10 ms·

A Life of One's Own is incredible, and is one of two books I credit with changing my life. I reviewed it partially here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/how-t

A Life of One's Own is incredible, and is one of two books I credit with changing my life. I reviewed it partially here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/how-to-enjoy-things https://superbowl.substack.com/p/how-to-enjoy-things

082349872349872 2y ago
don't know if additional vocabulary might help you turn up anything more useful, but the "narrow attention"/"wide attention" dichotomy you point out is something I've mostly heard talked about in metaphorical terms: a "hard eyes"/"soft eyes" dichotomy.
- superb-owl 2y ago
  Neat! I've never heard that one, will definitely add it to my vocab
- dang 2y ago
  If you guys want to go down an unusually interesting rabbit hole, the book Open-Focus Brain by Les Fehmi and (especially) the associated audio exercises, are all about this. The exercises are something like guided meditations, but unique in my experience, and I never do exercises like that. It's a pity that his work isn't better known*. He died a couple years ago. * Edit: although HN does not disappoint! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712532 (Oct 2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8721704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8721704 (Dec 2014) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8718142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8718142 (Dec 2014)
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    Interesting: it sounds like we do something similar with animals (training them not to close down their focus and fixate on things that might well, in a state of nature, be alarming, but don't really matter when living with people in a 21st century environment) but it's kind of hard to say while the Fehmi exercises are still in copyright... EDIT: the pain relief part seems completely orthogonal to what I was talking about above, but the perception of attention and especially gaps in attention is something that one finds in japanese martial zen... (for instance, the "3 pwns": the lowest level is to "pwn the sword", where you physically react quickly enough to counter an opponent's action; the intermediate level is to "pwn the technique", where by recognising the start of a technique one can predict where it will end, thus gaining time to counter; the advanced level is to "pwn the spirit", where by recognising where an opponent's attention lies one can predict what techniques they will attempt, thus gaining even more time...)
    - dang 2y ago
      Belated reply here - I don't fully understand what you're saying but I did hear that Les Fehmi was an accomplished Zen practitioner and used to hang out with Leonard Cohen at Mount Baldy.
  - zee_kristoffer 2y ago
    Are you still practicing them?
    - dang 2y ago
      Yes—they're quite remarkable and I've never encountered anything like them. But I wouldn't use the word "practice"—I'm more of a dilettante. I listen to them whenever I have trouble sleeping. Inevitably one of two things happens: either I fall asleep, or I end up in an expanded state—and either option is fine with me. I have the impression that Fehmi was disappointed that he didn't win more people over to becoming serious practitioners. People would resort to his stuff when they were stressed or in pain, but wouldn't necessarily practice it every day.
      - 082349872349872 2y ago
        > ...listen to one of them (the 'head and hands' one) whenever I have trouble sleeping My father taught me an "instasleep" system that may(?) be related: basically you start distally and work proximally, becoming aware of any tension in body parts and allowing them to relax. When I do it I feel "myself" kind of "diffusing" to meet my environment, like fresh and salt water meeting to form a brackish zone, sometimes with a rocking sensation, and I usually fall asleep well before getting to core muscles. (when I was younger, people used to ask "how can you fall asleep on rocks?" to which I replied "you have to choose the comfortable ones", but it was likely more this technique) The oddest thing about this technique is the source: although it sounds very Baba Cool, he'd been taught it in Uncle Sam's service.
- gradschoolfail 2y ago
  I hadn’t heard of this particular duality, and it seems to throw up some very instructive blogposts in sportscoaching. Expertise through peripheral vision is a pet obsession of mine, this is an almost academic article from that rabbit-hole (pdf; maybe they could have expanded on the dichotomy, though :) Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 2005 Peripheral Vision: Expertise in Real World Contexts https://www.wellesu.com/10.1177/0170840605053102 https://www.wellesu.com/10.1177/0170840605053102 Also would like to point out (maybe tangentially I’m afraid,) that in another HN thread, user mjburgess has a dichotomy of his own, the narcissistic/borderline[0]. It seems to be a refinement of Field’s masculine/feminine dichotomy in TFA! (as a bonus, “rhymes” with Aristotelian vice, “geometrically”) That whole thread imho relevant— psychiatry is finally moving on from psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, eye-opening to see ideas as they birth, in the basement of the (also, now “collective”) mind! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41246273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41246273
