To give other maturation advice to those not yet in their 40s:

It's quite likely that you have significant issues you haven't addressed yet. Getting into good medical care, therapy, exercise, and supportive e.g. nutrition, etc is likely more important than virtually anything else you'll do in your life, with a reasonable exception for choosing the right person to spend your life with and having a family. But having a good social life is a hell of a lot easier if you're in great physical and mental shape. I took all of those things very seriously, and I probably did not put enough value into any of those things, even given that orientation.

That leads right into: The only thing you can truly exert control over is yourself, and it's quite likely that nearly all of your problems are the result of your choices, either indirectly through the environment you live in or directly through the actions you take. Humility is drastically underrated, and being healthy plays into this enormously as well.

That being said, I'd love to hear a perspective from some of the older HN folks - what am I missing as a mid-40s person that I should absolutely be paying attention to?

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.

> 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.

> 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 trigger or push people in predictably bad directions.

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.

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 example. What is grief? It is a prediction error. An expectation of some past state that the prediction machinery keeps expecting to come up one way, but it comes up another. And when it does come up as an error it hurts. It’s OK to experience it and to embrace it even. But it’s also OK to see it for what it is. We can’t escape the machine. But we can step outside of it briefly and watch it at work and acknowledge what it actually is.

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.

I cannot be the only one who read the title wrong

When I read titles like these, I expect a relatively low value article.

This has probably been the highest value such article I've read in years. You've phrased item 3 better than I have been trying to for years after my own journey in realizing this.

Thank you.

One of rare articles here that is actually worth reading.

1st one requires that you actually care

2nd one relevance depends on what are you doing, not everyone works on airplane software

3rd one, novelty for me

I agree fully with the point about integrating emotion in your decision making. Earlier I used to get stuck in decisions since I had the need to be rational. Which is in it self an emotion I guess - since need is an emotion? Now my life is much simpler.

The title made me think the author is some kind of whisky

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

Hard disagree with part of this. Reason is an intellectual construct, that has a basis in logic. (Neuroscience not finding a division: sure. Just like electrical engineering doesn't see a dichotomy between Microsoft Word and Firefox.)

Reasoning isn't separated from emotion because reasoning needs inputs. Some inputs are secondary: the result of other reasoning. Some are non-negotiable facts from the world. But some primary inputs that go into reasoning are determined by values and desires. E.g. "I feel it would be nice obtain such and such a result in the world" (hard reasoning on how to get it ensues).

Here, you can find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constructed_emotion to be useful in articulating the following.

> 3. The dichotomy between reason and emotion is a cultural construct, and neither grounded in neuroscience nor in logic.

Guessing: Essentially that's psychology. And Human psychology is itself emergent behavior cannot be directly traced back to neuroscience. Logic, that is another thing, which primarily is used for understanding and reconstruct retainable after emotional experiences.

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

maybe not 0day stuff, but breaking the build is something that mature people have learned not to do. What are the rewards for move fast and break things for people?

Wonderfully written. I’m intrigued by the section about emotion. It seems like no coincidence that it follows the section about seeing beyond monocausal determinism.

3. Emotion motivates everything that we do. It's just a question of what emotions are you considering and what emotions are you prioritizing.

Reasoning is taking all emotions into context and focusing on actions that align with certain emotions.

Ahh these are fun. They come up often when thinking about consciousness.

If you like these, you might be interested in the book, I Am A Strange Loop

Being able to detach from your thinking while you are thinking, that's difficult and indeed very useful. I found that more often in llm than human beings.

The Old-guard is a good alternative to greybeards, no?

> Monocausal determinism is an illusion, and largely does not exist outside of computer debugging.

Also: quite often does not exist inside computer debugging, either.

> Monocausal determinism is an illusion, and largely does not exist outside of computer debugging.

I work in trading with a lot of software engineers, and one thing I noticed is that these cannot reason about uncertainty if their lives depended on it. Their way to approach any problem is like you debug code: there must be a specific code path that was followed that led to that outcome. But markets aren't like this, and things happen for no reason, or are better modelled as if happening for no reason.

