How to pick your life partner

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html

The marriage quality is more important than the marriage status**

People in unhappy relationships have a 3-step to-do list

1. go through a soul-crushing break-up
2. emotionally recover
3. find a great relationship

The divorce rate is 50%, but 86% of young people assume their marriage will last forever.

choose a life partner means choosing a lot of things: parenting partner, eating companion or 20,000 meals, travel companion for 100 vacations, leisure time and retirement friend, career therapist,…

people tend to be bad at knowing what they want from a relationship

You don’t get good at something until you’ve done it bunch of time. However, there’s just not enough time.

Society has it all wrong and gives us terrible advice.

1. society encourage us to stay uneducated and let romance be our guide
2. society places a stigma on intelligently expanding our search for potential partners. our current opportunities wins over our preferences. people end up picking from the whatever pool options they have. So the suggestion is to broaden the candidate pool by doing a lot of online dating, speed dating and other systems, instead of hoping for the dumb luck.
3. society rushes us.

several unhappy relationships

• overly romantic. he repeatedly ignores the little voice during the constant fight, shutting down the voice with thoughts like “everything happens for a reason”, “I’m totally in love with her, and that’s all that matters”
• fear driven. fear of being the last single friend, fear of being an older parent, fear of being judged or talked about, which lead us to settle for a not-so-great partnership. However, the only rational fear we should fee is the fear of spending the 2/3 of life unhappily.
• Externally- influenced. It may look great from the outside, but not actually great from the inside. He listens to others over his own gut and ties the knot.
• Shallow. A strongly ego-driven person is more concerned with the on-paper description of her life partner than the inner personality beneath it.
• Selfish. Wants to keep her single life and the benefit of having someone. Self-absorbed without returning anything. never compromise.

What makes a happy life partnership?

To succeed at something big, is to break it into its tinniest pieces and focus on how to succeed at just one piece.

Marriage isn’t the honeymoon, isn’t Valentine’s Day. It’s Forgettable Wednesday

Traffic Test

why they’re my friends?

I enjoy spending time with them!

If you stuck in a traffic, who do you want to spend time with?

The ability to extract fun out of unfun situations.

A respect for each other’s brains and way of thinking. If you don’t respect the way someone thinks, you’re not going to want to tell them your thoughts on work each day, or on anything else interesting that pops into your head, because you won’t care that much what they have to say about it.

A decent number of common interests, activities and people-preferences.

In such friendship, you have endless room to deepen and grow richer.

Most comfortable position in a chair for 12 hours

You know even the slightest bit of discomfort would grow to pain and eventually, torture.

• secrets are poison to a relationship, because they build an invisible wall.
• If I am with someone with a different wavelength, I soon becomes exhausted.
• Human have flaws. The worst fates would be to spend most of your life being criticized for your flaws.
• John Gottman,

  positive/negative interaction should be at least 5:1

Expect to put great effort in relationship

1. learn the good, consistent communication style
2. Mental equality. If one person dictates the mood, needs or opinions over others, in a way they’d need stand for being treated themselve, it’s not going to last long.
3. Every relationship is flaw, don’t make things even harder than they need to be.

​

Tame your mammoth

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html

meet your mammoth

When I was in 2nd grade, I told the truth that I loved a pretty girl… This horrifying experience taught me a hard lesson: it can be mortally dangerous to be yourself.

Your Grandfaterh knows socially acceptance is critical to survival in a small tribe. This obsession can be called a human’s social survival mammoth.

Civilization has dramatically changed. But our social structure and biology evolved at a snail’s pace.

Romantic rejection is a nightmare for a mammoth, but caution in today’s world only makes you a coward.

Mammoth’s fear of soical disapproval makes you feel weird about going to a restaurant or a movie alone, makes you go to a more lucrative career you’re lukewarm about, marry to a person you’re not in love with.

The Mammoth needs to feel calm and safe, also needs to be fed with praise, approval, and feeling of being on the right side of any social or moral norm.

Prestige is something used to incentivize people to do meaningless jobs.

Mammoth focus on winning the approval of a Puppet Master in your life. It can be a parent, your significant other, group leader or an alpha member.

When we get to the toxic state in our relationship with a Puppet Master, his presence hangs over our entire decision-making process.

Authentic Voice

AV knows how you feel deep down about things like money, family and marriage. It knows which kinds of people, topics of interests, and types of activities you truly enjoy, and which you don’t.

AV is someone the mammoth tends to ignore entirely. Mammoth has the ability to quickly adapt the environment, then AV starts to feel itself irrelevant, which makes AV shrink, fade and lose motivation.