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    on a tangent to the tangent, the NPD-leader BPD-follower model reminded me (even in one or two details) of Bob Altemeyer's studies of "authoritarian followers". EDIT: regarding Dreyfus & Dreyfus, it's interesting to think of expertise in terms of Minsky's Society of Mind: what if there's just as much deliberative choice going on for the expert, but it's no longer perceived at a conscious level? [go far enough along these lines of course, and you arrive at Jayne's ... Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), which is probably a bit too far]
    - gradschoolfail 2y ago
      By deliberative, do you mean something more sophisticated than “deterministic” ( to mean, e.g., that regarding a process that integrates internal & external inputs in a way that cannot be Kolmogorov-decompressed :)? More concretely, can a coach note the differences — why world champions need coaches, not necessarily coaches who were themselves world champions. >[haha] mjburgess thread commenter came back with anxiety-depression axis, which seems personally more salient, as I seem to wander into latent conflicts with depressives who seem depressed at the same level that i am anxious (in a particular situation). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41254674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41254674 Tangent to the tangent to the tangent [maybe this is the right moment to call it “peripheral”, if not “bounding”]: Meditating on this rare moment of anger (because of the vitious still in myself) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225388 That said, any pointers from Altemeyer I should watch out for before I go into a deepdive mapping the NB axis to the DA axis? (Tangential edit: inherent vice is imho the most autobiographical (as Sortilège?) of Pynchon, you might enjoy the soundtrack from the adaptation as well, esp. the rewilding of Can https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_(band)#Style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_(band)#Style https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortilège_(groupe) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortilège_(groupe) https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/enkb0m/in_ptas_inherent_vice_is_sortilège_real_or_is_she/ https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/enkb0m/in_ptas_in... )
calstad 2y ago
What’s the other one?
- superb-owl 2y ago
  Glad you asked! _Facing the Dragon_ by Robert Moore https://superbowl.substack.com/p/book-review-facing-the-dragon https://superbowl.substack.com/p/book-review-facing-the-drag...
  - gradschoolfail 2y ago
    Thank you! This does look like it could provide a much needed perspective to some Nietzsche-adjacent issues (relating to his own “cosmodicy”) that I have been wrestling with others about.. especially as I recently, off-handedly, in anger, in grandiosity even, accused somebodies of being well-intentioned bullies.. Also relevant to organizational/selves herding, of course ;) EDIT: if i may, your review makes me imagine that one socially virtuous mantra (or vitious countermand?) to meditate upon in mitigation of narcissism could be “loyalty to the Other” Tangential EDIT: it could also be worth meditating on the wide spread opinions that Ayn Rand (mentioned above) and Nietzsche are both young people’s (mostly young men’s) writers In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records, to my knowledge, date back some 2500 years or more... the recognition ATMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts. Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God). To Western ideology, the thought has remained a stranger... in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other's eyes, become aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one, not merely similar or identical... "The I That Is God" as translated in Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists (1984) edited by Ken Wilber
aidenn0 2y ago
Very off-topic, but has anyone ever read a book that someone else credited with changing their life and felt like their own life was changed? Anecdotally I haven't despite having read at least a dozen such books. Assuming I'm not an outlier, I think it's a bit like the "monad tutorial fallacy[1]" where the book crystalizes things that have already been bouncing around in one's head, rather than being the original source of the change. 1: https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuition-and-the-monad-tutorial-fallacy/ https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti...
- fragmede 2y ago
  The Alchemist came recommend that way to me, and it's certainly shaped how I think about certain things.
  - andrepd 2y ago
    Good example, because I thought it was a terrible book, utterly pedestrian and pseudo-deep.
    - phoe-krk 2y ago
      One man's pedestrian book is another man's lifechanging literature. Everything depends on whether the words that one is reading are what, when, and how they need to read. That's why reading a ton of books, and re-reading old ones, are both decent ideas. Something is gonna stick, even if purely via application of statistics.
    - bookiest 2y ago
      I had this experience with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I am sure I read it at the wrong time in my life. For me The Fountainhead was life changing precisely because I was an insecure and overly-mothered boy that needed to read about pursuing one’s own ends to the exclusion of all expectations otherwise. Today I’m a father and would find it uselessly myopic.
  - aidenn0 2y ago

