tweets shit like this, she gets elevated to sainthood
When Taleb says heād rather live happily in a world he doesnāt understand he gets philosopher of century award
Me, I get the hustleporn police writing me tickets for demotivation
This is sort of what I mean by being against lifelong learning. What most people actually end up with is a kind of limited life training. A finite bag of tricks that stabilizes by ~35 and backstops you under the mounting pressure of a median life.
Life is growing pressure. At a certain point, it collapses your learning curve, and you are a robot governed by your ātrainingā ā conditioned already learned adaptive behaviors. Every OODA eventually turns into an O_ODA. Itās a when, not an if.
Think of it as adaptation reserves. Itās a race to accumulate as much as you can before the pressures of human condition turn you into a non-orienting robot. If youāre lucky, your learning curve cruising altitude will be comfy one with jet stream tailwind. FU$ is a good altitude.
If youāre *really* lucky youāll be able to preserve the illusion that youāre still learning.
Nah. If thereās no open-ended adaptation stakes with non-diminishing marginal risk, youāre just chasing pleasant stimulation, not learning.
Typo 3 tweets up: O_DA, not O_ODA
A non-orienting OODA loop. Like ālearningā to solve sudokus at 70 while comfortably retired is stimulation seeking, not learning in hard sense lifelong learning people act like theyāre doing. You could call that lifelong learning but itās weak.
Only 3 kinds of people believe in lifelong learning
Young people who arenāt done learning yet and donāt realize winterās coming
People growing richer (or otherwise succeeding in life-adaptive ways) faster than theyāre aging, outrunning the growing pressure
okayable boomersā¢
My claim is roughly that whether youāre growth or fixed mindset, in the median case, life pressures will balance and eventually overwhelm your motivation to learn. You can only hope youāll level off in a good place by then. Again, when, not if.
This whole thread plus original snark inspired by noticing how little learning the learning LARPers are actually doing. Theyāre creating an illusion of learning. There are derpy people I know who are the same they were 10 years ago who claim to be āconstantly learningā
Some replies asking me what definition of learning Iām using. Youāre welcome to your own, but if youāre not changing in ways that alter your adaptive fit into your environment, youāre not learning by my definition. Youāre larping learning or seeking stimulation.
Itās odd that itās okay to be a champion of excellence as āmeritoriousā or a champion of the left-behind/oppressed as āunfortunateā, but noticing the conditions and adaptations of the vast middle is taboo. Mediocrity, self-delusion, finite learning... modalities of the middle.
Societal grand narratives are driven by a wishful hobbesian false Darwinism. A world of absolute winners and utter losers. No hanging on, treading water, sinking to training, surviving, good-enoughing, wing-and-prayering. The great 1-sigma blindspot in societal self-images.
āGrowth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.ā ā Edward Abbey.
Original context was an environmentalist critique of the logic of capitalism.
āLifelong learningā is actually the same ideology at a personal life level.
Itās even a contradiction in terms. Immortalist learning would be a better term. By definition ālifeā is finite, with non-learning boundary conditions. Lifelong learning implies a sawtooth wave discontinuity at the end of life. As in my joke a few tweets up.
The arguments against endless-growth capitalism are different (resource limits, mounting externalities) but that too is endless learning. But at least there itās kinda well-posed since the economy might be immortal for all we know. The market might really be an eternal learner.