it's not their own fault. It's not something you can fix by sprinkling on a little therapy or some self-help books. It's something they'll be fighting for the rest of their entire life, whether they escape or not. You can't just choose to be free of that. No one can.
In your 20s and 30s, it's relatively easy to brute-force physical and mental health problems.
I didn't understand what the word "stress" even meant exactly until I got into my late 30s. Then I realized that I had been under extreme stress for most of my life but had not noticed it because I could just keep going despite constant exhaustion and borderline depression. Then, that suddenly stopped working.
What cultural values does this wisdom and advice implicitly engender? That question bothers me a lot.
For some reason it strikes me that we don't think of a potato plant as needing life lessons. I doubt anyone here has moral compunctions about leaf structure or starch formation. People seem much the same way to me. Another part of me does instinctively model the inner world of people as small deviations from my own. Other parts of me think that is quaint.
It appears to me that the sense of clairty imparted by wisdom often looks like mere rigidity when seen from the outside. I have little doubt that your particular wisdom has been hard-earned, and at the same time, I think it is hopelessly myopic. The thing that gets me is that this also almost surely applies to my own wisdom, which is why I distrust them implicitly.
I think the world is so vast and our exposure so limited such that any Life Wisdom is hopelessly doomed to be a horrible overfit on the particulars of an individual.
Keep growing your idiosyncratic leaves though. I also genuinely think they're beautiful.
A wise person is naturally less anxious. Lots of people are anxious and dislike it so cultivating their inner life could help them with that. Most people prefer to not go that route, it is optional. Nobody is demanding you to grow wise or even that you would be capable of.
But as we grow old, not achieving some things we thought would be easier when we were young can cause frustration. Wisdom helps dealing with that.
I am mid 40s. Started working at a hyper scaler a couple years ago. I think you are overthinking it. All there is, is to be present and focus on what is important. And no one else can tell you what is important, you already know. Spend your time wisely with your family or on things that matter to you and not on trivial pursuit. There are no secrets in this. It is largely what you define.
When you ask this question of others, you are asking what am I forgetting? What will I regret? They can’t tell you. They can tell you what they regretted it and maybe you will regret those same things they did. But you have to decide. In 10 years. In 20 years. All you have to do is ask your future self what you’re gonna regret that you didn’t do. I had found that we already know the answers to those things.
E: think of it this way. And you don’t have to have a dog for these questions to work they’re metaphorical really, but also physical if you do have a dog. Did you walk your dog? Did you play ball with it? If they die tomorrow, will you look back and say that today was good? Did you do everything you could do with your dog? If not go do those things right now don’t leave them undone. That’s all there is. And the same thing works with everything in life. You know what you should’ve done in the day. If you do those things in 10 or 20 years, you won’t look back and say I wish I would’ve done those things cause you’ve done them.
> When you ask this question of others, you are asking what am I forgetting? What will I regret? They can’t tell you.
In one sense yes, but in another sense... humans are just so much alike. You can a learn a ton from your elders' common mistakes. Especially the ones where there's broad agreement. You're probably not an exception.
To use your dog metaphor (which I like), would you tell a dog looking for advice (if you could magically communicate with it) to just present and focus on the moment and he'll know what to do. Nah, we know a dog needs lots of walks, to be around other dogs, to eat the right foods, and so on.
The two approaches aren't mutually exclusive, but the practical one is... practical.
We do have metacognition and should use. It isn’t like we should go off the rails and become fully hedonic to “live in the moment” for example, we need some guiding principles . And when you are younger it can be really hard to know what is right. How to deal with purpose, and friends, and significant others, and all of the pain of the human condition. How do you figure it all out?
You don’t have to. Not all at once, anyway. You have enough information to make the right choices every day and learn more. We will always make mistakes, but if we acted with our best knowledge and fulfilled what we thought were the best choices in a given say you won’t have to regret the mistakes. That was kind of my whole point :)
And yes, always improve, and learn philosophy, and take care of your body and people around you. But at some point it all becomes obvious I think. At 46 it is all obvious for me now.
> If they die tomorrow, will you look back and say that today was good? Did you do everything you could do with your dog? If not go do those things right now don’t leave them undone
Sorry, life doesn't work that way. You are essentially saying, screw long-term planning, do right here right now what's best at this moment. If everybody did that, they'd be broke latest a year from now. Thereare things that I do, quite regularly, that I wouldn't do if this was the last day of my life. But I have to assume it is not, otherwise my life would collapse and I would pretty quickly be very restricted in what I could do in my life.
I think that you will fully misinterpreted what I wrote. Sorry maybe that is not fair. Assuming good intent. Let me expand what I was thinking: You should still do long-term planning and use that to decide how you will stay present. Nothing I wrote precludes you from doing long-term planning and incorporating that in your day-to-day living and staying present. I am not suggesting that you turn into a hedonistic animal that cannot think beyond two days into the future. I am saying that once you know what you should be doing you should be doing those things without question as they are the things you decided we’re right. That can be long-term and short-term.
> I am saying that once you know what you should be doing you should be doing those things without question as they are the things you decided we’re right.
Thanks for the clarification.
Though I still don't agree. Of course you should question sometimes. Regular reflection is important to realize whether your plans are still the right course of action. Otherwise you'll never course correct.
I don't think we disagree. I'm just outlining a narrow aspect of how I like to operate. I meditate and spend a lot of time thinking about philosophy and neuroscience and cognition. It is a very introspective and contemplative practice. I don't ever assume that I have it all figured out, but I do always make sure that I have a plan for the day and that I just stay focused on that. And there are a lot of easier to sort things. Time with family, time with dogs, work, so on and so forth. It is not like I assume that I have figured it all out. I also get feedback from others that I trust as they understand how I work, etc. I have been meditating for over a decade, so I'm pretty good at shutting down the self-narrative and just being. It makes a lot of things more clear when all of the noise is turned off. What I do want is at the end of the day, after all of the alignment and processing, that I know what I wanted to accomplish in the day, and that I did those things, and that those were the right things to do that day. Maybe I course correct the next day, or even during the day, but I set out with a clear intention of what I want to have accomplished in the day. And that is rooted by breaking down a multi-year plan into month, week, and day blocks even. It isn't rigid. If I need to change it, I will. But plans are always worth having, even if they have to course correct, as nothing ever stays quite how you want once it reaches contact with reality.
I’m pretty tall. I find that mostly beneficial except for walking into things. I also don’t fit well in Miata and some convertibles and other small cars, which is a bit of a problem on occasion.
I was going to add more, but I kind of forgot. My post was a bit stream of consciousness about overthinking things, which I may have over over thought. Oh well. I’m kidding sort of. I was going to say that I see a lot of overthinking all over the place at work. Complex environments often lead people to assume that a complex solution is needed. Some of the time the complexity is unavoidable. Most of the time the complexity is avoidable. Our individual lives and affairs are no different.
> If you do those things in 10 or 20 years, you won’t look back and say I wish I would’ve done those things cause you’ve done them.
My whole point is that you can't know that if your mind is clouded by ill health and ignorance - your predictions about what you'll regret are wrong, just as the decisions about what is important are wrong. Digging yourself out of that "what I think is important in this moment is important" mindset is a big part of it.
I was expecting you to actually say stuff you couldn't come back from, but all of those are recoverable in your 30s and 40s if you're a bit more flexible. It's never too late if you want those things, quite literally.
I'm much younger and I already have health issues that I can't come back from. I've received a lot of chemotherapy, and I have permanent damage from that. All I can do going forward is mitigate, but the risk is still there and won't ever go away. Of course it's not my fault. But the point is: yes, your health is something you can't control 100%. There are points of no return.
For most people, the common one is heart disease. Plaque buildup is irreversible. No amount of dieting, exercise, or pharmacology will reverse damage to your arteries. All you can do is prevent further damage, and yes, you will need drugs.
> yes, your health is something you can't control 100%.
Yeah, I guess this was more my point, you don't ultimately control that much about your health (is my perspective at least), you either win the genetic lottery or not, play the hand you're dealt, enjoy life while it last, in the way you can, some of us can only enjoy it so much compared to the rest of you.
Poor health decisions are essentially permanent. That's precisely what I was trying to say. You can certainly recover from them, and do a lot better, but it's a hell of a lot easier and less painful just to prevent them in the first place, and repair is no substitute for the original article, as people with knee replacements well know.
It is actually possible to build a family and have children in other ways than biologically birth your own. I'm not sure why people pretend like this is less like "having children" than other options out there.
I “retired” at 55 when I was laid off. The biggest reason I didn't find another job is that my spouse was working at a job that she loved. For the previous decades my career and our two children were our priority by necessity, but now she was able to concentrate on herself. I'm 70 now and my wife worked until the day she died last year.
I am sorry to hear that, but you had a good life together (I assume).
I plan to “work”, until I croak. The coroner is gonna have to rub “QWERTY” off my cheek.
The difference is that no one is paying me, and that makes all the difference. When someone pays me, they pay for veto rights, and the right to impose their stupid on me.
Having enough, so I don’t have to deal with that, is heaven.
I've lived pretty humbly. I think many folks, here, would sneer at my lifestyle (sneering at others, seems to be in fashion, these days), but it allowed me to be where I am, today. Also, I never really made a huge amount of money. There's kids coming right out of school, that are starting at more than I ever made, at the peak of my career.
This is the key in my opinion, and the most difficult to discuss with others without them getting defensive. You have to look at every dollar you spend. For me, debt and inflation have the potential turn my dreams to nightmares.
Heh... i wish i'd go for anything other than boxing 20 years ago.
Anyways, yes, weightlifting + something active (tennis, football, etc) is the way to go.
But weightlifting first. It is the only hralth-related hobby that teaches honest body control: muscle, gaining/losing weight, dieting basics, monitoring key body parameters over time.
Mid 50s here - you can start at any point. Can confirm.
The past is in the past. It had good and bad outcomes for you. Those stand, and you're best served by making your peace with them. All that matters are the decisions you make now.
