50 things I know
And wish I'd known sooner
You are allowed to care about people who don’t care about you, and even people who dislike you. The way you feel about someone else can be totally decoupled from how they feel about you. In fact, uncovering your capacity to love people who will never fully reciprocate it is the definition of grace.
If you’re unsure how to have better opinions, try just having fewer of them for a start.
The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get away with when it comes to how they treat different people, so pay special attention when others have sharply diverging experiences of someone’s character. Lots of variance in opinion about whether an idea is good means there’s a good chance the idea is good; lots of variance in opinion about whether a person is good is a warning sign.
Lots of things that look like reverse correlation are actually Berkson’s paradox. Or: relationships that look like tradeoffs sometimes arise because of selection effects. It’s not a coincidence that super hot guys are never good in bed; they don’t have to be to keep dating you.
You can go through a lot of relationships and experience a lot of flavors of admiration and obsession and limerence — in other words, lots of things that kind of feel like love — without experiencing real love. (This is either terrifying or reassuring, depending on your perspective.)
Writing defensively is a loser’s game. It lets people who won’t like your writing anyway win in advance.
There’s a reason 12-step programs work, and it’s steps 4 and 8. Everyone should try them.
There is no way to adequately correct for the planning fallacy. For any given task, double the amount of time and dollars you think it will take, and you will be partway there.
There are huge quality of life improvements downstream of “let me take this off future me’s plate.” You don’t just shift work earlier, you also save yourself all the mental friction between now and when you do it. Psychic cost is the integral of cognitive load over time — so do the things you most want to avoid first.
There is, annoyingly, really something to the idea that our childhoods have a massive effect on our later lives, and it’s possible to be totally convinced that you’ve gotten over your past while still laboring under all sorts of mental distortions as a result. At the same time, the point of engaging with all that stuff has to be to become more functional, not to develop an identity as a victim, or to constantly be peeling your skin off.
A lot of experiences that you might be inclined to interpret as metaphors when other people describe them are literally real. This will seem extremely funny once you experience them yourself. Related: Enlightenment is real, but it won’t necessarily make you a better person.
Revealed preference is a stupid concept, because it treats the self as unified. “If I did it, I must have wanted it” — maybe, or maybe you’re a conflicted parliament of sub-agents with diverging priorities. This is one of the most useful aspects of psychological modalities that point to layers of selfhood, whether psychoanalysis or IFS.
In 10 years you will look back and think you were so hot. Can you think it now?
Understanding asymmetric consequences — the fact that being mistaken in one direction is sometimes much costlier than being mistaken in another — can radically change what you think good decision-making looks like. Debates over climate change and animal welfare and AI policy are often between people who understand this and people who don’t.
Loneliness is not necessarily a feeling that requires a response.
There is no such thing as enough dopamine. Whatever tells you that more will satisfy you lies. You will never, ever, ever reach the limit of your longing for it.
Productivity is not effort x time — if you want one quick way to burn out, it’s believing that you just need to crank harder in circumstances where your effort is not efficiently creating results.
Ideas are cheap and easy to find; execution is everything. Effective altruists would be a lot more effective if they internalized this.
It’s possible for someone to have a motivational system very different from your own and still be a force for good in the world. I’m turned off when people are motivated primarily by prestige, but many great works have been produced at the altar of social status.
People don’t really get to choose who they are; many of the things we call “merit” are actually just another form of luck.
Happiness is a ghost, but one we’ve chased to the top of the mountain.
Many social dynamics are paradoxical — social acts that seem weak from the inside, when undertaken without apology, actually read as very strong. For example, being willing to say “I’m wrong” or “I don’t know.”
Agency is a morally neutral trait, and amoral people have more natural talent at it because they never learned the rules in the first place.
If it’s really the path, you’ll find it more than once.
You will not necessarily change your mind about wanting kids, or wanting lots of friends, no matter how many people tell you otherwise.
The people who make real change in the world are those who live on the knife edge between optimism (everything is really going to be okay) and pessimism (but everything is bad by default).
