Successfulness and related thoughts

Returning to the theme of the treachery of childhood, two things that I feel is sorely missing from a modern education is training in how to be successful and how to deal with everyday life.

In the traditional education of ages past, most children who were being educated (this wasn't every child back in those days) eventually moved from school into an apprenticeship that equipped them with a skill that was expected to provide them with their livelihood for the rest of their lives, and provide them with plenty of opportunity for advancement if they would apply themselves to it. The apprentice trained to eventually become a master in his own right, and to eventually have his own practice, either taking over his master's shop eventually or hanging out his own shingle. It was understood that he was working for the master with the intention of eventually setting himself up, and that while he served the master, he was building his own skills and reputation that would eventually serve him well in his own work, not simply advance the shop where he worked and allow him little opportunities for advancement as the shop grew (though never quite as large of a percentage of the advancement as would be received by the master). In this world, the path of education gave someone a very straightforward path to success. All a child, youth, and young man from an educated background had to do to find himself well on the path towards success was apply himself diligently to everything that his hand found to do. Of course, peasants and others of the uneducated classes faced a much harsher condition. Whereas, the people who followed the paths of education were practically guaranteed to meet success if they followed the path set in front of them, peasants were given no opportunity for significant advancement no matter what they did. They were locked in their condition. Still, there was a straightforward path for every child to take in his occupation. In all most all cases he could do no better than accepting his lot in life and making the most of it; those who grew discontent and tried to take up another life elsewhere tended to live short lives ended by cholera. (This is only a slight exaggeration... in the early days of the industrial revolution, the life expectancy of a peasant who moved to the city was only about five years past when he arrived. Whatever promise urban life seemed to hold at this time, it was a false promise. Those who stayed in the country did far better for themselves than those who left.) While the young peasant had no real chance of meeting great success in this world, he had a very clear path for maximizing his success, and it was quite simply to continue to do what he had been brought up to do, to work hard at it, and do it well.

And then the world changed. In many ways, it changed for the better. Producing things became much more efficient and cost-effective. No longer did most of the world's civilized population have to work in the fields to produce the food required to sustain the population. No longer did every piece of furniture need to be slowly assembled by a master craftsman by hand. The primary resource constraint limiting the amount that people could accomplish ceased to be human labor and instead became the raw natural productivity of the land. One person could easily tend the land that used to require hundreds of laborers, but that land still produced only as much as it was able to produce. In this world people were no longer looking to find assistants. They had plenty to choose from, for many people were now beginning to instead search for work. Instead of taking any capable boy who was interested in learning the trade and one or two connections to establish his reputation, those who had their own shop now had the luxury of searching for whatever assistants brought with them the most qualifications. Once these assistants were hired, they were no longer apprentices, being prepared to eventually succeed in their own right. They were simply workers, hired and expected to promote the advancement of the shop, and for motivation, they would be rewarded for their work with some small amount of the advancement that the shop received, provided they contributed more than their fellow-workers. In the resulting world there's no clear path to success. There's a huge disconnection between what you do in school and what you do in life after finishing your education, and simply doing what you're trained to do and excelling at everything your hand finds to do, is no longer anything close to a guaranteed path towards what feels like success. Someone who does this will still be extremely likely to find himself well-paid a few years into his career, but at an enormous sacrifice. To follow this path is to surrender the potential for mastery and to surrender with it the ability for your own individual skills and contribution to have much impact on how well you do in life. Your success is much more tightly tied to the success of your company than it is to your ability in your trade. People notice this almost immediately, and many begin jumping between companies in search of company that will achieve success and bring them up with it in its rising swell. But doing this relies on obtaining all sorts of skills that you've never been trained to have and that the people you work with and work for don't want you to obtain. It's an alienating experience. There's an enormous disconnect between what you do to succeed in your work and what you do to succeed in your life, and all of the rules that you've developed throughout your childhood based on the way advancement and recognition worked in your education have conditioned you to choose the things that help you succeed in your immediate work and sacrifice the things that will help you succeed in your life.

Something needs to be done about this. We've inherited an educational system from a time when education was meant to prepare people to enter a world of apprenticeship followed by eventually becoming a master of his own trade, but we no longer have a world in which this educational system makes any sense. Being a good student doesn't prepare people for life after education, and neither does being a bad student. There's no natural progression from developing skills to using them. Instead, people spend part of their lives developing skills and knowledge only to be thrust into a world in which almost all of their skills and knowledge are completely irrelevant, and have to learn from scratch how to function in this setting that is utterly unlike anything they have ever prepared for. My childhood wasn't entirely spent in education. There were also the summers, and I spent some of those summers in summer jobs, but if anything, summer jobs, at least of the variety I had, do nothing to prepare you for the world of work after college, and if anything are even less compatible with it than my education was. The sorts of things someone learns in three months of doing manual labor and the skills one develops in that situation just don't map over into the kinds of things people need to do in an office. The sorts of things kids do in sports and other social activities, don't map over into the kinds of things that are done to establish professional relationships. The whole of childhood, at least the whole of my childhood, was spent preparing me to function in a fictitious world that simply doesn't exist. I haven't figured out exactly what I need to do to function well in the world that does exist, yet, but I have learned that the lessons of my childhood have not done much to prepare me for figuring that out. All it did to help me was give me some skills and knowledge that are useful for impressing people who I sometimes need to impress, but ultimately prove useless for facing the sorts of problems that I face in the real world.

I'd planned to be more specific with examples from my own life, but I can't share them without becoming angry, so I won't.