> That leads right into: The only thing you can truly exert control over is yourself,
I don't see a disinction here between 'yourself' and 'the environment/world'. Both affect you, and you can/cannot control both. And the logical solution is to try (when it is worth it and not to try when it isn't).
The first thing that came to mind for me is that this perspective, while probably in the range of normal experience for software developers, is rooted in middle class expectations.
I have ADHD and OCD and grew up in total poverty and violent child abuse in a rural area with no economic opportunity, and was homeless from 16 to my early 20s.
While hindsight makes clear many of my own errors and shortcomings, a lot of the residual issues I face today, some of those shortcomings included, are the result of neglectful, ignorant or malicious choices from the adults in my early life. I have several physical health issues that were not addressed when they should have been, including lifelong gout and very likely fibromyalgia. I had a full-ride scholarship and campus job and lodging lined up that I worked very hard for in high school despite being homeless, and a malicious teacher illegally modified my grade out of spite to prevent me from graduating with the required credits. The administration did nothing and I had no family in my life to help me pressure the school board or file a lawsuit.
I also faced a gross mistrial after having a small town officer literally plant marijuana on me after a traffic accident, and the judge illegally sentenced me despite a total lack of evidence, and my defense attorney was corrupt and refused to submit a motion to quash or let me appeal the decision because "the judge is my boss and he will make my life hell." Six months jailtime for a first time criminal offense for a homeless seventeen year old. My whole life so far has been playing catch-up.
Your advice probably wasn't meant for me, but you were interested in hearing other perspectives so I figured you'd be interested to hear mine. I always find it interesting when casual conversation with other engineers reveals the gaps between our experiences and expectations. Lots of interesting and unique paths through our unique profession.
My friend has a diagnosis and has a prescription for Amitriptyline.
While that works, getting exercise also works wonders.
I have seen it backfire when she did too much, but exercising well within your capabilities - on 30% of the maximum force you can exert - can greatly reduce the symptoms.
This is a journey for sure, finding out what your body can handle, but it's worth it in the end.
Honestly I think it's even more important for people with tough childhoods and bad breaks to focus on taking care of themselves. I regret that, in the US at least, the safety net is nonexistent and makes that almost impossible, as you say. I hope you find a little peace and maybe some upward momentum.
I agree, and I think it's important advice that really does need to be drilled into people. Even if medical care is out of reach for some, we do have the internet and now even personal agents who can help teach us good habits and hold us accountable.
Things like good posture, exercise, and eating non-processed foods are within reach for the majority of us; and for those whose issues make exercise difficult, it's only even more important to try and double down if at all possible and close the gap.
Sleep should also be a top priority. I have had chronic insomnia since I was a toddler, sometimes staying up for days at a time unable to sleep, and honestly lack of sleep is destroying my mind and body faster than anything else. It's preventing me from maintaining a healthy weight, since fat burning is heavily impacted by irregular sleep.
I have tried everything under the sun, most recently I am re-experimenting with magnesium in the form of magnesium l-threonate because my magnesium deficiency might actually be causing me to have a very high "gain" in my CNS, meaning the smallest things wake me up or get me excited. It's still too early to rule out coincidence or placebo, but I think I'm noticing several differences since being on magnesium l-threonate, including better sleep.
Point being, leave no stone unturned when it comes to your health. Sometimes the solutions to complex issues might themselves be quite simple.
Thank you for your perseverance. We need testimonials like this to remind that our life isn't hard compared to this; And yet you have surprisingly chosen peace so far (congrats, and thank you).
I appreciate your kind words. It also helps for me to remind myself how much worse things could be.
I'm in a lot of pain all of the time, and recently, thanks to an abusive family member, I experienced an absolutely devastating life event that might completely derail my life, leave me with a permanent disability and end my career, but I'm keeping my chin up and counting my limbs and senses. Eyes on the prize. I am driven to succeed so that I might help the less fortunate. I think any of us in a position to do so have a duty to do so.
>it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices, either indirectly through the environment you live in or directly through the actions you take
This is a horrible thing to say, and I wouldn't go around saying stuff like that if you value your safety. Its probably true if you're a white guy with a average intelligence who was raised in the suburbs by loving family with a silver spoon in your mouth. However, the rest of us didn't choose to be born into poverty and family violence; we didn't choose to spend our formative years be assaulted, hungry, groomed, and abused; we didn't choose to be subjected to systemic problems, racism, sexism, and institutional abuse.
What you're basically doing is telling someone who was born with multiple sclerosis "the reason you have trouble walking is due to your choices."
That being said, this isn't a fatalistic post. I think everyone can and should make choices to make the best of what they have. I've been trying for 4+ decades. I spend thousands of dollars a year on therapy and medication trying to move on. I've personally witnessed the effects of bad decisions and I have the cognitive capabilities to see cause and effect so I won't be making the same choices for myself.
It's just a straight up fact that my suffering is not due to my own choices. I did not ask for this.
Some people have to work a thousand times harder than someone else for 1/1000th the payoff due to their starting point. That's just life. But that doesn't reduce the impact your choices have on your own life. With a few extreme exceptions you can choose to change your environment. It's just varying degrees of terrifying/uncomfortable/dangerous.
That still does not imply that ">it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices, either indirectly through the environment you live in or directly through the actions you take".
You changing your environment to void problems plenty of times means "abandoning your kids".
You may even have greates starting point ever and still have externally imposed diseases, injuries and problems.
> It's just a straight up fact that my suffering is not due to my own choices. I did not ask for this.
I would reframe this, in my view, that your suffering is not due to your own choices, but you are probably suffering a lot less than you might otherwise, due to good choices. That's what I mean - you can't control your situation or the world around you, but you can do the best with what you have, and in my view many people have never been given permission to do that.
I'm not taking advice from someone who says "it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices, either indirectly through the environment you live in or directly through the actions you take." So stop giving it.
Here's my advice, saying stuff like that gets you your ass kicked in the real world.
As a mid 40s person also, my advice: drink plenty of water, clean the kitchen every night, don’t try to time the market, forgive your past self for being an idiot.
I keep thinking about cleaning the kitchen every night (I just turned 30). The more I think about it, the more I think it's a good advice. I still need to forgive my past self for being an idiot, though :)
> The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.
There is an implication from this one that the article doesn't get into, which is whether you've picked a strategy of fail-safe or fail-disastrously. Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start. It is one of those ideas that sounds very simple to incorporate into your life and turns out to be hard.
IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous.
> The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
He's technically right, but our instincts are not suitable for a complex 8-billion person global economy. We have a bunch of instincts calibrated so that a group of ~200 monkeys probably raises >200 descendants on average, just. We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment.
It doesn't have to be a reason-emotion dichotomy, but there has to be something where effective people > destructive people in situations where our instincts don't trigger or push people in predictably bad directions.
I always phrase this as "Do you want to play zero-sum or negative sum games? Or would you rather play positive sum games where the world is better off even if you personally aren't 'the winner'?"
> Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start
I'm just going to quote that because it's a great statement of a truly astounding idea. Most people do not think like you do. Even inside the HN bubble, most people don't think like you do. The diversity in humanity is enormous, and I wish I'd known sooner how fallible and narrow a single person's view is, even when it's your own. Making the best choices you can possibly make does not guarantee success, and even if you succeed, there's no guarantee that it was the best idea or even a good idea.
> IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous.
Basically what Nietzsche said on morality. However, there is a counterfactual to this line of thinking as well and it doesn't map as easily.
> We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment.
This is where Immanual Kant's categorial imperative comes into play. Kant thinks there is absolutely an evidence-based principle to be moral. And he grounds it in reason and human beings themselves. His ideas make sense when you start thinking "okay lets say I am free to make my own values and must have a good relationship with my values, what is an objective way to evaluate this so I can be morally good?" Kant becomes a good starting point and he claims that you don't need any external objective way/method of evaluation other than the reason afforded to you by nature as a human being and then he spends a lot of pages elucidating how this type of a system would work.
Both Nietzsche and Kant are worth reading if you want to understand morality in general, even though Nietzsche fundamentally disagreed with Kant that there can be an objectively correct mode of evaluation.
What I have learned about neuroscience and philosophy is this: most people are not willing to invest as much time in small pursuits versus understanding the machinery of their mind and what will actually let them understand themselves with more clarity.
Understanding the self loop. The strange self loop. Seeing that the thing that is doing the observing inside of us is the whole and that from within our own system, we cannot completely reason about ourselves. The incompleteness theorem.
We have named it we call it the default mode network. It is essentially a recursive predictive machine. It only stops when we die. It is essentially making predictions about reality constantly. It is retrieving previous state and associating at the current state to make decisions. What it associates with previous memory and current state are encoding of our hormonal state and mental state at that point in time.
You can call it emotions. You can try and reason about it. It just exists. At some level, you just have to learn to let it be. All of the sophisticated words of psychology and trying to describe the machinery from within the machinery. It’s useful, you need a guide to live life. To keep the machinery and coding clean and not over, indexing on states that aren’t useful. But it all boils down to some pretty simple things. And when you see that the observer is the observed, and that it is all a part of the whole of the self, things become more manageable, for me, at least.
Take grief for example. What is grief? It is a prediction error. An expectation of some past state that the prediction machinery keeps expecting to come up one way, but it comes up another. And when it does come up as an error it hurts. It’s OK to experience it and to embrace it even. But it’s also OK to see it for what it is. We can’t escape the machine. But we can step outside of it briefly and watch it at work and acknowledge what it actually is.
Very good in theory. In practice, how do you actually understand yourself? I have done plenty of meditation and plenty of reading on mental health and psychology. I still don't understand why I specifically act the way I do.
Did you include meeting with a therapist? The problem is that they have to reveal you things you don't generally want to admit, so it takes a bit of time (time which I find absolutely wasted) and depending on the therapist, they might not tell you immediately about your inconsistencies.
The problem I have with modern therapy is it that it operates completely within the frame of oneself. They will very carefully walk with you inside of your own narrative, bringing you to a better place of operation within that framework of the self.
