meta there is a best outcome for each situation. it is the one that helps the most in the long run (i.e. gets you what you really want), differing from the default focusing on the situation’s route of least resistance. clear thinking is the mental process of aiming at and creating this best outcome. outcomes are affected by innumerable external factors, thus, a statistically good decision making process is the best use of time and thinking. to wit, make all thinking and decision-making as visible and open to scrutiny as possible. establishing good baselines before a decision rears its head, circumstances must exist. a more conscious and pleasurable life experience depends on rarely being forced into a decision by these circumstances. this means always thinking of the best outcome, i.e. no thoughtless action, actionless desire or panicking. these three are typically downhill from problematic defaults, such as: running from thinking. conforming to a group. reacting to perceived threats to self-worth or hierarchy. reacting to feelings instead of facts. resisting change, for the familiar. to act against these defaults, better habits are necessary, viz: self-control:  self-knowledge: self-confidence: self-accountability: method pre-decision the best decision comes from knowing that a certain option is the best one. define write down what you think the problem is. what am i trying to achieve? jargon here means you need to better understand the problem and hold off on any judgment till you do. explore list satisfactory criteria. imagine satisfactory possible futures to help. what would have to be true for this problem not to exist in the first place? imagine at least three routes to this future. take options off the table to help. evaluate for each route, ask: will this move me closer to my priority? how? is this a truly permanent fix? what happens if things go poorly? or properly? compare options and secondary results, rank with currency of time, money, or brainpower. decision if undo cost is low, decide asap. if it is high: decide alap (l = late), i.e. only when you: have large margins of safety. set up trip wires (negative signs and the absence of positive signs) for what you'll do when you hit a specific quantifiable time, amount, or circumstance. do pre-commit checks post-decision assistive review who needs to know your goals? do they know the top priority? do they know the positive and negative trip wires? what do they know about this problem from experience that i (or other people) don't? what would be their process for deciding in my shoes? what would be their process for executing? in all these, keep in mind their personal incentives as you update your decision making process. staying on-course is the top priority still the top priority? if not, what is? what will the top priority take now? is there a way to ensure i stick to the path i've decided is best? reviewing past decisions did the expected result happen for the reasons you thought? what did you know at the time of decision? did predictions happen for the reasons you thought? mistake handling accept responsibility, do a honest post-mortem: repair as best you can. reference shane parrish - clear thinking

How To Think Clearly

tl;dr a life worth living on its own must be engineered, primarily in the following ways: consciously shape work so its challenges yield engrossment and meaning. treat free time with this same idea from 1.  invest attention in other people’s goals so relationships generate flow rather than mere comfort. continuously take note, and notes, on 1-3. premise living is experiencing — doing, feeling, and thinking. the quality of this experiencing is what determines the quality of life. if i don’t take charge of this quality, it will be controlled unsatisfactorily, from the outside and from within. there is enough room for personal initiative and choice to make a real difference. emotions, goals, and the ordering of consciousness emotions are levers of attention and experience. negative emotions consume attention to restore inner order. positive emotions free attention to flow freely into whatever i choose. the only way to take ownership of life is by learning to direct psychic energy in line with my own intentions. in fact, my worst experiences are rooted in aimlessness. so i primarily need good, worthy goals. clearly knowing they are good and worthy helps my heart and mind focus, which improves my attention and therefore my experience. good, worthy goals = good, worthy experience. this is what can bring satisfactory flow. flow flow is the state where what i feel, what i want, and what i am thinking are in harmony. i can reach it through: specific, satisfying goals broken into substeps. immediate feedback, so it is clear how well i am doing. a balance of challenge and skill — skills “fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable.” in combination, flow emerges where high challenge meets high skill. it is satisfying in itself and is deterministic, because attention is fully invested, self-consciousness disappears, time distorts, and whatever i do is worth doing for its own sake — life is worth living for living’s sake.  the autotelic life a good life is lived for its own sake. pay attention partly free of personal agenda, so as to feel reality in its own terms. to make this happen: do whatever needs to be done with concentrated attention. every task can be done beautifully. even suffering can be handled beautifully — “acknowledge and respect its presence, and then get busy” focusing on a chosen object. transfer attention each day from disliked or passive activities toward desired ones. this requires mental effort to prioritise, organise, and streamline interest and attention.
for the most flow-blessed people, “it is that their enthusiasm for life makes most of what they do give them flow experiences.” i only need to refuse to ever waste time. life is spent on three functions — production, maintenance, and leisure — and they can all be aimed at autotelic living.  production the paradox of work work is dissatisfying when it feels pointless, boring, and stressful. the fix for the first two is to invest extra attention and make it personal: understand the whole context and impact of my actions, then continually ask — “is this step necessary? can it be done better, faster, more efficiently? what additional steps could make my contribution more valuable?”
 stress, too, is workable: establish priorities, match skills to challenges (delegate, learn, get help, or break tasks into parts), and above all refuse the passive freeze — “only by exercising control can stress be avoided.” leisure the risks and opportunities of leisure
lonely people with unsatisfying jobs turn to passive leisure, which then “cuts off further options for improving the quality of life.” the remedy is to treat free time seriously — “devote as much ingenuity and attention to it as one would to one’s job” — so that work becomes as enjoyable as leisure, and leisure becomes “true recreation instead of a scheme for dulling the mind.”
 maintenance the texture of everyday life the first step in improving the quality of life is engineering daily activities so that one gets the most rewarding experiences from them. keep a diary of the past day — to learn which activities produce your high points, then increase them. beyond the self: virtue and fate act always as if your future depends on what you do, because it does.
virtue is the ability to creatively overcome inertia — a difficult but necessary skill. relationships: friends, family, and solitude the quality of life improves immensely when there is at least one other person willing to listen to our troubles, because it is comforting and reassuring of the reality of our experience.
a good conversation finds out the other person’s goals, then adds your own experience “without trying to take over… but developing it jointly.”
a relationship should meet two conditions: adequate goal compatibility, and a willingness “to invest attention in the other person’s goals.” friendships should provide ever-new emotional and intellectual stimulation throughout life. family provides high expectations with unstinting love. solitude provides safety for cognition and reflection. when people pay attention to each other, or to the same activity together, the chances of flow binding them increases. reference  finding flow - mihaly csikszentmihalyi

