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Brain Food Reference

You are what you eat
-- Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Nowadays the problem is not information access but information overload. The real value produced by an information provider comes in locating, filtering, and communicating what is useful
― Carl Shapiro, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network 1998

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it
― Herbert Simon, cognitive psychologist and Nobel prize-winning economist

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn
― Alvin Toffler

  1. Stand up on the Shoulders of Giants with Wisdom Gems
  2. Bootstrap your framework of Mental Models for reasoning
  3. Update mental models with Knowledge Streams to fuel cognition along the Lifelong Learning way
  4. Navigate Pointers of Truth as support vectors in uncertainty to explore the limits of human knowledge despite the limitations of language
  5. Ask Hard Questions
  6. Introspect

Gems of wisdom

Nanos gigantum humeris insidentes

I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don't believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody's that smart
-- Charles Munger

In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time-none, zero
-- Charles Munger

Repetitio est mater studiorum. Any kind of important book should immediately be read twice, partly because one grasps the latter in its entirety the second time, and only really understands the beginning when the end is known; and partly because in reading it the second time one’s temper and mood are different, so that one gets another impression; it may be that one sees the matter in another light
-- Arthur Schopenhauer

Fools say that they learn by experience. I prefer to profit by others experience.
― Otto von Bismarck

У разночинца биографии нет — есть только список прочитанных книг
-- Осип Мандельштам

Streams

Tribe of mentors

The search after the great man is the dream of youth and the most serious occupation of manhood
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Uses of Great Men

Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you
-- Russell Simmons

Never be the brightest person in the room because you won’t learn anything
-- attributed to James Watson, Holly Hunter, James L. Brooks, Steven R. Craig, Michael Dell

Never take advice from someone you wouldn't trade places with

Cross-validate ideas, rules, practices of authoritative sources and people
-- Jordan B. Peterson

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with
-- Jim Rohn

Tribe of mentors changes with you as you grow
-- Tim Ferriss

Always hire people who are smarter than you are
-- Ed Catmull, Pixar

φύσις

ψυχή

CS - computer science & tech

ML - machine learning & cognitive systems

Datavis, infographics, data journalism

Business

Listen and Learn

Mental models

..all models are approximations. Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful. However, the approximate nature of the model must always be borne in mind..
-- George E. P. Box

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected
-- Richard Feynman, Lectures on Physics, Lecture 1 - Atoms in Motion

You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience ‑ both vicarious and direct ‑ on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head
-- Charlie Munger

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness
—  Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity

The world is huge and our sensory bandwidth is tiny and memory capacity is limited.

Mental models simplify huge complexity of the world into perception and reasoning patterns.

This old idea is that the learning is compression of the knowlege experience into hierarchies of abstractions

Shared models distill knowledge into the collective wisdom according to DIKW pyramid (which itself is a model too).

The Model does not give the truth yet posess certain tested predictive power. With scientific method You don't prove hypothesis (model) is true, you prove it not yet wrong. Science is falsifiable. Best destiny for each theory (model) is to become corner case for a new more broad theory (e.g. Newtonian physics superseded by the General Relativity).

People have tried to label them to build taxonomies of most common models in order to create reasoning frameworks and to put them in toolboxes.

And so there're plenty of them online

Steep gradient ascent along learning curve

Run Uphill. Simple heuristic: If you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the path more painful in the short term.
If you have two choices to make, and they’re relatively equal choices, take the path more difficult and more painful in the short term.
What’s actually going on is one of these paths requires short-term pain. And the other path leads to pain further out in the future. And what your brain is doing through conflict-avoidance is trying to push off the short-term pain.
By definition, if the two are even and one has short-term pain, that path has long-term gain associated. With the law of compound interest, long-term gain is what you want to go toward. Your brain is overvaluing the side with the short-term happiness and trying to avoid the one with short-term pain.
So you have to cancel the tendency out (it’s a powerful subconscious tendency) by leaning into the pain. As you know, most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term.
-- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
― Bill Gates

To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things everyday
-- Lao Zi

Warren and I are very good at destroying our own best-loved ideas. Any year that you don't destroy one of your best-loved ideas is probably a wasted year. Charlie likes the analogy of looking at one's ideas and approaches as "tools." When a better tool (idea or approach) comes along, what could be better than to swap it for your old, less useful tool? 'Warren and I routinely do this, but most people, as Galbraith says, forever cling to their old, less useful tools
-- Poor Charlie's Almanack

Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That's what you do when life is short
-- Paul Graham

Simplicity is hacking away the unessential. — It is not daily increase but daily decrease — hack away the unessential! The closer to the source, the less wastage there is
-- Bruce Lee

Iterate and refine models to sharp your decision making skills. Make incremental improvements)

Use Occam's razor when have competing models that make exactly the same predictions - the simpler one is better. Follow KISS principle, keep models as simple as possible, but not simpler. In the long term this prevents complexity growth, entangled and opaque structure.

