# How People Think
source: https://ift.tt/Sr2JLO5 tags: #literature #insights #favorites uid: 202212291148 —
1. Everyone belongs to a tribe and underestimates how influential that tribe is on their thinking.
2. What people present to the world is a tiny fraction of what’s going on inside their head.
When you are keenly aware of your own struggles but blind to others’, it’s easy to assume you’re missing some skill or secret that others have. Sometimes that’s true. More often you’re just blind to how much everyone else is making it up as they go, one challenge at a time.
3. Prediction is about probability and putting the odds of success in your favor. But observers mostly judge you in binary terms, right or wrong.
4. We are extrapolating machines in a world where nothing too good or too bad lasts indefinitely.
Good times plant the seeds of their destruction through complacency and leverage, and bad times plant the seeds of their turnaround through opportunity and panic-driven problem-solving.
We know that in hindsight. It’s almost always true, almost everywhere.
But we tend only to know it in hindsight because we are extrapolating machines. Drawing straight lines when forecasting is more straightforward than imagining how people might adapt and change their behavior.
5. There are limits to our sanity. Optimism and pessimism always overshoot because the only way to know the boundaries of either is to go a little bit past them.
The only way to find the limits of people’s moods — the only way to find the top — is to keep pushing until we’ve gone too far, when we can look back and say, “Ah, I guess that was the limit.”
It’s tempting to watch things go from boom to bust and think, “Why are people doing this? Are they crazy?”
Probably not. They’re just rationally looking for the limits of what everyone else can handle.
6. Ignoring that people who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you won’t like.
One day, I realized with all these people I was jealous of, I couldn’t just choose little aspects of their life. I couldn’t say I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality. You have to be that person. Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desires, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? If you’re not willing to do a wholesale, 24/7, 100 percent swap with who that person is, then there is no point in being jealous.
this is exactly what the article about envy says
7. We are pushed toward maximizing efficiency in a way that leaves no room for error, despite room for error being the most important factor of long-term success.
So many people strive for efficient lives, where no hour is wasted. But when no hour is wasted you have no time to wander, explore something new, or let your thoughts run free — which can be some of the most productive forms of thought. Psychologist Amos Tversky once said “the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” A successful person purposely leaving gaps of free time on their schedule can feel inefficient. And it is, so not many people do it.
8. The best story wins.
George Packer echoes the same:
The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires.
This drives you crazy if you assume the world is swayed by facts and objectivity — if you assume the best idea wins. But it’s how people think. And it’s actually optimistic, because when you realize you can change the world by explaining an old thing in a new way vs. creating something new, you start to see so much potential.
9. We are swayed by complexity when simplicity is the real mark of intelligence and understanding.
Simplicity is the hallmark of truth— we should know better, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction. When you give for an academic audience a lecture that is crystal clear from alpha to omega, your audience feels cheated and leaves the lecture hall commenting to each other: “That was rather trivial, wasn’t it? The sore truth is that complexity sells better.
See also: Minimizing Complexity Should Be The Goal 202212271453
One is that length is often the only thing signaling effort and thoughtfulness. Consumers of information rarely try to dissect an argument objectively; that’s too hard. When reading they just try to figure out whether the author is credible or not. Does this sound right? Does it pass the smell test? Has the author put more than a few seconds of thought into this argument? Length and complexity are often the only indication that an argument was thoughtful vs. a random gut feeling.
A second is that things you don’t understand create a mystique around people who do. When you understand things I don’t, I have a hard time judging the limits of your knowledge in that field, which makes me more prone to taking your views at face value.
10. Your willingness to believe a prediction is influenced by how much you want or need that prediction to be true.
There are so many things in life that we think are true because we desperately want them to be true. People do this with their relationships, careers, investments, political views — anything forward-looking is subject to being swayed by your desire to have a pleasant life.
