This post has something meaningful to say, but I lack respect for the circumstances in which you try to peddle it. Mentioning multiple times that you're playing the same status game with your substack/twitter "inb4"s criticism, but doesn't resolve the hypocrisy.
It also seems like your negative affinity towards these people and their crowd is affecting your judgement. For example, it's probably not great advice to tell people to stop worrying about their health or meditating, even if Isaac Newton didn't do it.
Another point worth mentioning: Isaac Newton allegedly had the ability to focus on his work for entire consecutive days at a time. This is highly unusual. The only non-chemical intervention I've ever heard of that can take a normal human mind to that ability is meditation. Though most people aren't willing to take their meditation practice to the level of intensity that does that, with proper instruction, it may have a more than marginal effect on prolonged concentration.
Strongly upvoted, but is meditation actually useful? There seem to be a lot of people hoping for benefits, but rather fewer who have experienced them. Total agreement on the rest.
I think I've experienced massive benefits, both in reduced suffering an increased productivity.
Do you have an idea of which part of your meditation journey helped the most with productivity?
Using it to do neural annealing was definitely the biggest boost.
Other than that, the step where I shifted the focus from "let's try to do well in formal practice" to "let's focus primarily on integrating it into life (mostly focused on equanimity).
but is meditation actually useful?
For what? It makes no sense to suppose that instruments value is the only kind
I don't understand who you're suggesting has a terminal goal of meditation, except maybe those doing it for religious reasons.
A lot of people who have done a lot of meditation (me included) value mindfulness for its own sake.
That's not a minor exception. Also , you are assuming a framework where terminal values are fixed and subjective. That allows you to mathematically solve puzzles, but is not known to be true.
ETA would you take a pill that gave the objectively true values?
Reading this is like looking into a world that is the reverse of what I know. My world is one of outsiders who are doing things they find meaningful or important as best they can, even under dire circumstances, but who can't or won't cross the threshold into being paid to do it. Meanwhile, apparently there's this other world in which vast sums of money are in play, and there are lots of people eager to be paid to do valuable things, but there's a shortage of actually valuable things to do.
I don't think that the problem is a lack of valuable things to do. It's rather that paradigm changing valuable things is a category of research for which there aren't reliable signals beforehand.
If we look at a topic like forecasting there's likely valuable conceptual work to be done but it's unclear about how to do it.
Trying to figure out what's being said here. My best guess is two major points:
The post doesn't spend much of its time making specific criticisms because specific criticism of this patronage system would indict OP for attempting to participate in it. This hampers its readability.
I'll just post a twitter thread here that I wrote in response to criticism. Maybe this will clarify my goals/intentions
I want “nerds” to realize that we are not above performative attention-seeking behavior, that we can really easily slip into a failure mode of “write a blog post that embraces some high-minded ideal that no one disagrees with and then propose some law/policy/program that will supposedly increase this thing and then pat yourself on the back and move on”. I wanted to expose my own emotions and insecurities around really caring about science/progress/altruism/etc. while also really wanting people to read and praise my writing because I think other people struggle with this too. I want people reflect on the fact that writing =/= thinking and if you aren’t careful it’s easy to forget that. I wanted people to consider that explicitly trying to be innovative, creative, or smart might not work as well being as earnest as possible in your pursuit of curiosity, love, beauty, etc and that internet/social media can make it really hard to be earnest in your intellectual pursuits. I also just wanted to entertain and make people laugh; of course I was making arguments but I also view this essay as art (pretentious, I know)– I want people to know it’s okay to do both, not everything has to be a Very Serious Essay That Convinces You of Something. In fact, I would argue that there is a dearth of aesthetic sensibilities in the science/progress/EA space and that we all might benefit from a little more style, emotion, beauty, and humor.
It's very hard to create new paradigms without community building. If you have an idea for a revolutionary new research paradigm but there's no community interested in that new research paradigm little value is created.
Einstein did have the advantage that there was a clear research community interested in what he had to say but that's not universally the case.
I also refuse to believe that Bezos gives a shit about any of this—it’s just virtue signaling for nerds. If he actually cared he would put his money where his mouth is and start a program that sponsors countless would-be miracle years, but instead his cheapskate ass has only donated 1% of his wealth while his ex-wife has donated 18%.
I do believe that Bezos cares. I think it's more likely that he currently doesn't think that it's straightforward to buy miracle years. To the extent that progress studies are useful, part of it might be to make it more straightforward for someone like Bezos to invest money into projects like that.