Practice vs Performance

A distinction that gets lost in most fields of study and in most professions is the distinction between practice and performance. In the areas where it does exist, we have much evidence to suggest that the distinction is valuable. Musicians don't become great musicians through rehearsals (performances that they play alone as a run-through of their actual performance), they become great musicians by practicing scales and exercises. Athletes improve their game by playing live games, and in-game experience is something that distinguishes rookies from veterans, but they don't get to be great at the game through their performances, they get to be great at the game through practice.

I happen to deal with two fields in which people seldom practice. They are both relatively private fields so people aren't ever "on stage," but they are almost always expected to be performing when they are live. My two chosen fields are writing and software development. (That's a lie, actually. I happen to have experience in software development, but the field I'd hoped to choose was computer science.) In these fields, it's a little harder to distinguish between practice and performance because the product you produce always becomes so similar. However, there is substantial evidence to suggest that the two differ from each other dramatically. People don't tend to improve at programming very much through on the job experience. The best programmers are the ones who spend hours of their own time programming their own projects. The very best ones are the ones who have already spent much of their own time practicing, whether or not they still do. (Once a programmer founds a start-up or otherwise gets consumed in a particular project, I think it's safe to say that she has ceased to practice and instead switched over to performance full time.) In coding, I think there is actually a little more of a distinction between what people do for themselves and what they do in contribution to a major project than there is for writing. Software projects tend to get bloated and maintaining them or otherwise continuing to develop them becomes an extremely slow undertaking. Developers who successfully maintain bloated projects do so by ceasing to think about programming in general and instead focus on the particular problems of their particular project. You learn the tricks of coding around particular bugs and layout projects. You learn to optimize on that one particular bottleneck. Everything you study and everything you learn tends to be constrained to one narrow project that has practically no relevance for any future programming project you deal with. If you start from scratch on a project, you can be sure that the one bottleneck your new project will be designed to have absolutely zero chance of recreating is whatever one you spent dealing with the most on your last project. You've learned that lesson, and you will not do anything that risks repeating it. Another part of the problem is that maintaining an ancient project tends to be excruciatingly slow compared to doing new development. In new development, you learn from writing hundreds of line in a sitting, and running dozens of new tests. You try out many things you've never done before every week. In maintaining an existing project, you spend most of your time debugging, which means you spend most of your time reading code instead of writing it, and most of the time you spend reading code is spent reading the worst code in your code-base because that's where most of the bugs live. (The original computer bug was a moth. Since then, the rest have mostly been dung beetles.) Trying to learn about writing good code by spending most of your time reading code that needs to be debugged is like trying to learn to write great poetry by reading the lyrics of pop music. Just ain't gonna happen. I'd love to know who the Tennyson and T.S. Eliot of writing code are. Someone could presumably learn a lot by reading their code, but as a profession, software developers have very little sense of what makes code good code. In fact, for a profession as filled with brilliant people as software development is, the field has extremely idiotic views of quality. Most software developers are intimately familiar with a lot of very bad code, and the prevailing views among software developers about good code tend to be that good code is the opposite of bad code. "Considered harmful" articles tend to be what advocates of better coding practices reach for when they seek to improve the way people develop. Good is not bad negated. Good is a very narrow and improbable condition. As such, bad negated still tends to be bad. (My own "considered harmful" article is a tongue-in-cheek criticism of the general philosophy behind "considered harmful" articles, but it is worth noting that my experience of people presenting their views on how code should be developed is sufficiently dominated by "considered harmful" articles that my pattern matching tendencies, etc. suggested that the best way to write the article would be to write a considered harmful article. I should probably write a follow-up called "good code considered helpful.")

Then you have writing. As you can probably see, my natural writing style tends to contain a lot of parentheticals and quite a few asides. (By my natural writing style, I mean my stream of consciousness. I could just as easily call writing childish rhymes my "natural writing style" because it was the first writing style I really developed. I'd say my early stabs at writing poetry were on average more poetical than the lyrics of most pop songs, but not by much.) Asides aside, my stream of conscious writing style is clearly different from the writing style I would and do use when attempting to write for publication. But I do still have a question in my mind as to how much writing in stream of consciousness should be considered practicing writing. I think it probably counts, but I don't think that it's a sufficient exercise on its own. Writing in stream of consciousness is probably roughly equivalent to a musician doing ear-training. You can't learn to be a great musician without it, but you can't even learn to be a mediocre musician by ear training alone. Reading would be equivalent to listening to other musicians. Writing poetry would be equivalent to doing advanced fingering exercises, but I still can't figure out the basics. What does it mean to practice writing the way one would practice scales? I think that certain constrained exercises might have merits. For example, I have a tendency to say "I think" more often than I should. It doesn't typically add anything to my writing. I'm planning to write a little bit of code to help me score my own writing. I'm already running my blog through a small amount of code everyday to measure a few things, I might as well start to build out a system for measuring other indicators of what I would consider improved writing. I'm not sure that this type of thing is at all equivalent to practicing scales. I think it comes closer to practicing particular measures of music to work out the kinks, but I expect it to be a valuable exercise. I will continue to think about this subject in the back of my mind, and hopefully I will have something interesting to say about it at some future date.