I feel this way about many things in my relationship
The same thing happens in investing, when people eagerly listen to forecasters whose track record is indistinguishable from guessing. Same in politics. The more uncertain the endeavor, and the higher the stakes of the outcome, the more you are persuaded by the most pleasing answer. And if you tell people what they want to hear you can be wrong indefinitely without penalty.
11. It’s hard to empathize with other people’s beliefs if they’ve experienced parts of the world you have not. 202212291713
The gap between how you feel as an outsider vs. how you feel when you’re experiencing something firsthand can be a mile wide.
There are theories that big wars tend to happen 20-40 years apart because that’s the amount of time it takes to cycle through a new generation of voters, politicians, and generals who aren’t scarred by the last war. Other political trends — social rights, economic theories, budget priorities — follow a similar path.
You can’t empathize with something if you haven’t experienced it; maybe this is true of wars as well
It’s not that people forget. It’s that empathy and open-mindedness cannot recreate what genuine fear and uncertainty feel like.
My guess is that more than half of all disagreements — personal, domestic, international, financial — would disappear if you could see the world through the lens of your opponent, and had experienced what they have in life.
12. An innocent denial of your own flaws, caused by the ability to justify your mistakes in your own head in a way you can’t do for others.
“It is easier to recognize other people’s mistakes than our own.”
I would add my own theory: It’s easier to blame other people’s mistakes on stupidity and greed than our own.
You see someone doing something crazy and think, “Why in the world would you do that?” Then you sit down with them, hear about their life, and after a while you realize, “Ah, I kind of get it now.”
Everyone is a product of their own life experiences, few of which are visible or known to other people.
What makes sense to me might not make sense to you because you don’t know what kind of experiences have shaped me and vice versa.
13. An underappreciation for how small things compound into extraordinary things. 202212291926
The question, “Why don’t you agree with me?” can have infinite answers.
Sometimes one side is selfish, or stupid, or blind, or uninformed.
But usually a better question is, “What have you experienced that I haven’t that would make you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?”
The real magic of evolution is that it’s been selecting traits for 3.8 billion years.
The time, not the little changes, is what moves the needle. Take minuscule changes and compound them by 3.8 billion years and you get results that are indistinguishable from magic.
14. The gap between knowing what to do and actually getting people to do it can be enormous.
It wasn’t the stress or responsibility. It was so basic. “Getting my patients to do what I ask of them,” she said.
I didn’t understand at first, but it made sense when she explained.
“You have an appointment with a patient and you say, ‘I need you to get this lab done, see this specialist, pick up this medicine.’ And they come back a month later and they haven’t done any of it.” They either couldn’t afford it, or it was too intimidating, or they didn’t have time.
So many things in life work like that. Investing, relationships, health, careers. In each, what we should do isn’t that hard — it’s actually doing it that requires moving mountains.
In many cases this is caused by the appeal of hacks — shortcuts and tricks to get what you want without paying the price. The patient doesn’t want to eat better and exercise; they want a pill to fix everything. The investor doesn’t want to wait a decade for their money to compound; they want a stock that will double next week.
Issac Asimov said, “Science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom,” which sums up a lot of things quite well.
15. We’re bad at imagining how change will feel because there’s no context in dreams.
Good and bad changes are hard to imagine, because you don’t know the full context behind them.
Future fortunes are imagined in a vacuum, but reality is always lived with the good and bad taken together, competing for attention.
16. We are blind to how fragile the world is due to a poor understanding of rare events.
This is what the antifragile book is about
If next year there’s a 1% chance of a new disastrous pandemic, a 1% chance of a crippling depression, a 1% chance of a catastrophic flood, a 1% chance of political collapse, and on and on, then the odds that something bad will happen next year — or any year — are … uncomfortably high.
Littlewood’s Law tells us to expect a miracle every month. The flip side is to expect a disaster roughly as often.
17. The inability to accept hassle, nonsense, and inefficiency frustrates people who can’t accept how the world works.
Is this me? #self-reflection
If you recognize that BS is ubiquitous, then the question is not “How can I avoid all of it?” but, “What is the optimal amount to put up with so I can still function in a messy and imperfect world?”