When you don’t know who you are, you make decision based on the crude, outdated needs and emotions of your mammoth. You don’t dip deep into the foggy center of what you really believe in to find clarity, you look for the strongest opinions around you.

Losing touch with your AV also makes you fragile, because when your identity is built on the approval of others, being criticized or rejected by others really hurts. A bad break-up is painful for everyone, but it stings in a much deeper place for a mammoth-run person than for a person with a strong AV. A strong AV makes a stable core, and after a break-up, that core is still holding firm—but since the acceptance of others is all a mammoth-run person has, being dumped by a person who knows you well is a far more shattering experience.

Likewise, you know those people who react to being criticized by coming back with a nasty low-blow? Those tend to be severely mammoth-run people, and criticism makes them so mad because mammoths cannot handle criticism.

Taming the Mammoth

The only way to take our lives back is to override the wiring of our brain and tame the mammoth.

get to know your AV

1st step: a clear and honest assessment of what’s going on in your head.

soul-searching, finding yourself:How does your gut really feel about your job and relationship status? Do you pretend to care about something?

Step out of your ordinary life and think. start being proud of whoever your authentic voice is.

figure out where the mammoth is hiding

When a mammoth is in control, the person is not really aware of it.

1st hiding place: fear. where are you most susceptible to shame or embarrassment? what part of life is a dreadful,sinking feeling washes over you? Which part of you life would clearly need a change?

2nd hiding place: good feeling you get from feeling accepted. Are you trying to please others at work or in your relationship? Are you terrified of disappointing Puppet Master and choose making them proud over aiming to gratify yourself? Do you get too excited about being associated with prestigious things? Do you care too much about status?

3rd hiding place: don’t fee comfortable making a decision without approval from others

Decide specific areas the mammoth needs to be ousted

The mammoth is alway with you. What you need to do is to carve out a sacred areas only for AV without mamonth influence

Mammoth has a low IQ

Everyone is talking about me and my life and just think how much everyone will be talking about it if I do this risky or weird thing.

No one really cares that much about what you’re doing. People are highly self-absorbed.

If I try really hard, I can please everyone.

Yes, maybe in a 40-person tribe with a unified culture. But in today’s world, no matter who you are, a bunch of people will like you and a bunch of other people won’t.

Being disapproved of or looked down upon or shit-talked about has real consequences in my life.

Anyone who disapproves of who you’re being or what you’re doing isn’t even in the same room with you 99.7% of the time.

Really judgy people matter.

Here’s how judgy people function: They’re highly mammoth-controlled and become good friends withand date other judgy people who are also highly mammoth-controlled. One of the primary activitiesthey do together is talk shit about whoever’s not with them.

When people shit-talk, they set up a category division of which they’re always on the right side.

I’m a bad person if I disappoint or offend the person/people who love me and have invested so much in me.

No. You’re not a bad person for being whoever your Authentic Voice is in your one life. It’s simple— if they truly selflessly love you, they will for sure come around and accept everything once they see that you’re happy. Otherwise, they care about more themselves than me.

The earth is surrounded by 99.999% of eternal emptiness.

You life is only a blink of the entire time frame.

mammoth’s efforts are counterproductive

• AV is interesting because it’s unique, complex. Mammoth are boring, only do what they are supposed to do.
• AV lead, they draw their thoughts and opinions from an original place. Mammoth follow, they try so hard to be the status quo. They don’t want to change.
• AV is more attractive, because they have the strength of character to tame their mammoth.

start being yourself

That takes more than reflection— it takes some courage.

​

Udacity talk 6, Sebastian

Jobs guarantee for the nano degree?

I believe 10,000 people well trained, can find job in 3-4 months.

self-driving car useful in narrow, curvy road in India?

these cars are very precise.

from scratch or integrate with current technology?

integrate

people will lose jobs due to technology?

Human is traditionally defined by our physical strength and agility. It wasn’t our mind. We aren’t trained to be thinkers, were trained to be doers physically. … We have so many intereting jobs and lives.

I learn an important lesson: if you don’ t aim high, you don’t achieve high. You got to try these things. Almost every expert says it can’t be done is wrong in every field.

what do you envision the impact by self-driving car?

save a lot of life. save a lot of parking space. reduce insurance cost…

​

Udacity talk 3, Jess Lee

Advice for woman to start a career in tech?

foucus on doing amazing work. surround yourself with the best people and learn from them.

more tenacious or aggressive ?

You have to find your own style. (Be yourself.) You have to lean to your own strength. I think as I was figuring out my own leadership style. look at different role models. I found some male leader whose style wasn’t quite right to me… It was ok to sought my personality out or not fit that classic alpha male mode.

advice for younger yourself?