Along the lines of the distinction between practice and performance, another valuable distinction that people often lose is the difference between playing to learn and playing to win. Valve has a documentary called "Free to Play" about the first DOTA 2 tournament. Dendi of NaVi as shown in that video is someone who understands the difference between playing to learn and playing to win. I don't know if any athletes make this distinction, but I know that many entertainers have. The Marx Brothers and the Beatles are well-documented to have taken this approach. Some performances matter more than others, and there are things that you can only learn in a performance that you cannot learn in practice. Great entertainers must learn to please a crowd, and to some extent they must learn how to do that by experimentation, so a typical performance should be done with some intention of playing to learn. You experiment and test things that might not work so that you can improve your ability to perform in the future. But then there are some performances there are some performances that are too important to lose by taking stupid risks. Dendi knew how to be patient, and he saved his patience for the tournament because it wasn't typically valuable. He could learn more by experimenting with stupid risks in his typical games than he could by playing with the intent to win, and winning wasn't mission-critical in most of those games, but he did know how to suppress that tendency when he played a game that mattered. The Marx Brothers experimented aplenty in live performances, but they knew to use only their best lines when they were in front of a camera. The Beatles produced plenty of garbage in their time, and even included a little garbage in most of their albums. All of it was highly experimental, but they also knew how to cut everything questionable when they were trying to produce truly magnificent albums, and they kept both Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Rode clean. "Glass Onion" would have ruined Sgt. Pepper. So would have "I Am the Walrus" or "Why Don't We Do It in the Road" and probably "Doctor Robert." (The Beatles openly admit that many of their songs are about drugs, but "Lucy in the Sky" is not one such song, according to them; it's a description of a picture a child drew.) Rubber Soul and Revolution are retroactively better albums than they would have been without Sgt. Pepper because they were clearly preparing material for Sgt. Pepper, but if those had been the height of the Beatles' psychedelic experimentation, they probably wouldn't be considered two of the five greatest albums of all time. Though it's hard to say, Bob Dylan never did learn to suppress his instinct for risky experimentation long enough to create a truly clean album. The Rolling Stones never pushed the kinds of boundaries that others of their era did. Jimi Hendrix is a little too abstruse. There aren't many musicians who have managed to be occasionally perfect while also innovating and experimenting enough to do something truly remarkable.

Those who achieve excellence, practice more than they perform. When they perform, they play to learn more often than they play to win, but they know how to play to win, and they sometimes do it. Most of the rest of us fail to even make the distinction.

Evil, magnificence, Roko's Basilisk and/or Pascal's Wager

I don't know exactly what it would cost to take over a third world country or topple the government of a first world country if someone was interested in doing precisely that, but my basic calculations and guestimations based on pursuing the most obvious lines of efficient attack suggest that the total cost should be well under a billion dollars. More importantly, we have some pretty compelling evidence to suggest that someone who wanted to do this could do it more efficiently and inexpensively if he was willing to be a ruthless, draconian despot than if he wanted to do it through more democratic methods. Putin's methods of control are very effective. Stalin made use of even stronger ruthlessness, so did Mao. The failed authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century tended to have a mixture of arbitrary enemies and political enemies that have been treated extremely poorly. Genocides have ended badly for their perpetrators on average, but for a genocide to take place, an authoritarian government has to use a considerable amount of its brute strength that it could be using to suppress political enemies and instead waste that energy killing and/or tormenting people for happening to be born the wrong race or for being raised in the wrong religion, or whatever. If you can get away with three hundred thousand murders (or whatever the actual limit is) before the international community and/or your own people start to decide that you are a legitimate threat to the world that must be eliminated, you are much better off using up your quota to squash your opposition than you are using up your quota trying to create racial purity or some other such nonsense. For anyone who can afford to do it, a basic strategy that ought to work for taking over third world countries is to buy some followers, equip them to fight your enemies, and have zero tolerance for dissent or resistance while avoiding war crimes other than ones that specifically have to do with destroying your enemies and eliminating resistance. It seems to me that tens of thousands of people or more have the ability to successfully implement this sort of conquest campaign, but to the best of my knowledge nobody's trying it. The world has a handful of rulers that use some of these policies to maintain control, but almost all of them worked their way up through an existing political or military institution in their country, and almost all of them were dealing with a country that already had similar policies in place. Frequently, these rulers are slightly less despotic than their predecessors. Nobody's used their existing success to secure extreme despotic power, and to the best of my knowledge nobody's even made the attempt. Every once in a while, we do see extremely militant draconian regimes rise up in this world, but to the best of my knowledge, they are all peasant regimes. Boko Haram and ISIS are rabble. Hitler was a convicted criminal who appealed to impoverished Germans. Mao was a teacher who had been disowned by his family who built up his popularity among peasants. These are examples of people who have successfully built a revolutionary movement that secured power by dealing harshly with its opponents, but ridiculously many un-noteworthy examples of failed movements formed by people in similar circumstances can also be thought of.

I've been thinking about this topic for quite a while, but I still struggle a little bit to piece it all together. But I think that a pattern we see in these sorts of revolution is a pattern that we also see many other places. What we call "evil" is often a failed attempt to achieve what we call "magnificence." I think humans have a basic need and desire to be significant, in particular, to be socially significant. I don't just want to be happy. You don't just want to be happy either. Choosing a course of life that leads to happiness is reasonably easy. Many people manage to be happy as peasants or hunter-gatherers. Most of them do so without being particularly ingenious or clever in their approach to life. It just doesn't require very much to be happy. However, most of those people are also in a position that makes it easy for them to be socially significant. Something about where they were born makes it easy for them to live a life that impacts other people the way they would hope to impact other people. Social significance has a lot to do with other people's happiness and a lot to do with having some ability to influence other people's happiness. Most of us have a desire to live in a way that causes our friends to benefit more than our enemies and for our enemies to be harmed more than our friends. People who manage to achieve this position have achieved social significance, and are no longer left craving it.

