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I feel like I need a button on HN for, as another commenter put it, "folksy wisdom porn", where an article superficially touches all the right buttons to get it to the front page (hey, I always fail to reach my goals, I need a new framework!), but is just anecdotes and shows the results of the author's own Rorschach test.

The section on NASA made absolutely no sense to me:

> NASA had a fixed budget, fixed timeline, and a goal that bordered on the absurd: land a man on the moon before the decade was out. But what made it possible wasn’t the moonshot goal. It was the sheer range of constraints: weight, heat, vacuum, radio delay, computation. Each constraint forced creative workarounds. Slide rules and paper simulations gave us one of the most improbable technological feats in history.

Wut? The constraints are what made it a hard problem, but the only reason they were able to hit this goal in an impossibly short timeline is the huge amount of resources that they put toward a very clear goal (which was, honestly, less "let man explore the heavens" than "beat the Soviets").

This is why I love hacker news. I often find myself falling for this stuff and thinking "yeah, that makes a lot of sense". It's always good come back to the comments and get a good old fashioned reality check.

Indeed. For offline use, a good inscribed rock can still go a long way: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa...

Those examples are pretty bad, though.

The guard deters thieves by mere presence - just like how an apparently-locked door, even if unlocked, deters more thieves than a wide-open door.

The example doctor provides psychological support and real advice when things are _obviously_ wrong. Those are things that are way more useful than a rock (also, in real cases, patients do return after 2 weeks).

(the futurist provides no value whatsoever, here we do agree :P)

But I feel the entire underlying message is questionable. "Pretty good heuristics" are honestly pretty good! Sometimes (oftentimes, even) it's all you need, and it's much better than doing the extensive research. You should only do the extensive research for the "volcano" scenario, where the consequences are dire - otherwise, you're probably wasting time)

> The guard deters thieves by mere presence - just like how an apparently-locked door, even if unlocked, deters more thieves than a wide-open door.

I don't really have any point to make, but it is fun to note that you can buy these.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secured-ADT-Alarm-Window-Stickers/d...

Stickers, and these! Solar powered! [0]

[0] https://www.amazon.com/BNT-Security-Simulated-Surveillance-R...

I loved that article :-) . The only thing I have to add is that the cult of the rock's main opposition is almost always another cult. People reading scientific papers and keeping track of the data don't stand a chance, they simply don't exude the same steely confidence.

What he describes is a very basic concept in data science, and the tradeoffs in making a binary classifier (which this essentially is), are very well explored in the Reciever Operator Characteristic (ROC) curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteris...).

This article is from 2022, and data science wasn't exactly novel by that time, considering the author appeals (successfully) to those big brained silicon valley types, that leads me to throw some shade at the writer and his readership.

Designing detectors for rare events is a pretty common, problem dealt extensively with in statistics, after all the linked methodology was devised for WW2 radar operators, and the default mode for radars is 'there isn't a German plane in range', despite that they needed to find a mathematical approach to find how good their radars are.

It definitely tripped my "self-important bullshit author" detector, which doesn't happen to be a very useful heuristic since it requires me to read the whole article.

But anyway, the examples used are not in any way like another. The "futurist" in particular fundamentally lacked the "they do things well and then get sloppy" which leads me to believe the author has a particular axe to grind about the topic of tech progress.

For a lot of the other examples, the entire point is that the person knows they are being sloppy, they know they're letting issues slip through the cracks. If you know you're doing a bad thing, what use is the analogy to a heuristic? It's not a heuristic to be sloppy, it's just being sloppy.

Once again, the article is lampshading the naive fallacy that if a classifier gets a large percentage of the input distribution right, that classifier is good. Basic literature about designing these classifiers recognizes these fallacies, and knows how to correct for them.

And part of that correction lies in the fact that different domains place different costs on false positives and false negatives.

He describes different scenarios and the apparent contradiction is resolved by weighing the consequences of getting things wrong. The futurist can do whatever, since nobody nothing happens if he gets things wrong or right. In the case with real stakes, where getting things wrong has an immense cost, you just have to accept you will cry wolf a lot of the time.

In the doctor scenario, let's say the doctor is highly skilled, and can tell that if a patient has a certain set of symptoms, he's 99% likely to have cancer. Thing is, only 1 people in 1000 actually do, which means even this amazing doctor will tell 9 healthy people for every sick person that they have cancer. Is the doctor bad at their job? No, he's excellent - the inconvenience caused to these people is dwarfed by letting a sick person go undiagnosed.

If a factory is making Happy Meal toys, and they determined that 1 out of 1000 they produce is faulty, should they invest in a similar screening process? No, the cost of the process, and the cost of handling false positives is way costlier than the minor problem of a child getting a broken toy once in a while.

Same numbers, different common sense actions.

Once again, I think your analysis is an oversimplification. (Also, staring with "once again" is so condescending it makes my skin crawl)

I am sorry, I did not mean to be rude, I apologize.

I just wanted to say that I still think the article doesn't really show surprising to people who took an undergrad stats/data science course, and the apparent 'conundrums' are well-understood.

can't agree more. there are a lot excellent comments that are better than the original post. I always think about a way to collect those pithy comments. so far i have not figure it out yet. i was wondering if anybody else has the same idea.

I just click "favourite" on good comments for quick access later

Often I find myself going directly to the comments … harvesting the wisdom of the crowd…

If someone is bringing up John Boyd in a serious capacity to make a point, it's likely they have no idea what they're talking about.

Why is that? Is Boyd not considered a serious source?

Boyd's role (and that of the fighter mafia in general) in the development of 4th generation fighters is very exaggerated. Bringing him up (and Feynman honestly) is a sign you're about to read some shallow self-help esque shloch.

Virtually every blog post that makes it to the front page is full of shit. They're either folksy wisdom porn, or a novice who just discovered a minor technical detail that is superficially new information to the HN audience (and leads to wrong conclusions). But the real key is a clickbait title; it's the "shocked face thumbnail" of every YouTube video made today. We can't stop clicking on them.

The "wisdom of the crowd" is a combination of ignorance and mesmerization, and the result is a front page of dreck.

> Virtually every blog post that makes it to the front page is full of shit.

While I agree many posts are full of shit, I think it's important not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are tons of HN posts that I find incredibly insightful and informative. The ones I like usually fall into 2 categories:

1. They are a detailed description of something the author actually did, and show a really cool solution or implementation of something. They don't always have to be jaw-droppingly amazing (though some are), but they just have to show that the blog post is the outcome of the work, not the other way around.

2. The author has been thinking about a problem for a while and brings a clear, informative, well-argued insight to the problem space. E.g. this post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509507, is one of my favorites that helped me understand phenomena I was definitely aware of but hadn't yet tied together.

For me, this "folksy wisdom porn" is a cheap, bad, superficial version of #2 (FWIW, I think what you describe as "a novice who just discovered a minor technical detail that is superficially new information" is the cheap, bad, superficial version of #1). It has the veneer of some sort of deep insight, but when you actually get to the details and try to understand it, it either just doesn't make sense or is essentially word salad.

In response to this, I was going to craft a comment that critiqued the critiques and began with the same wording as the critiques but instead I'll say this...

A nuanced critique! - excellent.

Please, nobody reply to this comment.

> 1. They are a detailed description of something the author actually did, and show a really cool solution or implementation of something

This is certainly entertaining, and feels insightful and informative. But usually it is inaccurate, subjective, or wrong, because it's an individual non-expert's experience.