Having thought about it some, I have been concluded that there’s only so far one can get when operating within that narrative. There’s only so much they can help with until you yourself can see that the “I” is it itself a machine generating the narrative, but also something else and more than just that narrative that is constantly running in our brains. It is something that can be observed. The observer is the observed as Krishnamurti would say.
As long time meditator, I find that there is nothing that is hidden from ourselves if we look. Meditation is one of the few ways to begin to access the whole and step outside of the narrative loop. You can also try psychedelics, but that’s riskier. A good trip might save you a decade of therapy. A bad one might genuinely imbalance your brains machinery. In some sense, the time is wasted. However, if you genuinely spend this time learning to observe yourself, this is very much a way of being that is not wasted in my opinion.
A therapist is generally going to work with you inside of a particular framework and way of stepping towards a particular way of operating. It sort of like the long or hard way of solving a math problem before you learned underlying theory of whatever problem you were working on.
You put very well into words why therapy felt off for me. I haven't been meditating for too long, but the perspective definitely shifts once you start turning the attention inwards, instead of following the narrative that the mind creates.
My recommendation to any of those interested: The Mind Illuminated by John Yates. Great intro to the meditation practice. Once you have some understanding of the general technique Goenka's 10 day vipassana courses is a great opportunity for deep introspective work.
True, I have not fully understood the direction therapists go to, apart from expliciting your thought process.
My interpretation of therapy is that it helps you feel aligned with you. It will remove the surface contradictions and counter-actions. But if your deeper you has concluded that you should be evil (assuming there is no contradictions in this view - and there always is), therapy will probably help you too. As long as you are aligned with yourself.
There is something incredibly important about a therapist I would not discard. And that is the human connection. We are hard wired for this and most often what people need out of a therapist is being seen. Another human being to fully and unerringly see you. To get to know you well enough to simulate /your/ thought loop and reflect it back to you, potentially with some meaningful observations. But that knowing that some other human sees you is mostly what therapy is about to me, some exceptions, of course, but in general
Also: incompleteness theorem again. The system cannot fully observe itself. A close friend can also do this too. In fact they are better at it than a therapist if you are open with the friend.
Also evil is a moral inclination and hard to discuss easily in this frame. Very little that is inherent in our machinery is disinclined towards evil or good. As social animals we must teach those values and hold them up. Different discussion :)
> If you were asked: “Would it be good if this 0day was used to apprehend a terrorist?” you would probably say “this is good”. If you were asked “would it be good if this 0day is used to arrest someone and then torture and waterboard him 183 times?”, you would probably say “this is bad”. So if your 0day was used to capture KSM, it is probably good? Or bad? Things get very complicated very quickly.
This is a version of the very classic problems "does the end justify the means" (should one torture a terrorist to prevent other terrorist acts). Much to the chagrin of utilitarians everywhere, the answer to that question is NO, because answering yes leads to a bottomless hole of infinite evil.
This is too simplistic an argument re utilitarianism. It assumes torture definitely works, and that there’s no further consequences. Many utilitarians might say “no” too, given that there is no persuasive evidence that torture is a superior intelligence-gathering method to well-conducted non-coercive interrogation; and that it’s likely to produce unreliable information alongside whatever truths it elicits. It’s a decidedly grey world.
US TV shows in the years after 9/11 are hard to watch now because they're plagued with pro torture scenes. I don't know when exactly but it seemed to have disappeared.
As someone who is now skewing towards the older side of the tech world (55 this year).
It’s a journey. There isn’t some point where you’ll suddenly find you are now “wise” and understand yourself.
Those moments do appear - but a few years later you’ll likely realise that it was only relevant for that time of your life and things have changed. What might have worked and served you well then may not be the right thing for now.
Getting locked into a way of thinking or behaving is a recipe for being old before your time.
Try and apply the agile principles - do a retro - is it still working, what should keep doing, what should you stop doing?
And - the best time to start doing something good is now. Doesn’t matter if you should have done it 20 years ago. Regret can be disabling.
Try and be nice to people. We don’t know what is happening in other people’s worlds.
[edit] And be kind to yourself. Self compassion is underrated. Forgive yourself. You are human. Not perfect. And you don’t need to be. Show yourself some love.
Dang these are really not at all common advice/reflections.
> 1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.
I think certainly your actions are maybe that paramount to the world because it has so many actors, but they are certainly important to you. The actions that we take on a daily basis nudge nudge nudge us to becoming something else. I think its something worth focusing on but not to the point it makes you anxious.
> The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
Hard disagree with part of this. Reason is an intellectual construct, that has a basis in logic. (Neuroscience not finding a division: sure. Just like electrical engineering doesn't see a dichotomy between Microsoft Word and Firefox.)
Reasoning isn't separated from emotion because reasoning needs inputs. Some inputs are secondary: the result of other reasoning. Some are non-negotiable facts from the world. But some primary inputs that go into reasoning are determined by values and desires. E.g. "I feel it would be nice obtain such and such a result in the world" (hard reasoning on how to get it ensues).
I don’t have the link right now, but I recall a study of some sort that examined brain activity and decision making. The “emotion” part lit up first, then the “reasoning” part.
Essentially, we make decisions based on emotion, then come up with an explanation for the decision that was already made. We form a memory that says the explanation was why we made the decision, but it was actually the emotion. In other words, by default, we’re rationalizing, not rational.
I think the issue is precisely the rationalising part.
Let's assume I have pre-decided something: if the fruit weighs over 100g, I'll buy it, otherwise I won't.
I can then measure and find out. My emotions -- based on looking at the fruit -- may mislead me here.
Now what about "likely to weigh more than 100g"?
Here it's really easy to lie to yourself.
But if you set conditions for what counts as likely before you know what they'll be used for, and you stick to them, you can make a decision based on reason.
There is no way to decide 100g is the threshold divorced from emotion, however -- unless it's rationally derived from something else emotionally based.
The "rationalisation" bit comes from us not making decisions for the reasons we think we are -- or in the way we claim to be.
Why does this supremely valuable extra information my body is feeding me tell me to stop running, sit down and eat ice cream while watching 400 short videos? Like, that's much worse advice than I get from flipping a coin!
When I read titles like these, I expect a relatively low value article.
This has probably been the highest value such article I've read in years. You've phrased item 3 better than I have been trying to for years after my own journey in realizing this.
> 3. The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
Guessing: Essentially that's psychology. And Human psychology is itself emergent behavior cannot be directly traced back to neuroscience. Logic, that is another thing, which primarily is used for understanding and reconstruct retainable after emotional experiences.
It's not psychology, it's just wrong. You can point to the parts of the brain (more accurately the body and brain) that handle reason and emotions, and they're physically distinct.
Also, reason is essentially a combination of pattern recognition and abstraction, and emotion is a set of spontaneous limbic responses.
Which is not to say there's no relationship between them, or that the grey area where they overlap isn't unusually interesting.
But it's a wild overreach to say the distinction is a cultural construct and not grounded in (largely) mammalian biology.
Points 1 and 2 are also questionable. They're not novel opinions, they have philosophical names (more or less consequentialism vs deontology, with some wrinkles), and they can be - and have been - hotly debated.
I don't see them as evidence of maturity or of immaturity, more of a considered moral position that not everyone agrees with.
Our measurements of the brain are derived from small samples, have a bunch of weird priors encoded in them and are mostly correlational, so I don't think we can make strong statements like in your first paragraph.
1. Emotion has no biological marker, which refute the idea of mechanical connection between brain (and other body parts) to emotion
2. Reasoning, by general feeling, is a mental process carried out by brain primarily, but has a seemingly much stronger connection to biological signals
3. What I was inferring from the theory of constructive emotion, is that emotion really is a form of higher level reasoning. It's higher than the typical reasoning, so that it's connection with biological signals are extenuated and more indirect
I don't remember the words of the book.
This connection between reasoning and emotion is primarily my own rudimentary idea. Can be seen as an expolation of the theory.
It seems very tenuous to me to characterize a biological process as “reasoning” only because it doesn’t map to certain biological markers. And we know that emotions are significantly influenced by processes outside the brain, in particular gut biology.
I agree fully with the point about integrating emotion in your decision making. Earlier I used to get stuck in decisions since I had the need to be rational. Which is in it self an emotion I guess - since need is an emotion?
Now my life is much simpler.
> 1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.
maybe not 0day stuff, but breaking the build is something that mature people have learned not to do. What are the rewards for move fast and break things for people?
Wonderfully written. I’m intrigued by the section about emotion. It seems like no coincidence that it follows the section about seeing beyond monocausal determinism.
Being able to detach from your thinking while you are thinking, that's difficult and indeed very useful. I found that more often in llm than human beings.
> ... the scientific method is a classifier that is intentionally biased against accepting something as true - so that we only accept things as true that are beyond any reasonable doubt true.
> A somewhat fascinating corollary of this is that there exists a large class of true things that will never be scientifically shown as true.
Wild shit. Gödel's undecidability at an institutional, societal level.
I don't particularly disagree with what the author has written about, but the jargon and complex wording is really annoying to read.
If this were written on a single subject, like engineering philosophy, then fine. But writing a multi-subject article requires simpler language so those who may be familiar with one thing but not the other can understand everything.
I find it hard to trust the intelligence of someone who uses words like "dichotomy", "meta-cognition", and "monocausal determinism" - language like this is purely performative. Let's not be performative, who are you trying to impress with your big words?
We use specific words in writing to mean specific things; there is no exact synonym for 'dichotomy' in the English language. The word is very common in academic and non-academic literature.
Meta-cognition is a compound word, where both parts are widely known, and the combination should be pretty obvious.
'Monocausal determinism' is different, very specific, and probably only known to a minority of readers. Determinism, the idea that everything within a system happens exactly according to cause and effect, comes from ontology, which is the study of existence and our place in the world. Mono derives from old greek single. Monocausal determinism is the idea that everything within a system derives from a single cause.
It is not a writers duty to be understood by everyone. Sure is nice, but more difficult to pull of, and often futile.
