This resonates with me. I can't have relaxing hobbies: I take them up, find some measurable/competitive/social aspect in them, smash my way from "rookie" to "advanced beginner" to "top 20 percentile" in very little time and then agonize about the ensuing plateau and how getting into the top 1% would require complete dedication or might be realistically out of reach for me. By that time I stop enjoying doing whatever…
Thanks for giving me ideas to add to my 200 hobbies, miniature painting it is. I even have an app (Streaks) that reminds me daily of thousands of things I want to do, and it just shows how unrealistic it is. I want to concentrate on just two things, but then I hate to plateau on the other skill. Right now I concentrate on guitar and trumpet. But my painting and drawing skills are really not that good anymore. I try to also publish some academic papers, repair my bike, lift weights, run, get better at theorem proving, read into all of the social sciences, read philosophy (Kant, Hegel), experiment with Arduino, build a repertoire in Rebetiko ... If you find a trick to just do one things, tell me.
I had a goal of programming every morning for an hour, and it wouldn’t stick… Once I dropped any pretense of making money, or getting anything out of it other than enjoying the craft, it has finally stuck.
There is the idea that I kind of subscribe too but not entirely, that if you want to improve yourself - you would just do it rather than force it.
In that trying to force it is like Sisyphus. In giving up the battle, you are freed up to actually do it.
So your exaple is great, you had a good intention but once you gave up that structure then you actually got to the goal.
Ok the most important sentence in this essay is its subtitle:
“Advice for myself around leisure activities”
Personally I am no perfectionist at all, but I don’t see the fun in making stuff myself that I could otherwise buy. I took up sewing, not because I want to sew the perfect shirt, but because men’s fashion sucks. That said, I sew stuff I can wear. So it needs to look at least as good as what I could buy. I don’t think that it’s “acting like being famous”. Similarly, I am writing a screenplay, because I have a lot of experience reading bad screenplay that were actually made into movies, and I think I can write one that is at least as good as the worst ones I read. I don’t paint or take photographs because I know mine will look terrible.
Maybe that would be my advice in taking up hobbies: aim to be better than the worst people who do it professionally.
If everyone started putting ketchup into their coffee, would that make it a good thing? Some notions of quality are not dependent on their popularity.
I would have considered the use of the Ad populum falacy more for use in terms of testable facts rather than opinions. Is quality of language and taste opinion or fact? I could see the debate being vigorous on that one.
It’s a big debate indeed and I don’t want to get into it here, but I think I come down on the side of, “some standards are not purely popularity contests, but are based on other things.” There are a lot of reasons I think this way, but even if someone doesn’t agree, I do think a purely consequentialist approach is illustrative.
Would we have better food if the top chefs in the world designed our meals, or if the entire population voted on them? For some topics (including the arts) I think a purely subjective approach has worse outcomes.
If enough people are making the same mistake, won't it eventually stop being a mistake?
If everyone started putting ketchup into their coffee, would that make it a good thing? Some notions of quality are not dependent on their popularity.
You can make a really ugly, low quality change to a language, wait for a new generation to grow up with it and it will now be accepted as perfectly fine. There isn’t any objective notion of quality here
If everyone started putting ketchup into their coffee, would that make it a good thing? Some notions of quality are not dependent on their popularity.
You can make a really ugly, low quality change to a language, wait for a new generation to grow up with it and it will now be accepted as perfectly fine. There isn’t any objective notion of quality here
That doesn’t imply it’s perfectly fine, it might just mean that the arbiters have lost their ability to detect quality. Which is exactly what I think has happened.
> The most egregious thing you can do with any activity is daydream about how you can make money off of it. That’s the quickest way to optimize for the wrong things and suck the fun right out of it. Most likely you will stop doing the activity almost immediately, so save the money-making schemes for work.
Is it bad if I yearn and pine for fame? I know it's frowned upon, and I bury the urge for fame, but deep down, I am hooked to other's validation and fame.
I wouldnt say it is bad but be careful of what you wish for.
On the flip side if someone is merely after fame that is not such a bad thing by comparison. It is not like those that seek wealth and power, it is at least going a more ethereal and potentially much less destructive goal. Having lots of fame doesn't necessarily take from others.
The problem with a lot of fame is that the more of it you get, the more decided people will be. A good modern example would be Taylor Swift. Some people love her, many don't even notice but some call her Taydolf Swifler.
Turns out you cannot get just the good, you have to have the bad come with it as well. Unless you are Weird Al, everybody loves him!
If enough people are making the same mistake, won't it eventually stop being a mistake?
Not until my dying breath. The English language is a mess because of its haphazard evolution mostly driven by immigration over centuries. Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them. No one that has learned English as second language could ever construct "could of" as it makes no sense. And the act of being defiant is very very different than being definite about something. Yet p…
> Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them
Why does it bug you? They are different classes of mistakes but both have driven the language over the centuries. Why are native mistakes wrong but immigrant mistakes good?