How To Live Well

studying will eventually be used for productive application - directed or not. so for every idea, why not begin with the possibility of producing the knowledge / understanding afresh, in your words and ideas.   method phase i: first pass - survey images, highlight text and raise questions. second pass - read and study in detail answering questions from the first pass. point here is to take detailed personally integrated notes. in doing this, question till it’s personally meaningful (relates to something you know) and you can put it in your words. to help, remember you’re actually teaching yourself the material. phase ii: to be done within the first 24 hours of studying the idea and at increasing intervals afterwards. memory test  grade repeat phase ii. meta take breaks to recharge immediately you get zoned out. have a study area. references:  marty lobdell - study less erin mcgurk  - study

How To Study

excel - be consistently superior in performance in a field. method ignore talent talk. dissect the thinking, discipline and attitude of the excellent.  look forward to each day with play, focus and celebration. act as though excellence is mundane. miscellani hold back, stay stagnant. share fantasies, stay dreaming.  reference the mundanity of excellence

How To Excel

having struggled with both, when i found a document directly dealing with them, i knew i would benefit from noting my understanding.  why? satisfaction with life is important and worth time and attention, since unhappiness is dangerous, for thought and life.  even in less ideal situations, a general sense of satisfaction helps. mood maintenance is thus a better way to live.  how? consider your historical baseline a result of being uninformed, not as everlasting. this means emotional information from self guided and focused experimenting is necessary.  focus on increasing the factors that help with heightening your baseline and decreasing the hurting factors. also, relax standards around feasibility to prevent self-sabotage.  habits to wit: pick a “default mood” you want to count as okay — one that’s a bit ambitious but still realistic — and treat that as your new normal. this should be a baseline and not the point to spend emotional energy, i.e. to do emotionally stressful tasks. use descriptive and directive labels for mood and emotions, so labels immediately suggest the next action - e.g. “overwhelmed” → reduce tasks. stop tolerating consistent minor injuries to mood.  if you don’t like waking to noisy alarms, fight for morning leeway.  commit to controlling your environment to a considerable degree for personal satisfaction. it can be hard to avoid thinking about things, but you can decide to think about whatever you want. when you write something off, continuously let it go.  be willing to expend resources on life satisfaction. be willing to spend money, and try new things, including whims. desire to do fun things is important and should be unrestrained where possible - even though they could cost time and other activities. have many accessible, cheap excuses to cheer up whenever feeling blue. have favorite pair of socks, make lots of friends on purpose to chat with, gather inexpensive goods like music and interesting websites. reference i forget now, but will add when i find it.

How To Improve Mood and Satisfaction

think about a core question yourself before reading a bunch of stuff about it. will help structure reading around answering questions not floundering. note confusion in detail. helpful questions to highlight confusion include: do not fool yourself at any point during 2. to answer questions in 2, get the data yourself. if not, try going for information-dense sources with high amounts of detail and facts. ask lots of questions of those sources till satisfaction - dumb or not. when in doubt, go closer / simpler. attempt explaining. use diagrams, words and bodily motions if necessary. repeat 2-5. understanding is multilayered hence the importance of repetition. reference nabeel qureshi - how to understand things.