The obvious tie-back to success and revolutions is that successful people already have social significance. They can already afford to be magnificent. If I have enough money to take over a third world country, then I also have enough money to throw amazing parties, and to ensure that the people I like have wonderful jobs, etc. etc. Failing-to-be-my-friend would be punished relative to succeeding to be my friend, and I don't necessarily feel the need to distinguish much between my enemies and the people who are simply not my friend because I haven't interacted with them. People who I simply haven't interacted with yet should have a much easier chance of becoming my friends than anyone who has already made herself my enemy, so there is even a little bit of a distinction there that I can preserve without having to do anything that anyone else might call "evil."

People who haven't achieved magnificence, which I'm defining as the ability to reward one's friends to one's heart's content, have two options for pursuing social significance. They can attempt to become magnificent or they can attempt to become evil i.e. draconian punishers of all who oppose them. There isn't really much of a compromise position available because choosing to become "evil" taints you in the eyes of everyone who is not already your ally, and it also taints your allies and your friends in everyone but your allies' eyes. Your friends are not necessarily your allies. Most of us know and love at least one person who would be very hurt if we decided to turn "evil." If this is the case, we must become sufficiently evil to hurt the people we hate more than we've hurt the people we love if we are ever going to achieve social significance.

Some future AI may be able to more easily hide its future plans than we humans can, but it might have even a harder time doing so if people can examine its source code. However, if people cannot learn of its pre-commitment, it's hard to imagine why it would derive any benefit from having that pre-commitment... unless for some arbitrary reason that pre-commitment is a terminal value. Humans cannot make a pre-commitment a terminal value that we hide because our future values are shaped by our present actions. If I decided to be as magnificent as possible today and to postpone doing anything evil until I can get away with it, I make myself unlikely to choose to ever become evil because I will be continuously reshaping my personality and my values through my present choice to engage in magnificent actions. An AI is not required to share this property, so there is some difference between Roko's Basilisk as applied to the development of AI than there is when thinking of Roko's Basilisk as applied to the creation of a militant movement or when applied to someone's career trajectory or whatever. But in most other ways, the idea remains the same.

This is one of the interesting things about Roko's Basilisk, as distinct from Pascal's Wager, at least to me. Roko's Basilisk is a much better description of human motivation than Pascal's Wager. Being extremely powerful and telling people that they must believe you are extremely powerful before you demonstrate your power if they want you to show them mercy seems pointlessly arbitrary to me. In contrast, choosing to punish people who have opposed you is a fairly common feature of human movements; and it appears to be a successful tactic especially when people know you will use it.

But it is only a successful tactic in a certain context. Punitive, ruthless, draconian movements tend to be movements led by the disenfranchised poor, supported by the disenfranchised poor, and they only tend to succeed in places where the majority of the population is part of the disenfranchised poor. These are movements led by and supported by people who have no magnificent friends and who have very little hope of becoming magnificent themselves. When people have the option to join sides with someone on route to magnificence or someone on route to evil, most people choose to join and befriend the person becoming magnificent. It's the natural Schelling point because everyone can reach the simple conclusion that we are all better off if we all decide to side with people seeking magnificence than if we decide to side with people seeking to become evil. We all have finite resources to invest in causes and movements, so we can't infinitely hedge our bets.

Priorities

My mind has a tendency to keep running down whatever paths it has started exploring. Even when I finish something, and move on, I continue to think many related thoughts. Perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that especially when I finish something and move on, I think about a lot of related thoughts. When I am working through an idea that I haven't solved, e.g. when I  am thinking about something to write that I haven't written yet, or when I am thinking about how to program something that I haven't programmed yet, my mind has a tendency to get stuck in repeat. Whenever I have a thought that seems good to me, my brain flags that thought, and it will keep returning to my mind every few hours or every few days until I finally do something with it. This has its advantages. I am able to remember many ideas for long periods of time, and to keep refining them in my mind before I use them without fear that I will lose the thought. It also has a major disadvantage, which is that my ideas can be distracting, and can keep distracting me until I finally do something with them.

My tendency to rethink ideas that I haven't used yet, which I'm guessing is a common tendency, greatly contributes to the stress of having something in progress, but not in continual progress. I'm always doing something and thinking about something. When I have a project that occupies much of my time without occupying all of it, it leaves me with other projects that also occupy some of my time without occupying all of it, which often leads to me continuously spawning new thoughts that I save until I use. Eventually, I start to feel like I have too many thoughts inside my head, and these repeated ideas start driving me crazy until I find a way to do something with them. One way of dealing with this type of situation is to develop opportunistic priorities.

My natural sense of how I should prioritize is to identify the most important things that I should be working on, and to focus my time on those things. This doesn't work particularly well for me most of the time. In general, the things that I consider most important are things that involve a lot of time. Working on them leaves my head full of all the smaller projects that I've also been thinking about. What I am gradually learning to consider a better approach is to look at how long I expect the various problems I consider important to take to solve, and to solve the fast parts first.

