I’m reminded of commentary about scale in role-playing games, how a party goes from concerning itself with a single town to a region, a country, a planet, a galaxy, a plane of existence, as it grows in power and influence.
At any scale, there’s something to look up at, and something to look down on.
This also feels adjacent to a thing which bothers me about the internet: Most of our ancestors existed in groups of a size where it was reasonable for each individual to be the best-in-the-group at something. As connectivity makes groups larger, it erases those nooks of comfort in which one can be meaningfully best, valued, etc. Or maybe that’s more about a ratio of critics to experts—digital transformation brings all claims into a world where there are many people who can tear them apart, but few to no people who with sufficient expertise to create something likely to robustly withstand its expected criticism.
There’s also something around here about social pressures and these nooks. My career is several nooks “up” from my parents’ world, and while I’m actually doing relatively poorly at it by this nook’s standards, I seem to be doing great by my parents’ standards because they can only judge my present status by those few signals which apply to both their nook and mine. If we frame nooks as levels of “accomplishment”, there are also certain social pressures against dropping down through them, even intentionally. Consider how your current friends might regard you if you returned to the life and worldview of the hometown friends who “never escaped”.
Re: group size and expertise, the life strategy I feel most drawn to as a response follows this argument:
It takes approximately all the effort to be the best at something.
By the pareto principle, it takes a meaningfully trivial amount of effort to be reasonably good at something.
You can thus become reasonably good at several things.
When you are reasonably good at several things, you in yourself form a cross-disciplinary team of those competences, with VERY GOOD intra-team communication.
By combinatorial explosion, given enough distinct competences overall, it’s fairly easy to become the only one in the world who is reasonably good at a particular set of them.
In this framework, the focus then shifts from putting all the effort into developing a single skill, to choosing distinct skills that have a good balance of synergies vs. nonobvious pairings (ie., some skills so naturally go together that having both don’t add much to your useful uniqueness, which is one thing to optimise for here).
“as above, so below”.
I’m reminded of commentary about scale in role-playing games, how a party goes from concerning itself with a single town to a region, a country, a planet, a galaxy, a plane of existence, as it grows in power and influence.
At any scale, there’s something to look up at, and something to look down on.
This also feels adjacent to a thing which bothers me about the internet: Most of our ancestors existed in groups of a size where it was reasonable for each individual to be the best-in-the-group at something. As connectivity makes groups larger, it erases those nooks of comfort in which one can be meaningfully best, valued, etc. Or maybe that’s more about a ratio of critics to experts—digital transformation brings all claims into a world where there are many people who can tear them apart, but few to no people who with sufficient expertise to create something likely to robustly withstand its expected criticism.
There’s also something around here about social pressures and these nooks. My career is several nooks “up” from my parents’ world, and while I’m actually doing relatively poorly at it by this nook’s standards, I seem to be doing great by my parents’ standards because they can only judge my present status by those few signals which apply to both their nook and mine. If we frame nooks as levels of “accomplishment”, there are also certain social pressures against dropping down through them, even intentionally. Consider how your current friends might regard you if you returned to the life and worldview of the hometown friends who “never escaped”.
Re: group size and expertise, the life strategy I feel most drawn to as a response follows this argument:
It takes approximately all the effort to be the best at something. By the pareto principle, it takes a meaningfully trivial amount of effort to be reasonably good at something. You can thus become reasonably good at several things. When you are reasonably good at several things, you in yourself form a cross-disciplinary team of those competences, with VERY GOOD intra-team communication. By combinatorial explosion, given enough distinct competences overall, it’s fairly easy to become the only one in the world who is reasonably good at a particular set of them.
In this framework, the focus then shifts from putting all the effort into developing a single skill, to choosing distinct skills that have a good balance of synergies vs. nonobvious pairings (ie., some skills so naturally go together that having both don’t add much to your useful uniqueness, which is one thing to optimise for here).