I certainly agree that all the things you suggest to maintain one’s freedom are technically possible. It is technically possible for Michael Jordan to abandon the entire status-oriented psychological machinery he built throughout his life to become the GOAT and play baseball in a recreational league. It is technically possible to simply stop caring about an entire dimension of human experience and set yourself free from society’s notion of success.
This post is a set of observations about how succeeding a second time in a different area is often harder than succeeding the first time. Of course it is still not impossible, and indeed it happens all the time, but significant extra effort is required that was not required the first time. This seems to me surprising and counterintuitive, because my initial model of such things was that success multiple times should only get easier and easier, since “gitting gud” is a cluster of highly generalizable skills.
Hmm, it seems maybe relevant that I don’t think of my various skill-acquiring periods in the past as about “success”? Or maybe that the thing my brain parses internally as success isn’t very defined by what society considers to be winning. When I moved from ICU nursing to operations work, it did involve going from somewhere I was acknowledged by my colleagues to be pretty good at and where I felt a lot of mastery, to somewhere where I was much more often making mistakes and getting criticism for them, and this was sometimes frustrating and hard. Still, my overall sense was still one where learning to be a good nurse gave me a ton of generalizable skills that transferred to ops and meant I could skill up a lot faster there. Possibly it helps that I picked nursing for reasons unrelated to its prestige, and in fact got a bunch of flak from people (including people in the rationalist community) about choosing this field.
Aside: the experience I’ve had that feels the most to my S1 like having “made it in life”, is participating in glowfic, a very niche online collaborative-rp-writing community. Writing fiction and having a couple of dozen people as avid fans of it is utterly maxing out my monkey brain’s metric for feeling high-status. I do think it’ll be a bit of an adjustment going back to full-time work of one sort or another (I’ve been doing a lot of this as a hobby while recovering from a serious medical issue, but will at some point be recovered enough to be productive on other things and will cut back substantially.) Possibly because it’s so niche and only involves a subset of my social circle, though, I don’t expect it to make learning different new skills feel like “losing.”
Human capability usually peaks around the age of 25; that’s about how old Einstein was during his “miracle year”. After that, everything gets gradually harder. For a while, it’s hardly noticeable unless you enter a new, hyper-competitive environment. Later on people rely on built up advantages to stay competitive. Eventually time makes fools of us all.
You’ll know more as you get older. You’ll have solutions cached for more problems. But your sheer ability to think will peak within a few years. Unless what you do is extremely IQ-intensive you won’t notice any significant decline for quite a while, but there’s a reason that 30 year old mathematicians are considered past their prime.
As far as being cross with the universe, there’s a support group for that. It’s called “everybody”. We used to meet daily after work in literally every bar, but the lockdowns have been rather disruptive.
Exactly. My point is that “succeeded a second time” isn’t a question of skill, it’s a question of societal status assignment mechanisms and the value we place on status. It’s true, I can’t claim any given individual can actually turn off the parts of their mind that care about status, but some people do happen to care less about that, and do go on to have multiple successes. Those kinds of figures tend to be somewhat polarizing personalities, but after the second time there is less resistance to the third. People expect it more of them.
I certainly agree that all the things you suggest to maintain one’s freedom are technically possible. It is technically possible for Michael Jordan to abandon the entire status-oriented psychological machinery he built throughout his life to become the GOAT and play baseball in a recreational league. It is technically possible to simply stop caring about an entire dimension of human experience and set yourself free from society’s notion of success.
This post is a set of observations about how succeeding a second time in a different area is often harder than succeeding the first time. Of course it is still not impossible, and indeed it happens all the time, but significant extra effort is required that was not required the first time. This seems to me surprising and counterintuitive, because my initial model of such things was that success multiple times should only get easier and easier, since “gitting gud” is a cluster of highly generalizable skills.
Hmm, it seems maybe relevant that I don’t think of my various skill-acquiring periods in the past as about “success”? Or maybe that the thing my brain parses internally as success isn’t very defined by what society considers to be winning. When I moved from ICU nursing to operations work, it did involve going from somewhere I was acknowledged by my colleagues to be pretty good at and where I felt a lot of mastery, to somewhere where I was much more often making mistakes and getting criticism for them, and this was sometimes frustrating and hard. Still, my overall sense was still one where learning to be a good nurse gave me a ton of generalizable skills that transferred to ops and meant I could skill up a lot faster there. Possibly it helps that I picked nursing for reasons unrelated to its prestige, and in fact got a bunch of flak from people (including people in the rationalist community) about choosing this field.
Aside: the experience I’ve had that feels the most to my S1 like having “made it in life”, is participating in glowfic, a very niche online collaborative-rp-writing community. Writing fiction and having a couple of dozen people as avid fans of it is utterly maxing out my monkey brain’s metric for feeling high-status. I do think it’ll be a bit of an adjustment going back to full-time work of one sort or another (I’ve been doing a lot of this as a hobby while recovering from a serious medical issue, but will at some point be recovered enough to be productive on other things and will cut back substantially.) Possibly because it’s so niche and only involves a subset of my social circle, though, I don’t expect it to make learning different new skills feel like “losing.”
Human capability usually peaks around the age of 25; that’s about how old Einstein was during his “miracle year”. After that, everything gets gradually harder. For a while, it’s hardly noticeable unless you enter a new, hyper-competitive environment. Later on people rely on built up advantages to stay competitive. Eventually time makes fools of us all.
I’m 23 and I still feel like a child who knows nothing. If I peak in two years I will be very cross with the universe.
You’ll know more as you get older. You’ll have solutions cached for more problems. But your sheer ability to think will peak within a few years. Unless what you do is extremely IQ-intensive you won’t notice any significant decline for quite a while, but there’s a reason that 30 year old mathematicians are considered past their prime.
As far as being cross with the universe, there’s a support group for that. It’s called “everybody”. We used to meet daily after work in literally every bar, but the lockdowns have been rather disruptive.
Exactly. My point is that “succeeded a second time” isn’t a question of skill, it’s a question of societal status assignment mechanisms and the value we place on status. It’s true, I can’t claim any given individual can actually turn off the parts of their mind that care about status, but some people do happen to care less about that, and do go on to have multiple successes. Those kinds of figures tend to be somewhat polarizing personalities, but after the second time there is less resistance to the third. People expect it more of them.