I think I was a little bit discouraged at first and feel like I couldn’t be a leader because I’m a little bit on introverted side, a little bit quirky, weird. I feel I didn’t fit that classic mode and then I figured out I could do it my own way.

… be more confident. I wish I’d learned that lesson earlier.

secret sauce for success?

1. delight your user
2. do a few things well. focus.
3. make an impact. At the end of the day, you want to be surround with the people, not only smart and can do the job. but you really love being around. Find a group of people, empower them,that makes the journey much better.

suggest young people to get master or doctoral degree?

From my personal experience, I am really glad I go to industries right after bachelor degree. I think it depends what you want to do. In certain fields or areas…

For the first few years I learn so much. teamwork, clean code, etc. It is always good to accelerate these process.

how do you come out the idea of Polypove?

The early founders were trying to build a house. They have to choose piles, all kinds element matched each other. Then we move to fashion …

The problem is huge, how can a young programmer do?

Some of best programmers, they don’t just think purely about the technical side, they want to actually understand why are we building this? What’s the user want out of it? What’s the business goal?

How to do a side project in a busy life?

If someone could tell me the answer… I can’t do it.

Maybe if you are really excited about it, quit your job and do it full time.

suggest for preparing an interview?

Sometimes if you really want a job, you’re really excited, you go that extra mile, you know the product, research interviews beforehand.

​

invisible iceberg and Hamingway

Let’s begin with Archimede’s principle on buoyant force:

where Fb is the buoyancy, rho is the density of water, V is the volume of ice immersed in the water. To keep balance, this force should be equal to the gravity, which is:

If we substitute the density of ice by 0.92 g/cm^3 and water by 1 g/cm^3, we get . In other words, the visible ice floating on the water is only 8% of its total volume.

Interestingly, the Iceberg Theory, or the theory of omission, was coined by American writer Hemingway in 1923. His iceberg theory highlights the symbolic implications of art. He wrote in “the art of the short story”:

You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.

If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless.

It is totally opposite to my previous understanding, which thought the invisible part is unintentional. Nevertheless, Hemingway has such a deep insight that how human perceive the world and construct his story in the same way. It’s something so deep in mind that people tend to believe his own conclusion.

1958 interview by Paris review

The journalist George Plimpton, tried to ask every details of what is in Hamingway’s mind when he is writing. However, he finds it difficult to talk about writing, he feels so strongly that such ideas should remain unexpressed, not be spooked by such questions.

He prefers not to talk about them (some superstitions things cheer him up), feeling that whatever value they may have can be talked away.

that though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.

Writing is a private, lonely occupation with no need for witnesses until the final work is done.

some habits are worth noting:

• he stands when he writes
• he keeps track of his daily progress, so as not to kid himself
• write every morning as soon after first light as possible. No one disturb you at that time. You can start from 6 to noon until you feel empty mind.
• discipline is acquired
• I have worked well everywhere…The telephone and visitors are the work destroyers.
• Once writing become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.
• Financial security can keep you from worrying, which destroy the ability to write.

When do you decide to become a writer?

I always wanted to be writer

The fun of talk is to explore. All that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it.

Some writers can hold teaching positions. I could not do it… Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job even though only a few hours a day are spent on the actual writing.

A writer can be compared to a well…It’s better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.

(I see I am away from the question, but the question was not very interesting). when you ask someone old,tired questions, you are apt to receive old tired answers.

The further you go in writing the more alone you are.

A close knowledge of works on the list help fill your “well”?

They are part of learning. **Nobody knows what it is made of, least of all yourslef.

the symbols in your novels?

If you don’t mind, I dislike talking about them and being questioned about them. If there are good explainers, why should I deprive their job?… Read for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading

I still belive it’s very bad for a writer to talk about how he writes.

How am I going to write it if you don’t leave me alone?

Do you work out the whole plan before you start?

I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote

Do you think a writer ‘s power diminishes as he grows older?

I don’t know about that. People who know what theyare doing should last as long as their heads last.

Do the titles come to you while you’re in the process of doing the story?

The title comes afterwards

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg… so that the reader read something it will become a part of his experience and seem actually to have happened

How soon do can you write about it in fictional terms from an experience (air crashes)?

There is no rule about how soon one should write about it.

Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function.

would you sy your work reflects one or two ideas?

The man who said it possibly had only one or two ideas.

What do you think is the function of your art?

why be puzzled by that?

From everything that happened, you know and unknown, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

​

WestWorld

This sci-fi TV show has taken a bold step. The future human robots have emotional intelligent and began to have self-consciousness. Furthermore, this show has included many interesting cognitive psychology terms, such as Bicameral mind, Dissonance theory.

