disagree, my sense is that “it works moderately such that you lose some weight but not to the point of not being fat anymore” is a very normal situation
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it’s not really the case that any given fat person can simply become not-fat through the atomic action “take a GLP-1”
some people get prohibitive side effects from GLP-1s. some people find them ineffective. many people find them somewhat effective and worth taking for the health benefits of being 30 pounds lighter but if you weigh 300 pounds then subtracting 30 isn’t visually notable, and subtracting more than 30 is hard
some of these things can be worked around by experimenting with different GLP-1s in the hope some work better with fewer side effects, and being reliably on them for a long time, and doing some work to rework one’s diet. but at that point the effort part of it is much bigger than the willingness to do this in principle part
I do think it is true that some people see a fat person and think “this person must be really unagentic to still be fat even though we have GLP-1s” but given the above I think that’s just incorrect
I’m curious whether e.g. Democrats mostly thought it was a Republican thing and Republicans thought it was a Democrat thing, or if most people thought it was their own party’s thing, or neither
Thanks for thinking through this in more detail! I think I roughly agree with you for the cases where someone is already good at singing and/or playing an instrument; I do think musical skill generalizes fairly well. (And thanks for spelling out the scenario of “you can actually practice this hands-on intensively for weeks or months in a row as your primary activity”; my default felt sense of weeks/months necessary to do something does not by default involve total primary focus.)
I don’t think I expect non-musicians to be reliably able to skill up in 6 focused months, though! Some would, if they have a good ear and, say, facility in learning languages or similar (to get really used to sheet music). But some would not be able to pick up basic pitch manipulation fast enough, and some might get stuck on becoming fluent in sheet music, and some might have trouble with the kind of vertical listening needed to evaluate harmonies & pick up mistakes.
Though to be fair, the part of that I’m most confident of is that it’s very hard to get from “tone-deaf” to “proficient with sufficient ease to scaffold additional complexity”; I might be more willing to believe that if you already have that kind of proficiency you can often skill up significantly in 6 months if you focus fully on it.
this definitely seems like a useful model for some purposes, I expect it will live in my head now. you do say right up top that this is a galaxy-brained theory, but I still feel the need to nitpick
I feel like this is more true the more generalist-y the stuff you’re doing is to begin with
in your quiz of examples, I perceive a trend where the technical examples are less generalist-y than the other ones, which I conjecture is because that’s in fact the area that Lightcone has the most specific expertise in
I claim that there exist lots of other kinds of tasks that are similarly specific in non-(purely-)technical directions, that it seems possible Lightcone has less visibility over
my personal experience is that many of my strengths are “the more technical side of design”, e.g. music theory and language learning and poetry translation, as distinct from more purely-creative design; I guess this is not so much a nitpick as perhaps something like “if you have sufficient combination of Design and Technical then you can combine them in useful ways”?
except I definitely know people who are quite good at some kinds of Design and way better than me at more central kinds of Technical, who are less good than me at the kind of technical-design I do
relatedly I was surprised you put “legal” squarely in Design, it seems v much a Design-Technical hybrid
there are also three- and four-way skill-combination tasks! e.g. directing a choir is all four—you need the design sense to decide how you want the piece to sound; the technical music chops to track all the parts and notice and pinpoint mistakes; the management skill to manage the group’s energy and attention; and the physical dexterity to wave your arms comprehensibly
and—I notice I disbelieve that someone who is good at, say, interior design and programming and people managing and climbing, would be able to become a proficient choir director quickly with no prior practice in music specifically
(I do think their management skill would transfer; their physical skill may or may not (it would if they were a dancer); but I do not think interior design transfers that well to music-design nor programming to music-technicals)
(possibly you would not put any of music under Technical? I might disagree with that though, or at least I definitely think there are more and less technical parts of music)
relatedly I do think people can have much more granular skill-spikiness
as you mentioned in another comment physical skills differ from each other really quite a lot, I think there’s any correlation between like “running skill” and “guitar skill” but really pretty little
my Things are “music” and “languages” and things that are in those fields are just for some reason way easier for me than most things that aren’t
I’ve known a lot of people who are really good at Design around words and really bad at Design around spaces, or really good at Design around spaces but couldn’t carry a tune, etc.
there are skills that benefit greatly from learning them early in life and/or just take a great deal of time to learn
additionally I do think this tetrachotomy is not exhaustive
executive function/time management/conscientiousness/whatever is probably worth tracking as a separate skill
“management” is sort of a subset of “social”, which is another important skill area in many professional and other pursuits
emotional skills are also an important thing but they kind of pervade other stuff rather than being a well-defined cluster in themselves usually
rationality also seems kind of separate tbh. like, calibration, careful reasoning, paying attention to the actual things people say rather than the vague vibes of those things, etc.
or maybe it also kinda straddles the Technical/Design divide
(I expect there’s other stuff I’m not thinking of, also)
+1 to “a chunk can have multiple words in it”
related thoughts:
once a phrase becomes memetic enough it can sorta become one chunk all together? like I think “yes in my backyard” is now p much one chunk for people familiar with it—it’s a pretty complex chunk if you were to parse it out (and relies on additional context that’s not actually in those words), but people can slot it into their working memory thoughts without pulling up all of that complexity every time
though, in the process of a slogan becoming a single chunk it probably also gets simplified and overlaid with valence & connotations that are not the same person to person
so I guess there’s an additional steering-step where you can—influence how exactly a given concept gets chunked into people’s heads (this is a thing political pundits do?)
