You don’t really mention <a thing that I think is extremely crucial> in this domain, which is that you do not have to (metaphorically) be an earthbender about everything. Other types of bending also exist. If you are not a native earthbender, you might be able to learn to do it (the real world does not have only one Chosen One who can bend all the elements), but as a meta-waterbender I personally recommend first looking around carefully, and trying to figure out how the most successful benders of your native element are doing it.
You do seem to see earthbending as maybe a “last resort” rather than the only way to do things, but it’s not obvious to me that it’s the correct last resort for everyone. The last resort of a successful airbender is probably more like “take even more steps back to see if there are any easier but more oblique approaches to this summit, or even other summits you’d actually rather climb”;
Sure; if it’s not obvious they’re from the universe of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Earthbending is substantially about: facing things head-on, “just getting it done”, “buckling down” (though I suppose this can be different than “buckling up”), being unyielding, orienting around “grit”.
Waterbending is substantially about: Being flexible, responsive to the environment, and careful.
Airbending is substantially about: Freedom of movement and action, using an opponent’s strength against them (which in PvE looks more like “doing what’s easy and/or fun”), speed.
The other one is firebending, but I didn’t reference it and I don’t really understand it well enough to put it in the same terms; still, my best gloss attempt is that it’s about focused and kinda bursty / lower-endurance intensity.
In the universe there are (usually) only these four elements, and most benders are pure specialists / only physically capable of learning their particular kind of bending; the main character (the avatar) is the only person who can / has to learn all four. In my analogy these elements don’t really cover the space of motivational structures that well, and anyway people don’t have to be specialists.
For reference, here’s Claude Opus 4′s summary of the styles:
EARTHBENDING
Neutral jing—waiting and listening before acting. Direct confrontation when the time comes—problems don’t go away by ignoring them. Being immovable and unmoved, enduring through standing firm rather than through continuous output. Drawing strength from solid foundations and deep roots. Meet challenges head-on, but only after patient observation and understanding what you’re facing.
WATERBENDING
The path of least resistance is often the most powerful. Push and pull, give and take—everything flows in cycles. Flexibility can overcome rigidity. Draw strength from external sources and community. Change is the only constant.
AIRBENDING
Freedom through detachment. The leaf doesn’t resist the wind. Conflict is an illusion that can be sidestepped. Joy and play are valid approaches to serious matters. New perspectives emerge when you release fixed positions.
FIREBENDING
Power comes from within—your drive, your breath, your life force. Act decisively from internal conviction and passion, maintaining intensity by continuously generating energy from within rather than standing firm. The sun gives life as well as destruction. Inner fire must be tended and controlled, not suppressed or allowed to rage wild.
I intended this disclaimer to at least touch on (what I think you) mean.
When you’re bouncing around, and in particular, you don’t feel like you’re getting much value out of any of the things you’re doing. (Sometimes structured-procrastination is a reasonable way for mull over a problem, but, in my experience, when I’m switching between a bunch of different versions of ‘doomscrolling’ or working on clearly low-value tasks, it’s a particularly good time to “buckle up”)
(I’m not really sure what you mean by “meta-waterbender” vs “airbender”. I guess to be fair I was also sort of confused by the distinction between water and airbenders in the show. I could see the distinction if I squint but they seemed least-different of all the elements)
I considered adding more extensive disclaimers. I didn’t do that for… uh, the maybe aggravating, maybe slightly-bad (but IMO not strictly bad) reason of “people don’t really comment on posts that get everything right and are super careful to disclaim everything appropriately”, and, uh, I selfishly/motivationally wanted more comments on my posts in this series so decided to lean in the direction of rushing it out the door less carefully.
But, I did just update the Triggers Section to make it a bit more explicit, and if you think there’s a better way of phrasing The Thing You Mean To Be Pointing At I’m interested.
I think I maybe mean to say a slightly different thing than came across, which makes sense because I was leaning heavily into the metaphor rather than trying to be very clear.
I think the triggers are definitely hints in the direction that buckling up might be the right move. Yet I also observe that, when I imagine the median or even 80th percentile person-explicitly-buckling-up-for-something-big, a big part of me wants to shake my head and be like “ah well, it was nice while it lasted” about their chances of doing a hard thing, especially an unusual hard thing.
This part of me is clearly wrong sometimes: My head would have shaken well off my shoulders if someone had told me-transported-to-1986, “Andrew Wiles is going to spend the next 6 years trying in secret solitude to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem”.
But also I think it’s clearly not entirely mistaken about such a person’s odds. If a person is a native “airbender”, i.e. they are deeply familiar with the “taking their situation lightly” stance, I don’t think I want to recommend that they take a sense of “welp, I guess I have to finally buckle up for this one” at face value, especially in the context of it being a last-resort for one of their most challenging projects or goals. It feels to me like such a person is more likely to succeed by (a) deciding to stop flailing, (b) retreating to a safe distance, and (c) reevaluating whether this is the path they really want to follow, while in connection with their sense of fun.