I know what all of these words mean. My point is that these are esoteric words that don't fit into the article's purpose or for the article's audience. The author would have gotten his point across far easier if he were to have first contextualized these words, or defined them himself.
Pedagogy is very important in writing. Without care for the reader, these words come off as performative.
The thing is, these words are both incredibly precise and compact. So I’m very happy that the author uses them, as it means I can get the meaning without lowest common denominator fluff or volume.
Have I always known what these words meant? No, but it’s the reward for a habit of right-clicking every word and looking up the definition - which also stretches your cognitive capacity over time so it’s worth doing for purely selfish reasons.
Your particular interpretation of the author's choice in words tells us more about your psychological makeup than the author.
Take the "meta-cognition" advice to heart and perform some self-debugging in order to determine what exactly in your psyche made you react in this way.
> Monocausal determinism is an illusion, and largely does not exist outside of computer debugging.
I work in trading with a lot of software engineers, and one thing I noticed is that these cannot reason about uncertainty if their lives depended on it. Their way to approach any problem is like you debug code: there must be a specific code path that was followed that led to that outcome. But markets aren't like this, and things happen for no reason, or are better modelled as if happening for no reason.
This is also the reason why I don't really think "software engineers" are real engineers, because real engineers can reason about uncertainty.
You are what you do, I think it's expected that if you spend your life reasoning in one framework, atrophies your practice at any other framework.
I agree with a lot of the first point but the expression does seem to lend an air of futility to caring about your impacts which I hope wasn't the intention. I do whole heartedly disagree with everyone believing they are the hero of their own story - while there sure are a subset of people who will justify screwing others (or at least bury their heads in the sand), there's also a subset of people that are happy to revel in schadenfreude. all that aside, the author's beliefs probably do apply to his target audience.
The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
This is a nice, thoughtful piece, but the final point oversteps while chasing a noble heuristic, I think. To touch on a few fields off the top of my head:
1. All serious cognitive philosophy since at least Kant has supported the idea of separate faculties -- in his case, specifically the four chambers [`--` quantitative sensitivity, `-+` qualitative perceptivity, `+-` causal judgement, `++` modal reason].[1] This is also at the root of the induction vs. deduction [vs. abduction] debate, which had been raging for at least 2,200 years before Kant.
2. Even our pre-gallilean understanding of neuroscience arrived at the same conclusion, though in hilariously abstract terms: 'fast thinking' vs. 'slow thinking'. Popularized primarily by a popsci book (?) that frames it like this: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
3. Psychologically the clearest paradigm is Freud's `- Id`/`+ Ego`/`* Super-Ego`, which is not nearly as discredited as his famous theories about parental lust would imply. If you asked your psychiatrist(/local research psychologist) about it today, they'd ofc use less medieval words for the same concepts -- roughly 'unconscious', 'cognition', and 'executive', in order.[2]
4. In cognitive science more broadly, a lot of the binaries discussed on Wikipedia's Mathematical Model article[3] are getting at this delineation.
5. Eastern philosophy has plenty of stuff on this dichotomy; in fact, I'd argue their discussion of it is predicated upon its existence and the various harmful states it can create if left unexamined. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_logico-epistemology
On a 'logical' level, the case for a separation of at least two types of thinking seems clear: any cognitive activity can either call the 'lightweight' model to guess what's happening (and be right 95% of the time), or call the 'superheavy' model to iteratively reason through webs of beliefs.
Sure, any call probably uses more than 0.0001% of both so they're not mutually exclusive, but I think the qualitative diffence is clear.
The sentiment is true in a bit more subtle of a way, I will admit... It's hard to articulate in brief (/at all), but I've become fascinated with the way the presence of the higher faculties sometimes seems to completely transform the lower ones, unlocking whole new affordances. Like the existence of a new structure of a higher level of complexity completely changing the behavior of nearby cellular automata. If you'll excuse the anthropomorphization of abstract patterns for moment: it reminds me of how a competent leader can unlock whole new affordances for the individuals on their team without actually directly changing the individuals themselves.
Like, consider how we have have tons of both instincts & intuitions related to language use -- speaking, writing, listening, etc. Chimpanzees & bonobos share many of our incredibly advanced intuitive abilities (e.g. manual dexterity, social 'theory of mind'/empathy, etc.), but they are categorically unable to pick those up. In this way the super-ego didn't add funtionality to our species, and it didn't even really multiply it geometrically (?) -- it seems much closer to an exponentiation of capability.[4]
TL;DR: Acknowledging the fallibility and inherently-subconscious basis of reason is a noble goal, but abandoning the Idea altogether is misleading. IMHO!
[4]: Here's to hoping that this fourth rung is the last one, at least for a while! Cause if there's a fifth one, and AI discovers and produces it... yikes. Truely alien ASI would follow, rather than just ASI-as-huge-but-fundamentally-grokkable-AGI.)
Author here. To clarify: when I talk about dichotomy in this context, I refer to the idea that these two systems are in opposition, and that ignoring one system (and set of data) is somehow enlightened.
There's no point in denying that both emotions and rational thought exist, and that different regions in the brain are responsible for them. I do advocate pretty explicitly that all information sources should be considered when making decisions, including emotions - as a lot of them carry actual important non-verbalized information.
Point 3 was heavily influenced by reading the book "Descartes Error", fwiw, and I recommend that book to pretty much everybody.
To give other maturation advice to those not yet in their 40s:
It's quite likely that you have significant issues you haven't addressed yet. Getting into good medical care, therapy, exercise, and supportive e.g. nutrition, etc is likely more important than virtually anything else you'll do in your life, with a reasonable exception for choosing the right person to spend your life with and having a family. But having a good social life is a hell of a lot easier if you're in great physical and mental shape. I took all of those things very seriously, and I probably did not put enough value into any of those things, even given that orientation.
That leads right into: The only thing you can truly exert control over is yourself, and it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices, either indirectly through the environment you live in or directly through the actions you take. Humility is drastically underrated, and being healthy plays into this enormously as well.
That being said, I'd love to hear a perspective from some of the older HN folks - what am I missing as a mid-40s person that I should absolutely be paying attention to?
> Getting into good medical care, therapy, exercise,
These are very different classes of things. Good medical care, of course, if there is a problem, get it fixed by somebody who knows what they are doing. Good exercise, of course, get your physique in shape, for well being, for health and for confidence. But therapy? If there is a problem and therapy is treatment, of course. But where does this desire in the western world come from to just by default having to go to some kind of psychotherapy? I refuse to believe that a happy life requires therapy. If it ain't broken etc.
> it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices
That's a position that must be deeply rooted in privilege. There are countless folks out there who don't have it easy because of conditions they didn't create, and saying it's because of their own choices is extremely ignorant, maybe even arrogant. Many could, theoretically, so sth about it, at least improve their situation marginally, but it would require extreme steps which they are just not able to take. It too simplistic to dump it all on the "well it was their choice". No need to blindly victimize folks, but the other extreme is just not helpful either.
I believe everyone can benefit from therapy, just like everyone can benefit from physical therapy. The "if it ain't broke" mentality has value, but it has a fatal flaw: most people are unbelievably bad at gauging their own deficiencies. Most destructive patterns of behavior are fueled by an inability to recognize them. Meaning, the people who most need therapy are often the ones to also believe they do not need it. Because, having such a belief is what allows them to engage in self-destruction in the first place. People who are self-aware and introspective are already in therapy, or at least recognize it can benefit them.
That's not to say therapy is universally good. There are bad therapists. But ultimately the point of therapy is to encourage introspection, and defeat ignorance of the self. Ignorance of the self is a vital tool to people because it allows them to believe just about anything. Problems no longer exist, in your mind, if you cannot identify them.
But the proof is in the pudding. You have to analyze your behaviors, your relationships. If things are constantly going south, that's a sign even if you can't identify why. That's when therapy has value, it can help you identify why.
You have a point above in which I acknowledge that some people might be in dire eed of therapy but don't think so, so will never seek it. Though you won't reach those by recommending it to everybody. In contrast, I consider it problematic that the self-improvement movement instills feelings of being insufficient unless everything is tried to improve (like therapy). I would claim that there are enough people perfectly happy and introspective, all without therapy, and creating a culture where it's seen as a flaw to not have regular therapy is hurtful.
> People who are self-aware and introspective are already in therapy, or at least recognize it can benefit them.
I don't agree. I know tons of folks who are introspective and very balanced and ever have been to therapy nor do they have the need.
> just like everyone can benefit from physical therapy.
I wouldn't agree here either. Everybody arguably benefits from physical exercise. That's different from physical therapy. The former is sth preventative, you can do yourself, no personal trainer needed, just go for a run or play some squash or push some weights. Physical therapy you need when you had an injury or need to correct an issue limiting your health. That's corrective, not preventative.
Similar with mental exercise (some introspection or meditation or philosophising you can do alone or with friends or strangers on the internet, or with a therapist/professional, why not) versus mental therapy (an issue needs to be addressed and that should be done with a professional).
A key question is maybe whether the risk of an undiagnosed issue left untreated is too high to take. That's where the self-improvement movement is going to far, I think. We all have our wrinkles, and that's ok. Not every personality quirk needs correction, just like not all odd movement pattern needs a fix nor ever wrinkle in the face needs plastic surgery. The latter has been driven much too far in western culture (particularly american), and I'm basically arguing that the same seems to be happening with mental therapy too.
> But therapy? If there is a problem and therapy is treatment, of course. But where does this desire in the western world come from to just by default having to go to some kind of psychotherapy?
I suspect you're exactly the kind of person I'm talking to when I say therapy is a valuable thing for everyone. You will experience stressors, grief, loss, and strife in your life, being psychologically healthy and having your coping skills in order is absolutely something you want to do in advance, and is something everyday people can and should do before they actively have any specific disorder or problem.