> 2. The author has been thinking about a problem for a while and brings a clear, informative, well-argued insight to the problem space

Again, feels like wisdom, but an armchair expert is not an actual expert, and "I thought about it for a while" is not the same thing as "academics critically discuss at length and come to a consensus".

In almost all cases, actual experts have actually studied a thing for a long time, or practiced it for a long time, and have actual evidence to go on. Blog posts don't - because real experts tend to publish in books and journals first (which are peer reviewed), not blogs. If the blog post isn't showing its work with a lot of evidence, critical study, and consensus, it's extremely likely to be bullshit.

I say all this because in the 16 years I've been on this forum, I can count on one hand the number of front page blog posts that accurately portray my field. I'm guessing the real information is not clickbaity enough, or it doesn't validate the biases and expectations of readers. However, the number of posts full of bullshit has been endless.

Damn, maybe I shouldn't finish my blog post entitled "I found out about tsort and it changed my life".

Lol

Don't forget the weekly sermons of the Lisp Liberation Front.

Without tight constraints you get vague solutions governed by politics which tends to fuck up the constraints in a vicious cycle. Without constraints you get a sea of solutions, although if constraints are too tight you get no solutions. What you want is constraints that are loose enough to explore a ridgeline or constellation with pretty clear local maximas but tight enough to not admit uncountably many solutions that breeds worthless rhetoric.

I kept skimming through the article, waiting for it to say something useful. I flamed out around the NASA example. The internet is overflowing with this kind of superficial nonsense.

At least this one was just a waste of time, instead of being actively harmful like some of it is.

right, the implication would be that if the goal was something easy like walking the President's dog NASA would never have been able to do it due to the lack of innovation fostering constraints.

"folksy wisdom porn" hits the nail on the head

For me the post just didn't make sense. Constraints are only constraits in regards to reaching something, and that something is a goal.

The author confused "constraint" which are rules or boundaries that define a situation or problem. She confused "constraint" With "strategy" which is a meta solution or algorithm to achieve a goal. A strategy doesn't have to be Google Maps giving you turn by turn directions. A better strategy is a set of rules or algorithm to guide you towards your goal; in all situations, situational awareness and common sense trumps any algorithm or strategy. It is like Google Maps telling you to drive straight while your eyes are telling you the bridge isn't there and driving straight will cause yourself to fall into a river.

>but is just anecdotes

While there's a hefty dose of junk, most of what's worth in life advice is "just anecdotes" too.

"Research-driven" or "scientific" insight for such matters is a joke - and often more snake-oily and based on some current fad than any crude anecdotes.

They also forgot to mention Sun Tzu.

That paragraph had me scratch my head as well, but overall the article is making a valid point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44236665

Thanks for this comment, I'm glad it's not only me. I came back feeling like, I enjoyed the article and it was a waste of time. Classic advice, where its only use is passing it on.

What actually made the moon mission possible was recruiting a bunch of Nazi rocket scientists[1] that gained their expertise making weapons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

This comment always comes up. Yes, their knowledge was a huge help to the space program and we conveniently forgot about their crimes in exchange for it. But it was THE sole thing that made the moon landing possible? Not our massive industrial and economic capacity? Not the droves of non-nazi scientists and engineers that were driven out of Europe and into the U.S. during the war? Not our academic institutions?

We obviously couldn't have gotten to the moon without any of those things, but someone always jumps in and credits the whole endeavor to Operation Paperclip as if it's a revelation. Gotta cash in on the modern trend of "erm, actually"-ing everything, I guess.

This is not like Intel poaching Jim Keller from AMD. The U.S. had only a nascent rocket program at the end of the war. They did more than recruiting scientists, they also came back with loads of hardware. Within a year they were launching seized V-2s at altitudes that matched the Germans, and within 7-8 years it was manufacturing rockets that matched Germany. The only rival to the U.S. rocket program after the war was the Soviet Union which had their own program to recruit Nazi scientists[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Osoaviakhim

Every field is "hobbyist level" before certain breakthroughs are made that allow it to take off. Look at computers before and after the invention of integrated circuits, transistors, or even vacuum tubes.

In this case those initial breakthroughs were made by the Nazis. Nobody is disputing that. But there is quite a leap to be made between lobbing explosives at London and putting live humans on the moon and then retrieving them, and many things besides scientists with dubious pasts were needed to make that leap. I do not understand what drives somebody to downplay those accomplishments every time the subject comes up. Your statement that those scientists were "what actually made the moon mission possible" is worded in a way that implies that they were the only thing that made it possible, rather than one factor among many, and that is objectively false. It's like saying that a spark plug is "what actually makes a car run".

We essentially imported the Nazi rocket program and continued investing in it. Obviously that continued investment was essential, but I don't think it's overstating it to say it's what made it possible. Many of the countries that have nukes have them as a direct result of espionage, and I don't think many people would object to saying that it was the espionage that made it possible, even though that is far less than importing large groups of scientists and equipment.

Constraints make the specific goal (moon landing) harder, but force technological development. If landing on the moon had been 'easy' with existing tech and not required that massive investment of resources, progress on everything else is delayed. Material science, engines, batteries, solar, radios, integrated circuits, even PCs and smartphones - sure it would all have happened eventually but the key innovations were made when they were because of constraints.

Does this imply the secret to success is making your life / business / product space artificially hard?

It seems like you'd do a better job "setting yourself up for success" than making your life as hard as possible, and hoping "that which doesn't kill you only makes you stronger" doesn't, in fact, "kill" you (metaphorically or literally speaking).

Yeah, I don't know myself as dyslexic but have trouble understanding what the heck are those constraints and in what relevant way are they different from the goal.

My goal is not to work for a salary. I'm constrained by an otherwise empty stomach to do it.

Kind of sounds like a long way of saying "use S.M.A.R.T. goals"

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound

(or, you know, constraints).

The questions should be: If the Apollo 13 accident had happened instead during Apollo 8 while the astronauts were behind the moon, so that the mission was lost and the cause was not known, would Apollo 9, 10, and 11 been delayed past the end of the decade? Should they have been? What if the cause was known? Was the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union correct when it denied Soviet Cosmonauts the opportunity to beat Apollo 8 to the moon using a rocket that had dismally failed all its tests?

Fortune favors the bold, sometimes. Did the good luck of the preceding astronauts lead to the decision to launch a space shuttle under adverse conditions on the day Reagan was scheduled to deliver his SOTU, etc?

I always get into this argument with people who always want to "keep their options open". No, that's just refusing to set a constraint, and that's a decision in itself, that usually leads to the most mediocre outcome.

Reminds of something that Paul Graham once wrote: one of the most consequential decisions you can make in life is the city you choose to live in. Now I realize this is just a big constraint you place on yourself: location.

Other big constraints are: marriage, religion, and choosing to go the VC vs. bootstrapped route in a SaaS business. Going the VC route constrains your version of success to extremely high growth (a very successful bootstrapped business would be a VC failure), while going the bootstrapped route constrains your growth rate potential (you might make millions but not billions).

I especially love this heading from the article: Goals are for Games. Constraints are for Worlds. I would add: successful people navigate worlds. Children play games. Many people are still stuck in a game-playing mindset even into their 40s, rather than navigating their world, they are still stuck in a goal-oriented game, such as a "career". Right out of university they look for their next well-defined game. At some point the complexity of the world collapses all your games. Then you hit your mid-life crisis.

> one of the most consequential decisions you can make in life is the city you choose to live in

This seems to have had the reverse effect on me. I always wanted to move to the Bay Area growing up because that’s where the tech industry was. When I finally did, I got distracted by all that California had to offer: nature, good food, an endless supply of places to go and interesting things to see. I moved there for tech but promptly lost interest in tech. I picked up a bunch of fun hobbies totally unrelated to my core motivations in life.

