I'm Screwtape, also known as Skyler. I'm an aspiring rationalist originally introduced to the community through HPMoR, and I stayed around because the writers here kept improving how I thought. I'm fond of the Rationality As A Martial Art metaphor, new mental tools to make my life better, and meeting people who are strange in ways I find familiar and comfortable. If you're ever in the Boston area, feel free to say hi.
Starting early in 2023, I'm the ACX Meetups Czar. You might also know me from the New York City Rationalist Megameetup, editing the Animorphs: The Reckoning podfic, or being that guy at meetups with a bright bandanna who gets really excited when people bring up indie tabletop roleplaying games.
I recognize that last description might fit more than one person.
A bullet point from an unsorted list of complaints I have against the English language. (And I think most languages.)
The following works for me. I do not know how well it works for other people.
I separate coming up with ideas and filtering for good ideas. Many of the ideas I come up with are bad ideas. For example, I'm about to spend a few minutes by the clock coming up with plans for becoming a professional film director.
"Go to film school and ask the professors for professional contacts. Show up at a college office hour and as the professors for contacts even if I'm not a student. Make movies in my backyard with home equipment, and put them online. Reach out to film studios and ask if they have educational opportunities or internships. Hire a professional film director to tutor me. Read books and biographies about professional film directors and copy what they did. Hang around the next actor's strike and ask if anyone wants to goof off and do an amateur project that wouldn't break the strike. Make movies and then talk to local theatres and see if they want to run those movies, maybe during slow times/days. Create an online buzz around an obscure and rarely seen auteur film that The Mainstream Media doesn't want you to see. Project it onto the sky on a screen held up by drones. Make a film of a famous fanfic- hey, podfics hitch a ride on someone else's story why not a film."
Okay, time over. Some of those ideas need more detail- like, making a movie with the tools I have comes up as a first step of several plans and I'd need to work through more about how to do that. That's not necessarily a bad thing; I know just enough about film-making to know there's some different choices I'd make while filming depending on the eventual format but maybe I can save some effort with multiple cuts or something. Other ideas are ways to fish for more ideas, like reading books on the subject or asking professors what to do.
Some are just bad ideas. Getting professional film directors to tutor me sounds expensive, and also I'm not at all sure the constraint is lack of skill at directing. Actor's strikes seem to happen about every ten years so maybe keep that in your back pocket while you work on other plans. As for projecting it onto the sky, I don't have any idea how that gets you paid enough to get called a professional plus you might get some kind of public disturbance complaint? But. . . talking to local theatres doesn't seem like a terrible idea? Putting some kind of weird spin on a movie released online might work- it at least points at different tweaks or implementations to just putting it up on Youtube.
The point is, I didn't come up with those plans to fill a quota. I was just coming up with a bunch of ideas. If in the end there was only one good idea in the mix, then I'd use that one and ignore the others. Sometimes there's no good ideas, in which case I give my brain a mental cookie for coming up with ideas and another for not pretending that any of them were good.
You're welcome, and thank you for the example! As you point out, whether you're constrained on time often matters for how many plans you can attempt.
I do hope you give yourself some points for noticing the first method wasn't working and switching. That's better than winding up with no data. I'd encourage thinking of this as an opportunity to get even more points.
Fair. In my head, "Curse of doom" is generic but attaches to "Pareto Best." There are many curses, here's one. I didn't manage to come up with a name for it that I loved, so I went with something that felt okay. Curse of Dimensionality is more specific but I feel like it doesn't get at the idea enough to feel useful? Alternate titles:
It does feel curse like to me but that's more poetry than precision.
Yep, as I said in the parenthetical, the model is incorrect. I'm >95% sure that some people are twice as competent as other people and wouldn't be surprised to encounter 10x gaps or higher if we're allowed to pick from outliers in both directions.
Finding an extreme polymath is a good trick if you can do it. Sometimes you can do it.
Three categories; there's things that aren't at all cursed because they only take one skillset or because their overlapping skillset is common, things that are a bit cursed where we have cases where the overlapping skillsets happened to work out but we have reason to expect there should be more, and things that are very cursed indeed. Note that, especially when looking at the difference between "Not at all cursed" and "a bit cursed" you're
Not at all cursed: Musicals or plays about the experience of being a writer or playwright. (Tick Tick Boom, Bells are Ringing, Birds of Paradise, Cabaret, City of Angels, Merrily We Roll Along...) Software that fixes problems encountered by software engineers. (Git, Leetcode, JIRA, Stack Exchange, and that's not counting this list of IDEs.) Legal or bureaucrat collective organizations that have done their paperwork. (See this list of bar associations just for Massachusetts.)
A bit cursed: Musicals or plays about the experience of being a U.S. president. (Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Hamilton, arguably 1776.) Computer programs about doing your taxes. (H&R, TurboTax.) Rationalist or EA organizations that have done their paperwork (see this post and ctrl+f for "king umbrella") or to pick another example with a larger population, software engineering associations that have done their paperwork.
Very cursed: Musicals or plays about being illiterate. Computer programs about Amish farming techniques. Anarchist organizations that have done their paperwork.
Note that a Very Cursed section I write might have some hits, mainly when it winds up being worth paying someone. It's hard to write a list of the things nobody thought to make, since obviously nobody thought to make them. Someone who had no knowledge of how the internet worked would have a hard time realizing that Google Docs or Amazon's online shopping would be options someone might try. It might be a better intuition pump to look at the gradient between Not At All Cursed and A Bit Cursed; what's the difference between lawyers and software engineers that makes it so lawyers have a dozen bar associations in MA, with their own bylaws and articles? The hypothesis I'm putting forward is that being a lawyer selects hard for being comfortable with paperwork, while being a software engineer doesn't select for that at all.
Or to reuse one of the examples I had in the main article: A book about an unappreciated writer or English teacher is a cliche. A book about an unappreciated janitor or waste collector is not a cliche. My hypothesis is this is because being a writer selects for writing ability, while being a janitor doesn't.
Yep, the list of places that try and accommodate foibles is not exhaustive. Thanks for pointing that out!
I didn't say it was easy, I said it was easier. Being the world's best mathematician/musician is much easier than being the world's best mathematician. If you haven't yet, check out the prerequisite.
I think it takes a lot less than ten thousand hours to reach competence at most skills, though this might be down to our definitions of competence? That's eight hours a day for three or four years, and it usually makes me think of Gladwell's 10,000 Rule from Outliers which is about achieving expertise.
I think riding a bike took me a weekend to learn so maybe ten to twenty hours, learning to play first person shooter videogames took me a weekend or two so about twenty to thirty hours, I picked up massage over a semester or two of class so about eighty hours of class time? I'm not saying I mastered those subjects that fast. I do think I learned enough to make use of them; you likely only need to practice riding a bike for a weekend or two before you can use it to get around town faster than walking.
If you have ten thousand hours of practice as a guitarist, your next fifty hours could go into being better at playing guitar. They could go into being better at audio recording, or setting up a great website for your band, or into being a better teacher for people who don't know guitar yet. If you're an amazing biology researcher with thousands of hours in bio, a week or two of intense study on how to write really good grant applications is probably more useful to you than an additional week or two of intense study in biology. My understanding is mathematicians who also know a little computer programming have options even in math that you don't have if you're a pure mathematician.