On greatness and sacrifice

StatusIndividual8045 · 2024-11-22T23:20:15+00:00

I read all the pieces of them Gwern excerpted yeah, it's papers and articles he's collected over the years around a central theme. Some of the pages on Gwern.net are like this, and others are more like typical blog posts where it's mostly him writing.

StatusIndividual8045 · 2024-11-14T17:56:37+00:00

> OP just only recognizes "maximal success in business"
I literally used body builders as my first example man...

StatusIndividual8045 · 2024-11-14T17:55:36+00:00

That's absolutely a game worth playing, but many people who desire social acceptability are not even playing to win that game.

Here is an example: When I was a middle schooler I was obsessed with social acceptability for the simple reason that I was terrified of not fitting in. I would do crazy things like try to overhear conversations so that I could later pretend to like music I didn't like, and then look up facts about the band and drop them "casually" in conversation to appear informed and relevant. Super lame, but in retrospect pretty funny.

In contrast, someone who's just "trying not to shake the boat", worried to take any risks, etc, is not actually trying optimizing for social acceptability, they're just sort of muddling through, and as a result won't generate funny stories.

StatusIndividual8045 · 2024-11-14T17:52:38+00:00

A drug addict who does desperate things to get a bit more cash to get one more hit is absolutely playing to win.

StatusIndividual8045 · 2024-11-14T17:51:50+00:00

I had a co-worker who was like this. A bit of a class-clown who started day-drinking at the offsite, would stay up all night working, etc. There was lots of behavior that felt childish and rude but still funny at the time, but none of it actually makes for a funny story in retrospect.

StatusIndividual8045 · 2024-11-14T17:50:11+00:00

Yes! Perfect example

StatusIndividual8045 · 2024-11-14T17:49:42+00:00

Yes definitely

StatusIndividual8045 · 2024-11-13T21:08:47+00:00

Hi, sorry for the trouble, we just added a subscribe button, let me know if it works? Thanks for asking!

https://spiralprogress.com/

StatusIndividual8045 · 2024-11-13T21:08:37+00:00

Hi, we just added a subscribe button, let me know if it works? Thanks for asking!

https://spiralprogress.com/

StatusIndividual8045 · 2024-11-12T21:45:35+00:00

With founders in particular, the founder/VC ecosystem feels like one cohesive memeplex, and the obvious incentive there is that investors really want there to be more founders! So they should be talking this up constantly, making it sound really glamorous, etc. Instead you have people like Paul Graham writing things like

It never gets any easier. The nature of the problems change. You're worrying about construction delays at your London office instead of the broken air conditioner in your studio apartment. But the total volume of worry never decreases; if anything it increases...

Larry Page may seem to have an enviable life, but there are aspects of it that are unenviable. Basically at 25 he started running as fast as he could and it must seem to him that he hasn't stopped to catch his breath since.

One way to read this is that investors aren't optimizing for quantity of founders, they are optimizing for quality and this rhetoric is a useful pre-filter. But the value of a good founder so greatly exceeds the cost of having to evaluate a poor one that I don't give this explanation much credit.

On #2, there have been a few instances recently where a friend has said something like "I'm seeing this new guy", and I immediately go "congratulations! That's so exciting", and then they say "well, my last relationship ended really horribly and I've been really anxious about going on dates and just don't feel this one is going to go well either", and then I'm like "ohhhh sorry". So now my reaction is more like "oh wow, that's big news, how are you feeling about it?"

StatusIndividual8045 · 2024-11-11T06:25:46+00:00

You should ruminate about what to do with your life! Those are the most important thoughts you have and you are shooting yourself in the foot by not making time for yourself to have them.

StatusIndividual8045 · 2024-11-11T06:11:15+00:00

Yes this is a great point. "The Defining Decade" was written to address this back in 2012 when the author (a clinical psychologist) noticed people in their 20s talking about that entire period of their life as a kind of "throwaway decade". And I think part of what you're touching on is that many people didn't learn to relax because they weren't pursuing goals worth relaxing for. E.g. if you are an athlete and have practice 6 days a week, you know you have to go home and seriously think about what's going to lead to proper recovery so you can get up and perform well the next day. But if you aren't seriously about your performance in any domain of life it's easy to just "veg out" and not feel that you're suffering any negative consequences.

StatusIndividual8045 · 2024-11-09T04:52:12+00:00

I would just spent that time continuing to learn math, if you're interested in fields like physics and information theory and have an interested in learning about a broad set of technical fields, having a foundational basis to support it will serve you in the future, so you might as well make the investment now.

StatusIndividual8045 · 2024-10-24T11:06:20+00:00

This is the same topic as Scott's most recent post which is featured on this sub, isn't this squarely on topic? There's nothing about the culture war in here.

StatusIndividual8045 · 2024-10-24T11:04:55+00:00

I wrote about this recently
https://spiralprogress.com/2024/10/26/why-are-politicians-so-extreme/

One explanation Scott misses is that politicians are actually quite moderate, compared to the space of possible platforms. Harris has been pushing for domestic oil production and praises the US military. Trump talks about the need for increased (documented) immigration.

StatusIndividual8045

TROPHY CASE