Accumulated knowledge asymmetry yelds Power.

Multidisciplinary skills

And the models have to come from multiple disciplines—because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That’s why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don’t have enough models in their heads. So you’ve got to have models across a fair array of disciplines
-- Charlie Munger / A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom

To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail

There's multiple ways to succeed in life: 1) get to top 1% at 1 skill 2) combine top 10% of multiple skills 3) learn art of storytelling - powerful way to rule the world
-- Tim Ferriss podcast

It’s kind of fun to sit there and outthink people who are way smarter than you are because you’ve trained yourself to be more objective and more multidisciplinary. Furthermore, there is a lot of money in it, as I can testify from my own personal experience
– Charlie Munger

Interdisciplinary research is hard.. Say you get two world-leading experts, in maths and genomics – there obviously could be some crossover. But who is going to do the work to understand the other person's field, their jargon, what their real problem is? .. Some of the most interesting areas of science are in the gaps between, the confluences between subjects. What I've tried to do in building DeepMind is to find 'glue people', those who are world class in multiple domains, who possess the creativity to find analogies and points of contact between different subjects. Generally speaking, when that happens, the magic happens
-- Demis Hassabis on hiring at Deepmind

An expert knows more and more about less and less until he or she knows everything about nothing.
A generalist knows less and less about more and more until he or she knows nothing about everything.
-- attributed to various sources

A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing
-- greek poet Archilochus quoted by Isaiah Berlin to define a spectrum

Move from I-shaped to T-shaped to Π-Shaped to M-shaped individual yet be aware of Jack of all trades, master of none. The key here ballance factors:

  • The Pareto Principle in Learning – The 80:20 Rule says that learning process isn't linear - you achieve 80% of result in the begining with only 20% of time.
  • Speed of Obsolescence of Knowledge and Skills at some point on a learning curve become greater than speed of your learning so the latter 20% isn't worth it
  • M-shaped skills strategy gives exponential drop in competition among crossover experts with growth of M (Venn diagram of the overlap of M domains is exponentially small)
  • Skewed Pareto distributions come from a Normal Distribution + Power of Accumulative Advantage over time. Small differences multiplied by consistent performance accumulate disproportionate rewards over time. So, in highly competitive zero-sum game, the Winner-Takes-All in rat raceRed Queen's race
  • If I-shape is a result of DFS strategy and jack-of-all-trades - result of BFS strategy of knowledge space traverse given limited number of steps (life time and energy), then optimal shape is the A* heuristic where Cost is proportional to depth and grows faster than the Value.

Crossover experts are Π-shaped speciallists.

Single crossdomain B+ speciallist is better than 2 A+ with gap between domains because of the communication overhead.

Metalearning

The Three Stages of Cultivation
— The first is the primitive stage. It is a stage of original ignorance in which a person knows nothing about the art of combat. In a fight, he simply blocks and strikes instinctively without a concern for what is right and wrong. Of course, he may not be so-called scientific, but, nevertheless, being himself, his attacks or defenses are fluid.
The second stage — the stage of sophistication, or mechanical stage — begins when a person starts his training. He is taught the different ways of blocking, striking, kicking, standing, breathing, and thinking — unquestionably, he has gained the scientific knowledge of combat, but unfortunately his original self and sense of freedom are lost, and his action no longer flows by itself. His mind tends to freeze at different movements for calculations and analysis, and even worse, he might be called “intellectually bound” and maintain himself outside of the actual reality.
The third stage — the stage of artlessness, or spontaneous stage — occurs when, after years of serious and hard practice, the student realizes that after all, gung fu is nothing special. And instead of trying to impose on his mind, he adjusts himself to his opponent like water pressing on an earthen wall. It flows through the slightest crack. There is nothing to try to do but try to be purposeless and formless, like water. All of his classical techniques and standard styles are minimized, if not wiped out, and nothingness prevails. He is no longer confined.
-- The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee (1996) p. 108-109

At the first level on the path he saw mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers.
On the second level of the path he saw that mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers.
And at a third level he saw once again mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers.
-- Zen teacher Qingyuan Weixin

Common sense

What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
-- Peter Thiel, Zero to One

Common sense is nothing but a collection of misconceptions acquired by age 18
-- Einstein

Bet against the consensus (being entrepreneur)
-- Ray Dalio

If you stop to think about it, a pari-mutuel system is a market. Everybody goes there and bets and the odds change based on what’s bet.. Any damn fool can see the horse carrying a light weight with a wonderful win rate and a good post position etc., is way more likely to win than a horse with a terrible record and extra weight and so on and so on. But if you look at the odds, the bad horse pays 100 to 1, whereas the good horse pays 3 to 2. Then it’s not clear which is statistically the best bet..
-- The Art of Stock Picking by Charlie Munger

