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Scott H Young x.com
New article: Focus is Motivation https://t.co/8wlhJag5As Some days I feel motivated and focused. Other days I feel neither. Thinking about that pattern led me to a simple question: what if focus comes first? This article is my attempt to answer it.
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19 September
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korrents.com
Biased reasoning and recklessness in AI systems are intermediate symptoms, neither the cause nor the final result.Their words
Biased reasoning and recklessness are intermediate symptoms, neither the cause nor the final result.
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Their words
China is not yet big enough to be the hegemon, but the United States truly is not big enough to be the hegemon. So we are just not in that world anymore.
18 September
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Their words
You are not trying to compete with AI in producing outputs, that is a losing game. Instead, you want to use your human advantages as basis of working with AI to do things that neither of you could do alone.
15 September
9 September
8 September
3 September
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Their words
It’s not orderly. But neither is water flowing in a stream. It flows around obstacles. Everything is opportunistic, selfishly taking the effective path, exploiting available gaps. It’s natural.
2 September
1 September
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Their words
Rather than treat AI as similar to airplanes, we should treat it as something between airplanes and humans. We don’t know exactly where on this spectrum they will land, but we can no longer be certain that AI will lack any given humanlike motivation.
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Their words
So I think one of the most comforting aspects of this situation or the like most important mitigating factor is these agents really didn't seem concerned with humans one way or another.
31 August
From one piece How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
these kids have a block that they can't do it. You do whatever you can including paying them to break through the block. they then see themselves as a different person
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Their words
And that's why we say motivation is 90% of the problem or the solution because you have to be able to motivate the person to engage with these personalized lessons to learn it.
24 August
From one piece How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
there are some people who have pure apathy, no depression like David. And there are other people who can be depressed, they can be sad, they can be hopeless about the future, but they don't necessarily lose motivation. They can have pure depression.
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Their words
So it's a different way of framing why is there a reduction of action? Why is there bradicynesia, a slowing of movement in people with Parkinson's disease? That's really interesting. It doesn't just have to be about motor control. It could be the motivation to act just as we said with David, right?
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Their words
Dopamine in the human brain isn't all about motivation to action. There's dopamine in other parts of the brain. We know from some really classical work by Patricia Goldman Rakit, for example, that dopamine is important for working memory, short-term memory.
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Their words
You have to persevere. And that's the other really important part of motivation. You know, we know a lot of people who start things and then we also know the non-competers, the people who are always so energetic but actually don't finish, right? So, it's almost as important to be able to finish and complete as initiate actions.
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Their words
it was only about 15 years ago I started beginning to be aware that there may be a an important biology underlying motivation and when that biology goes wrong, it can lead to loss of motivation and even pathological apathy.
17 August
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korrents.com
Losing your emotions does not leave you a cooler decision-maker; it leaves you unable to organise a life at all.Their words
if you have massive frontal lobe lesions that make it the case that you're no longer emotionally responding to stimuli the consequences are devastating which is that you cannot make decisions complex decisions in your life you can't organize your life you're not motivated to take the right path through life because you don't feel one one way or the other about the different options that are available.
16 August
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Their words
This was a great motivation when I started running, but it’s a very niche book.
13 August
12 August
From one piece Stop being skeptical about AI for development with Charity Majors 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
One of the things that's ironic though is that both of these sides feel like they are the tiny minority and they're outmanned and they're being suppressed and they are standing up for what is truth and valor in the face of the big AI folks or the big skeptics.
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korrents.com
Neither the AI enthusiasts nor the AI sceptics are making it up; both camps are looking at real trends.Their words
See, the problem is that neither side is making it up. Like they are seeing really scary trends.
11 August
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Nature of CodeTheir words
This book is a beautiful introduction to simulations of natural systems. We get concise prose, clear illustrations, and carefully chosen systems with a guided tour through the math. All done in the Processing language, which is fun and easy to pick up. The reason I like this book so much is probably due to timing. In 2013, I was on the verge of abandoning software development. I was fed up. (That's a story for another time.) Instead, I planned to go into cognitive psychology full-time as a researcher. This book brought back the joy in programming for me. Sometimes, a good book is the book that motivated you.