082349872349872 2y ago

don't know if additional vocabulary might help you turn up anything more useful, but the "narrow attention"/"wide attention" dichotomy you point out is something I've mostly heard talked about in metaphorical terms: a "hard eyes"/"soft eyes" dichotomy.

superb-owl 2y ago
Neat! I've never heard that one, will definitely add it to my vocab
dang 2y ago
If you guys want to go down an unusually interesting rabbit hole, the book Open-Focus Brain by Les Fehmi and (especially) the associated audio exercises, are all about this. The exercises are something like guided meditations, but unique in my experience, and I never do exercises like that. It's a pity that his work isn't better known*. He died a couple years ago. * Edit: although HN does not disappoint! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712532 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12712532 (Oct 2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8721704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8721704 (Dec 2014) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8718142 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8718142 (Dec 2014)
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  Interesting: it sounds like we do something similar with animals (training them not to close down their focus and fixate on things that might well, in a state of nature, be alarming, but don't really matter when living with people in a 21st century environment) but it's kind of hard to say while the Fehmi exercises are still in copyright... EDIT: the pain relief part seems completely orthogonal to what I was talking about above, but the perception of attention and especially gaps in attention is something that one finds in japanese martial zen... (for instance, the "3 pwns": the lowest level is to "pwn the sword", where you physically react quickly enough to counter an opponent's action; the intermediate level is to "pwn the technique", where by recognising the start of a technique one can predict where it will end, thus gaining time to counter; the advanced level is to "pwn the spirit", where by recognising where an opponent's attention lies one can predict what techniques they will attempt, thus gaining even more time...)
  - dang 2y ago
    Belated reply here - I don't fully understand what you're saying but I did hear that Les Fehmi was an accomplished Zen practitioner and used to hang out with Leonard Cohen at Mount Baldy.
- zee_kristoffer 2y ago
  Are you still practicing them?
  - dang 2y ago
    Yes—they're quite remarkable and I've never encountered anything like them. But I wouldn't use the word "practice"—I'm more of a dilettante. I listen to them whenever I have trouble sleeping. Inevitably one of two things happens: either I fall asleep, or I end up in an expanded state—and either option is fine with me. I have the impression that Fehmi was disappointed that he didn't win more people over to becoming serious practitioners. People would resort to his stuff when they were stressed or in pain, but wouldn't necessarily practice it every day.
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      > ...listen to one of them (the 'head and hands' one) whenever I have trouble sleeping My father taught me an "instasleep" system that may(?) be related: basically you start distally and work proximally, becoming aware of any tension in body parts and allowing them to relax. When I do it I feel "myself" kind of "diffusing" to meet my environment, like fresh and salt water meeting to form a brackish zone, sometimes with a rocking sensation, and I usually fall asleep well before getting to core muscles. (when I was younger, people used to ask "how can you fall asleep on rocks?" to which I replied "you have to choose the comfortable ones", but it was likely more this technique) The oddest thing about this technique is the source: although it sounds very Baba Cool, he'd been taught it in Uncle Sam's service.
gradschoolfail 2y ago
I hadn’t heard of this particular duality, and it seems to throw up some very instructive blogposts in sportscoaching. Expertise through peripheral vision is a pet obsession of mine, this is an almost academic article from that rabbit-hole (pdf; maybe they could have expanded on the dichotomy, though :) Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 2005 Peripheral Vision: Expertise in Real World Contexts https://www.wellesu.com/10.1177/0170840605053102 https://www.wellesu.com/10.1177/0170840605053102 Also would like to point out (maybe tangentially I’m afraid,) that in another HN thread, user mjburgess has a dichotomy of his own, the narcissistic/borderline[0]. It seems to be a refinement of Field’s masculine/feminine dichotomy in TFA! (as a bonus, “rhymes” with Aristotelian vice, “geometrically”) That whole thread imho relevant— psychiatry is finally moving on from psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, eye-opening to see ideas as they birth, in the basement of the (also, now “collective”) mind! [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41246273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41246273
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  on a tangent to the tangent, the NPD-leader BPD-follower model reminded me (even in one or two details) of Bob Altemeyer's studies of "authoritarian followers". EDIT: regarding Dreyfus & Dreyfus, it's interesting to think of expertise in terms of Minsky's Society of Mind: what if there's just as much deliberative choice going on for the expert, but it's no longer perceived at a conscious level? [go far enough along these lines of course, and you arrive at Jayne's ... Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), which is probably a bit too far]
  - gradschoolfail 2y ago
    By deliberative, do you mean something more sophisticated than “deterministic” ( to mean, e.g., that regarding a process that integrates internal & external inputs in a way that cannot be Kolmogorov-decompressed :)? More concretely, can a coach note the differences — why world champions need coaches, not necessarily coaches who were themselves world champions. >[haha] mjburgess thread commenter came back with anxiety-depression axis, which seems personally more salient, as I seem to wander into latent conflicts with depressives who seem depressed at the same level that i am anxious (in a particular situation). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41254674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41254674 Tangent to the tangent to the tangent [maybe this is the right moment to call it “peripheral”, if not “bounding”]: Meditating on this rare moment of anger (because of the vitious still in myself) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225388 That said, any pointers from Altemeyer I should watch out for before I go into a deepdive mapping the NB axis to the DA axis? (Tangential edit: inherent vice is imho the most autobiographical (as Sortilège?) of Pynchon, you might enjoy the soundtrack from the adaptation as well, esp. the rewilding of Can https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_(band)#Style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_(band)#Style https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortilège_(groupe) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortilège_(groupe) https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/enkb0m/in_ptas_inherent_vice_is_sortilège_real_or_is_she/ https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/enkb0m/in_ptas_in... )

