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"Probably, about 50% of the fault lies with Billy." Do you have any unsubstantiated claims that DON'T come from "The Secret"?

Hexstream 18y ago
I don't know what "The Secret" is, and that one certainly doesn't come from it because it's my own. In any case I came up with this unsubstantiated claim on my own (is it unsubstantiated if it stems from 12 years of first-hand experience?)
- dusklight 18y ago
  Can you elaborate a bit? What was the 50%, at least for you, that caused the bullying?
  - Hexstream 18y ago
    k, first I'll admit that 78% of statistics are made on the spot ;P But really, how can you explain that I had mostly the same attitude for 12 years and had the same problems and then I changed pretty fast and the problems went away just as quickly? Coincidence? If I only had 10% responsibility, seems to me I would have been mostly powerless to change things. I don't think my neighborhood has gotten any more or any less safer than it was. If it wasn't my environment that changed and it wasn't me that did either, yet all the situation changed, how do you explain that? When I say it's his fault, it's not to put him down, it's to empower him.
    - qaexl 18y ago
      Were you empowered by someone else, or did you seize on this yourself? In my (purely anecdotal) experience, telling someone they have a "choice", or they can change things, ... it does not work very well. That experience of knowing you can reach out and make a choice was something like becoming enlightened. You get it or you don't.
      - Hexstream 18y ago
        That's the sad thing about it, there's stuff you can't just get told. I know all the things my parents said to help, but it didn't really help at all when they said it, it's just now that it's over that I get what they meant. I guess you just have to reach a point where you're fed up enough that you want to change for the best, whether it takes a year or 12 to reach your bottom of the barrel. edit: There's this guy on the street that told me to raise my head instead of looking on the ground, and that kickstarted my process. I know it wouldn't have worked if I hadn't been fed up with my current situation and didn't have a clue I could do something about it. Like, if he had told me that 2 years earlier it wouldn't have had any effect probably. But it's just to say, if you're in deep trouble like Billy my hints might be worthless but for someone farther along, "on the fence", it might help.
        qaexl 18y ago
        So maybe, someone's life situation also has a "tipping point". I hear ya though. I didn't get beaten up, but I felt like a loser for a long time. It was made worse because I was naturally able to get a lot of things right, the first time. As things got more and more progressively difficult, I couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to accomplish what I wanted to do. I was helped though by a lot of fiction writers -- Heinlein, for one. I read Ender's Game annually for a while. But it wasn't until reading Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age that I got thinking I should start writing stuff, as a way to try to pass on what I know now about taking initiative, personal responsibility, etc. that on the off-chance that some teenager scraping the bottom of the barrel gets a hold of my book, it just might be what catalyzes this realization. Diamond Age was about a primer given to three different girls; the primer was built with nanotech, has a database full of old myths, folklore, and teachings, has sensors to figure out what is going on around itself and the girl that is bonded with it, and is able to generate stories based on what's happening. It was that which lead me to my current studies into Joseph Campbell's works on mythology and folklore. It's also why articles like this has always interested me. It's also why I like the whole concept of OLPC. I'd like to be able to write something like that Primer, or at least a pale imitation of it. It also helped that I trained in the martial arts that I did. Martial arts is pretty much obsolete if you measure if by how well you can inflict violence. A gun is a technology allowing someone to inflict more damage with less training time. But as far as a life practice that keeps your ability to take initiative sharp -- something Stephen Covey describes as "sharpening your saw" -- to push past that, "I dun wanna" feeling, martial arts is better for that than a gun. Since I think you understand this, I'm bringing this out here which I normally wouldn't for Hacker News. There's a Japanese word meaning budo. Transliterated, it means "way of war". I once heard someone explain it to mean, "the art of living well under all circumstances while protecting your interest." That is the context which I was reading the story with the bullying. The other is the Chinese word, kungfu. It's used in America to mean "martial arts", but it's been mistranslated. ("Wushu" is what you want). Kungfu means refined skill accumulated over time, the integral of effort over time. One teacher I met at a seminar once said, "I don't know why 'kung fu' is translated as 'martial arts' when it really means patience."
Hexstream 18y ago
Ok, I went overboard with an arbitrary and mostly irrelevant statistic. 25%, 50%, whatever. Does that really invalidate all my points completely? I'm shocked you're getting all that karma for such an obvious refutation while I get almost nothing for a view that might not be common sense or popular but not that far-fetched and more thought-provoking than "oh, poor guy".

