Macro, not Micro

Knuth famously said

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Wikipedia explains:

"Premature optimization" is a phrase used to describe a situation where a programmer lets performance considerations affect the design of a piece of code. This can result in a design that is not as clean as it could have been or code that is incorrect, because the code is complicated by the optimization and the programmer is distracted by optimizing.

Does that sound like the point you're trying to explain?

This is a really good point.

I call this habit of optimizing details "suboptimizing", because it is both suboptimal, and you are optimizing subcomponents.

The micro/macro thing is a good distinction. I'm suprised you didn't reference the competitive Starcraft literature; it is full of discussions of micro and macro game.

The problem is that thinking of trivial optimizations is more rewarding in the short term. It gives the impression of working toward improvement and conveniently distracts you from the larger optimizations (which for me are surrounded by ugh fields).

I rarely even implement such “subopimizations” because I skip the part about making the optimized behavior habitual, they are simply compulsive.

So, macro-optimization problem: how do I stop compulsive micro-optimization?

Concentrate on the high-order bits.

-- Umesh Varizani

You're cleaning the bottle caps and cigarette butts off the beach, to make the sand nice and neat around the whale carcases.

-- Anon., quoted by Eric Sosman

My summary of this idea has been that life is a non-convex optimization problem. Hill-climbing will only get you to the top of the hill that you're on; getting to other hills requires periodic re-initializing. Existing non-convex optimization techniques are often heuristic rather than provably optimal, and when they are provable, they're slow.

An especially important example of macro choice that deserves some thought is the choice of a professional activity. See 80000 Hours:

http://80000hours.org/

then spending give minutes to think of something else to do at the same time (like stretching)

I cannot parse this. Do you mean "five minutes"? That's the only thing I can think of that would make that sentence parse.

(I found this pretty readable, and I think I got what you meant)

You bring up the awesome point that focus and attention are limited resources, and that we have to trade off between different kinds of thought processes, but I don't think that you specified the right macro/micro interplay.

How useful a macro thought is depends on how useful locating a neighborhood in the search space is to you, and the level of abstraction that the assertion is at. If you get the right neighborhood, but lack the information necessary to use it, a small optimization might still be better.

For instance, I know that a good strategy for running a business is to create a service that's valuable to other people, make an attempt to convince some focused group of people that it's valuable for them, and then distribute it to them. This is much better than literally everything else that I've ever known as a business strategy before this, but it is not at a level of granularity that is actionable in any particular way.

Too much macro, and you might know that something should be possible but not how to do it, too little and everything you know how to do sucks. It seems like a more robust strategy is to be good at using macro level thinking to locate things that are likely to be very important, and then micro thinking to actually carry out a plan in that domain.

In this strategy, it seems like you would mostly be coming up with micro thoughts, just because any given thing you might do has more micro steps than macro thoughts. There are fewer abstract thoughts than detailed thoughts, and the search space is just much much smaller as you get more and more abstract, or macro.

I suppose we might also have different thresholds at which we call something macro or micro. Knowing that your tone of voice is a thing seems macro to me, but knowing that a particular tone of voice generally has this impact is micro. Something which is clearly micro, but probably not in general helpful would be something like reflecting on what tone of voice you should be use if this person brings this particular unlikely thing up in conversation.

This seems like a rewording/independent revelation of Humans are not automatically strategic which was a reply to A "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" Fallacy, though it's always nice to have important ideas articulated in a variety of ways.

I'm not sure that "structure of the search space" is quite what you want to be describing here, so much as "scope of the decision problem." Yes, when you're deciding what your morning routine will be, investing five minutes can result in savings of hours, spread over the year. But your morning routine is a small problem that is insulated from the rest of your life. The problem of your life's goal is a huge problem that informs the rest of your life- a small change there could result in savings of years.

The reason I think this is wrong is because it aims much too low

Are you familiar with the Toyota Production System? One of the major components (Kaizen) could be described as the idea that no improvement is too small to implement. Many small changes can add up to a big change.

More generally, it's not at all clear to me why this post is "Macro, not Micro" instead of "Macro and Micro." Several sections seem confused: is it a mistake to systematically search for such trades, or should such trades be incorporated into your thought process? I think you would do better with a post discussing integrating the perspectives than a post contrasting the two.

I get it man, and I absolutely agree.
As a quick sidenote, the fact that there are patterns in micro functions that contain answers to the macro is something that things like Freemasonry are built off of (from what I've read of it at least). The first degree itself is about using different mason tools symbolically to help with everyday life.
Anyway, yeah, there is a heirarchy of logic that we should take into account so that we can learn what to apply ourselves to in the first place, and from there how to apply. You're definitely right in saying learning to be social is an important semi-macro application. Money may be the most tangible form of power, but people (the ones who give money its power in the first place) are the biggest source of power.