People are their own punishment, which means revenge is rarely worth it.
Almost as soon as something crystalizes into a useful handle for a pathology — trauma, autism, ADHD — it will be co-opted by a wide range of people who benefit from pathologizing relatively normal behavior.
You can save yourself a lot of grief when dealing with someone who’s upset by leading with: “Are you in venting mode or solutions mode?”
The most important thing to hire for is deeply giving a fuck, and no amount of money will get someone who doesn’t care to care. This means you should pay people enough that it’s easy for them to say yes, but not enough that it’s hard for them to say no.
Knowing when to quit is one of the most valuable skills in the world. I have managed to achieve success in multiple fields only because I have managed to quit multiple fields.
Service is the only thing that makes anything feel better in a real, lasting way. This is because acts of service provide a temporary respite from the inherent cognitive dissonance of living selfishly.
If you always let people in in traffic, no one can cut you off.
Being able to live in the “world as it is,” rather than getting permanently fixated on the “world as it should be,” is a superpower. My heart is usually with the progressive team, politically, but I am sad to note that the classic aphorism is often true: “A liberal is someone who doesn’t understand the difference between is and ought.”
You will always feel bad about being mean to people after the fact, even if they deserved it.
“You are ruined by your gifts” — the traits that make you exceptional are the very same traits that show up in your neuroses and limitations. Learning to love the upsides, if undertaken with clarity and gentleness, also creates more space to address the downsides. This is what makes the Enneagram tremendously potent.
You can’t save the world if you can’t save yourself.
There is no grand unifying theory of morality, nothing that doesn’t break down in any edge cases — so avoid totalizing ideologies, or else. If you take anything too seriously, it can make you crazy. Related: Utilitarianism is a perfect program that doesn’t run on human hardware.
The freedom to be fully honest with other people is hard to overrate or even describe. It is always available to you.
“Every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.” Source.
It’s almost impossible to have an easy life and be interesting. Suffering is what gives people texture.
Forgiveness is a thing you do for yourself, not the other person. In fact, the reason to overcome most conflictual feelings is not for the benefit of others but for the benefit of your own soul. That said, every once in a while, someone will do something truly unforgivable, in the sense that — try as you might — you simply can’t forgive it. Accept this and move on, rather than spending years trying to find a way.
Much of life, and increasingly so, is a battle against superstimuli encroaching on your mental autonomy.
You basically don’t need to worry about being too kind or too chill. If you’re the kind of person who worries that being a little more relaxed or emotionally open will destroy your whole life, you could probably stand to relax and be more emotionally open.
If you can train yourself to ask “is there a better way to do this?” at random intervals ten times a day, you will become unstoppable.
When you approach someone on the street and are trying not to run into them, don’t look at them — look at where you want to go, and they will divert around you.
Heaven is a set of gradually increasing but attainable challenges.
People who are eager to insist that every action is “selfish” because it reflects some kind of preference, or who claim that altruism is just virtue signaling, are telling on themselves — they might be very clever, but they should never be trusted with real power.
You should pay special attention to the thoughts that gnaw at you despite them being against your self-interest to think.
No matter how hard you try, you will always look back with a certain remove and wonder what the hell you were thinking.
I stole this format from my husband, who stole it from Mari Andrew. It’s a good format sir. I probably have a full post in me for about 1/3 of these, so if you like one of them, let me know.
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> 45. If you can train yourself to ask “is there a better way to do this?” at random intervals ten times a day, you will become unstoppable.
I was reading this post in a cafe. This item prompted me to ask for the bill before finishing my meal instead of after. Saved a couple of minutes for myself, on my way to become unstoppable now.
This reply is sponsored by these two minutes.
> If you can train yourself to ask “is there a better way to do this?” at random intervals ten times a day, you will become unstoppable
I find that the opposite is true for me… I had to train myself out of the tendency to do this and just *do the thing*, or else I spend too much time researching and comparing options and doing multiple implementations to see which is best, etc.