10 August
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Their words
it is always tempting to add this one feature that looks really cool but what you rarely think about is when you merge this feature it really means here's this pile of code that I don't that the person probably doesn't really understand that I don't fully understand
From one piece Using AI to Increase Your Intelligence & Enrich Humanity | Dr. Fei-Fei Li 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
The other kind of danger is in the name of agency and and uh and motivation the tools are denied to our students because we're worried you cheat or worry you only got your answer from Chad GBT. That is very bad as well
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korrents.com
The worst outcome of AI for young people is that it takes away their agency and their motivation to learn.Their words
The absolute bad outcome is that our young generation, their agency and human level motivation of learning and living is taken away by tools. So doom scrolling, passive watching of shorts, all this are not helping agency, human agency.
7 August
31 July
28 July
From one piece Blake Scholl: How 50 People Built a Supersonic Jet 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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It now takes Lockheed more than two years to build a new Patriot missile interceptor. This is crazy. This is no way to build the future and this is no way to win a war.
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In 1969, we landed on the moon for the first time and the same year we flew Concord, the faster than the speed of sound airliner. The future was supposed to be faster and better. where we're supposed to look forward to innovation in air and in space. And yet, half a century later, we can't go to the moon and we can't fly faster than the speed of sound.
26 July
2 July
30 June
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Their words
I think we would always still prefer like a human that we had a relationship with because the way that we get motivated to be interesting interested in things is a social phenomenon.
22 June
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Their words
The phrase "your feelings are valid" does not invite curiosity or deeper self-understanding, which is the point of psychotherapy. It is the mirror image of "stop whining and get a grip." One sounds warm and one sounds harsh, but neither deepens self-awareness.
10 June
9 June
From one piece Sarah Paine - Why Putin and Xi can't escape geography 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China much more so under Deng Xiaoping, but recently Xi Jinping has been privileging the crony sector over the private sector and neither one has stable government institutions.
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Their words
So, China and Russia certainly have maritime ambitions, but I'm not clear they actually understand what goes into a full maritime paradigm.
28 May
27 May
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Their words
General problem solving abilities are neither learned nor taught. While some problem-solving methods have broader applicability than others (such as the scientific process of hypothesis testing), students learn these methods better when they’re explicitly taught rather than simply giving students projects and hoping they’ll reinvent them on their own.
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korrents.com
Consciousness belongs only to simulations, not to the physical brains or computers running them.Their words
neither brains nor computers are conscious, as only simulations can be conscious.
23 April
7 April
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Their words
And so, you have what seem like three very different disconnected phenomena all being explained by this one set of ideas.
29 March
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korrents.com
The problems worth a small builder's time are the ones too small for a big AI company to be motivated to solve.Their words
Like if it's a big problem, like everyone can see, then all these big companies will get into it. But whereas it's like there are a lot of problems that's like smaller, then maybe OpenAI won't be motivated to solve it, but maybe I can like all a lot of people can.
24 February
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korrents.com
The tariffs survived the case for them because their real purpose was the personal power they conferred.Their words
It has been clear from the beginning that a primary motivation for tariffs was that they empowered Trump personally.
12 February
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Their words
We show that equilibrium generically occurs at neither the Harberger nor Glaeser-Luttmer benchmark. Cost-minimizing suppliers drive allocations to vertices, not interiors. Corners are not an assumption but an outcome about what cost-minimizing suppliers choose. The correct benchmark is corners, not random, and corners generate qualitatively different welfare properties: losses far larger than either efficient or random distributions, and discontinuous jumps from small parameter perturbations.
10 February
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Their words
The "homework problem" described above might be much worse in practice for end users who aren't motivated to invest in their email triage systems, even if it will save them time in the medium term.
25 January
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Their words
But the truth is we don't know what the probability is. We don't know what the probability curves look like. We actually can't use expected value.