Hexstream 18y ago

I don't know what "The Secret" is, and that one certainly doesn't come from it because it's my own. In any case I came up with this unsubstantiated claim on my own (is it unsubstantiated if it stems from 12 years of first-hand experience?)

dusklight 18y ago
Can you elaborate a bit? What was the 50%, at least for you, that caused the bullying?
- Hexstream 18y ago
  k, first I'll admit that 78% of statistics are made on the spot ;P But really, how can you explain that I had mostly the same attitude for 12 years and had the same problems and then I changed pretty fast and the problems went away just as quickly? Coincidence? If I only had 10% responsibility, seems to me I would have been mostly powerless to change things. I don't think my neighborhood has gotten any more or any less safer than it was. If it wasn't my environment that changed and it wasn't me that did either, yet all the situation changed, how do you explain that? When I say it's his fault, it's not to put him down, it's to empower him.
  - qaexl 18y ago
    Were you empowered by someone else, or did you seize on this yourself? In my (purely anecdotal) experience, telling someone they have a "choice", or they can change things, ... it does not work very well. That experience of knowing you can reach out and make a choice was something like becoming enlightened. You get it or you don't.
    - Hexstream 18y ago
      That's the sad thing about it, there's stuff you can't just get told. I know all the things my parents said to help, but it didn't really help at all when they said it, it's just now that it's over that I get what they meant. I guess you just have to reach a point where you're fed up enough that you want to change for the best, whether it takes a year or 12 to reach your bottom of the barrel. edit: There's this guy on the street that told me to raise my head instead of looking on the ground, and that kickstarted my process. I know it wouldn't have worked if I hadn't been fed up with my current situation and didn't have a clue I could do something about it. Like, if he had told me that 2 years earlier it wouldn't have had any effect probably. But it's just to say, if you're in deep trouble like Billy my hints might be worthless but for someone farther along, "on the fence", it might help.
      - qaexl 18y ago
        So maybe, someone's life situation also has a "tipping point". I hear ya though. I didn't get beaten up, but I felt like a loser for a long time. It was made worse because I was naturally able to get a lot of things right, the first time. As things got more and more progressively difficult, I couldn't figure out why I wasn't able to accomplish what I wanted to do. I was helped though by a lot of fiction writers -- Heinlein, for one. I read Ender's Game annually for a while. But it wasn't until reading Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age that I got thinking I should start writing stuff, as a way to try to pass on what I know now about taking initiative, personal responsibility, etc. that on the off-chance that some teenager scraping the bottom of the barrel gets a hold of my book, it just might be what catalyzes this realization. Diamond Age was about a primer given to three different girls; the primer was built with nanotech, has a database full of old myths, folklore, and teachings, has sensors to figure out what is going on around itself and the girl that is bonded with it, and is able to generate stories based on what's happening. It was that which lead me to my current studies into Joseph Campbell's works on mythology and folklore. It's also why articles like this has always interested me. It's also why I like the whole concept of OLPC. I'd like to be able to write something like that Primer, or at least a pale imitation of it. It also helped that I trained in the martial arts that I did. Martial arts is pretty much obsolete if you measure if by how well you can inflict violence. A gun is a technology allowing someone to inflict more damage with less training time. But as far as a life practice that keeps your ability to take initiative sharp -- something Stephen Covey describes as "sharpening your saw" -- to push past that, "I dun wanna" feeling, martial arts is better for that than a gun. Since I think you understand this, I'm bringing this out here which I normally wouldn't for Hacker News. There's a Japanese word meaning budo. Transliterated, it means "way of war". I once heard someone explain it to mean, "the art of living well under all circumstances while protecting your interest." That is the context which I was reading the story with the bullying. The other is the Chinese word, kungfu. It's used in America to mean "martial arts", but it's been mistranslated. ("Wushu" is what you want). Kungfu means refined skill accumulated over time, the integral of effort over time. One teacher I met at a seminar once said, "I don't know why 'kung fu' is translated as 'martial arts' when it really means patience."

Hexstream 18y ago

Ok, I went overboard with an arbitrary and mostly irrelevant statistic. 25%, 50%, whatever. Does that really invalidate all my points completely? I'm shocked you're getting all that karma for such an obvious refutation while I get almost nothing for a view that might not be common sense or popular but not that far-fetched and more thought-provoking than "oh, poor guy".