I do think there are a lot of things you can due to get probability more on your side:
- Keep your eyes open for opportunities and look for the upside ("be optimistic" is the woo-woo version), but it's been proven in experiments that you'll catch things others won't
- Only keep friends around you that actually support you. It's really hard to try to make life changes when people are constantly telling you you can't or shitting on your parade.
- Start making analytical choices. Certain fields pay more than others. Certain businesses treat their employees better than others. A lower position at a better company will increase your probability of "bumping" into those people who might be life changing.
- Learn about probability (Fooled by Randomness is a good start). If you constantly expose yourself to more chances of success, _odds are_, you'll start to find more of it.
Source and book recommendation:
Robert H. Frank: Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691167404/su...
> In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine. In Success and Luck, bestselling author and New York Times economics columnist Robert Frank explores the surprising implications of those findings to show why the rich underestimate the importance of luck in success—and why that hurts everyone, even the wealthy.
Good summary in his article in The Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/why-luc...
I said luck isn't as _random_ as some people think it is. You're saying it plays a much bigger role than most people think it does.
These are not mutually exclusive.
It might even emphasize the point -- because it plays a bigger role than most suppose, it is important to understand how to best take advantage of poor (or superior) circumstances.
The knowledge that’s statistically likely to benefit someone that’s poor, may not work from unfortunate circumstances and that happen precisely when it will hurt the situation. That happens as everyone has a fairly unique life.
We also have to rely on if someone misfortune at birth (in some way), happens to be “lucky enough” to encounter the knowledge to hopefully benefit them or as I should say fate decided to allow it.
Some people do everything right contrary to a person doing the opposite and life can reward whoever the unique conditions happened to favor for each person.
Everything is decided at birth if we were to break everything down into cause & effect.
A) You really want to identify gambles with positive expectation. If you constantly expose yourself to “more chances of success” with negative expectation (such as going to the casino for the chance of winning big), you’ll end up ruined.
B) Even if you can identify gambles with positive expectation, the more resources you have initially, the more you can afford to gamble. Thus, people initially deprived of luck might have less chance of catching up, let alone making it big.
So that is where good advice would step in to offer some guidance about how to actually apply this knowledge.
Luck is making the better decision in a timely manner based on incomplete knowledge where each option appears equally valid. However, people generally are poor at calculating probability combined with risk/reward and simply make bad decisions. And sometimes, all choices lead to bad outcomes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19308323
To expand on this; if you are a healthy, intelligent adult I don't accept the idea that sometimes you don't have a choice, that somehow it is all out of your hands. That thinking leads to victimhood which is really an avoidance of taking responsibility for your decisions.
Yes, sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you - but you chose to take on the bear, whether directly or due to some previous decision (that didn't involve a bear at all).
Enjoyed watching "The Gentleman" the other night and a fan of films like Lock Stock, Two Smoking Barrels and the idea of events snowballing from the choices people make (and then the interaction of each individual's ongoing choices). But the situations that they find themselves in were a result of something they did.
Also: Scott Adams, in his book "How to fail..." has a chapter on increasing one's luck. Worth a skim if you haven't checked it out before.
As the proud owner of a 2004 Toyota Corolla and a 2011 Philosophy Minor, this line made my day. Honestly it is just plain good advice.
" Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself." — Rumi
Good quote!
I always feel philosophy is the abode for people who couldn't get sucked in by religion.
The former deals quite a bit with logic (which was my area of focus in undergrad). Classes I took ranged from "baby logic" (predicate logic, first-order-logic), to second-order logic, to mathematical logic (mostly Peano arithmetic), to metalogic (learning how to prove things like Godel's incompleteness), to lambda calculus, to game theory. This was on top of ethics classes, history of philosophy, and other miscellaneous classes (took a very fun seminar by a Yale visiting professor -- I forget his name -- on the philosophy of food). Most of the graduate seminars I took were on philsophy of language and model theory.
Just about every philosophy class had a pretty strong "logic" undercurrent.
And regarding the gp: most philosophy programs will have classes in informal and some even in formal logic, to Goedel’s incompleteness theorems and way beyond.
https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/philosophy/undergraduate/logic-...