Dwarkesh Patel’s essay “The Mystery of the Miracle Year” just went COVID-19-level viral (woah, too soon). Fucking Jeff Bezos read the article at tweeted at him (and Marc Andreessen and Paul Graham).
I’ve appeared on Dwarkesh’s podcast and he has given me feedback on some of my writing before. I like Dwarkesh and think he’s super smart and deserves every bit of attention and praise that is coming his way. But I do have a bone to pick, not with him or the essay per se, but with this kind of essay and the growing obsession with what I call “innovation porn”.
In the essay, Dwarkesh attempts to explain the annus mirabilis phenomenon, the extraordinary career-defining year of productivity found in the lives of various scientists, inventors, and creatives.
He briefly discusses a few possible explanations—the right problem at the right time (i.e. luck), youth and freedom (“Perhaps there’s a brief window in a person’s life where he has the intelligence, curiosity, and freedom of youth but also the skills and knowledge of age”) and the obligations that success brings (as a reason why these remarkable periods of creativity tend to fizzle out). The article ends with a forceful conclusion:
My first criticism, one that is often discussed in these kinds of debates, is the whole “ideas are getting harder to find” thing. As Dwarkesh points out, miracle years tend to happen in your 20s (Einstein was 26 during his). Newton, another miracle-year-haver (1665, age 22), famously remarked that if he has seen further it’s because he has stood on the shoulders of giants. Well, the giants are a lot taller nowadays. The most recent example of a scientific annus mirabilis that Dwarkesh discusses is Einstein—why has no one had a miracle year in the last 100 years? Because now people have to spend their 20s learning about the discoveries that others made during their miracle years (the so-called “burden of knowledge”).
Analysis of Nobel Prize winners supports the notion that it is getting harder and harder to innovate in your 20s.
I don’t think the growing burden of knowledge means that it is now impossible for 20-somethings to make breakthroughs or have miracle years, it just might be a little harder than it was in the past. So ultimately I agree with Dwarkesh that we should be doing more to help young people have miracle years, that we should give more young people “the freedom to explore far-fetched ideas without arbitrary deadlines or time consuming obligations”. Or at least I think I agree with him. It certainly gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to come out in favor of intellectual *~freedom~* and *~creativity~* and *~innovation~*. But when I think about it a little more, when I consider my experiences as a current high school teacher and former biology graduate student, I get much, much more cynical. What will high school students and college students do when given the freedom and resources to chase their biggest, boldest ideas? They will do shit like this:
They will make apps and found tech companies. They will build “communities”.
They will become obsessed with *~innovation~* and effective altruism and long-termism and X-risk and all of this other shit that is just catnip for nerds.
They will write blog posts about how we can develop more geniuses, about how “institutions are broken”, about how we can “fix” science (or how we can’t), about how we can most effectively do good in the world by giving money to this or that cause or by getting rid of this or that policy, about how we can reduce our chance of extinction by 0.000001% and how even that small difference matters Much More Than You Think It Does. They will attempt to become champions of the epistemic minor leagues, desperately trying to find that one novel insight or provocative argument that will get motherfucking Jeff Bezos to follow them. They will intellectually masturbate to innovation porn over and over again until their dick is limp and their balls are dry.
And yes, I am doing the exact same thing here—it’s why I named this article “Fuck Your Miracle Year” instead of something much more reserved like “Reflections on The Mystery of the Miracle Year”. It’s why I’m writing in this excessively combative tone that doesn’t totally reflect how I feel. It’s why I, too, write articles about how we can cultivate more creativity in science. I want motherfucking Jeff Bezos to follow me. Jealousy is the ugliest emotion and it’s coursing through my veins. I feel it corrupting my mind like a zombie virus.
