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Comment by xjay | Hacker News Reader

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xjay·

Those people ~ "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." [1] Law of the Instrument

"Where some have found their paradise, others just come to harm." - Law of Joni Mitchell

"Don't do things for the wrong reasons."

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument

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I think what you're getting at, since we're talking about values, is déformation professionelle: valuing things that you know, and devaluing (valuing less than objectively appropriate) other things.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9formation_professionnel...

“All we need to do is to decide on how to spend the time that is given to us”. Gandalf knows best. The hard part is making that decision. It’s something that ideally happens once you know your personal values. But - It’s even harder to make those decisions once you realise that your values will change over time. What a pickle!

I'm not sure I understand Joni Mitchell's law (beside a naive "when up, things can only go down")

“Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got Till it's gone They paved paradise And put up a parking lot”

I read "come to harm" as "get harmed" instead of "do harm".

In simpler terms: what's good for some is bad for others.

Yes, the idiom "come to X" does mean "be acted on by X". Common usages "come to harm", "come to Jesus", "come to his/her/your/my senses" ( = rational thought).

It's especially confusing in this case, where the previous sentence refers to a place.

"I come to the beach to relax, but others come to party."

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