“What sort of writing could you create if you worked on it (be it ever so rarely) for the next 60 years? What could you do if you started now?”
This rings my get-rich-quick alarm bell. My brain’s impulsive reaction is to imagine that there’s a way to “get rich,” or its equivalent in terms of the impact of your writing, with minimal effort, as long as you aim to get your payoff many decades in the future. I don’t think that’s what Gwern meant, and I’m criticizing my own reaction, not his writing.
There are big decisions that will need to be made one, five, 10 years in the future. It makes sense to start thinking about them now. We don’t want to spend so much time optimizing near-term details that we lose track of long-term enormities.
Gwern’s noting that people seem to pay too little attention to the long-term. They write blogs with no attention to cohesiveness or publishability. They toss out content without doing any work to collect, update, and preserve it. They address topics they think will give them 20 rather than 10 readers next weekend, rather than building toward the capacity to write articles that are much more influential in five or ten years.
The contrary argument is that people might do this because they’re much worse at long-term planning than they are at making a short-term effort. There’s probably an inverted U-shaped distribution of value in planning at various time horizons. If the long-term plans can’t be concrete and actionable, what are we supposed to do with them?
In any case, Gwern’s not advocating a “get-influential-with-minimal-effort” scheme. It’s just a call to plan for the long term in your writing habit, as we try to do in other areas of life.
What was the role of the EMH in these considerations? It was to notice my brain getting overly interested in the possibility of a reward. Then I considered Gwern’s questions under the assumption that any possible reward requires some combination of hard work, skill, luck, and sacrifice in order to scrape together an investment, and that the work has to be actionable for me and provide concrete value to others. His question, I think, is best interpreted as:
Could you help other people more over the course of your lifetime if you diverted more energy to planning for the future rather than optimizing for the present? What about with your writing? If so, what kind of planning projects would be most useful?
This is a sensible question, and one that silences the “get rich quick” alarm bell.
One way to try and answer it that springs to mind is:
Make a list of concrete decisions I expect to face in the future. These should be decisions that will involve creating some sort of framework, collating data, and figuring out how to combine it to narrow options and make a choice. Furthermore, I should focus on decisions where the normal course of life is going to frequently present me with data relevant to that decision, yet which I am likely to forget because I haven’t done any work to consider how to integrate it into my framework. Alternatively, I could focus on decisions where there’s a deadline, and a risk that I might not start soon enough to come up with a good framework and gather the required data in time.
Let’s label these two classes of decisions “long thinks” and “hard decisions.”
I could then babble a list of decisions I expect to have to make over the course of my lifetime, and categorize them as “long thinks,” “hard decisions,” both, or neither. “Neither” doesn’t mean a decision is easy or unimportant; it just means that there’s no deadline and no data stream to capture by planning ahead.
Let’s try to come up with ten:
Which professor to do research with in an MS degree.
Whether to publish a blog on my own website under my real name.
What to do when my lease is up; when and whether to move for graduate school.
Whether to pursue a PhD, and if so, what to study.
Whether to have children.
If I publish a blog on bioprinting and tissue engineering, what sorts of posts to write for it.
Whether to add a focused project to argue for a wider conversation about human challenge trials and pandemic vaccine strategies.
Whether to change my strategy for life improvements (i.e. better diets, exercise, etc) to focus on making much larger, more permanent changes.
What clothes to buy next year.
What car to buy next.
(1) is more a hard decision than a long think; all the professors are out there to be contacted, as are their grad students. That’s most of the data I’d have anyway to decide whom to work for.
(2) is neither. There’s no deadline, and I don’t notice myself routinely having experiences that could bear on whether or not to publish a blog.
(3) is a hard decision.
(4) is a hard decision and a long think.
(5) is a hard decision and a long think.
(6) is a long think, because if I had a framework for what sorts of posts to write, I could consider my daily reading and writing in terms of that framework.
(7) is a long think, since it’s a topic that keeps coming up.
(8) is a long think, since I already have conversations about and make attempts at life optimization, the data from which is often lost.
