i do lots of stuff and mention it and ppl usually don’t follow along and do my cool new projects. sometimes a few ppl read or learn 1/4 of it, a bit late, and then don’t take it very far.

and they aren’t doing a stream of their own awesome projects either.

this is my overall impression.

why?

well they are overreaching. they don’t have spare capacity to jump on opportunities as stuff comes up. they are booked up too much. if they only booked 50% of their time, then they’d have time available for cool opportunities as they come up.

in the name of efficiency, ppl will schedule all of their time, and then there’s no flexibility to get anything else done, and they miss out on tons of great opportunities. and they are often in crisis mode b/c they can't even do everything on their schedule, but they made promises to do those things, and then they have to take inefficient steps to deal with the crisis.

this is a ton like in The Goal, by Eli Goldratt, where factory work stations need excess capacity. and ppl intentionally try to get rid of any idle time in the name of efficiency. (read the book if you wanna understand this post better, and also b/c it's a really great book. there's tons of relevant stuff in the book which i don't go over here. also read his book, The Choice.)

this attitude ends up chasing lots of local maxima at the expense of global ones. that’s what busy schedules do too.

in The Goal, for example, they run robots 24/7 at their manufacturing plant so the robots won't be idle. but they end up producing too much of the stuff the robots can make, which makes things worse. and they have ppl at the heat treat oven go do other tasks while it runs, but then they're late to come back and lose super valuable time starting the next oven batch, so what they're doing is actually much, much worse than having ppl just sit around and wait by the oven and never be late to get the next load started.

paradoxically, ppl have their lives so full they never get anything done. which is exactly one of the main problems in The Goal.

it’s also like poor ppl who stay poor partly b/c, lacking spare money, they can’t jump on sales or bulk discounts very well. ppl who lack spare/idle time, b/c they are so time poor, end up using their time really inefficiently exactly like poor ppl use money inefficiently.

ppl often will make some attempt to free up time for a specific purpose. they want to do X so they manage to shift some time on their schedule from something else to X. but doing that never solves the problem of being overbooked in general, let alone giving one the excess capacity to jump on good opportunities and do things with longterm benefit (in the same way having excess money in the bank lets you use your money better).

i'm not advising you sit around doing literally nothing for long periods of time. but for most ppl it's really not hard to find things to do! most ppl have plenty of stuff they want to do. if you aren't doing anything for a while, don't rush to start an activity. give yourself time to think sometimes! and if you aren't doin much thinking right now or you finish thinking, ok, then consider your priorities and pick something good to do. also place a higher value on activities with flexible scheduling that are easy to interrupt and take breaks from, and activities that offer fast returns on investment so it's fine if you quit.

that's how i organize lots of my time. i avoid scheduled obligations and longterm commitments. instead of literal idle time, i have a lot of flex time where i have some things i can do, but also it's no problem to not do them if something else comes up.

examples of flex activities including reading, writing, playing games, watching videos, listening to podcasts, and having discussions. at a moment's notice i can redirect all my time away from those things and have all day to do something else, no problem. (it doesn't have to be something else, either. if i get really into reading something, and i'm learning a ton and excited by it, then i can redirect time to that. when i want to read something, i'm usually pretty much only limited by getting tired, not by my ability to free up time for it immediately. b/c of how i run my schedule, raw time is much less of an issue for me than for most ppl, so i have gotten to put a lot of thought into some more advanced issues of managing energy/attention/focus, which are where people's bottleneck should be. there are more hours in the day than hours per day you have the energy to do good thinking, so if time is your bottleneck you're doing something wrong!)

people managing their time, attention and mental energy very badly is also why Paths Forward seems so implausible to them. so to try to save time they actually act irrationally which is very destructive, especially for supposedly truth-seeking intellectuals.

also, in the majority of cases, concretizing plans in advance is premature optimization. don't tie down what you're going to do in advance when you have less information about what's best to do. in some cases you get benefits from partially deciding early (e.g. you can buy supplies for a project in advance), but you should usually avoid it. don't concretize plans early without a very clear reason it's beneficial, and only concretize to the extent needed to get the benefit, and be wary of activities that require a lot of concrete, advance planning.

ppl often push you for concrete planning, implicitly. cuz they are overbooked on concrete plans, they never get to the less concrete plans. so you have to schedule concrete plans with them in advance or you can't do anything with them. so their lack of idle time is causing every additional thing added onto their schedule to be concretized in advance (which is worse). the busy schedule itself is preventing the best activities and only letting lesser activities get onto the schedule! the busy schedule is causing tons of premature optimization.

