I’ve noticed in myself a strong preference for focusing on the meta level. It’s most visible in fields dear to me, like writing. For example, I’ll spend much more time reading up on rhetoric or tracking down rare 1980′s books about writing techniques than practicing writing essays or stories.
I don’t like this because my ultimate goal in studying the meta level is to get better at the object level. At the same time, I am sometimes rewarded for going so meta. I’ve gotten a lot of respect at work paired with feedback that I provide excellent feedback and perspectives.
There don’t seem to be immediately painful effects of this state. I have a family and a job and my life seems in order overall. But there’s a hunger for a) putting theory to the test and seeing results (ie. making meta pay rent), and b) learning from direct experiences & sharing those experiences with others. Meta is a lonely place to be.
I don’t think I’m the only one in this position. I found these two posts with just a few seconds of searching (I’m sure there’s more): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/g2AKPEzFdQitmpTDu/meta-addiction https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RnP5bR767NcxebYHd/conjecture-on-addiction-to-meta-level-solutions
The last few days, I’ve been catching myself starting on a meta-deepening activity and consciously switching to an object-level task. It’s been rewarding so far, so I believe that in a few weeks, my habits will shift toward where I want to be.
But I’m curious: has anyone else experience something similar? How did it go for you? What did you do?
Build things.
I initially thought this comment wasn’t very helpful, since, like, the guy already knows he needs to build things. Then I went to try to write a better comment… and found it drifting in a kind of meta-direction that seemed maybe anti-helpful in this particular situation. And then looked back at this comment and...
...yeah. I think there is something to be said for just “build things.”
Huh, I think “build things” is a meta comment, and on the lower end of helpfulness at that.
Said’s later comment with definitions for “building” and “things” seems significantly more helpful.
I had the same experience. I was essentially going to say “meta is only useful insofar as it helps you and others do object-level things, so focus on building object-level things...” oh.
With a time limit, enforced by someone else if you can’t do it yourself. Actual stakes that you care about if you fail are also helpful.
If you can’t do this with a job, do it with a hobby organization (e.g., offer to teach a workshop on the thing you want to build).
I haven’t found any of these conditions to be necessary, though of course YMMV.
What matters is that you build some concrete thing, for people (not just yourself) to actually use. The details are inconsequential (and will take care of themselves, if you care about building it right) as long as that basic goal structure is in place.
Find an area of the thing you want to do where quality matters to you less. Instead of trying to write the next great American novel, write fanfic[1]. Instead of trying to paint a masterpiece, buy a sketchbook and trace a bunch of stuff. Instead of trying to replace your dish-ware with handmade ceramics, see how many mugs you can make in an hour. Instead of trying to invent a new beautiful operating system in a new programming language, hack together a program for a one-off use case and then throw it away.
[1] not a diss to fanfic—but for me, at least, it’s easier to not worry about my writing quality when I do so
Some things that help me with this:
pots theory of art (which was actually about film photography, which I think was unusually likely to benefit from more raw attempts, but chanting “pots theory” still helps me).
Zefrank’s Brain Crack video. This is the guy who does True Facts about [Animals] and the sad cat diaries, so he has credibility on artistic work.
Remember my taste will always exceed my ability and it would kind of be a bad sign if I could live up to my own standard of perfection.
The pots theory reminded of this bit about creativity:
It struck me that, to extend the pots example, if you’re setting out to produce a god-tier pot, it entails massive resources and risk. It behooves you thus to avoid taking up such quests as much as possible, which in reality translates to creating pots when directed by an outside source, like a teacher or social pressure or whatever.
But if you’re out to churn out 50 pots a semester, it’s a cheap and risk-free endeavor. After all, you could probably make 42 or 52 or exactly 50 meh pots in a couple of days and still get an A. But that’s kind of boring, why not find something cool or fun to do with those pots? Make really slim ones that beg the question if they’re pots or pipes. Make a clay klein bottle. Make personalized pots that you will gift to your friends later. Make cube pots. Make a clay Rube Goldberg pot-device. Sky’s the limit.
