I don't have a good name for this fallacy, but I hope to work it out with everyone here through thinking and discussion.
It goes like this: a large majority of otherwise smart people spend time doing semi-productive things, when there are massively productive opportunities untapped.
A somewhat silly example: Let's say someone aspires to be a comedian, the best comedian ever, and to make a living doing comedy. He wants nothing else, it is his purpose. And he decides that in order to become a better comedian, he will watch re-runs of the old television cartoon 'Garfield and Friends' that was on TV from 1988 to 1995.
This is absolutely not a great use of his time. Maybe he'll learn a little about jokes structures and pick up a gag from the show. It's probably not entirely useless. But Garfield and Friends wasn't all that funny to begin with, and there's only so much to be learned from it. The would-be comedian would be much better off watching Eddie Murphy, George Carlin, and Bill Cosby if he wanted to watch old clips. He'd be much better off reading memoirs, autobiographies, and articles by people like Steve Martin and Jerry Seinfeld. Or he could look to get into the technical aspects of comedy and study well-respected books in the field. Or best yet, go to an open mic night, or spend time writing jokes, or otherwise do comedy. But he doesn't, instead he just watches re-runs of Garfield and Friends.
I think a lot of us are guilty of this in our daily lives. Certainly, most people on LessWrong examine our lives more carefully than the rest of the world. A lot of us have clear goals. Maybe not a full, cohesive belief structure, but pretty clear. And sometimes we dabble around and do low-impact stuff instead of high impact stuff. The equivalent of watching Garfield and Friends re-runs.
I've been an entrepreneur and done some entrepreneurial stuff. In the beginning, you have to test different things, because you don't know what's going to work. But I've seen this fallacy, and I was guilty of it myself - I didn't double down and put all my efforts into what was working, or at least commit mostly to it.
The most successful entrepreneurs do. Oh, keep learning, and diversify a bit, sure. But I remember watching a talk about the success of the company Omniture - they had two people in their enterprise business-to-business side, and 60 people in their business-to-consumer side. Then the founder, Josh James, realized 90% of their revenue was coming from business to business, so he said - "Hey. 58 of you go over to the business to business side." And just like that, he now had 60 of his team working in the part of the company that was producing of the company's revenues. Omniture sold last year for $1.8 billion.
I feel like a lot of us have those opportunities - we see that a place we're putting a small amount of effort is accounting for most of our success, but we don't say - "Okay, that area that I'm giving a little attention that's producing massive results? All attention goes there now." No, we keep doing things that aren't producing the results.
I'm curious as to why. Do we not evaluate the return on time? Is it just general akrasia, procrastination, fear of success, fear of standing out? Those hard-wired evolutionary "don't stand out too much" things? Does it seem like it'd be too easy or can't be real?
A lot of times, I'm frittering time away on something that will get me, y'know, very small gains. I'm not talking speculative things, or learning, or relaxing. Like, just small gains in my development. Meanwhile, there's something on-hand I could do that'd have 300 times the impact. For sure, almost certainly 300 times the impact, because I see some proven success in the 300x area, and the frittering-away-time area is almost certainly not going to be valuable.
And heck, I do this a lot less than most people. Most people are really, really guilty of this. Let's discuss and figure out why. Your thoughts?
That's an obviously good idea, now that I see it written out, and I'm going to try it.
Some of those things really are one-time, like finding a more convenient gym. Creating a habit takes determination over a longer time-span, though. When I try it, I need about a week before I no longer need to spend conscious effort maintaining a new habit, and another week before it's entrenched and I don't have to think about it anymore. I suppose you can still classify this as a one-time act, that just happens to take a while.
I wonder, what are some other Naritai Projects? I want some, so if anybody has some ideas, please post them. Some of my ideas:
Minor dietary change: exclude or strongly limit a single type of food. If you regularly eat candy, your dental health will probably benefit a lot if you swear off hard candy and strongly limit your consumption of any other sort of candy. I did this after my dentist had to do some unpleasant drilling, and it was a two-week process, as described above. The same sort of method can apply to alcohol, if you find yourself drinking too much.
If you're in college: go on a several-hour study binge on one of your classes where you try to understand the subject in greater detail than the class requires. Power-read a textbook, hit up Wikipedia, prove theorems while pacing back and forth in an unused classroom, whatever. And skim way ahead, even if you don't understand everything. Surprisingly, this gives a lasting boost to performance in that class. Improving your understanding early on improves how fast you learn, which improves how fast you learn, and so on -- education yields compound interest. It also improves your morale, at least temporarily.
But looking it up would be a one-time thing, and would make your grammar more correct forever! ;-)
I know that using the correct grammar would actually make your phrase harder for LWers to remember, so it would be a net loss. Still, it suggests another Naritai Project:
For diet, in my experience, trying to eliminate a food directly is nearly impossible; instead, I approach it from the opposite direction and look for foods to add, which can displace the unwanted ones. From this angle, a lot of subtle failure modes become more obvious; to displace candy, you need something (or some combination of things) that's equally convenient (or you'll backslide when you don't have time to cook), non-perishable (or you'll backslide when you haven't grocery shopped for awhile), portable (or you'll backslide when travedlling), and calor... (read more)