How could people miss such a point? Why do they confuse probability and expectation, that is, probability and probability times the payoff? Mainly because much of people's schooling comes from examples in symmetric environments, like a coin-toss, where such a difference does not matter. In fact the so-called "Bell Curve" that seems to have found universal use in society is entirely symmetric
-- Fooled by Randomness Role of Chance in Markets and Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A contrarian isn’t one who always objects—that’s a conformist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently from the ground up and resists pressure to conform.
Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.
-- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Much of the real world is controlled as much by the ‘tails’ of distributions as means or averages: by the exceptional, not the commonplace; by the catastrophe, not the steady drip…. We need to free ourselves from ‘average’ thinking
-- Philip Anderson, 1997, Nobel Laureate in physics

It seems like there are two degrees of freedom: you can choose the people whose opinions you care about (and on what subjects), and you can choose the timescale you care about them on. Most people figure out the former [1] but the latter doesn’t seem to get much attention.
You should trade being short-term low-status for being long-term high-status, which most people seem unwilling to do. A common way this happens is by eventually being right about an important but deeply non-consensus bet. But there are lots of other ways–the key observation is that as long as you are right, being misunderstood by most people is a strength not a weakness. You and a small group of rebels get the space to solve an important problem that might otherwise not get solved.
-- Sam Altman, The Strength of Being Misunderstood

Challenge beliefs & persist. Disagree & commit. Make asymmetric bets.

Golden mean

Golden mean or golden middle way is the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency

Extreme Golden middle way Extreme
cowardice courage recklessness
fatalist wave surfer Control-freak
autocracy (1 vote with infinite weight) meritocracy (N votes with weights proportional to the individual merit) democracy (N votes with constant weights equally distributed)
ascetic buddhist middle way hedonic
eternalism buddhist Middle Way annihilationism
Divine supreme predestination - Daiva Wu wei, Serenity Prayer Freedom of personal will - Purushakara
yin / inaction yang / action
faith, dogma, axiom testable falsifiable science
exploitation, deliberate practice, craftsman mindset exploration, deliberate experimentation
specialist generalist
security privacy
fast thinking, 1st signal system slow thinking, 2nd signal system
a maniac constantly in a state of pleasure and cannot be satisfied a hermit constantly in a state of satisfaction cannot experience pleasure
creating (entrepreneurs) running (manager)
divergent thinking (out of then box, creative) convergent (focused)
wisdom of crowds consensus bias, common sense misconceptions
self-reliance standing on a shoulder of giants
rules breaking pirates rules navigated navy
Moral absolutism Moral relativism

Reasoning

It is important to view knowledge as sort of semantic tree. Make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.
-- Elon Musk

I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So the normal way we conduct our lives is, we reason by analogy. We are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing… with slight iterations on a theme. And it’s … mentally easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles. First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world, and what that really means is, you … boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, “okay, what are we sure is true?” … and then reason up from there. That takes a lot more mental energy
-- Elon Musk

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is
-- Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut

People (and so AI algorithms) do abstraction and decomposition to reduce search space to solve planning and decision.

Build hierarhical decision policy function: Values -> Strategy -> Tactics -> Routine

Understand your circle of competence expanding into next near development zone to ballance exploration–exploitation tradeoff dilemma

Use Five Ws to gather facts (capture breadth) and Five whys to get to the roots (explore depth) down to first principles

Push yourself out of comfort zone, keep Bruce Lee's "Broken rhythm"

Embrace the "Kierkegaard's School of Anxiety"

Expertise requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence.

Intellectual curiosity

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing
-- Theodore Roosevelt

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation
--Mark Twain

You never achieve real success unless you like what you are doing
-- Dale Karnegie

Choose a Job You Love, and You Will Never Have To Work a Day in Your Life -- attributed to various sources

When you are young, work to learn, not to earn
– Robert Kiyosaki

Craftsman mindset focuses on what you can offer the world, the passion mindset focuses instead on what the world can offer you. This mindset is how most people approach their working lives
― Cal Newport, So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love

Follow your intellectual curiosity. Love what you do - enjoy process, not results - otherwise you won't get through the hard times.

Early in your carrier prefer exploration - take relatively big steps (diversification) in the search space. Later - decrease - move to intensification / exploitation. The strategy is similar to Simulated annealing.
Deliberate experimentation (exploration, BFS) is more efficient than deliberate practice in a rapidly changing world. 10000-experiment rule beats 10000-hours rule (exploitation, "craftsman mindset", DFS)

Later focus on the chosen path with Warren Buffett's 5/25 Rule

Values

You've got to serve somebody
-- Bob Dylan

Principles are like lighthouses. They are natural laws that cannot be broken
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Values are most important, abilities come next, and skills are the leastimportant. Yet most people make the mistake of choosing skills and abilities first and overlooking values. It is important for you to know what mix of qualities is important to fit each role and, more broadly, what values and abilities are required in people with whom you can have successful relationships. In picking people for long-term relationships
-- Ray Dalio