Some other advice for getting started with the object level might be “start small and repeatable”. The worst case scenario is if you run out of energy before getting the reward for finishing, and can’t pick it back up. Plus you’re probably doing a new thing without expertise, so you’ll learn a lot from repetition with variation.
Projects that are technically object level but are too big or require too much learning to be practical are another meta trap for me.
Cultivate an appreciation for the object level
When I pay attention, some object level stuff feels nourishing, the same way certain food feels more nourishing even when it’s not as dopamine-inducing as hyperpalatable snacks. Sounds like you’re already doing this
Let meta be leisure
It’s pretty bad to do meta with the false justification it’s advancing a goal, but the problem is in the false justification, not the meta itself. I’m allowed to do things just because I enjoy them, and I enjoy meta, so I do it. As long as I’m honest about why I’m doing it it seems no worse for me than competing leisure activities, and there are occasional pay offs.
Some examples of this:
I have a productivity porn list on GoodReads and pull from it whenever I want peppy vibes, without the illusion the content will transform my life.
Writing my plans down on fancy post-its makes me happy. It might also help with planning or organizing my thoughts, but mostly I’m in it for the fancy post-its.
Thanks! Your comment made me realize I built sort of trap for myself: I would go for meta when I would be tired, telling myself “hey, maybe I’m not pushing on The Thing, but at least I’m pushing on it indirectly.” But that slowly moved me farther and farther away from The Thing because if I can keeping pushing on it with less energy by going meta, why would I ever push on the object-level which costs more energy for the same effect?
But the effect is not the same of course. I just tricked myself.
Also, from your other comment, the pots theory really resonated because it sounds so much like play—making 50 pots creates so much space for experimentation and silliness!
This makes me think maybe there’s more to explore about rest for you? Like, maybe you’re not doing more object level because you’re out of energy, and with more energy you’d automatically do more. Maybe a bottleneck is learning how to properly rest instead of spending down whatever energy you have (an issue I struggle with too). Maybe you’re doing a perfectly reasonable amount of actual work, but are holding yourself to an unrealistic standard.
I’m not confident in any of the specifics but if fatigue is what pushes you from object level to meta it seems worth exploring.
Funny/uncanny to read this. This is something I’ve just started working on (+improving sleep) maybe two weeks ago.
How does this work for you if you don’t mind me asking?
I spent a long time simplifying my life so that the number of things I needed to do really was manageable (which included limiting my freelance work to things that were either short or didn’t have deadlines. This required strategy and sacrifice on my end, but I also feel like I should own that I had other gifts that made it easier, like a set of skills people will sometimes pay a lot for even when I won’t do tight deadlines).
It was often hard for me to know what I was capable of because it fluctuates and because I sometimes won’t realize I’m spending down reserves until they’re gone, so it was really important not just that the overall workload be low, but that I be able to suddenly peace out without it being a disaster.
I also had to give up doing The Most Important Thing, in favor of Something That Will Actually Get Done. I think EA/rationality memes are paralyzing to a certain type of person, and what I really needed at the time was to do small things, for lots of reasons. the cumulative finishing of small things freed up energy in my life, it built a sense of efficacy, and it gave me information that was eventually useful in doing bigger things. I talk about this some here,
An intermediate point was, when choosing what to do for a day or week, forcing myself to think of one or two alternatives and choose between them. I didn’t have to pick the absolute best choice (which was I probably right was impossible, and was parayzling even if i was wrong), but I did have to think about my choice at all. This naturally built up the skill of identifying and choosing between options.
After things had been going well for several years, I started to get a sense that I really wanted more continuity and long term investment in my projects. This was different than the previous big-thinking, which was mostly about making other people happy (see the post I linked above). It was more like an itch, or a nutrient I needed. That started a little under two years ago. I spent the first year trying stuff, little of which panned out but I think I was following the right algorithm.
A little over one year ago I made a list of potential projects and resources they needed, and it became clear that getting myself more energy and time should be my top priority. Of ways to do that sleep was probably the most influential, except it was also affected by most things, so that didn’t really add much clarity. I spent three months with medical stuff being my primary focus, most of which was useless but at the very end I found a magic device that improved my life by 2 points out of 10 (unfortunately this only replicates for a few people).
