> Never use a credit card for credit. The only kind of credit, or debt, that is acceptable is debt to acquire something whose exchange value is extremely likely to increase, like in a home. The exchange value of most things diminishes or vanishes the moment you purchase them. Don’t be in debt to losers.
While true on credit, I would like to point out that the statement "something whose exchange value is extremely likely to increase, like in a home" can only be made by someone who doesn't know history beyond their lifespan and beyond their country (or maybe even beyond their county). The long term value of homes basically doesn't increase. People in their 60s are especially prone to not knowing this, having lived through the greatest asset appreciation period in the history of America, and perhaps in the history of the world.
Forced savings may be worth it, but it is forced at the expense of crazy leverage and severe tail risks. 10% downpayment is 10x leverage, 20% downpayment is 5x leverage - would you ever leverage stocks or any other personal investment even by 3x?
I did not buy a house because I expected it to appreciate in value. I bought a house because the alternative was to pay rent.
Rent is a service. A renter does not get anything of inherent, transferable value out of the exchange. A renter is also subject to the whims of his/her landlord and, from my experience, a renter has to move regularly to avoid rent increases and bad landlords.
The majority of my mortgage payment goes towards ownership of a product - my house - which has inherent, transferable value. When I'm ready to move again, I can sell my house and put that money towards acquiring a new one using less debt. Meanwhile, I don't have to worry about landlord problems or rent increases so I can wait to move until I am ready.
I'd say that's a perfectly good reason to take on some debt. After all, if that money wasn't going to the bank, then it would just go to a landlord instead.
EDIT: I'm not saying rent is bad. It is a perfectly reasonable option for many people depending on their preferences and circumstances. I just wanted to highlight the reasons why I chose to take on some debt to buy a house, regardless of whether it will appreciate in value.
> The majority of my mortgage payment goes towards ownership of a product - my house
For many (most?) people that's not true. Even ignoring that mortgage payments often include property taxes and/or private mortgage insurance, you can expect to pay more interest than principal for the first fifteen years or more of a thirty-year mortgage.
I think we can put property taxes aside, you’ll have to pay your landlords property taxes if you rent after all.
If you can afford the cost of a down payment (more on that later), then buying a home does have some utility in wealth generation. You’re right that most of the initial mortgage payments go towards interest, but even collecting 25% of your monthly payment towards your own net worth is a big deal compared to collecting 0%. Especially since there is a good chance that your landlord has a mortgage too, either original or secondary to afford more property, so you must pay their interest plus a portion of their living expenses. This is why generally speaking home ownership is considered superior to renting if you’re not going to move anytime soon.
I think the main argument against home ownership from a wealth standpoint is that it ties up a large amount of money as collateral that you could otherwise be using. Here in SoCal purchasing a home with a traditional 20% down would involve locking up $200,000 that could be put into the market productively, potentially making me even more money. This is why the counterintuitive rule is that if you have enough money to buy a house with cash, you should get a mortgage and invest the rest, as you’ll be better off that way in the long run[0].
[0] Caveat here being your age. If you’re 30, you have another 30 years for the difference to grow in the stock market, while if you’re 70 you’d probably appreciate the lower cost of living and stability that this provides.
In general prices are set by the ability to pay, not by the input costs + some "fair profit".
Many landlords have no mortgage, and are clearing loads of profit every single month. Are they charging lower rent because they only need "fair profit"? No, they charge the market rate.
"Here in SoCal purchasing a home with a traditional 20% down would involve locking up $200,000 that could be put into the market productively"
I've been saying this for years, maybe after this year it'll make more sense: It is not sensible to model "the market" as if it makes steady X% (for X somewhere in the 5-8 range) returns every year. It can and has gone decades being flat-ish, or slightly down after inflation, or up but nowhere near X% a year. The timescale where this is a reasonable model is longer than your expected productive working years. "Return X% a year" is basically the best case on a decade time scale, not the average case. There have been time frames in my life when paying principle on my mortgage was a significantly better "investment" than the stock market.
In hindsight it'll be obvious what you should have done, but in hindsight you can turn a few hundred dollars into a few million in just a couple of weeks with perfect past knowledge of the market, so if we're stipulating hindsight you've made way bigger mistakes than merely "buying a house".
The standard recommendations for buying a house, in my opinion, are recommendations for buying a house you can barely afford. I recommend buying houses you can comfortably afford, and put some extra principal payments in towards the beginning if at all possible. (Especially if you're just starting now-ish... I suspect the whole "but you could have put it in the stock market instead and made tons more money" both looks a bit less appealing than it did a year ago, and may take a bit before it's advice that would turn out well again.)
An HN-specific nuance is that I might as well be saying "don't live in the valley"... you want to call that an exception, eh, go ahead, you're an adult. But in general I recommend that.
(Also, you have to check the area you are in. Where I happen to live & in the price zone I'm in, mortgages are quite a bit cheaper than rent. Though that may not be true in another year!)
>I recommend buying houses you can comfortably afford
This is great advice. In addition to paying less mortgage, the more affordable house is likely smaller, costing less to heat and maintain. I'd be really interested to see a TCO breakdown for various sizes and ages of house.
Yes, if you look at your mortgage payments, very little is going to principal.
On the flipside, when you rent, you get certain services—maintenance of property and major appliances—that you don't get as a home owner. When I started my mortgage I was surprised at how much money I started spending on home stuff that I never used to spend as a renter. Partly it's because you own it so you have higher standards, but partly you're just eating costs that used to be hidden.
But you pay for those in the form of rent. As a homeowner you can also pay someone to do those things. There are a ton of property management companies that will handle a single house if you want to completely hand it off to someone.
In general when renting you usually rent a LOT less than you end up buying which I think is where many people get the "renting is cheaper than buying" thought.
It's not like your landlord magically eats all these extra costs. They pass them on to you.
It depends on the market. In most of the US, buying is cheaper all things considered, but that’s not always true. Would you rather buy or rent in Flint?
Exactly. Some would say I'm wasting money by renting. I'd say I'm saving myself time and stress by not becoming an unpaid novice handyman, and not spending money on home improvements that I could do without.
if I rent for 10 years or I pay a mortgage for 10 years, then at the end of the 10 years I have likely paid less in mortgage payments than I would have paid in rent payments. further if I sell my property then it is likely that I could recoup some or all of my mortgage payments, I definitely can't do this with my rent payments.
People always talk about how “you pay more in interest than principle for the first X years” but seemingly forget that you pay some principle always, versus never paying any principle renting. And in my area (Seattle), the rent vs. mortgage monthly prices aren’t all too different, but with mortgage you get some of it back, plus appreciation.
But I won’t fight too hard against people being pro-rent, as my family makes a good chunk of change off of them :)
A renter does not get anything of inherent, transferable value out of the exchange.
Does "I didn't have to find a contractor to tear out the kitchen wall when a leak on the third floor got all the way down to my first floor apartment, nor did I have to pay for them to do this, and could just keep on going to work as normal" count as value?
Any decent landlord provides the service of "medium-sized repairs happen without any more work on your part than a message".
> Does "I didn't have to find a contractor to tear out the kitchen wall when a leak on the third floor got all the way down to my first floor apartment, nor did I have to pay for them to do this, and could just keep on going to work as normal" count as value?
How often does this happen, and how much does it cost? I can guarantee you your time is not worth this much and it is still less expensive and safer for you to buy a house than rent one.
If you rent for 30 years, at the end of these 30 years you will have nothing and if anything happens, you'll be left in the streets.
If you take a loan for 30 years, at the end you will have a roof above your head, for the rest of your life. The small amount of time you spend finding a contractor and cost of those infrequent leaks repairs represent nothing.
> If you rent for 30 years, at the end of these 30 years you will have nothing
That chestnut again. It makes me sad to see it on HN. It's just a dishonest comparison.
The money saved by not paying back a bank loan plus interest goes into long term investment, not into consumables. In most places on the world, for the last 40 years, the renter comes ahead of the home-owner in spe in terms of total cost.
I presume the context is the United States where a typical loan requires no more than a 20% down payment, providing 4:1 non-recourse leverage, with 3-4% interest. Outside of home mortgages, that sort of sweet-heart financing is only available to the very wealthy. When you factor in retained equity, at the end of the day, unless mobility or liquidity is exceptionally important to you, buying absolutely makes sense for the vast majority of Americans who can afford it. The home mortgage interest tax deduction is just icing on the cake.
That housing prices don't appreciate as much as the stock market is not dispositive. Now, once you already own a home, then of course the fact that the stock market provides higher returns matters for subsequent investment decisions. The calculus of residential ownership isn't nearly as favorable for non-owner-occupants. For small-time real estate investors banks offer you less leverage (3:1 or worse), higher interest rates, and your risk exposure is greater because you're purely speculating--whereas with owner-occupier you were presumably going to be living in that market, so you're only marginally speculating.