It's one thing to say therapy is helpful. It's another thing to say it's just what you need to get over yourself in life. I have friends that cannot just "be psychologically healthy". They had sexual abuse and emotional abuse for decades of their early life. Every would-be friend betrayed them. They have too many illnesses and disorders to count. They're disabled, unimaginably neurodivergent, and impossibly complex. Therapy is not the solution to this. This is not as simple as "being psychologically healthy". Life for people in these sorts of situations is a life of such difficult tradeoffs that there simply is no right answer. Everything they do just digs them deeper into some hole, even if it was supposed to get them help. I did encourage one to try therapy, but the therapist spilled everything from their sessions to abusers. Their living situation became measurably worse and has not improved since. It is not their fault. They've been emotionally beaten to a pulp, and it's not their choices that brought them here. They arrived here by process of elimination, where everything else they've ever tried was met with extreme punishment. External assistance is often the only possible out for them. Not external assistance from a professional or therapist. External assistance from someone who knows them and their situation better than anyone else ever could, who's seen too much of their life day-in and day-out for years. You can't select for that. You can't even hope for that. You certainly can't choose that.
To think one's own choices can impact matters like this is such a disgusting level of privilege I can't even imagine. There are too many people that can't simply choose to escape their situation, and it's not their own fault. It's not something you can fix by sprinkling on a little therapy or some self-help books. It's something they'll be fighting for the rest of their entire life, whether they escape or not. You can't just choose to be free of that. No one can.
In your 20s and 30s, it's relatively easy to brute-force physical and mental health problems.
I didn't understand what the word "stress" even meant exactly until I got into my late 30s. Then I realized that I had been under extreme stress for most of my life but had not noticed it because I could just keep going despite constant exhaustion and borderline depression. Then, that suddenly stopped working.
I wish I'd realized this a decade or two earlier.
What cultural values does this wisdom and advice implicitly engender? That question bothers me a lot.
For some reason it strikes me that we don't think of a potato plant as needing life lessons. I doubt anyone here has moral compunctions about leaf structure or starch formation. People seem much the same way to me. Another part of me does instinctively model the inner world of people as small deviations from my own. Other parts of me think that is quaint.
It appears to me that the sense of clairty imparted by wisdom often looks like mere rigidity when seen from the outside. I have little doubt that your particular wisdom has been hard-earned, and at the same time, I think it is hopelessly myopic. The thing that gets me is that this also almost surely applies to my own wisdom, which is why I distrust them implicitly.
I think the world is so vast and our exposure so limited such that any Life Wisdom is hopelessly doomed to be a horrible overfit on the particulars of an individual.
Keep growing your idiosyncratic leaves though. I also genuinely think they're beautiful.
A wise person is naturally less anxious. Lots of people are anxious and dislike it so cultivating their inner life could help them with that. Most people prefer to not go that route, it is optional. Nobody is demanding you to grow wise or even that you would be capable of.
But as we grow old, not achieving some things we thought would be easier when we were young can cause frustration. Wisdom helps dealing with that.
I am mid 40s. Started working at a hyper scaler a couple years ago. I think you are overthinking it. All there is, is to be present and focus on what is important. And no one else can tell you what is important, you already know. Spend your time wisely with your family or on things that matter to you and not on trivial pursuit. There are no secrets in this. It is largely what you define.
When you ask this question of others, you are asking what am I forgetting? What will I regret? They can’t tell you. They can tell you what they regretted it and maybe you will regret those same things they did. But you have to decide. In 10 years. In 20 years. All you have to do is ask your future self what you’re gonna regret that you didn’t do. I had found that we already know the answers to those things.
E: think of it this way. And you don’t have to have a dog for these questions to work they’re metaphorical really, but also physical if you do have a dog. Did you walk your dog? Did you play ball with it? If they die tomorrow, will you look back and say that today was good? Did you do everything you could do with your dog? If not go do those things right now don’t leave them undone. That’s all there is. And the same thing works with everything in life. You know what you should’ve done in the day. If you do those things in 10 or 20 years, you won’t look back and say I wish I would’ve done those things cause you’ve done them.
> When you ask this question of others, you are asking what am I forgetting? What will I regret? They can’t tell you.
In one sense yes, but in another sense... humans are just so much alike. You can a learn a ton from your elders' common mistakes. Especially the ones where there's broad agreement. You're probably not an exception.
To use your dog metaphor (which I like), would you tell a dog looking for advice (if you could magically communicate with it) to just present and focus on the moment and he'll know what to do. Nah, we know a dog needs lots of walks, to be around other dogs, to eat the right foods, and so on.
The two approaches aren't mutually exclusive, but the practical one is... practical.
We do have metacognition and should use. It isn’t like we should go off the rails and become fully hedonic to “live in the moment” for example, we need some guiding principles . And when you are younger it can be really hard to know what is right. How to deal with purpose, and friends, and significant others, and all of the pain of the human condition. How do you figure it all out?
You don’t have to. Not all at once, anyway. You have enough information to make the right choices every day and learn more. We will always make mistakes, but if we acted with our best knowledge and fulfilled what we thought were the best choices in a given say you won’t have to regret the mistakes. That was kind of my whole point :)
And yes, always improve, and learn philosophy, and take care of your body and people around you. But at some point it all becomes obvious I think. At 46 it is all obvious for me now.
> If they die tomorrow, will you look back and say that today was good? Did you do everything you could do with your dog? If not go do those things right now don’t leave them undone
Sorry, life doesn't work that way. You are essentially saying, screw long-term planning, do right here right now what's best at this moment. If everybody did that, they'd be broke latest a year from now. Thereare things that I do, quite regularly, that I wouldn't do if this was the last day of my life. But I have to assume it is not, otherwise my life would collapse and I would pretty quickly be very restricted in what I could do in my life.
I think that you will fully misinterpreted what I wrote. Sorry maybe that is not fair. Assuming good intent. Let me expand what I was thinking: You should still do long-term planning and use that to decide how you will stay present. Nothing I wrote precludes you from doing long-term planning and incorporating that in your day-to-day living and staying present. I am not suggesting that you turn into a hedonistic animal that cannot think beyond two days into the future. I am saying that once you know what you should be doing you should be doing those things without question as they are the things you decided we’re right. That can be long-term and short-term.
> I am saying that once you know what you should be doing you should be doing those things without question as they are the things you decided we’re right.
Thanks for the clarification.
Though I still don't agree. Of course you should question sometimes. Regular reflection is important to realize whether your plans are still the right course of action. Otherwise you'll never course correct.
I don't think we disagree. I'm just outlining a narrow aspect of how I like to operate. I meditate and spend a lot of time thinking about philosophy and neuroscience and cognition. It is a very introspective and contemplative practice. I don't ever assume that I have it all figured out, but I do always make sure that I have a plan for the day and that I just stay focused on that. And there are a lot of easier to sort things. Time with family, time with dogs, work, so on and so forth. It is not like I assume that I have figured it all out. I also get feedback from others that I trust as they understand how I work, etc. I have been meditating for over a decade, so I'm pretty good at shutting down the self-narrative and just being. It makes a lot of things more clear when all of the noise is turned off. What I do want is at the end of the day, after all of the alignment and processing, that I know what I wanted to accomplish in the day, and that I did those things, and that those were the right things to do that day. Maybe I course correct the next day, or even during the day, but I set out with a clear intention of what I want to have accomplished in the day. And that is rooted by breaking down a multi-year plan into month, week, and day blocks even. It isn't rigid. If I need to change it, I will. But plans are always worth having, even if they have to course correct, as nothing ever stays quite how you want once it reaches contact with reality.
> I am mid 40s. Started working at a hyper scaler a couple years ago. I think you are overthinking it.
What does working at a hyper scaler have to do with the rest of the post? Do you want to mention your total comp or height while you’re at it?
I’m pretty tall. I find that mostly beneficial except for walking into things. I also don’t fit well in Miata and some convertibles and other small cars, which is a bit of a problem on occasion.
I was going to add more, but I kind of forgot. My post was a bit stream of consciousness about overthinking things, which I may have over over thought. Oh well. I’m kidding sort of. I was going to say that I see a lot of overthinking all over the place at work. Complex environments often lead people to assume that a complex solution is needed. Some of the time the complexity is unavoidable. Most of the time the complexity is avoidable. Our individual lives and affairs are no different.
I mean clearly it's what matters to them and not a trivial pursuit;)
To me that phrase added useful context how to treat the advice...
> If you do those things in 10 or 20 years, you won’t look back and say I wish I would’ve done those things cause you’ve done them.
My whole point is that you can't know that if your mind is clouded by ill health and ignorance - your predictions about what you'll regret are wrong, just as the decisions about what is important are wrong. Digging yourself out of that "what I think is important in this moment is important" mindset is a big part of it.
There are some things you cannot easily come back from - or at all - later in life eg poor health decisions, bad finances, not having children.
I was expecting you to actually say stuff you couldn't come back from, but all of those are recoverable in your 30s and 40s if you're a bit more flexible. It's never too late if you want those things, quite literally.
I'm much younger and I already have health issues that I can't come back from. I've received a lot of chemotherapy, and I have permanent damage from that. All I can do going forward is mitigate, but the risk is still there and won't ever go away. Of course it's not my fault. But the point is: yes, your health is something you can't control 100%. There are points of no return.
For most people, the common one is heart disease. Plaque buildup is irreversible. No amount of dieting, exercise, or pharmacology will reverse damage to your arteries. All you can do is prevent further damage, and yes, you will need drugs.
> yes, your health is something you can't control 100%.
Yeah, I guess this was more my point, you don't ultimately control that much about your health (is my perspective at least), you either win the genetic lottery or not, play the hand you're dealt, enjoy life while it last, in the way you can, some of us can only enjoy it so much compared to the rest of you.
Poor health decisions are essentially permanent. That's precisely what I was trying to say. You can certainly recover from them, and do a lot better, but it's a hell of a lot easier and less painful just to prevent them in the first place, and repair is no substitute for the original article, as people with knee replacements well know.
There actually is a point where you cannot have children anymore. You actually can wait too long and im not sure why everyone pretends its impossible.
It is actually possible to build a family and have children in other ways than biologically birth your own. I'm not sure why people pretend like this is less like "having children" than other options out there.
A bit of financial acumen goes a long way over the long term.