I started creating or signing up for bigger commitments. I recently finished 2 months teaching at a summer program, and my next few months are spoken for by grants I applied for back in July (which was a big step for me, to be confident I’d want to stick with anything that long, and that I could predict it two months ahead of time). I’m currently in the middle of figuring out a project management system that will support my new workload, in addition to actually doing the work.
Something I want to caution here is that, if you’re like me, your body will eventually go on strike unless it believes in what you’re doing. So it was important to get myself internally aligned and pointed in the right direction before I stepped on the accelerator.
Thank you for sharing that. Parts of it resonate very strongly, like being unable to know how much fuel I have left, or practicing making choices, or the need for strategy (which is just dawning on me). It’s helpful to know that someone else has walked this path, at least the common part of it, and made it farther along.
I’ve been trying to learn how to play Super Smash Bros. Melee, lately.
Melee is a game that was accidentally created in such a way that has led to an enormous amount of competitive depth and room for improvement.
I’m in a somewhat unique position because I played it a bit as a kid but unlike a very large portion of the community, I know very little about the metagame, the movement tech, the lingo, what’s considered good or bad, etc.
The majority of the community, it seems, has either played for years already, or has watched the competitive scene for years already, or both. Most commonly, both. There is a huge resource of tutorials on YouTube and Reddit and various Discords and Google Docs, and it’s easier than ever to play via Slippi, which allows for painless online matchmaking and ranked mode.
Of course, I came in attempting to remain humble but also with some part of me screaming out that I’m about to become god’s gift to the game and destroy everyone with their preconceived notions of what’s good or bad, of how you’re ‘supposed to play’, et cetera.
And so, after a week or so of practice I entered a tournament specifically for beginners and got basically destroyed.
The only leg up I had on the competition was that I’m able to skip some of the initial hurdles of executing difficult things on a GameCube controller by deciding to play on a keyboard. This means that I’m fumbling around less than some order newbies and that gets me to a base level of competency that others seem to lack—“what?? you’ve only been playing a week? that’s crazy, you’re at the level of a month or two for sure”.
But a prodigy I am not. And so I went to the books. I’ve been watching the videos, and reading the docs, and looking at the frame data, and googling until I understand what a tech chase is, and what a ledgedash is, and every little bit helps, but I also have to practice everything I learn, preferably immediately after learning about it, or it doesn’t do a lick of good.
Melee in particular very clearly illustrates a process I’ve never quite experienced in the same way.
When you learn a given ‘tech’ (almost always some exploit in the game used by competitive players to gain an advantage), you usually first learn it by recognizing it. You see it happen in a match, or someone mentions it, or you read about it on a forum. Your brain creates a little pocket of space in the Melee zone called ‘wavedash’. Then, you learn what is is, why it’s used, and how to do it. The entry is filled in.
Then, you try it in practice mode, and you fail. Over and over. Eventually, you can do it maybe 50-70% of the time in practice mode.
That’s pretty decent, right? So we should be able to use it 50-70% of the time while we’re playing!
Nope. Unless your opponent is standing still or barely moving, you’re going to fumble it nearly every time when you start trying to use it in matches.
But when you hit it! When you start hitting it in a match, and especially if you use it in a way that gives you an advantage in the fight rather than just to show off, something clicks. And then when you see other people use it more adeptly than you, hopefully it makes even more sense. And when you go back to practice mode after using it a few times in a real match, you’re instantly more consistent at performing it. Using it in the pressure of the real situation, that solidifies it in your mind.
There’s a Japanese phrase, ‘swimming on a tatami mat’, to refer to practice that’s so far removed from reality that it accomplishes basically nothing.
To me, this all feels analogous to the language concept of Comprehensible Input. You can practice grammar and vocabulary all day long, but until someone speaks the word and you understand the meaning, it tends to easily slide off back into the noise. And then, to speak the word in appropriate context, in a real conversation, that solidifies it. First you learn what a wavedash is, then how to do it, then you practice the pronunciation, and then you use it in conversation. Only then do you begin to know what is truly meant in the conversation between two players when someone wavedashes. And the meaning that conveys between you and your buddy in a friendly match, compared to the meaning conveyed by two top players competing for a five-figure prize is like comparing preschool math to rocket science.
