The thinking path | Hacker News Reader

The thinking path

robinsloan.com

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I live in a wonderfully walkable tiny university town. I let my driver’s license expire a year ago and walk everywhere.

My productivity went up noticeably.

Interesting fact: 8 miles away is another walkable, extra hilly, tiny university town.

So I tried something crazy.

I bought out Tue & Thu 9am morning massage sessions from my favorite therapist, for two months in advance, in the OTHER college town.

It’s a 3 hour walk. But now, twice a week, I get up at 5am, and put in 6 hours of walking, to get a massage. On top of my other walking.

Productivity went through the roof. I do less, but what I do is so much better planned that progress is on fire.

I am now thinking about how to keep this up through winter.

The physical & mental health benefits are significant. I have lost weight, sleep better, clearer mind, more ideas, less anxiety …

Do you listen to music or podcasts?

I love long walks and a podcast but it doesn’t clear the mind quite like a plain walk just listening to the world.

I sometimes listen to music, but usually listen to the quiet. :)

Why is that crazy?

When you feel pressure to get things done, committing 6 hours to just walking seems like a crazily inefficient use of time if all you want is exercise. Very interesting though.

It fits the sharpening-the-ax idea, usually misattributed to Abraham Lincoln [0] :

  > If I had 8 hours to chop down a tree, I would spend 6 of those hours sharpening my axe.

In this case you are the ax, that you should spend a considerable amount of time of your workhours to keep sharp.

[0] : https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/29/sharp-axe/

If you keep it up, you might get faster and then maybe your long walk to get a massage becomes more sustainable, perhaps even in winter.

My 20 min mile went down to 16 min pretty quick!

I've become known amongst my friends for giving the same advice when it comes to most problems: "Uninstall Twitter and start going on walks."

I don't think it's only useful for intellectual pursuits: we rarely get enough alone time nowadays. And when we do, we're bombarded with stimulation and noise. There's no good opportunity to be alone with ourselves. Walking in a safe, familiar place without my phone has become one of my most important and cherished daily rituals -- I see it as an emotional cleansing.

I think it's a balance. For "emotional gardening" as I call it, disconnecting from tech / anti-social media and taking a walk is great. But if you still want to assess present reality and make good judgments about the future (or even just have some novel thing to talk about), these tools can still be great for absorbing information context.

I like the Digital Wellbeing app on Android. Set a daily timer for app usage and then it gets blocked once you're over the timer.

> I think it's a balance. For "emotional gardening" as I call it, disconnecting from tech / anti-social media and taking a walk is great. But if you still want to assess present reality and make good judgments about the future (or even just have some novel thing to talk about), these tools can still be great for absorbing information context.

I don't think Xitter is a good tool for assessing present reality and making good judgments about the future, either. (Actually, I took you to mean "directly obtain accurate information about the world and act on it," but maybe you meant "find out the worst of what people are currently doing and be prepared.")

Agree; at the root, I think it’s a misconception that being informed is better than being uninformed. We know too much about current events and we have far too little context for it; and our idea of being informed about the state of the world (which requires, I think, intake of context in vast excess to content) has been replaced with having an opinion about everything in it, or really, someone else’s opinion on it.

I agree with Darwin’s combination of rocks, thinking, and walking, they seem to go together. If you don’t have his circular path, you can put a handful of pebbles in your pocket. Then when you’re at a particularly stuck spot in your thinking, toss one away. Works wonders!

Every morning, I get up early (5AM), and take a 5K walk. It's always the same walk, and I usually play some mindless techno, while doing it.

I use the time to "triage" the day's tasks. Sometimes, I even fix bugs, while thinking about a solution that had perplexed me, the night before.

In reading lately have come across a lot of famous names that made 'walking' a big part of their learning. It is good way to let brain wonder and have subconscious solve problems.

Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Aristotle, Thoreau

Also. Buried in the page farther down.

One of the more scary takes on how we could have 'Killer AI'.

Everyone seems to argue 'Killer AI' is still far in the future, because they associate it with the Terminator Movies and current Robot Tech is lagging AI. So why worry, we can still un-plug them.

This video is how it will actually happen. AI can be incorporated into a lot of weapons.

From the linked site

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU

Dogs make great thinking companions and need you to think deeply three times a day!!

This is a nice sentiment, but I've found that needing to pay attention to my dog while walking him does interrupt my thinking. Walking with him is good for us both, but walking alone is better for thinking.

A humble suggestion: Load up contradictory thoughts or points of view, and think about them as you walk. Here's a starter pack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2a-DsX9Ezg

I don't want to tell you what you should get out of this; it took me a long time to understand what 'dialectic' means. This may be intro level material to many people, but not everyone gets to go to a four year college, or gets raised in an open-minded community.

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Reading someone else's philosophy is often a chore. Often people just want the best answer, or the truth.

When I deploy a software system, can I say that it will work? Or can I say that it is working right now?

I can't write software that will work a year from now. I have no idea what the world will look like in a year. Specifically, patches are applied and versions change.

The best answer is almost always contingent on context. We can have shared evidence, but proof is internal to one mind.

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How do you deal with the problems of running a blame free and learning organization?

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'Be Nice to Spiders' was my first introduction to counter-culture. When everyone else is afraid or uncomfortable or angry about something, you don't have to be.