“Maybe you should write something about geniuses again. Erik Hoel also got a lot of attention for his post on developing geniuses through aristocratic tutoring. Scott Alexander even wrote a response to it. Doesn’t that Rohit the Strangeloop Canon guy also write about geniuses and patronage and stuff like that? He’s got 5,239 twitter followers (and counting) and you only have 400 so he must be doing something right. Remember when you wrote “The Myth of Myth of the Lone Genius” and Scott Alexander linked to it and then Steven Pinker re-tweeted it? What a high! It felt like you were finally being recognized for being a Deep Thinker with Deep Ideas, the only thing you ever really wanted in life. But wait, didn’t you also just write this:
“Hmmm, yes, yes I did. But Erik (my real name), let’s be pragmatic here. You want the attention and the respect, you want patronage or a grant that will pay you to sit around and think and read and write, the only things that your useless ass is good at (and even that is highly debatable). You want to be a public intellectual like Sam Harris or Tyler Cowen or Scott Alexander. Shit, you’d even settle for being Erik Hoel. Didn’t he just get a grant from the FTX future fund for his blog? Man, that would be pretty cool. Remember when you wrote that predictions for 2050 post and he wrote about one of your predictions? Yeah that was pretty cool too, brought some good attention to your blog. I know you really wanted to write that short story about that guy who becomes obsessed with plants and in a fit of madness convinces himself that plants are manipulating humanity into destroying themselves and all animal life so that they can have the planet for themselves, but let’s be honest it’s probably going to suck and no one is going to read it (it sounds a lot cooler in my head, I promise). Just write some more progress porn, maybe something about how we can improve science by changing the way we fund it. Or maybe write something about how changing incentives can save science (or how new incentives will not save science), people love that shit.”
Phew, sorry I got a little carried away there. Where was I?
Look, no one talked about how we can engineer miracle years when miracle years were actually still happening. This modern obsession with progress is just a sign of our decadence, of our creative exhaustion and inability to innovate in any meaningful way. Einstein wasn’t reading fucking blog posts about geniuses and he definitely wasn’t writing them. He was thinking.
Dwarkesh’s essay is really good. “90% of everything is crap” (Sturgeon’s Law) but I think it falls into the 10% of things that are decidedly not crap. But I still have to wonder what the point is, because it’s not going to help anyone have a miracle year or achieve anything that actually helps people become more creative/productive. What it’s going to do is spawn an army of copycats who write articles about geniuses because they desperately want to win The Blog Prize, a Thiel Fellowship, an Emergent Ventures grant or some other award/fellowship/grant that will finally give them the freedom and support they need to have their One Big Idea that will revolutionize science or save the world or save the whales or whatever. I also refuse to believe that Bezos gives a shit about any of this—it’s just virtue signaling for nerds. If he actually cared he would put his money where his mouth is and start a program that sponsors countless would-be miracle years, but instead his cheapskate ass has only donated 1% of his wealth while his ex-wife has donated 18%.
I’ll make a prediction, one that I really hope I’m wrong about: Dwarkesh will never have a miracle year. [1]He will continue to chase the high of having Jeff motherfucking Bezos follow him (better than heroin some say, we’ll have to ask him because we’ll never know). He will spend more time blogging and podcasting and promoting his work on twitter. He will talk and write about how we can make *~progress~* and encourage *~creativity~* and use *~rationality~* to effectively do good, all things that no reasonable person could possibly be against, right? Right?!?!?
In his article “America is running on fumes”, Derek Thompson, another purveyor of progress porn par excellence, hypothesizes that the internet is the real culprit behind our lack of new ideas.
This is the sad truth. The double-edged sword of the internet is cutting us much, much deeper than we realize. It makes Dwarkesh and countless others like him (myself included) waste their time writing about geniuses and how we can best foster innovation (a very safe, pre-approved topic—who doesn’t want to be innovative?), which as I said before is essentially just virtue signaling for nerds. It makes it so, so difficult for us to do something for ourselves (for love, for curiosity, for beauty, for pain) and ourselves only, not for college applications or resumes or followers (and this is the real reason why ideas are getting harder to find).
Do you really want to have a miracle year?
Delete the draft of that blog post you were writing. The post sucks and no one was going to read it anyways.
Stop gorging yourself on the internet and its endless buffet of information. Stop masturbating to innovation porn and (effective) altruism porn. Stop reading my blog. Stop masturbating to sex porn while you’re at it.[2] Use your imagination, just like they did back in Einstein’s day.
Fantasize.
Think.
This seems like the perfect time to announce that I will be deleting my substack and my twitter account forever. Just kidding—please like, share, and subscribe, and if anyone reading this would like to fund me or knows anyone who would be interested in doing so please contact me because I’m about to quit my teaching job and I’m really scared that I’m making a terrible decision and that I’m just going to waste a lot of money and feel like a complete failure :)
Obviously I’m being super dramatic here and I hope Dwarkesh or anyone else reading this doesn’t take this as an insult, far from it (not having a miracle year puts him in good company with basically everyone else who has even lived). I think Dwarkesh has incredible potential and I’m really making this prediction as more of a challenge to keep working hard and not let success get to his head (which I know he won’t).
Also, stop meditating and trying to optimize your mental and physical performance. Has anyone who’s ever had a miracle year cared about any of this shit?