The thinking path(robinsloan.com) |
The thinking path(robinsloan.com) |
My productivity went up noticeably.
Interesting fact: 8 miles away is another walkable, extra hilly, tiny university town.
So I tried something crazy.
I bought out Tue & Thu 9am morning massage sessions from my favorite therapist, for two months in advance, in the OTHER college town.
It’s a 3 hour walk. But now, twice a week, I get up at 5am, and put in 6 hours of walking, to get a massage. On top of my other walking.
Productivity went through the roof. I do less, but what I do is so much better planned that progress is on fire.
I am now thinking about how to keep this up through winter.
The physical & mental health benefits are significant. I have lost weight, sleep better, clearer mind, more ideas, less anxiety …
I love long walks and a podcast but it doesn’t clear the mind quite like a plain walk just listening to the world.
I don't think it's only useful for intellectual pursuits: we rarely get enough alone time nowadays. And when we do, we're bombarded with stimulation and noise. There's no good opportunity to be alone with ourselves. Walking in a safe, familiar place without my phone has become one of my most important and cherished daily rituals -- I see it as an emotional cleansing.
I like the Digital Wellbeing app on Android. Set a daily timer for app usage and then it gets blocked once you're over the timer.
I don't think Xitter is a good tool for assessing present reality and making good judgments about the future, either. (Actually, I took you to mean "directly obtain accurate information about the world and act on it," but maybe you meant "find out the worst of what people are currently doing and be prepared.")
I use the time to "triage" the day's tasks. Sometimes, I even fix bugs, while thinking about a solution that had perplexed me, the night before.
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Aristotle, Thoreau
Also. Buried in the page farther down.
One of the more scary takes on how we could have 'Killer AI'.
Everyone seems to argue 'Killer AI' is still far in the future, because they associate it with the Terminator Movies and current Robot Tech is lagging AI. So why worry, we can still un-plug them.
This video is how it will actually happen. AI can be incorporated into a lot of weapons.
From the linked site
I don't want to tell you what you should get out of this; it took me a long time to understand what 'dialectic' means. This may be intro level material to many people, but not everyone gets to go to a four year college, or gets raised in an open-minded community.
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Reading someone else's philosophy is often a chore. Often people just want the best answer, or the truth.
When I deploy a software system, can I say that it will work? Or can I say that it is working right now?
I can't write software that will work a year from now. I have no idea what the world will look like in a year. Specifically, patches are applied and versions change.
The best answer is almost always contingent on context. We can have shared evidence, but proof is internal to one mind.
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How do you deal with the problems of running a blame free and learning organization?
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'Be Nice to Spiders' was my first introduction to counter-culture. When everyone else is afraid or uncomfortable or angry about something, you don't have to be.
Rich Hickey has a great talk "Hammock Driven Development" in which he describes the value of giving your mind time to think deeply about a problem:
> "When Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think."
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...
IDK if it makes me more productive. Maybe. I certainly came upon some solutions (for programming) or clever formulations (for blog/newspaper articles) while walking. But there is an important exception: hot days. Walking on hot days fries my brain.
Hopefully if you're a person that analyzes contradictory thoughts you've already realized that a huge portion of society cannot do this. It's always fun at family reunions when attempting to discuss a complex topic has confused their opinion for being a fact and they cannot imagine a point of view that is not their own.
The first hard part of life is learning different views exist.
The second hard part of life is realizing some people have a very hard to near impossible time accepting other views exist.
But perhaps when you say views you are implicitly saying that all views are valid, which is a different kind of acceptance I suppose.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/03/what-developmental-mil...
Often named “dialectic plan”, or “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” [0]
[0]: https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thesis,_antithesis,_synthesi...
Thèse, antithèse, synthèse... 25 years later I still hate the highschool version of that format because it came with a minimal words count and I suck at taking something that can be said using 3 propositions and turning that into a 5 phrases paragraph.
As a spider enthusiast and photographer, this makes me happy. Thank you for showing these creatures respect :)
Picking up a habit of 'reaching for dialectic' is one of the most valuable things I've ever learned. I've found that it even helps to 'decouple' 'ideas' from 'identity' more completely and thoroughly than quite a lot of learning about and practicing 'mindfulness' in various forms - at least, for someone like me. And, that is about as helpful as anything gets if you want to be able to "see clearly" ... to get more clarity in terms of what is "more actually true" (as opposed to whatever mix of nonsense and shades of truth(s) any of us may have in our heads at any given time).
In that vein, and I may have written this on HN before ... not sure and not bothering to check this second: true 'skepticism'** STARTS with skepticism of one's own thoughts! It's about as inefficacious as 'methods' get to spend all of one's time picking apart ideas and 'information' and the like presented from 'the outside'*** while spending no time subjecting what's presented internally to any amount of scrutiny at all.
* vs. a "parsimonious" solid set of wisdom with some breadth even if tending towards a little "ad hoc" - yet, it all hangs off common thread(s), IMO
** In more of an original [Ancient Greek] sense than modern connotation
*** I.e., NOT "the half behind the eyes", as Terry Pratchett phrases it in one of his books
most people want the most convenient, easiest answer that conforms to their own confirmation biases.
The key to solving this problem is adhering to published standards, which tend to be long-lived. I have code still in use that I wrote 30+ years ago. Of course, just adhering to standards is only half the battle. There's more to writing long-lived code than just that. But it is a skill that can be learned.
It requires less mental energy to slot new information into an existing framework of beliefs than to consider alternative ways for the information to fit.
We don't question our entire belief system with every new piece of information; that would be mentally exhausting.
> If I had 8 hours to chop down a tree, I would spend 6 of those hours sharpening my axe.