calstad 2y ago

What’s the other one?

superb-owl 2y ago
Glad you asked! _Facing the Dragon_ by Robert Moore https://superbowl.substack.com/p/book-review-facing-the-dragon https://superbowl.substack.com/p/book-review-facing-the-drag...
- gradschoolfail 2y ago
  Thank you! This does look like it could provide a much needed perspective to some Nietzsche-adjacent issues (relating to his own “cosmodicy”) that I have been wrestling with others about.. especially as I recently, off-handedly, in anger, in grandiosity even, accused somebodies of being well-intentioned bullies.. Also relevant to organizational/selves herding, of course ;) EDIT: if i may, your review makes me imagine that one socially virtuous mantra (or vitious countermand?) to meditate upon in mitigation of narcissism could be “loyalty to the Other” Tangential EDIT: it could also be worth meditating on the wide spread opinions that Ayn Rand (mentioned above) and Nietzsche are both young people’s (mostly young men’s) writers In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records, to my knowledge, date back some 2500 years or more... the recognition ATMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts. Again, the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: DEUS FACTUS SUM (I have become God). To Western ideology, the thought has remained a stranger... in spite of those true lovers who, as they look into each other's eyes, become aware that their thought and their joy are numerically one, not merely similar or identical... "The I That Is God" as translated in Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists (1984) edited by Ken Wilber

aidenn0 2y ago

Very off-topic, but has anyone ever read a book that someone else credited with changing their life and felt like their own life was changed? Anecdotally I haven't despite having read at least a dozen such books. Assuming I'm not an outlier, I think it's a bit like the "monad tutorial fallacy[1]" where the book crystalizes things that have already been bouncing around in one's head, rather than being the original source of the change. 1: https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuition-and-the-monad-tutorial-fallacy/ https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti...

fragmede 2y ago
The Alchemist came recommend that way to me, and it's certainly shaped how I think about certain things.
- andrepd 2y ago
  Good example, because I thought it was a terrible book, utterly pedestrian and pseudo-deep.
  - phoe-krk 2y ago
    One man's pedestrian book is another man's lifechanging literature. Everything depends on whether the words that one is reading are what, when, and how they need to read. That's why reading a ton of books, and re-reading old ones, are both decent ideas. Something is gonna stick, even if purely via application of statistics.
  - bookiest 2y ago
    I had this experience with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I am sure I read it at the wrong time in my life. For me The Fountainhead was life changing precisely because I was an insecure and overly-mothered boy that needed to read about pursuing one’s own ends to the exclusion of all expectations otherwise. Today I’m a father and would find it uselessly myopic.
- aidenn0 2y ago