Thomas Dullien on the Three Insights That Shaped His Thinking

As a mid 40s person also, my advice: drink plenty of water, clean the kitchen every night, don’t try to time the market, forgive your past self for being an idiot.

> The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.

There is an implication from this one that the article doesn't get into, which is whether you've picked a strategy of fail-safe or fail-disastrously. Once someone makes the leap to realising that their own mind is unreliable and it is entirely possible that their thoughts and memories are just wrong they have to start seriously asking what happens if they set out to do something, achieve it and then discover that it was a bad idea from the start. It is one of those ideas that sounds very simple to incorporate into your life and turns out to be hard.

IMO the people who tend towards pacifism and non-violence have internalised the idea because the violent ones just do so much more harm than good while thinking they are virtuous.

> The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.

He's technically right, but our instincts are not suitable for a complex 8-billion person global economy. We have a bunch of instincts calibrated so that a group of ~200 monkeys probably raises >200 descendants on average, just. We need some sort of principle where we expect people to take evidence-based action rather than always just picking what feels good in the moment.

It doesn't have to be a reason-emotion dichotomy, but there has to be something where effective people > destructive people in situations where our instincts don't t […]

> If you were asked: “Would it be good if this 0day was used to apprehend a terrorist?” you would probably say “this is good”. If you were asked “would it be good if this 0day is used to arrest someone and then torture and waterboard him 183 times?”, you would probably say “this is bad”. So if your 0day was used to capture KSM, it is probably good? Or bad? Things get very complicated very quickly.

This is a version of the very classic problems "does the end justify the means" (should one torture a terrorist to prevent other terrorist acts). Much to the chagrin of utilitarians everywhere, the answer to that question is NO, because answering yes leads to a bottomless hole of infinite evil.

What I have learned about neuroscience and philosophy is this: most people are not willing to invest as much time in small pursuits versus understanding the machinery of their mind and what will actually let them understand themselves with more clarity.

Understanding the self loop. The strange self loop. Seeing that the thing that is doing the observing inside of us is the whole and that from within our own system, we cannot completely reason about ourselves. The incompleteness theorem.

We have named it we call it the default mode network. It is essentially a recursive predictive machine. It only stops when we die. It is essentially making predictions about reality constantly. It is retrieving previous state and associating at the current state to make decisions. What it associates with previous memory and current state are encoding of our hormonal state and mental state at that point in time.

You can call it emotions. You can try and reason about it. It just exists. At some level, you just have to learn to let it be. All of the sophisticated words of psychology and trying to describe the machinery from within the machinery. It’s useful, you need a guide to live life. To keep the machinery and coding clean and not over, indexing on states that aren’t useful. But it all boils down to some pretty simple things. And when you see that the observer is the observed, and that it is all a part of the whole of the self, things become more manageable, for me, at least.

Take grief for e […]

As someone who is now skewing towards the older side of the tech world (55 this year).

It’s a journey. There isn’t some point where you’ll suddenly find you are now “wise” and understand yourself.

Those moments do appear - but a few years later you’ll likely realise that it was only relevant for that time of your life and things have changed. What might have worked and served you well then may not be the right thing for now.

Getting locked into a way of thinking or behaving is a recipe for being old before your time.

Try and apply the agile principles - do a retro - is it still working, what should keep doing, what should you stop doing?

And - the best time to start doing something good is now. Doesn’t matter if you should have done it 20 years ago. Regret can be disabling.

Try and be nice to people. We don’t know what is happening in other people’s worlds.

[edit] And be kind to yourself. Self compassion is underrated. Forgive yourself. You are human. Not perfect. And you don’t need to be. Show yourself some love.

Dang these are really not at all common advice/reflections.

> 1. The importance of understanding your own incentive structure, and not believing everything you think.

I think certainly your actions are maybe that paramount to the world because it has so many actors, but they are certainly important to you. The actions that we take on a daily basis nudge nudge nudge us to becoming something else. I think its something worth focusing on but not to the point it makes you anxious.

Thanks for the thoughtful piece.

Why does this supremely valuable extra information my body is feeding me tell me to stop running, sit down and eat ice cream while watching 400 short videos? Like, that's much worse advice than I get from flipping a coin!