The thing people miss is that there are bad things that become bigger problems when you try to eliminate them. I think the most successful people recognize when a certain amount of acceptance beats purity.
A unique skill, an underrated skill, is identifying the optimal amount of hassle and nonsense you should put up with to get ahead while getting along.
Franklin Roosevelt — the most powerful man in the world whose paralysis meant the aides often had to carry him to the bathroom — once said, “If you can’t use your legs and they bring you milk when you want orange juice, you learn to say ‘that’s all right,’ and drink it.”
Every industry and career is different, but there’s universal value in that mentality, accepting hassle when reality demands it.
How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably
- Author: blog.stephsmith.io
- Full Title: How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably
- Document Tags: #life-advice #productivity #literature #insights #favorites #advice #howto
- URL: https://blog.stephsmith.io/how-to-be-great/
- uid: 202210031623
Highlights
- Perhaps “great’, is just “good”, but repeatable. (View Highlight)
- Note: I think this hits the nail on the head when it comes to my recent feelings of unproductivity. I’m too often drifting into mental and emotional mediocrity and expecting bursts of greatness to lift me up. When instead, I should put in the (potentially difficult) effort to be consistently good, good, good, good until it hurts to be good anymore. That’s how long it’ll take for me to become great. Becoming good means signing up for things and actually going through with them. Being good means promising myself I’ll do something and actually doing it. Being good means recognizing that I’m going down spirals of online distraction (which I don’t even have much left of by the way, because I’m starting to get sick of Reddit and none of my other online distractions are that great), and pulling myself out and doing something else with my time. All these things involve me being just “good”, and I’ve consistently failed in doing them recently.
- Moreover, being “great” is not about being better than someone else. It is about being dependable and disciplined, and ultimately it is earned. (View Highlight)
- “Until you work as hard as those you admire, don’t explain away their success as luck.” - James Clear, Atomic Habits (View Highlight)
- Tags: #quotes
- “If you cannot do great things, do small things a great number of times”. (View Highlight)
- It’s easy to wake up whenever you “feel like it”. It’s hard to stick to a routine of getting up at 6AM. It’s easy to pivot from side project to side project, focusing on the new shiny object of the month. It’s hard to stick with a side project for years, many of which may not be profitable for a long while. It’s easy to give up on someone when you hit a roadblock or the next potential partner becomes available. It’s hard to be faithful and invest in a relationship for decades. (View Highlight)
- ’the addiction to having success is what makes you feel unsuccessful at the times when you’re not feeling the immediate dopamine hit of your work ’succeeding’ at that precise moment.’ (View Highlight)
- Note: this is so true.
- “The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.” - Atomic Habits, James Clear (View Highlight)
- If you invest time into solving for what leads to success continuously, you will reap those benefits for years to come. (View Highlight)
- Note: I have noticed this again and again and again. When I set myself up for success down the line and see that my preparation has helped me in whatever situation I’m working on, that genuinely feels like it’s my competitive advantage. It also makes me more willing to continue to work on setting myself up for success.
- “Moving fast and breaking things” is not a strategy, unless you are clearly defining a process of learning so that in the future, you can “move fast and break less of the same things”. (View Highlight)
- There is one thing to clarify: this habit of progression must come with the right inputs. Being consistent with something leading you in the wrong direction, will unsurprisingly lead you in the wrong direction. So if this is the way you are constantly moving (excluding short periods of local minima), pivot until you determine what the right inputs are. (View Highlight)
- If you’re struggling to identify the right path, create more nodes of optimization. For example: if you’re making changes every year, you only have maybe 80 in your entire life to make. Instead, try testing things intentionally every month or even every week. Pilot a lot and then double down when you have found your path towards “good”. (View Highlight)
- And that’s exactly the point of continuous improvement. Since I believe that we can only ever see “two levels out”, we can’t discover these new inputs without slow, but repeatable change. We must explore 58 and then 59 and then all of a sudden, 61 will appear as this new array of opportunity we had never considered before. (View Highlight)
- “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” - Henri Bergson (View Highlight)
- The interesting outcome of the experiment was that the best photos were produced not by the quality group, but by the quantity group. Why? While the quality group spent their time speculating what perfection may have been, the quantity group took action in testing what was truly great. “It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change: the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle. We are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action” - James Clear, Atomic Habits (View Highlight)
- Note: This article is a really interesting counterpart to Atomic Habits.
