A large element of instrumental rationality consists of filtering, prioritizing, and focusing. It's true for tasks, for emails, for blogs, and for the multitude of other inputs that many of us are drowning in these days[1]. Doing everything, reading everything, commenting on everything is simply not an option - it would take infinite time. We could simply limit time and do what happens to catch our attention in that limited time, but that's clearly not optimal. Spending some time prioritizing rather than executing will always improve results if items can be prioritized and vary widely in benefit. So maximizing the results we get from our finite time requires, for a variety of domains:
- Filtering: a quick first-pass to get input down to a manageable size for the higher-cost effort of prioritizing.
- Prioritizing: briefly evaluating the impact each item will have towards your goals.
- Focusing: on the highest-priority items.
I have some thoughts, and am looking for more advice on how to do this for non-fiction reading. I've stopped buying books that catch my attention, because I have an inpile of about 3-4 shelves of unread books that have been unread for years. Instead, I put them on my Amazon Wishlists, which as a result have swelled to a total of 254 books - obviously un-manageable, and growing much faster than I read.
One obvious question to ask when optimizing is: what is the goal of reading? Let me suggest a few possibilities:
- Improve performance at a current job/role. For example, as Executive Director of a nonprofit, I could read books on fundraising or management.
- Relatedly, work towards a current goal. Here is where it helps to have identified your goals, perhaps in an Annual Review. As a parent, for example, there are an infinitude of parenting books that I could read, but I chose for this year to work specifically on positive psychology parenting, as it seemed like a potentially high-impact skill to learn. This massively filters the set of possible parenting books. Essentially, goal-setting ("learn positive psychology parenting habits") was a conscious prioritization step based on considering what new parenting skills would best advance my goals (in this case, to benefit my kids while making parenting more pleasant along the way).
- Improve core skills or attributes relevant to many areas of life - productivity, happiness, social skills, diet, etc.
- Expand your worldview (improve your map). Myopically focusing only on immediate needs would eliminate some of the greatest benefit I feel I've gotten from non-fiction in my life, which is a richer and more accurate understanding of the world.
- Be able to converse intelligently on currently popular books. (Much as one might watch the news in order to facilitate social bonding by being able to discuss current events). Note that I don't actually recommend this as a goal - I think you can find other things to bond over, plus you will sometimes read currently popular books because they serve other goals - but it may be important for some people.
You may want to warn people that "a large amount of hands" means in the order of hundred thousand hands and more.
And to be more exact, variance only goes down relative to the expected winnings. The standard deviation of a sample increases as a square root to the number of hands. Whereas the expected winnings increases linearly. In Limit Hold'em, a 1,5BB/100 hands expected winrate just barely covers two standard deviations from the mean over 100,000 hands. Experienced player can perhaps play 4-6 tables simultaneously, which means that he can accumulate approximately 500 hands per hour. So 100,000 hands would take around 200 hours of play.
The real challenge of poker is dealing with the inherent variance of the game. The immense variance is the reason why poker is so profitable, but even the most experienced players are unable to cope with the most extreme swings of negative luck. The brain constantly tries to pattern-match the immediate results and however much you reason that it's just bad luck (when it really is bad luck!) it will make you sick psychologically.
Note that we assumed we know the expected winrate of a given player. However, conditions change, profitability of the games fluctuate, etc, so it's practically impossible to quantify any given player's current profitability. This makes it vastly more difficult to know whether bad past results are because of variance or because of sub-optimal play.
200 hours is 1 month of 50 hour weeks, or 2 months of 25 hour weeks. Is it really that big a deal for your results to only matter month to month rather than day to day? I mean, yeah, it can be frustrating during a bad week, but it's not like the long run takes years.