Associate yourself with people whom you can confidently and cheerfully outperform the Nash Equilibrium with.
lionhearted (Sebastian Marshall)
Karma: 2,362
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
-- Peter Drucker
Huh, I’d never heard of that. Great story. Thanks for sharing -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Mucius_Scaevola
“I am Gaius Mucius, a citizen of Rome. I came here as an enemy to kill my enemy, and I am as ready to die as I am to kill. We Romans act bravely and, when adversity strikes, we suffer bravely.” He also declared that he was one of three hundred other Romans willing to give their own life to kill Porsenna.(Ab Urbe Condita, II.12) Porsenna, fearful and angry, ordered Mucius to be cast into the flames. Mucius stoically accepted this punishment, preempting Porsenna by thrusting his hand into that same fire and giving no sign of pain. Impressed by the youth’s courage, Porsenna freed Mucius.
I disagree. I don’t see why doing that which shouldn’t be done at all inefficiently wouldn’t be even more useless.
I’m not sure of the exact context, but Drucker is primarily a writer on management and business. He wrote a really high number of books outlining management principles, he’s considered one of the fathers of the discipline of management.
So to his audience, he’s saying “Don’t get excited how efficient your card-puncher-tallying system is, when your real goal is high quality output.” I think he’s reminding people to not get caught up in doing a process well if the process doesn’t produce real results.
A “Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time” Fallacy
I suspect (perhaps “fear”) that, outside of very specific goal-oriented fields like entrepreneurship, this is more likely a symptom self-deception about our goals. … In short, we sometimes fall short of our “goals” because they’re actually not our goals.
This is a good point, yes. A lot of times the finish line is not well-defined, and you have to choose. Or people self deceive for self esteem reasons or for signalling reasons. Yes, this could be a major reason it happens. Good point. There’s still an open question of why people do it when they do have very clear purpose that they honestly want… for instance, the would-be comedian who really really does want to do comedy and is taking lower gains… that said, I think you just uncovered a big reason it happens—self-deception about goals, indeed.
I consider participating in Less Wrong an excellent example of this.
How so? I find it to be a great use of learning time, my learning rate on this site is as high as almost anywhere. In fact, it’s one of the very very few sites that I get somewhere close to the signal:noise ratio that I would with an excellent book. I’ve learned a lot from here, especially Eliezer and Yvain, but really everybody here has good perspectives. The community is shockingly intelligent and focused on a topic that’s really important...
But to answer OP more directly: I feel that in most cases it’s simple akrasia and the fear of succeeding.
Yeah, maybe it’s just that. I love that Bruce post by the way, that’s one of my favorite posts on here. That one and “Generalizing From One Example” are probably my favorite non-Eliezer posts.
Wow Jim, that’s actually a really really amazing insight.
a goal at the end that you’re supposedly trying to get to, but in fact your goal is not to reach the end quickly but to search as much of the maze’s area as you can
you put it off as long as possible, because you’re optimizing for fraction-of-content-seen, rather than probability-world-is-saved, which is 1.0 from the very beginning
Do you think people get a feeling of, “Well, I’ll get there eventually anyways, so I might as well (have some ice cream / surf the net / watch some TV / screw around)?” Fascinating if true… hmm...
Sure. An easy one:
Commenting on nothing particularly important on Hacker News when I could be writing my second book. Commenting on HN = very small gain, minor contribution to a few people over a very short period of time. Working on a book = much more enjoyable, and much larger contribution over a longer period of time.
Have you seen the same phenomenon in your life at all Andreas? Maybe “300x” is an exaggeration—or maybe not, even, if the value of the distracting task is low enough, and the value of the good task is high enough.
Indeed, this is a good insight. I’ve done both, actually. I have an active blog, and actually making a public commitment helped me finish my first book. I wrote about it under “The Joys of Public Accountability”; it does work.
More generally, consider structuring your social environment such that social expectations and rewards line up with activities you consider valuable. I have found this to be a powerful way to change my behavior.
That’s a really powerful observation. Why do you think people don’t do that more often? Ignorance? Also, do you have any observations from your own life of structuring your environment? I’d be fascinated to hear, you seem very knowledgeable and astute on the subject.
This was a magnificent post, Anna. I’d like to write a longer reply and more analysis later, but for the moment I wanted to say this was really fantastic and amazing, and there’s wisdom and insight packed very densely here. Thank you for writing this up, it’s inspiring and insightful.
Steps to Achievement: The Pitfalls, Costs, Requirements, and Timelines
This post is excellent, although it doesn’t fold on the main site and takes up a lot of space scrolling through recent posts.
Thank you, and I apologize for my brutish formatting. I tried to edit, but didn’t find a setting to make it wrap? Could someone point me in the right direction?
“Insert summary break” on the toolbar, next to “Text color” and “Blockquote”.
Done, thanks for pointing that out.
There’s some great thinking in this post, but it needs some editing. LessWrong articles are very rarely this long, so it decreases the chance that it will be widely read. Some more attention to formatting would go a long way.
Good point—I didn’t intend for it to be so long. I had a concept in mind, started writing, and it came out much longer. About formatting—yes, probably there as well. Good feedback—ideas don’t do much good if their presentation isn’t good.
Are you Sebastian Marshall? Cool, I like some of your writing quite a bit! Glad you’re here.
Indeed, I am! Thank you for the kind words. I’d been following the community for quite a while, before Less Wrong existed—I wanted to contribute a little bit back, and happy to be here :)
Collecting and hoarding crap, useless information
You might want to include the Second Boer War, the Philippine-American War, and the 1991 uprisings in Iraq in your study of asymmetrical warfare. All three are modern-day examples of insurgencies that were successfully and dramatically defeated by a conventional army.
Philippine-American is actually one of my key examples—the ideas for this came together when I read a description of the Philippine-American war and some key conflicts, and how Mao’s rural countryside recruiting and tactics enabled him to take over China. Looking at the two together, I started realizing that a lot of guerrilla warfare is about symbolic victories for recruiting purposes, and about shaking the will of the opposing side. I’ll check into 1991 and the Second Boer War as examples too, thanks for that.
Asymmetrical warfare is a lot harder when your enemy is willing to “make a wasteland and call it peace”. Guerrillas can’t hide among civilians if all the civilians are dead, enslaved, or in internment camps.
Indeed, but I’d phrase it a little differently. “If one side fights much more honorably than the other, they lose.”
Thanks for the feedback. Great stuff.
Funny, I was just the opposite. I skimmed the “Understanding vipassana meditation”, saw no guidelines on what it actually entails, and discarded it as mysticism. Now that you’ve given clear guidelines, I’m inclined to try it, and also to read the original post with an open mind.
-- Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor