One example was the self-help blog of Phillip Eby (pjeby), where each new post seemed to bring new amazing insights, and after a while you became jaded.
Around that time, I started pushing for a (partly LW-inspired) greater focus on empirical improvement in my work, because there was just too much randomness in how long the effects of my then-current techniques would last. Some things were permanent or nearly-so, and others might only last a few days or weeks… and I had no reliable way to predict what the outcome of a particular instance of application would be.
It was a tough shift, because at the time I also had no way to know for sure that anything more reliable or predictable in fact existed, but unlike the more “faith-based” self-help folks, I couldn’t just keep ignoring the anomalies in my results.
The good news is I got over that hump and developed more reliable methods. The bad news is that it didn’t involve brilliant simple epiphanies, but lots and lots of little hard-won insights and the correlation of tons of practical knowledge.
(And one of those bits of practical knowledge is how to avoid stopping at the “epiphany” phase of a given insight.)
Anyway, I quit blogging about it (at least to the general public) because once you’re no longer dealing in simple epiphanies, there starts to be too much inferential distance to be able to talk about anything meaningful, short of creating my own Sequences to reconstruct the inferential chains… one mini-epiphany at a time.
Phillip, I apologize for using you as an example, but will still keep it in the post because it’s such a nice example :-) It’s very good to hear that you came to similar conclusions eventually, I didn’t know that!
Perhaps it would become an even better example, then, by adding a link to the relevant post, e.g. “and after a while you became jaded, until even he realized it was a loop”. ;-)
Er, you do realize I stopped most of my blogging for more or less that reason, right?
Around that time, I started pushing for a (partly LW-inspired) greater focus on empirical improvement in my work, because there was just too much randomness in how long the effects of my then-current techniques would last. Some things were permanent or nearly-so, and others might only last a few days or weeks… and I had no reliable way to predict what the outcome of a particular instance of application would be.
It was a tough shift, because at the time I also had no way to know for sure that anything more reliable or predictable in fact existed, but unlike the more “faith-based” self-help folks, I couldn’t just keep ignoring the anomalies in my results.
The good news is I got over that hump and developed more reliable methods. The bad news is that it didn’t involve brilliant simple epiphanies, but lots and lots of little hard-won insights and the correlation of tons of practical knowledge.
(And one of those bits of practical knowledge is how to avoid stopping at the “epiphany” phase of a given insight.)
Anyway, I quit blogging about it (at least to the general public) because once you’re no longer dealing in simple epiphanies, there starts to be too much inferential distance to be able to talk about anything meaningful, short of creating my own Sequences to reconstruct the inferential chains… one mini-epiphany at a time.
Please do!
Hoping to find more epiphanies?
Phillip, I apologize for using you as an example, but will still keep it in the post because it’s such a nice example :-) It’s very good to hear that you came to similar conclusions eventually, I didn’t know that!
Perhaps it would become an even better example, then, by adding a link to the relevant post, e.g. “and after a while you became jaded, until even he realized it was a loop”. ;-)