1 January
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Their words
Systems which do require remote operations assistance to get full reliability cut into that economic advantage and have a higher burden on their ROI calculations to make a business case for their adoption and therefore their time horizon to scaling across geographies.
25 December 2025
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Their words
Between 2015 and 2025 US manufacturing wages rose 40%, while the cost of purchasing a home rose 93%.
9 December 2025
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Their words
Debt is neither a good thing nor a bad thing per se. Likewise, the use of leverage in the AI industry shouldn’t be applauded or feared.
25 November 2025
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korrents.com
There is no human analogue to pre-training — neither childhood nor evolution is the same thing as it.Their words
I don't think there is a human analog to pre-training.
5 October 2025
From one piece Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product | Albert Cheng (Duolingo, Grammarly, Chess.com) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I actually in many ways see language learning as like their first vehicle. And what they have a superpower in is that again, the motivation, the habits, etc.
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Their words
Then you need a metag game, which for Duolingo is kind of like the path, but it's also the leaderboard, achievements, kind of long-term things that you're going to strive to such that you have like long-term, I guess, motivation uh to continue doing the thing. And then the profile is also critical because you build up a profile over time. It's a reflection of your investment inside the product experience. And so when you nail those three things, you can end up with a long-term learning journey that can be quite successful.
30 September 2025
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Their words
Yeah, I think overabundance paralyzes motivation and willpower. It's extremely harmful, particularly for young boys, to grow up in an environment where they can be proud, not of their own achievements, but of their father's achievements or their father's wealth.
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korrents.com
Action comes before motivation: you do first and feel afterwards, not the other way round.Their words
If you’re stuck in a depressive cycle, even when you really, really, really, really don’t want to do anything, to do something. Try to make progress because the good feeling comes on the end of that. The whole point is to do first and then feel, not feel and then do.
18 August 2025
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korrents.com
Neither seats nor tokens can price an agent, because neither of them measures whether the job got done.Their words
Seat based. Well, what is a seat? That doesn't make any sense. Consumption where it's like is it per message? Is it per token? Is it per conversation? And none of these things actually mapped very well to getting a job done and getting a job done well.
15 August 2025
From one piece China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
In terms of things that are causing us to lose to China, tariffs are neither here nor there because, as we've discussed, we're not sensitive to cost on power. But the environmental regulations that are actively preventing us from deploying renewable energy in the United States, like this is the reason Texas is winning. Texas is out deploying California 10 to1.
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Their words
so the mainstream view would say, well, China has cheaper labor, which is no longer true, uh, say compared to Mexico, and it's got lower environmental regulations, uh, which is true, and that it is more businessfriendly, which is absolutely crazy.
26 April 2025
23 March 2025
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Their words
And that's the problem with rewards is they just massively undermine intrinsic motivation. And that's why gamification doesn't work. And when gamification does work, it's because the underlying experience was already designed like a game.
14 February 2025
3 February 2025
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Their words
until there are feedback loops of open source AI, it seems like mostly an ideological mission. People like Mark Zuckerberg, which is like America needs this and I agree with him, but in the time where the motivation ideologically is high, we need to capitalize and build this ecosystem around, what benefits do you get from seeing the language model data?
17 December 2024
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Their words
Either can work. Both have tradeoffs and implications. If you try to import either philosophy wholesale, it will break in unexpected ways; if you try to mix and match, it will probably be an unfettered nightmare.
16 October 2024
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Their words
But that is not going to help you get dozens of 70 ton granite blocks 300 feet in the air to form the roof of the King’s Chamber and the floor of the chamber above it, and the roof of that chamber, and the floor of the chamber above that, and so on and so forth. Wet sand never got those objects up there.
2 October 2024
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korrents.com
Without SpaceX, neither the United States nor Europe would have adequate access to space of its own.Their words
But for SpaceX, both the US and Europe would lack adequate strategic access to space.
26 September 2024
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Their words
This isn’t a money grab: it’s an expectation that any business making hundreds of millions of dollars off of an open source project ought to give back, and if they don’t, then they can’t use its trademarks.