The situation is different in many other parts of the world with different socioeconomic policies (e.g. expensive mortgages, high down payments) and real estate markets (e.g. more common for housing to depreciate in value), but that's irrelevant to the U.S. You can't say whether owning makes sense or not without accounting for all the opportunity costs, which can vary widely. But in the U.S., generally and historically, buying a home adds up. Maybe the U.S. is worse off for incentivizing homeownership, but it is what it is.
> A renter does not get anything of inherent, transferable value out of the exchange.
Your getting a roof? And maybe a garden?
> A renter is also subject to the whims of his/her landlord and, from my experience, a renter has to move regularly to avoid rent increases and bad landlords.
You have a contract that sets the duration. If you have a flexible contract you also have the option to change (if you have more money or need less space).
Owning a home is useful in that you must have somewhere to live, and ownership can reduce your cost of living. That’s separate from the price rising, even stable prices allow you to build equity and lower your CoL.
My unpopular opinion is that home prices should fluctuate around inflation, barring sudden changes in local population. The utility of a home is effectively fixed, most of us will never afford two, making the ability for them to rise in value faster than wages in the area limited. Furthermore, without maintenance and occasional renovations homes actually degrade, implying that their value should actually slip slightly compared to inflation without occasional infusions of cash.
It's maybe an unpopular opinion but it is the truth - Robert Shiller has gathered a lot of data that confirms it (prices go along with inflation if you don't compensate for maintenance costs - meaning that the actual value depreciates over time). He writes about it extensively in Irrational Exuberance.
Investing in your primary residence should have a small return, but much less than investing in the market.
So from a purely dollars and cents point of view it makes the most sense to live with your parents forever, or find the smallest apartment in the worst neighborhood with the worst commute and the most roommates. But that doesn't make sense. So what does make sense?
Look at the opportunity cost of your house. What is your expected small return if you buy a large house vs. your larger return if you get a small apartment and invest the rest in the market? Remember to include all the cost of owning, taxes, maintenance, etc.
That difference, the opportunity cost, is what the decision to buy a house will cost you.
My opinion is that you should still go ahead and buy the house, knowing the opportunity cost. What are you working so hard for? A nice sized house, a car, vacations, money for retirement.
Don't buy a home so expensive that you can't save for retirement that you want or the vacation you want. Banks will let you borrow enough money to get yourself into this situation. It's up to you to figure out your whole financial picture, and buy a house that fits your income.
So go ahead and spend your money on those things, as long as they're in balance with each other. A balance that's right for you. Some people really want to retire early. Some people really want a large house. Each person has a different balance that's right for them.
Yeah I completely disagree with this sentiment that debt = bad. You should use debt where it acts as an investment (in the true sense of the word investment, rather than speculation). If you need to take on debt to buy that car that saves you an hour walk to work every day then that is good debt. Is it a good idea to use debt to purchase a house? If we believe in free markets then ownership should have roughly the same cost as renting. But ownership allows you to have more certainty that you won't get evicted x years down the line and that may be a worthy thing to invest in.
Debt is risk. What happens when you lose all your income (as millions are right now)? Payments can't get made, and repossessions happen. If losing a job doesn't sound like a disaster to you, you've probably never experienced it, and/or you have the privilege of having a career in an in-demand field.
Repossession is a slow process. As a practical matter a homeowner who loses their job is in a better short-term position than a renter (all else being equal) because eviction for non-payment of rent is much faster than foreclosure.
And that's why there are products to insure you against this risk called payment protection insurance (PPI). It's a shame that in the UK, PPI is now synonymous with mis-selling. The true cost of debt should be the interest rate and the costs to insure the debt (buildings insurance, landlords insurance, car insurance, PPI...)
How are they working out right now? It's one thing for an insurer to have a steady but small stream of policy payouts; it's another when half of your customers suddenly need a bailout at the same time.
Even if your house gets foreclosed on, they don't confiscate it; you still own whatever equity you have in it, so you get a check when it's sold. Yes, you don't build equity quickly at the start, but still it's better than the rental situation in this regard.
It's only a good debt if you have something useful to do with that hour you save. If it's just to spend more time watching TV then walking to work is the better investment by far.
Spot on! I once read that Warren Buffet doesn't recommend leverage greater than 1.4x and I can only say I agree fully. The fact that most of the people find 5x leverage "normal" is scary.
Yet Warren Buffet has made most of his wealth through either normal leveraging or leveraging using his insurance companies' float. https://www.nber.org/papers/w19681
Sure, BH uses some leverage. But much less than 5:1 unless things have changed a lot in the past few years. [Or unless I'm worse than I realize at figuring out balance sheets, which is certainly possible.]
It's also nonsense on its face. The point of credit is to smooth out expense over the useful life (depreciation) of an asset. Cities fload bonds to build roads. People take out loans to pay for cars. As long as you can pay off the debt approximately before the purchase depreciates, then credit and interest is a reasonable way to amortize cost. Waiting until you pay cash deprives you of the value of the asset -- which may be non-monetary. You can't eat money; it is currency for buying utility.
> Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.
This is very true.
Last year I saw a motorcycle stunt display in the Isle of Man. It was all very impressive, and the chap had extremely good control of the bike, but the time that his skill was most apparent was when he had the rear wheel of the bike on a car bonnet and it started sliding off to one side. I thought he was for sure going to crash because there's no possible way to save it when his feet are so far from the ground. Somehow he managed to wriggle around and force the wheel back to the centre. I still don't know how. But that was the bit that showed me how skilled he was: not the amazing bike control that he wanted to display, but the way he recovered from a seemingly-unrecoverable mistake.
This is true in many fields, including IT. Anybody can install a piece of software by repeatedly clicking OK, and most of the time it'll go fine, but you'll need the expert when the install/upgrade goes horribly wrong with a slew of incomprehensible error messages.
Agreed. Reminds me of a friend in finance who oversees reconciling the transactions at the end of the day. He says that most days he does almost nothing, but every once in a while, at the end of the day, the department can't track down where some $300 milion transaction ended up. That's when his expertise comes into play.
> The hood (North American English) or bonnet (Commonwealth English excluding Canada) is the hinged cover over the engine of motor vehicles that allows access to the engine compartment
In case anyone else wasn't familiar with the term.
I've seen a couple friends go through a sort of change, it's kind of when they arrive or something.
One friend worked on cars for a couple years as a hobby. I saw him a few years later, and he said to me, "I can do anything here."
It was sort of a statement of mastery, of self-confidence and of happiness. He had maintained things, then diagnosed things, then fixed things, then fabricated things.
It's also not bluster or boneheadedness or hold-my-beer.
Another look at that stuntman might've been if he did botch it and fall, how he'd play that to the crowd. A professional performer would handle that better than someone falling and entering a panic.
> The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation.
This is very powerful. Reminds me of the "system 1 vs system 2" discussion, and some descriptions of e.g. ADHD and depression causing what could be described as "failure to terminate in self-negotiation".
Indeed. I've also been realizing recently that my #1 failure mode with procrastination is this: by the time I stared a distracting activity (e.g. reading HN, watching something on Netflix), the self-negotiation is already lost. My mind will drag the argument ad infinitum while continuing to do the thing it's currently doing, i.e. procrastinating.
Maybe I'm wrong but I think self-negotiation here means: when I put my dishes away after dinner, I attempt to negotiate with myself if I have to do it right now. A habit instead terminates this attempt at negotiating and gets you to just do it without thinking if you should or shouldn't.
> Don’t say anything about someone in email you would not be comfortable saying to them directly, because eventually they will read it.
Absolutely - I've learned this the hard way and it's giving me new appreciation for phone calls.
It's amazing how many people do _not_ remember that an email chain of several hundred pages _will_ contain something incriminating or embassaring if forwarded to someone outside the original circle of recipients.
Sometimes even that isn't enough. You have to read it twice.
I was having a text exchange with a manager on the road. Hard to come to a consensus that way. So I wanted to talk when he got back to the shop.
I texted "We can talk some more when you get it."
One letter. The issues it caused lasted for years.
Edit: To clarify. If you just cut the chord to someone, negating any chance of a constructive resolvement of the conflict, than that is bullying. It is not the same as to terminate communication, you can do choose to agree on that.
>Following your bliss is a recipe for paralysis if you don’t know what you are passionate about. A better motto for most youth is “master something, anything”. Through mastery of one thing, you can drift towards extensions of that mastery that bring you more joy, and eventually discover where your bliss is.
Another unsolicited advice, from a 40yo this time: do not use alarm clocks to wake up. The pressure shifts to the evening because you have to go to sleep early if you want to wake up early.
