I strongly disagree, despite the excellence of your presentation :) Arguing against excellence is a bad look, but I feel compelled to voice my take anyway. I strongly suspect that many LW readers are already pursuing excellence beyond what is optimal for their real goals.
It certainly makes sense to pursue excellence in some things. But that usually takes time, which limits the number of other projects you can do. And there’s often a large nonlinearity in the likely success vs. time spent on a given project, making pursuit of excellence actively irrational.
In my two decades in academic research, it looked to me like the pursuit of excellence was a very common mistake made by academics. I suspect the same is true of the rationalist community on average. I found I could be quite helpful by examining different scientific projects and pointing out where corners could be cut that would save a lots of time while having only a tiny effect on the project’s outcome and likely success. The people doing those projects usually agreed with me; they hadn’t thought about those measures because they had been pursuing excellence as a heuristic without any real means-ends analysis.
I do not see a nice dividing line between excellence and perfectionism, but a smooth continuum that requires frequent re-evaluation specific to each project.
“Anything worth doing is worth doing well” is my nomination for most damaging aphorism in history.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Or, to put it another way: pursue excellence in your choice of how to spend your time. Sometimes the correct choice will be pursuit of excellence; this is particularly likely when that pursuit builds your skills, or excellence is required for even satisfactory results. By this broader definition, doing something well means doing it efficiently: spending no more time than the time/results tradeoff curve dictates, and bearing in mind the opportunity cost of not spending that time on other projects.
In many situations, excellent choices mean doing a good-enough job, and quickly moving on to accomplish other things.
I’m sorry to say that I find this suggestion to be actively anti-rationalist. There is certainly such a thing as too much analysis, but that’s much more likely on small decisions where a quick decision beats a better decision. Deciding how to spend one’s time seems to deserve a careful analysis, not heuristic-based decision-making.
I also think that much American culture already stresses excellence over happiness, which is a huge mistake of another sort. Telling American high achievers to pursue excellence seems like the opposite of the advice they most need: satisfice, prioritize, and keep your eye on how your actions pursue your real goals.
The topic is a good deal more complex and detailed than either this piece or my response covered. Like most important questions, it comes down to the specifics of each situation. But I did feel compelled to offer the counterargument, since the essay didn’t really address them.
I actually agree with quite a bit of this. (I nearly included a line about pursuing excellence in terms of time allocation, but — it seemed possibly-redundant with some of the other stuff on not making the perfect the enemy of the good, and I couldn’t quickly see how to fit it cleanly into the flow of the post, so I left it and moved on …)
I think it’s important to draw the distinction between perfection and excellence. Broadly speaking, I think people often put too much emphasis on perfection, and often not enough on excellence.
Maybe I shouldn’t have led with the “Anything worth doing, is worth doing right” quote. I do see that it’s closer to perfectionist than excellence-seeking, and I don’t literally agree with it. Though one thing I like about the quote is the corollary: “anything not worth doing right isn’t worth doing” — again something I don’t literally agree with, but something I think captures an important vibe.
I do think people in academia can fail to find the corners they should be cutting. But I also think that they write a lot of papers that (to a first approximation) just don’t matter. I think that academia would be a healthier place if people invested more in asking “what’s the important thing here?” and focusing on that, and not trying to write a paper at all until they thought they could write one with the potential to be excellent.
I strongly disagree, despite the excellence of your presentation :) Arguing against excellence is a bad look, but I feel compelled to voice my take anyway. I strongly suspect that many LW readers are already pursuing excellence beyond what is optimal for their real goals.
It certainly makes sense to pursue excellence in some things. But that usually takes time, which limits the number of other projects you can do. And there’s often a large nonlinearity in the likely success vs. time spent on a given project, making pursuit of excellence actively irrational.
In my two decades in academic research, it looked to me like the pursuit of excellence was a very common mistake made by academics. I suspect the same is true of the rationalist community on average. I found I could be quite helpful by examining different scientific projects and pointing out where corners could be cut that would save a lots of time while having only a tiny effect on the project’s outcome and likely success. The people doing those projects usually agreed with me; they hadn’t thought about those measures because they had been pursuing excellence as a heuristic without any real means-ends analysis.
I do not see a nice dividing line between excellence and perfectionism, but a smooth continuum that requires frequent re-evaluation specific to each project.
“Anything worth doing is worth doing well” is my nomination for most damaging aphorism in history.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Or, to put it another way: pursue excellence in your choice of how to spend your time. Sometimes the correct choice will be pursuit of excellence; this is particularly likely when that pursuit builds your skills, or excellence is required for even satisfactory results. By this broader definition, doing something well means doing it efficiently: spending no more time than the time/results tradeoff curve dictates, and bearing in mind the opportunity cost of not spending that time on other projects.
In many situations, excellent choices mean doing a good-enough job, and quickly moving on to accomplish other things.
I’m sorry to say that I find this suggestion to be actively anti-rationalist. There is certainly such a thing as too much analysis, but that’s much more likely on small decisions where a quick decision beats a better decision. Deciding how to spend one’s time seems to deserve a careful analysis, not heuristic-based decision-making.
I also think that much American culture already stresses excellence over happiness, which is a huge mistake of another sort. Telling American high achievers to pursue excellence seems like the opposite of the advice they most need: satisfice, prioritize, and keep your eye on how your actions pursue your real goals.
The topic is a good deal more complex and detailed than either this piece or my response covered. Like most important questions, it comes down to the specifics of each situation. But I did feel compelled to offer the counterargument, since the essay didn’t really address them.
I actually agree with quite a bit of this. (I nearly included a line about pursuing excellence in terms of time allocation, but — it seemed possibly-redundant with some of the other stuff on not making the perfect the enemy of the good, and I couldn’t quickly see how to fit it cleanly into the flow of the post, so I left it and moved on …)
I think it’s important to draw the distinction between perfection and excellence. Broadly speaking, I think people often put too much emphasis on perfection, and often not enough on excellence.
Maybe I shouldn’t have led with the “Anything worth doing, is worth doing right” quote. I do see that it’s closer to perfectionist than excellence-seeking, and I don’t literally agree with it. Though one thing I like about the quote is the corollary: “anything not worth doing right isn’t worth doing” — again something I don’t literally agree with, but something I think captures an important vibe.
I do think people in academia can fail to find the corners they should be cutting. But I also think that they write a lot of papers that (to a first approximation) just don’t matter. I think that academia would be a healthier place if people invested more in asking “what’s the important thing here?” and focusing on that, and not trying to write a paper at all until they thought they could write one with the potential to be excellent.