Of course if we make good things, it is not only to the credit of science; it is also to the credit of the moral choice which led us to good work. Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it. Such power has evident value — even though the power may be negated by what one does with it. To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell. (Proverb of the Buddhist religion) What then, is the value of the key to heaven? It is true that if we lack clear instructions that enable us to determine which is the gate to heaven and which the gate to hell, the key may be a dangerous object to use. But the key obviously has value: how can we enter heaven without it?
-- Richard Feynman on value of science and moral choice

If you can figure your life so that what you're genually doing is aiming to the highest possible good then the things that you need to survive and to thrive on a daily base will deliver themselves to you... If you dare to do the most difficult thing that you can conceptualize your life will work out better that it will if you do anything else. Well how do you find out if that's true, its a Kierkegaardian's Leap of Faith, there's no way to find out unless you do it, so no one can tell you either because if it works for some else, that's no proof that it;ll work for you. You have to be all-in in this game... If you manifest yourself properly in the world that those things will come your way. I've watched people operate in the world and I would say that There's no more effective way of operating than to conceptualize the highest good that you can and strive to attain it. There's no more practical way to a kind of success you would new if you only knew what success is
-- Jordan B Peterson Biblical Series VII

Life is suffering and if you say it meaningless then your suffering is meaningless dumb and reckless. Find higher purpose and goal to suffer
-- Jordan B Peterson

Loyalty in action, regardless obstacles or challenges, to one’s most cherished values, this is the essence of moral rectitude and it is the foundation of heroism
-- Andrew Bernstein, Heroes, Legends, Champions: Why Heroism Matters

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed
-- Terence McKenna

Begin with end in mind -- Stephen Covey

Never prostitute your principles in your work. — I will never prostitute myself in any way that I do what I don’t believe in.
-- Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living (2000) edited by John Little

Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny
— Mahatma Gandhi

Choose axiomatic set of Principles and derrive Values, vision, beliefs, meaning, purpose, goals, incentives.

Search for a Middle Ground between moral absolutism and relativism of your Values against others.

First you choose the path, then the path chooses you.

Time

Value your time, it’s all you have
-- Naval Ravikant

No “yes.” Either “HELL YEAH!” or “no.”
-- Derek Sivers hellyeah rule

Learn to say 'no' to the good so you can say 'yes' to the best
― John C. Maxwell

Man! Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived
-- The Dalai Lama XIV (when asked what surprised him most about humanity)

Money is infinite and your time is not. When You're trading time for money, you cannot trade back.

Strategy

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth
-- Mike Tyson

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of "emergency" is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

Tactics

The abstract summary of your actions is your strategy; what you'll do to implement the strategy is your tactics. Frequently, a strategy at one managerial level is the tactical concern of the next higher level. — Andy Grove (High Output Management)

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat
— Sun Tzu

Routine

Nulla dies sine linea

True greatness consists of being great in little things
-- Charles Simmons

How you do anything is how you do everything
-- T. Harv Eker / Secrets of the Millionaire Mind book

Inspiration is for amateurs while the rest of us just show up and get to work
-- Chuck Close

Daily progress. — Make at least one definite move daily toward your goal.
The three keys to success. — Persistence, persistence, and persistence. The Power can be created and maintained through daily practice — continuous effort. The spirit of the individual is determined by his dominating thought habits.
Take inventory of everyone with whom you have contact.
Thoughts are things.
The intangible represents the real power of the universe. It is the seed of the tangible.
Faith is a state of mind that can be conditioned through self-discipline. Faith will accomplish.
Faith makes it possible to achieve that which man's mind can conceive and believe.
Possession of anything begins in the mind.
-- Part 6 "Beyond System — The Ultimate Source of Jeet Kune Do" Jeet Kune Do: Bruce Lee's Commentaries on the Martial Way (1997) edited by John Little

Amateurs have a goal. Professionals have a process.

Deliberate practice makes perfect

Habits

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
-- Aristotle

Our character, basically, is a composite of our habits. “Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny,” the maxim goes
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

First we make our habits, then our habits make us
— Charles C. Nobel

Humans are basically habit machines… I think learning how to break habits is actually a very important meta skill and can serve you in life almost better than anything else
-- Naval Ravikant

Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do)
— Stephen Covey

The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half
― Demons novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  • Nulla dies sine code linea commit
  • Calm stressed mind with Yoga Nidra recorded audio session

Willpower requires conscious effort - energy inefficient. Habit is an automated unconscious process. Willpower is for sprint, Habit is for marathon. Willpower is short-term tactics, Habit is for long-term strategy.

