This is my manual on how to live a good life. This is a reminder for myself on how I should live life.
I worry that it's only going to get harder for us to pull back frmo the brink here. THere are so many ways in which things could go wrong. Take the deep fakes for example. Evidence won't be applicable in court anymore.
It seems like fake video generation is going to completely change (and possibly destabilize) societal dynamics (eg. video, audio, text evidence won't work in court anymore). The proposed solutions (like water marking or hoping discriminators will always be better than generators) are not convincing to me. Seems like people are not as worried as they should be about this. Even though we might be able to solve this problem, there are so many other ways in which we could get things wrong. Examples: nuclear weapons, recommender systems, social media, pills for exercise -- which have massive real world consequences.
There are definitely some famous books, like "the secret" that promote pseudoscience and are "wrong". Ideas like "if you want something to happen, just believe in it strongly and it'll happen".
It makes people who blindly believe it in worse (on average, that's my intuition atleast). Anytime something doesn't work, the book argues it's because "you didn't believe it in storngly enough". It makes people blame themselves, and feel worse.
We are just "believing" science, yes. We trust the scientists (generally speaking) and take them by their word.
Why do we believe non scientists? I do that because I think science is the best way to get at truth. And when other people make claims, I'm open to considering them as long as they don't blatantly violate scientific principles. The secret violates every law of physics we know of. :P
I'd call secret unscientific because it violates all models about how the world works. You can design experiments to show that it fails. And it fails of several other aspects: the methods used to arrive at the approach, the arguments used to justify it, etc.,
Of course, we can't be 100% sure that it's wrong. We never know anything 100%. But given what we know about the world, it seems unlikely to be true.
Strategies: get into converstaions with people and just them as chunks for chpaters in your book. What if I start conversations with people on chapters I want to write in my book?
Are we more likely to procrastinate a task if it's an hour of exericse instead of 10-minutes? Yes! But that doesn't make any sense. In either case, the immediate next actions you need to take is the same. Our brain uses mental models to make these estimations, we need to break through that.
Read Michael Simmons: https://medium.com/@michaeldsimmons
Go around and pick the chapters that suit your needs best. I believe each of these chapter would have been revolutionary to my 22- year old self.
This book is on the insights I got when trying to implement the principle I learn in various book into my life. Reading without implementing those ideas is pointless. We need to actively push back on this temptation.
Inspired by Lex Fridman's tweet and David Goggins's mentality, I decided to do 20,000 reps of various exercises in 30 days. I focused on pushing myself and doing this hard workout everyday to strengthen my mind. The hardest part wasn't the pain during the workouts or the soreness after (they weren't much, especially because I slowly ramped up to hit those many reps), but to workout around 2 hours everyday without excuses. This is different from my plank challenge where I hit 8.5 minutes of plank, where the hardest part is to not give in to the pain or suffering.
Lex's tweet: https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1266580747407765509 Tracking sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wyskmTmTWE8NA47HcgWqsdhLORR3H371dWgO00FWEPk/edit#gid=1404168043
If you find that these ideas add value to your life, buy me a coffee. If you're a student, and you can't walk into a coffee shop and buy coffee for yourself for free, you're banned for contribution,