1 the original

What do you think about of world?

Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world, the disarray; I choose to see the beauty

To believe there is an order to our days, a purpose…

At some points, we were all new to this world…. a place with unlimited possibilities.

• No offense. I rather win a woman’s affection than pay for it.
• You always pay for it. The difference is our costs are fixed and posted right there on the door.

Do you feel inconsistencies in your world? or repetitions?

All lives have routine. Mine’s no different. Still, I never cease to wonder at the thought, that any day the course of my whole life could change with just one chance encounter.

Just trying to look chivalrous.

What if you and everyone you know were built to gratify the desires of the people who pay to visit your world.

Did you see the cracks after a while. That’s why I like the basic emotions. you know what that mean? It means, when you’re suffering, that’s when you are most real.

2 chestnut

The violent delights have violent ends.

roll them back. Don’t play god if you couldn’t handle with the devils.

Dr. Ford: what’s the point of it? Get a couple of cheap thrills? some surprises? But it’s not enough. It’s not about giving the guests what you think they want. No, that’s simple. The titillation, horror, elation. They are parlor tricks. The guests don’t return for the obvious things we do, the garish things. They come back because of the subtleties, the details. They come back because they discover something they had never noticed before, something they’ve fallen in love with. They are not looking for stories that tells them who they are. They already know who they are. They are here because they want a glimpse of who they could be.

3 stray

I guess people want to read what they want most and experiences the least.

Why do you ask about my son?

Personal questions are an ingratiating scheme.

Let’s not go someday, Teddy. Let’s go now.

Bicameral mind: theory of conscience. voice is from god.

Is there something wrong with these thoughts I’m having?

No. Evolution only uses one tool: mistake

Do you want me to change back?

No. Let’s see what the path leads.

4 Dissonance theory

you think the grief will make you smaller inside, like your heart will collapse itself. It doesn’t. I fell spaces opening up inside of me, like a building never explored.

I think I want to be free.

you don’t want to go back to the old life.

No choices you have ever made was your own. You have always been a prisoner. What if I told you I’m here to set you free?

6 Adversary

Great artist hide themselves in the work.

Never start something you’re not willing to finish. And you will get fucked either way.

7 Trompe L’Oeil

William: I’ve been pretending my whole life. Pretending I don’t mind, pretending I belong. My life build on it. And it’s a good life. It’s a life I’ve always wanted.But then I came here, and I get a glimpse for a second of a life in which I don’t have to pretend. **A life in which I can be truly alive. How can I go back and pretend when I know what this feels like?

You unlock something on me.

Ford: people tend to ignore things that are harmful to them

I have come to think of so much of consciousness as a burden, a weight, and we have spared them that. Anxiety, self-loathing, guilt. The hosts are the ones who are free. free here under my control.

8 Trace Decay

Ford: You are now in a unique position. A programmer who whos intimately how the machine work and a machine works its own true nature.

Every host needs a backstory. It’s a story we tell ourself. And every story needs a beginning. Your imagined suffering makes you lifelike.

Pain only exists in the mind. It’s always imagined.

We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Human fancy that there is something special about the way we percieve the world, and yet we live in loops, as tight and as closed as the hosts do.

• seldom questioning our choices,
• content, for the most part, to be told what to do next

Bicameral mind

Arnold: Memory, improvisation, each step harder to reach than the last and you never got there. …One day, I realized, consciousness isn’t a journey upward, but a journey inward. Not a pyramid, but a maze. **Every choice could bring you closer to the center, or send you spiraling to the edge, to madness.

I can’t roll you back. Once you’ve found it, you’ll find your way back. This place will be a living cell for you. It’s unconcisouable.

Another option: break the loop before it begins.

I want you to remove them (the sad memory)

Benard: I can’t. Not without destroying you. Your memories are the first step to consciousness.How can you learn from your mistakes if you can’t remember them?

The divine gift is not from higher power, is from our mind.

Did you find what you were looking for?

In order to escape this world, you will need to suffer more.