Morning ritual

End your day thinking about an important question MIQ and then wake up the next morning and brainstorm on it
-- Josh Waitzkin

Wim Hof breathing technique is a secular kind of hyperventilation breathwork known in Kriya Yoga pranayama vedic tradition and has been taken to extreme by Stanislav Grof in Holotropic Breathwork practice.

Journaling

JG: You've said that the Russian poet Yevgeny Rein once advised you to keep your adjectives to a minimum and concentrate on nouns, even if the verbs suffer as a result. Do you follow his advice?
Joseph Brodsky: Yes, more or less. I'd say that's one of the most valuable pieces of advice I've received over the span of my literary career. If, for example, we were to wrap a poem in some sort of magical cloth which automatically removed the adjectives when you unwrapped the cloth, you should still have a lot of print on the page — verbs all over the place — but the adjectives, for the most part, should be as few in number as possible.
-- Conversations in Exile: Russian Writers Abroad John Glad - 1993

Писатели, чтоб ты знала, бывают двух видов. Те, кто всю жизнь пишет одну книгу – и те, кто всю жизнь пишет ни одной. Именно вторые сочиняют рецензии на первых, а не наоборот. И упрекают их в однообразии
-- Пелевин, iphuck10

Weekly retrospective

Notes grow over time. Merge notes into topics groups and prune bullshit. Groups form unstructured set of clusters.

The multitude of relations between topics is incomprehensible for conscious mind to grasp.

Accumulated knowledge graph can be highlighted from a particular perspective (projection) with the 'spotlight of attention'. This spotlight structures subgraph in a tree (instant temporary Mind maps)

Trees of perspectives form a forest. Trees grow over time - relations weights grow from subjective life experience.

Pruning trees is an essential part of active introspection, mental hygiene, since attention requires mental energy resources.

Sleep

Sleep is underrated in modern culture, yet is essential cognitive performance and memory consolidation. Sleep deprivation has detrimental effects on mental health. Listen to interview Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, with Matthew Walker, Ph.D, Sleep Scientist for Google.

Segmented sleep is normal and not a sign of any pathology.

Decisions

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

You can’t tell the quality of a decision from the outcome...
.. you make the best decision you can based on what you know, but the success of your decision will be heavily influenced by (a) relevant information you may lack and (b) luck or randomness. Because of these two factors, well-thought-out decisions may fail, and poor decisions may succeed. While it might seem counterintuitive, the best decision-maker isn’t necessarily the person with the most successes, but rather the one with the best process and judgment. The two can be far from the same, and especially over a small number of trials, it can be impossible to know who’s who
-- Howard Marks memo: You Bet

Hard work is really overrated. How hard you work matters a lot less in the modern economy.
What is underrated? Judgment. Judgment is underrated. Can you define judgment?
My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment. They’re highly linked; knowing the long-term consequences of your actions and then making the right decision to capitalize on that.
In an age of leverage, one correct decision can win everything. Without hard work, you’ll develop neither judgment nor leverage.
You have to put in the time, but the judgment is more important
-- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

I’ve certainly been fortunate and it is hard to actually figure out whether I was skilful at taking advantage of opportunities or just blind luck because you can’t actually run this experiment twice.
What I do think is that as a society we attribute too much to luck. Luck is like an atheistic word for God: we ascribe things to it that we don’t understand or don’t want to understand. As a venture capitalist, I think one of the most toxic things to do is to treat the people I’m investing in as lottery tickets where I say: “Well I don’t know if your business is going to work. It might, it might not.” I think that’s a horrible way to treat people. The anti-lottery ticket approach is to try to achieve a high level of conviction, to ask: “Is this a business that I have enough confidence in that I would consider joining it myself?”
-- Peter Thiel interview

If there is no solution to the problem then don't waste time worrying about it. If there is a solution to the problem then don't waste time worrying about it
― Dalai Lama XIV

It is very rare or almost impossible that an event can be negative from all points of view
― Dalai Lama XIV

Learn and obey the rules very well so you will know how to break them properly
― Dalai Lama XIV

There're lots of frameworks and tools for decision making

Strategy for triaging:

Learn from feedback

Estimate Cost of failure: Corporate risk-aversion mentality (status quo, large cost of failure) VS Startup risk-taking mentality (fail-fast, large benefits from success).

You have to have skin in the game.

