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Joe Gaffney's avatar

Wow, these are some really important concepts and you described them so well. Novelty and variance in experience are so essential to finding new creative inspiration and excitement. And I also always recommend Dale Carnegie’s book on how to make friends.

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I.D. Aulis's avatar

Yeah, how to make friends is surprisingly good for such an old book in the self-help genre.

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I.D. Aulis's avatar

Your hierarchy of actions feels painfully accurate even though I know in my heart of hearts that being productive relies as much on leisure time and non-directed exploration as it does on the grind. Thank you for sharing.

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eamag's avatar

Nice post! I feel like it's too easy to slide into coping that consuming things (like listening about british politics) actually brings something meaningful, so one has to be careful about it. I like the end thought about random things, I think there's some balance about exploration/exploitation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration%E2%80%93exploitation_dilemma

and one needs to find a good understanding when it's time to stop consuming (probably when it doesn't bring anything substantial anymore?)

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CasualPhysicsEnjoyer's avatar

yeah i completely agree, you don't want to sway too far the other way. i guess what i still don't know is - how do you tell is something isn't bringing something substantial?

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eamag's avatar

With a news example: how will my life change if I wasn't following (or only followed the most important news that surface anyway)

With a content: what will bring me more - continue watching the next season of a TV show or explore a new one

Very difficult question I'm general indeed, in ML there are different techniques to solve exploration exploitation, maybe we can pick up some of them for a real life (or maybe it's the other way around and ml folks adapted decision theory techniques?)

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