Now that I live somewhere boring again, I spend most of my free time learning about new areas of mathematics and computer science.

I’ve also observed the same paradoxical effect with having children. Prior to kids, I had tons of free time that I essentially wasted. But now that free time is scarce, I wake up at 4 AM to study, practice, or create something before the work day starts.

It’s almost like sub-optimal conditions trigger an instinct to fight against those constraints by producing value. If I actually get what I think I want (living somewhere interesting, having plenty of free time, etc.), it’s like I just lose focus and motivation. Go figure.

You'd find many people (even here on HN) that would argue your time spent among "nature, good food, an endless supply of places to go and interesting things to see" is well worth the lack of focus on your career. Hell, many people hyper focus too much on the latter until they wake up one day wishing they spent more time appreciating the former.

And, it's hard to imagine anyone arguing in good faith that you should give those amenities up and move somewhere boring in order to "spend most of my free time learning about new areas of mathematics and computer science" (not that that's not a noble pursuit in itself).

Harking back to the article, it's more about how you want to see yourself in the future. Do you want to be someone who has an appreciation (and has appreciated) life outside a career, at expense of some potential of said career?

"Hell, many people hyper focus too much on the latter until they wake up one day wishing they spent more time appreciating the former."

And some wake up realising they will still have to die, despite their awesome career and that there is no point in taking their money into their grave and they should have started living at some point. But it might be too late by then.

Like most things in life, it is about the right balance.

> it's hard to imagine anyone arguing in good faith that you should give those amenities up and move somewhere boring

Oh, that's certainly not why I moved haha. We wanted to be closer to family and that was just one of the unfortunate tradeoffs of that decision. The math and CS topics I've been studying are those that I find intrinsically interestingly (e.g., computability theory), but they are unlikely to benefit my career more than tangentially. I didn't really make that clear above.

With "core motivations" I was referring to what I would like to accomplish over a lifetime, which is more about what actually benefits society in some way (and at least so far, that appears to be orthogonal to my career). Personally, I found that moving somewhere less "interesting" helped me to realign with those objectives. Or maybe that's just post-hoc rationalization.

>t’s almost like sub-optimal conditions trigger an instinct to fight against those constraints by producing value.

The beatings will continue until productivity increases!

Very different but this vaguely reminds me of body doubling - the idea that just having another person around you makes you work harder and focus

Great framing. I'd add a strategic layer to this.

From a purely strategic perspective, as in military doctrine or game theory, expanding your set of viable options is almost always advantageous.

The goal is to maximize your own optionality while reducing your opponent's.

The failure mode you're describing isn't having options, but the paralysis of refusing to commit to one for execution.

A better model might be a cycle:

Strategy Phase: Actively broaden your options. Explore potential cities, business models, partners. This is reconnaissance.

Execution Phase: Choose the most promising option and commit fully. This is where your point about the power of constraints shines. You go all-in.

The Backlog: The other options aren't discarded; they're put in a strategic backlog. You don't burn the bridges.

You re-evaluate only when you hit a major "strategic bifurcation point" - a market shift, a major life event, a completed project. Then you might pull an option from the backlog.

This way, you get the power of constraints without the fragility of having never considered alternatives.

The opponent part could use one extra point: reduce your opponent’s options to the range you want them to have, not to none at all.

From Sun Tzu, and put into practice frequently by the Mongols:

When you surround an army, leave an outlet free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mohi

Finally, the demoralized soldiers decided to flee. They tried to escape through a gap left open on purpose by the Mongols, and almost all of them were slaughtered.

Sun Tzu was talking about human psychology not about making a strategic choice.

Sun Tzu was saying it is better to give your enemy the illusion of a path to retreat. If you don’t, the enemy will fight to the death. It is for the same reason why you should treat your prisoners humanely. You want them to surrender and end the fighting as quickly as possible.

Choosing a strategic plan only works if you follow through and execute. What is worse than paralysis by over analysis is a boss who constantly changes strategy. That is a sure path to ruin.

Not sure how that is a contradiction. My point was that the goal isn’t necessarily to reduce the options the opponent has, because if you remove all options it’s actually not a good move - as the enemy will then fight to the death, literally or metaphorically.

> I would add: successful people navigate worlds. Children play games.

Seems kind of arrogant. I personally view goals and constraints as different kind of tools that are both helpful.

Yes, to use a very ancient example, the goal of a hunters work is meat. You get it, if succesful, or you don't.

Constraints are where and when and how you can hunt. But the goal of a hunt is the meat.

Maybe goal of the hunter is food. Meat is often end result and what they train for - but if they happen on a ripe raspberry patch they can divert to get food from that instead.

Note that I said maybe. Different cultures have different situations. Sometimes your constraint it meat and you need to walk past those easy to pick raspberries.

No hunter would choose rasperries over meat. You maybe eat some while hunting, or after the hunt failed. But collecting rasperries and hunting requires very different equipment. You wouldn't risk loosing 100kg of meat because you found 50 g of rasperries.

(Rasperries take a lot of time to collect, hard to transport in meaningful quantities and go bad very quickly. If we are talking about ancient hunter tribes - children with women would be the ones doing rasperry picking close by while the men go further away and then carry the meat back to the camp)

Hunting is also a high risk activity - you sometimes don't get anything. Thus some ancient tribes would choose to pick the raspberries - which is to say abort the hunt to bring the women and children to pick with them. Others would turn back to get the women and children and then go on with the hunt. Still others would just go on with their hunt without telling anyone.

The rasperries won't go away if you spot a good patch while following the game.

In either case, the goal would still be to get food.

a lot of hunting isn't following game, it is search for game. If you have game in site that changes the calculation again.

Yes, in ancient context it is search for game - but that means searching for fresh tracks. And when you follow fresh tracks, you don't stop for rasperries until the track turns cold. It would be distracting and like I initially said, only to be considered if the hunt failed (meaning no signs of game at all)

goals imply that achieving the goal will give you the success that the goal is meant to be a proxy of. That's why people go high into debt to obtain that degree - it's a goal, and the proxy for successful job/career. And yet, it seems to not be the case when they discover that this degree isnt the the golden ticket.

it's true that goals in games work - because it was designed to work that way. People setting goals in real life like they might be in a game (such as obtaining some sort of achievement, beating a "level" like passing school etc) might find that these goals don't actually reward them unless they're after intrinsic rewards.

If you fail a goal in games you can restart - which most of us will a few times in playing games. You cannot restart life so easially. We only get an unknown amount of years to live (statistically about 80, but up to about 120 is possible, or down to however many hours old you are right now) I've thought about going back to college several times in life, however as each year goes by the value of a different degree goes down because there is even less time I could use it. Though also as time goes by the cost of "useless degrees" goes down because I have more money saved (though it is saved for retirement).

Often if you fail to reach some goal in life it is gone for good. If you lose out in a promotion to someone else (who might or might not be good) you need to give up on that goal - either find a different promotion you can get next year, or a different job equivalent to that promotion (assuming you are worthy of the promotion)

Sure, degrees don't _guarantee_ you'll be successful. That's just a misguided expectation. You might even create constraints to help you get there.

Not all goals are misguided, and constraints can be misguided, too.

Do constraints somehow reward you more then? I've had both constraints and goals in my life, both have been rewarding and not just intrinsically.

In the US it's mostly the hope that tuition and time studying will have a positive return on investment in terms of future earning potential.

Constraints create games.

Yeah and I still play games so what.

