Josephine's Shortform

Consider these two cases:

• A university graduate on a job hunt just can't find something that matches his skills. People never get back to him, interviews go nowhere, pretty opportunities peter out. Attempt after attempt leaves him frustrated and empty-handed, and as his motivation thins or his desperation thickens, he finally decides that he needs something and applies for a job he's massively overqualified for, maybe an entry-level position in a supermarket. Then, to his horror, that job rejects him. 
• A woman trying to pay her bills runs into complications - her checking account is overcharged by an unexpected payment, a new emergency crops up or someone in her life needs her help. Running out of ideas, she finally elects to sell her more valuable items. The process of losing so much is tearful, but she prepares to part with most of her library, her furniture, her entertainment and so on. Only after trying this does she discover no one wants any of it - used bookstores won't give her more than $30 for her collection and no one will respond to her ads. 

I've had experiences like these, even today. And I think the root of much learned helplessness in my life stems from situations like these where things are measurably worse than I'd thought possible. I would call this insufficient cynicism, but I think it's a combination of both overvaluing the likelihood and value of certain options combined with flinching away from thinking about them too closely. 

Some options don't work out, and some options are painful to consider, but options that are both can be generators of helplessness and bitterness. I graduated early with a degree in Communications, and my experiences since have made my wish dearly that I'd made different choices; looking back, what would need to be different for me to predict that this achievement would make no actual difference to my career? 

I've noticed two points in recent life where I've fallen prey to Goodhart's law, and I'm working to improve them. 

1) On my birthday a few days ago I finally dropped a goal I had for this year, to read as many books as possible. (My main strategy for this was to tell people how many books I'd read and maintain a list on Goodreads whenever I finished one.) For the last three years I've tried to measure books per year as a way to gauge how much I was learning, but as I improved and the number increased the differences between "reading lots of books" and "learning" began to magnify. 

2) I've tried many different methods for organizing tasks, and my current method is to fill cells in a spreadsheet with goals and then color them in as I complete them. Despite that I enjoy it, this has led to many unnecessary problems, like running out of tasks to fill the space presented and feeling a gnawing incompleteness. Worse, if there's a large task then either it can generate akrasia sitting alone in its cell or split up into a column of steps that are mostly unactionable. 

I've also had to accept the repeated evidence that majestic-looking lists of tasks will only lead to eighty or so items being completed in a day, and I've moved more toward making one column of immediately-actionable tasks, finishing 75% of it or more, and then creating a second and a third and so on. (This still produces the flaw of all task systems I've found, that a kernel of akratic items will accrete and show up over and over from list to list, but I haven't worked out a solution to that. Even typical "eat the frog" style advice only changes the composition of that kernel, hopefully to things you don't care so much about.)

So in both of these cases I've noticed that I've gotten sidetracked by optimizing things I don't (want to) care about. Strategizing my day and making sure I don't forget anything doesn't require thinking of a number of tasks divisible into columns of 20 or even keeping track of how many things are done. Likewise, reading lots of books is orthogonal to learning lots of things, and the right volume on its own can be worth fifty or a hundred random paperbacks. 

The problem I continue to run into, and the root of why Goodharting is so easy to do, is that it's difficult to operationalize these goals any other way. The desire to learn can be broken into "true" goals GTD-style and then measured by understanding certain texts, carrying out certain actions correctly or passing certain tests, but this requires a pretty solid understanding of the subject matter. I'd like to learn more about polyominoes, for instance, but knowing what that "more" consists of (or whether, having learned about them, I'd rather have learned something else) requires its own baseline of knowledge. My next solution to this going forward is probably going to be to have smaller, "scouting" goals for understanding fields enough to develop more concrete ones. 

Operationalizing productivity itself seems more difficult, but I think part of it might be resolved with a better integration of habits or schedules. One very big flaw of all my lists has been that they create a sense of accomplishment whenever they're filled out instead of encouraging a general sort of well-being throughout the doing of the tasks - writing only feels good once I've written a certain amount. The moments where I'm most thankful for lists like these are ironically the times that they drop out of my awareness and I start wanting to do more in one of the streams of work I've entered into. 

I've been writing things in one form or another for about 13 years, and I've passed the first "million bad words" every writer's said to have. I've also released around 200 rap songs under different names, which tends to come off lower-status but is no less dear to me. (I would consider 500-1000 songs to be the equivalent "bad" cutoff, though.) Since these are the things I've spent the longest time learning and practicing, I want to see if I can apply anything in them to learning and practicing in general. Here are my thoughts so far:

• Every art is really several arts. There is no "learning to write" separate from learning characterization, imagery, the elements of style, dialogue, text formatting and so on.
• Likewise, these sub-skills are not all created equally - while content, rhyme scheme, flow, swing, breath, cadence, delivery and so on may be the most relevant to other musicians critiquing your work, the final judgment of what you make can depend on things that seem at first to be unimportant or polish, like the technical specs of your microphone or the level of audio engineering performed on your finished product.
• Attainment individuates. Rank beginners produce things that are very alike because they're making the same handful of beginner mistakes. "Beginner mistakes" themselves are just how humans natively do things, and it's only in overcoming them that the wider space of possible performances is opened.
• Because of this, skills and techniques are generally about iterating away from whatever your earliest work looks like, one step at a time. And from wherever you're standing, it's possible to identify someone as being more or less skilled than you. (Someone it's hard to do this on, who seems better at some things than you are and worse at others in a way that's inconclusive, is basically level with you.)
• You can give more advice to one student than to all the students in the world, and most advice is written for as many of them as possible. 1-on-1 lessons with someone you want to be more like can be worth more than all the articles or books you can find, if you're able to truly accept how many things still need improving.
• To reemphasize: the person who teaches you must be someone you want to be more like. Not all advice is instruction in how to be more like the advisor, because people can recognize and speak about their own flaws more easily than they can fix them, but you should expect to wind up more like your teacher than if you hadn't studied under them.
• When it's said that those at high skill levels are "never done learning" it's because they've achieved a higher granularity of what they can improve.
• Early work is typically bad even to you, which can be extremely frustrating, but after enough practice it's possible to be impressed by your own work - especially if you've left it for long enough to forget the details of it. Despite this fact, impostor syndrome never really goes away, it only adapts to your new situation.
• Arts produce communities of practitioners. The majority of these people will be worse at what they're practicing than you'd expect, because they fall below the skill level usually presented publicly. At first you may not recognize that you're one of these people, and that your work is not so great either.
• Because of this, spaces practitioners use will typically sprout a policy of giving as little criticism as possible.
• This is not necessarily a bad thing; criticism is not a panacea, not all of it is worth following and there's only so much of it you can act on until you've internalized and digested it. Plus oftentimes people really do just need a bit of social encouragement so that they can continue forward. (This goes doubly so for anyone who makes things for free.)
• There's nothing wrong with simply wanting praise, but know that's what you're looking for and don't confuse it with a desire to cleave off your flaws as fast as possible.
• The more work you produce the easier criticism will be to take, because you identify less with the thing being critiqued.
• The practice of creating something is really the practice of making very small moment-to-moment decisions, usually between the handful of ideas that arise in your mind about which thing to do next.
• As you notice the flaws in your own work and the work of others, you'll eventually notice flaws in the work of those you admire, including the ones who inspired you to begin in the first place. The end result of this isn't dislike of your past heroes, but an understanding that they really were just like you are.
• Beginners should aim to use or dismiss as many of their ideas as possible, because better ones will appear given space and attention. Your ideas and insights into what to do will never be worse than they are now, and future ones need room the present ones are taking up. Be less concerned about running out of ideas than with the quality of the ones you already have.
• The simplest way to encourage ideas is to write down each new one as soon as possible from when it enters thought, especially the ones that are no good. This both keeps the way clear for better ones and encourages your brain to generate ideas continuously.
• Doing something well and doing it well in front of an audience can be completely different skills, and sometimes your feeling that you're good at something will completely dissolve once a small group of strangers are watching you. (When I attempted a small concert at a convention the songs I thought I could repeat by heart were suddenly so foreign to me that I had to read them off of a phone.)
• Likewise, there are things which may seem as trivial or "part of the package" which no amount of normal mastery will teach you, and the only path to these is to learn them separately. (The easiest example of this is freestyling, which I can't do to save my life despite it being the first thing anyone asks for upon hearing that you make rap - to develop it, I would need to start fresh with the skillset involved, which focuses more on quick-wittedness and knowing precisely how much to extend oneself.)