Those two topics are discussed in entry level CS courses as well. So I assumed that the fields might be semi-related if they require the same mathematical foundations.
Also, some stereos come with a backup cam. This has to be spliced in though.
HUGE NOTE: I bought a 4.5-star receiver on Crutchfield, but the receiver didn't have Sirius XM on it, so I basically don't have radio (unless I use an app on my phone to stream the radio). I don't listen to the radio often so it's not a huge deal for me, just something to be aware of.
I see a lot of people in tech with inflated ideas of what success means, and they're almost all tied strictly to salary/net worth.
Yeah, having money is nice, but if that's all you base happiness/idea of success on, its going to be a bumpy road.
>There are a lot of self-conscious IT people in the midwest making $70k/year feeling like failures
I understand how this can point of view can develop, but one of the things I'm most grateful for in life is struggling through a slew of minimum-wage jobs out of college before transitioning into tech. That first bump to "tech salary" literally doubled my income over night and it was only 70k in a high COL east coast city. I learned how to live poor, and discovered I could still have a meaningful life while being broke.
Although I still pursue career advancement, it's not just for money. And if it were to all disappear over night (which is the case for a lot of people right now), I'm comforted by the fact that I've already had it "that bad".
As someone who was broke for many years and now is less broke (cash is flowing, there's money in my accounts, but I'm deeply in negative net worth due to student debt), I think you're understating the issue, vastly.
Simply put, money is freedom. If you have it, you can do things people who don't have it can't. If you have enough of it, you can do just about anything. And, I'm not necessarily talking about luxuries, I'm talking about stuff like:
* If you have enough money in the bank, an unexpected car repair is a hassle, rather than a disaster.
* If you can afford to buy a home, then you don't have to worry about being evicted or not having a lease renewed.
* If you have enough money, you can send your kids to a good school and get them off to the best possible start in life.
* If you have an absurd amount of money, you don't need to worry about going bankrupt from getting sick.
As I said, none of these things are luxuries, but, to reach "don't have to worry about medical bankruptcy" levels, or even "I get to own a home and nobody can tell me I can't paint my front door pink" levels takes a huge amount of money relative to the median income today.
> I learned how to live poor, and discovered I could still have a meaningful life while being broke.
That doesn't mean being broke is great, good, or even not all that bad. It just means you've gotten used to it.
> If you have an absurd amount of money, you don't need to worry about going bankrupt from getting sick.
I don't know where you're from, but most rich countries, and even some poorer ones, have free, quality education for all, and health care tends to be nearly free... if you get sick, the government will support you for as long as needed. If you're from a very poor country, sorry about that... maybe you should consider migrating to a better country, if you have skills that are in demand, that's pretty easy nowadays!
Or you live in a country with a socialised medical system.
But Socialism is not the answer.
As Churchill said "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
Socialism is great in concept. In class, which deals with the theoretical, it sounds great. For teachers, who can teach concepts and don't need to deal with the pesky nastiness of the real world, it is the thing to teach.
But in real life, Socialism, and partial socialism, and partial social by other names, are all TERRIBLE for the average dude.
Study history, for real. Look at the countries which have had all the "ism's". Democracy (and in many cases, even autocracy - which is also REALLY bad) are better.
I am not at all wealthy, live simply (no car, no smartphone, no whatever). I moved from the States to a socialy democratic country with an excellent public Medicaire system.
Even so, if I could make it more democratic and less socialistic, I would, and so would anyone else I know. A massive amount of my neighbors have moved to the States or are waiting for papers to do so. Everyone who can afford it has supplemental insurance.
It would be a shame if the States lost what they have right.
Yeah, everyone knows that rich people live longer on average, but most people don't realize how much longer.
> It's worth sticking around to maybe make my little corner of the world a slightly better place.
> Happiness is amazing. It's so amazing, it doesn't matter if it's yours.
> You may not like living much, but you can make the world a better place. So don't give up, because then they've won. And they grow in numbers.