How To Understand

intro ideas are a batting game. you need to generate a billion of them to get the worthy 10. following this, idea generation needs to be a personal practice.  as with all practices, for this, there are evergreen and fundamental ideas codified into principles and methods.   principles ideas are new combinations of old elements.  new combinations depend on the ability to see relationships. methods gather there are two kinds of materials / ideas to gather for better chances of new and striking combinations: specific materials about product and the people of interest and general ideas about life and events.  have a general curiousity about life and events, and equal curiousity about your creation and colleagues. you can also enormously expand your experience vicariously but this is best done as an end in itself.  in all, patient living seems to me to be necessary to discover the unique interesting idea in each topic.  to store and organize ideas, you need a system. the card-index, where you write one item / idea on a card and overtime build classes for the cards.  the scrapbook or file for indexing and cross-indexing index cards. digest  for all you learn, observe each in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. take each apart and see how it fits with other facts in the index. it is likely three things happen in sequence: little partial ideas will come to you. get them down.  you will get very tired of trying to fit your puzzle together. keep trying to get one or more partial thoughts onto your little cards.  after a while you will reach the hopeless stage. everything is a jumble in your mind, with no clear insight anywhere. relax drop the whole subject and put the problem out of your mind as completely as you can. turn to whatever stimulates your imagination and emotions. listen to music, go to the theatre or movies. capture out of nowhere the idea will appear — while shaving, or bathing, or most often when you are half awake in the morning. capture and detail as best you can. share with humility “a good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. it stimulates those who see it to add to it. thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will come to light.” reference: a technique for producing ideas - james webb young 

How To Generate Ideas.

milieu recently read an article where walter ong presented literacy - the ability to read and write - as a technology for the restructuring of the mind. he then discussed the ways literacy changes our relationships with reality and concluded with the effects of these changes on us as humans in relation to ourselves and to society. upon review, the use of the word “technology” had me questioning its accuracy. here, i summarize his reasonable answers to my questioning and my eventual synthesis. meaning firstly, technology is the application of techniques towards certain ends. so, this led me to two questions: the answer to both is: literacy enables lucid, intimate thinking and experience by developing and enhancing the practice of separation. method with this i started to see his point about literacy’s methods. it imbues this habit of separation by: merit looking around and within, i saw that this separation can indeed make the practioner anti-embodying and more pro-experiencing or pro-observing.  and as observation skills improve, five core skills sharpen on an ever growing trajectory, viz: when this observation becomes a lifestyle, one may notice an increasingly intimate, effable reconstruction of thought and reality. this way we can deal with both on their own terms and as a result, build better maps of ourselves and the world. memory in his discussion, he does continually reference the advantage of orality - the practice of speaking (singing included), and listening -, in that, while literacy is essential for continuously improving clarity, it is nowhere near as efficient as orality in terms of memory. by this, i mean orality helps things stick in the mind in ways literacy cannot, using tools our minds prefer, such as melody, epithets, proverbs, repetition, rhyme, hyperbole etc.  moral therefore, to build better maps of reality and thought, make writing and reading a lifestyle. however, to ensure memory in this lifestyle, use the many compressed, formulaic structures of orality.  reference: ong - writing is a technology that restructures thought 

Literacy as technology.

what is math but a formalized set of nifty tricks.  braver has some challenges whose solutions tickled my fancy.  for example: diagonally slice the above parallelograms and rectangle and you end up with a triangle. turns out every triangle is just a quadrilateral cut in half, and thus the area will simply be half the area of it imaginary whole quadrilateral. the b \times h in \frac{1}{2}b \times h is sister to l \times b or l \times l of quadrilaterals. another, is this question: i was close to getting this but i was blocked in my mind by the focus on only the big square. turns out, the focus is the area of the big square, which can be seen as: the square of (a + b), which i quickly noticed or  (four times \frac{1}{2}(a \times b)) + c^2, which is just nice. equating these means:
a^2 + 2ab + b^2 = (4 \times \frac {1}{2} (a \times b)) + c^2 or,   a^2 + 2ab + b^2 = 2ab + c^2 \therefore a^2 + b^2 =  c^2 so nifty.  the equivalent of watching neymar at work.  this was based on his precalculus made difficult book. 

