Articles 13.
13.1
Life is Short - Paul Graham
“Ok, so life actually is short. Does it make any difference to know that?
It has for me. It means arguments of the form "Life is too short for x" have great force. It's not just a figure of speech to say that life is too short for something. It's not just a synonym for annoying. If you find yourself thinking that life is too short for something, you should try to eliminate it if you can.
When I ask myself what I've found life is too short for, the word that pops into my head is "bullshit." I realize that answer is somewhat tautological. It's almost the definition of bullshit that it's the stuff that life is too short for. And yet bullshit does have a distinctive character. There's something fake about it. It's the junk food of experience.
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One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to ask yourself whether you'll care about it in the future. Fake stuff that matters usually has a sharp peak of seeming to matter. That's how it tricks you. The area under the curve is small, but its shape jabs into your consciousness like a pin.
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If life is short, we should expect its shortness to take us by surprise. And that is just what tends to happen. You take things for granted, and then they're gone. You think you can always write that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realize the window has closed. The saddest windows close when other people die. Their lives are short too. After my mother died, I wished I'd spent more time with her. I lived as if she'd always be there. And in her typical quiet way she encouraged that illusion. But an illusion it was. I think a lot of people make the same mistake I did.
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Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That's what you do when life is short.
“
13.2 *
Play Deprivation is A Major Cause of The Teen Mental Health Crisis - John Haidt & Peter Gray
“Children’s freedom to play and explore has declined greatly over the last half-century.
The first fact is that over the past 5 decades or more we have seen, in the United States, a continuous and overall huge decline in children’s freedom to play or engage in any activities independent of direct adult monitoring and control. With every decade children have become less free to play, roam, and explore alone or with other children away from adults, less free to occupy public spaces without an adult guard, and less free to have a part-time job where they can demonstrate their capacity for responsible self-control. Among the causes of this change are a large increase in societal fears that children are in danger if not constantly guarded, a large increase in the time that children must spend in school and at schoolwork at home, and a large increase in the societal view that children’s time is best spent in adult-directed school-like activities, such as formal sports and lessons, even when not in school.
Children’s mental health has declined greatly over the last half-century.
The second undisputed fact is that over these same decades, rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among young people have increased enormously. Using data from standard clinical questionnaires administered to school-aged children over the decades, researchers have estimated that the rates of what we now call major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder increased by roughly 5- to 8-fold during the second half of the 20th century, and other measures indicate that they have continued to increase during the first two decades of the 21st century.
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Final Thoughts
So, what can you, I, and others do about this? Too many people are focusing on drugs and therapy, as if something is wrong with the kids that needs correction, and not enough of us are thinking about prevention. Prevention would involve bringing normal childhood back to children. Children are designed to play and explore and thereby becoming increasingly independent as they grow older. Their instincts tell them that something is seriously wrong if they don’t have such independence. Letter #14 outlines some ways to bring more play into children’s lives in today’s overprotective world, but we also need to work for change in the larger societal constraints on children’s lives.
If you wish to see more of the research evidence behind what I have described here, including reference citations, you can do so by examining our article in the Journal of Pediatrics.”
13.3*
How to Do Great Work - Paul Graham
“If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out by making it.
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There's a kind of excited curiosity that's both the engine and the rudder of great work. It will not only drive you, but if you let it have its way, will also show you what to work on.
What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.
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It would be better if they at least admitted it — if they admitted that the system not only can't do much to help you figure out what to work on, but is designed on the assumption that you'll somehow magically guess as a teenager. They don't tell you, but I will: when it comes to figuring out what to work on, you're on your own. Some people get lucky and do guess correctly, but the rest will find themselves scrambling diagonally across tracks laid down on the assumption that everyone does.
What should you do if you're young and ambitious but don't know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.
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If you're making something for people, make sure it's something they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something you yourself want. Write the story you want to read; build the tool you want to use. Since your friends probably have similar interests, this will also get you your initial audience.
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I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach "staying upwind." This is how most people who've done great work seem to have done it.
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For example, while you must work hard, it's possible to work too hard, and if you do that you'll find you get diminishing returns: fatigue will make you stupid, and eventually even damage your health. The point at which work yields diminishing returns depends on the type. Some of the hardest types you might only be able to do for four or five hours a day.
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One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it usually camouflages itself as work. You're not just sitting around doing nothing; you're working industriously on something else. So per-project procrastination doesn't set off the alarms that per-day procrastination does. You're too busy to notice it.
The way to beat it is to stop occasionally and ask yourself: Am I working on what I most want to work on? When you're young it's ok if the answer is sometimes no, but this gets increasingly dangerous as you get older.
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Affectation is in effect to pretend that someone other than you is doing the work. You adopt an impressive but fake persona, and while you're pleased with the impressiveness, the fakeness is what shows in the work.
