Self-Help is like a vaccine
Very good. Maybe a new favorite author!
Self-help is like a vaccine, when used, it works wonders.
- knowing what someone cant do tends to be hard. You should make such claims with care.
- Id rather live on my knees than die on my feet. Almost everyone knows that appeasement works. They have too much pride to appease.
"If you're so smart, why arent you rich?" A: The market poorly rewards deep, accurate knowledge of the Big Picture. If you want to get rich your're better off knowing the right kinds of trivia.
The world is packed with brilliant priple who desperately want to become fabulously rich. The quest to grasp the Big Picture, in contrast, is only a nerdy hobby.
- Why aren't (relatively) poor Americans expected to live like college students? Before anyone starts collecting welfare, it is more than fair to ask them – for starters – to try to solve their own problem by taking on some roommates.
- Other factors – like low IQ, low conscientiousness, low patience, or plain irrationality – must be driving both poverty adn substance abuse.
- Depressed people have a preference to be depressed. You are the preferences you really have.
- A strong presumption in favor of kindness and respect almost never hurts you, and often helps. Note that I say "presumption". Dont "wait and see" if people deserve friendly treatment. Hand it out first, no questions asked. You will make friends (very good), avoid making enemies (good), and occasionally show underserved kindness and respect (only mildly bad). keeping friends is much more important that getting your way.
Make your own bubble:
Stop paying attention to things that aggravate you unless they a) concretely affect your life AND b) you can realistically do something about them. Stop following national and world news!
Pay less frequent attention to things that aggraate you even if they do concretely affect your life and can realistically do something about them.
Emotionally distance yourself from people you personally known who aggravate you. Dont purge anyone – that causes more trouble than it saves.
Actively try to make more fiends with people who share you likes. In the internet age this is shockingly easy. Dont try to make more friends who share your dislikes; build friendship on common passions, not joint contempt.
Rules when you dont know what your doing:
If you dont have clear and convincing evidence that doing something is better than doing nothing, do nothing.
If you know that doing nothing is bad, but dont have clear and convincing evidence that one action is better than another, do the simplest, standard thing.
- Ask to permanetly store one trips worth of supplies at each destination that you frequent.
Thigs you learn from parenting:
Have kinds to create beloved companions, pay forward the gift of life, adn see the world anew, not to get a person to mold or boss around.
You have little effect on your childs intelligence, success, or even character. Bu you have a genuine effect on his appreciation of you – how he feels about and remembers you.
Use discipline to turn your kid into a good roomate when hes a kid.
Purpose of discipline: keep your kid in one piece / make your life easier / for your kid to sacrifiece very short run gains for short-run gains.
Mild disciple, mechanically enforced, deters bad behavior far more effectively than harsh discipline arbitrarily enforced. Idle threats, do not improve behavior at all.
Expressing anger at your children is counter productive. It undermines your authority and give wayward children hope of besting you.
Dont let your kids ignore you
Once you have your first child the marginal cost of another is small.
TV is youf friend – if you think TV rots the brain, your aren't searching hard enough for good shows. The Simpsons is at least as good as Shakespeare.
Reduce the ambition of your family vacations until you have zero desire to scream at your kids or spouse.
Show zero tolerance for irresponsible driving and dont worry about being "fair" when you confiscate car keys. Driving is the most dangerous activity young people in our society engage in.
The last 10% of parenting hours cause half of all parental unhappiness.
- When smart kinds dont know advanced math, they forfeit about half of all high-status career opportunities.
- If a subject has an arbiter, that subject is fake. The fact that one persons say-so decides an issue reveals the make-believe nature of the issue.
Getting angry clouds your thinkging, leading to intellectual and moral error. And two of my chief goals are beign right and acting rightly.
The main person who suffers when you get angry is you.
- The fact that you have a right to do X does not mean that its right to do X
- When two people want incompatible things, they should politely say goodbye and move on with their lives.
- We should presume that conflicts are misunderstandings in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary.
Men and house work
Even when a man pays the full cost of cleanliness and receives the full benefit, he doesnt do much. Why? B/c the typical man doesnt care very much about cleanliness. When the bachelor gets married, he almost certainly start doing more housework than he did when he was single
The problem with applying the Golden Rule to housework is that most men already give their wives at least as much help as they would like to receive themselves.
- "This will either make you more likely to believe X, or have no effect" Once you understand Bayesian reasoning, however, this makes no sense. "Is this evidence stronger or weaker tha I would have expected?" If the answer is stronger you should becomre more likely to believe X if weaker, then you should be less likely to believe X.
- If you really think that only 1% of people are worth talking to, search for the 1% instead of lamenting their scarcity.
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