I’d be interested in some of the mental moves your thinking of as alternatives, and what triggers distinguish when it’s a more buckling-down-time than the-other-thing-benwr-is-imagining time.
(I realize a full version of this is asking to write your own sequence of rationality-TAPs, but, interested in a quick table of contents if you got it)
Also: the particular “buckle up” move I’m imagining is for things that are more like “1 to 16 hours of concentrated work”. For things that are like months or years of work, there’s some equivalent of “buckle up” but it’s enough of a different move I’d probably write a pretty different post about it.
@benwr oh I guess I did very specifically include a longer timescale example, so, uh, whoops. I do think there are fairly different flavors to the shorter term and longer term ones.
Yeah I can try to say some of them, though my sense of the crucialness here does shift on learning that you mean for this to be about hour-to-week levels of effort. I guess I may as well try to come up with element-bending-flavored ones since I’m in pretty deep on that metaphor here.
The biggest differences in which one I’d recommend as a “default last resort” depend on the person and their strengths rather than the situation.
The thing recommended for the airbender above, i.e. “retreat to a safe distance and consider if there’s anything that seems like a fun challenge instead of a grind”.
For a firebender: “Commit to doing it really hard for about [30 minutes]. See where you get. Wait [2 * 30 minutes] after that, and check if you feel energized or drained. If energized, repeat; if drained, [I don’t know; this is the one I have the least familiarity with]”
For a waterbender: Something like “Do naturalism to it”. “When you make good enough observations, you can’t help but make high-quality inferences” is one of my favorite quotes, and I think it applies especially well in this kind of last-resort setting.
On one hand, I actually didn’t really mean “buckle up” to be very specific in terms of what move comes next. The most important thing is recognizing “this is a hard problem, your easy-mode cognitive tools probably won’t work.”
(I think all the moves you list there are totally valid tools to bring to bear in that context, which are all more strategic than “just try the next intuitive thing”)
On the other hand… the OP does sure have a vibe about particular flavors of problem/solution, and it’s not an accident that I wrote a thing that resonates with me with that you feel wary of.
But, leaning into that… I’m a bit confused why the options you list here are “last resorts” as opposed to “the first thing you try once noticing the problem is hard”. Like the airbender should be looking for a way for it to feel fun pretty early in the process. The “last resort” is whatever comes after all the tools that came more naturally to the airbender turn out not to work. (Which is in fact how Aang learned Earthbending).
((notably, I think I spent most of my life more airbendery. And the past ~2 years of me focusing on techniques that involve annoying effort is that the non-annoying-brute-force-y techniques weren’t solving the problems I wanted to solve.))
But I think the first-hand is more the point – this is less about “the next steps will involve something annoying/powerthrough-y” and more “I should probably emotionally prepare for the possibility that the next steps will involve something annoying/power-through-y”
Right, I think it just seems like doing emotional preparation that matches this description is a kind of earthbender-friendly / earthbender-assuming move, while an airbender-friendly move would be more like “notice and accept that you’d have more fun doing it a different way or doing a different thing; that flailing isn’t actually fun”. The effect is kind of similar, i.e. both earthbenders and airbenders should come away less-clinging-to-something, but the earthbender comes away less-clinging-to “the locally easy and straightforward things will work if I do them enough” while the airbender is less-clinging-to something more like “This is what I’d choose”.
Re the last-resort framing, I’m not sure why I said that exactly; I think it’s related to the vibe I got from the OP: Like, “if you notice that you’re not making progress, what do you do? Well, you could keep flailing or avoidantly doomscrolling, or you could [do the thing I’m suggesting], or you could give up in despair”; I think it feels like a “last resort” because the other realistic options presented are kind of like different kinds of death?
The link doesn’t work but think I know the comment you’re referring to but I found those explanations too vague to be useful. I’d really like just another analogy.
Are they saying that once one has realized that they need to buckle up that one can either face it head on (what does that mean? “just get it done”—it’s not getting done, hence the resignation to buckling up for a protracted process, how does this attitude change the completion or resolution of the problem?).
“Airbending is substantially about: Freedom of movement and action, using an opponent’s strength against them (which in PvE looks more like “doing what’s easy and/or fun”), speed.”
I’m really struggling to think of a real world situation where I can use this analogy to solve a protracted problem. It seems like you either have “freedom of movement” or you don’t—you can’t opt in. For example, if you’re in a hostile corporate take over the party with the most liquid capital likely has the most freedom of movement since they can outlast the other side… man I wish I had corporate takeover level cash...)
