(from this discussion)

you are a more complex software project than anything from Apple, IBM, etc.

your consciousness gets to audit the software and do maintenance and add features. the heart of the software was written in childhood and you don't remember much of it. think of it like a different team of programmers wrote it, and now you're coming in later.
you don't have full access to the source code for your audit. you can see source code for little pieces here and there, run automated tests for little pieces here and there, read some incomplete docs, and do manual tests for sporadic chunks of code.

and your attitude is: to ignore large portions of the limited evidence available to you about what the code does. that is, the best evidence of what the code says available is your own behavior. but you want to ignore that in favor of believing what you think the code does. you think the conclusions of your audit, which ignores the best evidence (your behavior – actual observations of the results of running code), and doesn't even know that it's a software audit or the circumstances of the audit, should be taken as gospel.

you find it implausible there are hostile software functions that could be running without your audit noticing. your audit has read 0.001% of the source code during the last year, but you seem to think the figure is 99%.

introspection skills means getting better at auditing. this can help a ton, but there's another crucial approach: you can learn about what people in our culture are commonly like. this enables you to audit whether you're like that in particular ways, match behavior to common code, etc. b/c i know far more about cultural standard software (memes) than you, and also i know what the situation is (as just described and more) and you don't, i'm in a much better position to understand you than you are. this doesn't apply to your idiosyncrasies, i know even less than you about those, but i know that and avoid claims about the areas where i don't know. on the other hand, i can comment effectively when you write down the standard output (as judged by category and pattern, not the exact bits) of a standard software modules, at length, and i recognize it.

for more info relating to intelligence, listen to my podcast about it.

https://www.goldrattconsulting.com/webfiles/fck/files/The-Power-of-Technology.pdf

It must be that long before the technology was available we developed modes of behavior, measurements, policies, rules that helped us accommodate the limitation (from now on I’ll refer to all of them as just “rules” even though in many cases those rules are not written anywhere).

What benefits will we gain when we install the technology that removes the limitation, but we “forget” to change the rules?

The answer is obvious. As long as the rules that helped us to accommodate the limitation are obeyed the end result is the same as if the limitation still exists. In other words, we cannot expect to see any significant benefits.

I criticize the book and there's comments from Justin and Max. Read as a PDF.

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan Peterson. Typos in rule 1:

The animals advance on each other, with increasing speed.

Delete the comma.

Its original brain just isn’t sophisticated to manage the transformation from king to bottom dog without virtually complete dissolution and regrowth.

Missing the word "enough" after "sophisticated".

Now evolution works, in large part, through variation and natural selection.

Delete "now" or put a comma after it.

The “fit” in “fitness” is therefore the matching of organismal attribute to environmental demand.

Should be plural "attributes" (or "an" organismal attribute).

When operating at the bottom, the ancient brain counter assumes that even the smallest unexpected impediment might produce an uncontrollable chain of negative events, which will have to be handled alone, as useful friends are rare indeed, on society’s fringes.

Delete the comma after "indeed".

Delete the comma after "alone". "As" is like "because" here, and see https://www.grammarly.com/blog/comma-before-because/

Most people have been subject to the deafening howling of feedback at a concert, when the sound system squeals painfully.

Delete the comma.

You will therefore continually sacrifice what you could otherwise physically store for the future, using it up on heightened readiness and the possibility of immediate panicked action in the present.

I think the text "the possibility of" should be deleted. This is redundantly talking about resources used for readiness and then, basically, readiness again (dealing with a possibility is a readiness issue). So maybe the second point should say actual panicked action rather than the possibility of it?

Gobble delivers a weekly box of meal kits that you cook yourself. I'm paying for more than just food this way (e.g. delivery, meal selection, getting them to package the right amounts of every ingredigent). why?

• food delivery is great

• when i try to do my own cooking, there are a million recipes. i don't know which are good. gobble is reliable about choosing good recipes.