And then it magically happens that you sleep as much as you need. Being a long time supporter of naps I find myself not doing them at all.
Of course this applies only if you have flexible hours to work, don't have appointments, etc.
My life has improved after I started getting up extremely early (0400) four or so years ago. And that doesn't happen without an alarm clock.
My point is not to say that you are wrong but that we might be better off trying different solution for ourselves instead of believing in authorities here or elsewhere.
(I'm not saying you shouldn't listen to normal advice like getting good sleep etc, but don't think that getting up at 0400 will solve your problems because eitland says so and don't think that waking up naturally will solve all your problems. Instead try one, then the other if the first didn't work.)
I think the most important point is not so much that you should never use an alarm (I do regularly), but that if you're unsure of whether you actually get enough sleep, it is worth finding out how much sleep you need, and ensure you get it, whether by adjusting your bedtime or your alarm time, or ensuring you compensate every few days.
Too many people don't know how much sleep their body would want if unconstrained by alarms. Once you know, you can get decent results of manipulating when you get that sleep with alarms. But if you don't know it's very easy to be near constantly sleep deprived.
The most interesting pattern I observed in my sleep is the integral patterns associated with it -- it's nearly impossible for me to wake up after less than 3.5 hours of sleep[1], and then after about 4 hours of sleep it becomes difficult again to wake up until after about 7.5 hours, when I usually wake up on my own, and then after around 8 hours of sleep if I oversleep you're probably not seeing me until I've finished a solid 11 hours.[0]
It's extraordinarily useful for planning when I am not getting much sleep. If I must be somewhere at X o'clock, and I can't get a full night's sleep for some reason, I make sure I am going to sleep so that my alarm starts going off when I am at around 3.5 hours of sleep or so. I've missed too many meetings and flights trying to get 5 or 6 hours of sleep. And if I've just pulled an all-nighter and need to be somewhere in 2 hours, I don't go to sleep unless I have someone who can literally kick me awake at the appropriate time, 'cuz nothing else is going to get it done.
[0] Yes, I've read enough about sleep to know most of the details behind such sleep rhythms.
[1] Well, having children does change that a bit, but a beep-beep-beep isn't going to get the job done.
I recently did a stint of waking at 0500 to work on my side projects. This was a big transition from waking at 8:15 and hitting the sack after midnight. But getting the important stuff sorted early and having such a consistent routine, including a bedtime routine was intoxicating. Since moving and being in complete lockdown Ive returned to my old ways for various practical and also disfunctional reasons but I look back at my structured early-riser days with envy. I guess I am a morning person after all. Many years of distraction and lack of direction trying to be productive in the evenings behind me. It wasnt ADD it was just not the right time of day! This is coming from a 30 year old.
I've done the same and also reverted, but found it easier in summer (no fear of getting out of a warm bed, plus earlier daylight).
That said, I get by on little sleep and can be productive in the evenings when I know I have more time available if I get on a roll. Wake up at 5am and parents inevitably have kids up and distracting them from 6:30. Work at 9pm, and you can carry on until 3am or longer without distraction.
100% agreed. My life got a lot better when I focused on controlling my sleeping time rather than my waking time.
Although personally, I don't think one needs flexible working hours to achieve it. Once I got my habits and home lighting right, my sleep cycle very naturally became: sleep at +/- 10:30, wake at +/- 6:30. That only works if I stay out of sleep debt, of course. But that's entirely worth it; I didn't realize how much sleep debt was harming my mental clarity until I experienced a long stretch of sleeping enough every night.
Maybe this is just true of all advice, but I think this one's going to vary substantially from person to person. I find that setting an alarm in the morning helps keep my sleep cycle from drifting, so I get tired at the right time at night instead of staying up later than I'd prefer.
I don't really find this a problem. If I want to stay up very late, I'll take a short nap early in the evening, timed based on how long I want to stay up. But generally I like getting up early during weekends too. Less so when I used to go clubbing, of course, but then napping in the afternoon to prepare worked well. That, and caffeine.
Never understood employers who had a problem with this. I have people scheduling a small conference room we have to take 30 minute naps, or going to their car, or sleeping under their desk. Why should anyone care about that as long as they are generally productive and get the work done?
(probably should note I don't overwork my employees, make them keep 80 hour schedules or anything - a couple of them get up at like 4:30 AM to go to the gym / shoot hoops before coming in, and want to take a nap around lunch before the 2nd part of their day)
Well, there’s one part where it’s kind of awkward to ask to take a nap or have a coworker find you sleeping (“should I wake them up or wait to get my PR reviewed?“) but another part of it is that it’s not really comfortable to sleep at work unless there are ample soft couches or something. At home I can just jump into bed…
Eh I think you can leave someone undisturbed for 15-20 minutes unless it's something truly important. 99% of PRs can wait that long, unless you are working on a production issue (where the likelihood of someone sleeping in the middle of is pretty small anyway).
> it’s not really comfortable to sleep at work
I actually find it easier to take short naps on desk, just cross my arms and use them as a pillow to bury my head into. The position just comfortable enough that you will sleep easily for 15 minutes and then wake up.
On the other hand, getting into a bed I could see myself sleeping from anywhere between 30 minutes to 3 hours :/
Just an added tip, if you don't want to take a pillow to work, use a pack of tissues as a pillow. For me they were the perfect height and I kept on using it even after I remembered to bring my pillow because it felt even better than my raggedy pillow.
In sweden we have a law mandated "vilorum", that's basically a room where you should be able to take a nap. However this is only applicable when an office is larger than x people (x ~50 ?) and is frustratingly often just implemented as minimum effort to abide with the law, like a large sofa that in theory could be used to take an uncomfortable nap. Meaning it's only used in rare cases when you are too tired to even go home (or late at night when an office party has gone off the hooks)
At a past job my solution was to go sit in the local park with mirror shades and my hands in a prayer position... It was far from ideal, but on an estate with plenty of security roaming so felt safe and the hand position is an effective trick to prevent people from bothering you (e.g. I use it also if meditating somewhere public). Unless you slump over or snore, I guess.
Yeah, snoring is the killer. I never had a problem with taking a nap in the office, but I tend to snore, so that gets noticed. Fortunately, last office I worked in, almost everyone was taking a nap at some point during the day (often unintentionally), so nobody gave anyone any hard time about it.
No one really has a problem with it unless they themselves are sleep-deprived and expecting everyone else to "tough it out".
It's also an easy arrow to grab in the event that you're working in a place with sick/corrupted incentives and someone more established can save face by firing you before someone else finds out what you dug up while trying to solve a seemingly innocent bug in invoice generation.
I worked for about 3 years in taiwan and there its a norm. Everyone uses half of their lunch hour for lunch and other half for a nap. By the time I left I had it down to a science. I even drank a couple gulps of coffee because it felt like it kicked in in exactly 20 mins and I felt extra recharged
It should be; especially big companies have more than enough money to make more accommodations; quiet rooms, noise insulation, comfortable sofas / recliners, etc.
Here's one I heard elsewhere, and isn't in the list.
If you're searching for something important, search until you find one that satisfies all your requirements. Then, don't stop, keep searching until you find a better one. Then stop.
This raises you maybe a whole standard deviation in quality, without taking exponential time. Works for all sorts of things. A new pair of shoes; a favorite dish in a restaurant; a spouse.
This is one piece of advice that sound true and insightful, but in my opinion doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. An example of what I mean is the saying "perfect is the enemy of good", which directly conflicts with the above.
Since I'm from the north, outdoor gear is a good example of this — there is no hardshell jacket in the world that ticks every box in my checklist. I've been through the lineup of both known and obscure companies item by item, from cheap shells to the ones that command a ridiculous premium. Finding this out has been a fun little hobby over a number of months, but realistically I don't think I'd be worse off if I just got the first one that was "good enough".
I don't think you're contradicting the advice. The advice was basically to find one good enough, then search a bit more. You found something good enough, then spent a unbounded search time on more alternatives. This is precisely what the advice told you not to do. You did it and are not entirely satisfied with the outcome. This doesn't seem to contradict the advice.
The thing I dislike about all these maxims is exactly what happened here. You took this:
"Then, don't stop, keep searching until you find a better one."
and turned it into:
"then search a bit more."
There was no mention of "unbounded search time" in the original maxim, and the person that you're responding to is following the maxim exactly ("don't stop until you find a better one").
Don't get me wrong - I think your interpretation is reasonable and a better idea than the original. But everyone takes these maxims and adds layers of interpretation and good sense to such a degree that you may as well have just trusted in your good sense to begin with.
If the original maxim had been more actionable ("then spend no more than 20% of the time you originally spend searching to attempt to find a better one, stopping if you do so") it might be more helpful, but it loses that air of folksy wisdom that these maxims love to put on.
