Thanks, I'm early-mid career, and this feels like really good advice. It almost seems obvious: be helpful, don't be an asshole, and you'll be fine.
248 karma · joined February 18, 2015
Beside your point, but wondering if you could expand on this. I have a tendency to do this, and while it's fun, I'm starting to get the sense that it's a bad habit, possibly because I sense I'm overly confident on something that might be 100% wrong and it feels... invasive?
Also, it makes me wonder about cultural relativism, since it seems there's this implicit sense of "progress" by the way the map was constructed. It lines up with my values, but is that my Western bias?
Make no mistake, whatever the goal is, the side-effects are unfortunate.
A little off-topic, but this is an interesting point. Made me wonder if our corporations fall prey to the same problem as well, since they're basically authoritarian states in structure. But I guess it's because they have such one-dimensional goals that this structure is so effective, as you said.
> If the Chinese government can ever arrive at a good solution to local, delegated authority (and I'm not hopeful it will), these smaller issues can be attended to
Do you think it's possible for delegated authority to exist under an authoritarian system at all?
Not saying this applies to everyone, but I think it's helpful for people who approach their social anxiety with a type-A mentality.
Meditation is just another tool, although a very powerful one. Use it wisely.
Very interested in taking a course, but there are so many offerings available. I have high level ML understanding from classes I took in college, but wanted to dive deeper into it.
Yes, it's true that we assume we can approximate the emotional experience of others, but I think a critical piece the author left is the verbal part of emotional intelligence - the words someone says that convey nuances that facial expressions/non verbal cues don't. And I'm not saying what a person says is what they really mean. You need to be cognizant of both to hear the "real message". That's at the heart of emotional intelligence. I feel like the beginning was just a contrived critique made to draw the reader into the meat of the article. Can't we just examine the existing literature and add our own thoughts without suggesting some grand "rewrite"?
Also internal and external emotional intelligence are very different, I feel like somewhere the author conflated the two without making a clear distinction although maybe I just didn't read it deeply enough.
That said, the discussion on emotional granularity is very interesting and I will definitely be reading more into it.
> Learn how to trick your brain into thinking that fear is excitement. You don't have to be able to do it very long, just the ten seconds before you're about to start, but it makes all the difference.
I would say that fear and excitement are actually the same underlying emotion, just interpreted differently. So it's less about tricking yourself than it is just making a cognitive decision.
As someone who has struggled with mental health myself in the past, I'm kind of wary of the whole "let's reduce depression down to how we would treat a broken arm." argument. While it's good intentioned, and I totally agree we need to reduce its stigma in society, I wonder if it does more harm then good in the long run.
Depression is a disease of the soul, and I think it is so deeply embedded in the human experience that we can't just compare it to a physical ailment. I agree you shouldn't define yourself by a mental illness, but it no doubt deeply affects how you perceive and think about the world, sometimes for worse, but also in my experience, for the better. Good employers take this into account, although i think it happens more on a employee-manager relationship level than through organizational rules. But culture helps a lot.
I think we should broach the topic of depression as a society with deep care, empathy, and patience, recognizing how enormous and fundamental it is to the human experience. To compare it to a physical ailment is restrictive and a bit reductive. (If you can't tell, I think the biochemical causes of depression are a bit overemphasized in today's society.) We will be less frustrated at the lack of progress if we understand the enormity and complexity of the problem.
This line sounds deep, but I think it incorrectly conflates work with life having meaning. If eventually there isn't a need for large swaths of the population to work, then so what? I don't think the elite aristocrats in previous centuries had any problem with not working. Humanity can adapt to find other sources of meaning, like the pursuit of art in its various forms (although I'm assuming that computers can't replace art). I think a better question is if society can adapt quick enough to fill the void left by the absence of work.