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Jiro comments on Trying to Try - Less Wrong
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Comments (53)
I think for most people if you ask them to define what "try" means they will tell you that it's about putting in effort to achieve a goal. Emprirically that's however doesn't describe well the circumstances in which they use the word.
Especially on LW it might be possible that you actually don't wouldn't describe the manager who works 80 hours as trying to do his best at his job, but what you said doesn't make me confident that's the case.
I was at a hypnosis seminar where one of the exercises is about temporily forgetting numbers. There no mental action that you can do where you exert effort that gets you to forget the numbers but if you are in a mental state where you don't try and follow the instructions of the hypnotherapist you will temporarily forget the numbers.
At the end of the seminar I think of roughly 20 people there were two for which it didn't work. It didn't work for me because I wanted to have the effect happen and therefore I couldn't let go enough to stop trying to make it work. There was another person who happened to be a professional hypnotherapist for whom the same was true.
The mental state of just working towards a goal and not putting in any effort isn't easy to achieve.
These do not go together. People on Lesswrong often would describe things in ways that would be very weird to an average person.
Also, in the case of the manager working 80 hours, remember that the definition is about effort, not about number of hours. People need not believe that effort is strictly correlated with number of hours.
And in the hypnosis example, most people would say something like "if you try to forget, it won't work". In other words, they would not say that the person who exerts effort isn't trying, just that he's not successfully trying.
Yes, normal people associate working 80 hours with effort and on LW you might have people who don't. The thing that matters for trying is effort.
The main point is that exerting effort and doing what's necessary to achieve an objective are two different things.
There are certain effects that can be achieved in trance that you can achieve if you exert effort. Telekinesis isn't one of them, but it makes sense that a fictional character who can do telekinesis would need an effort less trance state to do it.
There are certain tasks like sitting in front of one's computer that where you will have less back pain if you invest less effort into the act of sitting (and in the Alexander technique you can learn how to do the task with less effort).
Than there's EY meaning that a lot of people will say "I will try" when they are asked to achieve an outcome where they aren't certain whether they can achieve it with the strategy they choose to persue the goal. They commit to investing some energy into following the strategy but they don't commit to the responsibility of making the outcome happen.