Web Excursions 2022-08-05
How to Think for Yourself | Psyche Guides
Each of us has, I hope, at one point in time discovered a thinker whose writing captures exactly what we think,
or have been trying to think, but couldn’t find the right words to say.
Schopenhauer placed the highest value on thinking for yourself.
(There is, of course, a single German word for this activity: Selbstdenken, which is also the title of one of Schopenhauer’s essays.)
it appears also to have had an existential dimension for him: if we lose the ability for independent thought, then we miss out on a key opportunity to become our authentic, original selves.
For these reasons, Schopenhauer was surprisingly critical of the value of reading;
if we read too much, he thought, then we will fail to think for ourselves.
The novelist Marcel Proust, who admired Schopenhauer and noticed the same ‘dangers of erudition’ as him,
also noticed how Schopenhauer’s own approach to book-learning offered an exemplary solution to the problem.
Schopenhauer ‘offers us the image of a mind whose vitality wears the most enormous reading lightly …’
In other words, Schopenhauer never pretended to be anything other than extremely well read, but he was always, clearly, his own ultimate authority.
Don’t use reading as a substitute for thinking
Schopenhauer was very clear: ‘Reading is a mere surrogate for one’s own thinking’ and, for this reason,
‘erudition makes most people even more stupid and simple than they already are by nature’.
a sort of opportunity cost: when you are reading, you could be thinking for yourself.
But this is only a problem if the kind of thinking you do while you are reading – because reading is at least some form of thinking –
is significantly different from, and lesser than, the kind you do when you are not reading.
Concern on originality.
Reading, he thinks, inserts ‘foreign and heterogeneous’ thoughts into our own, which never truly belong to us.
Reading is like ‘the seal to the wax on which it presses its imprint’;
it ‘sticks to us like an artificial limb, a false tooth, a wax nose or at best one formed by rhinoplasty from another’s flesh’;
the book-learner ‘resembles an automaton put together from foreign materials,’ while the independent thinker ‘resembles a living, begotten human being’,
because ‘what is acquired through one’s own thinking resembles the natural limb’.
Thinking for yourself will make your thoughts your own
the primary intellectual virtues that derive from thinking for yourself, apart from originality, include authenticity and ownership.
The world we encounter in reading has already been organised according to the mind of the author,
whereas our own direct experiences of the wider world demand that we impose some order on it for ourselves.
If all goes well, the ultimate result of thinking for yourself is what Schopenhauer calls ‘the maturity of knowledge’,
a state of total organic integration between thoughts and experiences
For Schopenhauer as for Proust, thinking is, at the very least, paying attention;
it is taking a look at things for yourself.
as if authenticating a work of art, Schopenhauer always checked the provenance;
anything he found in books was assimilated only if he could trace it back to experience.
Combine your reading with thinking for yourself
Read for company and encouragement in your thinking
a writer’s works may be ‘incomparably richer in content than his company’
because they are ‘the quintessence of a mind … the result and fruit of all his thinking and studying’.
‘Often I was pleasantly surprised afterwards to find formulations in ancient works by great men of propositions that I had hesitated to bring before the public because of their paradoxical nature.’
Allow beautiful writing to entice you to think for yourself
At his most pessimistic, Schopenhauer sees reading as a mere surrogate for thinking for yourself,
while Proust, on the other hand, sees it as an enticement to do so.
The reader, in Proust’s experience, is always left wanting more;
they long to see the rest of the world that the great writer has managed, teasingly and tactfully, only to intimate
Make your thoughts known
The beauty of the scene strikes him not simply as an aesthetic experience
but also as an intimation of some secret of reality that he can reveal only if he writes it down, and fast:
They were impressed by different things in Schopenhauer’s philosophy:
for Tolstoy, it was the central place of compassion;
for Beckett, the unrelenting despair;
for Borges, the marvellously all-encompassing system;
for Wagner, the redemptive possibilities of art.
But it wouldn’t be accurate to describe Schopenhauer’s best readers as Schopenhauerian;
they’re original and distinctive enough in their styles of thinking to deserve their own adjectives: Tolstoyan, Beckettian, Borgesian, Wagnerian.
Nietzsche wrote in 1888:
The two essays on Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner are, it seems to me now, confessions about myself – above all, they are avowals to myself,
rather than, say, real psychological accounts of those two masters, to whom I felt as much kinship as I felt antagonism
What's Actually Going on With Google and Facebook Hiring Freezes? - We Surveyed 1000 Engineers to Find Out.
Our survey went out to users on July 23rd and got 1003 responses (mostly between July 23rd and July 25th).
Amazon is at the top of the list, given that they haven’t announced freezes and are continuing to aggressively hire engineers.
Given that Facebook had supposedly been frozen for a while, I was surprised to see them in 3rd position.
Facebook first announced their hiring freeze on May 4th.
Though the announcement made it clear that the engineering org would be affected, it didn’t go into detail.
Of course, around the time that the freeze was announced, commentary about the freeze also started popping up on Blind (like this one).
Consistently from thread to thread, it looked like Facebook froze hiring for engineers below E7, with the exception of Machine Learning Engineers, whom Facebook continued to hire, at all levels.
Our best insight into candidate ability is how they perform in interviews on our platform (we do both mock interviews and real ones and have hosted over 100K interviews to date).
we grabbed the overall mean score on interviewing.io, across all users.
Then we compared that mean to the mean scores of people who were still interviewing at Facebook.
There wasn’t a statistically significant difference.
In other words, from what we know, Facebook probably isn’t using their hiring freeze as a smoke screen.
Google is indeed not extending offers throughout the duration of the freeze.
In other words, there are people in various stages of interviews, but even if they get past the hiring committee, they wouldn’t get an official offer until the freeze is lifted.
L3 or “early career” hiring is indeed frozen until next year.
Almost everyone who responded to us and had been interviewing for L3 was paused.
That said, it looks like Google is willing to continue L3 interviews in some cases with the understanding that those results will be valid for a year, so that when headcount for L3 opens up again, candidates will be able to skip the onsite process.
Unlike the Facebook analysis, we did see some statistical significance at L4.
Candidates who were still actively interviewing at L4 had significantly higher interviewing.io scores than the average interviewing.io candidate (p < 0.03 with a “medium” effect size of 0.45).
We did NOT see any significance for candidates at L5 and above.