making the right changes is so much more important than spending tons of time making tons of changes. it's not "efficient" to spend all your time that way, that's a local maxima. you'll get more productively accomplished, in a fraction of the time, if you do the right things. this is a theme of Goldratt which fits with FI well.

if flex time loses 10% against the local maximum to retain flexibility, and you do a different much better activity once a week (use the flexibility a minority of the time), you can come out way ahead.

e.g. you might play video games that are easily interruptible. this reduces your selection of games, so you get to play a slightly less ideal game on average. some days, as a result of doing this, you come out behind – play a less ideal game with no upside on that day. however in the bigger picture you come out ahead – the days where you gain a large benefit from the flexibility more than make up for the minor downsides.

don't screw up the important stuff b/c you were too distracted optimizing minor details! this is a big deal, and is in The Goal (having ppl wait around at the bottleneck work stations, spending most of their time idle, improves production b/c those work stations are so important that it's better to wait around for hours than to be a little late from multitasking.)

you can look at this in terms of local vs. global evaluation of results, or seen and unseen (Bastiat's take on the broken window fallacy and selective attention).

what's natural for me personally is to see that, right now:

1) play game with 9 value per hour, and have a 10% chance to interrupt it to do something worth 50 value per hour

is more points, now, than:

2) play game with 10 value per hour.

cuz i look at expectation value (a well known poker concept meaning the avg expected value of what ur doing, regardless of what happens today), so i even get the local case right. the expectation value is 90% * 9/hr + 10% * 50/hr which is 13.1/hr (that math doesn't cover the mixed case where you do it for a while then interrupt partway through, so the real advantage is smaller but, given reasonable assumptions about the unstated details, it'll still be an advantage. note: you do need to be careful with risk when dealing with expectation values, especially when dealing with high stakes all at once. e.g. i'd rather have a million dollars than a 50% chance of 2.1 million dollars, even though the second option is a little more money on average. the only way i'd take the second option, which comes out to 50k more on avg, is if i made a deal with a bank or rich guy. e.g. the bank gives me a million dollars plus 10k, and i pick the 2.1m choice and give them the full amount from it. then i get 10k more than if i picked the 1m option, and the bank comes out 40k ahead on avg, and they have enough money to deal with the variance.)

Eli Goldratt Interview:

EG: The first one is: how do you invent? Invent powerful solutions to your real problems, to your environment. And most people think that, maybe, you have to be born with this ability to invent. What I’ve tried to show here is that every good manager is a fantastic inventor. But you don’t pay attention to it, and you waste all the inventions. Let me explain a little bit what I mean, okay? Every manager faces emergencies. And he reacts to emergencies. What can he do? As a matter of fact, a good manager will react quite well to emergencies, and he solves the problem. And what we have to realize is: whenever we react to an emergency we actually deviate from the standard rules. Always! What people do not pay attention to is that you don’t just deviate from the standard rules, you are actually following a different set of rules. And the point is: after the emergency is over, why won’t you take the time to verbalize the new set of rules that you just followed? Then think on the following; if I would have used this set of rules not just in emergencies, but in the normal day to day, what damages will happen? What undesirable effects will result, and how can I prevent them? Because, if you will now augment this new set of rules with what should be happening, in order that, when I’m using them in day to day life at the normal time they do not lead to anything negative, what you are ending up with is a set of rules that is so much better than your current rules. So much better, that even emergencies are handled as if there is no emergency. And that’s what I’ve shown in this book, if you notice. Okay, a pipe is broken. Emergency. Fine, you react to it. But then what is even Paul saying? He’s dying to go back to normal! Wait a minute, pay attention. Look at how much the situation is better now. Think, how can you use it on a daily basis, because then you get this huge improvement. And that’s what’s happening in this book.

...

EG: Absolutely! But what I’m saying is: this is always the case. For example, take ‘The Goal’. In the first chapter, he faces an emergency. As a matter of fact, the emergency is so big that the head of the division comes to say, “There is an order which you are late on. You must expedite it!” So they expedite it. And he’s bitching and moaning about it. At the end of the book he’s doing exactly the same for the big order that saves his bottom line. If he would have just stopped after the first chapter and said, “I’ve deviated from the rules of how we are running a plant. It did work, I did send the order earlier. What are the new rules that I’m following?”, he would have saved the whole book, and he would have invented it rather than Jonah. Because, let’s face it, the way that he handled his big order at the end is exactly the same concept that he handled the emergency in the first chapter. It’s always the case. So, if people would just pay attention to it, everyone becomes an inventor.

