Why do more things? Tl;dr It feels good and is highly correlated with other metrics of success.
Partial counterargument: I find that I have to be careful not to do too many things. I really need some time for just thinking and reading and playing with models in order to have new ideas (and I suspect that’s true of many AIS researchers) and if I don’t prioritize it, that disappears in favor of only taking concrete steps on already-active things.
You kind of say this later in the post, with ‘Attention / energy is a valuable and limited resource. It should be conserved for high value things,’ which seems like a bit of a contradiction with the original premise :D
Yes, this is true—law of reversing advice holds. But I think two other things are true:
Intentionally trying to do more things makes you optimise more deliberately for being able to do many things. Having that ability is valuable, even if you don’t always exercise it
I think most people aren’t ’living their best lives”, in the sense that they’re not doing the volume of things they could be doing
Attention / energy is a valuable and limited resource. It should be conserved for high value things
It’s possibly not worded very well as you say :) I think it’s not a contradiction, because you can be doing only a small number of things at any given instant in time, but have an impressive throughput overall.
I think it’s not a contradiction, because you can be doing only a small number of things at any given instant in time, but have an impressive throughput overall.
I think that being good at avoiding wasted motion while doing things is pretty fundamental to resolving the contradiction.
Partial counterargument: I find that I have to be careful not to do too many things. I really need some time for just thinking and reading and playing with models in order to have new ideas (and I suspect that’s true of many AIS researchers) and if I don’t prioritize it, that disappears in favor of only taking concrete steps on already-active things.
You kind of say this later in the post, with ‘Attention / energy is a valuable and limited resource. It should be conserved for high value things,’ which seems like a bit of a contradiction with the original premise :D
Yes, this is true—law of reversing advice holds. But I think two other things are true:
Intentionally trying to do more things makes you optimise more deliberately for being able to do many things. Having that ability is valuable, even if you don’t always exercise it
I think most people aren’t ’living their best lives”, in the sense that they’re not doing the volume of things they could be doing
It’s possibly not worded very well as you say :) I think it’s not a contradiction, because you can be doing only a small number of things at any given instant in time, but have an impressive throughput overall.
I think that being good at avoiding wasted motion while doing things is pretty fundamental to resolving the contradiction.