Minding Our Way

When the world is complicated, entangled, and rapidly changing, would you expect there to be one centralized official guide?*

At the risk of sounding glib or paternalistic -- but I'm going to say it anyway, because once you "see it" it won't feel like a foreign idea being imposed on you -- there are ways that help to lower and even drop expectations.

How? To mention just one: good reading. Read "Be a new homunculus" [1]. To summarize, visualize yourself like you are the "thing that lives in your brain". Yes, this is non-sense but try it anyway.

If you find various ways to accept "the world is changing faster than ever before" and it feels like too much. Maybe you are pissed off or anxious about AI. Maybe AI is being "heavily encouraged" for you (on you?) at work. Maybe you feel like we're living in an unsustainable state of affairs -- don't deny it. Dig into that feeling, talk about it. See where it leads you. Burying these things isn't a viable long-term strategy.**

* There is an "awesome-*" GitHub repository for collecting recommended resources to help with Claude Code: [2] But still requires a lot of curation and end-user experimentation: [2] There are few easy answers in a dynamic uncertain world.

** Yes I'm intentionally cracking the door open to "Job loss is scary. It is time to get real on this, including political activism."

[1]: https://mindingourway.com/be-a-new-homunculus/

[2]: https://github.com/hesreallyhim/awesome-claude-code

Growth
Mr. Money Moustache [http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/]
Study Hacks, Cal Newport [http://calnewport.com/blog/]
Tim Ferriss [https://tim.blog/]
Oliver Emberton [oliveremberton.com]

Intellectual
Farnam Street, Shane Parrish [farnamstreetblog.com/blog]
Less Wrong [http://lesswrong.com/] [lesserwrong.com]
Raw Thought, Aaron Swartz [aaronsw.com/weblog]
Slate Star Codex [slatestarcodex.com]
Edge [http://edge.org/]
Melting Asphalt, Kevin Simler [http://www.meltingasphalt.com/]
Essays, Paul Graham [paulgraham.com/articles.html]
Minding Our Way, Nate Soares [http://mindingourway.com/]
Ribbonfarm, Venkatesh Rao [ribbonfarm.com]
Overcoming Bias, Robin Hanson [overcomingbias.com]
Shtetl-Optimized, Scott Aaronson [http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/]
Raikoth, Scott Alexander [http://web.archive.org/web/20140220082152/http://raikoth.net:80/]
Heterodox Academy [https://heterodoxacademy.org/]

Technology
Hacker News [https://news.ycombinator.com/]
Worrydream, Bret Victor [http://worrydream.com/]
Naval Ravikant [https://startupboy.com/]
Unenumerated, Nick Szabo [http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/]
Stratchery [http://stratchery.com/]

Statistics
DataTau [http://www.datatau.com/]
FiveThirtyEight [fivethirtyeight.com]
Simply Statistics [https://simplystatistics.org/]
Chris Olah [colah.github.io]

Economics
Marginal Revolution [marginalrevolution.com]
Project Syndicate [project-syndicate.org]

> I'm talking about things like: journaling, Arduino, web development, game dev, photography, writing fiction, tweeting, posting videos to YouTube, knowledge management, 'note-taking,' and more.

One issue I see is that none of the project examples you listed have a real end. They are continuous and can never be finished. "Create an online 4-player version of battle-city" is a project. "Game dev" is not a project.

Then the things like journaling, knowledge management, and note taking are big tells. To me these seem upside down. The natural thing to do is to have a defined project and take notes and journal and gather knowledge when you encounter road-blocks while executing the project. Otherwise these activities are fruitless on their own.

I think you might benefit from reading this series of short articles: https://mindingourway.com/guilt/ (note that you have to read them in order).

I procrastinate as well. What I find has been working for me lately is not making it about the thing itself, but about who I'm becoming by doing it (and doing it early), as described here: https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/become-a-person-who-actually-does-things (the rest of the blog is fantastic if you want to check it out, there's many posts on personal improvement)

I was also pointed to this resource by Neel, you could use to it to re-frame the goal of the task (e.g. instead of "do well on exam" -> "pass exam with as little effort as possible"): https://mindingourway.com/half-assing-it-with-everything-youve-got/

http://mindingourway.com/there-are-no/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/i0/are_your_enemies_innately_evil/

As others in this thread, I don't assign a goodness index to people around me, my model of them is much more complex than that, based on evolutionary psychology, mainly.

As for myself, I try to maintain a love for the self, in a way, trying to reassure myself that my system 2 thinking will be there for system 1, irrespective of whatever failures I may be experiencing. That's not really compatible with my definition of evil.