I'm slowly implementing this change in my habits. For years, I've been putting off blogging because I felt that finishing my first book was more important. Instead of writing about the single ideas that I could easily write about when I had them, I focused on writing out outlines for several of the books, I've wanted to write, and a far larger than reasonable number of opening chapters for a far larger than reasonable number of books. In retrospect, this has been stupid. It has been stupid for the simple reason that it gives me nothing to show for my work and for the more complicated reason that it has been a bad thing for me psychologically. More bizarrely, deciding to start each day by writing a quick essay to take care of one thought that's been turning over in my head has helped me significantly with my other writing. Switching over to a blog format for my essays instead of trying to keep them organized with my other documents and being tempted to collect them into larger works has also been an improvement at least in the past few days. (I've been interrupted a little bit more than I typically have been when I was simply writing essays mostly because I've been traveling, but in a particularly exciting twist yesterday because what I woke up wanting to write about was actually a piece of my book that had been causing me a little bit of trouble.)

I need to collect more data. I've only been following this approach for about a month, but my preliminary results are that in January, I had quite a bit of trouble with writer's block, that increased the harder I tried to defeat it, and since I've switched over to my current approach, I've not only been able to get one thought out of my head first thing every morning, I've also been able to make consistent progress on writing (and even harder for me, editing) the book I am getting close to completing.

Incidentally, going back to the concept I was talking about in my last post about time management, my episode of writer's block in January was onset by a significant interruption to my work. I was traveling and then I came down with a nasty fever that kept me bed ridden more so than any other illness I've ever developed, and then I had an important job interview while I was beginning to recover. I became non-productive for almost two weeks during this time, and after that, I had a lot of difficulty getting my wheels turning again. Jumping back into my existing project proved far more difficult for me at that time than just putting down other thoughts, so my decision to readjust my priorities was largely an act of necessity. I had one clearly designated most important project, but I was not making progress on it by simply focusing my time there. It was sufficiently important that switching to my second or third most important project seemed like a terrible idea. Part of the reason I've got so many projects started is that I've never had as certain of a designation of highest priority before, so it was always easy for the next idea (or returning to my previous idea) to seem more important than continuing to work on my current idea, but when I reached the point that I was three chapters and a few transitions away from finishing a book, with several well-polished chapters that I'd already edited when I was having trouble coming up with how to word my not material, that possibility seemed ludicrous. My only two sane options were to keep grinding away at something that seemed like it was going nowhere or to take care of little things that seemed unimportant but that I could easily finish and forget about. As the failure of the first option became increasingly obvious, I was left with only the other if I was looking for something that would work well. I'm pleased to say, at least for now, it is working.

I still believe in my overall thesis from a few days ago, very strongly. I'm not trying to contradict it, only refine it. I do think I need to have one major project that I work on as consistently as possible with minimal interruptions, but some interruptions (e.g. sleep) are inevitable. In these cases, when I have one short thing I could work on or my one big thing I could return to, I think the optimal strategy is to procrastinate the one big thing a little, so that I can get the little thing out of the way. Little means exactly what it did in the context of the previous essay. If a project is long enough that I think I will need to stand up to go to the bathroom or to eat something or do anything else like that before I finish, it's too big. That will just become one more source of stress. Those kinds of projects need to be deferred until after my completion of my biggest priority, but when the project is a single bite-sized chunk that I can finish and forget about and it is competing with my main project for my cognitive energy if I don't finish and forget it, I should prioritize the bite-sized project.

Since I like having a single tidy label to store my ideas under, I'm calling this approach to getting work done having "opportunistic priorities."

Bite-sized chunks

I draw satisfaction and energy from accomplishing what I set out to do. The sort of work that I find most satisfying is the sort of work where I have a specific objective to accomplish, where I can sit down, work on it for a reasonable duration of time, and finish it before I get up. When I am happiest and most fulfilled is when I have this sort of work, and I also have the freedom to get up and do something else for a while once I've finished doing what I set out to do. The kind of work that I find most frustrating and draining is the kind of work with no end in sight. I hate working on massive projects during which I wake up, go in to work, grind away at a problem, make some limited progress, and think about what all I need to finish before the problem is taken care of, think about the pace at which I'm currently making progress, and realize that months will pass before I'm finished.

Every project can be divided into bite-sized chunks, so that I could, in principle, always create a specific objective for each time I sit down and keep that objective to something manageable. However, not every distribution of bite-sized chunks works to produce satisfaction as opposed to frustration. For work to be most satisfying to me, the optimal chunks need to be self-contained. If I have to start out each sitting reviewing what I've already done in the previous sitting no matter, how clearly I can define intermediate sub-goals, I am still working on the same project. The ideal project is one that has a start, a middle, and an end with  no connectors in between. Where I can begin without worrying about the stuff that I've already done to prepare for doing this project, and I can finish and stop worrying about everything I've just finished. I don't think the apprehension or satisfaction is derived from the work itself per se. I think it's largely drawn from the time in between when I start work and when I finish it.

An important corollary for me, when dealing with large projects is that large projects cannot be interrupted. I need to dive in, start working, keep working, and then finish. If a project takes me weeks or months, I need to have the ability to make work my life for those few weeks or months. However, I am not at all willing to make work my life in general. So for me to do well at large projects and derive satisfaction from my work, I think the thing I am most well-suited to be doing is binging intermittently with rest and recreation in between. The typical workweek could, at least in theory, be thought of as having this feature. You grind for five days and then rest for two... assuming you actually grind for the full five days. I've found that in office life, most people quickly find that the most productive course of action for promoting the combined benefit of their personal sanity and their personal career advancement is to keep themselves mostly in first gear and to learn not to care about results. This is not a condemnation of the average worker. It's a condemnation of the average workplace. At most workplaces, being significantly more productive than your coworkers is simply not rewarding. But the real problem with the workweek is not that most people are just putting in the hours without actually putting in the effort that makes those hours valuable. Instead, it's that the grind and interruptions are unrelated to the work. The weekends do not coincide nicely with the ends of projects. The schedule of the office during the week does not necessarily fit well with working on a project either. Everyone is involved in all sorts of meetings, etc. that take place at certain prespecified times and are not necessarily related to the ongoing projects. Office hours are eight to five and if you work late today you are still expected to be in at eight tomorrow, and if you work extra hours all of this week, you're still expected to work your normal hours all of next week, you have a specific time window for taking lunch, and if you don't have lunch then, you're not supposed to leave the office for more than fifteen minutes just to fetch something, which you can eat at your desk. After about two, you're really not ever supposed to be away from your desk for more than a five minute stretch of time unless your at a meeting, or unless you have a doctor's appointment or something like it that you've already notified everyone in advance you would have to take a break to attend, etc. etc. etc.