Uncertainty

We have two classes of forecasters: Those who don’t know – and those who don’t know they don’t know
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

Forecasts usually tell us more of the forecaster than of the future
-- Warren Buffett

Those who have knowledge don’t predict; those who predict don’t have knowledge.
-- Lao Tzu

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know
-- Rumsfeld DoD speech

Beyond these three categories there is a fourth, the unknown known, that which we intentionally refuse to acknowledge that we know
-- attributed to Slavoj Žižek

People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome
-- George Orwell

The field of economics is muddled and imprecise, and there’s good reason it’s called “the dismal science.” Unlike a "real" science like physics, in economics there are no rules that one can count on to consistently produce a given outcome, as in “if a, then b.” There are only patterns that tend to repeat, and while they may be historical, logical and often-observed, they’re still only tendencies.
-- Howard Marks "Uncertainty" memo

.. a lot of that extrapolation – and just about all the rest of our conclusions – consists of what Lipsitch calls opinion or speculation and what I call guesswork. (George Bernard Shaw said, “All professions are conspiracies against the laity.” Thus the rules of the investment profession seem to require that its members describe their views about the future using highsounding terms like “analysis,” “assessment,” “projection,” “prediction” and “forecast.” Rarely do we see the word “guess.”)
-- Howard Marks Memo: Knowledge Of The Future

Overconfidence .. the most significant of the cognitive biases.
-- Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow book

Known knowns refer to a high level of confidence, yet overconfidence is the most significant of the cognitive biases.

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so
-- Mark Twain, but also to several others:

People with low ability at a task overestimate their ability (Dunning–Kruger effect ) at the same time high-achievers suffer from opposite cognitive bias - underestimate themselves (impostor syndrome)

Known unknowns refer to considered "risks" under estimated uncertainty so it can be managed

Life is a game with incomplete and imperfect information, so people have developed frameworks to estimate confidence when managing decisions under uncertainty.

Three factors: hidden information, skill, and luck.

Game Hidden information Skill Luck
Chess X
Roulette X
Backgammon X X
Blackjack, poker X X X

Unknown unknowns refer to risks invisible, unconsidered and unestimated e.g. Black Swans

… Black Swans hijack our brains, making us feel we “sort of” or “almost” predicted them, because they are retrospectively explainable. We don’t realize the role of these Swans in life because of this illusion of predictability. Life is more, a lot more, labyrinthine than shown in our memory— our minds are in the business of turning history into something smooth and linear, which makes us underestimate randomness. But when we see it, we fear it and overreact. Because of this fear and thirst for order, some human systems, by disrupting the invisible or not so visible logic of things, tend to be exposed to harm from Black Swans and almost never get any benefit. You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

By grasping the mechanisms of antifragility we can build a systematic and broad guide to nonpredictive decision making under uncertainty in business, politics, medicine, and life in general— anywhere the unknown preponderates, any situation in which there is randomness, unpredictability, opacity, or incomplete understanding of things..

It is far easier to figure out if something is fragile than to predict the occurrence of an event that may harm it. Fragility can be measured; risk is not measurable (outside of casinos or the minds of people who call themselves “risk experts”). This provides a solution to what I’ve called the Black Swan problem— the impossibility of calculating the risks of consequential rare events and predicting their occurrence. Sensitivity to harm from volatility is tractable, more so than forecasting the event that would cause the harm. So we propose to stand our current approaches to prediction, prognostication, and risk management on their heads.

.. we can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry : anything that has more upside than downside from random events (or certain shocks) is antifragile; the reverse is fragile
-- Nassim Taleb in Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Antifragility is the antidote to Black Swans.

Unknown knowns refer to cognitive bias of self-denial to accept new facts - evidence that challenges prior belief system

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself- and you are the easiest person to fool
-- Richard Feynman

Who has deceived thee so often as thy self
-- Benjamin Franklin

One definition of a moment of suffering is “the moment when you see things exactly the way they are.” This whole time, you’ve been convinced your business is doing great, and really, you’ve ignored the signs it’s not doing well. Then, your business fails, and you suffer because you’ve been putting off reality. You’ve been hiding it from yourself
-- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Introspection

We don’t see things as they are, but as we are
— Anaïs Nin

All of human unhappiness comes from one single thing: not knowing how to remain at rest in a room
— Blaise Pascal

Empty your mind, be water my friend
-- Bruce Lee

Transcend

The essentially self-transcendent quality of human existence renders man a being reaching out beyond himself
-- Viktor Frankl, The will to meaning

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality
― Erich Fromm

What a man can be, he must be
-- Abraham Maslow in Motivation and personality

One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again
― Abraham Maslow

It is a fundamental law of nature that to evolve one has to push one’s limits, which is painful, in order to gain strength—whether it’s in the form of lifting weights, facing problems head-on, or in any other way
-- Ray Dalio, Principles

We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are
-- Max de Pree

The goal is not to be better than the other man, but your previous self
― Dalai Lama XIV

True change is within; leave the outside as it is
― Dalai Lama XIV, How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life

Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming
-- John Wooden

Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.
You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being
-- Victor Frankl

When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return
-- Leonardo da Vinci

If there is no further growth, then sunset is near
-- Seneca

Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are
— Buddhist saying

To express yourself in freedom, you must die to everything of yesterday. From the ‘old’, you derive security; from the ‘new’, you gain the flow
– Bruce Lee