Perhaps it works often because it coincides with the Secretary Problem often enough. Maybe running the Secretary Problem approach with a quick upper bound of how many you're willing to consider will work. I'm going to explicitly try that and see.
Perfect it enemy of the good, but many times I hear someone saying that for some app/software and then, afterwards, complaining that the software isn't perfect.
You have time, money, team to do the "good" but then is charged for the perfect.
I recently discovered by shopping for one with my fiance that being a woman raises the complexity of the problem by several orders of magnitude because women have even more body dimensions for the hardshell to either crush or bag up around.
(of course, they don't make it anymore, I think. But the Extrem 5000 is very similar. They added a pocket, moved the other two)
For years before this, I had been reasonably happy with an old North Face goretex jacket. It last about 15 years, but had a lining and in the end the exterior water shedding ability (not waterproofness) was shot.
The Berghaus is just what I always wanted: single layer, goretex, lightweight but very heavy duty fabric, the perfect hood design.
I wore it to hike the 230 mile Cape Wrath Trail last year, and verified once again that it was completely waterproof, very comfortable, perfect in every way (for me, at least).
If you forced me to make one criticism, I'd like a slightly larger patch of slightly softer material where the neck/hood comes up over my mouth/chin when it's fully "on". But even 2 weeks of wearing it every day (sometimes all day) in Scottish rain didn't really make that much of an issue.
Most people are satisficing problem solvers. Given a problem to solve they will come up with a solution that they consider to be satisfactory. Ask them to come up with a better solution and they will respond that they came up with a satisfactory solution, and a darn good satisfactory solution at that. If they can be persuaded to try, their brain will immediately head for the original, satisfactory, solution.
Truly creative people are the ones whose brains are able to avoid the trap of immediately heading for the original solution, and continue searching until they find better and better solutions.
there was some mathematical proof that was the optimization of your algorithm. I think it had statistical numbers of dates before you did a summary and went to choose a spouse.
This page really is a goldmine. In the spirit of not being afraid to ask stupid questions, I don't understand a couple of them - anyone care to explain?
> When you die you take absolutely nothing with you except your reputation.
Is this saying that your reputation dies with you? I don't get this, surely people will remember how you acted when you were alive. I'm probably taking it too literally.
> Don’t ever respond to a solicitation or a proposal on the phone. The urgency is a disguise.
A disguise for what? I'm not sure I get what they mean by this. I'm guessing the author is advising that you don't let yourself be rushed into agreeing to something over the phone, think about it and take your time, don't be pressured
> When you die you take absolutely nothing with you except your reputation.
The opposite. When you die, you don't take anything material with you. No money, no assets, nothing. Your own personal experience dies with you as well.
The only thing that doesn't die is how people will remember you.
It's also a hidden paradox. You might aim for widespread fame and acclaim, yet totally forget about the people closest to you who might end up not having a high opinion of how you acted towards your goals.
In a sense, a better way of approaching reputation is as a by-product or a secondary goal to what you pursue. Your primary goal would be: how do I make a positive impact on the world around me? First and foremost, my own community?
> A disguise for what?
It's a bait and switch: them trying to make their priorities, your priorities. The urgency itself is the bait: it's an appeal towards your empathy as well as your desire to act from your gut/instincts (we are bad at instinctively guestimating opportunity cost) rather then sit back and figuring out the bigger picture.
Context matters, and so this gets sometimes obscured by a lot of tangential circumstances. For instance, it's easier to see this one through if the caller is a stranger rather then a friend or acquaintance, or even someone who comes at you from a point of authority such as a business partner, your boss or someone who is either wealthy or owns an experience you desire yourself.
After all, it's a proposal. An invitation. Not an order or a command made from a place of authority.
>> Don’t ever respond to a solicitation or a proposal on the phone. The urgency is a disguise.
>A disguise for what? I'm not sure I get what they mean by this. I'm guessing the author is advising that you don't let yourself be rushed into agreeing to something over the phone, think about it and take your time, don't be pressured
Most of the time when someone pressures you into making a decision quickly, it's for their benefit not yours. Think "if you make this decision now, you'll get a 10% discount!". You don't have the time to decide whether you really need this or not, but that discount sure sounds nice.
>> When you die you take absolutely nothing with you except your reputation.
>Is this saying that your reputation dies with you? I don't get this, surely people will remember how you acted when you were alive. I'm probably taking it too literally.
I interpret this the other way around: nothing you gain in life matters/retains value/sticks (to you?) after you die except your reputation
>> Don’t ever respond to a solicitation or a proposal on the phone. The urgency is a disguise.
> A disguise for what?
I think:
Something not quite right or something worse.
It's easier to get away with things when they aren't face to face. People often know when they are trying to get away with something and leak the truth or information about the truth in body language.
Also it is quicker to communicate over the phone. If they are desperate they can deliver a proposal( ask for stuff?) over the phone within a quicker time frame.
I think the argument is flawed. If you don't exist to feel the loss of rep or what people think of you afterwards. It doesn't matter at all. It's as non-existent as other things.
> When you die you take absolutely nothing with you except your reputation.
I look at it slightly differently. I interpret it as, you take your reputation with you to the grave because when you die, your reputation as it stands, is as dead as you are.
How you act while you're around will be interpreted in one way, but when you're gone, you are no longer around to defend your reputation, or to act in a way that reflects the times.
In this way many people, and especially white males, have had their reputation tarnished. Instead of being good, accomplished, respectable people, they have been labeled racist or sexist or misogynist, and have had their achievements diminished or taken away from them entirely.
Don't believe me? Look for articles in the Guardian or NY Times about Albert Einstein, Shakespeare, Gandhi, Nietzsche, Bill Hicks, DH Lawrence, and on and on and on and on.
Apparently it's trendy to take people out of the context in which they existed, and judge them based on a different one entirely.
It doesn't take a superhuman effort to do better than the society you're in. It just takes recognising the issue, and then a small amount of introspection every now and then; that's beyond most people, but it's still possible.
The amount we can (unhypocritically) criticise these people for not doing better than their times is proportional to the likelihood that they would've noticed the systematic issues in their society, of which they played a part.
Nietzsche and Gandhi… well, they definitely should've known better. Albert Einstein? He probably was exposed to feminist ideas, but I doubt he internalised them. Shakespeare? We can probably give him a pass.
And remember: achieving great, good things doesn't mean you haven't done bad things. It just outweighs them.
I think you just proved my interpretation of the quote.
When you die you take absolutely nothing with you except your reputation.
People will judge you based on the values and trends of the day, and chastise you for not being or doing X or Y better.
In other words, you took your reputation with you when you died.
I bet these filthy men also contributed to the spread of disease, there's no way they washed their hands for 20 seconds every time. I bet these immoral citizens compromised the health of their children by painting their walls with leaded paint too.
"Hire for aptitude, train for skills" is a very software development oriented view. Training on its own is difficult and most available employees outside of engineering don't have a habit of self teaching. I've done a lot better with experienced people in my hires in my profession.
Software is also weird when it comes to skills. While the total domain knowledge possible in software is absolutely massive, the set of baseline skills required to rapidly learn new domains and perform is surprisingly small. Any good programmer can learn a new language and a new portion of the stack within at least year, probably less, because the core skills of the profession are very very small.
It’s not clear to me how common this is in human endeavors.
That's dated. This used to be true, absolutely. But the size of various eco-systems is such that if you want to really master something now you have to invest a lot of time and if you bet on the wrong horse then you can lose a lot of time and effort for little return. Front end is especially brutal in this sense.
That appears to have calmed down significantly in the past few years, with React in particular showing a level of stability and staying power in this space that I thought was impossible.
Anecdotally, I started out working with JS and React about 2 years ago, and while it was extremely easy to get started in terms of architecture and general coding (based on 10 previous years of experience with other languages), we’re also still dealing with bad decisions made because of idiosyncrasies in the language/libraries.
Nonsense. You can migrate a back end developer to the front end in far less time than it takes to train a new front end developer from scratch. The domain knowledge of front end specific tasks must be learned, sure, but the core fundamentals of how to program remain. You don’t suddenly forget how to actually program once you pick up JS, all jokes notwithstanding.
Having crossed over from a back end developer to a front-end developer at a design shop, it’s not that hard. Nowhere near as hard as learning to program the very first time. I think that a lot of the discussed differences between different portions of the “stack” is actually the narcissism of small differences [0]; they share more in common than we typically give them credit for.
And if you do it repeatedly, then suddenly one day you'll realize you can make good original work.
The same is true about learning anything else. Personally, when I've been first starting programming, I learned a lot of useful programming techniques by stealing bits and pieces from videogames and demos whose source was available and incorporating them into my own attempts at writing a game engine.