Heh. Unrelated but I've been re-watching a lot of KOTH during quarantine and this line reminded me of a scene from the first season
I'd recommend the following:
1. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
2. 12 Rules for Life - Jordan B Peterson
3. Letters from a self made merchant - John Graham
A note on this, since mentioning Peterson tends to spark controversy: I think I think the people who get the best out of Peterson don't treat him as a guru issuing rules written in stone tablets (in spite of the implication of the book title) but as a provoker of attention/reflection. This is probably generally true of anyone, but especially worth considering here.
I also tend to recommend his university course lectures over his public-directed material; I'm not sure why it seems more moderated, but I'd guess that professional accountability and contextual habits developed before fame have something to do with it.
I've noticed the same thing. I think he's gotten into bad habits commenting on subjects outside of his area of expertise, but I did enjoy his YouTube lectures for the reasons you mentioned
He's smart and thinks. That guy also just happens to be an expert in an area of knowledge.
Smart business choice, this is how you capitalize on ambiguity. Sarcasm as a business model.
But I did have something more specific in mind that I didn’t articulate well: I think he’s successful at provoking attention to some genuinely helpful philosophical questions... and at least calling attention to a segment of knowledge from psych/neuroscience and then to some extent literature and mythology that are relevant to the questions. I can see why the provoke part sometimes overwhelms the rest and limits his audience, he is not without sin, but I think he’s doing more than trading in ambiguous deepities. YMMV, it’s possible someone better educated in those fields can point to something better.
His lectures go more in depth and are not trying to hit a peak of condensed information. As much as Peterson likes nietschze, he can’t write like nietschze, with highly condensed sentences. Peterson has always been better in the long form.
Be it foundational or just currently popular, following up a work by reading it's most talented detractors can multiply it's value to you. Learning about an entirely different philosophical approach will often be more useful to you than reading another book on similar ideas.
Oh, and really good popularizors are rare. Usually the original sources are far better - but by nature much less accessible. So you have a trade off to make.
For some people, that’s really valuable. You see this especially with people who’s prior independent experience didn’t work out very well. Maybe they grew up in an abusive home and want instructions on breaking the cycle and raising their family better. Maybe there was criminal behavior, substance abuse, relationship or career stagnation. For many people, a pre-packaged world view from Religion X can be a big step up from their prior experience, ESPECIALLY when it comes with a supportive community.
The problem, of course, is two fold.
First, life isn’t one-size-fits-all. Eventually the pre-packaged beliefs will be sub-optimal for your personal situation. The better religious communities are flexible enough to accommodate this. The uglier ones lock you down or cut you out.
Second, the pre-packaged beliefs usually assert their own universal and exclusive validity. Even if the one you pick happens to be correct about this, it encourages toxic behaviors that will isolate you from non-community members. And of course the claim is preposterous on its face; The interchangeability of religions undercuts their claims to universal truth.
So, to summarize: Religion is a reasonable place to get a default world view and community, especially if you’re existing beliefs/community aren’t serving you well. Long term they are suboptimal because they don’t adapt to your personal circumstances very well.
The actual pre-packaged beliefs? Meh. I'm less interested than I ever was in arguing the particulars of Paul with anyone. So, to summarize, for me religion is a reasonable place to get a default set of rituals and perhaps community, and long term that's the useful part because the rituals can continue even as my beliefs and circumstances change.
This may also be worth thinking about with respect to healthy eating, exercise, etc. Don't get sucked into a cult, but if signing up for (now-virtual) CrossFit or Pilates classes, or following Starting Strength, gets you doing something, it's a concrete physical ritual that can stay with you even as you change :)
> I find it useful to consider the pre-baked objectives as a sort of rough draft I can push against, but more importantly, I've discarded the world view and taken the concrete. For Christianity, that's bread, wine, the holidays, the rhythm, the community, the directive to support charities generously.
That’s pretty interesting to me. I certainly agree that the rituals and community are the best part of organized religion. I’ve enjoyed them in the past and I miss them now. I actually considered returning to the church when I had a young family for exactly these reasons.
I just can’t untangle the practical from the philosophical. The community is great in and of itself, but it exists explicitly to advance a particular set of beliefs. It’s hard to take the community without the beliefs. At least, I haven’t been able to do it successfully. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say I could have, but I would have felt like a fraud. I think that would limit my ability to integrate.
