biren34's comments

In most every discussion I've come across that touches on money advice, I've see a variant of this comment "This world view doesn't incorporate (my) reality of the poorest of the Western world and is so in invalid and offensive".

I'm not sure what motivates this. If you invert the situation and someone made a list with stuff like "use coupons", would rich people come by and say "this is dumb because it only saves you $0.50 and I (as a rich person) don't care about $0.50"?

People have different starting conditions and different current situations, if what's described isn't relevant to yours--why does it bother you so? Let the people who find value in it find value in it.

First, ambitious people will find ways to figure out if they're succeeding. There are good ways and bad ways.

Second, objective rank ordering does exist. You can deny it or dismiss it, but it's there:

- Who's fitter? - Who's prettier? - Who can run/swim/bike farther? - Who makes more money? - Who got in to a "better" school / got the better job / got promoted faster? - Who's got more friends?

Then, the biggest zinger of them of all: who has more status?

Humans may never know the entire leaderboard, but we're exceeding good at knowing our local neighborhood on these kinds of ordering systems.

You can say that these things "don't matter", but to a vast fraction of humanity, they do matter. And as social animals, I'd argue that humans are more or less programmed to care about these things. Maybe not everyone, but imo, social status is core driver of human behavior, just like hunger and sex. And status is all about rank ordering.

This is super interesting to me.

Several comments to this thread show that the poster is mixing up the will to power with a specific value system.

The will to power--and the skills to go with it--are a pure good in my mind. It's the stuff let makes babies get up and learn to walk. It's the curiosity that makes kids ask "why?" about everything in the world. It's the fire in humanity that let us put 7+ Billion on this little blue planet while generating amazing standards of living for so many of them.

That will to power can be aimed at whatever target you choose. If Porshe's and Gucci bags and trophy wifes, okay. It can just as easily be a good-paying job that puts a roof over your head and feeds your family, while leaving you plenty of time to be present in everyone's life. It can easily be starting a charity that feeds the homeless or shelters battered women.

The will to power--and the skills that go with it--are the ability to shape your world in to whatever you want. There's nothing in there that forces you to pick ugly shapes.

How I wish I could link to another comment.

Here's my answer to that, with some of it repeated from a comment posted to another comment above:

I 100% believe in "success" and the will to power--and I want my kids to succeed, full stop. I make no excuses. It's part of my value system, and I don't hide from it. I'm a second generation immigrant, and on my visits back to India, I've seen what real poverty looks like.

I don't mean any offense in this, but here it is as plainly as I can say: The idea that "success" isn't crucially important in life is just wrong. I see it as coming from a softness that I associate with participation trophies and the general wimpification of America.

I very much ascribe to G. Michael Hopf's philosophy of “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

The ability to succeed is essential. It's the ability set a goal and accomplish it. That ability is totally separate from the nature of the goal. That goal can be making a billion dollars or it can be building a neighborhood community group.

Given the above, I DON'T deem to know the right path for my children. They are their own people with their own passions, skills, and motivations. They're still young, but I hope that, if one day, one of them wants to drop out of college and pursue acting full time, I'll be supportive.

My goal is to give them the skills and emotional strength to go out there and be the best version of themselves, and in my opinion, knowing how to succeed--and how to see other are farther along than you and still keep going--it crucial.

At the same time, there's a reason I couched this conversation in terms of what I'd tell my kids. I'm not claiming any universal truth. This is me, my values, my biases. I think I'm right, but I'm just another schmoe doing the best I can. And fortunately, it's my right to screw up my kids in my own way :)

I 100% believe in "success" and the will to power--and I want my kids to succeed, full stop. I make no excuses.

It's part of my value system, and I don't hide from it. I'm a second generation immigrant, and on my visits back to India, I've seen what real poverty looks like.

I don't mean any offense in this, but here it is as plainly as I can say: The idea that "success" isn't crucially important in life is just wrong. I see it as coming from a softness that I associate with participation trophies and the general wimpification of America.

I very much ascribe to G. Michael Hopf's philosophy of “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

The ability to succeed is essential. It's the ability set a goal and accomplish it. That ability is totally separate from the nature of the goal. That goal can be making a billion dollars or it can be building a neighborhood community group.

If I had to guess--and I don't know you well enough to do anything but guess--you're confusing America's value of extreme individualism and a proper focus on internal control and self-improvement in order to be able to succeed.

There's a very subtle distinction here, and you're right, I didn't articulate it well.

I'm not advocating ignoring the leaderboards (especially for things like chess where they're essential to determining skill).

But you don't focus on the leaderboard. It's not the center of your world--just one data point in a complex web of feedback.

To take the chess example, sitting there and saying "I'm 1063rd and I want to be better" is barely a start. You have to do a lot of evaluation of your internal strengths and weaknesses as a chess player: do you get bored/hyperaggressive? Do you get too cautious? Do you lose focus after X hours?

