Tag: wf/ankify

Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil:

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

Brett Hall: In our times, rapid progress comes not from setting goals, but overcoming the *unexpected*. 

Goals are a kind of prophesy & can be coercive, so quickly choosing “failure” over *achieving them* must be a “goal” of any rational goal setting methodology to preserve error correction.

Brian: Can you elaborate? Is the idea that hewing too close to achieving a goal, particularly one far in the future, causes errors to go uncorrected because you’re not adjusting to the problems right there in front of you at the time?

Brett Hall: Yes & if gurus, life/business coaches, etc are to be believed we need goals: a “5 year plan” or some such. 

• Get this job, 
• Make that income. 
• Etc 

But human minds create new preferences continuously though guru logic casts choosing those as failure (to be goal-oriented).

If one sticks to a goal because they’re being “disciplined” & it’s part of the grand plan (for success, happiness, whatever) – that’s an error. Worse: it’s anti-rational: it actively prevents errors being corrected and suppresses creativity in the service of “achieving a goal”.

Brian: But there are some goals that you may want over the course of years and that take years to achieve, right? House, marriage, kids, etc. for many. Or what about the persistence needed to, say, get a gold in Judo at the Olympics? Seems like there’s got to be a middle ground.

Brett Hall: If each day one wakes & enthusiastically decides the “goal” ostensibly set is best & most fun (& not worked towards because one is solely being focussed/driven/disciplined) – that’s different. “Goal” there labels a different thing: daily human choice determining life, not a plan.

It may help some (eg your Olympian) to know what it takes to “have the fun” they want (like a pilot’s checklist for landing) & “plans” do help the depressed & confused: those who *don’t know* what they want. But those are exceptions “that prove the rule”: people don’t need goals.

(In those exceptions a “plan for success” is like “Wittgenstein’s Ladder”: once depression is gone or you don’t need to remind yourself of a “gold medal” to be excited to get to the gym & train, the plan can be thrown away as it’s not needed to get what is *really* wanted: joy).

What if mental health, motivation, and even joy depended not on solving problems, but on knowing which ones not to accept?

I think about the tweet below a lot. Particularly the part about “the existing nasty pressure on young people to conform by being ‘remarkable’.”

How many of your “problems” emerged from your creative engagement with the world? Problems are soluble, but they should be your problems. You have the right to reject problems imposed on you.

See also: A Genuinely Felt Problem is the Most Powerful Generator of Creative Problem-Solving that Exists

We often think knowledge is just facts or information we’ve acquired through education or experience. But David Deutsch has thought of knowledge as information with causal power i.e. information that has the power to make things happen. I also think of knowledge this way.

Knowledge has only ever been created by two processes: evolution and creativity.

We can change our future by creating knowledge. In that sense, knowledge gives us a power once imagined only in magic and myth.

See also: The Beginning of Infinity

Links to this note:
Explanatory Knowledge

Agency is not fundamental. Knowledge creation is.

What people call “agency” is a surface manifestation of a deeper capacity: the ability to create explanatory knowledge that expands the space of available actions.

A rationalist is simply someone for whom it is more important to learn than to be proved right; someone who is willing to learn from others – not by simply taking over another’s opinions, but by gladly allowing others to criticize his ideas and by gladly criticizing the ideas of others

― Karl Popper

To be rational is to try to solve problems by seeking good explanations and actively pursue error correction by creating criticisms of both existing ideas and new proposals.

Links to this note:
Change the Problem Landscape

“The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it. The way real science goes is that you come up with lots of ideas, and most of them will be wrong.”

—Francis Crick

“A free market is a continuous process that cannot be held still, an upward process that demands the best (the most rational) of every man and rewards him accordingly. While the majority have barely assimilated the value of the automobile, the creative minority introduces the airplane. The majority learn by demonstration, the minority is free to demonstrate. The “philosophically objective” value of a new product serves as the teacher for those who are willing to exercise their rational faculty, each to the extent of his ability. Those who are unwilling remain unrewarded—as well as those who aspire to more than their ability produces. The stagnant, the irrational, the subjectivist have no power to stop their betters…”

– Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

“The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.”

― Gilbert K. Chesterton

“This is the real secret of life – to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”

― Alan Watts