Mastery is hardly needed for the bulk of software development work. Just like with the building trades, most coding can be done "good enough" with apprentice or journeyman skill levels as long as the team has a few masters to provide guidance and check the results.
OK, so perhaps it extends to journalism. It's a sentiment I would have agreed with wholeheartedly when I was in software, and here in veterinary medicine I know that training is difficult, people with seemingly high aptitude often don't help you train them, and experience is a great measure of someone's ability.
I think it makes more sense in the context of the full quote: "Experience is overrated. When hiring, hire for aptitude, train for skills. Most really amazing or great things are done by people doing them for the first time."
He's pretty clearly talking about creative work here, where the goal is to make new things. Whereas the goal of most of medicine, presumably yours included, is to reliably do a known thing. If I'm going to have surgery, I'm going to find a surgeon who has done the procedure a large number of times, because there's a clear expected outcome, and a deviation from that likely means failure.
This seems to be veering into tiresome nitpicking and willful misunderstanding, but I'll give it one more go.
I suspect you already understand that novelty is not the only goal of creative work, so I'm just going to go on past your first bit. Let me know if you truly don't get it.
He didn't say that debuts are usually the best art pieces. One, you have the flow wrong. He's more saying that the best art pieces were debuts. But two, he's not saying that either, because "things" is broader than art, and "best" is different than "really amazing".
As an example, look at Hamilton. I'd call it both amazing and great. But it wasn't done by somebody with decades of training and experience. Miranda started work on it when he was 28. It was not his 10th or 20th rap-influenced historical musical. It was his first. And only his second produced musical period.
The good thing about experience is that it gives us habits that work quite well. But that's also the bad thing, because it's very hard to approach the top fresh, to do enough things that don't work on the way to finding something novel that does work. So a lot of great creative work is done by the relatively young and inexperienced. And as Kelly says, we should give them the room to try.
The flip side to your example is, of course, artists like Rodgers & Hammerstein, Sondheim or Bernstein, all of whom produced good works in their youth but some of their best works as they gained more experience and developed more style.
This is how one goes about understanding (or extracting a meaning from) a point. By poking at it with scepticism and watching how it holds up to scrutiny.
That is one way to do it. But if you expect somebody else to participate in your particular chosen process of understanding, you'd really better demonstrate some actual understanding, and perhaps some gratitude for their gift of labor. Because from here it looks like garden-variety tedious argumentation based in willful ignorance, which is everywhere on the internet.
Of course there are Rimbauds, and there are Monets. That's beyond dispute. The implication I'm not sure about is whether the former outnumber the latter.
It's psychologically understandable for someone who's accumulated considerable life experience to feel more nostalgic towards the freshness of being unexperienced.
"Train for skills" is much more common in other countries, although less common than it used to be. Those experienced hires didn't get to be experienced at zero cost to anyone - other employers enabled them to become experienced.
Be a good employer and do your part of the process: train for skills (so that someone else can hire those people too)
Sorry about the other response. It was flippant like yours was, but two wrongs don't make a right.
The real issue is that in many industries you don't just walk into a top job with no experience. If I'm hiring a technician, it's going to be someone with experience because in this profession they will have started as a kennel keeper, then moved up to assistant, then started doing more technical work, usually as they are in technician school, and then they will be able to work as a registered technician. Sometimes experience can be almost equivalent to having school, although there are a few things that an unlicensed/unregistered technician cannot legally do.
All that experience is much more valuable than just the book learning, and you can't make up for it with a few months training.
The approach you previously (something like "I need to get people who've already acquired the experience") is very common in the USA today, but less so in e.g. northern European countries.
The approach you explicity describe here (the existence of a training/experience pathway) is something that you currently require to exist, but seem less willing to be the provider of.
I understand that there are going to be employment situations where providing those training pathways is impossible (or almost impossible). But particularly in the USA, we've gone too far in the other direction: offloading the generation of "experienced" to other, unnamed and unidentified people and organizations, and then expecting to be able to reap what others have sown.
I see what you're saying. But let's put it a different way. Let's say I need a technician. If I have an existing employee who can move into that role, great, but I'm a small organization, like many others. Otherwise I have to hire one. Some technicians will have no experience as a tech, others will have 1 year experience, others will have more. If I can hire one with more, it's likely a better hire, even at a higher rate. Otherwise I have to hire the inexperienced one. This is where I disagree that aptitude is more important. The experienced tech has probably already demonstrated aptitude. The new grad/career riser's aptitude I'd have to guess based on references and interview. The inexperienced person would not be able to hit the ground running.
In order to have that person ready for the moment they were needed, I would have to have a lot of slack in a very small organization. It'd be a lot different if I were a manager at Siemens needing a new mechanical engineer.
That makes sense as far as it goes. But it also means that you are implicitly relying on the existence of other organizations to train people to a level where you feel you can hire them. That's OK, as long as you don't try to deny this. Why do I think that's important? Because those other organizations are carrying the costs of training for you. Should they want some sort of social payback (of any kind) to reflect this, it seems wise to me that you'd recognize the benefit that you accrue from this sort of thing, and be supportive of it.
You don't need an HR department to create a training plan, and you don't need a training department to deliver it. There are lots of businesses providing training courses.
I can confirm that one shouldn't trust all-purpose glue.
Bought a tube of it a year ago, and out of about 10 times I've tried to use it, I don't remember a single one not needing re-gluing with something else later.
All except your fingers of course - glue them, and they're sticky for weeks.
So well in fact that it can be used as an alternative to stitches. Medical grade cyanoacrylate is a bit different (less irritant) but in an emergency, the regular household kind can be used.
Yeah, I added one to my first-aid kit just for really emergency emergencies.
I also love cyanoacrylate because it stops sticking when you apply water to it. I don't worry about my fingers, because whenever I work with this family of glues, I just keep a glass of water on my workbench, into which I dip the fingers if I notice I spilled some glue on them. The glue immediately polymerizes, and you can pull/scratch it off.
No. Even fully cured cyanoacrylate can be picked off without taking skin off. It's actually kind of fun, like picking a scab. It doesn't come off easily though.
I did that after a metalworking incident (large greasy shaft with a burr slipped through my fingers), you can't even see the scar and my finger was cut open all the way to the bone.
It's also one of the few things that readily stops a bleeding nail if you are clipping a pet's nails and hit the quick (blood vessel region). Corn starch is supposed to, but I find CA is faster for deep cuts.
The author (Kevin Kelley) travelled a lot in Asia between 1972-1979 when he was young and took many photos which he later published in a book (https://asiagrace.com). I think he has seen and understood first hand many of the complex geopolitics in Asia.
It might have also been a reference to the videogame Civilization (can't recall which one. Civ 3 perhaps?), where that one is quoted in a loading screen.
Like what? This is one of the few bits that I honestly didn't understand because it felt so specific and without further explanation. Can you elaborate?
1) Outside armies have a poor track record in winning wars in Asia. History books are full of those failures ...
2) because most Asian countries have millions of citizens to conscript, on their home turf, and not many centralized targets to bomb, the battle is asymmetrical. Each soldier just needs an AK-47 and directions to the front.
In the US-Korean War, China just kept pouring troops over the border until the US was overwhelmed, which illustrates the "millions" part.
Same against Japan in WW2. Japanese victories became slower and slower as China mobilized human waves against them. The Japanese military told everyone the entire war would take weeks, but it extended into years.
In Afghanistan, the Russians gave up on defined battles and went with genocide (poisoning wells, shooting on sight, etc.)
It's a quotation from "The Princess Bride" so mostly a joke. The land war the movie is referring to is Vietnam, not generally considered an American success story.
In the movie the humour comes from the incongruity of the fantasy setting with the knowing political aside.
> The next war on land will be very different from the last one, in that we shall have to fight it in a different way. In reaching a decision on that matter, we must first be clear about certain rules of war. Rule 1, on page I of the book of war, is: "Do not march on Moscow". Various people have tried it, Napoleon and Hitler, and it is no good. That is the first rule. I do not know whether your Lordships will know Rule 2 of war. It is: "Do not go fighting with your land armies in China". It is a vast country, with no clearly defined objectives, and an army fighting there would be engulfed by what is known as the Ming Bing, the people's insurgents.
> The more I study the problem of future war, which I do a good deal, the more I reach the conclusion that air power and sea power will provide the main offensive punch in an unlimited nuclear war of the future. Their offensive power must be mobile. Land power will be essential as a direct "stop" on the ground, in order to protect vital territories and peoples. But the strategy of those who fight on land will be defensive, since any considerable movement will not be possible owing to the terrific destruction caused to communications by nuclear bombardment, as well as by the movement of refugees. This latter is a terrific problem, and during the ten years in which I served in Supreme Headquarters in Europe, we never could get the refugee problem seriously tackled. The sea must be exploited increasingly to give surface strategical mobility, and to provide mobile launching sites for nuclear weapons.