• it's too much work for me to get all the ingredients (especially to cook stuff with the kinda variety and obscure ingredients that Gobble routinely uses, and which i appreciate trying)

• when i buy ingredients, i get too much of lots of them. they come in larger amounts than i need. this means instead of thinking of gobble as costing more money, a lot of the difference is actually: gobble leaves me without leftover ingredients. with regular cooking, a lot of the savings goes into extra quantities of ingredients, rather than being actual cash saved. the value of leftover ingredients to me, in practice, in my experience, is considerably less than their cash value – they reasonably often spoil and get thrown out, or i have to cook more of the same meal before i want to have it again, or i try improvising and using them in some other meal and it doesn't turn out all that great.

• the things i'm outsourcing to gobble are things i think are good to mostly outsource. i have better things to do and think about.

sign up for Gobble (their advantage over rival meal kit deliveries is they make their meals faster and easier to cook):

sign up (with this link, you get a discount and i get an account credit)

“Preventing money laundering” is another way to say our financial system puts a huge amount of effort into preventing monetary privacy.

This is widely seen as obviously good. It's not. It has some apparent upsides and downsides. It violates a major principle, so it's presumably actually bad. It being bad doesn't mean we should get rid of it overnight; we have to figure out good ways to transition our system and alternative ways to solve the genuine problems that anti-money-laundering currently addresses.

The basic underlying tensions here is: privacy is helpful to criminals. But privacy is also great for non-criminals! And I don't think a trusted central authority knowing everything about everyone is the right way to handle crime, because the government can't be trusted that much and because there needs to be market competition in order to fight crime better.

I think it'd be best to stop blaming tools of crime which are also tools of non-crime – such as money and guns – and go after criminals more directly without causing a lot of collateral damage for the rest of society.

Jordan Peterson on the Channel 4 Controversy and Philosophy of "How to be in the World" (emphasis added, and transcription may not be 100% exact):

My suggestion was, well, it’s a very complex problem, there isn’t a solution. But the solution to a very complex problem is you should be [a] better person than you are because then you’d be better at solving complex problems. And lots of them are coming your way, so bloody well get your act together. And that’s what I’ve been telling people. But it’s more than that because that’s merely burdening people with excess responsibility, let’s say, so that could be a crushing message: You’re not who you could be, you know, get your bloody act together, you’re whining away in the corner, and you’re no good to yourself and anyone else. You know, it’s harsh. But then there’s another element to that, which is: There’s way more to you than you think you are, and that you have something necessary and vital to contribute to the world, and if you don’t contribute it then things will happen that aren’t good, and that’s terrible for you and everyone else. So it’s not only that you need to do this because it’s your responsibility, but you need to understand that there isn’t anything better that you could do for yourself or anyone else. And people are dying to hear that message.

Problems are inevitable. Problems are soluble. Get better at solving problems. Get better at life. Get more powerful. Embark on the beginning of an infinite journey of rapid progress. It's rapid progress or death. There are no alternatives. Problems will keep coming – including big ones with big consequences for failure (including the extinction of humanity). Either make ongoing progress at problem solving or failure is inevitable. There is no power level which is safe forever, but at least making more progress as fast as possible is the safest thing to do, it's the only thing that can possibly work.

47:40-49:10

You’re a puppet of other motivational forces. Like this is what happens when you unite the motivational forces that guide you; unite your own nature with your own culture and rise up above it. That’s what happens, is you end up acting this out in one way or another. And you might as well know it. This was Jung’s point. You can be the unconscious actor of a malevolent, tragic drama. Or you can wake the hell up. And you can decide that you’re going to be the hero of not only your story, but of everyone’s story. And then you can choose: which of those do you want? Now the problem with choosing, let’s call it the archetypically heroic path, is that you have to take responsibility. But the upside is, well, what the hell’s the difference between responsibility and opportunity. You can say, well, there’s no difference between responsibility and opportunity, so the more responsibility you take the more opportunity you have. Now maybe you don’t want that because you’d rather cower in the corner and hide. But the thing is that you probably wouldn’t rather do that because if you try it you’ll find that there’s nothing in it but self-contempt and misery. That’s a bad pathway: to pull back and to fail to engage in the world. You end up bitter and resentful and self-destructive and vengeful and then far worse. You can develop a liking for that. I wouldn’t recommend it.