> Other big constraints are: marriage, religion, and choosing to go the VC vs. bootstrapped route in a SaaS business.

This gave me a chuckle. On of these is definitely _not_ like the others.

Which one do you have in mind? For each of those three constraints mentioned, I can think of a reason why it's not like the other two, but there's not one in particular that seems to stick out especially.

Marriage is the odd one out.

VC/SaaS is surprisingly like religion!

Could you say that taking money from a VC is like marrying them?

> one of the most consequential decisions you can make in life is the city you choose to live in

It's not always quite as simple as it being a choice. E.g. I might be able to move to SF if I liquidated my assets and applied for a green card, but that's not an easy feat. Where we are born & raised limits that choice to a large extent.

Yes, and the idea of separating from siblings and other relatives was a huge factor for us. We've visited SF several times, it would be awesome to live there, but man, the cost and family made the decision easy not to.

The definition of success remains personal. Employing certain biases, too. Being successful in World Choice and Gameplay is relative, but it is also proportional to the biases.

The way "success" is obsessing someone is a big constraint.

People make games actually because they have interest in well defined constraints, and in experiencing what can be achieve or not within some arbitrary rules.

Also anything humans do can be portrayed as some game. That’s no accident the game theory extended and swallowed so many domains in its models.

> At some point the complexity of the world collapses all your games. Then you hit your mid-life crisis.

Thanks for this gem. We're all just learning this game/world of life as we go along, right?

"I'll keep it short and sweet. Family, religion, friendship. These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business."

> At some point the complexity of the world collapses all your games. Then you hit your mid-life crisis.

Billionaires famously never have mid-life crises

I guess Elon Musk didn’t get the memo that he wasn’t supposed to have a midlife crisis

I suspect you're replying to sarcasm.

I needed to read this today, it makes perfect sense. Thank you.

Location, VC/bootstrapping, marriage all provide real-world tangible trade offs. Religion is an unverifiable claim made about supernatural entities.

Which still provides tangible benefits (comfort, meaning of life, emotional support, coping mechanisms, a community) to many.

I don't subscribe to one myself, but I definitely see the benefits. In a way, I think my life would be better - or at least easier - if I wasn't so skeptical.

Religion is a major factor, that impacts your lifestyle, community, happiness and longevity. In most cases, positively. There are studies proving it.

So yes, most religions if not all are based on unscientific claims, but they make people's lives better.

These are merely correlational studies. Religion often makes people’s lives worse as well: sexual repression, homophobia, religious intolerance, fear of eternal damnation, misplaced guilt/shame, hours wasted on prayer/services/rituals, sheltered upbringings..

I think the underlying issue is whether a person views the objective appraisal of reality as a positive thing or not. For someone who doesn’t, self-deception may seem the better choice.

> These are merely correlational studies. Religion often makes people’s lives worse as well.

I'm not religious, but that doesn't make any sense: those cases would weaken the correlation (or correlate it the other way), and now you're also claiming a causative effect that's opposite to the correlation you don't refute?

I’m not denying it can have beneficial effects but only denying that it necessarily has beneficial effects. That’s why I pointed out that the studies in its favor are merely correlational and why I also list several negative effects it can have (although it won’t necessarily have).

It’s clear that social outcomes always have intertwined retroactive loop with psychological representations.

When we live in a society which publicly announce anyone doubting the dogma is a miscreant who should be tortured through long painful experiments, we will feel safer and better if we are in the camp of the true-sincere-believers™. Indeed it’s far less likely that any of these corrupted souls will come and trouble our peaceful minds. But if we have a ounce of skepticism in our veins, there’s no happy path for us in this society.

Sorry for a super late answer.

The reason those studies are just correlational, is because in social sciences, you don't really have many other tools.

There are no axioms, deduction is impossible. So that part of the argument is not really all that much valid. You have no mechanism to make social sciences more exact.

--

Yes, there are also negative outcomes. But positive ones are stronger than the negative ones.

And also, some of your examples are not negative at all. The point of fear of damnation for example is the reason why ethics were enforceable for hundreds or thousands of years, when the state was significantly weaker, there weren't real courts, etc. Shame and guilt are important motivators. They developed in humans to make correction of antisocial behaviors possible if you don't want just violently punish people for everything. Having no shame and guilt is an attribute of psychopaths.

All mental models are wrong. But some are more useful than others. Religion falls in this category.

Religion can fall in this category.

The Taliban shows it is not always thus. Nothing is that simple.

If you look for examples of something good, or something bad, you will always find them.

I think, when we look at all social phenomenons, we need to look on the whole system. What is the role of religion? When religion is not there, what fits the hole? (Nowadays, there are many non-religion religions like consumerism, extreme-individualism, or global warming; all of those have their own prophets, the story of fight between good and evil, rituals, inherent sin and a way to 'buy out' out of that sin)

In that case, why is that the most rich and developed countries are secular and not religious?

You would expect a population with "better lives" to outperform the rest.

Not OP but perhaps you could consider Manifest Destiny and Capitalism as a religion?

Protestant Scandinavia and Calvinist Netherlands and Switzerland never really consider(ed) Manifest Destiny nor Capitalism as religions. And both regions are becoming increasingly atheist.

The effects of believing something, whether real or not, are tangible and often predictable.

The issue is whether a constraint is positive or negative. Choosing to handicap oneself, for example by wearing a blindfold, is an indeed a constraint with tangible and predictable effects, but these are negative effects. You can’t see what’s in front of you.

The parent comment advocates for adopting a religion you don’t believe in, for the sake of “constraint.” Self-deception is choosing a blindfold.

You are conflating religious belief with religion. Just the word "religion" is underspecified. Historically and reaching to the present, there have been many communities where the church was the mechanism to deliver healthcare, food distribution, some forms of non-religious education, banking, community bonding and growth, etc. They also had religious services, and the religious leader managed how all the other things were done. Does that count as religion?

Many of the "faithful" were not, in fact, faithful. Or they only applied it to very limited parts of their lives. But they still showed up to church on Sunday, and professed to believe the teachings (in general even if not in any of the particulars).

Adopting a religion you don't believe in is quite common and rational. Do you think all those people who marry into a religion or different denomination are getting brain surgery at the altar? Or if you want to run a business in a community, do you want to be the one guy who doesn't go to church? In some places, that would be both stupid and pointless.

I agree with the author, but I would also say there is something above goals and constraints. Values. A set of things that, when comparing multiple options, make the choice clear. An example of some values I frequently use is "What will give me the most enjoyment the furthest into the future? "What will result in the world being a better place?" "What will make me become someone who resembles Jesus more?" They are different from constraints as they don't knock out any options by default. Instead, they make triaging when there are many different things I could be doing much easier, and circumvent my messy intuition which is based on hormones, hunger, weather, etc.

I think values, goals, and constraints are all valuable, but it's a hierarchy. We should create constraints that help us become more aligned with our values. We should create shorter-term goals that make it easy to stay within our constraints.

To support both my point and the authors, here is Benjamin Franklin's "Thirteen Virtues," which seem to be a mix of constraints and values (zero goals): https://fs.blog/the-thirteen-virtues/

> I think values, goals, and constraints are all valuable, but it's a hierarchy. We should create constraints that help us become more aligned with our values.

Thank you for saying it so well.

I have found difficulty in finding my values. Writing my obituary helped: https://www.jjude.com/my-obituary/. I wrote that almost 16 years back (published only in 2020). It helped me choose my pursuits well.