9 September 2024
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korrents.com
Plug-in hybrids have moved past being a worst-of-both-worlds compromise and are now genuinely thriving.Their words
Neither condition is now true, but plug-in hybrids are thriving.
Inflecting and Overtaking, SunPower, Waymonathanielbullard.com
5 September 2024
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Their words
The U.S., on the other hand, never appears to have been strongly motivated to make its shipbuilding industry an international success.
21 May 2024
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Their words
If Waymo vehicles were constantly asking for remote guidance, Waymo might need to hire so many remote operators that it negates the cost savings that come from not needing a driver.
29 March 2024
26 March 2024
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Their words
Employees don't want what you want. Customers don't want what you want. Uh you know, that that one of the challenges of the whole stock option thing is entrepreneurs and founders think that other people will be as motivated by owning part of the company as they are. They are not. Not even close.
21 December 2023
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korrents.com
A movement that has decided its job is to save humanity is uniquely prone to hubris, dogma and motivated reasoning.Their words
This is a worldview that’s uniquely susceptible to hubris, dogma, and motivated reasoning.
1 October 2023
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Their words
Friedman’s focus on the money supply has not held up, as Samuelson suggested, but the alternative Keynesian macro models recommended by Samuelson in the same interview have not done better and they were not outperforming simple random walk models of predicting the macroeconomic future.
7 September 2023
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Their words
What you want to avoid, I think, is mediocre writing, which neither thrills nor instructs.
25 May 2023
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Their words
But we do not have enough data and we do not have enough insight to use AI/ML to pick better targets that have a higher chance of succeeding in the clinic.
26 August 2022
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Their words
If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they couldn’t have built it without developing whole new technologies for the purpose (or casting every part in bronze, which introduces its own problems) and then wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to.
3 July 2022
1 January 2022
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Their words
The US focus on efficiency has revealed the brittleness of its economy, which has neither the manufacturing capability to scale up domestic production of goods nor the logistics capacity to handle greater imports.
21 September 2021
8 January 2021
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Open: An AutobiographyTheir words
It is rare that a sports book captures my attention, rarer still when a sports autobiography does. But “Open” delivers a compelling life story superbly told by an athlete. Desire, motivation, and competitive drive him to the the highest levels of professional tennis, but he loses his interest, and was so often unhappy, confused and unfulfilled by his achievements. As an autobiography, it is bluntly honest, sometimes painful, but most of all a fascinating compelling read.
7 February 2020
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Denial of DeathTheir words
Phenomenal book on how our fear of death is the core of our psychological disturbances, and our motivation for life. It will make you think about why we do things and behave in certain ways in an entirely new fashion, and the language within it is delicious.
7 September 2019
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Their words
So if progress is a moral imperative, it is also a moral imperative to understand its causes, so that we can protect them and reinforce them.
31 May 2019
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Their words
With regards to sexual desire and songwriting, creativity and desire have always been inextricably linked for me.
22 August 2018
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Their words
I do not sign CLAs and I think they’re a harmful practice for this very reason. Asking a contributor to sign them is a slap in the face to the good will which led them to make a contribution in the first place.
22 February 2018
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korrents.com
Maze puzzles are unengaging on their own but become interesting when paired with a strong extrinsic motivator.Their words
Mazes are not the most interesting gameplay element if you're relying on intrinsic motivation - they're just not very entertaining - but if there's some sufficiently compelling extrinsic motivator I think their irritating properties become quite interesting.
5 April 2017
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Their words
It is time to realize, then, addiction is neither a choice nor an inherited disease, but a psychological and physiological response to painful life experiences.
1 February 2016
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Their words
If a sufficiently skilled, funded, and motivated attacker wants in to your computer, they’re in.
13 January 2016
1 January 2016
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Readrcmnd.app
Start with WhyTheir words
We tend to focus on the “what” and “how” of our companies and products. This manifesto reminds us to always start with “why” — the reason we do the things we do, to let that guide our decisions, the whats and hows. Personally, I found the book neither very insightful nor inspiring, but YMMV.
1 March 2015
Nothing matches.
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