You don’t really mention <a thing that I think is extremely crucial> in this domain, which is that you do not have to (metaphorically) be an earthbender about everything. Other types of bending also exist. If you are not a native earthbender, you might be able to learn to do it (the real world does not have only one Chosen One who can bend all the elements), but as a meta-waterbender I personally recommend first looking around carefully, and trying to figure out how the most successful benders of your native element are doing it.
You do seem to see earthbending as maybe a “last resort” rather than the only way to do things, but it’s not obvious to me that it’s the correct last resort for everyone. The last resort of a successful airbender is probably more like “take even more steps back to see if there are any easier but more oblique approaches to this summit, or even other summits you’d actually rather climb”;
got more exposition on what you mean with the different elements in this context?
Sure; if it’s not obvious they’re from the universe of Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Earthbending is substantially about: facing things head-on, “just getting it done”, “buckling down” (though I suppose this can be different than “buckling up”), being unyielding, orienting around “grit”.
Waterbending is substantially about: Being flexible, responsive to the environment, and careful.
Airbending is substantially about: Freedom of movement and action, using an opponent’s strength against them (which in PvE looks more like “doing what’s easy and/or fun”), speed.
The other one is firebending, but I didn’t reference it and I don’t really understand it well enough to put it in the same terms; still, my best gloss attempt is that it’s about focused and kinda bursty / lower-endurance intensity.
In the universe there are (usually) only these four elements, and most benders are pure specialists / only physically capable of learning their particular kind of bending; the main character (the avatar) is the only person who can / has to learn all four. In my analogy these elements don’t really cover the space of motivational structures that well, and anyway people don’t have to be specialists.
Thanks! (I knew enough about Avatar to know what you wrote in your last paragraph, but the rest is new to me)
For reference, here’s Claude Opus 4′s summary of the styles:
EARTHBENDING Neutral jing—waiting and listening before acting. Direct confrontation when the time comes—problems don’t go away by ignoring them. Being immovable and unmoved, enduring through standing firm rather than through continuous output. Drawing strength from solid foundations and deep roots. Meet challenges head-on, but only after patient observation and understanding what you’re facing.
WATERBENDING The path of least resistance is often the most powerful. Push and pull, give and take—everything flows in cycles. Flexibility can overcome rigidity. Draw strength from external sources and community. Change is the only constant.
AIRBENDING Freedom through detachment. The leaf doesn’t resist the wind. Conflict is an illusion that can be sidestepped. Joy and play are valid approaches to serious matters. New perspectives emerge when you release fixed positions.
FIREBENDING Power comes from within—your drive, your breath, your life force. Act decisively from internal conviction and passion, maintaining intensity by continuously generating energy from within rather than standing firm. The sun gives life as well as destruction. Inner fire must be tended and controlled, not suppressed or allowed to rage wild.
I intended this disclaimer to at least touch on (what I think you) mean.
(I’m not really sure what you mean by “meta-waterbender” vs “airbender”. I guess to be fair I was also sort of confused by the distinction between water and airbenders in the show. I could see the distinction if I squint but they seemed least-different of all the elements)
I considered adding more extensive disclaimers. I didn’t do that for… uh, the maybe aggravating, maybe slightly-bad (but IMO not strictly bad) reason of “people don’t really comment on posts that get everything right and are super careful to disclaim everything appropriately”, and, uh, I selfishly/motivationally wanted more comments on my posts in this series so decided to lean in the direction of rushing it out the door less carefully.
But, I did just update the Triggers Section to make it a bit more explicit, and if you think there’s a better way of phrasing The Thing You Mean To Be Pointing At I’m interested.
I think I maybe mean to say a slightly different thing than came across, which makes sense because I was leaning heavily into the metaphor rather than trying to be very clear.
I think the triggers are definitely hints in the direction that buckling up might be the right move. Yet I also observe that, when I imagine the median or even 80th percentile person-explicitly-buckling-up-for-something-big, a big part of me wants to shake my head and be like “ah well, it was nice while it lasted” about their chances of doing a hard thing, especially an unusual hard thing.
This part of me is clearly wrong sometimes: My head would have shaken well off my shoulders if someone had told me-transported-to-1986, “Andrew Wiles is going to spend the next 6 years trying in secret solitude to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem”.
But also I think it’s clearly not entirely mistaken about such a person’s odds. If a person is a native “airbender”, i.e. they are deeply familiar with the “taking their situation lightly” stance, I don’t think I want to recommend that they take a sense of “welp, I guess I have to finally buckle up for this one” at face value, especially in the context of it being a last-resort for one of their most challenging projects or goals. It feels to me like such a person is more likely to succeed by (a) deciding to stop flailing, (b) retreating to a safe distance, and (c) reevaluating whether this is the path they really want to follow, while in connection with their sense of fun.
