I am a relative newcomer to Less Wrong. I discovered Elizer Yudkowski and Scott Anderson in 2019. I have never known Less Wrong 1.0.
lsusr
Karma: 2,547
The Mutant Game—Rounds 31 to 90
Matryoshka Faraday Box
Thanks! I have fixed both issues.
Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets—Part 1
Sometimes people called Moody ‘paranoid’.
Moody always told them to survive a hundred years of hunting Dark Wizards and then get back to him about that.
Mad-Eye Moody had once worked out how long it had taken him, in retrospect, to achieve what he now considered a decent level of caution—weighed up how much experience it had taken him to get good instead of lucky—and had begun to suspect that most people died before they got there. Moody had once expressed this thought to Lyall, who had done some ciphering and figuring, and told him that a typical Dark Wizard hunter would die, on average, eight and a half times along the way to becoming ‘paranoid’. This explained a great deal, assuming Lyall wasn’t lying.
―Chapter 63 of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky
I intended my post as the highest praise. :D
There many situations one can be in. Some require desperate effort. Some require extraordinary effort. Some require neither. Some require both.
There is also performative effort—what I call breath to spare and what you describe as “loud public complaining contests”. Performative effort is not effort at all. It is pathetic childish whining.
I found your anecdote about doorknobs funny. I don’t have time for doorknobs. I don’t even turn on lights. I just memorize my home’s layout and then fumble about in the dark. On the one hand, this is stupid. On the other hand, I don’t need a flashlight when I’m out in the wilderness.
If you can save the world by sitting back in an armchair then that’s great! Sometimes I want to jump in a frozen winter lake just because it’s there. From my understanding of human psychology, the less you torture yourself the more your brain will misconstrue minor inconveniences for torture.
I would offer that if you sat back and did only things that came easily, you might learn an altogether different way of trying with all the extra slack that saves you.
This is good advice I possibly ought to heed.
It would be trivial to re-write my personal experience into “Success is the Enemy of Freedom”.
The point of my story is that repeated failures restricted my access to resources. (I have succeeded at things I didn’t mention, like teaching myself magic tricks and learning Chinese. These earned me freedom like “being able to live cheaply in China”.) My post would have been clearer if I had gone deeper into my successes. Instead, I focused on how failure restricted my freedom of action.
Of all the skills and psychological traits I need for the same startup, every single one would have been harmed by going into the Air Force compared to the factual. My inability to get an Air Force scholarship was a failure. But it was my lack of confidence and resources (due to other failures) which drove me to such desperation. My lack of resources originated in failure. In this way, one failure helped mitigate (but not entirely cancel) previous failures.
Another counterfactual is the one where I am hired at Amazon instead of my first programming job. I’d probably keep working there for one more year and then quit with years of extra runway for my startup. My ordinary daily living situation would be a lot easier. I wouldn’t have to spend as much effort on survival. I could put more effort into networking which pays dividends. I could afford to take more risks. I could invest a greater fraction of my time into my business. It would be far easier to start a startup but I would be less desperate to do so.
For ordinary people, desperation may be more useful than absolute resources because desperation fuels effort. I am anomalously self-motivated. Effort has never been my limiting factor. Success wins capital and failure loses capital. My historical success is driven by the Kelly criterion.
I wrote the above before reading your ROT13 spoiler.
My maverick personality traits would have been suppressed by going into the Air Force. My technical skills would have been annihilated.
Thank you for this! I’ve started writing my own fiction too but have so far been too cowardly to post it on Less Wrong until now.
Yeah, that’s better. I have changed it back from “I have read enough books”.
I’m going from my general impression of the chapter “The Low Information Diet” in The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris, where he recommends restricting information for a single week. It would be hyperbole to say Tim Ferris always avoids reading books. It may be more accurate to say he sometimes avoids reading books.
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
—The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris
This feedback makes sense in the context of what I wrote. I’m going to provide broader context which didn’t make it into the original post.
My reading is cyclical. The books I read in any given year indeed tend to be quite narrow. Some years I read lots of science fiction. Another year was about spirituality. In previous years I’ve read Heart of Darkness, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 1984, Ancillary Justice, The Little Prince, The Wealth of Nations, Goodbye Darkness, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, Steal Like an Artist, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, Arabian Sands, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, The Fault in Our Stars, Guerilla Warfare and The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.. Technical books don’t show up on this list either because I tend not to read them cover-to-cover. The same goes for other books I’ve tried out without finishing such as Pride and Prejudice, Mere Christianity, Hard Choices, Twilight, Quotations from Chairman Mao and the 1911 Boy Scout Handbook. My scientific research with commercial applications doesn’t get posted to this blog either.
I’m slowly working my way through Sunzi’s The Art of War. This bodes well with your recommendation to read old writings and translate difficult concepts. We may be on the same page here.
I’ve also cracked open a D&D book. Your comment is helpful in encouraging me to continue.
What was the old title? I forgot.
Success Buys Freedom
Pain is the unit of Effort
The more bitterness you swallow, the higher you’ll go.
―Chinese proverb.
Do you have the original Chinese?
If you think something’s supposed to hurt, you’re less likely to notice if you’re doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.
―How to Do What You Love by Paul Graham
Evading Mind Control
Transparent Technologies
there are many more degree holders than available tenure track positions
desired candidate is clear…agreeableness toward colleagues
These are optimal conditions for homogeneity and groupthink.
“Must” might be a little stronger than I’m going for here. It’s more along the lines of how complex tools designed to reduce cognitive burden skew economic power towards the manufacturers of those tools. Then the Invisible Hand pressures those manufacturers into installing anti-features.