I just googled it, it’s a StarCraft reference. The Khala is some psionic link between all members of this alien race that have submitted to it, and at some point a demon hijacks the Khala, and the members have to sever a nerve cord to destroy it.
When I was in college, I intuitively realized that severing myself from the Khala would have intellectual benefits, so I did. The problem was, the fruits of those intellectual benefits paid off socially, such that severing myself from the Khala seemed less and less attractive. Eventually, although I didn’t realize it at the time, I started to cash out. (I live with my partner who I met on the basis of my intellectual reputation. The most recent one, that is. There were a few.) My depression mostly disappeared, and I’d gotten myself an alright social life, but… I just couldn’t write anymore. And eventually I started to believe that my investment in high-variance strategies was misguided, and decided to ‘become a normie’.
It was only after I realized I’d succeeded that it dawned on me that I’d made a mistake.
But “severing myself from the Khala” isn’t quite the framing I’d use. It felt more like adopting a very high-variance strategy: there were a few people who greatly respected me and a few people who wanted to kill me, and to most people I was just illegible—not that I cared about any of that. In a low-variance strategy, no one wants to kill you, but no one (or at least very few people) respect you, until you’re old enough to have become respectable, to have gotten somewhere with the slow grind of life; and all your energy is consumed by the grind.
Most people who aren’t currently drawing juju from their respectability could stand to be higher-variance. If you’re intentionally sacrificing your own standing to make a point (and not to trade it in with more valuable standing from different people), you could stand to be lower-variance. There’s a golden mean there, but undershooting variance seems to be a much more common error than overshooting it.
I just googled it, it’s a StarCraft reference. The Khala is some psionic link between all members of this alien race that have submitted to it, and at some point a demon hijacks the Khala, and the members have to sever a nerve cord to destroy it.
Oh, *that*.
When I was in college, I intuitively realized that severing myself from the Khala would have intellectual benefits, so I did. The problem was, the fruits of those intellectual benefits paid off socially, such that severing myself from the Khala seemed less and less attractive. Eventually, although I didn’t realize it at the time, I started to cash out. (I live with my partner who I met on the basis of my intellectual reputation. The most recent one, that is. There were a few.) My depression mostly disappeared, and I’d gotten myself an alright social life, but… I just couldn’t write anymore. And eventually I started to believe that my investment in high-variance strategies was misguided, and decided to ‘become a normie’.
It was only after I realized I’d succeeded that it dawned on me that I’d made a mistake.
But “severing myself from the Khala” isn’t quite the framing I’d use. It felt more like adopting a very high-variance strategy: there were a few people who greatly respected me and a few people who wanted to kill me, and to most people I was just illegible—not that I cared about any of that. In a low-variance strategy, no one wants to kill you, but no one (or at least very few people) respect you, until you’re old enough to have become respectable, to have gotten somewhere with the slow grind of life; and all your energy is consumed by the grind.
Most people who aren’t currently drawing juju from their respectability could stand to be higher-variance. If you’re intentionally sacrificing your own standing to make a point (and not to trade it in with more valuable standing from different people), you could stand to be lower-variance. There’s a golden mean there, but undershooting variance seems to be a much more common error than overshooting it.