One of the tricky aspects is that you might be at a local maximum, or even on a downward slope, but the ground could be shifting under your feet. So navigating effectively depends not only on your willingness to move downhill, but your ability to assess the stability of the ground.
Ways this can show up and cause problems:
Staying in a relationship/job/house too long, always with a plausible reason why it might get better
Breaking up/quitting/moving out too early because you expect the challenges of the present moment to continue.
Seeing yourself as having more or less ability to influence your house/job/relationship quality than you really do.
Struggling with collaborators/partners/housemates over the expected value of exploration vs exploitation
Good examples. I’m gonna address this somewhat in the next post—premature optimisation seems like the bigger problem, but there are also relatively stable domains in which it makes sense to switch from exploring to exploiting as early in the piece as possible.
As you point out, the strategy hinges on the stability of the ground, which in turn hinges on the ability to determine said stability. I think there are some OK heuristics for this, although they mostly just look like asking ‘what domain of life does this decision fall under?’
One of the tricky aspects is that you might be at a local maximum, or even on a downward slope, but the ground could be shifting under your feet. So navigating effectively depends not only on your willingness to move downhill, but your ability to assess the stability of the ground.
Ways this can show up and cause problems:
Staying in a relationship/job/house too long, always with a plausible reason why it might get better
Breaking up/quitting/moving out too early because you expect the challenges of the present moment to continue.
Seeing yourself as having more or less ability to influence your house/job/relationship quality than you really do.
Struggling with collaborators/partners/housemates over the expected value of exploration vs exploitation
Good examples. I’m gonna address this somewhat in the next post—premature optimisation seems like the bigger problem, but there are also relatively stable domains in which it makes sense to switch from exploring to exploiting as early in the piece as possible.
As you point out, the strategy hinges on the stability of the ground, which in turn hinges on the ability to determine said stability. I think there are some OK heuristics for this, although they mostly just look like asking ‘what domain of life does this decision fall under?’