What is age? Is it the number of years you have lived? That is part of age; you were born in such and such a year, and now you are fifteen, forty or sixty years old. Your body grows old—and so does your mind when it is burdened with all the experiences, miseries and weariness of life; and such a mind can never discover what is truth. The mind can discover only when it is young, fresh, innocent; but innocence is not a matter of age. It is not only the child that is innocent—he may not be—but the mind that is capable of experiencing without accumulating the residue of experience. The mind must experience, that is inevitable. It must respond to everything—to the river, to the diseased animal, to the dead body being carried away to be burnt, to the poor villagers carrying their burdens along the road, to the tortures and miseries of life—otherwise it is already dead; but it must be capable of responding without being held by the experie nce. It is tradition, the accumulation of experience, the ashes of memory, that make the mind old. The mind that dies every day to the memories of yesterday, to all the joys and sorrows of the past—such a mind is fresh, innocent, it has no age; and without that innocence, whether you are ten or sixty, you will not find God.
-- Jiddu Krishnamurt, The Book of Life, Die every day

..On this account it is, that although the acquisition of fresh knowledge is the necessary precursor of every step in social progress, such acquisition must itself be preceded by a love of inquiry, and therefore by a spirit of doubt; because without doubt there will be no inquiry, and without inquiry there will be no knowledge. For knowledge is not an inert and passive principle which comes to us whether we will or no; but it must be sought before it can be won; it is the product of great labor and therefore of great sacrifice. And it is absurd to suppose that men will incur the labor, and make the sacrifice, for subjects respecting which they are already perfectly content. They who do not feel the darkness, will never look for the light
-- Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England: Volume 1

You have that personal obligation to yourself to make yourself the best product possible according to your own terms. Not the biggest or the most successful, but the best quality — with that achieved, comes everything else. ...
Pliability is life. — Be pliable. When a man is living, he is soft and pliable; when he is dead, he becomes rigid. Pliability is life; rigidity is death, whether one speaks of man’s body, his mind, or his spirit. ...
Flow in the living moment. — We are always in a process of becoming and NOTHING is fixed. Have no rigid system in you, and you’ll be flexible to change with the ever changing. OPEN yourself and flow, my friend. Flow in the TOTAL OPENNESS OF THE LIVING MOMENT. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo. ...
An intelligent mind is constantly learning. — An intelligent mind is one which is constantly learning, never concluding — styles and patterns have come to conclusion, therefore they [have] ceased to be intelligent. ...
Liberate yourself from concepts and see the truth with your own eyes...freedom to be open and not tethered by any ideas, concepts, etc.…
When our mind is tranquil, there will be an occasional pause to its feverish activities, there will be a let-go, and it is only then in the interval between two thoughts that a flash of UNDERSTANDING — understanding, which is not thought — can take place. ...
Keep your mind uncontaminated by past conditioning. — The more and more you’re aware, the more and more you shed from day to day what you have learned so that your mind is always fresh, uncontaminated by previous conditioning.
...
Tradition enslaves the mind. — Classical methods and tradition make the mind a slave — you are no longer an individual, but merely a product. Your mind is the result of a thousand yesterdays. ...
The strength of emptiness. — Nothingness cannot be confined, the softest thing cannot be snapped. ...
Holding on prevents growth. — Tension: from NOW to THEN. People try to hold onto the sameness. This holding onto prevents growth. ...
Wu-shin is making oneself empty. — I must give up my desire to force, direct, strangle the world outside of me and within me in order to be completely open, responsible, aware, alive. This is often called “to make oneself empty” — which does not mean something negative, but means the openness to receive.
-- Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living (2000) edited by John Little

Truth is not found in a book. — Independent inquiry is needed in your search for truth, not dependence on anyone else’s view.
Truth has no path. Truth is living and, therefore, changing. Awareness is without choice, without demand, without anxiety; in that state of mind, there is perception. To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. Awareness has no frontier; it is giving of your whole being, without exclusion.
-- Bruce Lee (statement probably derives from a famous one of Jiddu Krishnamurti: "Truth is a pathless land.")

There is no such thing as maturity. There is instead an ever-evolving process of maturing. Because when there is a maturity, there is a conclusion and a cessation. That’s the end. That’s when the coffin is closed. You might be deteriorating physically in the long process of aging, but your personal process of daily discovery is ongoing. You continue to learn more and more about yourself every day.
-- p. 131 The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee (1996)

There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.
-- Bruce Lee as quoted in The Art of Expressing the Human Body (1998) edited by John R. Little, p. 23

Life is a bridge, build no house upon it; it is a river, cling not to its banks; it is a gymnasium, use it to develop the mind on the apparatus of circumstance; it is a journey, take it and walk on. -- not Buddha

The drive for Self-actualization depends on basic bodily and ego needs - physiological, safety, belonging and social esteem needs been fulfilled same as human forebrain cortex depends on midbrain infrastructure, same as human consciousness is powerless against orders of endocrine system programs.

Second Self ritual in "fixed role therapy".

Cage monkey mind.

