pjeby comments on "Epiphany addiction" - Less Wrong

52 Post author: cousin_it 03 August 2012 05:52PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (92)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: pjeby 03 August 2012 10:55:08PM 33 points [-]

One example was the self-help blog of Phillip Eby (pjeby), where each new post seemed to bring new amazing insights, and after a while you became jaded.

Er, you do realize I stopped most of my blogging for more or less that reason, right?

Around that time, I started pushing for a (partly LW-inspired) greater focus on empirical improvement in my work, because there was just too much randomness in how long the effects of my then-current techniques would last. Some things were permanent or nearly-so, and others might only last a few days or weeks... and I had no reliable way to predict what the outcome of a particular instance of application would be.

It was a tough shift, because at the time I also had no way to know for sure that anything more reliable or predictable in fact existed, but unlike the more "faith-based" self-help folks, I couldn't just keep ignoring the anomalies in my results.

The good news is I got over that hump and developed more reliable methods. The bad news is that it didn't involve brilliant simple epiphanies, but lots and lots of little hard-won insights and the correlation of tons of practical knowledge.

(And one of those bits of practical knowledge is how to avoid stopping at the "epiphany" phase of a given insight.)

Anyway, I quit blogging about it (at least to the general public) because once you're no longer dealing in simple epiphanies, there starts to be too much inferential distance to be able to talk about anything meaningful, short of creating my own Sequences to reconstruct the inferential chains... one mini-epiphany at a time.

Comment author: cousin_it 03 August 2012 11:25:45PM *  14 points [-]

Phillip, I apologize for using you as an example, but will still keep it in the post because it's such a nice example :-) It's very good to hear that you came to similar conclusions eventually, I didn't know that!

Comment author: pjeby 04 August 2012 04:15:09AM 22 points [-]

it's such a nice example :-)

Perhaps it would become an even better example, then, by adding a link to the relevant post, e.g. "and after a while you became jaded, until even he realized it was a loop". ;-)

Comment author: bbleeker 04 August 2012 12:32:38PM *  16 points [-]

creating my own Sequences

Please do!

Comment author: Thinkchronous 14 November 2013 05:31:55PM 1 point [-]

Hoping to find more epiphanies?