(Context: I’ve been following the series in which this post appeared, and originally posted this comment on the substack version.)
Overcompressed summary of this post: “Look, man, you are not bottlenecked on models of the world, you are bottlenecked on iteration count. You need to just Actually Do The Thing a lot more times; you will get far more mileage out of iterating more than out of modeling stuff.”.
I definitely buy that claim for at least some people, but it seems quite false in general for relationships/dating.
Like, sure, most problems can be solved by iterating infinitely many times. The point of world models is to not need so many damn iterations. And because we live in a very high-dimensional world, naive iteration will often not work at all without a decent world model; one will never try the right things without having some prior idea of where to look.
Example: Aella’s series on how to be good in bed. I was solidly in the audience for that post: I’d previously spent plenty of iterations becoming better in bed, ended up with solid mechanics, but consistently delivering great orgasms does not translate to one’s partner wanting much sex. Another decade of iteration would not have fixed that problem; I would not have tried the right things, my partner would not have given the right feedback (indeed, much of her feedback was in exactly the wrong direction). Aella pointed in the right vague direction, and exploring in that vague direction worked within only a few iterations. That’s the value of models: they steer the search so that one needs fewer iterations.
That’s the point of all the blog posts. That’s where the value is, when blog posts are delivering value. And that’s what’s been frustratingly missing from this series so far. (Most of my value of this series has been from frustratedly noticing the ways in which it fails to deliver, and thereby better understanding what I wish it would deliver!) No, I don’t expect to e.g. need 0 iterations after reading, but I want to at least decrease the number of iterations.
And in regards to “I don’t think you know what you want in dating”… the iteration problem still applies there! It is so much easier to figure out what I want, with far fewer iterations, when I have better background models of what people typically want. Yes, there’s a necessary skill of not shoving yourself into a box someone else drew, but the box can still be extremely valuable as evidence of the vague direction in which your own wants might be located.
(Context: I’ve been following the series in which this post appeared, and originally posted this comment on the substack version.)
Overcompressed summary of this post: “Look, man, you are not bottlenecked on models of the world, you are bottlenecked on iteration count. You need to just Actually Do The Thing a lot more times; you will get far more mileage out of iterating more than out of modeling stuff.”.
I definitely buy that claim for at least some people, but it seems quite false in general for relationships/dating.
Like, sure, most problems can be solved by iterating infinitely many times. The point of world models is to not need so many damn iterations. And because we live in a very high-dimensional world, naive iteration will often not work at all without a decent world model; one will never try the right things without having some prior idea of where to look.
Example: Aella’s series on how to be good in bed. I was solidly in the audience for that post: I’d previously spent plenty of iterations becoming better in bed, ended up with solid mechanics, but consistently delivering great orgasms does not translate to one’s partner wanting much sex. Another decade of iteration would not have fixed that problem; I would not have tried the right things, my partner would not have given the right feedback (indeed, much of her feedback was in exactly the wrong direction). Aella pointed in the right vague direction, and exploring in that vague direction worked within only a few iterations. That’s the value of models: they steer the search so that one needs fewer iterations.
That’s the point of all the blog posts. That’s where the value is, when blog posts are delivering value. And that’s what’s been frustratingly missing from this series so far. (Most of my value of this series has been from frustratedly noticing the ways in which it fails to deliver, and thereby better understanding what I wish it would deliver!) No, I don’t expect to e.g. need 0 iterations after reading, but I want to at least decrease the number of iterations.
And in regards to “I don’t think you know what you want in dating”… the iteration problem still applies there! It is so much easier to figure out what I want, with far fewer iterations, when I have better background models of what people typically want. Yes, there’s a necessary skill of not shoving yourself into a box someone else drew, but the box can still be extremely valuable as evidence of the vague direction in which your own wants might be located.