> This may also be worth thinking about with respect to healthy eating, exercise, etc. Don't get sucked into a cult, but if signing up for (now-virtual) CrossFit or Pilates classes, or following Starting Strength, gets you doing something, it's a concrete physical ritual that can stay with you even as you change :)
Absolutely. The principal applies to many places. Employers, even. Many start ups want you to drink the kool-ade, own the vision, play ping pong... you can opt out of that and just do the engineering and paycheck!
No. The community is above the beliefs.
Humans benefit greatly from acting within a group. Yes, it always grows a "here are The Best Practices" division. (It's just a sad side effect.) But one can identify with a smaller and humbler subgroup with the wink-wink approach to rules: switch to the higher levels, seek new goals, etc.
As an atheist, I took me years to notice this minority. Talking with deeply religious people often reveals that stuff they are actively pursuing is not only very interesting, but it's far above what you can achieve just by pondering about some Nietzsche text in your armchair taking mental notes "oh this definitely goes on the top of my todo list now". The group is the magic ingredient to the real-life results.
On this forum, a good analogy is the difference between a huge Agile© event and a small team-only standup meeting.
Disturbingly big part of modern atheism is actually sheer laziness. If I've written my final conclusion "Therefore all religion is useless." it's easy to come up with hundred semi-honest-but-true arguments to reach that conclusion. There is a lot that goes under the radar, like supporting the self-improvement of your children/family and coping with bad problems in your own life, chiefly including suffering and death. Atheism mostly says: better be rich and be able to afford some good professionals.
IMHO the Socratic Dialogues, as basically the foundational text of all Western Philosophy, and being pretty friendly and approachable, are the right place to begin. Helps you figure out how to figure it out for yourself. You can make your own calls from there.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180320101920/http://mikhailape...
His other health choices don't really help his case. He went to Russia to get weened off of an addiction because "North American hospitals had misdiagnosed him". The Russian doctors are "not influenced by pharmaceutical companies to treat the side-effects of one drug with more drugs," and they “have the guts to medically detox someone from benzodiazepines.”"
On the other hand, removing vegetables from diet goes completely against the currect best knowledge. You should eat a lot of vegetables, preferably raw. Like, okay, you can cook your broccoli; but then eat some other raw vegetable, and some fruit (uncooked, without extra sugar). -- However, I have never heard Peterson recommend removing vegetables as a general advice for others; it was always in context of finding out what works for his autoimmune disorder, because the standard medicine didn't help him much, so he experimented with crazy things.
So, these are two different things. One is highly controversial, the other not at all.
Many research bodies and authorities on health have flipped the food pyramid around. The CSRIO supports a low carb diet over the traditional carb heavy food pyramid. She’s just repeating what the experts have said. That part is the opposite of pseudoscience, and it’s lazy parroting.
Jordan has reactions to foods we don’t normally have a problem with, as does his daughter. They share methods that work for them and hold up the idea of eliminating everything and then working foods back in as they prove to be okay for them.
There’s been countless documentaries about the effect of big pharmaceutical money on the likelihood of certain drugs being prescribed by doctors and the money the docs make. It’s standard fare in America, no judgement about that from me.
Apart from a few eccentric behaviours and saying dumb things occasionally like his comments on godel, Jordan states the obvious in an inflammatory way and people are surprised when he’s actually rational under the flames. Zzz.
“”I can also, strangely enough, tolerate vodka and bourbon.”
The idea that alcohol, one of the most well-documented toxic substances, is among the few things that Peterson’s body will tolerate may be illuminating. It implies that when it comes to dieting, the inherent properties of the substances ingested can be less important than the eater’s conceptualizations of them—as either tolerable or intolerable, good or bad. What’s actually therapeutic may be the act of elimination itself.“
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...
When did he say that?
yikes
In. Simple. Ideas.
Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back
Rule 2: Treat yourself like you would someone you are responsible for helping
Rule 3: Make friends with people who want the best for you
Rule 4: Compare yourself with who you were yesterday, not with who someone else is today
Rule 5: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world
Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
Rule 8: Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie
Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
Rule 10: Be precise in your speech
Rule 11: Do not bother children when they are skate-boarding
Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/01/jo...
1-4 are "respect yourself".
5 is.... I think legitimate bad advice as worded, but I'm sure as expounded it makes more sense. Maybe its designed as a hook (the "wtf" that drives views).
6-8 are general advice you'd find anywhere
9-11 are how to effectively deal with other people without saying the word "empathy"
12 is kinda spurious
I've never seen someone turn the Golden Rule inward like this. I like it.
> Rule 5: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
Other people will do what they do. The only thing you have control over is your own reaction. Most adults understand this.
> Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world
Nobody's house is in perfect order. Internalizing the tu quoque fallacy of relevance is not good philosophy.
> Rule 8: Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie
I'd mention the "Jew in the attic" thought experiment, but there's probably some way to successfully hide the Jew without telling a "lie" if you're clever enough about defining what a "lie" is and what precise statements you make.
> Rule 11: Do not bother children when they are skate-boarding
Unless this conflicts with Rule 5, I suppose.
(I don't have any issue with the statements I didn't respond to.)
It mentions studies (or parables? Who cares?) of people taking better care of their dogs post-surgery than they take of themselves. It rings true, and speaks to anyone who thinks or knows they aren't taking good enough care of themselves.
Has certainly been an enjoyable read so far.
Of course if you are a horrible person you might dislike them for their good behaviours. But if you're a horrible person chances are you'll mess up your kids with or without that rule.
There is a difference between not being able to control your child fully, and not even trying. In my experience, most parents are trying, but I have met one or two who did not care, seemingly believing that whatever their kid does is perfectly okay, because hey, it's just a small child... completely ignoring that fact that other kids around, of the same age, are well behaved.
Now, this strategy of making excuses may work well while the child is small. Like, adults will look at a misbehaving 4 years old and only think "what a horrible child... and what a horrible parent" and walk away. But as your child grows up, the environment becomes less forgiving, and it becomes more difficult for you to instill good habits. If the child's behavior irritates you, as a parent, you can bet that it irritates unrelated people at least twice as much. This creates a spiral, when the environment and your child become hostile to each other.
On the other hand, if you succeed to instill pleasant behavior in your child, it can create a positive spiral, when other people enjoy the presence of your child and by their attention reward the nice behavior, and your child has more pleasant life and more opportunities to further improve social skills.
It’s about setting a boundary where it is most productive, children who are not socialised by the age of four hit problems in later life. Parents and kids who go to war help no one.
I was fortunate enough to grow up with good parents, but there were times where they were misguided and myself disobeying them helped us both in the long run.
Those times you disobeyed were also met with decades of limiting your agency. Not letting you cover yourself in peanut butter or fight with other kids, or mistreat pets, or spend infinite money.
Jp sees resentment and pride as the ultimate source for being a rapscallion or monster, putting responsibility on the parent to keep their child in the ‘liked’ category is a very elegant way to keep a kid from destroying your house but also make a parent confront/channel any resentment or excessive pride into productive directions.
How I caught ring worm
Cats are filthy creatures
Rule 10 is self-contradictory, since it doesn't specify what "precise in your speech" means.
Rule 11 is oddly-specific (why just skateboarding and not any other risky activity?), and reads like it's thrown in there to look "cool" ("how do you do fellow kids?" meme).
Rule 12 is vapid fluff. It's also potentially dangerous, since a unknown stray cat may carry rabies, or be fearful of humans and claw you up bad.
My answer, having checked a few of your boxes... Your lifetime wages are going to be lower than many of your peers. This is unlikely to change. Adjust your worldview accordingly. Don't assume any debt that relies on increasing future earnings to be comfortable.
By all means, keep trying, but stay level headed. Success for most is not always right around the corner. Prior to SV eating the world, the only people that said that we all should be entrepreneurs really just wanted you in their Amway downline.
Society doesn't like to show the magnitude failures out there, or worse, the getting-by'ers. There are a lot of self-conscious IT people in the midwest making $70k/year feeling like failures, when they are the winners of Kokomo, IN.
Read some philosophy. Buy a reliable used car. Look inward for contentment. Try therapy if your shitty childhood and shitty parents made inward a hard place to look.