Anything that compounds is better off started early.
It's not about the money at the high level, but relative comfort frees you up to be your best self.
Or so I'm told.
I “retired” at 55. The scare quotes, are because I didn’t have a choice. No one wanted to hire me.
Back in the 1980s, when I was just getting started, I was told to save everything I could.
I thought it was silly advice, but I took it, starting in 1990, when I started my final job, which lasted until 2017.
Good thing, too.
I’m not rich, but I was able to retire, and it’s one of the best things that ever happened to me (although I didn’t think so, at the time).
I have enough to afford decent tools, and work hard, every single day, on stuff I always wanted to, but my management never let me.
I “retired” at 55 when I was laid off. The biggest reason I didn't find another job is that my spouse was working at a job that she loved. For the previous decades my career and our two children were our priority by necessity, but now she was able to concentrate on herself. I'm 70 now and my wife worked until the day she died last year.
I am sorry to hear that, but you had a good life together (I assume).
I plan to “work”, until I croak. The coroner is gonna have to rub “QWERTY” off my cheek.
The difference is that no one is paying me, and that makes all the difference. When someone pays me, they pay for veto rights, and the right to impose their stupid on me.
Having enough, so I don’t have to deal with that, is heaven.
I did quite the opposite.
Ignored all the sage advice, lived a rather tumultuous life, but lived it fast.
Diagnosed ADHD at 45 was a bit of an aha moment!
So I'm stuck on the treadmill for quite a few years yet.
Envious of where you've ended up, but imagine the path there wasn't easy.
All the best with retirement!
I've lived pretty humbly. I think many folks, here, would sneer at my lifestyle (sneering at others, seems to be in fashion, these days), but it allowed me to be where I am, today. Also, I never really made a huge amount of money. There's kids coming right out of school, that are starting at more than I ever made, at the peak of my career.
That can't afford a house.
Crazy times.
This is the key in my opinion, and the most difficult to discuss with others without them getting defensive. You have to look at every dollar you spend. For me, debt and inflation have the potential turn my dreams to nightmares.
Yup. A very wealthy friend of mine tells me that the key is avoiding personal debt (and being careful about corporate debt, too).
When I got married, I had a lot of credit card debt, and I had to use most of our wedding gift money to nullify it.
It was humiliating, and I vowed never to carry a balance again, and to avoid any form of debt, if at all possible.
WFM YMMMV
Early 40s here. I really wish I had started weightlifting 20 years ago.
This. I (41) joined a gym last year. Did wonders for my physical and mental health.
As you get older you need more and more protein to build muscles. I need to get 150 grams of protein per day. That is difficult.
And you need more recovery time.
I have friends who never went to the gym. They develop more back issues.
Heh... i wish i'd go for anything other than boxing 20 years ago.
Anyways, yes, weightlifting + something active (tennis, football, etc) is the way to go.
But weightlifting first. It is the only hralth-related hobby that teaches honest body control: muscle, gaining/losing weight, dieting basics, monitoring key body parameters over time.
Mid 50s here - you can start at any point. Can confirm.
The past is in the past. It had good and bad outcomes for you. Those stand, and you're best served by making your peace with them. All that matters are the decisions you make now.
> That leads right into: The only thing you can truly exert control over is yourself,
I don't see a disinction here between 'yourself' and 'the environment/world'. Both affect you, and you can/cannot control both. And the logical solution is to try (when it is worth it and not to try when it isn't).
I am 54 and my response to your 40s insight is, "Amen".
The first thing that came to mind for me is that this perspective, while probably in the range of normal experience for software developers, is rooted in middle class expectations.
I have ADHD and OCD and grew up in total poverty and violent child abuse in a rural area with no economic opportunity, and was homeless from 16 to my early 20s.
While hindsight makes clear many of my own errors and shortcomings, a lot of the residual issues I face today, some of those shortcomings included, are the result of neglectful, ignorant or malicious choices from the adults in my early life. I have several physical health issues that were not addressed when they should have been, including lifelong gout and very likely fibromyalgia. I had a full-ride scholarship and campus job and lodging lined up that I worked very hard for in high school despite being homeless, and a malicious teacher illegally modified my grade out of spite to prevent me from graduating with the required credits. The administration did nothing and I had no family in my life to help me pressure the school board or file a lawsuit.
I also faced a gross mistrial after having a small town officer literally plant marijuana on me after a traffic accident, and the judge illegally sentenced me despite a total lack of evidence, and my defense attorney was corrupt and refused to submit a motion to quash or let me appeal the decision because "the judge is my boss and he will make my life hell." Six months jailtime for a first time criminal offense for a homeless seventeen year old. My whole life so far has been playing catch-up.
Your advice probably wasn't meant for me, but you were interested in hearing other perspectives so I figured you'd be interested to hear mine. I always find it interesting when casual conversation with other engineers reveals the gaps between our experiences and expectations. Lots of interesting and unique paths through our unique profession.
> fibromyalgia
My friend has a diagnosis and has a prescription for Amitriptyline.
While that works, getting exercise also works wonders.
I have seen it backfire when she did too much, but exercising well within your capabilities - on 30% of the maximum force you can exert - can greatly reduce the symptoms.
This is a journey for sure, finding out what your body can handle, but it's worth it in the end.
Have patience with your body.
Honestly I think it's even more important for people with tough childhoods and bad breaks to focus on taking care of themselves. I regret that, in the US at least, the safety net is nonexistent and makes that almost impossible, as you say. I hope you find a little peace and maybe some upward momentum.
I agree, and I think it's important advice that really does need to be drilled into people. Even if medical care is out of reach for some, we do have the internet and now even personal agents who can help teach us good habits and hold us accountable.
Things like good posture, exercise, and eating non-processed foods are within reach for the majority of us; and for those whose issues make exercise difficult, it's only even more important to try and double down if at all possible and close the gap.
Sleep should also be a top priority. I have had chronic insomnia since I was a toddler, sometimes staying up for days at a time unable to sleep, and honestly lack of sleep is destroying my mind and body faster than anything else. It's preventing me from maintaining a healthy weight, since fat burning is heavily impacted by irregular sleep.
I have tried everything under the sun, most recently I am re-experimenting with magnesium in the form of magnesium l-threonate because my magnesium deficiency might actually be causing me to have a very high "gain" in my CNS, meaning the smallest things wake me up or get me excited. It's still too early to rule out coincidence or placebo, but I think I'm noticing several differences since being on magnesium l-threonate, including better sleep.
Point being, leave no stone unturned when it comes to your health. Sometimes the solutions to complex issues might themselves be quite simple.
Thank you for your perseverance. We need testimonials like this to remind that our life isn't hard compared to this; And yet you have surprisingly chosen peace so far (congrats, and thank you).
I appreciate your kind words. It also helps for me to remind myself how much worse things could be.
I'm in a lot of pain all of the time, and recently, thanks to an abusive family member, I experienced an absolutely devastating life event that might completely derail my life, leave me with a permanent disability and end my career, but I'm keeping my chin up and counting my limbs and senses. Eyes on the prize. I am driven to succeed so that I might help the less fortunate. I think any of us in a position to do so have a duty to do so.
Hey I just want you to know I see you. Good luck in your life even if it started hard.
<3 I wish you the best as well. I hope things are working out.
Mounjaro, TRT, Lexapro, statins if you need them, and much less alcohol.
I'm in my 40s.
>it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices, either indirectly through the environment you live in or directly through the actions you take
This is a horrible thing to say, and I wouldn't go around saying stuff like that if you value your safety. Its probably true if you're a white guy with a average intelligence who was raised in the suburbs by loving family with a silver spoon in your mouth. However, the rest of us didn't choose to be born into poverty and family violence; we didn't choose to spend our formative years be assaulted, hungry, groomed, and abused; we didn't choose to be subjected to systemic problems, racism, sexism, and institutional abuse.
What you're basically doing is telling someone who was born with multiple sclerosis "the reason you have trouble walking is due to your choices."
That being said, this isn't a fatalistic post. I think everyone can and should make choices to make the best of what they have. I've been trying for 4+ decades. I spend thousands of dollars a year on therapy and medication trying to move on. I've personally witnessed the effects of bad decisions and I have the cognitive capabilities to see cause and effect so I won't be making the same choices for myself.
It's just a straight up fact that my suffering is not due to my own choices. I did not ask for this.
Some people have to work a thousand times harder than someone else for 1/1000th the payoff due to their starting point. That's just life. But that doesn't reduce the impact your choices have on your own life. With a few extreme exceptions you can choose to change your environment. It's just varying degrees of terrifying/uncomfortable/dangerous.
That still does not imply that ">it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices, either indirectly through the environment you live in or directly through the actions you take".
You changing your environment to void problems plenty of times means "abandoning your kids".
You may even have greates starting point ever and still have externally imposed diseases, injuries and problems.
> It's just a straight up fact that my suffering is not due to my own choices. I did not ask for this.
I would reframe this, in my view, that your suffering is not due to your own choices, but you are probably suffering a lot less than you might otherwise, due to good choices. That's what I mean - you can't control your situation or the world around you, but you can do the best with what you have, and in my view many people have never been given permission to do that.
Don't move the goalposts, dude.
I'm not taking advice from someone who says "it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices, either indirectly through the environment you live in or directly through the actions you take." So stop giving it.
Here's my advice, saying stuff like that gets you your ass kicked in the real world.
As a mid 40s person also, my advice: drink plenty of water, clean the kitchen every night, don’t try to time the market, forgive your past self for being an idiot.
I keep thinking about cleaning the kitchen every night (I just turned 30). The more I think about it, the more I think it's a good advice. I still need to forgive my past self for being an idiot, though :)
Short but brilliant. Well done.
I'd add: try to sleep well. It adds up.
So much to do and so little time. But you’re right, it’s so important.
> The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.
There is an implication from this one that the article doesn't get into, which is whether you've picked a strategy of fail-safe or fail-disastrously. Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start. It is one of those ideas that sounds very simple to incorporate into your life and turns out to be hard.
IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous.