I don't live in the biggest house in town, or own a sports car. But I work for 3 days a week, homeschool two kids, have breakfast and dinner together as a family, we either workout at home or swim as a family, preach in two churches, and enjoy my work. I consistently feel, I am living in a dream.

> What will make me become someone who resembles Jesus more?

Certainly period-correct carpentry tools such as an adze, maul and cubit stick.

As someone that enjoys carpentry, I don't think I would be entirely upset about this way of taking the question haha.

The adze certainly would not be Jesus period. I think it was more 10,000 BC period.

? Adzes are still in use.

Being a rabbi with no possessions and who is kind to others.

Thanks for sharing the 13 virtues. It was a bit dense to read, so here's an (LLM assisted) friendlier version.

Temperance (Practice Self-Control): Don't overeat, and don't drink just to get drunk. Practice moderation in your habits.

Silence (Speak with Purpose): Only speak if you have something meaningful or helpful to say. Avoid gossip and pointless chatter.

Order (Be Organized): Keep your belongings organized and manage your time effectively. Have a place for everything, and a dedicated time for each task.

Resolution (Be Decisive and Committed): Figure out what you need to do, and then follow through. Do what you say you're going to do.

Frugality (Be Mindful of Your Money): Spend money only on things that truly benefit you or others. Be resourceful and avoid waste.

Industry (Work Hard and Be Productive): Use your time wisely. Always be engaged in a useful activity and eliminate distractions.

Sincerity (Be Genuine and Honest): Don't deceive people. Be sincere in your thoughts and words and speak with good intentions.

Justice (Be Fair and Responsible): Don't harm anyone. Fulfill your responsibilities and be fair in all your dealings.

Moderation (Avoid Extremes): Practice balance in all things. Don't overreact, and learn to let go of grudges.

Cleanliness (Be Clean and Tidy): Maintain good personal hygiene and keep your clothes and living space clean.

Tranquility (Stay Calm and Composed): Don't get upset by small things or events you can't control.

Chastity (Practice Sexual Responsibility): Treat sexuality with respect, in a way that isn't harmful to your well-being or anyone else's peace of mind and reputation.

Humility (Be Humble): Learn from others. Prioritize listening and learning over ego.

Marie Kondo built an entire industry around this philosophy. “If it doesn’t bring you joy, get rid of it”

I prefer timeboxing to goals.

Rather than "I will achieve this fixed thing" I say "I will change my behaviour in this manner for this amount of time and see what happens".

It works so much better. It emphasises that the only thing I can control: my behaviour.

Or not: plenty of times the thing that happened is that I couldn't keep up the desired behaviour for the desired time. That is also a valid outcome.

I am not in control of events, or circumstances, or other people's behaviour, or any of the other things that determine whether I succeed in achieving a goal or not. Because the effort is not linked to the outcome, when it's clear that the effort is not going to achieve the outcome, then that doesn't disincentivise the effort. The effort becomes the point. Which is really valuable in its own right.

As it happens, you are creating a time constraint.

While I enjoyed the essay, I have my quarrels with it.

First of all the over-generalization: why would all successful people do the same thing? Why would there be only one road to succees? People are different.

Second: the lack of definitions. Is "leave everyone better than you found them" a goal? It would appear so. What about "leave no one worse-or-equal than you found them"? Looks like a constraint. And yet they are the same rule.

Lastly: the lack of backup. Except for some interpreted anecdotes, there's not much evidence there.

Points for creativity and engaging style. But could do more on evidence and clarity.

To your second point: For me, the major difference between goals and constraints would be that I can clearly achieve a good goal, but a constraint is something that will never be fulfilled. A good goal is to run and complete a 10k marathon, it's easy to tell when you're done, or if you failed, potentially even measuring how far off you were. But a constraint would accompany you until you choose to disregard it. You can respect a constraint, but you can never complete it, only in the context of a finite project.

To me, a lot of this post sounds like goals vs habits, caring more about what you do today than what you may achieve sometime in the future, only that the habits are constraints here, so not doing something. In short, "leave everyone better than you found them" is something you can adhere to constantly (like a habit), but for it to be a good goal you would have to know when you're done finding people I guess.

Ultimately, what I read from this post is that constraints are used to provide identity, to help you guide yourself everyday. And maybe that's what you need more than goals if a lack of identity (in your work) is what's troubling you.

This was a neat way to put it. Goals have always bothered me because they are an excuse to stop working – either because they are fulfilled, or because it becomes clear they will not be fulfilled. Constraints don't have the same problem.

Goals have always been more like milestones to me and also something that you can change. I see goals and constraints both as different kind of tools to be used. If you decide to change direction, both of them can change.

Put this way (P and GP) this makes a lot more sense. Thank you, glad you chose to share!

I think the article sets up a pretty silly and false dichotomy between goals and constraints. You’re not doing anything without planning, and you’re not doing anything with only planning.

Anyways, the following part does resonate with me. “Setting goals feels like action. It gives you the warm sense of progress without the discomfort of change. You can spend hours calibrating, optimizing, refining your goals. You can build a Notion dashboard. You can make a spreadsheet. You can go on a dopamine-fueled productivity binge and still never do anything meaningful.”

The article is mostly talking about life goals or ambitions:

“There are times when goals make sense. Training for a marathon. Preparing for an exam. Trying to ship a product by a hard deadline. In finite, controlled, well-understood domains, goals are fine.

“But smart people often face ambiguous, ill-defined problems. Should I switch careers? Start a company? Move cities? Build a media business? In those spaces, setting a goal is like mapping a jungle with a Sharpie. Constraints are the machete.”

“Do you want to be someone, or do you want to do something?

“Goals often come from the first desire. Constraints come from the second.

“One is about image. The other is about identity.

“And the latter has more room to grow.”

There is a better article hiding in there, but I think it is making a good point.

In business/investing circles, this is known as "analysis paralysis." There is no limit to the amount of preparation you can do in anticipation of a big purchase or effort, but past a certain point the returns are not only diminishing but substantially negative due to the lost opportunity cost.

In a lot of contexts, taking action with incomplete information is better in the long run than spending a lot of time weighing every decision and taking fewer actions as a result. And there are studies out there that show this.

An example: Not that I advocate individual stock picking, but if you spend 3 months researching the best biomed company stock to buy, you may be decreasing your risk of picking a bad one, but you are just as likely to miss out on 3 months of positive market-based returns that you would have gotten had you just picked _any_ company with a positive balance sheet.

The quote mentioned reminds me of one of key lessons of Oliver Burkeman’s wonderful book, Four Thousand Weeks. Highly recommend - it’s a book about happiness disguised as a book about productivity.

I sometimes feel guilty. I’ve tried to set goals (I really have) but it’s just not how I’m wired. I tend to improvise my way through things. Even as a kid, I remember never feeling that urge to "win" at anything. Sports, board games, whatever. Other kids would light up with competition. I’d just… show up, participate, drift through it. I always felt slightly out of sync with that whole dynamic. That’s why this line hit me so hard: “Some of the most powerful forms of progress emerge from people who stopped trying to win and started building new game boards entirely.” Maybe that’s been the point all along. Thanks for sharing this.

same for me, i see it also as a mirror of people's approach to a happy life, ie. ticking the checkbox goals: marriage, kids, career, house, money for x, etc and finding (apparently?) satisfaction in that.

while i never would or could, i live a comfortable life with a lot of freedom but never felt like i've achieved a goal. i just look for the next interesting challenge or path to walk because we have only one life, and sitting with one person in a concrete box somewhere and just sit it out would be a waste of mine.

so i constantly change/challenge the constraints/rules of the game i'm playing to keep life interesting enough to participate without falling into the hedonistic treadmill trap

I’ve always felt the same way. What’s the point of winning in a game? Why are some people so obsessed with that kind of competition? The rules are artificial, it’s somebody else’s box. You’re mostly just training yourself to accept external reward functions uncritically.