The Choice by Eliyahu Goldratt and Efrat Goldratt-Ashlag (emphasis added).

"Father, I can assure you that there is no way you can convince me that people don't have conflicts."

He resorts to his pipe.

After a while he starts again. "Let me take a step back. Maybe we should discuss the differences and similarities between the words contradiction and conflict."

Since I don't know where he is heading, I keep quiet.

"Let's examine an example of how deep everybody's conviction is that there are no contradictions in the material world. Suppose that we have two different techniques to measure the height of a building. And when we use them to measure the height of a specific building we get two very different heights. Facing such an apparent contradiction no one would say, 'Let's compromise; let's agree that the height of this building is the average between the two measurements.'"

"What we would say is that somewhere along the line we have made an erroneous assumption. We'll check to see if, in the time that passed between the two measurements, additional floors were added. If that's not the case, we'll explore if our assumption—that each of the measurements was carried out properly—is correct. If they were, we'll look for an erroneous assumption in the techniques themselves; we'll explore the possibility that one of these two techniques is faulty. In extreme cases we'll even doubt our understanding of height. But we'll always look for the erroneous assumption and never contemplate the possibility of compromise. This is how strong our belief is that there are no contradictions in nature."

I'm not impressed. "A building cannot have two different heights, that's obvious. But a person can have two conflicting desires."

"Believe me, I know," he says. "I know that people may have conflicts. But that is also the situation in the material world. It is filled with conflicts. Reality doesn't contain contradictions, but it is full of conflicts.

"Can you explain the difference between a contradiction and a conflict?"

"Conflict is a situation where what we want is a contradiction." When he sees that doesn't help, he hurries to explain. "Take, for example, the wing of an airplane. On one hand, we need the wings to be strong. And in order to ensure the strength we should use thick supporting beams. But on the other hand, we need the wings to be light, and in order to ensure that, we should use thin supporting beams. A typical conflict. And like any other conflict, including conflicts between people, it will lead in good situations to some acceptable compromise, and in bad situations to a stone wall."

"Actually," I say, "in many situations a conflict will lead to a bad compromise. To a compromise that is bad because it is the cause of many undesirable effects. Come to think of it, I cannot think of even one example of an undesirable effect that is not the result of a conflict."

"No argument," he agrees. "What I'm suggesting is that we treat any conflict like a scientist treats a contradiction."

In the last ten years I've gained a lot of experience, most of it successful, in using his conflict removal method. So I allow myself to take over. "In other words," I say, "when we face a conflict, especially when we cannot easily find an acceptable compromise, let's do exactly the same thing we do when we encounter a contradiction; let's insist that one of the underlying assumptions is faulty. If, or should I say when, we pin down the underlying assumption that can be removed, we remove the cause of the conflict; we solve the conflict by eliminating it."

"Correct," he says. "So can you now verbalize the second obstacle that prevents people from effectively using their brainpower?"

Slowly I say, "I need a minute to organize my thoughts."

Yesterday I came to the conclusion that meaningful opportunities are opened when one sees how to remove a blockage, how to overcome an undesirable situation that I'm convinced I cannot change. Many times, the blockage is due to a conflict that does not have an acceptable compromise. From experience I know that as long as we think that the only way to handle a conflict is by compromising, we'll never think about the underlying assumptions and how to remove at least one of them; we'll never find the way to eliminate the conflict. And we'll never come up with the breakthrough; we'll never reveal the great opportunity that hides there. We'll just lower our expectations.

Confidently I say, "The second obstacle is that people's perception is that conflicts are a given and that the best we can do is to seek a compromise."

Bitterly Father remarks, "In academia we are encouraging that devastating mistake. Under the glorifying title of 'optimization' we invest considerable efforts to teach students, not how to remove conflicts, but how to waste time finding the 'best' compromise. What a waste of talent."

Consider the connection between conflict is a situation where what we want is a contradiction and the TCS concept of "coercion".

I made videos where I read Jordan Peterson's new best-selling book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, and share my thoughts in detail. I went in blind and edited out the silences from reading; it's my raw thoughts as I read, which show you one of my processes for how I think things through and analyze them.

12 Rules Screencast part 1 talks most about whether animals are intelligent (I disagree with the book and explain my view). I also talk about writing techniques.