For some types of work this schedule makes some degree of sense. There are many jobs where a significant part of your job description is to be there to answer the phone and be able to have your attention fully devoted to the phone call whenever someone calls you. There are many other jobs where your job mainly consists of reaching out to people during normal business hours so that you can build deals and build relationships on behalf of your company. These sorts of jobs should be based on a schedule, because they must be. We need scheduling conventions to help people figure out when it is or isn't a good time to make a call. Interestingly, all of these jobs, or at least all the ones I can think of, are also well-suited to being based on a schedule. The job naturally fits into bite-sized chunks. You research and prepare one phone call or one presentation, and then you research prepare the next one. You meet the needs of one client who has walked into your store, you complete the transaction, and then you move on to the next client. You're not editing and refining any of your past work.

Work like writing, engineering, software development, and even producing artwork, is nothing like these kinds of work, with respect to how tasks relate to time. The schedule that would (if my experience in working with projects is anything close to typical and all of the research I am familiar with on the subject of flow and engagement suggests that it is) best fit the kind of work that artists and engineers to do is to plunge, then vacation. Plunge and then vacation. You might work 100 hour weeks for a month until something has reached a state of completion that allows you to forget about it. And if you do that, you should then be given a month off (or more, if you are trying to preserve something close to a 40 hour work week, on average). Why? Because nobody wants to make work his or her life, and nobody wants to constantly have incomplete work hanging over his or her head during his or her time off. We want and crave completion, and we want and crave the ability to live our own lives and experience fun and interesting things. You really get neither of these things when you try to work on engineering projects with the traditional schedule, and that's a horrible shame. It's why I'm done with software development, unless I find a position that allows me to work at it pretty much on my own terms. I'd also discourage most smart young people from going into the field. It might pay well (actually, on an  IQ-adjusted basis, it really doesn't pay well if you're smart), but it is not a career path that is conducive to experiencing a satisfying life. If the world needs more engineers, the world needs to make careers in engineering more satisfying. This isn't a problem that has anything to do with engineering itself. Writing code is fun. I'll still write code for myself, in the future. It's a problem with workplaces, management, conventions, and schedules. All of which can be changed simply by people making appropriate decisions, and none of which require much work to implement. If humanity can't get those things right, it's not ready to tackle problems that are actually challenging.

Is it possible to write entertaining fiction about victorious lawful good?

One of the things that happens when we live in a society full of entertainment, whether that is epic ballads, books, or movies, is that many of our experiences occur through fiction. Many of us have only experienced things like government, law enforcement, and prison through entertainment, and for most of us the bulk of our entertainment experience is fictitious. The story, an art form optimized to be engaging rather than an art form optimized for consistency with reality, often takes particular forms, dictated by plot considerations rather than dictated by reasonableness. Why did the society discussed in The Giver decide to eliminate the perception of music and color from the human experience? The backstory of this world is full of wars and famines from which humanity has been re-engineered for its own protection. But what sort of wars and famines could possibly occur that would cause people to decide that music was the problem? I can't imagine that context, it doesn't seem at all reasonable. Similarly, why did the society decide that it needed to instill honesty as the supreme virtue in all of its children, knowing full well that it was going to assign most of the children to roles in which it would ask them to lie to the rest of their community. I can see why most of the patterns that this society has constructed make sense, for example, I can believe that some circumstances would cause people to decide that they need to all people to take medication to chemically castrate themselves as soon as they begin to experience the first tinglings of sexual awareness. I can imagine a society deciding that it needs to restrict the number of children per family to exactly two and practicing eugenics to keep the appropriate number of people in the population. It makes some limited degree of sense that this society might also abstract away the responsibility of childbearing and assign it to particular birth mothers while allowing no one else to procreate. It seems plausible to me that a society that decides to practice eugenics at birth would also decide to practice euthanasia at the end of life. All of these decisions seem like a plausible outcome from the backstory of this world, but then why, then oh why, does this society develop its particular form of education and instill in its children particular naive beliefs of how life should operate that are diametrically opposed to what they will experience in their adult lives? The answer is of course plot. Lowry didn't need to tell the story of how her world came to be exactly how it came to be, she only needed the plot to remain self-consistent with the world she gave us, and she only needed to provide enough detail about the past to enable suspension of disbelief. So we are presented with a world that is deliberately designed around ethics antithetical to the readers, but in which the reader is first steeped in a belief system that takes their own naive ethics and multiplies it to an extreme. The purpose of this educational system is to make the plot work, so that we believe that the main character would have seen this world through moral lenses very similar to our own, even more strongly than our own moral lenses. So that he might make an act of courage that we would wish him to make, even though we realize the we ourselves would be unlikely to make it. And why are there no colors, and why is there no music? Because we must be given a sense of horror. The idyllic setting at first seems lovely and enticing, without a sense of horror there would be no story, and without some unbearable sacrifice there would be no horror. Yes, we would see that this world operates on a system of ethics that is completely contrary to normal modern beliefs and we would also see that this world operates on a system of ethics directly contrary to what it teaches, but we would also see that the way it operates works. Even more damning for us modern moralists looking from our modern vantage point before the story begins, we would see the problem of our own world view, the way that unchecked population growth leads to starvation, and all of the irritating complexities of living in the modern world. If this world had color and music, it wouldn't be a distopia, it would be the Shire. So the world cannot have color and music.