When these boxed-in competitive people age, usually money becomes their terminal external reward, but they don’t seem to know what they want to actually do with it.

I always thought of winning a game as proof of my skill in the game. All those hours of studying the rules, practicing moves, or whatever it takes have proven to pay off because I win once in a while - or if I lose it proves that I didn't do enough and is motivation to study/practice enough. Playing the game is in itself fun as well even if I lose and the constraints of the rules makes the game possible.

What I don't get is watching someone else play a game. I want to do it myself. If I'm watching the game it is to learn how someone else does it. OTOH, I can sit in the audience and watch someone else play music for hours... YMMV.

Agree. Winning a game is worth it if you want the prize and the prize will benefit you. But, as you say, doing this uncritically is bad. If the prize will not benefit you, or is so vague as to not matter, and you still feel the need to win, you're being manipulated.

One part that really hit home for me was how constraints actually help you cut through the noise. Like for me, I stopped trying to get to the perfect gym routine and just decided I’d never work out for more than 30 minutes. That one rule made it way easier to actually show up and do it. No more feeling like I had to have some big goal or perfect system. Just a small boundary that worked better for me.

"When John Boyd, the brilliant / irascible military strategist, developed the OODA loop, he worked within the limits of jet fighter dogfights."

Boyd is a superb recommendation for startup programmers to read. Boyd and the OODA loop can completely transform teams who aim to build software quickly.

My OODA loop notes for tech teams are here: https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/ooda-loop

Maybe you're the right person to clear this up. Ages ago I read in a HN comment that the OODA loop is often misunderstood to be a sequence of steps, rather than something more continuous? And that people's explanations of it are very different from what Boyd had in mind. People treat it more as a Shewhart PDSA cycle rather than the integrated, concurrent dynamic process Boyd described it as.

Since then I've avoided reading others' re-explanations of it, and instead tried to find any original writing from Boyd on it, to shape my own understanding of it before corrupting it with others' misunderstandings.

The problem is I have been unable to find any original Boyd writing on it. Could you guide me in the right direction?

https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/AUPress/Books/B_...

Not OP. Have you perused these references from the Wikipedia page for OODA loop? The reference to a “supposed slide set” sounds interesting; perhaps that is what you’re alluding to regarding source material being hard to find?

Boyd, John R. (3 September 1976). Destruction and Creation (PDF). U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Destruct...

Boyd, John, R. (28 June 1995). "The Essence of Winning and Losing". danford.net. A supposed five-slide set by Boyd.

https://danford.net/boyd/essence.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

An interesting video from another time this came up on HN:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdK4y6O-llE

> OODA Loop & Evolutionary Epistemology of John Boyd by Chuck Spinney

From this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26466750

They also mention a video by Chet Richards and how it relates OODA to business context.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hDhznBtN24

The Q&A with both Chet Richards and Chuck Spinney is also worth a look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWfbPoDuEwg

Chet Richards' Boyd material here including all his presentations. https://slightlyeastofnew.com/439-2/

Patterns of conflict presentation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phm0Y5mFz1g&pp=ygUjSm9obiBCb...

Even the agile goals make sense, but when people read the description they turn it into a meaningless ritual.

Same for your OODA loop and anything supposed to improve your efficiency.

https://www.coljohnboyd.com/

The OODA loop is great, but Boyd has so much more brilliant stuff for people willing to put in the effort. OODA loop gets you the heart of his thought, but if you really want to understand him read a transcript of "Patterns of Conflict." Osinga's "Science, Strategy, and War" is also a superb summary of Boyd's thought, although I'm partial to "Patterns."

Seems a little contradictory.

For example: "Constraints scale better because they don’t assume knowledge. They are adaptive. They respond to feedback. A small team that decides, "We will not hire until we have product-market fit" has created a constraint that guides decisions without locking in a prediction. A founder who says, "I will only build products I can explain to a teenager in 60 seconds" is using a constraint as a filtering mechanism."

I think sensible constraints are based on knowledge. Goals can also respond to feedback, not be indefinitely locked-in. But they do differ as tools.

The small team that decided to not hire probably created that constraint to get to some goal, e.g. profitability, and the constraint is based on a prediction about what should work best.

Similarly, the 60 sec constraint probably serves some goal. Why are goals so bad again?

The funny thing is, I think either goals or a constraint are a tool that should serve the user. Constraints that don't automatically allow the user to achieve goals they would have otherwise accomplished, and that are meaningful and important to them, are useless constraints.

I think figuring out the constraints one likes to work with can act as a great filter once someone knows what kind of success, goals, values and life they want to inhabit. Otherwise, it's as arbitrary as goal setting.

For me, I parroted other people's cool-sounding goals for a lot of my life, achieving varying degrees of success and happiness. Only in retrospect can I look at my favourite success and failure stories and consider which constraints, if I held them earlier, would have helped me narrow down to those favourite storylines from the get-go. Those constraints, I keep near and dear to my heart and attention in my daily life.

I don't think there's a way to set a meaningful constraint before practicing setting goals first. Walk before you run, etc. etc.

I think this sums up my approach to work and life even though I never put it into words.

I've never set myself a career goal, but being uncompromising about the work I do pulled me up rather quickly in every single place I worked in. This is only possible in workplaces that aren't stagnant, where your work actually matters, but by coincidence this was the constraint that I chose for myself long ago.

Same goes for my running hobby: I don't have a goal to run the marathon, but I run 5-6 times a week and run a marathon almost every weekend. The constraint I have is to push myself to run even when I don't want to. So far I've been doing better than some of my friends who has a "marathon goal" but only run when they feel like it.

I have a google doc called "The No Project".

Every day I try and add something that I have said "no" to. Projects, feature requests etc. I don't always have an entry, but it keeps No top of mind.

Not exactly a constraint, but....

The problem with that is you become the "no guy" even when yes is the right answer. Saying no to bad things is good, but you don't want to look too hard for reasons to say no lest you say no to something worth doing.

The problem is, I'm the "yes guy".

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that successful people do all sorts of things in all manner of ways, but that most of them probably don't spend much time reading blog posts on how to be successful.

I think both goals and constraints are powerful tools for achieving success. Goals give you direction, while constraints shape your mindset and drive consistent progress. For example, “write every day” is a constraint — and it reliably leads to improvement. I enjoyed the essay. It’s not a complete system, but I appreciate its focus on consistent action over goal-setting. Thanks for sharing!

To me, this sounds like a reframing of the classic advice “focus on your process”. Success is emergent - it can rarely be brute forced. What matters is the process you use for navigating life, any success you realize is a byproduct of your process. This snippet from the article illustrates what I mean:

“One person sets a goal: become a best-selling author. Another imposes a constraint: write every day, but never write what bores me. The first may spend years pitching, networking, contorting themselves into marketable shapes. The second may accidentally build a following simply because the work sustains itself.”

About 15 years ago I set a constraint that I would design and publish sets of free vector assets on my website. I wanted a reason to practice vector art, I wanted to give back to the design community. What came from it was recognition and job offers. Last year I tried to set a constraint to write one blog article a month on my experiences in the design world. I failed at that because I wanted to add all the supporting images and just ended up putting too much constraints on myself.

