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Last year I wrote about setting personal goals. One bit of feedback I got went something like, “Goal setting is a bad mindset, you should use systems instead.” I’ve heard that idea before, with a few different justifications. I do have some thoughts, and experience, on using systems to build skills or manage productivity, and I realized I should write on that too in order to make the goal-setting content more complete. Continue reading
A couple years ago, I noticed that I’d been holding onto a mindset that was counterproductive, and I’ve often seen this mindset in some of the online communities I spend time in. I like talking with people who believe in the truth-seeking power of good-faith disagreements, but some of these kinds of people have a tendency to overestimate the value of argument, which causes them to engage in conversations they shouldn’t. And I think I have good heuristics for avoiding that without giving up on rational disagreements entirely. Continue reading
Figuring out which strangers to trust on the Internet is a challenging problem, but potentially a very rewarding one. Ideally you’re interacting with transparent, accountable people who may even be experts in their fields, who may have tons of invaluable wisdom and knowledge to share—if only you trust them. I’m weighing in on this because I have reason to believe I’m particularly good at solving this problem. Continue reading
On paper, the Internet looks like something that would drastically change humanity for the better. But, while capable of delivering just about any information that our greatest aspirations could demand, it is mostly delivering information perfectly tuned to our lowest aspirations. The Good Internet is the subset of the Internet that actually makes your life better. It is hidden in plain sight. Continue reading
Denial of Death is the 1973 summation of anthropologist Ernest Becker’s life’s work studying human nature, building upon the work of the great psychologists of the 20th Century. It basically aims to be a grand unifying theory of psychology, and against all odds it kind of succeeds. Continue reading
This one is about setting goals. In my last post I wrote from experience about some ways to approach problems of willpower and increase our chances of doing the things we most want to do. Closely related to that is the practice of goal-setting. If your goals are stated in detail and align well to your deepest values, you’ll have an easier time justifying the work to carry them out. Continue reading
This one is about willpower. Willpower is definitely an overdone topic in the whole lifestyle-improvement-self-help-literature world. But it seems no one out there is saying quite what I want to say about it, so I have to say it myself. … Continue reading
There’s a weird kind of phenomenon that happens when people use easy-to-fake symbols to try to deceive each other: the symbols become cyclic in their meaning. They flip to mean the opposite of what they once meant, and then they flip back again. Continue reading
This post presents a model for understanding the different ways that people can relate to symbols and their substance. Back in Part 2, I mentioned that, apart from surrogating on symbols, we can use them as symbols, for the indirect benefits we’ll receive from our audience—this post speaks more to that idea. Continue reading
The concepts you most readily use to understand your experiences are determined by the language through which you learned them. And that language has been shaped arbitrarily by your own culture as well as cultures that came before it. Only by consciously avoiding those ready-made concepts can you actually notice the full spectrum of your experience. Continue reading
We need symbols because we need to break down our complex experiences into simple comprehensible parts—both for easy communication with others and for easy comprehension ourselves. Continue reading
Remember that language exists as a mechanism for conveying ideas. If the ideas themselves have been effectively shared, you have no honest reason to continue dwelling on the particular words. If you find yourself failing to share the ideas, you should try using different words. And finally, if you’re using words to cleverly obscure ideas in a way that feels advantageous to you, you’re committing deception and should be called out for it. Continue reading
You should stop committing surrogation whenever and wherever you notice it, but there’s more than one way to do this. Continue reading
(If you haven’t read the Introduction and are wondering what I mean by “symbols,” I recommend you read that first.) Part 1: Surrogation Because we deal in symbols every day, and the substances behind those symbols are often agreed upon … Continue reading
A human’s life is full of symbols. A red heart symbolizes love. A red octagon symbolizes the command to stop. A sideways triangle symbolizes the “play” function of a media device. But it’s not just combinations of colors and shapes … Continue reading