The temptation to be someone else is greatest for the young. They often feel like nobodies. But you never need to worry about that problem, because it's self-solving if you work on sufficiently ambitious projects. If you succeed at an ambitious project, you're not a nobody; you're the person who did it. So just do the work and your identity will take care of itself.
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The core of being earnest is being intellectually honest. We're taught as children to be honest as an unselfish virtue — as a kind of sacrifice. But in fact it's a source of power too. To see new ideas, you need an exceptionally sharp eye for the truth. You're trying to see more truth than others have seen so far. And how can you have a sharp eye for the truth if you're intellectually dishonest?
13.4
Game Theory as a Dark Art - Scott Alexander
“ One of the most charming features of game theory is the almost limitless depths of evil to which it can sink.
Your garden-variety evils act against your values. Your better class of evil, like Voldemort and the folk-tale version of Satan, use your greed to trick you into acting against your own values, then grab away the promised reward at the last moment. But even demons and dark wizards can only do this once or twice before most victims wise up and decide that taking their advice is a bad idea. Game theory can force you to betray your deepest principles for no lasting benefit again and again, and still leave you convinced that your behavior was rational.
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The Evil Plutocrat
You are an evil plutocrat who wants to get your pet bill - let's say a law that makes evil plutocrats tax-exempt - through the US Congress. Your usual strategy would be to bribe the Congressmen involved, but that would be pretty costly - Congressmen no longer come cheap. Assume all Congressmen act in their own financial self-interest, but that absent any financial self-interest they will grudgingly default to honestly representing their constituents, who hate your bill (and you personally). Is there any way to ensure Congress passes your bill, without spending any money on bribes at all?
Yes. Simply tell all Congressmen that if your bill fails, you will donate some stupendous amount of money to whichever party gave the greatest percent of their votes in favor.
Suppose the Democrats try to coordinate among themselves. They say “If we all oppose the bill, then if even one Republican supports the bill, the Republicans will get lots of money they can spend on campaigning against us. If only one of us supports the bill, the Republicans may anticipate this strategy and two of them may support it. The only way to ensure the Republicans don't gain a massive windfall and wipe the floor with us next election is for most of us to vote for the bill.”
Meanwhile, in their meeting, the Republicans think the same thing. The vote ends with most members of Congress supporting your bill, and you don't end up having to pay any money at all.
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This sort of clever thinking is, in my opinion, the best that game theory has to offer. It shows that game theory need not be only a tool of evil for classical figures of villainy like bloodthirsty pirate captains or corporate raiders or economists, but can also be used to create trust and ensure cooperation between parties with common interests. “
13.5
The Imperfectionist: You can't hoard life
“The truth, of course, is that experiences are for having, not for hoarding. As J. Jennifer Matthews puts it, in her book Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, “we cannot get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket situated outside of life” to which you could take “life’s provisions and squirrel them away.” Spending your days trying to get experiences “under your belt”, in an effort to maximise your collection of experiences, or to feel more confident about the future supply of similar experiences, means placing yourself in a position from which you can never enjoy them fully, because there’s a different agenda at play.
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Contrast all this clenching and grasping with the spirit of the Japanese tea ceremony, in which the exquisite precision of the ritual is meant to articulate the absolutely unrepeatable, unhoardable nature of the moment in which it takes place:
Great attention should be given to a tea gathering, which we can speak of as ‘one time, one meeting’ (ichigo, ichie). Even though the host and guests may see each other often socially, one day’s gathering can never be repeated exactly. Viewed this way, the meeting is indeed a once-in-a-lifetime occasion.
Sure, you can have a hundred tea ceremonies. You can ever have them all with the same people. But you can only have that ceremony, that cup of tea, once. Then the moment evaporates forever. “
13.6
What’s Become Of Us? - Freya India
“Most of the time when we talk about social media being bad for us we mean for our mental health. These platforms make us anxious, depressed, and insecure, and for many reasons: the constant social comparison; the superficiality and inauthenticity of it all; being ranked and rated by strangers. All this seems to make us miserable.
But I don’t just think it makes us miserable. I’ve written before about how it makes us bitchy. And self-absorbed. And over time I’m becoming convinced that our most pressing concern isn’t that social media makes us feel worse about ourselves. It’s that social media makes us worse people.
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I honestly don’t know where we go from here. Distancing ourselves from these platforms, yes. Staying away from things that, no matter how normal they seem now, we feel are changing us for the worse. But I also think a good place to start is to change the way we talk about social media. Not just about our vulnerabilities but our vices. Not just about our anxiety but our arrogance. And to look at ourselves, honestly, all of us, and think, for once, not only about how all this is making us feel. But who the hell is it making us become?”