You can let your life be run by your static memes, your culture, convention, tradition, ritual, religion, biology, other people's opinions, social pressures, your parents ... or you can run your own life. The choice is yours: choose reason or be a puppet. Pursue more control over reality – rapid ongoing progress – or be controlled by forces you don't even understand, without even knowing what's going on. If you aren't taking control over your life, and learning all you can, and being as rational as you can, then you are being controlled quite thoroughly, and more than necessary, by forces beyond your understanding (especially memes – which are widely misunderstood, and to understand them you must read The Beginning of Infinity).

Reason is the only effective way to make progress and get control of your own life. Without reason, you'll do it wrong, because reason is the name for methods of thinking which are good at correcting mistakes and actually getting things right.

People say "yeah, great" to this then don't do it. Well, actually do it. Learn about reason. Study it. Write about what you're learning. Discuss it and get criticism because you're going to get things wrong, and the set of mistakes you make will not be identical to the sets of mistakes other people make. You can discuss in the comments below.

i do lots of stuff and mention it and ppl usually don’t follow along and do my cool new projects. sometimes a few ppl read or learn 1/4 of it, a bit late, and then don’t take it very far.

and they aren’t doing a stream of their own awesome projects either.

this is my overall impression.

why?

well they are overreaching. they don’t have spare capacity to jump on opportunities as stuff comes up. they are booked up too much. if they only booked 50% of their time, then they’d have time available for cool opportunities as they come up.

in the name of efficiency, ppl will schedule all of their time, and then there’s no flexibility to get anything else done, and they miss out on tons of great opportunities. and they are often in crisis mode b/c they can't even do everything on their schedule, but they made promises to do those things, and then they have to take inefficient steps to deal with the crisis.

this is a ton like in The Goal, by Eli Goldratt, where factory work stations need excess capacity. and ppl intentionally try to get rid of any idle time in the name of efficiency. (read the book if you wanna understand this post better, and also b/c it's a really great book. there's tons of relevant stuff in the book which i don't go over here. also read his book, The Choice.)

this attitude ends up chasing lots of local maxima at the expense of global ones. that’s what busy schedules do too.

in The Goal, for example, they run robots 24/7 at their manufacturing plant so the robots won't be idle. but they end up producing too much of the stuff the robots can make, which makes things worse. and they have ppl at the heat treat oven go do other tasks while it runs, but then they're late to come back and lose super valuable time starting the next oven batch, so what they're doing is actually much, much worse than having ppl just sit around and wait by the oven and never be late to get the next load started.

paradoxically, ppl have their lives so full they never get anything done. which is exactly one of the main problems in The Goal.

it’s also like poor ppl who stay poor partly b/c, lacking spare money, they can’t jump on sales or bulk discounts very well. ppl who lack spare/idle time, b/c they are so time poor, end up using their time really inefficiently exactly like poor ppl use money inefficiently.

ppl often will make some attempt to free up time for a specific purpose. they want to do X so they manage to shift some time on their schedule from something else to X. but doing that never solves the problem of being overbooked in general, let alone giving one the excess capacity to jump on good opportunities and do things with longterm benefit (in the same way having excess money in the bank lets you use your money better).

i'm not advising you sit around doing literally nothing for long periods of time. but for most ppl it's really not hard to find things to do! most ppl have plenty of stuff they want to do. if you aren't doing anything for a while, don't rush to start an activity. give yourself time to think sometimes! and if you aren't doin much thinking right now or you finish thinking, ok, then consider your priorities and pick something good to do. also place a higher value on activities with flexible scheduling that are easy to interrupt and take breaks from, and activities that offer fast returns on investment so it's fine if you quit.

that's how i organize lots of my time. i avoid scheduled obligations and longterm commitments. instead of literal idle time, i have a lot of flex time where i have some things i can do, but also it's no problem to not do them if something else comes up.