At which point I'm starting to feel sick in my stomach and decide to abandon reading whatever it is that I was just reading. I'm already in a bad head space thanks to COVID-19, I don't want to contemplate the realities of a world in the middle of a war in which nuclear weapons are used as actual weapons.
> When you are young spend at least 6 months to one year living as poor as you can, owning as little as you possibly can, eating beans and rice in a tiny room or tent, to experience what your “worst” lifestyle might be. That way any time you have to risk something in the future you won’t be afraid of the worst case scenario.
Done it around my 24, I lived 2 years without spending any money, except for my room rent (I was paying by cheques, since you don't really need a credit-card anymore in my case). I ate from student restaurants bread leftovers, markets ends (lots of fruits/vegs), and sometimes supermarket bins with other persons
You change dramatically after that, it's like a new life, with new values, minimalism, endurance, you know much more yourself. Why I did so? I don't know, I started for a few days, a week, then I didn't stop, there was some intent to save money, but the benefit was of course different, you actually risk to lose money, by losing your job, luckily it didn't happen, but I wasn't very productive
> Optimize your generosity. No one on their deathbed has ever regretted giving too much away.
Not sure if I agree completely. I've seen people regret giving their life to the service of others and not noticing they were not living their own life until too late.
Agree, but my comment is more on the second part of the phrase: "No one on their deathbed has ever regretted giving too much away." - I'm not sure this is completely true.
Like most of these these platitudes, it can mean whatever you want it to mean. "Optimize" - you mean "do the ideal thing"? Good thing that's so easy to figure out at the time...
"giving too much away" is not only material stuff. You can give too much time away, mainly taking care of others that should be able to find a way to take care of themselves (obviously not talking about elderly people).
I'm married to a nurse, and I know a lot of people on the field. I'm constantly amazed how they are wired to take care of others before themselves.
> Don’t be the smartest person in the room. Hangout with, and learn from, people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who will disagree with you.
I've often struggled with this one. It might sound arrogant, but I am 90% of the time the smartest person in the room. This is a frequent cause of unhappiness as I just feel I'm carrying others and I'm not able to learn anything myself. I've changed jobs many times to try to combat it but before long I find that I am, once again, the smartest person in the room.
The only time I never felt like this was with my PhD supervisor who was definitely always the smartest person in the room.
Try moving to a different field, especially a high-value one where raw intelligence is less important than "street smarts"/intuition/flair. There are many fields where the smartest person in the room doesn't have a Ph.D. or impressive academic/technical credentials.
I often try to reinvent myself every couple of years. Moving from technical fields that I'm comfortable with into less technical fields where I'm forced to be a beginner has helped remind me what it's like to ramp up from an ignorant state. It's uncomfortable but worth it.
The analytical mindset (which cerebral people tend toward) is disproportionately powerful for tackling various problems, but there are many open-domain problems--laden with tons of uncertainty--that only yield to heuristic approaches and trial-and-error. It's useful to learn what it actually feels like to be engaged with problem domains where analytical approaches aren't as effective.
Here's something to consider: take a sampling of large multinational U.S. companies and look at the biographies of their executives. You'll likely find that most of them only have a bachelor's degree and often from middling schools, yet they are at the helm of these large corporations. It's tempting to think all of them got to where they were because they knew how to play the politics game in their orgs -- which is true in part -- but having worked with folks of this ilk, I would submit that there are some non-technical skills that these folks have that we tech folks don't often recognize.
Verticals like retail or part of the business that center on customer interaction. Marketing. Understanding funnels etc. Business development. Understanding the metagame that is being played.
The people side of things. Organizing and managing workforces or fleets. Understanding carrots and sticks. Understanding how things can fail in the field and how to quickly organize and execute workarounds. Physical world ops instead of devops.
> Before you are old, attend as many funerals as you can bear, and listen. Nobody talks about the departed’s achievements. The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving.
Where I live, most tombstones have one of the few popular sayings or Bible verses on them. I'm sure the choice of a particular one was deeply meaningful to the person making that choice, but it gives zero information (above "probably wasn't an atheist") to an outside observer.
> Rule of 3 in conversation. To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they just said. Then again, and once more. The third time’s answer is close to the truth.
This is one where I see how it can be very helpful, but I don't have the first clue on how to go about it. Simply asking to "go deeper" is often met with a "what?"
> Before you are old, attend as many funerals as you can bear, and listen. Nobody talks about the departed’s achievements. The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving.
This one might be true for funerals, but definitely not for obituaries.
> Art is in what you leave out.
As an aspiring writer of fiction, this was the only one I could not understand at all, yet really, really wish I did.
> You really don’t want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person.
True, but I believe there's a difference between "fame" and "distinction". Striving for the latter might not be all that bad.
I think "go deeper" is replaced with a contextual question that shows you understand so far and invite the person to speak further.
On simplifying your art, I assume they're getting at leaving readers to fill in parts with their imagination. There is some notorious shredding of Dan Brown writing I've seen which might help convey it.
i.e., describe rough hands to infer a life of manual labour or a deliberate pace to imply age, rather than just tell people the age, job title and so on.
A landscape photographer I know advises looking at the scene and finding a way to simplify it. Then again. And again. So, recomposing the scene to avoid an extra tree, or more rocks or something else distracting. When editing a digital image, it can involve spot-removing rocks from sand or blemishes that only distract the eye.
Found this on Reddit: As Dr Seuss said: "A man with two heads must have two hats and two toothbrushes. Don't give him hair of purple seaweed and live fireflies for eyes."
I've no words to express how strongly these resonated with me, this is the only article I re-read 5 times in a row and read it slowly. Thank you for your wisdom.
> When an object is lost, 95% of the time it is hiding within arm’s reach of where it was last seen. Search in all possible locations in that radius and you’ll find it.
Yup, look closely in the place you expected it to be. Something may be on top of it, or it may have fallen off.
And pull an image of it into your mind. Then glance around. Your brain's mighty correlation/association engine may find it for you! It will seem to pop out of the clutter.
Just a question, and I know it is completely dependent on culture, do people really believe
> Trust me: There is no “them”.
I feel like there is constantly a them. The way I interpret it is that you should not modify your behavior based on other people's opinion. Or is it about people who don't matter? How do you know people who don't matter? I have never known from the beginning of a relationship that this person will end up mattering.
>
In sociology and social psychology, an in-group is a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member. By contrast, an out-group is a social group with which an individual does not identify
Are you implying that the out group is them? But that will mean that there is no out group, everyone is in the in group and thus we should listen to everyone's opinion and give it credence.
Sure. We're social primates that evolved in the context of lots of inter-troop and inter-tribe violence. As well as plenty of intra-troop violence, competition, and coalition-building. We are primed to see a "them", because our ancestors not always a little worried about "them" died out. It's like how we're hardwired to see snakes. [1] But as conscious beings, we can choose to indulge the wiring or work against it. Snakes freak a lot of people out, but if they calm down they can appreciate them as cool animals and fellow ecosystem participants.
But I think his point here is that beyond the continuous us-vs-them processing we're doing as social primates, there's a deeper truth. That we're all people. We're all connected. We're all, like it or not, in this together.
This one's ambiguous. It may be referring to "they say" "who's they?", or "them" as the invisible enemy. Maybe "them" is illuminati/reptillians/etc. Or maybe he's rejecting non binary gender, who knows
This is what happens when you reach a certain age when you need to deliver on your said “experience”. All of what was said is true, but it is also comparable to saying “be what you want to be” to your child, forgetting that the hard part is in actually following this advice, rather than giving it.
> Talent is distributed unfairly, but there is no limit on how much we can improve what we start with.
That's just not true. I will never be an Alan Turing or a John von Neumann, and I dare say neither will you, dear reader. The reason isn't that we're just too lazy.
See also the legend (myth?) of Antonio Salieri's jealousy of Mozart's natural talent:
When confronted with the limitations of his own mediocre talent, Antonio Salieri, Mozart's nemesis, believes God has cheated him, while a vulgar, undeserving brat seems to possess divinely inspired musical gifts.
Which would be solid advice, but he put there is no limit. That's the part I'm questioning.
You'll never get anywhere without self-improvement, of course, but there's no sense pretending we can all be a prodigy like von Neumann - whose natural intelligence was shocking even to the top professors of his day - if we just work hard enough.
There very much is a limit, but one need not be deluded to be motivated or successful.
edit Perhaps the point is meant to be read as 'you can always improve yourself further', rather than 'there is no ceiling on your abilities'. Which seems far more reasonable.