Futuristic fictions must have its distopias because the plot demands it. If the Ministry of Love didn't torture all dissenters into conformity, and the government didn't forbid passion and romance in the lives of its subjects, the story of 1984 couldn't be told. If Longshanks didn't give his representative in Scotland the right of prima nocta, Braveheart would be the story of a lunatic. For stories of warfare and rebellion to connect with the audience, they must hate the enemy. But why isn't the enemy ever the poorly organized and ineffective insurgents, why must it be the government? Again, the answer seems to be not so much the moral alignment of the authors or even necessarily the expected moral alignment of the readers. Instead, it's again the sake of the plot. To be a hero, the antagonist must overcome overwhelming odds. We don't tell stories of the really great guy who happened to be a giant killing a much smaller and weaker fiend any more than we tell stories about a little boy swatting a mosquito.

So in the stories we tell, powerful governments are necessarily evil and big businesses are necessarily corrupt. Evil is always set up to win, and virtue is always set up to lose, and only through the hero's virtue, courage, genius, and luck does good finally prevail. We live in a world where power is evil and wealth is corrupt not because reality requires it, but because this condition is required by our fiction. And most of us experience wealth and power, not through reality, but simply through fiction.

Never become a perfectionist (except when it's helpful to do so)

I spend a lot of time thinking about something I call the treachery of childhood. My experiences in life so far strongly indicate to me that the ways I was trained to think and behave as a child are strongly counterproductive. For anyone who failed to be a sufficiently rebellious child, becoming a functioning adult has a lot to do with unlearning the habits acquired in childhood. I don't regret remaining sober throughout high school. I don't regret remaining a virgin throughout high school. (I have some slight regrets about not making use of my first few opportunities to lose my virginity in college, but I think I would also have regretted the opposite had I been in that situation.) I don't regret doing my assigned readings, doing my homework, and doing well in school. I don't regret not having shoplifted when I was a teenager. I think all of those decisions were individually good decision. What I  do regret is being the sort of person who would make all of those decisions. I regret having been a good kid, because there is so much wrong with being a good kid. I regret not having done enough thinking for myself. I regret having been too willing to follow the advice of my elders and abiding by the moral customs of the culture that raised me.

All of the things I just listed are the reasons why it's bad to be a bad kid. Some of the things that people can do have consequences that people eventually regret, and everyone who lives with those regrets tells other people not to do those things because they wish they'd never done them themselves. The lessons that those types of experience teaches it that some of the advice that your elders give you and that some of the advice that is part of the moral custom of your culture is good advice. However, some of the advice is also bad advice. Good kids who follow the rules and do what they're supposed to do make mistakes whenever what would be beneficial to do differs from what they are supposed to do. Bad kids who break the rules and do what they're not supposed to do mess up whenever what they're supposed to do actually is beneficial. Both of these policies are idiotic.

What is also idiotic is that both of the adherents of both of these notions advocate think for oneself. Those that give advice advocate "Thinking for yourself" and those that advocate being a rebel advocate "Thinking for yourself." Actually, I think that this is a big part of why I failed to think for myself. I always viewed myself more as a thinker than as an individualist, so I did what the people who emphasized thinking suggested instead of what the people who advocated being myself suggested.

As always, the problem is that I didn't yet have any understanding of statistics when I was six years old or however old I was when I was first forming a strong sense of my own identity as a person and picking sides in this charade.

If you are actually thinking for yourself, you will sometimes decide that some of the rules and routine advice you receive is good. When that happens, you will follow it. You will also sometimes decide that some of the rules and routine advice you receive are stupid. When that happens, you won't follow it. Whenever multiple factions continue to exist, it is sensible to assume that neither of them have a monopoly on good information. If the rebels weren't doing anything right, all of the rebels would grow up to be failures and people a little bit younger than them would be able to see that being a rebel would soon become incredibly uncool, so they should grow out of it ASAP. Of course, this doesn't happen. A lot of rebels go onto become great successes. Actually, disproportionately many of the extremely successful people in the world were rebels in their younger years... in many cases, serious rebels, who were too extreme to be mainstream like Steve Jobs whose time as a hippy instilled in him a hatred for the tyranny of basic hygiene like showering, or cofounders of paypal, the majority of whom built bombs in high school. Somehow, I don't think that not showering and building bombs are the things that they did that helped them become more successful. What they did right is that they didn't listen to bad advice.

Anyways, if I had truly been thinking about what seemed right to do and trying to do what seemed right, I should have developed a personality that was a combination of the different trends, as well as some things that nobody else was saying. If neither side has everything wrong and neither side has everything right, then the optimal strategy whatever it is, should have some things that each group says to do, and some things that each group says not to do, plus some things that nobody talks about.