Then address those with a process in order to move up on the leaderboard. If you define "success" as executing that process, as opposed to winning the game, that's the ticket to both feeling good about yourself regardless of the result AND winning more games over time.

First, I'm not looking for excuses for poor performance, and I don't want my kids doing that either. You screw up then own it. It's okay. You don't have to be perfect, no one is. But don't be a coward and hide from your own limitations.

Second, I think you're glossing over the part about process-oriented goals.

If one stays stuck on results-oriented goals, then your comment is pretty much on point. It doesn't matter who I'm competing with, I'll have bad days.

But with process-oriented goals, the focus switches how you do what you're doing, and that's something purely in your control.

To put it in exercise terms, you won't always be able to lift more than you did yesterday or run faster than you did 5 years ago--but you can always actually get off the coach and do it, you can always focus on your form, you can always push for that last rep or work hard into the last sprint.

It's really about an internal focus PLUS a process-oriented approach. Not just one or the other.

Okay, this brings up a really pivotal point that took me way too long to learn:

ALL advice MUST be tailored to the individual.

This entire discussion is moot for some fraction of the population whether due to internal traits or external circumstances.

So, if you are living option #4, good luck to you. If someone is not living option #4, there are likely internal drives they need to learn to control/manage, and just pointing out that other people are able to live option #4 isn't useful to them.

The example you give is true. However, it's a toy example that doesn't usually relate to real world data sets.

In most cases, with the amount of data you have, the rounding washes out any real impact of the effect, and you often have measurement error far larger than it anyway.

But yeah, if you're ranking 9 people on an easily knowable stat, then technical 4/9 are below median, 4/9 above, and 1 is exactly median.

With the IQ example you gave, it's just that people don't speak with that level of precision about most things--also, that level of precision is very rarely useful.

So, you're not wrong, but kind of sideways to the discussion at hand. It's actually a common problem in business, where really detail-oriented analysts miss the forest for the trees over stuff like this.

Regarding median vs mean vs average (as the 1st reply to your comment mentioned), median and mean are generally equal as long the values being measure are symmetrically dispersed around the "average". If you get a fat tail in one direction or the other, the mean will be skewed in the direction of that tail, and you need to be careful.

In video games--and life--the only rewards for success are a transient celebration and a harder level.

My reply to another similar comment:

I think there must be some misunderstanding.

My point is that everyone will have to deal with not being the best. For the vast majority of people being the best at anything is out of the question, regardless of effort or focus. Even if you are one of the lucky few who can be "the best", it'll only be for a moment in time. All of us age and our capacities fade. Then you're left dealing with the additional burden of having once kissed the sky and now being earthbound like the rest of us.

The whole point of the philosophy is finding something else to focus on other than the (true but depressing) objective rank-ordering of you among your peers. Leaderboards are useless to all but a chosen few.

However, everyone (even the ones that will place on the top of the leaderboards) can benefit from taking their focus off the leaderboard and putting it on their own process and effort (in some sense replacing the comparison to others with a comparison to their yester-selves).

While I enjoy a good nitpicking as much as the next guy, when talking about rank ordering, the use of average to denote median is valid.

Median and mean only diverge when there's a long-tail scalar that skews the mean away from the median. Since rank ordering gives every individual the same weighting with no scalars, "average" is accurate enough, if somewhat colloquial.

I think there must be some misunderstanding.

My point is that everyone will have to deal with not being the best. For the vast majority of people being the best at anything is out of the question, regardless of effort or focus. Even if you are one of the lucky few who can be "the best", it'll only be for a moment in time. All of us age and our capacities fade. Then you're left dealing with the additional burden of having once kissed the sky and now being earthbound like the rest of us.

The whole point of the philosophy is finding something else to focus on other than the (true but depressing) objective rank-ordering of you among your peers. Leaderboards are useless to all but a chosen few.

However, everyone (even the ones that will place on the top of the leaderboards) can benefit from taking their focus off the leaderboard and putting it on their own process and effort (in some sense replacing the comparison to others with a comparison to their yester-selves).

Yeah, the fact is other people are often more talented, any maybe worse, even if other people aren't more talented, you just screw stuff up--often a lot.

It's part of life and putting your head in the sand about is just weak. If you could have been farther--and worst case the only reason you aren't is because of mistakes you knew better than to make--face it, accept it, forgive yourself and use the experience to keep your head on straight going forward. It's all you can do anyway.

As for tactics, sometimes it might help if you imagine it was someone else who screwed up the way you did and consider how you'd treat/view them. (For those of us with really super-critical inner voices, this can help us get in touch with our compassion.) Like all these kinds of things, YMMV.

Here's what I would tell my kids: "Odds are, you ARE behind. In any given rank ordering, 50% are below average. 90% are NOT in the top 10%

If you're lucky and work hard, you can be in the top 10%, 5% or even 1% of a few areas. But even then, you can beat yourself up about not being the best--because even if you sometimes are the best at something, sometimes you aren't. You can always make yourself miserable, if you choose to.