Nifty Triangle Geometry

question given the general quadratic equation: a x^2+b x+c=0
 derive the quadratic formula:  x=\frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4 a c}}{2 a} solution \therefore \begin{aligned}& a x^2+b x+c=0 \\& x^2+\frac{b}{a} x+\frac{c}{a}=0\end{aligned} if complete squares are of the form: x^2+2 a x+a^2=(x+a)^2
 then, constant a^2=\left[\frac{2 a}{2}\right]^2 and complete squares become: x^2+2 a x+\left[\frac{2 a}{2}\right]^2=(x+a)^2 
for the second equation above, this gives: x^2+\frac{b}{a} x+\left[\frac{b}{ a}\times \frac1 2\right]^2+\frac{c}{a}=\left[\frac{b}{ a}\times \frac1 2\right]^2  x^2+\frac{b}{a} x+\frac{b^2}{4 a^2} + \frac{c}{a} =\frac{b^2}{4 a^2}  x^2+\frac{b}{a} x+\frac{b^2}{4 a^2} =\frac{b^2}{4 a^2} - \frac{c}{a} now the left hand side is a perfect square.
\left[x+\frac{b}{2a}\right]^2 = \frac{b^2}{4a^2}-\frac{c}{a} x+\frac{b}{2a} = \pm \sqrt{\frac{b^2}{4a^2}-\frac{c}{a}} x+\frac{b}{2a} = \pm \sqrt{\frac{b^2}{4a^2}-\frac{4ac}{4a^2}} x+\frac{b}{2a} = \pm \sqrt{\frac{b^2-4ac}{4a^2}} x+\frac{b}{2a} = \pm \frac{\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a} x = \frac{-b}{2a} \pm \frac{\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a} x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a} voila.

Deriving the quadratic formula.

asking this question was based on unconscious ignorance of the shared aspect of a marriage with a real person you choose, instead implying a marriage with an amorphous amalgam of society’s implicitly communicated assumptions. with this implication, the hesitation and questioning was and still is reasonable. who would want to marry the many examples of terrible spouses you have heard of or seen. therefore, a better alternative is, “why marry this person you are choosing?”. perhaps there are benefits that bring one to a choice like this. an explicit discussion of a shared desirable future with a lover and friend. a desire for permanence in emotional connection with this person. economic and social benefits of being with them. what convinced me was the agency of the first benefit, since the desire for permanence of the relationship is implicit in my decision to be serious with the person in the first place, thus predating the choice of a marriage[1]and a focus on the economic and social benefits stems from a philosophy i am not interested in (i.e. using people). beyond that, a personally reasonable benefit is the elevation of your relationship. your friendship going beyond the less serious - yet important - relationship into spousehood is a personal, social, legal - and for those who believe, spiritual - testimony to the seriousness with which you intend to care for your spouse and your relationship.  if there is another way to proclaim this elevation that i am unaware of, i would love to know. therefore, it is not about the concept of a marriage, but the prospectus of a marriage to this person. the explicitness of this leads to a second question, what kind of marriage is worth undertaking such testimony? for me, only one is, me and my friend. me and my game, joke, drink, food, talk, serious, business, sex and pray buddy.[2] if i do not see the possibility of sharing myself in these ways with this person or wanting to know them in these many ways, there is no point to the entire enterprise. initially, i was asking the titular question from a purely epistemological perspective. i wanted to know why people did and do it, especially given the deluge of evidence against the choice. the good faith answer is that they do it because they believe in the person in front of them.[3] [1]: also, while marriage contains the promise of permanence, it is not an assurance of permanence, as seen by the normalcy of breakups and divorce. i am not certain how much this should weigh in consideration. [2]: it is why i propose asking out your good friend, not making your girlfriend your friend. not that that is not possible, but i have never fancied that.   [3]: i do not believe the primary purpose of marriage is begetting, hence the ignorance of children in this discussion. to me, they are a collaborative choice made after choosing a spouse.

Why marry?

Generating Molecular vdW Surfaces

it is crucial to be definite about tomorrow, to imagine a future worth living and wholly throw your self behind it. as i say this, i do not have the full idea or experience of what that is, but an attempt at this is likely better than having no definition. this thought was revived as i read peter thiel’s zero to one.  my receipt from this text is that specificity and optimism are learnable and important skills.   “if you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. but if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.” — thiel, zero to one, 2014. attempt a definition of a great tomorrow and be adaptably committed to it, it will make tomorrow easier and more favorable.  reference zero to one

Define Tomorrow.

work on problems worth it. you know them, you can feel it.  get the problems clear. build solutions that are tractable, scalable and bold. these require you to become persistent, okay with ambiguity and undistracted.  after succeeding, move on to new problems.  how not to work work on problems you don't care about, without change. work on important difficult problems without changing them to important yet tractable ones.  continuously excuse this hesitation to change.

2026