additionally, things take up less working memory if they are mnemonic in some way, like rhyming or being a song. I am not sure how to translate this into “numbers of chunks”—a song is definitely not all one chunk bc you can partially know a song, even a line of a song is not all one chunk bc you can know part of a line, maybe songness ups the number of chunks you can learn?
then there’s also factors like things being easier to parse and remember if they are simpler, less surprising, more internally coherent. less inferential distance from what you already know, but also e.g. if it’s a song it’s easier if the music “fits” the words; it’s easier to remember a five-word sentence than five random words. this also seems hard to translate to the “number of chunks” model but it does matter
(I keep meaning to write up the example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mury_(song) which I think I’ve told you about—in which a popular Catalan protest song that was originally straightforwardly about overthrowing oppressors was adapted to Polish in a version that also warned against appropriating anti-oppression rhetoric to do new oppression, and then that Polish version was adopted by Polish protestors with the warning bit basically skipped, to the frustration of the author. seems relevant here)
A thought I noticed on rereading this: if most Americans have a deep mastery of driving, and having a deep mastery of something requires patient and direct observation, is this also a claim that most Americans have already engaged in patient and direct observation of driving?
(I can’t decide if I’d agree such a claim is true. Certainly most Americans have not done the particular slow-down-and-look moves of naturalism-as-described-by-Logan. But drivers certainly have spent many hours practicing driving and seeing what happens when they do x or y, and iterating accordingly; I’m not sure if that’s close-enough-to-the-same-thing.)
also, good post, that somehow instills in me the urge to get good at running meetups, though I don’t have an obvious niche to do that in and am not sure I want to prioritize
If you assign readings and someone shows up who has not done the reading, what happens then? Do you ask them to leave, ask them to listen quietly, or something else?
oh yeah that would be cool. I actually kind of hate allotted time at events for filling out feedback forms because I actually love giving a lot of detailed free text feedback and don’t want to be doing that on my phone on a time limit, but yeah doing a quick version first would probably work.
(though another reason I don’t like filling out feedback forms while I’m still at the event is that while I’m at the event I want to be in “enjoying the event” mode, not in “judging the event” mode, especially if some of the feedback I want to give is socially sensitive)
“relevant creams” is a great phrase. “Beverage Research” is a great party name.
I’d say Google Maps only mostly lives in physical reality, it does also contain things like political borders and the names of restaurants and such, and there are various pressures on the reviews displayed, and location data in China is slightly fuzzed, and maybe there’s other things like that. This is a nitpick, though.
I really like the comparison with literally fictional worlds, and the mention of “should” worlds. (I think I live in a superposition of social reality and normative reality more than I endorse.)
...also I think it is in part my paranoia-based epistemic strategies that cause me to violently bounce off of a lot of LLM output, which is a pretty disabling amount of blinding myself for the current environment, I guess
Good post.
A thing that’s not mentioned here but is super salient to my personal experience of navigating an untrustworthy world is reputation-based strategies—asking your friends, transitive trust chains, to some extent ratings/reviews/forum commments are this-ish too. This is perhaps a subset of “blind yourself” (I often do kind of blind myself to anything not recommended by friends, when I can afford to). And I guess this kind of illustrates how even though we’re in an age where anyone can in principle access any information and any thing, it’s common to restrict oneself to what one can access through one’s personal network, as though we were village-dwellers of centuries past.
But I think more concretely, I think it motivates a principle I hold very dear to my heart: “Do not be the kind of actor that forces other people to be paranoid”.
I’d enjoy a follow-up post going into more detail on this.
curious how you handle the hemisphere issue! do you do it in December or in June?
Seems fine to just link to Eventbrite, but currently it says Partiful, which is confusing
Is there a Solstice afterparty, and is it gated on Unconference tickets?
oh also, another next step is “see if I can make this task more pleasant/tolerable”. (sometimes “assign this task more time and recruit help” helps achieve this too. but there can also be separate steps like “fix any current sensory annoyances” and “make some nice tea”)
Yeah this is relatable and familiar. When I do this my next step is usually some flavor of “set aside some time for the task”—can be “I will work on this for the next pomo” or “I will set aside a day to work on this specifically” or “welp I guess I need to make an entire project of this/I think I will not make progress on this unless it is the ~main thing in my life”. For the medium- or larger-scale things, also “see if I can get other people in the loop”.
Will also note that one less intuitive type of task this can apply to is “deal with my emotions about this thing I’m trying to do”. Ideally this would happen trivially and I could just do the thing, but sometimes I notice I am stuck and then I need to add an action item of actually looking at the emotional blocker before I can proceed. (And sometimes the emotional blockers are large enough to turn into their own project.)
and for that matter “got problematic side effects on at least the first GLP-1 they tried” is also not uncommon in my anecdotal experience of friends who have talked about this at all at least
this isn’t always prohibitive but (1) it can be, (2) even if it isn’t it can make the process much slower bc you need to be on a lower dose or try different meds or figure out a protocol that works, (3) once you’re in that kind of “need to figure out a protocol that works” regime rather than just a “try this one easy thing” regime, it’s more like new lifestyle homework than an easy body hack