Anthony Panozzo's Blog

I attempt to eschew trivia, to avoid learning things that have little value. By definition, trivia is trivial, so it is desirable to know as little of it as possible. Anything that I have knowledge of that is not useful represents an opportunity cost of foregone useful knowledge. Perhaps winning trivia night should be considered a mark of shame.

I don't really keep up with the news all that much. Most things are outside of my locus of control. Does it really matter what celebrity did something, or that a tornado just hit a midwest town? Tornadoes will be hitting towns and celebrities will be doing things until the world ends. But knowing this fact allows me to mostly safely abstract away the news. Every now and then I don't hear about something, but then people are able to fill me in on the details. Following news on a daily, or worse, hourly, basis is a recipe for wasting time and getting little value.

There are some thoughts that are negative and self-reinforcing, and it is useful to catch these and stop thinking about them. A few years ago I shared my thoughts and techniques with someone else and they found it valuable, so I am going to share it here.

My personal example was playing conversations in my head about or with a certain person. I would imagine them saying something and what my responses would be. The conversations would typically be of an argumentative nature. Sometimes the thoughts would arise from me doing something and wondering what the other person would think. I think it was my brain's defense mechanisms trying to prepare me for conflict.

I have followed Cosma Shalizi's blog / site for a long time, and there is a wealth of information on various technical fields such as statistics, computer science, economics, psychology, and much more. Really, his notebooks are a good index of interesting things. Every time I look through it I see new references to dense readings. Cosma also publishes blog posts, and these are often centered around books (he likely reads more hard books in a year than most people do in a lifetime) and classes that he is teaching.

One of the things I like about his blog is that the articles are long but often have an Attention Conservation Notice at the top. This is a longer version of tl;dr (too long; didn't read), a summary or editor's note on what is important. Some of my favorites are "I have no taste" (when he is talking about "books to read while algae grow in your fur") or "7800 words about the intricacies of [some specific controversy in a subset of some specific field]".

People generally think that I am a pretty calm person, someone not prone to get angry. I have heard some people say that they have never seen me be angry. But I have also had my share of mistakes. This post covers some of the tips that I try to use to avoid losing my cool and to avoid encouraging negative emotions. I will go from practical strategies to more abstract thoughts about how negative thoughts work.

Many of these ideas accord with what Stoic philosophers and practitioners thought and wrote about. Similarly, there is a lot of overlap with Buddhism, and there are probably some Christian influences in there as well.

Taking The Long View

A mentality that I find helpful is to consider whether my actions or the events that happen to me will matter an arbitrarily long time from now. For example, will this experience matter later today? Tomorrow? In a month? In a year? In five years? In twenty years? In a century?

Most "bad" things don't really matter that much on a long enough time scale. There are very few one-off events that have a level of significance of even one week, let alone one year. This is probably most the case when it is something that affects me personally. People hundreds of years from now will not care whether I was a little cold or felt a bit tired on one day unless it results in something extremely significant. Just taking a breath and looking at my situation more broadly puts things in a better perspective.

In fact, it helps modulate positive emotions as well. Will this thing that I think is so fantastic really appear so ten years from now?

Today's post is about a little mantra that I created that helps me deal with meetings that start late or not at all. It probably increases my work ability by half an hour a week.

The mantra developed when scheduled remote meetings kept getting forgotten by the other party and severely delayed or postponed. I would typically be ready five minutes ahead of time, and then fritter away twenty minutes or so, not wanting to get deep into any work. Then I would be a little demotivated for another few minutes when I realized the meeting wasn't going to happen and that I wasted a lot of time.