Scott Young

And, yes, some people are irrational and do hold logically contradictory beliefs. But most of the time this level of snark simply isn't justified and pretending that someone you disagree with is just logically incoherent is arguing in bad faith.

i.e. It's framed as if the person holding the beliefs is logically incoherent, rather than that you simply disagree with their assumptions/perspective. Since the former implies the person isn't just wrong but stupid, it's pays to miscategorize peoples beliefs as being irrational

Saying, "I don't understand people who believe both X and Y" usually implies that the person thinks those beliefs are incompatible. But usually there's a rationale for combining both, but the person doesn't agree with it.

Side benefit: everything is way less busy on normal weekdays. Beach, slopes, even getting haircuts are all better done while everybody else is working.

Since working for myself, I prefer to choose my own long weekends rather than have them dictated in advance. Sometimes a regular Monday is better off than the pre-schedule one, no?

Yes, sometimes quitting is the right idea. But the new thing you start will have problems too. It's facing those hard problems, not imagining scenarios where they don't exist that gets stuff done.

I see this in learning: "I should start from the very beginning because I've forgotten everything." In business: "I should start a completely new website/company." In creative works: "I should do something fresh, this one I'm working on now sucks."

There's an impulse to want to start from scratch, to give up on the flawed efforts you're putting in now and go back to a pristine beginning. This is usually a harmful fantasy. Nine times out of ten the right way forward is to stick with what you've got and improve upon it.

Do stuff. See what works. Repeat.

The latter type of goals involve not only clear habits, willpower and self-discipline, but a lot of experimentation, learning, research and luck. It takes a different kind of mentality to work on goals which have no obvious way of accomplishing them.

e.g. getting in shape vs starting a million dollar company. One is effortful, but straightforward. The other, most people don't know how to do it, even if they tried hard.

Goals can be difficult to achieve because they require a lot of effort, or because it's not clear how to reach them. These two reasons shouldn't be conflated.

I think there's a benefit in being able to flip yourself between different toolboxes, as well as collecting them. Travel, belonging to different communities, having diverse friends and interests are all ways to get access to different boxes of thinking strategies.

I'm using professional labels here as toolbox categories, but the phenomenon is more diverse. When I studied CS, I often heard about MIT vs Bell Labs approaches. The former was focused on correctness. The latter on whether the algo worked practically, even if they didn't prove it

Entrepreneurs often (but not always) focus on bottom-line driven, scrappy solutions. Artists focus on building something unique, even if it isn't always practical.

Similarly, accountants make for great analyzing your business, but they often focus on optimizing problems not taking bold visions. Their toolkit is to work with known variables really well, and that breaks when you start thinking about things that are completely unpredictable

For instance, I've written that a lot of engineers I know like complicated investing schemes. I believe this is because their profession rewards a toolbox which says, "Here's a complex system--you can use your brains to figure it out and make it do what you want."