Caring about excellence

I strongly disagree, despite the excellence of your presentation :) Arguing against excellence is a bad look, but I feel compelled to voice my take anyway. I strongly suspect that many LW readers are already pursuing excellence beyond what is optimal for their real goals.

It certainly makes sense to pursue excellence in some things. But that usually takes time, which limits the number of other projects you can do. And there's often a large nonlinearity in the likely success vs. time spent on a given project, making pursuit of excellence actively irrational.

In my two decades in academic research, it looked to me like the pursuit of excellence was a very common mistake made by academics. I suspect the same is true of the rationalist community on average. I found I could be quite helpful by examining different scientific projects and pointing out where corners could be cut that would save a lots of time while having only a tiny effect on the project's outcome and likely success. The people doing those projects usually agreed with me; they hadn't thought about those measures because they had been pursuing excellence as a heuristic without any real means-ends analysis.

I do not see a nice dividing line between excellence and perfectionism, but a smooth continuum that requires frequent re-evaluation specific to each project.

"Anything worth doing is worth doing well" is my nomination for most damaging aphorism in history.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Or, to put it another way: pursue excellence in your choice of how to spend your time. Sometimes the correct choice will be pursuit of excellence; this is particularly likely when that pursuit builds your skills, or excellence is required for even satisfactory results. By this broader definition, doing something well means doing it efficiently: spending no more time than the time/results tradeoff curve dictates, and bearing in mind the opportunity cost of not spending that time on other projects.

In many situations, excellent choices mean doing a good-enough job, and quickly moving on to accomplish other things.

I'm sorry to say that I find this suggestion to be actively anti-rationalist. There is certainly such a thing as too much analysis, but that's much more likely on small decisions where a quick decision beats a better decision. Deciding how to spend one's time seems to deserve a careful analysis, not heuristic-based decision-making.

I also think that much American culture already stresses excellence over happiness, which is a huge mistake of another sort. Telling American high achievers to pursue excellence seems like the opposite of the advice they most need: satisfice, prioritize, and keep your eye on how your actions pursue your real goals.

The topic is a good deal more complex and detailed than either this piece or my response covered. Like most important questions, it comes down to the specifics of each situation. But I did feel compelled to offer the counterargument, since the essay didn't really address them.

I just finished reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" yesterday, which you might enjoy reading as it explores the topic of Quality (what you call excellence). From the book:

“Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristic of quality.”

Advice about drafting without concern for whether it's defensible is helpful; as someone who wants to do good work, it's hard to not be sucked into "what if this is wrong" or "what if this is a dumb take."

Maybe I haven't found a long-lasting fire yet, but I lose interest in a lot of things after a few days or a month. And a big part of losing interest is because I think that many other people are far ahead of me, and the field has become saturated. Maybe doing shorter projects helps with this?