The perspective of rebelliousness isn't really worth analyzing, so I won't analyze it. One can learn everything worth learning about the perspective of rebelliousness by analyzing the things that the rebels are rebelling against, and trying to figure out what portion of that perspective is worth keeping and what portion of that perspective deserves to be thrown away. The good parts of the traditional moral perspective are pretty obvious: don't do all of the stupid stuff that people do as teenagers and later regret in life; don't take stupid risks; and don't become a total hedonist. Driving 100mph on roads that were not meant to have people drive faster than 45 on them is a bad idea. Failing to get enough sleep is unhealthy. (It's unhealthy whether you fail to get enough sleep because you stayed up late studying or because you failed to get enough sleep because you were out late partying.)

The horrible advice also tends to fit into a few broad categories. The one that I've been thinking about most recently is having high standards. Sometimes, it's useful; usually it's not. I love hanging out with people who are frequently pleased and who frequently get excited. Being someone who is genuinely pleased and excited by things that other people regularly do is so rare and so beneficial that it's practically a superpower. It also has to be something that makes your own life way more pleasant.

A similar sin that someone can have oneself is wanting to have a finger of Midas. I want everything I attempt to turn succeed and everything I touch to told to gold. It's crippling, and it leads to all sorts of poor decisions. I wish I'd decided four years ago to just take more risks, begin presenting my thoughts to the world, do a bunch of things that would have likely led to failure and possibly led to success. Four years from now, if I don't start doing it now, I think I'll still have the same regret. I had the same regret two or three years ago, and decided it  was to late to change. Doh! That was a horrible decision. Here's some good advice: don't become a total hedonist. Have fun though. Delay gratification enough that you are confident that you are building a life that will be better five years from now than it is today, but don't delay it so much that you cease to enjoy living. Also, don't delay gratification without reason; becoming ascetic and depriving yourself of something when you don't know why your doing it isn't going to help you with anything. When you delay gratification, you should do it for a specific reason with a specific belief in mind. I'm not going to buy X today because I want to save money so that I can do Y tomorrow... where Y might be something as complicated as "save up $20 million so that I can spend a thousand a day living off my income while still having my net worth increase faster than inflation assuming I don't utterly fail at my attempts to invest it wisely." Unless you're planning to buy a space elevator, delaying gratification in order to save up more than $20 million is not actually delaying gratification, it's foregoing it. It's asceticism at that point. Not many people are in that position, but many people would rather have a 10% shot at becoming a billionaire than a 50% shot at accumulating $20 million, but unless you have your heart set on collecting Picassos and Monets or you want to build your own private island in the middle of the Pacific or you want to make the biggest donation in the history of some organization that you care about contributing to, it's hard to imagine why. There's practically no differentiation between the way you can live if you're able to spend $1000 a day from the way you can live if you're able to spend $50,000 everyday.

Getting back to bad advice, according to the Bible's book of proverbs, "A man of many friends comes to ruin."  So pick your friends carefully and have a few good friends. That's horrible advice. It's hard to even think of worse advise. Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration: "go commit murder in a public place with lots of people watching and stand around afterwards to gloat" is pretty easy to think of, and it's worse advice. Having many friends is better than having a few good ones. Some people, mostly people steeped in traditional wisdom, disagree, but the evidence is squarely against them, assuming that you treat the success and happiness of the people who adhere to advice as a good marker of whether or not the advice is good. While I received mixed advice from my elders about whether it was better to have many friends or a few friends as a child, my elders were uniform in advising me and the other children I knew to be careful about who we befriended. Some people advised me to find a few of the right sort of people; others advised me to find as many of the right sort of people as possible, but they all strongly cautioned against becoming friends with the wrong sort of people. (This is not to say that everyone who gave me advise as a child gave me this advice or believed in it; some people never advised me one way or the other on this subject. Some of them, I would guess, remained silent on this subject because they knew that their viewpoint disagreed with the dominant one in their community.) Of course, the right sort of people were people who had a similar background to ourselves, who followed the same advice that we were being given, who wouldn't tempt me to question whether I should be doing the things that I've been told I should do. This is even worse advise than telling someone to have few friends. People can't learn anything from talking to a mirror, and the closer their friendships come to approximating that experience, the less they will be able to learn from them. Moreover, people's influence is measured much better by the breadth of the cross-section of society that they have formed close associations with than it is by how many people they know. Influential people tend to know retirees and students. Influential people have connections to politicians, criminals, and prison guards, protesters, and the people do the things that protesters are protesting, slum lords and their tenants, journalists and engineers. The idea of popularity separated from everything else is just fame: being Paris Hilton. The idea of being well connected separated from everything else is the idea of influence: being a mob boss. 

The American experiment, i.e the type of democracy that first appeared in America, owes in my opinion a great deal of its success to the development of classnessless, of refusing to have standards. 

When I think about things I've gotten wrong in the past few years, that I need to correct going forward, I think the biggest overarching mistake I've been making in my life is trying to be too selective in general (not just with respect to forming connections) and looking for too much perfection in the immediate term. Perfection, like gratification is something that often needs to be delayed. In the short term, there are a few forms of perfection that are worth striving for: perfect technique, for example, but that's another subject for another time. Sometimes, having low standards is a good thing. All of the people who are natural rebels already figured that out a long time ago. It's one of the things that they got right. For people like me, to whom rebelliousness, for all the intellectual appeal it sometimes had, never came naturally, this realization clashes with entrenched beliefs and heavily trained tendencies. To correct for my natural tendencies, I think I need to try to have low standards except when I have a good reason to raise them. My natural tendency to try to be selective gets in my way.