I am constantly in analysis paralysis. I personally waste way too much time trying to prematurely optimize how I am going to learn something before actually learning any piece of the issue. To remedy this, I try to tell myself that I will naturally optimize the learning process as I progress. I think this was nicely explained by Andrej Karpathy in a podcast.
Recently, I have been thinking about this a lot as I am on full-time sabbatical, learning technical alignment research. There is so much to do and a general feeling of ignorance in any direction, making it ripe for constant optimization. I would love to have an answer, but at this point I try to operate mostly on the faith that I will optimize and the more I force premature optimization, the more time I waste. At some point, I have to just Do The Work.
I like where this ends. For lots of things, the (potentially frustrating) reality is that we must simply have the faith to do the work we know we should do and trust that it will have the intended effect. Trying to speed up early often works against the value of doing the work, and costs more in the end than simply doing the work would have.
I am constantly in analysis paralysis. I personally waste way too much time trying to prematurely optimize how I am going to learn something before actually learning any piece of the issue. To remedy this, I try to tell myself that I will naturally optimize the learning process as I progress. I think this was nicely explained by Andrej Karpathy in a podcast.
Recently, I have been thinking about this a lot as I am on full-time sabbatical, learning technical alignment research. There is so much to do and a general feeling of ignorance in any direction, making it ripe for constant optimization. I would love to have an answer, but at this point I try to operate mostly on the faith that I will optimize and the more I force premature optimization, the more time I waste. At some point, I have to just Do The Work.
I like where this ends. For lots of things, the (potentially frustrating) reality is that we must simply have the faith to do the work we know we should do and trust that it will have the intended effect. Trying to speed up early often works against the value of doing the work, and costs more in the end than simply doing the work would have.