I’m reminded of a conversation I once had with a piano teacher I respect greatly who taught at a music store I worked at for some time. I had a friend who said he didn’t want to learn music by the books, he didn’t want to learn to read music, he didn’t want to practice scales or etudes, he just wanted to play, and learn that way. Why? “I don’t want to learn other people’s stuff, man, I want to make my music.”
I said, what do you think about my friend? Does he have any merit in this thinking? He said he wants lessons from you, but he doesn’t want to use the books. The teacher said, quite plainly, “He thinks he’s unique and forward thinking, breaking the mold, but I’ve had a hundred students like him. He’s lazy. It’s a cop-out. He doesn’t want to practice or study and just wants to skip to the result in his head. You have to learn the rules before you can break them. And if he was really the rare entirely self-taught savant, he’d be too busy playing to bother asking you, and too proud to want lessons from me.”
I think about that conversation pretty often. I try to use it to keep me grounded when I start feeling like I don’t need to learn the rules before I break them.
There’s a sort of legendary Melee player named Borp, who gained brief popularity and then vanished away, who didn’t use the wavedash, didn’t use any of the techskill that’s so ubiquitous, and managed to beat high ranking players using his unorthodox methods.
I think people like me, and like my friend, want to be Borp. The trendy meme right now would be that our toxic trait is believing we totally could be as good a Borp if we tried. But the secret of Borp which anyone who’s put a lot of work into the game will tell you, is that he’s good because he could do all that techskill and he chooses not to, he knows all of this stuff and then uses that to break the meta, he isn’t some guy off the street who picked up a Melee controller off the ground and started destroying people, every time he doesn’t use a wavedash is a conscious choice.
The meta element of anything is a necessary evil, and something that also must be tempered. You need to know the rules to break them, you need to not just watch the tutorial but understand it, and try it, and fail, and the try it in a real match, and fail, and then finally after a hundred matches of failing to hit it when you need it, you’ll start hitting it every time, and then you’ll use it way too much because you can finally do it. Then eventually, once you can pull it off without thinking, you’ll truly understand it, and stop using it so damn much just because you can, and it becomes another element of complexity and beauty to your expression of the craft.
Thank you for writing this out. It resonates with what’s happening in my head on a deeper, emotional level (“if I study enough meta, I will become a fearsome champion in my first match, ha ha”).
This is going on a post-it on my desk.
source
I think it’s similar to the divide between thinking/planning and actually acting. A sort of avoidance, of never being ready for action.
Do you know the “No free lunch theorem”? What’s specific is often more important and relevant than the general. A general solution might have more width, but you’re an individual person, and your life is specific to you. Why apply blunt, general tools to your very specific life? You know the information which is specific to your own circumstances, so throwing it away for a more generic approach would only have negative utility.
Lately I’ve been thinking that I should be more direct, more present, more engaged in the task at hand, and to be more personal and bold, like a person who loves his work rather than someone suffering from doubt about the quality of his approach.
For a very relevant but unique example, I see people who download mods to games all day, or perhaps assets to games like The Sims, only to play a single time and get bored again, perhaps only to download more.
For productivity, perhaps less knowledge is ideal at times, since he who knows less knows it better. I used to be very sure of myself and the value of what I was doing, but with knowledge grows doubt, so in learning about other peoples work, I’ve harmed my own approach badly by comparing them. If I don’t create something better than which already exists, I can no longer believe that it’s valuable.
Perhaps I’ve already said what I should, so that writing any more would be missing the mark, but another person commented with “build things”, and I can’t help but consider this valuable for the reasons that I wrote above. When you build, your creation is personal, it’s specific, and it’s an act of “actually doing” something.