If you go to high school in France, this will more than ring a bell: it’s the expected essay format.

Often named “dialectic plan”, or “thesis, antithesis, synthesis” [0]

[0]: https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thesis,_antithesis,_synthesi...

In Germany they call it "Eröterung".

Not only France, Québec to and I would not be surprised if that practice was common to the Francophonie.

Thèse, antithèse, synthèse... 25 years later I still hate the highschool version of that format because it came with a minimal words count and I suck at taking something that can be said using 3 propositions and turning that into a 5 phrases paragraph.

> This may be intro level material to many people, but not everyone gets to go to a four year college, or gets raised in an open-minded community.

Hopefully if you're a person that analyzes contradictory thoughts you've already realized that a huge portion of society cannot do this. It's always fun at family reunions when attempting to discuss a complex topic has confused their opinion for being a fact and they cannot imagine a point of view that is not their own.

The first hard part of life is learning different views exist.

The second hard part of life is realizing some people have a very hard to near impossible time accepting other views exist.

This still leaves room for believing all your views are the 'right' ones. Perhaps the third hard part is accepting that some of these views are valid.

But perhaps when you say views you are implicitly saying that all views are valid, which is a different kind of acceptance I suppose.

I always liked this idea that you have to realise that others are as convinced of their opinions as you are of yours. It doesn't matter that you are very well informed, because they think they are also very well informed.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/03/what-developmental-mil...

> 'Be Nice to Spiders' was my first introduction to counter-culture. When everyone else is afraid or uncomfortable or angry about something, you don't have to be.

As a spider enthusiast and photographer, this makes me happy. Thank you for showing these creatures respect :)

Any cool pictures to share?

Not without doxxing myself unfortunately. Maybe I'll create an anonymous account on a photo hosting site and share.

> Often people just want the best answer, or the truth.

most people want the most convenient, easiest answer that conforms to their own confirmation biases.

Getting confirmation on a confirmation bias releases pleasant hormones and tends to be addictive. (is this true?)

I will say yes, because it makes me feel pleasant.

I don't know if it's necessary to even invoke hormones for this (it may be true, I'm not sure), you can also view confirmation bias as simply more efficient.

It requires less mental energy to slot new information into an existing framework of beliefs than to consider alternative ways for the information to fit.

We don't question our entire belief system with every new piece of information; that would be mentally exhausting.

I love this comment. You've packed a lot of snippets of wisdom and good ideas into an "economized" length (# of words). And, you're exactly right - I see a lot of "meat" here, but even a decade ago, I would have seen a lot less and some of this would be more of a starting point ... some outlining and ideas to learn more about.*

Picking up a habit of 'reaching for dialectic' is one of the most valuable things I've ever learned. I've found that it even helps to 'decouple' 'ideas' from 'identity' more completely and thoroughly than quite a lot of learning about and practicing 'mindfulness' in various forms - at least, for someone like me. And, that is about as helpful as anything gets if you want to be able to "see clearly" ... to get more clarity in terms of what is "more actually true" (as opposed to whatever mix of nonsense and shades of truth(s) any of us may have in our heads at any given time).

In that vein, and I may have written this on HN before ... not sure and not bothering to check this second: true 'skepticism'** STARTS with skepticism of one's own thoughts! It's about as inefficacious as 'methods' get to spend all of one's time picking apart ideas and 'information' and the like presented from 'the outside'*** while spending no time subjecting what's presented internally to any amount of scrutiny at all.

* vs. a "parsimonious" solid set of wisdom with some breadth even if tending towards a little "ad hoc" - yet, it all hangs off common thread(s), IMO

** In more of an original [Ancient Greek] sense than modern connotation

*** I.e., NOT "the half behind the eyes", as Terry Pratchett phrases it in one of his books

> I can't write software that will work a year from now. I have no idea what the world will look like in a year. Specifically, patches are applied and versions change.

The key to solving this problem is adhering to published standards, which tend to be long-lived. I have code still in use that I wrote 30+ years ago. Of course, just adhering to standards is only half the battle. There's more to writing long-lived code than just that. But it is a skill that can be learned.

Walking is just one way to pull yourself out of the workplace and give yourself time and space to focus on the problem.

Rich Hickey has a great talk "Hammock Driven Development" in which he describes the value of giving your mind time to think deeply about a problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc

True, see also the Leo Szilard two-hour-bathtub session approach. Although reports are that he also used the walking method:

> "When Szilard told the story later he never mentioned his destination that morning. He may have had none; he often walked to think."

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...

It’s not necessarily that much time. It’s not rare that I block hard on some issue for a significant time, and the moment I stand up and go to the kitchen making some dishes, the solution pops up.

True, but walking has additional physical-health benefits.

I walk a lot. On average, 8 km (5 miles) a day for some two years by now (previously, I didn't have a Garmin watch to count the steps).

IDK if it makes me more productive. Maybe. I certainly came upon some solutions (for programming) or clever formulations (for blog/newspaper articles) while walking. But there is an important exception: hot days. Walking on hot days fries my brain.

I find random walks to be too distracting. Instead I prefer to pace in a space, inside or out, that holds few or no surprises for me...

I found actively walking (even indoors) prevents me from opening a tab to an addictive website.

As an aside, anyone know what makes pages like these not wheel-scroll? Page shows 2 scrollbars.

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