So what do you do? You have 3 choices:

1. sit there and complain about it

2. Deny the reality of your "behindness", which makes for weak men and women (and I didn't raise wimps)

3. Or, you can realize that there's a set of skills related to managing your internal state

The best way to do this is to focus on process-oriented goals, rather than results oriented goals. In other words, take pride in your work not in the output. You can lose every game, yet feel okay, if you set your goals to be play a bit better than last time--and do it.

Once you get there, you can admit others are better than you and be thankful for the opportunity to learn from them--since you're no longer competing.

This is what is meant by "losers focus on the winners, and winners focus on themselves".

It's simple, but not easy. It takes work to achieve this, just like it takes work to achieve any useful skill. And just like any other skill, you'll get this right sometimes and screw it up at others. Just try to do it better today than you did yesterday, yes, like it's any other skill.

Good luck, I'll always be rooting for you.

Shouldn't this question be asked in a larger context? Since the moon landing, pretty much every major government-led initiative has been less successful than the one before, as far as I can think of. (Admittedly this is my "general sense" and not based on any exhaustive research).

Is nuclear power special? I don't think so. I think it's just more sensitive to the various pathologies that have crept into the US political system over the past 5 decades.

If I wrote a history of modern technology since 1960, my first guess at a theme would be "the government led the development of many major new technologies then people decided it wasn't good at this, and it passed all the profits on to private companies--who then stopped working on big breakthroughs (mostly)"

Again, maybe I'm wrong, but that's my hypothesis.

There are two big forces driving this divergence.

First, the last 50 years have seen a series of "one off" increases to global labor supply. Between Asia and former communist countries, American workers have been forced to compete in an environment dominated by the largest globalization of labor ever. That competition pushes wages down for anything that can be done outside our borders.

Second, as the issuer of the world's reserve currency during this period of massive globalization (while all this increased trade is creating a demand for dollars overseas), America's financial sector is involved in exporting dollars the way Norway exports oil. So Wall Street is sitting at the center of an incredible boom driven by international forces + the increased financialization that has come from having an artificially strong dollar (kind of a Dutch Disease for us, where the "sector" thats growing is the dollar-printing sector). Most dollars are printed using private debt, so Wall Street is basically the Saudi Arabia for dollars.

Given these two forces, of course Wall Street compensation was going radically outpace the minimum wage. (Not that I would/could have predicted that in 1970 if I had been alive then.)

Fair.

My main point was that people don't want to talk about the main issue, but rather these details.

The fact that natural hunger/satiation doesn't seem to work anymore certainly counts as a main issue (and you got some off topic replies).

Thinking about "what's broken" though, I have a few hypotheses:

1. We're surrounded by supernormal stimulatants that are hijacking our brain. (While this is possible, most of the worst food was available before the recent spikes in obesity)

2. Economics: calories (in any form) used to be expensive, so only the rich could get fat. The skills required to thrive in a world that doesn't impose calorie restriction at some level are just not widespread.

3. Our internal systems can't function in a world where people get less than 1 hour of vigorous exercise a day (or even a week). It doesn't matter how little you're spending, the body expects you're going need at least, say 1500 calories and for many people that's too many.

4. Something environmental. We're awash in so many new chemicals building up in our environments and bodies, and few have been studied for their long term effects. Maybe there's something in here that's throwing off internal signals or hormones.

The other replies to this comment are examples of what I was talking about.

Do different foods have difference metabolic properties, including variations in accessible calories? Yes.

Can we accurately measure calorie intake? Kind of. Even with a food scale, I'm not sure we get to within 10% of the "correct" calorie count because the methods for determining the calorie / lb may have issues.

Could people do weird things, like wrap food in cellophane, burnt it before eating, or even just throw it all up? Of course.

But so what? We have a real world problem here in that Americans (and others) are suffering a material degradation in quality of life due to health issues related to diet and exercise.

There are tons of optimizations possible, but they don't matter to cohort in question. For them, CICO is good enough by far. These optimizations are like trying to teach matrix math to someone who can't add--and doesn't want to learn.

Yet, I regularly see these discussions veer into the realm of these optimizations, presumably because the real problems are too hard and/or depressing.

I understand the desire to investigate stuff like this, but for 90%+ of people, every inquiry in to "most optimal way to not be debilitating unhealthy" is just a waste of time.

If you're not in a special group (gout, hypertension, allergies, etc.) the answer is incredibly simple:

- your diet determines your size

- your activities (or lack thereof) determine your shape

I realize that type 2 diabetics (as being studied in this paper) might be considered one of those groups, but as far as I can tell, almost all of the war is in getting people wanting to improve, and very little of it is in the how to do it.

Maybe that's just me, but I feel like we're searching for our keys under streetlight here. These are easily studied problems, so there are papers/book written. Trying to understand the myriad psychological and societal (and possible environmental) processes is where the real gains will be made.