Draft: Notes From Reading "The Courage to Be Disliked"
Jun 15, 2025
- surprised by how good it is.
- my biggest fault with the philosophy presented is that there’s too many named concepts. if you introduce 15 different concepts like TODO then you can explain anything you want in a way which sounds convincing. but it’s too complicated, these concepts are just not that good, definitely not good enough to have 15 of them. it’s a house of cards.
- concepts that I like and need to consider some more:
- being disliked ~ freedom, and the opposite that being liked ~ an unfree life living out the desires of others.
- happiness stemming from contribution to the community.
- boundaries. I didn’t “get” this when reading Chris Lakin’s blog, I want to revisit the idea now.
- the causality reversal on things like “you feel shy so that you don’t have to ask her out”. this rhymes nicely with Lakin’s local optimality idea which I think is critical and under-appreciated.
- seeing people as comrades
- some things rhyme with predictive coding, especially the teleology stuff. but at this point I see predictive coding everywhere so I wouldn’t read into this too much.
- some points I was unconvinced on:
- the living in the present stuff. I don’t get it. if this is practical advice then for me it wasn’t clear enough, and if it’s spiritual advice trying to get you to be more enlightened then the logical-argument framing is misleading.
- things I feel I don’t understand very well or I’m unsure about:
- how are the boundaries set for the separation of tasks? where do my tasks end?
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