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Make an Extraordinary Effort

overcomingbias.com

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Re: Make an Extraordinary Effort

#11

Post by teaquaffer »

Eliezer wrote: post #9
MicahWedemeyer wrote: post #3

Could this be summed up as Work smarter, not harder ?

There's a difference between the notion of "working smarter", and the notion of being willing to leave your comfortable zone and do things outside your usual boundaries, when the ordinary result (or desperate result) isn't good enough. What does "work smarter" mean operationally? If there were a little switch you could throw in your head, we wouldn't need the Overcoming Bias blog.

I've found that a lot of times there _is_ a little switch in my head. Every once in a while I'll be banging my head against a problem, but if I stop and ask myself "how would a physicist solve this?" I can figure it out.

It takes an effort for me to step back and ask myself what the problem is, rather than just sitting down and working on it.

Usually "just sitting down and working on it" works, which may mean my problems are too easy. :)

Re: Make an Extraordinary Effort

#12

Post by walterk »

teaquaffer wrote: post #11
Eliezer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between the notion of "working smarter", and the notion of being willing to leave your comfortable zone and do things outside your usual boundaries, when the ordinary result (or desperate result) isn't good enough. What does "work smarter" mean operationally? If there were a little switch you could throw in your head, we wouldn't need the Overcoming Bias blog.

I've found that a lot of times there _is_ a little switch in my head. Every once in a while I'll be banging my head against a problem, but if I stop and ask myself "how would a physicist solve this?" I can figure it out. It takes an effort for me to step back and ask myself what the problem is, rather than just sitting down and working on it. Usually "just sitting down and working on it" works, which may mean my prob…

Asking yourself "how would a physicist solve this?" is a good example of priming. I can't remember if I read about it in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, but there was an experiment where a couple groups were given a task, with one group told to imagine that they were professors. That group performed significantly better than the other.

But you'll notice that it takes something more specific than "work smarter" to change up the way you approach a problem.

Re: Make an Extraordinary Effort

#13

Post by iamwil »

anon-e-moose wrote: post #7

Pure psycho-babble. "If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon."

Only if it were a pretty poster and a cute saying.

It's sometimes hard to convey in a sentence what we mean, especially something translated, so we take a whole blog post.

Re: Make an Extraordinary Effort

#14

Post by Alex3917 »

"It is essential for a man to strive with all his heart, and to understand that it is difficult even to reach the average if he does not have the intention of surpassing others in whatever he does."

Only a wretch would aspire to surpass others. This guy's epitaph pegs him as shallow and insecure, and the rest of the post only further showcases his ignorance.

Re: Make an Extraordinary Effort

#15

Post by ChaitanyaSai »

randomwalker wrote: post #5

I enjoyed the East vs. West discussion in the article. I grew up in the "East" (India), and even by those standards, the importance of "making a desperate all-out effort as if your own life were at stake" was drilled into my head from a pretty early age. It's one of the things I've chosen to keep, even as I've discarded most things the East gave me, like religion. When I moved to America, I realized that this notion…

"...making a desperate all-out effort as if your own life were at stake..." This may be specific to your (extended) family. While it is foolhardy to speak of any unified cultural milieu for India, I think it is fair to say that predestination has largely been accepted and reveals itself in the way our culture gave rise to rigid class stratification. And predestination, almost by definition, discourages risk-taking.

Within these class boundaries, you do have people striving to reach conventional goals, but rarely at risk to the family (which tends to be established early).

Also, the largest nurturing family structure, the Indian bureaucracy (where most of the educated Indian workforce was employed until the nineties) instills passivity and "do-just-enough-ness".

These value are changing, but the change is really glacial outside the few, truly cosmopolitan, western influenced cities and social strata.

Re: Make an Extraordinary Effort

#16

Post by arockwell »

walterk wrote: post #10
arockwell wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what "work smarter and harder" misses the most is not the level of effort you need to make, but that in order to get to that level of "extraordinary effort" you need to take risks. I think trying to reduce this post to one sentence is probably a bad idea anyways. I thought it was worthwhile reading.

I agree. (Incidentally, I wasn't trying to put down your comment specifically, in case it came across that way. I just replied to it since I didn't want to duplicate the point that working harder was also part of the equation.)

Hah, no problem. This is one of the few sites I assume by default people are trying to be positive.

Re: Make an Extraordinary Effort

#18

Post by dhbradshaw »

Alex3917 wrote: post #14

"It is essential for a man to strive with all his heart, and to understand that it is difficult even to reach the average if he does not have the intention of surpassing others in whatever he does." Only a wretch would aspire to surpass others. This guy's epitaph pegs him as shallow and insecure, and the rest of the post only further showcases his ignorance.

"Only a wretch would aspire to surpass others"

If you are just trying to compete randomly then you end up lost, with no direction of your own, and easily manipulated.

But if you have a goal, getting there may require that you surpass others. If it is a large goal, it almost certainly will. You have to leave the village to get to the top of the mountain.

Re: Make an Extraordinary Effort

#19

Post by randomwalker »

ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #15
randomwalker wrote: post #5

I enjoyed the East vs. West discussion in the article. I grew up in the "East" (India), and even by those standards, the importance of "making a desperate all-out effort as if your own life were at stake" was drilled into my head from a pretty early age. It's one of the things I've chosen to keep, even as I've discarded most things the East gave me, like religion. When I moved to America, I realized that this notion…

"...making a desperate all-out effort as if your own life were at stake..." This may be specific to your (extended) family. While it is foolhardy to speak of any unified cultural milieu for India, I think it is fair to say that predestination has largely been accepted and reveals itself in the way our culture gave rise to rigid class stratification. And predestination, almost by definition, discourages risk-taking. W…

No, it's not just a family thing. I'm not going to argue about abstract cultural values and philosophical systems. I'm just pointing out what actually happens.

I went to one of the IIT's. Unless you've been through the system, it's hard to imagine the level of parental and peer pressure the kids who train for the entrance exam face and the kind of work ethic it fosters in you. How many countries in the world do you think there are where it is common to go to boarding school for two years and forgo any kind of social life and a normal childhood just to have a shot at getting into a specific college? Pretty much just Japan, Korea and India.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of kids attempt the IIT. But that was just an example. In general, competition for resources is so scarce that it is common to make a Herculean effort to get things that are taken for granted in the developed world. Like a car.

I'm willing to admit that this might be an entirely urban phenomenon, and that rewards for hard work were much harder to come by in socialist India, until the early 90s. But we live in the new century, and a third of the country is now urban, where social stratification has largely broken down. That's more than the total population of the U.S.

Re: Make an Extraordinary Effort

#20

Post by ph0rque »

randomwalker wrote: post #19
ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...making a desperate all-out effort as if your own life were at stake..." This may be specific to your (extended) family. While it is foolhardy to speak of any unified cultural milieu for India, I think it is fair to say that predestination has largely been accepted and reveals itself in the way our culture gave rise to rigid class stratification. And predestination, almost by definition, discourages risk-taking. W…

No, it's not just a family thing. I'm not going to argue about abstract cultural values and philosophical systems. I'm just pointing out what actually happens. I went to one of the IIT's. Unless you've been through the system, it's hard to imagine the level of parental and peer pressure the kids who train for the entrance exam face and the kind of work ethic it fosters in you. How many countries in the world do you t…

> How many countries in the world do you think there are where it is common to go to boarding school for two years and forgo any kind of social life and a normal childhood just to have a shot at getting into a specific college? Pretty much just Japan, Korea and India.

China as well, iirc.

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