- Reading to improve is like watching someone else workout — it does almost nothing for you. To run better, run. To paint better, paint. To write better, write. To build better, build. (View Highlight)
- Note: This is what I’m doing right now. It’s a delicious form of structured procrastination.
Weekly review (Week of June 8th)
Declutter
10 Minute Mind-dump
Currently in a limbo between my two internships (and EE 16B), and trying to use this time that I have effectively before I don’t have this flexibility of time anymore. Generally things are pretty good, and I have a pretty organized system of tasks, and a lot of meaningful things to work on. I just have to make sure I don’t fall into the trap of spending too much time on the wrong things, or thinking that I’m spending time on something productive, but just getting tunnel vision and eventually not finishing the overarching task.
What’s on my mind personally?
Making sure that I’m growing personally, and continuing to be a good person (and continuing to have interesting, important insights based on what I’ve been reading.)
What’s on my mind professionally?
Making sure that I’m keeping up with full-time applications coming out, especially for things like Hudson River Trading (where it seems like they already released the application?) (https://www.hudsonrivertrading.com/careers/job/?gh_jid=82675, https://www.hudsonrivertrading.com/careers/job/?gh_jid=86641).
Making sure I’m performing adequately for research work is pretty important to me right now, especially since these are the days when I don’t have anything going on supposedly, so my output should be a lot higher than it was during my internships.
Reflect
Completed tasks for the past week
- (06/13/2020) [+] Address any answered communication (work / research / personal)
- (06/13/2020) [+] Close all distractions - Do Not Disturb mode
- (06/13/2020) [+] Clean up downloads/screenshots/unejected disks
- (06/13/2020) [+] Audio record one quiz-bowl packet
- (06/13/2020) [+] Process digital inboxes
- (06/13/2020) [+] Clear off my desk
- (06/13/2020) [+] Remove garbage and recycling
- (06/13/2020) [+] Clean computer screen
- (06/13/2020) [+] Daily Review (5/5)
- (06/13/2020) [x] Email 170 profs if they’ve come to a decision (06/17/2020)
- (06/13/2020) [+] connect with gowri
- (06/13/2020) [+] Read a speech from Instapaper
- (06/13/2020) [+] clean iPad apps
- (06/13/2020) [+] Do one packet of quizbowl questions
- (06/13/2020) [+] Audio Quizbowl Studying (3/3)
- (06/13/2020) [+] know my name (add to books list)
- (06/12/2020) [+] matze/mtheme: A modern LaTeX Beamer theme
- (06/12/2020) [+] Amazon Background Information Form - 168345836
- (06/12/2020) [+] Do Amazon background review
- (06/12/2020) [+] last episode of game of zones
- (06/12/2020) [+] Daily Review (4/4)
- (06/12/2020) [+] 3-2-1: Entrepreneurship, habits, and the joy of climbing
- (06/12/2020) [+] Create checklists for daily review and weekly review
- (06/12/2020) [+] look i nicholas zhao
- (06/12/2020) [+] Interview Cake Weekly Problem #294: What’s Wrong with This JavaScript?
- (06/12/2020) [+] Interview Cake Weekly Problem #293: JavaScript Scope
- (06/12/2020) [+] Interview Cake Weekly Problem #296: Binary Search Tree Checker
- (06/11/2020) [+] fix keyboard shortcuts media, move photos to media and make the corresponding changes in the file, then delete the keyboard shortcuts assets folder
- (06/11/2020) [+] Change mobile blog feeds to match desktop ones
- (06/10/2020) [+] look up fitness routines for while staying at home that can sync with fitbit (research)
- (06/10/2020) [+] fill out taxes on credit karma
- (06/10/2020) [+] Algorithms to Live By
- (06/10/2020) [+] advent of code
- (06/09/2020) [+] Check out Shrugs - Slack app
- (06/09/2020) [+] Account ready on the UCB Institutional cluster, Savio.
- (06/09/2020) [+] make slides in beamer
- (06/09/2020) [+] Ways to refine zettelkasten (2/2)
- (06/09/2020) [+] 5 min look at bread
- (06/08/2020) [+] Decline the ship insurance using cigna (07/15/2020)
- (06/08/2020) [+] Wiping Theorem computer
- (06/08/2020) [+] Add each speech to a separate instapaper
- (06/08/2020) [+] Add fuzzy git article to archive
- (06/08/2020) [+] Add learn c++ to archive note
- (06/08/2020) [+] Remove articles from the zettel (2/2)
- (06/08/2020) [+] Download how not to be wrong book and send it to kindle
- (06/08/2020) [+] Decide if obsidian is the app of choice
In reflection, the main tasks that I completed were:
- Putting my speeches on Instapaper
- Declining ship insurance
- Wiping Theorem computer
- Finishing the algorithms book
- Completing my taxes
- Doing a good amount of Interview Cake
- Daily review and weekly review checklists
- Quizbowl audacity setup and testing
Overall, I think this was a pretty average week in terms of productivity, maybe slightly above average? Idk, I’ll have to see as I do more of these.
Review calendar items and meetings from the past week
Monday:
Had meeting with 170 profs, it was pretty cool, and the professors seemed to be very nice. Friday:
Didn’t end up having research meeting, but told Lucas about the work that I had done over the past week. Saturday:
Learned how to cook a paratha, and made an aloo paratha.
Had meeting with Varun (for 170 TA interview), which was pretty casual, and I felt pretty at home around him.
Review notes I’ve made over the last week
The highlights were
Conservative viewpoints 202006080227: A compendium of thoughts that I’ve heard in person, from people who aren’t leaning far left like most of my acquaintances.
Cardinal rankings in society 202006110153 - Pretty interesting note about how we do better than animals in ranking ourselves
The weekly review template 202006131906 - Pretty lasting note, that I’m sure I’ll refer back to several times.
Was I able to accomplish my general weekly goals?
✅ Software engineering: 15 hours a week
- 6 hrs, 52 minutes through Saturday. Fell pretty short ❌ Reading: 5 hours a week
- Really need a better way to track this.
- I’ve kind of been lying to beeminder, so I need a better way to track it. But I don’t think I met this. ❌ Active minutes: 10 hours a week 432 minutes (7 hours, 12 minutes). I was pretty close
✅ Talk to at least one new person!
- Talk to Gowri
❌ Try one new thing
- Not reallyyy
Goals and Projects
Were specific goals for this week accomplished?
Didn’t have any specific goals for this week! Will do this starting next week.
Did actions this week helped me reach my monthly/big picture goals?
Goals for June 202006132042 Goals for 2020 202006132045
Monthly:
- Planning to grow physically, by doing more cardio exercise
- Pushed myself mentally with Interview Cake stuff
Annually:
- Mindfulness is my theme for the week, and I’ve been thinking about it more than I have in the past. Just want to be honest with myself, and never losing sight in the moment of what I’m doing or where I’m going.
Plan Ahead
Big-picture goals for next week
- Try reading on laptop instead of Kindle (easier to task, already on laptop anyways)
- Have at least one hour of time in cardio exercise zone
- Play The Stillness of the Wind (game)
- Finish “My life workflow”
Any new weekly goals I want to set?
Map My Future
New ideas for projects or plans
- Keeping up with doing math problems
- Anki for quizbowl stuffs (don’t know if I want to / have the time to go through that grind, but it would be quite fun to get back into quiz bowl again)
uid: 202006131934 tags: #journal