> The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
He's technically right, but our instincts are not suitable for a complex 8-billion person global economy. We have a bunch of instincts calibrated so that a group of ~200 monkeys probably raises >200 descendants on average, just. We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment.
It doesn't have to be a reason-emotion dichotomy, but there has to be something where effective people > destructive people in situations where our instincts don't trigger or push people in predictably bad directions.
I always phrase this as "Do you want to play zero-sum or negative sum games? Or would you rather play positive sum games where the world is better off even if you personally aren't 'the winner'?"
> Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start
I'm just going to quote that because it's a great statement of a truly astounding idea. Most people do not think like you do. Even inside the HN bubble, most people don't think like you do. The diversity in humanity is enormous, and I wish I'd known sooner how fallible and narrow a single person's view is, even when it's your own. Making the best choices you can possibly make does not guarantee success, and even if you succeed, there's no guarantee that it was the best idea or even a good idea.
> IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous.
Basically what Nietzsche said on morality. However, there is a counterfactual to this line of thinking as well and it doesn't map as easily.
> We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment.
This is where Immanual Kant's categorial imperative comes into play. Kant thinks there is absolutely an evidence-based principle to be moral. And he grounds it in reason and human beings themselves. His ideas make sense when you start thinking "okay lets say I am free to make my own values and must have a good relationship with my values, what is an objective way to evaluate this so I can be morally good?" Kant becomes a good starting point and he claims that you don't need any external objective way/method of evaluation other than the reason afforded to you by nature as a human being and then he spends a lot of pages elucidating how this type of a system would work.
Both Nietzsche and Kant are worth reading if you want to understand morality in general, even though Nietzsche fundamentally disagreed with Kant that there can be an objectively correct mode of evaluation.
What I have learned about neuroscience and philosophy is this: most people are not willing to invest as much time in small pursuits versus understanding the machinery of their mind and what will actually let them understand themselves with more clarity.
Understanding the self loop. The strange self loop. Seeing that the thing that is doing the observing inside of us is the whole and that from within our own system, we cannot completely reason about ourselves. The incompleteness theorem.
We have named it we call it the default mode network. It is essentially a recursive predictive machine. It only stops when we die. It is essentially making predictions about reality constantly. It is retrieving previous state and associating at the current state to make decisions. What it associates with previous memory and current state are encoding of our hormonal state and mental state at that point in time.
You can call it emotions. You can try and reason about it. It just exists. At some level, you just have to learn to let it be. All of the sophisticated words of psychology and trying to describe the machinery from within the machinery. It’s useful, you need a guide to live life. To keep the machinery and coding clean and not over, indexing on states that aren’t useful. But it all boils down to some pretty simple things. And when you see that the observer is the observed, and that it is all a part of the whole of the self, things become more manageable, for me, at least.
Take grief for example. What is grief? It is a prediction error. An expectation of some past state that the prediction machinery keeps expecting to come up one way, but it comes up another. And when it does come up as an error it hurts. It’s OK to experience it and to embrace it even. But it’s also OK to see it for what it is. We can’t escape the machine. But we can step outside of it briefly and watch it at work and acknowledge what it actually is.
Very good in theory. In practice, how do you actually understand yourself? I have done plenty of meditation and plenty of reading on mental health and psychology. I still don't understand why I specifically act the way I do.
Nonjudgemental self observation is table stakes. And I mean as much of the time as you can manage (Eventually all the time).
Did you include meeting with a therapist? The problem is that they have to reveal you things you don't generally want to admit, so it takes a bit of time (time which I find absolutely wasted) and depending on the therapist, they might not tell you immediately about your inconsistencies.
The problem I have with modern therapy is it that it operates completely within the frame of oneself. They will very carefully walk with you inside of your own narrative, bringing you to a better place of operation within that framework of the self.
Having thought about it some, I have been concluded that there’s only so far one can get when operating within that narrative. There’s only so much they can help with until you yourself can see that the “I” is it itself a machine generating the narrative, but also something else and more than just that narrative that is constantly running in our brains. It is something that can be observed. The observer is the observed as Krishnamurti would say.
As long time meditator, I find that there is nothing that is hidden from ourselves if we look. Meditation is one of the few ways to begin to access the whole and step outside of the narrative loop. You can also try psychedelics, but that’s riskier. A good trip might save you a decade of therapy. A bad one might genuinely imbalance your brains machinery. In some sense, the time is wasted. However, if you genuinely spend this time learning to observe yourself, this is very much a way of being that is not wasted in my opinion.
A therapist is generally going to work with you inside of a particular framework and way of stepping towards a particular way of operating. It sort of like the long or hard way of solving a math problem before you learned underlying theory of whatever problem you were working on.
You put very well into words why therapy felt off for me. I haven't been meditating for too long, but the perspective definitely shifts once you start turning the attention inwards, instead of following the narrative that the mind creates.
My recommendation to any of those interested: The Mind Illuminated by John Yates. Great intro to the meditation practice. Once you have some understanding of the general technique Goenka's 10 day vipassana courses is a great opportunity for deep introspective work.
True, I have not fully understood the direction therapists go to, apart from expliciting your thought process.
My interpretation of therapy is that it helps you feel aligned with you. It will remove the surface contradictions and counter-actions. But if your deeper you has concluded that you should be evil (assuming there is no contradictions in this view - and there always is), therapy will probably help you too. As long as you are aligned with yourself.
They prioritize you. Not the others.
There is something incredibly important about a therapist I would not discard. And that is the human connection. We are hard wired for this and most often what people need out of a therapist is being seen. Another human being to fully and unerringly see you. To get to know you well enough to simulate /your/ thought loop and reflect it back to you, potentially with some meaningful observations. But that knowing that some other human sees you is mostly what therapy is about to me, some exceptions, of course, but in general
Also: incompleteness theorem again. The system cannot fully observe itself. A close friend can also do this too. In fact they are better at it than a therapist if you are open with the friend.
Also evil is a moral inclination and hard to discuss easily in this frame. Very little that is inherent in our machinery is disinclined towards evil or good. As social animals we must teach those values and hold them up. Different discussion :)
> If you were asked: “Would it be good if this 0day was used to apprehend a terrorist?” you would probably say “this is good”. If you were asked “would it be good if this 0day is used to arrest someone and then torture and waterboard him 183 times?”, you would probably say “this is bad”. So if your 0day was used to capture KSM, it is probably good? Or bad? Things get very complicated very quickly.
This is a version of the very classic problems "does the end justify the means" (should one torture a terrorist to prevent other terrorist acts). Much to the chagrin of utilitarians everywhere, the answer to that question is NO, because answering yes leads to a bottomless hole of infinite evil.
This is too simplistic an argument re utilitarianism. It assumes torture definitely works, and that there’s no further consequences. Many utilitarians might say “no” too, given that there is no persuasive evidence that torture is a superior intelligence-gathering method to well-conducted non-coercive interrogation; and that it’s likely to produce unreliable information alongside whatever truths it elicits. It’s a decidedly grey world.
US TV shows in the years after 9/11 are hard to watch now because they're plagued with pro torture scenes. I don't know when exactly but it seemed to have disappeared.
As someone who is now skewing towards the older side of the tech world (55 this year).
It’s a journey. There isn’t some point where you’ll suddenly find you are now “wise” and understand yourself.
Those moments do appear - but a few years later you’ll likely realise that it was only relevant for that time of your life and things have changed. What might have worked and served you well then may not be the right thing for now.
Getting locked into a way of thinking or behaving is a recipe for being old before your time.
Try and apply the agile principles - do a retro - is it still working, what should keep doing, what should you stop doing?
And - the best time to start doing something good is now. Doesn’t matter if you should have done it 20 years ago. Regret can be disabling.
Try and be nice to people. We don’t know what is happening in other people’s worlds.
[edit] And be kind to yourself. Self compassion is underrated. Forgive yourself. You are human. Not perfect. And you don’t need to be. Show yourself some love.
Dang these are really not at all common advice/reflections.
> 1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.
I think certainly your actions are maybe that paramount to the world because it has so many actors, but they are certainly important to you. The actions that we take on a daily basis nudge nudge nudge us to becoming something else. I think its something worth focusing on but not to the point it makes you anxious.
Thanks for the thoughtful piece.
> The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
Hard disagree with part of this. Reason is an intellectual construct, that has a basis in logic. (Neuroscience not finding a division: sure. Just like electrical engineering doesn't see a dichotomy between Microsoft Word and Firefox.)
Reasoning isn't separated from emotion because reasoning needs inputs. Some inputs are secondary: the result of other reasoning. Some are non-negotiable facts from the world. But some primary inputs that go into reasoning are determined by values and desires. E.g. "I feel it would be nice obtain such and such a result in the world" (hard reasoning on how to get it ensues).
I don’t have the link right now, but I recall a study of some sort that examined brain activity and decision making. The “emotion” part lit up first, then the “reasoning” part.
Essentially, we make decisions based on emotion, then come up with an explanation for the decision that was already made. We form a memory that says the explanation was why we made the decision, but it was actually the emotion. In other words, by default, we’re rationalizing, not rational.
I think the issue is precisely the rationalising part.
Let's assume I have pre-decided something: if the fruit weighs over 100g, I'll buy it, otherwise I won't.
I can then measure and find out. My emotions -- based on looking at the fruit -- may mislead me here.
Now what about "likely to weigh more than 100g"?
Here it's really easy to lie to yourself.
But if you set conditions for what counts as likely before you know what they'll be used for, and you stick to them, you can make a decision based on reason.
There is no way to decide 100g is the threshold divorced from emotion, however -- unless it's rationally derived from something else emotionally based.
The "rationalisation" bit comes from us not making decisions for the reasons we think we are -- or in the way we claim to be.
To quote a 17c vulgarity, reason is a whore.
Why does this supremely valuable extra information my body is feeding me tell me to stop running, sit down and eat ice cream while watching 400 short videos? Like, that's much worse advice than I get from flipping a coin!
One of rare articles here that is actually worth reading.
