I think for many people the definition of boring is:
- anything that I don't understand
- anything that forces me to think
This is the kind of comment a very boring person would make
Readit Newslouis___ commented on Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness sloanreview.mit.edu/artic... · Posted by u/pella
There is no doubt in my mind that happiness predicts and causes success. A simple predictor of long term success for everywhere I have worked is mean loud laughs - whining.
An old psych study claims that one year after some great or terrible event, winning the lottery, or breaking your back. People are roughly as happy on average as they were before the event. It makes sense in many ways, happiness does not seem to change much over life. To me it looks like happiness is regulated towards some fix point. This is often cited as a reason not to despair, which is nice, but for someone like me it is horrifying. Much like with weight, there is no reason to assume that you are being regulated towards a healthy state.
I am successful by most metrics, but I am so despite being miserable, and well aware of it. But it is also a question of what kinds of tasks I focus on, positivity and natural happiness is extremely important for most sales people, and beneficial for teamwork, especially high stress teamwork. But less so for solitary independent work like research, and too much positivity seems to make people easier to scam, and I would prefer a cynic as responsible for it sec (not that I have ever seen one that wasn't). Happiness has a wide range of other positive effects too, but it is difficult to decorrelate, and if I was optimistic Id say something like teamwork and sales are easy to measure, so anything which is positively correlated with work productivity will be biased due to selection bias. If I was pessimistic I think Id just say yeah its probably true, but hey, the world isn't fair, and while I am miserable, at least I'm not stupid, and I would not want those two reversed.
I'd suggest you try meditation. It does not bring you instant happiness, but slowly brings about a sense of wisdom and peace that really resembles long-term happiness
louis___ commented on Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/sohkamyung
> “You can’t exercise your way out of obesity,” […] “you can’t outrun a bad diet.”
While this article is being a bit dramatic and possibly understating the impact of exercise slightly, I feel a little dumb that I didn’t know this earlier. It took me several decades too long to understand the obvious, that exercise is for building strength, and losing weight happens by eating less. I tried for way too many years to exercise my fat off, and it never really worked because I’d unconsciously eat to compensate. Once I tracked what I ate, exercise actually became more effective.
A lot of people know this already, so it’s not busting everyone’s myths, but we also do have a strange narrative surrounding exercise and weight loss that I bought into. It makes me wonder if we’re physiologically wired to be allergic to the idea of less food, from an evolutionary perspective, because being hungry is literally risking death to our alligator brains.
> we also do have a strange narrative surrounding exercise and weight loss that I bought into
This narrative is pushed by the fast and highly-processed food industry. MacDonalds is sponsoring sport events with that very narrative : "morbidly-obese children of 8 should just do a bit more sport"
louis___ commented on Building a modern home in the woods johnnyrodgers.is/building... · Posted by u/hokumguru
So sad to see a somewhat wild area got uglied with a shiny, propane-powered mansion. Poor birds will just fly away from this spot
louis___ commented on I think I know why you can't hire engineers right now cushychicken.github.io/wh... · Posted by u/cushychicken
I do not disagree with your take, but I think you may only be speaking for a subset of engineers that are already fairly well compensated. The article likewise seems to discard the importance of money in favor of three other more immaterial factors, but I do not think this is representative of the situation of the global job market right now. I also think such a perspective can not fully explain the difficulties that many companies are having with regards to hiring engineers at the moment.
If you look outside of coastal cities, there are plenty of job offers for engineering jobs that pay less than 6 figures. Over in Europe and East Asia, $50 to $60k salaries are the norm. And people job hop frequently for a few extra $k because that corresponds to a significant increase in quality of life for them. The difference between a 2 br and 3 or 4 br apartment, between another kid or not, etc...
People will absolutely leave your company if they think they can get paid more elsewhere. People will absolutely pass over your job offer if they think they can get more elsewhere.
You also see the reverse phenomenon which is that you'll find plenty of engineers doing soul-wrenching, boring jobs in toxic environment who still say because they are very generously compensated (hello FAANG).
It seems you are over-generalizing. Maybe people are not like you.
> People will absolutely leave your company if they think they can get paid more elsewhere.
Maybe you will. Maybe they won't. Everyone has his own bar for "enough" money. For some there is no such bar.
louis___ commented on Toddlers are harsh judges of moral character digest.bps.org.uk/2021/12... · Posted by u/rustoo
> As for "lie-cheat-steal machines", I've personally observed it across thousands of children. It mainly happens at 11-13 years of age, middle school in the USA.
Nonesense. First, you did not personally observed thousands of 11-13 years old.
Second, 11-13 years are pretty empathetic and already have a lot of values in them. They do lie, just like most adults do, but they don't steal and don't cheat all that much. They are already building pretty nuanced value system.
Why are you so agressive to the comment you're responding to ? Why do you refuse it the benefit of the doubt ?
louis___ commented on Facts don’t change our minds (2018) jamesclear.com/why-facts-... · Posted by u/nvr219
Are you sure about that? Even in your own life? Why did you eat the dinner you had last night? Was it because the caloric intake was the proper amount you needed for life? Or were there other reasons? You liked the taste? Just felt like it?
many decisions we make are shortcuts in life. Maybe at one point something was a rational data decisions. But you can turn that into a 'gut feel' very quickly with little thought.
Changing someone's opinion with facts almost rarely works. Unless they do not care about the outcome. Then you can easily change their minds. Something like 1+1=3 'hey you got that wrong' 'oh yeah you are right its 2'. That sort of fact decision is easy to 'fix'. But which steakhouse is the best one on the market? You will get lots of opinions and anecdotes. But there are known and sometimes manipulative methods to change someone's opinion on those things. Edward Bernays methods are usually manipulative and use extensively in politics and marketing campaigns. I usually personally use a more questioning methodology. You also have to get past the idea of 'right vs wrong' also, and be willing to change your own opinions. If not fact methodology usually makes people dig in and ignore you.
I think both you and the guy you replied to are right. It is just 2 aspects of life.
What matters is how do we want to live life ? Do you want to accept that everything is pre-decided, and that we are puppets to our own biases, or do we want to believe that the power of our destiny is in our hands, that we change in every fleeting moment, and we can decide to change for the better version of ourselves ?
Because what you believe influences deeply what you become.
louis___ commented on Mihály Csíkszentmihályi has died twitter.com/sbkaufman/sta... · Posted by u/fagnerbrack
For those interested in the flow state, I became convinced that this is the kind of state achieved while practicing Zazen meditation :
https://zmm.org/teachings-and-training/meditation-instructio...
At one point, the only activity of being sit is the one necessary to reach the flow state.
louis___ commented on Amazon warehouse employee in Poland dies at work gloswielkopolski.pl/smier... · Posted by u/nathell
Opposite experience. It leads to wasting time, especially compared to getting to the same conclusions using more effective, if less 'true', tactics. It just doesn't scale.
At some level good faith is superior on a very large scale, since the reality tends to provide a somewhat consistent feedback, but there remains a local niche of maxxing out persuasion skill tree. Not to beat dead horse, but large organizations with too much resources seem particularly prone - it is an obviously self correcting mechanism, but the tactic remains valid locally.
It starts with not assuming bad faith from the other side.
Trying to adapt your communication strategy depending on the profile of the other side is not really "good faith". The goal is to train _ourselves_ to look at reality in a less biased, personal way. Wanting to max out every opportunities precisely tends to distort reality.