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?
> 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.
If you like these, you might be interested in the book, I Am A Strange Loop
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.
> 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.
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?
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
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.
> 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.
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.
Reasoning is taking all emotions into context and focusing on actions that align with certain emotions.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
Also: quite often does not exist inside computer debugging, either.
The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.
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.)