1st one requires that you actually care
2nd one relevance depends on what are you doing, not everyone works on airplane software
3rd one, novelty for me
When I read titles like these, I expect a relatively low value article.
This has probably been the highest value such article I've read in years. You've phrased item 3 better than I have been trying to for years after my own journey in realizing this.
Thank you.
Here, you can find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constructed_emotion to be useful in articulating the following.
> 3. The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
Guessing: Essentially that's psychology. And Human psychology is itself emergent behavior cannot be directly traced back to neuroscience. Logic, that is another thing, which primarily is used for understanding and reconstruct retainable after emotional experiences.
It's not psychology, it's just wrong. You can point to the parts of the brain (more accurately the body and brain) that handle reason and emotions, and they're physically distinct.
Also, reason is essentially a combination of pattern recognition and abstraction, and emotion is a set of spontaneous limbic responses.
Which is not to say there's no relationship between them, or that the grey area where they overlap isn't unusually interesting.
But it's a wild overreach to say the distinction is a cultural construct and not grounded in (largely) mammalian biology.
Points 1 and 2 are also questionable. They're not novel opinions, they have philosophical names (more or less consequentialism vs deontology, with some wrinkles), and they can be - and have been - hotly debated.
I don't see them as evidence of maturity or of immaturity, more of a considered moral position that not everyone agrees with.
Our measurements of the brain are derived from small samples, have a bunch of weird priors encoded in them and are mostly correlational, so I don't think we can make strong statements like in your first paragraph.
The theory of constructed emotion doesn’t say anything about the relation of emotions to reasoning.
My read:
1. Emotion has no biological marker, which refute the idea of mechanical connection between brain (and other body parts) to emotion
2. Reasoning, by general feeling, is a mental process carried out by brain primarily, but has a seemingly much stronger connection to biological signals
3. What I was inferring from the theory of constructive emotion, is that emotion really is a form of higher level reasoning. It's higher than the typical reasoning, so that it's connection with biological signals are extenuated and more indirect
I don't remember the words of the book.
This connection between reasoning and emotion is primarily my own rudimentary idea. Can be seen as an expolation of the theory.
It seems very tenuous to me to characterize a biological process as “reasoning” only because it doesn’t map to certain biological markers. And we know that emotions are significantly influenced by processes outside the brain, in particular gut biology.
I cannot be the only one who read the title wrong
You're not, I'm sorry to say! I was only quickly scanning the HN front page, but still.
Does that say something about steps required in our own maturation processes?
I agree fully with the point about integrating emotion in your decision making. Earlier I used to get stuck in decisions since I had the need to be rational. Which is in it self an emotion I guess - since need is an emotion? Now my life is much simpler.
> 1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.
maybe not 0day stuff, but breaking the build is something that mature people have learned not to do. What are the rewards for move fast and break things for people?
3. Emotion motivates everything that we do. It's just a question of what emotions are you considering and what emotions are you prioritizing.
Reasoning is taking all emotions into context and focusing on actions that align with certain emotions.
Wonderfully written. I’m intrigued by the section about emotion. It seems like no coincidence that it follows the section about seeing beyond monocausal determinism.
Ahh these are fun. They come up often when thinking about consciousness.
If you like these, you might be interested in the book, I Am A Strange Loop
Being able to detach from your thinking while you are thinking, that's difficult and indeed very useful. I found that more often in llm than human beings.
> Monocausal determinism is an illusion, and largely does not exist outside of computer debugging.
Also: quite often does not exist inside computer debugging, either.
The title made me think the author is some kind of whisky
I don't particularly disagree with what the author has written about, but the jargon and complex wording is really annoying to read.
If this were written on a single subject, like engineering philosophy, then fine. But writing a multi-subject article requires simpler language so those who may be familiar with one thing but not the other can understand everything.
I find it hard to trust the intelligence of someone who uses words like "dichotomy", "meta-cognition", and "monocausal determinism" - language like this is purely performative. Let's not be performative, who are you trying to impress with your big words?
We use specific words in writing to mean specific things; there is no exact synonym for 'dichotomy' in the English language. The word is very common in academic and non-academic literature.
Meta-cognition is a compound word, where both parts are widely known, and the combination should be pretty obvious.
'Monocausal determinism' is different, very specific, and probably only known to a minority of readers. Determinism, the idea that everything within a system happens exactly according to cause and effect, comes from ontology, which is the study of existence and our place in the world. Mono derives from old greek single. Monocausal determinism is the idea that everything within a system derives from a single cause.
It is not a writers duty to be understood by everyone. Sure is nice, but more difficult to pull of, and often futile.
You appear to define words you don’t immediately understand at this point in time as ‘performative’, ie used only to show off.
An odd position to take.
If you don’t know a word just look it up, you may well learn something.
I know what all of these words mean. My point is that these are esoteric words that don't fit into the article's purpose or for the article's audience. The author would have gotten his point across far easier if he were to have first contextualized these words, or defined them himself.
Pedagogy is very important in writing. Without care for the reader, these words come off as performative.
The thing is, these words are both incredibly precise and compact. So I’m very happy that the author uses them, as it means I can get the meaning without lowest common denominator fluff or volume.
Have I always known what these words meant? No, but it’s the reward for a habit of right-clicking every word and looking up the definition - which also stretches your cognitive capacity over time so it’s worth doing for purely selfish reasons.
Your particular interpretation of the author's choice in words tells us more about your psychological makeup than the author.
Take the "meta-cognition" advice to heart and perform some self-debugging in order to determine what exactly in your psyche made you react in this way.
The Old-guard is a good alternative to greybeards, no?
Greybeard is not sexist.
> Monocausal determinism is an illusion, and largely does not exist outside of computer debugging.
I work in trading with a lot of software engineers, and one thing I noticed is that these cannot reason about uncertainty if their lives depended on it. Their way to approach any problem is like you debug code: there must be a specific code path that was followed that led to that outcome. But markets aren't like this, and things happen for no reason, or are better modelled as if happening for no reason.
This is also the reason why I don't really think "software engineers" are real engineers, because real engineers can reason about uncertainty.
You are what you do, I think it's expected that if you spend your life reasoning in one framework, atrophies your practice at any other framework.
I agree with a lot of the first point but the expression does seem to lend an air of futility to caring about your impacts which I hope wasn't the intention. I do whole heartedly disagree with everyone believing they are the hero of their own story - while there sure are a subset of people who will justify screwing others (or at least bury their heads in the sand), there's also a subset of people that are happy to revel in schadenfreude. all that aside, the author's beliefs probably do apply to his target audience.
1. All serious cognitive philosophy since at least Kant has supported the idea of separate faculties -- in his case, specifically the four chambers [`--` quantitative sensitivity, `-+` qualitative perceptivity, `+-` causal judgement, `++` modal reason].[1] This is also at the root of the induction vs. deduction [vs. abduction] debate, which had been raging for at least 2,200 years before Kant.
2. Even our pre-gallilean understanding of neuroscience arrived at the same conclusion, though in hilariously abstract terms: 'fast thinking' vs. 'slow thinking'. Popularized primarily by a popsci book (?) that frames it like this: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
3. Psychologically the clearest paradigm is Freud's `- Id`/`+ Ego`/`* Super-Ego`, which is not nearly as discredited as his famous theories about parental lust would imply. If you asked your psychiatrist(/local research psychologist) about it today, they'd ofc use less medieval words for the same concepts -- roughly 'unconscious', 'cognition', and 'executive', in order.[2]
4. In cognitive science more broadly, a lot of the binaries discussed on Wikipedia's Mathematical Model article[3] are getting at this delineation.
5. Eastern philosophy has plenty of stuff on this dichotomy; in fact, I'd argue their discussion of it is predicated upon its existence and the various harmful states it can create if left unexamined. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_logico-epistemology
On a 'logical' level, the case for a separation of at least two types of thinking seems clear: any cognitive activity can either call the 'lightweight' model to guess what's happening (and be right 95% of the time), or call the 'superheavy' model to iteratively reason through webs of beliefs.
Sure, any call probably uses more than 0.0001% of both so they're not mutually exclusive, but I think the qualitative diffence is clear.
The sentiment is true in a bit more subtle of a way, I will admit... It's hard to articulate in brief (/at all), but I've become fascinated with the way the presence of the higher faculties sometimes seems to completely transform the lower ones, unlocking whole new affordances. Like the existence of a new structure of a higher level of complexity completely changing the behavior of nearby cellular automata. If you'll excuse the anthropomorphization of abstract patterns for moment: it reminds me of how a competent leader can unlock whole new affordances for the individuals on their team without actually directly changing the individuals themselves.
Like, consider how we have have tons of both instincts & intuitions related to language use -- speaking, writing, listening, etc. Chimpanzees & bonobos share many of our incredibly advanced intuitive abilities (e.g. manual dexterity, social 'theory of mind'/empathy, etc.), but they are categorically unable to pick those up. In this way the super-ego didn't add funtionality to our species, and it didn't even really multiply it geometrically (?) -- it seems much closer to an exponentiation of capability.[4]
TL;DR: Acknowledging the fallibility and inherently-subconscious basis of reason is a noble goal, but abandoning the Idea altogether is misleading. IMHO!
[1]: http://staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk/ppp/ksp1/toc.html
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_therapy#Basis
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_model#Classificat...
[4]: Here's to hoping that this fourth rung is the last one, at least for a while! Cause if there's a fifth one, and AI discovers and produces it... yikes. Truely alien ASI would follow, rather than just ASI-as-huge-but-fundamentally-grokkable-AGI.)
Author here. To clarify: when I talk about dichotomy in this context, I refer to the idea that these two systems are in opposition, and that ignoring one system (and set of data) is somehow enlightened.
There's no point in denying that both emotions and rational thought exist, and that different regions in the brain are responsible for them. I do advocate pretty explicitly that all information sources should be considered when making decisions, including emotions - as a lot of them carry actual important non-verbalized information.
Point 3 was heavily influenced by reading the book "Descartes Error", fwiw, and I recommend that book to pretty much everybody.
The PopSci book you're thinking of is "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman