Humans, by default, define success in part by social approval, and status is a zero sum game. If instead your goal is to live a life that you find meaningful, in a community you choose, and you manage to genuinely not care what the rest of society thinks of that, you end up with a lot more options. I may need lots of prestige to become a tenured professor at a top university, and getting that prestige is very costly, so yes, if that’s the kind of success you want, you’re going to pay in giving up other options.
Could Michael Jordan, instead of trying to become a professional baseball player, have retired from pro sports and founded a recreational league for former pro athletes interested in playing a wider range of sports? No sponsorships, no TV deals, no salaries, just playing for fun in a still-high-level environment? I don’t see who could have stopped him, he had enough money to do it and I doubt he would lack for interested participants. I’ve certainly heard enough stories of pro athletes who lose all joy they ever took in their primary sport.
Your Tetris player could have created a pseudonym and a second account where he never used his signature move, then later start incorporating the signature move into the second account’s play. Or just not care if his play suffered for a while, the surprise everyone with a comeback once he has two well-practiced signature moves. Who doesn’t love a comeback story? And then if he does it again, people won’t be surprised by it as much.
Deborah can tell her husband how unhappy she is, and if he worth having as a partner he’ll understand. They’ll sell the expensive house, live somewhere nice but modest, and she can write whatever she likes.
So yes: society lies to everyone about what “success” is and means. I’m a Harvard grad myself, and while I didn’t know this until several years in, most of what you get by going to a place like that is the opportunity to gain status, to form certain kinds of connections that are helpful for playing certain social games, and to be seen as a certain kind of person when it’s useful to do so. The math, physics, comp sci, and everything else you learn are the same there are at hundreds of other good schools.
Also, even in high status environments, it is sometimes possible to cultivate a reputation for being eclectic in various ways, but you have to be savvy enough to pull it off while still clearly “fitting in” enough to be worth keeping around. Flouting some norms can be an act of claiming high status, or it can be done in such a way it’s seen as adding more diverse but useful viewpoints. You can be the person people go to with problems so hard the conventional approaches aren’t working. Anna can rightly claim she was able to solve a major problem because of the other niches she studied, and if that doesn’t help she can look for a new advisor at the cost of a slower path to graduation. Or, she can leave academia (like most PhDs and PhD students do), live a life that provides her free time, and study anything she wants, publishing anything useful along the way. Does her field of pure math require full-time work and lots of grant funding, or just basic, widely available tools and her brain?
I certainly agree that all the things you suggest to maintain one’s freedom are technically possible. It is technically possible for Michael Jordan to abandon the entire status-oriented psychological machinery he built throughout his life to become the GOAT and play baseball in a recreational league. It is technically possible to simply stop caring about an entire dimension of human experience and set yourself free from society’s notion of success.
This post is a set of observations about how succeeding a second time in a different area is often harder than succeeding the first time. Of course it is still not impossible, and indeed it happens all the time, but significant extra effort is required that was not required the first time. This seems to me surprising and counterintuitive, because my initial model of such things was that success multiple times should only get easier and easier, since “gitting gud” is a cluster of highly generalizable skills.
Hmm, it seems maybe relevant that I don’t think of my various skill-acquiring periods in the past as about “success”? Or maybe that the thing my brain parses internally as success isn’t very defined by what society considers to be winning. When I moved from ICU nursing to operations work, it did involve going from somewhere I was acknowledged by my colleagues to be pretty good at and where I felt a lot of mastery, to somewhere where I was much more often making mistakes and getting criticism for them, and this was sometimes frustrating and hard. Still, my overall sense was still one where learning to be a good nurse gave me a ton of generalizable skills that transferred to ops and meant I could skill up a lot faster there. Possibly it helps that I picked nursing for reasons unrelated to its prestige, and in fact got a bunch of flak from people (including people in the rationalist community) about choosing this field.
Aside: the experience I’ve had that feels the most to my S1 like having “made it in life”, is participating in glowfic, a very niche online collaborative-rp-writing community. Writing fiction and having a couple of dozen people as avid fans of it is utterly maxing out my monkey brain’s metric for feeling high-status. I do think it’ll be a bit of an adjustment going back to full-time work of one sort or another (I’ve been doing a lot of this as a hobby while recovering from a serious medical issue, but will at some point be recovered enough to be productive on other things and will cut back substantially.) Possibly because it’s so niche and only involves a subset of my social circle, though, I don’t expect it to make learning different new skills feel like “losing.”
Human capability usually peaks around the age of 25; that’s about how old Einstein was during his “miracle year”. After that, everything gets gradually harder. For a while, it’s hardly noticeable unless you enter a new, hyper-competitive environment. Later on people rely on built up advantages to stay competitive. Eventually time makes fools of us all.
You’ll know more as you get older. You’ll have solutions cached for more problems. But your sheer ability to think will peak within a few years. Unless what you do is extremely IQ-intensive you won’t notice any significant decline for quite a while, but there’s a reason that 30 year old mathematicians are considered past their prime.
As far as being cross with the universe, there’s a support group for that. It’s called “everybody”. We used to meet daily after work in literally every bar, but the lockdowns have been rather disruptive.
Exactly. My point is that “succeeded a second time” isn’t a question of skill, it’s a question of societal status assignment mechanisms and the value we place on status. It’s true, I can’t claim any given individual can actually turn off the parts of their mind that care about status, but some people do happen to care less about that, and do go on to have multiple successes. Those kinds of figures tend to be somewhat polarizing personalities, but after the second time there is less resistance to the third. People expect it more of them.
Humans, by default, define success in part by social approval, and status is a zero sum game. If instead your goal is to live a life that you find meaningful, in a community you choose, and you manage to genuinely not care what the rest of society thinks of that, you end up with a lot more options. I may need lots of prestige to become a tenured professor at a top university, and getting that prestige is very costly, so yes, if that’s the kind of success you want, you’re going to pay in giving up other options.
Could Michael Jordan, instead of trying to become a professional baseball player, have retired from pro sports and founded a recreational league for former pro athletes interested in playing a wider range of sports? No sponsorships, no TV deals, no salaries, just playing for fun in a still-high-level environment? I don’t see who could have stopped him, he had enough money to do it and I doubt he would lack for interested participants. I’ve certainly heard enough stories of pro athletes who lose all joy they ever took in their primary sport.
Your Tetris player could have created a pseudonym and a second account where he never used his signature move, then later start incorporating the signature move into the second account’s play. Or just not care if his play suffered for a while, the surprise everyone with a comeback once he has two well-practiced signature moves. Who doesn’t love a comeback story? And then if he does it again, people won’t be surprised by it as much.
Deborah can tell her husband how unhappy she is, and if he worth having as a partner he’ll understand. They’ll sell the expensive house, live somewhere nice but modest, and she can write whatever she likes.
So yes: society lies to everyone about what “success” is and means. I’m a Harvard grad myself, and while I didn’t know this until several years in, most of what you get by going to a place like that is the opportunity to gain status, to form certain kinds of connections that are helpful for playing certain social games, and to be seen as a certain kind of person when it’s useful to do so. The math, physics, comp sci, and everything else you learn are the same there are at hundreds of other good schools.
Also, even in high status environments, it is sometimes possible to cultivate a reputation for being eclectic in various ways, but you have to be savvy enough to pull it off while still clearly “fitting in” enough to be worth keeping around. Flouting some norms can be an act of claiming high status, or it can be done in such a way it’s seen as adding more diverse but useful viewpoints. You can be the person people go to with problems so hard the conventional approaches aren’t working. Anna can rightly claim she was able to solve a major problem because of the other niches she studied, and if that doesn’t help she can look for a new advisor at the cost of a slower path to graduation. Or, she can leave academia (like most PhDs and PhD students do), live a life that provides her free time, and study anything she wants, publishing anything useful along the way. Does her field of pure math require full-time work and lots of grant funding, or just basic, widely available tools and her brain?
I certainly agree that all the things you suggest to maintain one’s freedom are technically possible. It is technically possible for Michael Jordan to abandon the entire status-oriented psychological machinery he built throughout his life to become the GOAT and play baseball in a recreational league. It is technically possible to simply stop caring about an entire dimension of human experience and set yourself free from society’s notion of success.
This post is a set of observations about how succeeding a second time in a different area is often harder than succeeding the first time. Of course it is still not impossible, and indeed it happens all the time, but significant extra effort is required that was not required the first time. This seems to me surprising and counterintuitive, because my initial model of such things was that success multiple times should only get easier and easier, since “gitting gud” is a cluster of highly generalizable skills.
Hmm, it seems maybe relevant that I don’t think of my various skill-acquiring periods in the past as about “success”? Or maybe that the thing my brain parses internally as success isn’t very defined by what society considers to be winning. When I moved from ICU nursing to operations work, it did involve going from somewhere I was acknowledged by my colleagues to be pretty good at and where I felt a lot of mastery, to somewhere where I was much more often making mistakes and getting criticism for them, and this was sometimes frustrating and hard. Still, my overall sense was still one where learning to be a good nurse gave me a ton of generalizable skills that transferred to ops and meant I could skill up a lot faster there. Possibly it helps that I picked nursing for reasons unrelated to its prestige, and in fact got a bunch of flak from people (including people in the rationalist community) about choosing this field.
Aside: the experience I’ve had that feels the most to my S1 like having “made it in life”, is participating in glowfic, a very niche online collaborative-rp-writing community. Writing fiction and having a couple of dozen people as avid fans of it is utterly maxing out my monkey brain’s metric for feeling high-status. I do think it’ll be a bit of an adjustment going back to full-time work of one sort or another (I’ve been doing a lot of this as a hobby while recovering from a serious medical issue, but will at some point be recovered enough to be productive on other things and will cut back substantially.) Possibly because it’s so niche and only involves a subset of my social circle, though, I don’t expect it to make learning different new skills feel like “losing.”
Human capability usually peaks around the age of 25; that’s about how old Einstein was during his “miracle year”. After that, everything gets gradually harder. For a while, it’s hardly noticeable unless you enter a new, hyper-competitive environment. Later on people rely on built up advantages to stay competitive. Eventually time makes fools of us all.
I’m 23 and I still feel like a child who knows nothing. If I peak in two years I will be very cross with the universe.
You’ll know more as you get older. You’ll have solutions cached for more problems. But your sheer ability to think will peak within a few years. Unless what you do is extremely IQ-intensive you won’t notice any significant decline for quite a while, but there’s a reason that 30 year old mathematicians are considered past their prime.
As far as being cross with the universe, there’s a support group for that. It’s called “everybody”. We used to meet daily after work in literally every bar, but the lockdowns have been rather disruptive.
Exactly. My point is that “succeeded a second time” isn’t a question of skill, it’s a question of societal status assignment mechanisms and the value we place on status. It’s true, I can’t claim any given individual can actually turn off the parts of their mind that care about status, but some people do happen to care less about that, and do go on to have multiple successes. Those kinds of figures tend to be somewhat polarizing personalities, but after the second time there is less resistance to the third. People expect it more of them.