Thoughts on reading Gwern’s about page on the content on his website:
This rings my get-rich-quick alarm bell. My brain’s impulsive reaction is to imagine that there’s a way to “get rich,” or its equivalent in terms of the impact of your writing, with minimal effort, as long as you aim to get your payoff many decades in the future. I don’t think that’s what Gwern meant, and I’m criticizing my own reaction, not his writing.
There are big decisions that will need to be made one, five, 10 years in the future. It makes sense to start thinking about them now. We don’t want to spend so much time optimizing near-term details that we lose track of long-term enormities.
Gwern’s noting that people seem to pay too little attention to the long-term. They write blogs with no attention to cohesiveness or publishability. They toss out content without doing any work to collect, update, and preserve it. They address topics they think will give them 20 rather than 10 readers next weekend, rather than building toward the capacity to write articles that are much more influential in five or ten years.
The contrary argument is that people might do this because they’re much worse at long-term planning than they are at making a short-term effort. There’s probably an inverted U-shaped distribution of value in planning at various time horizons. If the long-term plans can’t be concrete and actionable, what are we supposed to do with them?
In any case, Gwern’s not advocating a “get-influential-with-minimal-effort” scheme. It’s just a call to plan for the long term in your writing habit, as we try to do in other areas of life.
What was the role of the EMH in these considerations? It was to notice my brain getting overly interested in the possibility of a reward. Then I considered Gwern’s questions under the assumption that any possible reward requires some combination of hard work, skill, luck, and sacrifice in order to scrape together an investment, and that the work has to be actionable for me and provide concrete value to others. His question, I think, is best interpreted as:
Could you help other people more over the course of your lifetime if you diverted more energy to planning for the future rather than optimizing for the present? What about with your writing? If so, what kind of planning projects would be most useful?
This is a sensible question, and one that silences the “get rich quick” alarm bell.
One way to try and answer it that springs to mind is:
Make a list of concrete decisions I expect to face in the future. These should be decisions that will involve creating some sort of framework, collating data, and figuring out how to combine it to narrow options and make a choice. Furthermore, I should focus on decisions where the normal course of life is going to frequently present me with data relevant to that decision, yet which I am likely to forget because I haven’t done any work to consider how to integrate it into my framework. Alternatively, I could focus on decisions where there’s a deadline, and a risk that I might not start soon enough to come up with a good framework and gather the required data in time.
Let’s label these two classes of decisions “long thinks” and “hard decisions.”
I could then babble a list of decisions I expect to have to make over the course of my lifetime, and categorize them as “long thinks,” “hard decisions,” both, or neither. “Neither” doesn’t mean a decision is easy or unimportant; it just means that there’s no deadline and no data stream to capture by planning ahead.
Let’s try to come up with ten:
Which professor to do research with in an MS degree.
Whether to publish a blog on my own website under my real name.
What to do when my lease is up; when and whether to move for graduate school.
Whether to pursue a PhD, and if so, what to study.
Whether to have children.
If I publish a blog on bioprinting and tissue engineering, what sorts of posts to write for it.
Whether to add a focused project to argue for a wider conversation about human challenge trials and pandemic vaccine strategies.
Whether to change my strategy for life improvements (i.e. better diets, exercise, etc) to focus on making much larger, more permanent changes.
What clothes to buy next year.
What car to buy next.
(1) is more a hard decision than a long think; all the professors are out there to be contacted, as are their grad students. That’s most of the data I’d have anyway to decide whom to work for.
(2) is neither. There’s no deadline, and I don’t notice myself routinely having experiences that could bear on whether or not to publish a blog.
(3) is a hard decision.
(4) is a hard decision and a long think.
(5) is a hard decision and a long think.
(6) is a long think, because if I had a framework for what sorts of posts to write, I could consider my daily reading and writing in terms of that framework.
(7) is a long think, since it’s a topic that keeps coming up.
(8) is a long think, since I already have conversations about and make attempts at life optimization, the data from which is often lost.
(9) is neither.
(10) is a hard decision.