- Imagine two people faced with solving a problem
- Alice approaches the problem methodically, decomposing or simplifying the problem before coming up with a solution
- Bob panics, and in panicking, drops into a loop where his distress causes him to focus on his distress, which further prevents him from solving the problem
- So why do some people approach problems analytically, while others panic?
- Is it just experience? Maybe Alice has encountered the problem, or similar problems before
- Self-confidence also plays a part: if Alice is more self-confident than Bob, then she will do better at solving the problem, even if she and Bob have the same level of experience
- Finally, consider response patterns:
- Bob sits waiting for a solution to present itself
- Alice actively engages with the problem, and tries to simplify it or break it down into subproblems
- Looking at Alice and Bob, we can say that Alice is more confident than Bob, but that doesn’t tell us how or why confidence works
- We can readily imagine that Alice (and Bob) responding in their characteristic manners to a variety of situations
- The goal of developing appropriate response patterns is to avoid flailing or staring blankly
- The reflex of blanking your mind and waiting for a solution to be delivered isn’t a very effective strategy
- Effective response patterns are about solving the problem well, not solving it quickly
- Jumping in without taking time to understand the problem often results in you solving the wrong problem
- The most confident people are people who have effective response patterns
- Developing effective response patterns in an area takes much less practice and knowledge than developing true expertise
- Having an explicit checklist of things to do can be helpful in avoiding panic and ineffective response patterns
- People can benefit from having “fallback” response patterns for handling new or surprising events
- Every citation is either a homework assignment or a promise
- Either assigns the reader work to fill in background knowledge or promises that the cited material is accurate
- Every book also has implicit citations - the assumed background knowledge that’s shared between the author and the reader
- Books are not separable units of wisdom, even though they’re presented as such by society
- Books are inseparably tied to their historical contexts
- Interestingness is not a fixed property of a work, but a measure of whether that work can move from shared common knowledge to surprising new information
- Books are only interesting if you have the common knowledge the author assumes you have
- People consumed books vastly differently before the Internet
- Prior to the Internet, your entire interaction with the book consisted of you reading it
- The only real way to respond to a book was to write your own book and get it published
- Now books are more used as source material for conversations on the Internet than being the loci of conversations themselves
- The three types of canon
- In an oral culture, people could hold their entire cultural canon in their heads
- With the advent of printing, the canon starts fragmenting
- Divide between “high” and “popular” culture
- Literary genres
- Finally with the spread of information technology, the entire concept of a shared canon goes away, and all you have is the canon that’s specific to the subcultures you belong to
- Even though we no longer have a shared canon across all of society, we still want one - the spread of viral media is the result of people’s attempts to forge a new shared canon
- Permanent liminality
- Liminality - the state of being between states
- A liminal space is a space that connects two “real” spaces
- Behavioral scripts are relaxed and altered in liminal spaces and times
- Dreams are a stereotypical liminal space
- Permanent liminality is a situation in which liminality is activated and never deactivated
- Temporary deviations from the normal become permanent without any social acknowledgement that they’ve become permanent
- “Common knowledge” shifts and never shifts back
- At this point, we should see liminality as the rule rather than the exception
- In a situation of constant liminality, people start to see patterns in the change
- Even though people are subjec to constant change at the object level, they draw meta-level similarities to create a non-liminal meta-space
- There is a distinction between social and economic class
- Economic class: how much money you make
- Social class: social status (how much you’re trusted by strangers)
- While each type of class can be parlayed into the other type, doing so requires a conscious choice
- In the US, there’s a lot of pressure to conflate social and economic class
- Discussing economic class is fine; discussing social class is taboo
- Social classes are cultures
- The problem with most rationalists’ distinction between social and economic class is that it risks obscuring the fact that different social classes are not co-equal tribes
- We think of high-class things as good because they’re high class
- Class amplifies capitalism into psychological terror: “it is your fault that you’re poor”
- Completely eliminating class is a moral goal
- Everyone (even those at the top of the class hierarchy) is affected by the tyranny of class
- There isn’t a single, global class hierarchy - class hierarchies are fractal
- Racism can be explained as the automatic conflation of race with class, putting people those of certain races into lower classes while ignoring other class signifiers
- The success of ideological movements comes down to how well they can make their values into upper-class values
- However, there are two big risks with turning your movement into a class signifier
- Class signifiers tend to be more about symbolism than results
- Backlash - people of other classes will deliberately work against your movement
- Remember your true goals
- Accumulating lifehacks for the sake of accumulating lifehacks is pointless
- Lifehacks stigmatize effort
- Lifehacks prioritize efficiency over results
- Means that high-effort goals are implicitly considered less valuable
- Lifehacks undervalue the obvious and useful for the new and ineffectual
- Lifehacks are easier to fund and promote than actually good advice
- Lifehacks lead to aimless optimization
- The best way to become more productive is to have a set of definite goals
- The goal will naturally provide the metrics by which you judge optimizations and will prevent you from spending effort on optimizations that don’t enhance your ability to reach the goal
- Lifehacks distort our view of time
- Lifehacks focus on short term immediate optimizations
- Risk getting us stuck in local maxima
- Lifehacks, paradoxically, lead to procrastination
- Lifehacks often suggest a definite or optimal starting point
- This often induces people who are not at that particular starting point to put off working on their goals
- But the important thing is to start working, even if conditions aren’t optimal
- Lifehacks favor irrational rationality
- Irrational rationality: being reasonable at an unreasonable time
- Rational irrationality: being unreasonable at the right times
- Do what works, even when other people think it’s stupid
- What’s the point, what is there to do?
- Lifehacks weaken self-reliance
- Lifehacks are tactics, not strategy
- While non-experts can rely on experts to judge the validity of research within a field, they cannot rely on those experts to judge the validity of the field itself
- Catch-22: the only people who are in a position to question the foundational assumptions of a field (experts) are those with the strongest incentives to not do so
- So how do we deal with the problem?
- Find people familiar with the methodology of the field but not of the field itself
- Look for testable predictions and a track record of predicting correctly