- To say that people do things for signalling value is not contrary with saying that people do things because of authentic desire
- People draw a distinction between signalling as conscious intent and signalling as a secondary consequence of authentic desires
- Society disapproves of conscious signalling
- However, the consequences of a behavior are the same, regardless of whether it was done with conscious intent or not
- Allegorical story describing the process of getting an education and a job as a series of levels in a game
- “Maze of Tests” - grade school
- Advance by giving the right answers
- Realize that you can advance more quickly by guessing the teacher’s password
- However, being able to advance more quickly in this fashion doesn’t make you smarter
- “Swamp of College Admissions”
- Need to hire a test-prep guide to get you through one of the three-letter exams
- Need to come up with a good story about how you have potential to benefit society
- However, even though you’ve come up with a good story, it doesn’t mean you’re actually benefiting society
- Once in college you need the “magic smoke of the right names” in order to get a good job
- Interning at a well-known company gets you an advantage even if you didn’t really do any challenging work
- Need to put the right names on your resume in order to get a good offer
- Once in the workplace, you need the “magic rope of right relationships” to advance
- Find your higher-up’s deepest fears and insecurities
- Play politics to advance
- However, the fact that you’re advancing doesn’t mean you’re more deserving
- The “Inside game”
- Notice that “insiders” have a fast track to the top of the social hierarchy
- Take the insiders’ route to the top, bypassing all the real work done by others to advance
- Once you get to the top, you realize that there are no “true” answers
- The real game is setting the rules of the game for everyone else
- “Hard mode” means accomplishing goals in a manner that ensures personal growth
- Deliberately eschew trying to make yourself look better than you are
- “Hard mode” is about being true to your own values, even if they run contrary to what society expects
- “Easy mode” is analyzing systems and finding the most efficient path to your goal
- Easy mode strategies can fall victim to Goodhart’s Law, where you optimize the narrow thing that society expects of you while losing site of your broader goals and values
- Easy mode can get you to certain goals faster, but doesn’t build character
- Easy mode is “selling out”
- Guilt/shame motivation works great right up until it stops working
- If you want to be effective, remember your goals
- Accomplish your goals with a minimum of wasted effort - doing something too well can be as wasteful as not doing it well enough, since it takes away time from you accomplishing the next thing
- You don’t have enough energy or enough time to do everything perfectly - focus your energy on the things that you really care about and spend a minimum of effort on the other stuff
- Remember what your goals are; deploy your full effort towards reaching them with a minimum of wasted motion