Avoid Magneto syndrome of Spiritual Elitism and Spiritual Darwinism.

Developmental Stages

In human existence there are seven times that we call “age”: infant, child, adolescent, young, adult, mature man, old man. The changing period of the Moon, during early childhood, is replaced by that of Mercury, in which the first knowledge is acquired, then that of Venus, which reveals its strength in the passionate emotions of adolescence; then comes the zenith of life, the three seven years of full life force and desires for expansion. The kingdom of the evil Mars generates a sudden change and leads to the struggles, bitterness and disillusions of adulthood. Then, under the scepter of Jupiter, once again appears a peak of life, maturity proper, which, wise and serene, contemplates the joys and sufferings of existence, always contributing joyfully. Finally, under the star of Saturn, slow and far from the earth, comes the great age in which the vital forces cool and slowly stop.
-- Hippocrates (460 – 377 B.C.)

Stages of physical, emotional, mental development along The Stages of Life and 7 year cycles proposed by Rudolf Steiner - father of Waldorf education school.

Stage Years Age Description Development aspects and level
1 0-7 childhood Moon, Mother physical, behavioral, emotional
2 7-14 youth Mercury, Father physical, emotional, mental
3 14-21 adolescence Venus, puberty, independence, nonconformity, revolt against familty & society physical, emotional, social, mental
4 21-28 adulthood Sun 1, Integration into society after Revolt failure. Play that turns to responsibility emotional, social, mental
5 28-35 adulthood Sun 2, Peaking physical body, creation own family cocoon. Organizing Knowledge, “I think” social, mental
6 35-42 maturity Sun 3, Crisis and Questioning mental, spiritual
7 42-49 maturity Spiritual Self birth spiritual
8 49-56 maturity growing vision and understanding of life
9 56-63 senility
.. ... ? ? ?

Memento mori

Death smiles at us all; all we can do is smile back
― Marcus Aurelius

The idea is to die young as late as possible
― Ashley Montagu

This life is only a prelude to eternity, where we are to expect another original, and another state of things. We have no prospect of heaven here but at a distance; let us therefore expect our last hour with courage. The last, I say, to our bodies, but not to our minds. Our luggage we leave behind us, and return as naked out of the world as we came into it. The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of our eternity; and it is the only way to it. So that what we fear as a rock, proves to be but a port, in many cases to be desired, never to be refused. And he that dies young has only made a quick voyage of it
-- Seneca. Consolations against death

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
...
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot.
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Death is the most important thing that is ever going to happen to you.
― Naval Ravikant

Acceptance of death. — The round of summer and winter becomes a blessing the moment we give up the fantasy of eternal spring. Fluidity is the way to an empty mind. You must free your ambitious mind and learn the art of dying.
-- Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living (2000) edited by John Little

Christian: Ars moriendi.

Egyptian: Book of Emerging Forth into the Light

Tibetan: Bardo Thodol

Vedic Indian: Garuda Purana

Man's refusal to acknowledge his own mortality - the Denial of Death.

A Worm at the core of our motivation.

A Need for Sence of Heroic Worth as the Denial of Death.

Pointers of Truth

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotations
― Isaac Disraeli

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations
― Sir Winston Churchill

The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.
― Oliver Wendell Holmes

Я всю жизнь выписывал пословицы, которые мне нравились своей глубиной и точностью. Причем, не просто выписывал, а искал и находил решение трудных проблем. Когда появлялись дети, и я им вместо пустых назиданий давал эти пословицы. Очень часто сила, свет этих народных указаний выручала меня, подбадривала, наставляла, утешала.
― Александр Солженицын

Limitations of language

When the sage points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger

Truth has nothing to do with language. Truth is like Moon in the sky and language is like the finger that points to the moon. A finger can point out where the moon is, but the finger is not the truth. You can see the moon without help of any fingers, can you?

-- Chan Buddhist scripture Platform Sutra

Wisdom cannot be passed on. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to pass on always sounds like foolishness..
.. One can pass on knowledge but not wisdom. One can find wisdom, one can live it, one can be supported by it, one can work wonders with it, but one cannot speak it or teach it. I sometimes suspected this even as a youth; it is what drove me from my teachers..
.. Words do no justice to the hidden meaning. Everything immediately becomes slightly different when it is expressed in words, a little bit distorted, a little foolish. And that too is good and pleases me very much. It is perfectly fine with me that what for one man is precious wisdom for another sounds like a foolery.
-- Hermann Hesse in Siddhartha.

So, what is important is not to ask, “What is the purpose of life, of existence?” but to clear the confusion that is within you. It is like a blind man who asks, “What is light?” If I tell him what light is, he will listen according to his blindness, according to his darkness; but suppose he is able to see, then, he will never ask the question “what is light?” It is there.
-- Jiddu Khrishnamurti, The Book of Life

Symbolic System is a map, not the territory it represents.

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