This is also the reason why I don't really think "software engineers" are real engineers, because real engineers can reason about uncertainty.

You are what you do, I think it's expected that if you spend your life reasoning in one framework, atrophies your practice at any other framework.

Greybeard is not sexist.

I don't particularly disagree with what the author has written about, but the jargon and complex wording is really annoying to read.

If this were written on a single subject, like engineering philosophy, then fine. But writing a multi-subject article requires simpler language so those who may be familiar with one thing but not the other can understand everything.

I find it hard to trust the intelligence of someone who uses words like "dichotomy", "meta-cognition", and "monocausal determinism" - language like this is purely performative. Let's not be performative, who are you trying to impress with your big words?

I agree with a lot of the first point but the expression does seem to lend an air of futility to caring about your impacts which I hope wasn't the intention. I do whole heartedly disagree with everyone believing they are the hero of their own story - while there sure are a subset of people who will justify screwing others (or at least bury their heads in the sand), there's also a subset of people that are happy to revel in schadenfreude. all that aside, the author's beliefs probably do apply to his target audience.

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

1. All serious cognitive philosophy since at least Kant has supported the idea of separate faculties -- in his case, specifically the four chambers [`--` quantitative sensitivity, `-+` qualitative perceptivity, `+-` causal judgement, `++` modal reason].[1] This is also at the root of the induction vs. deduction [vs. abduction] debate, which had been raging for at least 2,200 years before Kant.

2. Even our pre-gallilean understanding of neuroscience arrived at the same conclusion, though in hilariously abstract terms: 'fast thinking' vs. 'slow thinking'. Popularized primarily by a popsci book (?) that frames it like this: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.

3. Psychologically the clearest paradigm is Freud's `- Id`/`+ Ego`/`* Super-Ego`, which is not nearly as discredited as his famous theories about parental lust would imply. If you asked your psychiatrist(/local research psychologist) about it today, they'd ofc use less medieval words for the same concepts -- roughly 'unconscious', 'cognition', and 'executive', in order.[2]

4. In cognitive science more broadly, a lot of the binaries discussed on Wikipedia's Mathematical Model article[3] are getting at this delineation.

5. Eastern philosophy has plenty of stuff on this dichotomy; in fact, I'd argue their discussion of it is predicated upon its existence and the various harmful states it can create if left unexamined. See, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_logico-epistemology

On a 'logical' level, the case for a separation of at least two types of thinking seems clear: any cognitive activity can either call the 'lightweight' model to guess what's happening (and be right 95% of the time), or call the 'superheavy' model to iteratively reason through webs of beliefs.

Sure, any call probably uses more than 0.0001% of both so they're not mutually exclusive, but I think the qualitative diffence is clear.

The sentiment is true in a bit more subtle of a way, I will admit... It's hard to articulate in brief (/at all), but I've become fascinated with the way the presence of the higher faculties sometimes seems to completely transform the lower ones, unlocking whole new affordances. Like the existence of a new structure of a higher level of complexity completely changing the behavior of nearby cellular automata. If you'll excuse the anthropomorphization of abstract patterns for moment: it reminds me of how a competent leader can unlock whole new affordances for the individuals on their team without actually directly changing the individuals themselves.

Like, consider how we have have tons of both instincts & intuitions related to language use -- speaking, writing, listening, etc. Chimpanzees & bonobos share many of our incredibly advanced intuitive abilities (e.g. manual dexterity, social 'theory of mind'/empathy, etc.), but they are categorically unable to pick those up. In this way the super-ego didn't add funtionality to our species, and it didn't even really multiply it geometrically (?) -- it seems much closer to an exponentiation of capability.[4]

TL;DR: Acknowledging the fallibility and inherently-subconscious basis of reason is a noble goal, but abandoning the Idea altogether is misleading. IMHO!

[1]: http://staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk/ppp/ksp1/toc.html

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_therapy#Basis

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_model#Classificat...

[4]: Here's to hoping that this fourth rung is the last one, at least for a while! Cause if there's a fifth one, and AI discovers and produces it... yikes. Truely alien ASI would follow, rather than just ASI-as-huge-but-fundamentally-grokkable-AGI.)