​

What mad pursuit, Crick, 1988

What mad pursuit— A personal veiw of scientific discovery
Francis Crick, 1988
Oscar Wilde

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Acknowledgement

…
My other major debt is to my family not only did they encourage me to become a scientist but they helped me financially . my parents made considerable sacrifices to enable me to go away to boarding school , especially during the depression . my uncle Arthur crick and his wife not only assisted me financially while i was a graduate student at university college but also gave me the money to buy our first house . my aunt Ethel , in addition to teaching me to read helped financially when i first went to Cambridge after the war , as did my mother . they both helped also with the education of my son Michael . while i had very little money when i was young , was secure in the knowledge that , thanks to my relatives , i would have enough to live on.
…

the main perpose of the book: the discovery of DNA double helix in 1953-1966.
the most important theme of the book is natural selection.
Francois Jacob

Evolution is a tinkerer

The basic laws of physics can usually be expressed in exact mathematical form. The “laws” of biology are often only broad generalizations.
Elegance and deep simplicity are useful guides in physics, but may be very misleading in biology, which receive much more guidance from the experimental evidence.
My first degree was in physics. I took some time to adjust to the rather different way of thinking necessary in biology. It was almost as if one had to be born again.. It is well worth the effort.
1947, at age 31, I went to Cambridge after WWII.
I am concerned more with ideas than with people.

1 Prologue: My Early years

I have no doubt that this loss of faith (12 years old) in Christian religion and my growing attachment to science have played a dominant part in my scientific career. I realized early on that it is detailed scientific knowledge which makes certain religious untenable. such as true age of the earth and the fossil record.

2 The Gossip Test

During war I worked on the design of mines. After the war I was at a loss as to what to do. Although I was offered a permanent job, I was reasonably sure that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life designing weapons. But what did I want to do? I took stock of my qualifications. … I was sure in my mind that I wanted to do fundamental research rather than going into applied research, even though my Admiralty experience would have fit me for developmental work.
I ask my close friend, Georg Kreisel, who said,

I’ve known a lot of people more stupid than you who’ve made a success of it.

Thus encouraged, my next problem was to decide what subject to choose. Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice. I brooded over this problem for several months. …
I have several friends who were interested in science but knew less than me. One day I noticed that I was telling them, with some enthusiasm, about recent advances in antibiotics–penicillin and such. Only that evening did it occur to me that I myself really knew almost nothing about these topics, apart from what I had read in some periodicals. It came to me that I was not really telling them about science. I was gossiping about it.
This insight was a revelation to me. I had discovered the gossip test– what you are really interested in is what you gossip about. Without hesitation, I applied it to my recent conversations. Quickly I narrowed down my interests to two main areas: the borderline between the living and nonliving, and the workings of the brain.
It should not be imagined that I knew nothing at all of either of my subjects. After the war I had spent a lot of my spare time in background reading. The Admiralty had generously allowed me to go once or twice a week to seminars and courses at University College during my working hours.
In spite of these reading, I must emphasize that I had only a very superficial knowledge of my chose subjects. I certainly had no deep insight into them…
At this point a crisis suddenly arose. I was offered a job. Not a mere studentship, but an actual job on neurobiology.
The decision was a hard one. Finally I told myself that my preference for the living-nonliving borderline had been soundly based, that I would have only one chance to embark on a new career, and that I should not be deflected by the accident of someone offering me a job…. attractive though it was, I must refuse this offer.
My next task was to find some way of entering my new subject. I went around to see Massey, under who I worked during war, to explain my position and to ask for his help… He looked surprised when I told him of my interest in biology, but he was very helpful and gave me two valuable introductions.
I visited 5 different lab and finally chose Strangeways laboratory, where they did tissue culture….
After a year I want to mellanby to report progress. .. I had spent much of my time in trying to educate myself…. now that I had a background in biology, I would like to work on protein structure.

3 The Baffling problem

For natural selection, the first point to grasp is that a complex creature or organ, such as the eye, did not arise in one evolutionary step. Rather it evolved through a series of small steps.
- random alteration in the gene
- selective pressure of the environment

14 Epilogue: My later years

…
In fact, some of scientist work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking. they should heed the saying,

A busy life is a wasted life.

I decided that the move to Salk Institute was an ideal opportunity to become closely interested in the working of the brain….It took me several years to detach myself from my old interests, especially in molecular biology.
I found there was a new subject that called itself cognitive science. ( It’s joking that any subject that has science in its name is unlikely to be one). cognitive science was part of the rebellion against behaviorism. … may cognitive scientist tend to regard the brain as a black box, better left unopened. take no account of such things as nerve cells. … how do they hope to unscramble the way it operates by looking solely at its input and output, ignoring what goes on between? It is essential to study organisms at higher levels. The study of neurons by itself will never sole such problem.
Functionalist,

If you want to understand function, study structure.

My own prejudices are exactly the opposite. I think one should approach these problems at all levels. In nature hybrid species are often sterile, but in science the reverse it often true. Hybrid subjects are often astonishingly fertile.
In studying a complicated system, one can’t see what the problems are, unless one studies the higher levels of the system. but the proof of any theory about higher level usually needs detailed data from lower levels if it is to be established beyond reasonable double.