The Fountainhead has many flaws (IMO) but a scene I remember very well that I recall often, is the one where Peter Keating finally reaches the top of the firm, sits in his office, and starts crying. To me, and I guess to the author, it represents this aspect of having externally defined goals (as opposed to personnaly/intrinsic defined) and how unfulfilled you feel if/when you achieve them.

People (me included) often get confused and think that their goal of climbing the career ladder or being able to afford the nice <anything> is goal set by themselves only, when in fact it is a goal most likely induced by society and/or to reach a given social status. If you pause for a second and think honestly about your current goals you can probably identify the ones that are truly yours and the ones that are expected by society.

In the book "The subtle art of not giving a fuck" there is in addition to that the notion of open ended goals as a rule of thumb of good goals to have. And this to me is probably the equivalent of "constraints" in this essay. Make sure the goals you follow are set by you and not expectations of society and try to make and formulate them as open ended goals.

Wether they are imposed on us or self-imposed, constraints reduce chaos. But while a chess coach will tell you not to leave pieces hanging a top chess AI will leave pieces hanging in order to gain a more important long-term advantage. It thrives in what looks like chaos to a less capable player.

I think we just have to know our limits and set a reasonable amount of constraints accordingly. You don't want to burn your wings.

"Constraints" is when I finally understood why, when trying to get a startup off the ground, it wasn't going to work.

The first (and only) time I tried to make a plan with my co-founder, and there was an obvious constraint, he couldn't work with the constraint. It was at that point that I realized my co-founder just couldn't stop himself from letting his imagination run away.

For context, throughout the process of trying to get our startup off the ground, every other week or so, my co-founder would come to me with some kind of idea and just wouldn't take "no" for an answer. I couldn't understand why he just kept pushing beyond reason, until he got into that mode when we had an external constraint around what the idea could be, and he couldn't adapt his ideas to the fundamental constraint that we had to work with.

At that point I realized that my co-founder was just letting his imagination run away the entire time: constraints be damned! It became clear that my co-founder couldn't turn his insights into actionable plans.

    > The first (and only) time I tried to make a plan with my co-founder, and there was an obvious constraint, he couldn't work with the constraint.

The tandem word here is "discipline". Once the constraint is created, then discipline is required to stay within that constraint.

Case in point: deadlines. Deadlines are fine. Deadlines without discipline with respect to scope creep is just setting a team up for failure and low quality work.

It wasn't even a "team." It was just two of us. We simply didn't get far enough, in part because I insisted that we bootstrap until we had a product.

I have limited myself to not setting any constraints.

Haha I love this

Paradox

Recursive without base.

The Five Obstructions is a beautiful example of how constraints - counterintuitively - make creativity easier not harder.

Lars Von Trier challenges Jørgen Leth to remake his classic short ‘The Perfect Human’ five times under increasingly ridiculous constraints.

Really worth a watch.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0354575/

Thanks but one of my constraints is to never watch another Lars Von Trier movie.

It’s not really his movie. He is cast intentionally as the biggest asshole they can find who will make difficult obstructions - he does a good job.

I used to make these long to do lists and chase after big goals. But honestly, most of them never got done. What actually helped me were small limits, like not checking Slack after dinner or opening a new tab only after I finished the task at hand. Sounds weird, but limits gave me more freedom. Less chasing, more doing.

My email sig (remember those) is:

    --
    "Design depends largely on constraints." - Charles Eames

> Remember when email sigs were limited to 4 lines and had to have the double hyphen and a space on a line above?

I do not - sounds like a specific email client's thing rather than something in any IETF RFC.

It's from the pre-web internet of usenet, smtp and uucp in the 1980s.

Back in the deep dark past of bang email addresses and HOSTS.TXT when all Australian email addresses had !munnari at the end and everyone knew about !decvax and how to connect to it.

This was more or less universal in the days of Usenet.

The dash, dash, space is still a defacto standard signature separator.

Remember when echomail taglines were supposed to be a single line of no more than 70 characters?

> That was the moment I began to question the entire architecture of ambition. Not whether it worked, but whether it asked the right things of a person. Whether a life could be constructed from milestones rather than methods, from outcomes rather than orientation.

Just happen to be reading Augustine's Confessions and this is very similar to his struggles in deciding whether to give up his temporal ambitions and become a Christian. He wonders why he's so devoted to pursuing his ambitions for status and accolades, when it doesn't really bring him much joy.

If you've done any sort of optimization / operations research, you know that most things can (sometimes unhelpfully) be rephrased in terms of an optimization problem. If "success" (whatever that means) is to be seen that way, then (some) successful people probably do both: set constraints to reduce the search space, and chase goals within that space (optimization). You can relax some constraints but then you need to be better at optimizing fast, or willing to accept other goals / winning conditions (get rich by being a criminal).

Your website is beautiful on desktop. I had to look up to make sure I was still in my browser. Very cool.

agreed. and this was a good essay.

agree. it reminds me my own personal website (yaps.gg)

Like some other comments, found the article a bit "off" regarding the words and their usage (among other things). But since it does touch a topic that I have thought of a lot, as have many others, leaving my unsolicited advice here.

Set a "goal" and then figure out a "daily-habit" that brings you closer to that goal. Then mostly just forget about that goal and execute on that daily-habit. Every now and then, either (1) change the goal - based on your feelings about the daily-habit you are executing, or (2) change the daily-habit - based on whether it is bringing you closer to the goal or not. Repeat.

I have been on both ends at different times - obsessing over either the journey or the reward - and like most things - the answer is not neat, it is murky, and in the middle. We like neat boxes so we obsess and ruminate - goals or constraints, identity or actions, work forwards or backwards, promotions or purpose, etc. - I feel all these ruminations are forms of procrastination and pseudo-productivity.

While it is good to adjust and calibrate your goals & wants every now and then, I believe that taking action is more important than passive thinking. Also, figuring out what you TRULY want becomes a lot easier after taking a bit of action anyway, instead of being in your own head.

I’ve always found an “heuristic” approach useful.

Instead of saying “I want to be there, then.” (A goal), or “I won’t accept a less than 40% success rate.” (A constraint), I say “That hill seems to be the one I want to climb. I know that it gets colder, as I go up the mountain, so I’ll pack some long underwear.”

But I suspect that my own definition of “success” may be somewhat orthogonal to that of a lot of folks, hereabouts.

Isn’t “write everyday” a goal?

The author seems to be distinguishing goals that are externally motivated (eg win award) vs internal (eg practice every day)

Definitional issue. In everyday speech you could certainly say that it is. However as it's used here it's a constraint.

For example "write the essay that's due on wednesday" is a goal while "work on english homework for 30 minutes every afternoon" is a constraint. The difference is between a discreet event versus a general behavior.

Just slept on this article and realized something.

There are two wildly popular management methodologies in IT (and probably other places), which can be grouped into constraint-based like agile, scrum, where the focus is not on individual deadlines, but getting a consistent performance out of employees, and goal-based, with project managers and deadlines.

I wouldn't exactly say either style is uncontroversially popular, and depends on the needs of the project, with greenfield projects requiring a goal-based approach, and maintenance/feature dev of existing ones leaning more towards agile (there's a lot more of the latter, that's why agile's popular).

For what works for you, well that's up to you. I'm a wildly inconsistent person by nature, whether playing to my strengths or covering my weaknesses is a better approach, that's once again not an easy question to answer.

Interesting article. But I think the author is implicitly considering an agentic individual who does something, because 'total inaction' is a valid solution for a constraint-oriented approach (unless we are assuming constraints that force you to do action like "do X every day"). Otherwise, you can be perfectly aware of the limits of your situation while not doing anything.