examples of flex activities including reading, writing, playing games, watching videos, listening to podcasts, and having discussions. at a moment's notice i can redirect all my time away from those things and have all day to do something else, no problem. (it doesn't have to be something else, either. if i get really into reading something, and i'm learning a ton and excited by it, then i can redirect time to that. when i want to read something, i'm usually pretty much only limited by getting tired, not by my ability to free up time for it immediately. b/c of how i run my schedule, raw time is much less of an issue for me than for most ppl, so i have gotten to put a lot of thought into some more advanced issues of managing energy/attention/focus, which are where people's bottleneck should be. there are more hours in the day than hours per day you have the energy to do good thinking, so if time is your bottleneck you're doing something wrong!)

people managing their time, attention and mental energy very badly is also why Paths Forward seems so implausible to them. so to try to save time they actually act irrationally which is very destructive, especially for supposedly truth-seeking intellectuals.

also, in the majority of cases, concretizing plans in advance is premature optimization. don't tie down what you're going to do in advance when you have less information about what's best to do. in some cases you get benefits from partially deciding early (e.g. you can buy supplies for a project in advance), but you should usually avoid it. don't concretize plans early without a very clear reason it's beneficial, and only concretize to the extent needed to get the benefit, and be wary of activities that require a lot of concrete, advance planning.

ppl often push you for concrete planning, implicitly. cuz they are overbooked on concrete plans, they never get to the less concrete plans. so you have to schedule concrete plans with them in advance or you can't do anything with them. so their lack of idle time is causing every additional thing added onto their schedule to be concretized in advance (which is worse). the busy schedule itself is preventing the best activities and only letting lesser activities get onto the schedule! the busy schedule is causing tons of premature optimization.

making the right changes is so much more important than spending tons of time making tons of changes. it's not "efficient" to spend all your time that way, that's a local maxima. you'll get more productively accomplished, in a fraction of the time, if you do the right things. this is a theme of Goldratt which fits with FI well.

if flex time loses 10% against the local maximum to retain flexibility, and you do a different much better activity once a week (use the flexibility a minority of the time), you can come out way ahead.

e.g. you might play video games that are easily interruptible. this reduces your selection of games, so you get to play a slightly less ideal game on average. some days, as a result of doing this, you come out behind – play a less ideal game with no upside on that day. however in the bigger picture you come out ahead – the days where you gain a large benefit from the flexibility more than make up for the minor downsides.

don't screw up the important stuff b/c you were too distracted optimizing minor details! this is a big deal, and is in The Goal (having ppl wait around at the bottleneck work stations, spending most of their time idle, improves production b/c those work stations are so important that it's better to wait around for hours than to be a little late from multitasking.)

you can look at this in terms of local vs. global evaluation of results, or seen and unseen (Bastiat's take on the broken window fallacy and selective attention).

what's natural for me personally is to see that, right now:

1) play game with 9 value per hour, and have a 10% chance to interrupt it to do something worth 50 value per hour

is more points, now, than:

2) play game with 10 value per hour.

cuz i look at expectation value (a well known poker concept meaning the avg expected value of what ur doing, regardless of what happens today), so i even get the local case right. the expectation value is 90% * 9/hr + 10% * 50/hr which is 13.1/hr (that math doesn't cover the mixed case where you do it for a while then interrupt partway through, so the real advantage is smaller but, given reasonable assumptions about the unstated details, it'll still be an advantage. note: you do need to be careful with risk when dealing with expectation values, especially when dealing with high stakes all at once. e.g. i'd rather have a million dollars than a 50% chance of 2.1 million dollars, even though the second option is a little more money on average. the only way i'd take the second option, which comes out to 50k more on avg, is if i made a deal with a bank or rich guy. e.g. the bank gives me a million dollars plus 10k, and i pick the 2.1m choice and give them the full amount from it. then i get 10k more than if i picked the 1m option, and the bank comes out 40k ahead on avg, and they have enough money to deal with the variance.)