I read this a few months ago and thought about it out loud in a Discord channel with the intent to turn my thoughts into a nicely structured comment here eventually, and then I never ended up doing that. So instead I’m going to do a lower-effort version of that, where I more or less copy my thoughts from Discord with only light editing, because that seems better than nothing. I’ll put in section headers for readibility, also.
0. start
this is a really good post imo
and one that’s relevant to me [due to the fact that I often have low/fluctuating levels of energy/spoons, and am not great at reliability]
I really appreciate the part at the beginning where Duncan patiently explains the value of having social norms at all
it feels very “nerd who has gone through the valley of bad rationality and come out the other side with a better understanding of why that fence was there”
some of the post’s object-level recommendations are things I have learned to do but have to sometimes keep reminding myself to do, and sometimes go through periods of failing harder than usual at when my capabilities change
I guess actually maybe nearly all of the things are things I already try to do? just without quite this much theory about it
I like having the theory about it though
I could treat it as a checklist
I think a thing that would be useful for me to do is to come up with a bunch of examples for each point
1. reliability equilibria & why lower-reliability ones are good sometimes
one thing that I think is missing from the post is discussion/acknowledgment of different… reliability equilibria
like, the first example that came to mind is that I just today cancelled a planned coworking session because I am too tired to do it without being miserable
but, it’s already understood between me and the other person that such things will be cancelled sometimes? I guess this probably hasn’t been explicitly established in words before but both of us have cancelled on each other before and yet continued to be willing to set up new plans in the future
and this is good, I think?
if such plans required 99% reliability I would be way less willing to make them
which for some things would be the correct tradeoff! there are plans I should be extremely hesitant to make because they legitimately require really high reliability
but coworking isn’t inherently such a thing; it could be a thing like that for some people but I think that, given two people who find low-certainty plans acceptable, making such plans creates more value than not making them
this makes me think of the recent discussion [in this server] about [sometimes] enjoying not being the most late person to a thing
I think one reason I sometimes enjoy this is that it’s an update on the level of reliability expected here?
in some contexts, lower-expected-reliability is a better fit for me personally. so evidence that I’m not wildly out of norm is really good for me
(e.g. today a coworker missed a meeting with me because she forgot about it and went to dinner. I can imagine contexts in which this would annoy me greatly but in this case it actually made me feel kind of relieved because a workplace in which this is an allowable level of [occasional, infrequent] fuckup is more hospitable to me than one where it isn’t. [since I’m posting this publicly I feel the need to clarify that this is not a type of fuckup I am personally prone to. but I have sometimes slept through an early morning meeting due to not hearing my alarm, when particularly sleep-deprived. not a Very Important one though.])
though there are certainly also contexts where updates in the “this is a lower-reliability-expectations equilibrium than I thought” direction are unpleasant!
like if I have plans with someone and I care about those plans a lot and they seem to be prioritizing the plans less than I am
2. proactive communication
also sometimes it annoys me if someone flakes on something at the last minute when they could have told me earlier
even if I’m fine with the thing being cancelled
though this kind of varies
and this is a thing I sometimes fail at myself
(one of Duncan’s prescriptions is in fact “loop the renegee in as soon as possible”)
this is a thing I’ve tried to get better at—e.g. I’ve mostly ingrained the habit of giving people I’m meeting up-to-date ETAs if I’m running notably late
in the past I would much more often delay telling them this as much as possible because I dreaded the moment when they find out how late I will be
also this part:
“I’m happy to schedule a 50% chance of a lunch on Saturday, if that works for you, but if you need a firm ‘yes’ or ‘no’ then I have to say ‘no.’”
I’ve started doing this^ much more often, though I’m still less systematic about it than this
I mostly do that during time periods when I have unusually low energy / bad mental health, and it sometimes takes a while to notice that this is the case
3. making fewer plans
this thing:
Perhaps I’m agreeing to things too quickly in general, or not giving myself enough time to rest, or failing to acknowledge that no, it’s not just a bad week, this is just the new normal, at least for this month or this year.
so yeah, this:
If I can’t be confident that I’ve nailed the problem down, the next step is simply to increase my error bars. Make fewer commitments in general, through a top-down conscious effort, or make each individual commitment looser, giving people more notice that I might bail or flake.
though there’s a problem where it’s not always feasible for me to make only as many commitments as I can reliably handle
4. more proactive communication, reputation effects, self-prediction & calibration
in which case yeah one of my strategies is to try to inform people of this
it helps in a sense that I am already known to flake on things sometimes?
anyway it might be useful for me to make a more systematic habit of actually estimating how likely I am to succeed at various plans, and telling people those estimates, and scoring and calibrating my predictions over time
I’ve had this thought before but not followed up on it in a systematic way
though I do give people such estimates sometimes when it feels salient and appropriate
I read this a few months ago and thought about it out loud in a Discord channel with the intent to turn my thoughts into a nicely structured comment here eventually, and then I never ended up doing that. So instead I’m going to do a lower-effort version of that, where I more or less copy my thoughts from Discord with only light editing, because that seems better than nothing. I’ll put in section headers for readibility, also.