A sublinear function seems like the way to model it, but even log(x) will eventually reach a very high value. Even if I could live forever, I'd never reach von Neumann's intelligence.
Better to use a function that tends toward an asymptote, such as 1 - 1/(x+1)
I mean, things rather fall down in the extreme case. If my brain is spared the ravages of time, we could say I'm guaranteed to continue to close the gap as time passes, but I don't think this is a helpful way to look at things.
In reality, there are limits to what you can do with a trained ape. An usually long-lived ape doesn't much help you. I suspect the same applies here.
You cut out the meat of the advice. The point is that you may not need the tools to last a lifetime; you buy a cheap set first, and then replace the ones you actually use with the quality ones, for the reasons you explain. This prevents you from spending excess money on tools you don't use.
Exactly. Buying pro-grade anything before you have proven need is a giant waste.
A while back I was thinking I wanted a standing desk. My first urge was, "Find the best and buy it!" Instead I prototyped something out of an ironing board and a highly adjustable laptop stand. That's been adequate for months, and it's taught me a lot about what will work for me, and what "best" actually means. Eventually I'll get around to buying something professional. But it won't be the thing novice me thought was the right one. And it could have easily turned out that I didn't need one at all.
Sounds like you "shipped" an MVP, figured out what did/didn't work, and iterated. Amazing how this works, huh? ;)
I wonder if people arguing against the "cheapest thing that will work, then learn" also argue in favor of over engineering systems to address requirements that may come months or years from now.
Some people prefer to rent instead of buying cheap tools. And I understand them.
Cheap tools sometimes don't work even once. I had first experience.
- Hacksaw blades that wore out before cutting a tenth small metal part. The good one bought as a replacement made short work of it and was still good for may others.
- Egg beater went up in smoke making slightly thick dough. The good one barely slowed down. It is not the first power tool I had that went up it smoke after moderate use, but that one didn't even last a single use.
- Square that was more than one degree off.
- Sewing needle with a hole too small for threading anything thicker than a human hair.
- Screwdrivers and bits that simply don't fit. At least not without damage.
- Adjustable pliers that slipped every time, could only be used at their widest setting. With terrible grip of course.
All these were replaced with good quality tools, the first purchase was a complete waste.
To be honest many of the cheapoes I bought are very nice. My set of cheap wrenches perform flawlessly. Don't feel as good as the nice ones but they at least perform their primary function. The adjustable ones are crap though, rounded a few nuts before being replaced.
So my take is to use good judgment, the "absolute cheapest" is often a bad idea. The problem is that if you are experienced, you probably have the good stuff already, and if you are not, it is hard to make that judgment.
Personally, when it comes to cheap tools I had the most success when buying store brands from large chains. IKEA tools for instance are not even hobbyist grade in quality, but at least, they perform their basic function and are suitable for light duty work.
I've actually had some good luck with harbor freight tools. some tools I definitely upgrade though - I like wiha #0 #1 #2 screwdrivers, I enjoy a dewalt gyroscopic power screwdriver, and I have a klein 10-in-1 in easy reach for around the house general stuff.
On top of this, before you get some experience using a tool, you might not be able to judge whether it's high quality. And you might not know which dimensions of quality matter most to you. But you can tell pretty quickly whether it's cheap :)
If all that went wrong with tools was that they broke, the rule of thumb could be: when you break a tool, replace it with one twice as expensive. When you lose a tool, replace it with one half as expensive.
Like the power-of-2 realloc trick, the amortized cost of finding the tool you need is at most 2x.
But cheap tools do something worse than break. They ruin work, they frustrate you, they can be dangerous.
(Perhaps in KK's youth, the cheapest tools were still acceptable. But today, the cheapest tools literally cannot do a single instance of the task they're ostensibly made for.)
Once or twice I’ve spent a lot of money on a tool but I’d only end up using it once or twice at best.
On the other hand, I’ve been burnt a lot more by buying the cheapest tools. When I was younger (student days) and couldn’t afford quality tools, they would not “do the job expected of them without creating a new problem”. These new problems (usually rounded off nuts, screws, Allen bolts, etc.) would usually cost more money and time to resolve. I also recall quite a few minor injuries to the hands when a badly fitting tool suddenly slipped from the part it was working on.
Now that I’m older and somewhat wiser, I certainly wouldn’t recommend the cheapest – though often, there may well be no need to go to the opposite extreme of buying the most expensive.
Seconding this. Most of the issues I've had doing manual work has been a result of using cheap or inadequate tools. I don't often find myself thinking "that expensive set of pliers didn't do as good of a job as the cheap set at the dollar store." Whereas every time I buy a cheap tool to do the job it inevitably breaks or fucks up.
For example, once I was trying to run some stainless steel wire to make a cheap curtain rod across some windows. I had assumed that the stainless steel crimp jackets could be crimped with some physical strength and a set of pliers. It was an absolute disaster and finally I broke down and bought a special set of pliers for crimping the stainless steel jackets. They were about 4x as much money as the pliers I was using but they did the job swiftly and efficiently without damaging anything.
I often also see the most expensive tool doing the job more poorly, so I would revise the rule to "spend as much money on a tool as it takes to get the correct set of features and level of durability to do the job." For example, the $4.00 caulk gun does a better job than the $20.00 caulk gun because the $20.00 caulk gun doesn't come with a built-in cutter or a plug popper. So you're paying 4x as much for a tool that can't complete the entire caulking job. So buy the $4.00 caulk gun because the built-in cutter means you never have to risk cutting the caulk outlet wonky again, and the caulk job will be much easier.
Premature optimization. If you end up using a tool only once, buying the best quality tool for that is a waste of money. And you can rarely tell in advance which tool you'll be using often.
If you have infinite storage space and infinite money, ok.
But over the years I've found a small toolbox, close at hand, with super frequently used tools works well.
Working on motorcycles, you could probably do most things with a really nice 10mm, a 12mm and maybe 14mm t-handle wrench. But you don't need every size from 1mm to 100mm too. You could probably have a 1/4" and 3/8" t-handle wrench and use a general socket set for uncommon tasks.
or put another way -- shoot your whole wad on a snap-on tool chest full of tools, and then you have no money for a circular saw or a car lift, or welder or milling machine.
I think there are a lot of variables in the decision on what point in the quality spectrum you chose when purchasing a tool.
Some cheap tools actually do well beyond a "good enough" job, and if you end up only ever needing to do that job once or twice, well "going cheap" can be a good move.
However, some cheap tools are complete garbage, won't even complete the job the first time you use them, and are thus a waste of money.
On the flip side, high quality (and generally more expensive) tools can pay for themselves many times over, but that depends very much on how much you use them. If you only use them once, and you know you'll likely not need it again, you might be able to sell the tool at a lower price after using it, but that may or may not be worth the time and hassle to you.
Also, there are many tools that are just so expensive they are out of a lot of people's price range in the first place.
I personally try to skew to the "higher quality" end of the range as much as possible. This is mostly because I tend to do a lot of things for myself, rather than paying for someone else to do them, and thus the chances that I will reuse a tool are quite high. And I've been burned enough times by cheaper tools, that I go that route far less often, and usually only because I have enough information on the cheap tool to decide it is worth it. Also, for me the cheap tool route is usually limited to those tasks that I am confident I am unlikely to ever do again (and those cases are rare).
In all of the above, I am thinking of physical tools. When it comes to tools in the form of software, I think there is even more variance. There are a fair number of "paying more == having better tools" scenarios, but there are also some very expensive tools that are complete garbage, and there are free and/or open source tools that do the job far better than commercial products do.
All this to say I mostly agree with the original tip, except I would not say "Start by buying the absolute cheapest tools you can find", but rather "Don't absolutely dismiss a tool because it is cheap, consider it if you think you will only rarely need it, and you have reason to believe it will adequately do the job."
The pleasure of saving some $ will be instantaneous and will not repeat. The regret of something having bad (or barely ok) performance is permanent and will repeat every time you use it.
Shakespeare knew what to do with people who proffer great quantities of unsolicited advice; look what happened to Polonius.
A bunch of these are good, a bunch are just... OK, and some are questionable or just a matter of simple opinion. A lot just reek of "truthiness"; a sort of middle-brow confidence about art/business/doing stuff that's manages to frequently just pass off made-up bullshit as authoritative. The "rule of 7 in research", "Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes", "Talent is distributed unfairly, but there is no limit on how much we can improve what we start with" - a lot of these don't make a lick of sense on sober examination.
Those make sense to me. Like all maxims, they're overcompressed; they imply a context that the reader has to be able to fill in. But I think they're useful in context.
E.g., the phrase "It is what it is" is on the surface tautological and useless. But in context, it's a valuable reminder about coping with some of the flaws in human consciousness.