Having a direction (or goals) has the side effect of being a strategy that is biased towards action. Theory of Change, I think, is kind of an intersection between the two. You have an idea of what you want and then proceed backward to your current situation, address the limits, and try to increase the probability of making it happen. It is planning and "plans are scripts. And reality is improvisation" but if you act randomly and you constantly improvise without a direction, you are in a brownian motion with an average displacement of 0.

Aren't these 2 complementary things? Goals tell you what you need to achieve, constraints tell you what road to take or rather avoid taking, to get there.

You need to set goals if you don't want to wander around for a while on the "ok" paths until you stumble onto something that might be your target or just a local maximum.

For me, goals define the what and when, they give direction and timeline.

Constraints define the how and why, they shape focus, discipline, and intention.

Together, they form a system that keeps progress going.

I don’t see them as opposing ideas.

Constraints and goals work best together for most of my real-world projects.

Still a great read and interesting point of discussion.

goals or constraints are just different life outlooks, and could be rephrased and characterised as overly ambitious and giving up depending on which finger was pointing where as to the worlds complexity, that realy depends on definitions, and how much situational detail is included in "different" so called profesions, which to illustrate I will point out that, no one who has not taken on formal(paid) students and actualy proffesed there occupation is in fact a profesional. my real point is that any discussion of the things that are exclusivly human constructs is stuck in a world of arbitrary definitions and is meaningless unless there is a strict adhearance to those defintions. there are dictionarys, use them

There is nothing wrong with goals. Constraints make setting useful goals easier. Constraints and goals are complementary.

But as constraints go: Ikigai is great. [0]

With regard to the popular Venn diagram [1], I add: "With who inspires you / Community"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai

[1] https://www.japan.go.jp/kizuna/_src/7994686/ikigai_japanese_...

The following is well-written / well-stated:

>"Goals are for Games. Constraints are for Worlds.

A goal is a win condition. Constraints are the rules of the game. But not all games are worth playing. And some of the most powerful forms of progress emerge from people who stopped trying to win and started building new game boards entirely.

[...]

Richard Feynman didn’t get his Nobel Prize by pursuing "win a Nobel Prize" as a goal. He played with problems, often placing arbitrary limits on himself: what if we assume this system has no dissipation? What if we ignore spin?

He looked for elegance within boundaries, not outcomes.

His freedom came from self-imposed structure."

Constraints in one dimension can allow unconstrained movement in another dimension. I use this all of the time in my revenue consulting. A classic example: given fixed costs, if you constrain margin, price must be unconstrained and be free to move up or down. If you constrain price, then margin must be free to fluctuate.

The error is when the client has goal like "We need to sell at $X to keep up with competitors and our margin needs to be Y" while costs are unable to change.

That is two competing mutually exclusive goals. I use the financial reality of these constraints to help get at the bottom of their true goals.

A.k.a. “goals vs. systems”:

• <https://web.archive.org/web/20210811125743/https://www.scott...>

Alternatively, as a ~5-minute video:

• <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcKTYvupJw>

System in itself is not super productive. It can work with implied goals (usually if you have a lot of experience).

The most resilient structure is a web of interconnected goals: even if you fail at some, the web will not break. The more interconnected your goals are, the higher your chances of success.

I used to always set goals for myself, but a lot of the time I’d either burn out or lose focus halfway through.

Lately I’ve been trying simple constraints instead, like no phone use in the 20 minutes before bed. These small limits have actually helped me feel more focused and less anxious.

Curious if anyone else has tried something similar. How do you balance goals and constraints in your day to day?

I don't understand what this article is trying to say.

Whatever constraints exist certainly shape things, but they're not some success magic ... the fact that they exist at all / in so many success stories isn't significant, constraints exist in life, including with success and failures.

I also don't see "goals" and "constraints" as some weird opposite forces or concepts that conflict.

Maybe I missed the whole idea here....

Link no longer works. Article was moved to: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/smart-people-don-t-chase-go...

I personally have found it effective to oscillate between having a goal and defining constraints in some _direction_. There are points on the journey where articulating a specific goal is helpful. At other times, I get more results with a few well-defined constraints. It can depend upon the season, but both have been solid tools for progress.

There is a mathematical parallel here. Boundary conditions are essential for solving PDEs and ensuring that the solution is physically relevant and unique.

The goal here is “solving the PDE” and the constraints ensure the solution accurately models the physical environment of the problem. Without constraints there can be an infinite number of solutions

Not a real fan of this approach. This is what's called emerging strategy where you react on what happening around you (not to be confused with agile where you look at what's happening around you and then deciding a course of action). Problem here is that you are never in control of where you are going to, and wasting a lot of energy and work switching over to the new strategy.

you could actually define the goal as a set of constraints.

Well that would be subtractive: I don't know what I want, but I don't want X & Y. You would steer yes, but it would be very broad. You're not really working towards something, you're working away from multiple things.

I find that orienting around results can help unlock whether positive or negative space (a goal or constraints set) is the better focus. In my experience, there are times when goals do not serve me, but rather hinder me. This is purely from regularly observing results. In those cases, pivoting to a focus on some well defined constraints has yielded better results. As long as the direction is the same between the two, that might still be considered proactive.

This article is full of conflicting implicit beliefs and personal opinions.

This is anecdotal folksy wisdom porn.

Having constraints may also make something more achievable. It helps avoid issues like analysis-paralysis, and helps me focus on the path through the obstacles towards the destination I desire.

So for me, still goals, but made more efficient by constraints?

I like this idea, but my problem is with the word "successful". Setting constraints rather than chasing goals leads to doing interesting things. But there's no guarantee you'll ever be recognized or rewarded.

Sidenote: If you're curious, this blog was created using Ghost: <https://github.com/tryghost/ghost>

interesting equality assumption: the title of the post says "successful", the title in the web page says "smart". This post have been flagged as uninteresting by my personal heuristic.

I didn't know that's what smart people do.

Does the author mean that if I create limits, I am or become smart?

Or is this blog post merely an observation?

There are 4 things that are true in this world: 1) successful people set constraints, 2) successful people set goals, 3) unsuccessful people set constraints, and 4) unsuccessful people set goals.

You're welcome.

Yea I also spotted that. Never liked the format of “Successful people do X. You should do it too”.

Interesting article though, somehow I found goal setting never worked for me well, but I find clarity in constraints.

Spending a paragraph debunking the goals thing them immediately bringing up John Boyd is giving me whiplash.

reminds me of hunter's take-- https://fs.blog/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/

Lots of things are constrained optimization problems.

You can also become trapped by your own constraints.

Absence of execution equals bounty of potential.

There's a saying for this. If you're not building your dream, someone will hire you to build theirs.

"You don't rise to the level of your goal, you fall to the level of your training"? Something like that?

I would like to think of this as Operational Gravity, or something like that. Might help it stick. Good quote. Thanks for sharing.

I recognised myself in this one. Good job.

Phew that hits hard.

So the latter is better because you get paid.

I'm glad that people like you exist!

Without us all is just dreams and nothing is done. Every big company wouldn‘t exist.

You're right, and I would have no one to do the hard work for me.

Aren't you saying the opposite of the article? A "dream" is a goal in slightly different terminology.

I found the article helpful!

Meh, we are very used to one constraint: time, and you can see that a lot of very successful people chase goals because they don't have that hard constraint embedded on the daily job. Bell Labs? Xerox Parc? Fermat being a lawyer and "playing" with math? Libcurl?

A clear goal includes constraints, the problem is blind goals.

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@grok summarize

Top-down (goals) vs. bottom-up (constraints)?