And while my personal take on this seems a bit like intentional ignorance, I’ve always enjoyed work which had a soul, and I’ve always found soul to be inversely proportional to doubt. I know many people who have matured and come to doubt their own abilities, and worsened a lot as a consequence. The self-criticism and self-awareness basically killed all creative output, as well as the lightheartedness which allowed them to work tirelessly for hours on end. What once came easy to them is now difficult, and they have no confidence despite improving a lot.
This comment doesn’t have a strong rational focus, but I find that attitudes and mindsets have a stronger influence on the world than the level of correctness.
For a simple answer, I’m considering this approach: To no longer stand at the side-lines living in the world of potential, but to finally settle on something and to lose myself in it to the degree that I’m unable to see any meta-perspectives at all.
Most weekdays, I set the goal of myself of doing twelve focused blocks of 24 minutes of object level work (my variant on Pomodoro). Once I complete these blocks, I can do whatever I want—whether it be stop working for the rest of the day, more object level work, meta work, or anything else.
If you try something like this, I’d recommend setting a goal of doing 6(?) such blocks and then letting yourself do as much or as little meta as you want; and then potentially gradually working up to 10-13 blocks.
Here’s how I tried (I haven’t 100% succeeded): I decided that what goes on in my head wasn’t enough. For a long time it was enough, I’d think about the things that interested me and maybe discuss them with some people and then move on to the next thing. This went on for years and some time was spent thinking about how I might put all that mental discourse to use but I never did. I worked at day jobs producing things I didn’t care about and spent my free time exploring. Eventually I quit my day job, I spent more energy on personal pursuits anyway, and found ways to apply all my meta-practice on object level work. Eventually I landed in teaching and still get stuck in meta-land but find it useful to differentiate between understanding and intuition: Meta-level exploration is useful for improving understanding and object level practice improves intuition. I decided that understanding wasn’t enough.
I have had similar experiences with getting lost in the meta, as well as the isolated experience that it provides. In my case, it would manifest as me focusing on trying to improve my big-picture “system metaphor” for my IFS-esque mental multi-threading architecture (one of my most useful constructs), even when I was well past the point where it was worth trying to further refine the top-down granularity.
I did notice the trend eventually, and once I consciously acknowledged the problem I was able to visualize some fairly straightforward paths away from it… except that external circumstances were keeping me from having the resources I would need to act upon those paths. As an attempt to summarize: the system metaphor development was pretty low-computation due to it being a fishing expedition via intuition pump, and the more grounded paths I identified all required major concentration shifts away from daily routines that I couldn’t afford.
I ended up having to make a pretty major environment shift to try and escape that cycle, basically ditching parts of my life that were tying up the resources I wanted to draw upon to follow the non-meta paths. This was a fairly recent change and the dust hasn’t yet settled, but I’ve been able to hit the ground running again on non-meta activities.
I think this is a productivity/habit question disguised as something else. You know you want to do thing X, but instead procrastinate by doing thing Y. Here are some concrete suggestions for getting out of this trap:
Try Focusmate. Sign up and schedule a session. The goal of your first session will be to come up with a concrete project/exercise to do, if you have not already done so. The goal of your second session will be to make some progress on that project/exercise (e.g., write 1 page).
You can also use the same accountability technique with a friend, but Focusmate is probably easier since you can always schedule a session whenever you want, and you will feel more obliged to focus in the presence of a stranger.
I often start my day with scheduling Focusmate sessions. It is easier to schedule a session for future you to be productive during, and then to stick to that commitment, than to start being productive right away.
Try Beeminder. Sign up and set a goal to write object-level things for at least N minutes each day. If you fail to do so, Beeminder will charge you money. (I think N can be small—the difficult thing is to get started on the right task.)
Try other accountability devices. For example, tell a friend or partner that you commit to doing N minutes of object-level writing each week, and that you will report your progress to them weekly. If you did not do what you committed to, brainstorm ways to make it more likely that you do so next week.
I can see how this can look like procrastination from the outside. But I think in my case, it really is some weird jedi trickery where meta-level replaced the object-level (at much less energy cost—so why would I ever do object level?)
I’ve written more this week than in a long time just by clearly asking myself whether I’m doing something meta (fun, leisure) or object-level (building stuff) and there’s no ugh-field at all!