If you make a car with a max speed of 65mph by decreasing the amount of force available, it will be:

1. impossible to pass cars safely, because you won't be able to overtake quickly
2. very difficult to maneuver while going near 65 mph, because you won't be able to accelerate quickly
3. very annoying to change lanes, because while you are vectored to the side, you will be going less than 65 miles per hour down the road because you will max out at (65 * sin(theta)) mph, making it difficult to speed up while changing lanes, which is often considered good form
4. very difficult to go up steep hills at speed, because you will use most of your power fighting gravity.

It's very difficult to decrease max speed by decreasing performance without creating a car that is much worse.

To paraphrase the hiker's saying "regret is mandatory, suffering is optional". What you describe as not feeling regret to me sounds like feeling regret but not suffering because of it. Knowing that you could have made a better choice is an act of feeling regret for the choice you did make. Suffering as a result of it is bad for you (it's suffering, after all), and it sounds like you don't suffer when you regret. This is a good place to be! It's good to both recognize that there were better possibilities, and maybe you can aspire to pick better next time, but maybe you did ultimately do as good as you could have done in that situation, so beating yourself up wouldn't be useful.

We may disagree on the semantics of the word regret, so imagine I'm saying regret_{alex} for my version, and regret_{gordon} for your version.

The original post has much more value than the one-sentence summary, but having a one-sentence explanation of the commonality between the mathematical example and the programming example can be useful.

I would say it is perhaps not nice to provide that sort of summary but it is kind.

The general lesson is that understanding the thing directly is better than understanding someone else's explanation of the thing.

This is a massive misread of the article. The benefit of lifting is the feeling of joy in the merely material, and of transforming the feeling of being embodied from a feeling of trappedness to a feeling of capabilities being granted to you.

Until I’d gained some muscle, I didn’t know that getting out of bed shouldn’t actually feel like much, physically, or that walking up a bunch of stairs shouldn’t tire you out, or that carrying groceries around shouldn’t be onerous. I felt cursed by the necessity of occupying space while shuffling around this mortal coil. And now I do not. Moreover, I no longer feel that I need some special justification for existing, because simply residing in the material is now a privilege.

The first time I moved apartments after I started seriously lifting, I enjoyed it. I had always suffered while moving before lifting, ending up sore and tired and cranky, but after lifting, I didn't feel any negatives.

Unfortunately, all of life is a virtue ethics/game theory context.

Excellent post. To do things, do things, and surround yourself with people who do things. To do things better, you have to practice rationality, but without some specific target goal, you can't evaluate whether you are being successful at your practice of rationality.

I've noticed a similar thing with Anki flashcards, where my brain learns to memorize responses to the shape of the input text blob when I have cards that are relatively uniquely-shaped. I have to swap around the layout every few months to ensure that the easiest model to subconsciously learn is the one that actually associates the content on the front of the card with the content on the back of the card.

Less so under potentially adversarial conditions, when there are politics/culture-war aspects. For example, many people have large personal and social incentives to convince you of various ideas related to UFOs. In that case, it may not be the correct move to engage with the presented arguments, if they are words chosen to manipulate and not to inform. Do not process untrusted input,.

I'm curious if you think that this formulation of the above idea is still antithetical to epistemic rationality.

Kids can be surprisingly useful resources at a surprisingly early age.

On farms, as you've said, kids can figure out what to do and help out easily. If your work requires a lot of low-skill repetitive manual labor, kids can do that, and it can help teach them how to do your slightly higher-skill labor next year. 

This does not apply if you work as an engineer, or in an office, or many other cases where specific skills contingent on mostly-finished-developing brains are required to do your work and there is no manual labor that you can offload to children. If you expect your kid to go through the standard college route, there are 22 years of waiting before they can really do anything useful to help with your labor.