They "make sense", but they aren't really true. They are not such much "overcompressed" as subject to whatever interpretation makes them sensible, but as such, they are dependent more on the good sense of the person unpacking them than on their inherent virtue.
So, for example, the "Rule of 7" is a ludicrous exaggeration (by the time you actually go through a chain of 7 people you're talking to a random stranger and weeks have passed), but someone who had done some research might mentally fix this to a rule of 3 (which would be a pretty reasonable thing). However, a maxim that's on the face of it pretty dumb until you fix it up is Not Good.
Similarly, the one about "pros" vs "amateurs" is Just Plain Made Up - it's easy to conjure up situations where it seems clever, but in general it doesn't make a lick of sense.
I suppose I'm perennially annoyed - one might even say "triggered" - by these kind of wildly variable mixes of folksy wisdom, mild common sense and Just Plain Opinion. No-one has any business mixing fairly reasonable ideas about how to find a missing object or get a cable while traveling with Deep Wisdom About How To Live Your Life; the net effect is to anesthetize our critical facilities through sheer volume.
Putting your advice as to what constitutes a meaningful life on the same level as advice on how not to get into credit card debt is a serious category error; at worst it's banal, at best it's a way of smuggling a bunch of unexamined values in as universals.
I am fascinated that you are sure you know more about journalistic research than Wired's founding executive editor, a guy who has written a half-dozen successful books.
But I think we get a little closer to the truth about what's going on when you admit that you just really don't like this kind of thing. Which is fine! Nothing's for everybody. But your problem here isn't the article, it's your expectations. Reading this, all I expect is what it's clearly signaled as: things he in his life has found to be true. Personal insights, not carefully researched scientific fact. The opening paragraph makes it clear what he's up to.
That you take your irritation with something not being what you want and universalize it into Evil Mistruth Worth of Death is exactly the same sort of value-smuggling that you're complaining about.
You have a point about "journalistic research" (very likely what he means by "research" for obvious reasons) - I am applying my value-smuggling and reading "research" (which is all it said) as either academic or "post-academic" (i.e. the sort of research you might do as a working practitioner with a PhD). A generalist writing for Wired might well be more reasonably expected to take 7 steps (give or take) than someone already practicing in an area.
That being said, you're histrionically exaggerating for no apparent reason. When did I call these "evil" or call for the death of the promulgator? I have never wished death on anyone from Wired, not even for those responsible for the very worst color schemes in the earliest days.
I think it's reasonable to read my response at the same level: "OK, so here are some things you found to be true? Well, fine, here are some things you wrote that I find to be a load of bollocks".
> Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them, they are waiting for you to send them an email, they are waiting for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.
Then again, maybe not. Reminds me of the rejection therapy[0] - a self-help game in which you try to get rejected every day. To play, you have to purposefully make requests for things others can provide you, that are outside your comfort zone. Like, asking for a discount at the market. Or asking that person you like out. Etc.
The point of that game is that it's surprisingly hard to get rejected (unless you ask for something completely silly and/or impossible). So if you need something, you may as well ask for it, and stop feeling so afraid and vulnerable about being rejected. Other people turn out to be happy to help or accommodate you (just like you are, if someone asks you for something). I've tried this in the past with some small things, I don't think I've managed to get one rejection. A surprisingly large number of people, myself included, are just more shy than it's optimal.
It doesn't say ALL other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them. I think the point is more that you miss 100% shots you don't take so don't let your fear of rejection prevent you from trying.
It is both the hardest bit of advice on the list to follow, and the most profound. Many religions have some version of a holy man/woman going to a mountain/cave/ocean/forest and coming back with divine/enlightened wisdom. What they all have in common is some version of 'Unity: we are one'. It makes violence much harder, among other things. What left hand wants to shoot the matching right hand?
Pragmatically, this means whenever you are thinking with the us vs them mentality you can try to realize that there is some value of us which includes you and the ones you consider 'them', a common ground. A possible first rule is that this is the key step in any negotiation. A possible second rule is that everything is a negotiation.
But some humans are more human than others, at least in my system of ethics.
I don’t necessarily blame the bad apples, but in the same way that I don’t blame my infected finger. It’s still going to require a strong dose of antibiotics.
I took it to mean there is no one conspiring against you. Sometimes people add more meaning to innocuous interactions and believe it's planned or concerted effort when really its just a bunch of random peoples choices.
For me, it just means that when you are just saying "them" (or "they", or "their") the group of people your are referring to doesn't exist, and you are on your own.
"they are going to fix my problem": no one is working on your problem
"I told them": the message went nowhere
"It is their job": if it is someone's job, that someone is you
>
In sociology and social psychology, an in-group is a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member. By contrast, an out-group is a social group with which an individual does not identify
No, if you are "the only" you are going to do that for the rest of your life.
Also, it is at odds with the second previous point "Hangout with, and learn from, people smarter than yourself". You can't have people smarter than yourself if you are the only.
And it is at odds with all the other points promoting sharing and generosity too. If you are the only, it means you didn't share your knowledge.
What is the purpose of a pedantic comment like this? The meaning is clearly supposed to be something like, “don’t directly compete with other people, but be the best as something new/different.”
Scott Adams and Peter Thiel have echoed similar sentiments.
I still think it's very good advice. Barely anyone bothers to share their knowledge, and even less people manage to communicate it effectively. In this context, if you put any amount of effort into sharing, you're probably already "the only" among your close peers.
Just because you're "the only" doesn't mean you're the smartest person in the room. You might, however, have the knowledge in the right areas that makes you indispensable. For example, I often find myself to be the only person around with enough knowledge in the areas of graphics, design and programming to combine them effectively. I might not even be particularly talented in any of them, but very often I'll be the only person capable of knowing how to complete certain tasks.
Maybe you're reading it wrong. It makes no sense to provide wisdom that clashes with other points. So.. you might be applying it wrong.
You could be the only love of someone's life. Or the only that made a difference. Or the only father. Or brother. I didn't read it in terms of competition, where you STRIVE to be the only.
> It makes no sense to provide wisdom that clashes with other points
Sometimes when there's a tradeoff to be made, it's best to present the opposing principles one at a time. Yes it's worthwhile to seek to go beyond being the best and be the only. Yes it's good to surround yourself with people smarter than your. These are in tension. You have to figure out the balance for yourself.
Speaking from experience in an automotive repair shop, Thats a great way to make sure you're the only guy who does lube jobs and rotor turns, and the most hated guy on the team.
Branch out and learn new things. you dont need to be perfect, but if youre just one thing to one shop then you get missed (and replaced) about as quickly as a lug nut.
"Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat."
But if everyone of your friends follows this advice, you'll be a bunch of poor people without a boat unable to help each other when a boat is needed.
Nothing in recent history; you're probably thinking of the colonizers, there was a much bigger power and technology skew back then. And I'm mainly thinking of India there; they only really managed to colonize Hong Kong in China for example.
In China you have Macau, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tianjin and Kunming were all either explicitly or implicitly under the control of European Powers and those are just the one's off the top of my head, then you have Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Borneo, Myanmar, Singapore (the list goes on and we are only in East Asia) that were all under Western control until the 20th century
Actually I'm European. Though on European powers winning land wars in Asia -- I think it's a question of what are the boundaries of Europe, both in time and in space. And Kevin Kelly was wise not to get into that debate.
Cheerful people regroup faster and are still going strong on the 3rd/4th attempt to solve a problem.
The higher-IQ person is more likely to get it right the first time. But there won't be much conviction on try No. 2, and after that, his/her position will be: "It doesn't work. Can't be done. Dumb idea."
In a lot of work that I see, the IQ adjustment might be more like 10-15 points. For gnarly problems, we might still get better results with the really smart guy who's not 100% invested. And even grouchy geniuses can get enthused once they see that their ideas might work in a problem that has most other people stumped.
Still, for problems that just require a lot of different attempts until something clicks, well-aimed enthusiasm can work wonders.
IQ is, at best, a measure of raw capacity. But what matters in practice is how you apply that capacity. If somebody is enthusiastic then they are alert to details, excited to try things, and resilient in iterating. That means they're going to end up with a smarter end product than somebody who is smart but not really into it.
While true on credit, I would like to point out that the statement "something whose exchange value is extremely likely to increase, like in a home" can only be made by someone who doesn't know history beyond their lifespan and beyond their country (or maybe even beyond their county). The long term value of homes basically doesn't increase. People in their 60s are especially prone to not knowing this, having lived through the greatest asset appreciation period in the history of America, and perhaps in the history of the world.
Forced savings may be worth it, but it is forced at the expense of crazy leverage and severe tail risks. 10% downpayment is 10x leverage, 20% downpayment is 5x leverage - would you ever leverage stocks or any other personal investment even by 3x?