Related to half-assing things with all you've got, I've noticed that there's often a limit to how much you can succeed at a given task. If you write a paper for a class worth an A+ it's certainly still possible to improve the paper, just not in the context of the course.

The Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa once put this as "You will never be decorated by your guru." In the presence of a master, your development of your art will never blow their mind and leave them deeply impressed - and if it did, it would only be a signal that you're in need of a different master. It cannot be another way.

Thus, we should recognize success by the context we expect it to appear in, or the person who will be measuring it, and calibrate accordingly.

From what I remember, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids contains only a very short mention of how to inspire good behavior in children - essentially the advice to punish consistently, especially including funny or endearing offenses. The more I think about this, the more it seems to me that discipline itself is the practice of training the same response to an increasing range of stimuli. 

Progress in Vipassana, and in meditation in general, comes from engaging with fewer and fewer distractions. Progress in habits comes from decreasing the number of times that you allow some override or excuse to change your plans. Progress in security comes from shrinking the number of people you make exceptions for, maybe because you don't want to be mean to them or there are extenuating circumstances. Progress in being a fair parent comes from providing the same consequences for the same actions, even if one of your children's actions gets a warmer reaction from you. 

This isn't to say that discipline is the only virtue, or that you ought to seek discipline for its own sake; some excuses do rise above the threshold of acceptability [LW · GW]. But the point of training discipline is, in a nutshell, to have consistent reactions to stimuli that invite inconsistent ones. 

Failure to apply a lesson is usually failure to register its relevance to your life. Don't look for the moments where you try and retry but your effort doesn't bear fruit, look for gaps between what you learn/know and your world-model.

This is one reason to make beliefs pay rent in expectations, and to ensure that all the nodes in your model of the world are hooked up to something. The go-to example of this being Feynman's story of students who understood the math of refraction indices but not that water was a refraction index, leaving them unable to use what they'd learned. I read that example years back and then fell into the exact same trap, because it's a story about science education and not general thought.

In my own experience, the most powerful moment of this so far was realizing my trans-ness, which is also my greatest "oops" moment. I'd found some internet content centered around trans people, including lists of potential signs that a person is trans and hasn't realized yet. I knew these signs applied to some people, but I also thought the net they cast was far, far too broad because, after all, half of them even applied to me! (Looking back, I sometimes laugh at the utter lack of self-awareness present in that thought.)

I already knew people could be trans, and I don't think more information on that front would have helped anything. The realization that changed the course of my life really was just that I counted as people too.

I think the logic behind this is that we handle many many concepts and not all of them will apply in our lives, so the onus tends to be set pretty high for a piece of information to become relevant to us. There's a default sense of immunity or exclusion to new concepts, even when we take them on knowing they surely must apply to something.

To handle catastrophizing, you have to first grasp that the thing you're doing that seems to have traits in common with it probably isn't a special edge case or a false alarm - and that the reason it hasn't jumped out at you sooner as an example of catastrophizing is that you weren't focusing on it. And if you read a guide to something like negotiation, the techniques involved will avail you nothing until you find reason to believe that you're engaging in negotiations. Application rests on these kinds of understanding.