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Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

maalvika.substack.com

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Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#41

Post by fcatalan »

This resonates a lot with me. In fact it's a trait that has made me unhappy for as long as I can remember.

I'm seeing a therapist later this month because in a talk with my GP she saw strong enough hints of ADHD to send me there, and the kind of situations and some feelings talked about in the article came up a lot in the conversation.

I size up my oil paints against the old masters, not the old ladies in the atelier. I paint miniatures way better than average but hang around with Golden Demon winners so I always find myself wanting. Can play beautiful Renaissance pieces on my uke, but infuriatingly not at a professional performance level. Can win many sim races, but not against the top 0.1%, yet I size myself against their telemetry and laptimes. I dabble in Chess but being forever stuck around lowly 1300 ELO makes me feel dumb. My dead side projects cemetery has subdirectories approaching 3 figures. I go out and cycle with my brother but I huff and puff while he tops the Strava segments and wins the regional amateur championship again.

So too many days I just sit and do nothing, or just look for something else to enjoy for a few months until I become an unhappy promising beginner at yet another thing, adding to the overall problem.

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#42

Post by ants_everywhere »

Loughla wrote: post #27
meander_water wrote: post #26

> the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers. This resonated quite strongly with me. It puts into words something that I've been feeling when working with AI. If you're new to something and using AI…

This is the disconnect between proponents and detractors of AI. Detractors say it's the process and learning that builds depth. Proponents say it doesn't matter because the tool exists and will always exist. It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other.

I usually see the opposite.

Detractors from AI often refuse to learn how to use it or argue that it doesn't do everything perfectly so you shouldn't use it.

Proponents say it's the process and learning that builds depth and you have to learn how to use it well before you can have a sensible opinion about it.

The same disconnect was in place for every major piece of technology, from mechanical weaving, to mechanical computing, to motorized carriages, to synthesized music. You can go back and read the articles written about these technologies and they're nearly identical to what the AI detractors have been saying.

One side always says you're giving away important skills and the new technology produces inferior work. They try to frame it in moral terms. But at heart the objections are about the fear of one's skills becoming economically obsolete.

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#43

Post by ninetyninenine »

>Creation is not birth; it is murder. The murder of the impossible in service of the possible.

What a stupid quote. You know why it's stupid. Because murder is creation. It is the creation of death while destroying life.

Just use the word the way it's meant to be used. Don't come up with quotes that sound clever and trick the mind into thinking a statement is profound when really it's just more word trickery.

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#44

Post by scuol »

If this sounds like you, I highly recommend reading "The Problem of the Puer Aeternus".

You can definitely skip a lot of the tedious bits where the author essential copy-pastes other books for analysis, but this is a very common pattern where people tend to hold themselves back because doing the unambitious, rather pedestrian next step forward requires one to face these preconceived notions about oneself, e.g. "I should've done this long ago", etc.

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#45

Post by ninetyninenine »

Loughla wrote: post #27
meander_water wrote: post #26

> the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers. This resonated quite strongly with me. It puts into words something that I've been feeling when working with AI. If you're new to something and using AI…

This is the disconnect between proponents and detractors of AI. Detractors say it's the process and learning that builds depth. Proponents say it doesn't matter because the tool exists and will always exist. It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other.

>It's interesting seeing people argue about AI, because they're plainly not speaking about the same issue and simply talking past each other.

There's actually some ground truth facts about AI many people are not knowledgeable about.

Many people believe we understand in totality how LLMs work. The absolute truth of this is that we overall we do NOT understand how LLMs work AT all.

The mistaken belief that we understand LLMs is the driver behind most of the arguments. People think we understand LLMs and that we Understand that the output of LLMs is just stochastic parroting, when the truth is We Do Not understand Why or How an LLM produced a specific response for a specific prompt.

Whether the process of an LLM producing a response resembles anything close to sentience or consciousness, we actually do not know because we aren't even sure about the definitions of those words, Nor do we understand how an LLM works.

This erroneous belief is so pervasive amongst people that I'm positive I'll get extremely confident responses declaring me wrong.

These debates are not the result of people talking past each other. It's because a large segment of people on HN literally are Misinformed about LLMs.

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#46

Post by the_af »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #43

>Creation is not birth; it is murder. The murder of the impossible in service of the possible. What a stupid quote. You know why it's stupid. Because murder is creation. It is the creation of death while destroying life. Just use the word the way it's meant to be used. Don't come up with quotes that sound clever and trick the mind into thinking a statement is profound when really it's just more word trickery.

I thought the phrase was a whimsical/poetic way of saying something that rings true to me: that all the possibilities in your mind get narrowed down to a single imperfect one when actually materializing/putting them into practice -- in a way getting "destroyed" and replaced with an imperfect but existing version -- and that we sometimes get anxious about this.

It's not the only way of looking at it, but it is one way, and it's not wrong.

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#47

Post by strogonoff »

To be strategic, you think hard enough how to get somewhere and carefully plan and eliminate unknowns until you reach a point when getting there is no longer interesting.

Congratulations: you have successfully turned your cool idea into a chore. It’s just a lot of trivial typing and package management and it might not even be all that impressive when it is done.

Your idea is not at all a path well-trodden, but it is a path down which you’ve sent a high-resolution camera FPV drone so many times that you doubt you will see anything new in person.

What might happen then is that you try to keep it interesting by making it more impressive and raising the bar, by continuing to think and plan even harder. Why not write it in Rust? Why not make it infinitely extensible? More diagrams, hundreds more of open tabs…

It can absolutely lead to cool ideas with strategic and well-defined execution plans. Unfortunately, it is also difficult to break this loop and actually implement without an external force or another mind giving you some reframing.

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#48

Post by gsf_emergency_2 »

chatmasta wrote: post #38
meander_water wrote: post #26

> the "taste-skill discrepancy." Your taste (your ability to recognize quality) develops faster than your skill (your ability to produce it). This creates what Ira Glass famously called "the gap," but I think of it as the thing that separates creators from consumers. This resonated quite strongly with me. It puts into words something that I've been feeling when working with AI. If you're new to something and using AI…

This is exactly why I’m wary of ever attempting a developer-focused startup ever again. What’s not mentioned is the utter frustration when you can see your own output is not up to your own expectations, but you can’t execute on any plan to resolve that discrepancy. “I know what developers want, so I can build it for them” is a death knell proportionate to your own standards… The most profitable business I built was s…

>letting perfect be the enemy of good.

My attempt to improve the cliche:

  Let skill be the enemy of taste
2 issues here. Neither can be developed (perfected?) in isolation, but they certainly ramp up at different rates. They should probably feed back into each other somehow, whether adversarially or not

Re: Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage

#50

Post by Joel_Mckay »

I tend to find if it isn't ambitious enough, than it is just low hanging fruit for competitors... Chances are someone already published something similar.

The market usually doesn't want advanced technology, but rather the comfortable nostalgic dysfunctional totems they always purchased in the past. =)

"The Man In The White Suit" ( 1951)

https://archive.org/details/TheManInTheWhiteSuit1951_201810

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