I’d be interested in some of the mental moves your thinking of as alternatives, and what triggers distinguish when it’s a more buckling-down-time than the-other-thing-benwr-is-imagining time.
(I realize a full version of this is asking to write your own sequence of rationality-TAPs, but, interested in a quick table of contents if you got it)
Also: the particular “buckle up” move I’m imagining is for things that are more like “1 to 16 hours of concentrated work”. For things that are like months or years of work, there’s some equivalent of “buckle up” but it’s enough of a different move I’d probably write a pretty different post about it.
@benwr oh I guess I did very specifically include a longer timescale example, so, uh, whoops. I do think there are fairly different flavors to the shorter term and longer term ones.
Yeah I can try to say some of them, though my sense of the crucialness here does shift on learning that you mean for this to be about hour-to-week levels of effort. I guess I may as well try to come up with element-bending-flavored ones since I’m in pretty deep on that metaphor here.
The biggest differences in which one I’d recommend as a “default last resort” depend on the person and their strengths rather than the situation.
The thing recommended for the airbender above, i.e. “retreat to a safe distance and consider if there’s anything that seems like a fun challenge instead of a grind”.
For a firebender: “Commit to doing it really hard for about [30 minutes]. See where you get. Wait [2 * 30 minutes] after that, and check if you feel energized or drained. If energized, repeat; if drained, [I don’t know; this is the one I have the least familiarity with]”
For a waterbender: Something like “Do naturalism to it”. “When you make good enough observations, you can’t help but make high-quality inferences” is one of my favorite quotes, and I think it applies especially well in this kind of last-resort setting.
Nod, those all seem like good moves.
I’m sort of torn between two more directions:
On one hand, I actually didn’t really mean “buckle up” to be very specific in terms of what move comes next. The most important thing is recognizing “this is a hard problem, your easy-mode cognitive tools probably won’t work.”
(I think all the moves you list there are totally valid tools to bring to bear in that context, which are all more strategic than “just try the next intuitive thing”)
On the other hand… the OP does sure have a vibe about particular flavors of problem/solution, and it’s not an accident that I wrote a thing that resonates with me with that you feel wary of.
But, leaning into that… I’m a bit confused why the options you list here are “last resorts” as opposed to “the first thing you try once noticing the problem is hard”. Like the airbender should be looking for a way for it to feel fun pretty early in the process. The “last resort” is whatever comes after all the tools that came more naturally to the airbender turn out not to work. (Which is in fact how Aang learned Earthbending).
((notably, I think I spent most of my life more airbendery. And the past ~2 years of me focusing on techniques that involve annoying effort is that the non-annoying-brute-force-y techniques weren’t solving the problems I wanted to solve.))
But I think the first-hand is more the point – this is less about “the next steps will involve something annoying/powerthrough-y” and more “I should probably emotionally prepare for the possibility that the next steps will involve something annoying/power-through-y”
Right, I think it just seems like doing emotional preparation that matches this description is a kind of earthbender-friendly / earthbender-assuming move, while an airbender-friendly move would be more like “notice and accept that you’d have more fun doing it a different way or doing a different thing; that flailing isn’t actually fun”. The effect is kind of similar, i.e. both earthbenders and airbenders should come away less-clinging-to-something, but the earthbender comes away less-clinging-to “the locally easy and straightforward things will work if I do them enough” while the airbender is less-clinging-to something more like “This is what I’d choose”.
Re the last-resort framing, I’m not sure why I said that exactly; I think it’s related to the vibe I got from the OP: Like, “if you notice that you’re not making progress, what do you do? Well, you could keep flailing or avoidantly doomscrolling, or you could [do the thing I’m suggesting], or you could give up in despair”; I think it feels like a “last resort” because the other realistic options presented are kind of like different kinds of death?
mm, okay yeah the distinction of different-ways-to-cling-less seems pretty reasonable.
What are earth and water benders? Is someone able and willing to paraphrase this with a different analogy?
He wrote a followup comment explaining here.
The link doesn’t work but think I know the comment you’re referring to but I found those explanations too vague to be useful. I’d really like just another analogy.
Are they saying that once one has realized that they need to buckle up that one can either face it head on (what does that mean? “just get it done”—it’s not getting done, hence the resignation to buckling up for a protracted process, how does this attitude change the completion or resolution of the problem?).
I’m really struggling to think of a real world situation where I can use this analogy to solve a protracted problem. It seems like you either have “freedom of movement” or you don’t—you can’t opt in. For example, if you’re in a hostile corporate take over the party with the most liquid capital likely has the most freedom of movement since they can outlast the other side… man I wish I had corporate takeover level cash...)