0. start
this is a really good post imo
and one that’s relevant to me
[due to the fact that I often have low/fluctuating levels of energy/spoons, and am not great at reliability]
I really appreciate the part at the beginning where Duncan patiently explains the value of having social norms at all
it feels very “nerd who has gone through the valley of bad rationality and come out the other side with a better understanding of why that fence was there”
some of the post’s object-level recommendations are things I have learned to do but have to sometimes keep reminding myself to do, and sometimes go through periods of failing harder than usual at when my capabilities change
I guess actually maybe nearly all of the things are things I already try to do? just without quite this much theory about it
I like having the theory about it though
I could treat it as a checklist
I think a thing that would be useful for me to do is to come up with a bunch of examples for each point
1. reliability equilibria & why lower-reliability ones are good sometimes
one thing that I think is missing from the post is discussion/acknowledgment of different… reliability equilibria
like, the first example that came to mind is that I just today cancelled a planned coworking session because I am too tired to do it without being miserable
but, it’s already understood between me and the other person that such things will be cancelled sometimes? I guess this probably hasn’t been explicitly established in words before but both of us have cancelled on each other before and yet continued to be willing to set up new plans in the future
and this is good, I think?
if such plans required 99% reliability I would be way less willing to make them
which for some things would be the correct tradeoff! there are plans I should be extremely hesitant to make because they legitimately require really high reliability
but coworking isn’t inherently such a thing; it could be a thing like that for some people but I think that, given two people who find low-certainty plans acceptable, making such plans creates more value than not making them
this makes me think of the recent discussion [in this server] about [sometimes] enjoying not being the most late person to a thing
I think one reason I sometimes enjoy this is that it’s an update on the level of reliability expected here?
in some contexts, lower-expected-reliability is a better fit for me personally. so evidence that I’m not wildly out of norm is really good for me
(e.g. today a coworker missed a meeting with me because she forgot about it and went to dinner. I can imagine contexts in which this would annoy me greatly but in this case it actually made me feel kind of relieved because a workplace in which this is an allowable level of [occasional, infrequent] fuckup is more hospitable to me than one where it isn’t. [since I’m posting this publicly I feel the need to clarify that this is not a type of fuckup I am personally prone to. but I have sometimes slept through an early morning meeting due to not hearing my alarm, when particularly sleep-deprived. not a Very Important one though.])
though there are certainly also contexts where updates in the “this is a lower-reliability-expectations equilibrium than I thought” direction are unpleasant!
like if I have plans with someone and I care about those plans a lot and they seem to be prioritizing the plans less than I am
2. proactive communication
also sometimes it annoys me if someone flakes on something at the last minute when they could have told me earlier
even if I’m fine with the thing being cancelled
though this kind of varies
and this is a thing I sometimes fail at myself
(one of Duncan’s prescriptions is in fact “loop the renegee in as soon as possible”)
this is a thing I’ve tried to get better at—e.g. I’ve mostly ingrained the habit of giving people I’m meeting up-to-date ETAs if I’m running notably late
in the past I would much more often delay telling them this as much as possible because I dreaded the moment when they find out how late I will be
also this part:
I’ve started doing this^ much more often, though I’m still less systematic about it than this
I mostly do that during time periods when I have unusually low energy / bad mental health, and it sometimes takes a while to notice that this is the case
3. making fewer plans
this thing:
so yeah, this:
though there’s a problem where it’s not always feasible for me to make only as many commitments as I can reliably handle
4. more proactive communication, reputation effects, self-prediction & calibration
in which case yeah one of my strategies is to try to inform people of this
it helps in a sense that I am already known to flake on things sometimes?
anyway it might be useful for me to make a more systematic habit of actually estimating how likely I am to succeed at various plans, and telling people those estimates, and scoring and calibrating my predictions over time
I’ve had this thought before but not followed up on it in a systematic way
though I do give people such estimates sometimes when it feels salient and appropriate