12 Rules Screencast part 2 discusses a wider variety of issues, many of which I believe are important criticisms of the book.

Scholarly Criticism: Jordan Peterson’s Sloppy Cite (+quotes, research) changes format. I made slides and focused on criticizing one cite about serotonin and the brain. It's shorter and more organized.

12 Rules Screencast part 4 finishes discussing rule 1 at a faster pace using notes and quotes instead of the book text.

https://www.aynrand.org/novels/opar

Ayn Rand called her philosophy “Objectivism” because central to it is a new conception of objectivity. Traditionally, objectivity has meant the attempt to efface the knower out of existence, so that consciousness can “mirror” or “copy” reality, “untainted” by any processing. Skeptics then bewail the possibility of man knowing reality, since any attempt to do so must make use of his senses and/or rational faculty, both of which engage in processing.

This text is confusing so I wrote an explanation of the issue:

There is an idea that if an observer or thinker has any traits or characteristics, these bias his observations or ideas. His evidence and conclusions are tied to his own nature – the way his eyes work, the way his brain works, etc. The thought is that people with different eyes or brains could not agree with each other because they will each see or think about the world in their own different way, and won't have any objective ideas/evidence for common ground.

Objectivism says the logical implication of this way of thinking is that you kinda need to not exist to avoid bias. Any eyes or brain have a particular form (or "identity" is the word Rand uses) and therefore the only way to avoid bias is not to exist, not to have anything like a brain or eyes that are one way instead of a different way!

Objectivism rejects the idea that your eyes taint your observations, and that observations have to perfectly mirror reality to be any good. Even if you have blurry eyesight or you're colorblind, you can learn about actual reality instead of merely your subjective perceptions. Having a particular kind of eye doesn't prevent you from having a connection to reality.

To think objectively requires certain methods of thinking, such as trying to understand the nature of your eyes and brain and account for any problems they may cause. E.g. you can know your eyes are flawed and get glasses. And you can also use cameras and other tools to look at the world. And the results are there's an underlying reality which can be understood, rather than a chaos of incompatible observations for each observer or measurement instrument.

Objective thinking requires other things as well, like trying to see other sides of issues instead of just arguing for your initial position. Standard reason stuff.

None of this should lead us to skepticism, to giving up on there being a real world that we can know things about.

when i was growing up, no one told me about tragedy and malevolence – not parents, school, TV, books. (fantasy books do present evil, but outside the context of the real world, as a fantasy.) so i was not prepared to face the human condition (which has positive aspects, potential and opportunity, but there's also plenty of weakness, sin, suffering, etc. the world is full of problems, some quite hard). i was told society is great, evil is rare and weak, reason and success are common.

it's been difficult finding out how fucked up the world is. it would have been easier to face from the outset instead of as a readjustment later.

One of the meanings here is: don't lie to children about the nature of the world to shelter them in certain ways (other ways of protecting children are good, and the distinction takes some serious thought to get right). but i don't think that's primarily it. i'm from the San Francisco Bay Area. neither my parents nor teachers knew what the world was like themselves!

when you read a book that talks about important problems in the world, you get to choose how much attention to pay. you can just read through it and miss a lot of the point. that's what people normally do.

to get more out of it, you have to voluntarily choose to analyze it more, and think through what the negative issues are.

learning about the serious problems of the world isn't just a matter of opening your eyes, it takes a large, active effort. you have to put work into understanding them and making them a part of your own thinking.

it's up to you how much evil, badness, chaos, misery, etc, to voluntarily bring into your life.

it's understandable, in a way, that people usually don't bring in a lot. they don't take a book like Atlas Shrugged or The Gulag Archipelago and read it carefully and think through all of the meaning.

and they have a lot of excuses. this isn't like leaving your lights off to not see that your home is dirty. it takes a major effort to understand the world's misery and disorder beyond what is well known. flipping a light switch is easy, but you can say you're too busy doing other things to carefully think through the full consequences of some long, difficult books. or you can say that you did read it and think about it a lot – and face some of the world's evil – while not doing enough to face even more of the evil/problems (stopping short and pretending you did near the maximum, when there's really a lot more which you didn't make the effort to be aware of).

bringing disorder into your life is serious business. most people are already overwhelmed with their problems, so maybe they shouldn't. as Jordan Peterson would say, you need to get your own life in order before you should take on a bunch of other challenges! (don't overreach!)

this idea helps clarify for me why people don't get a lot out of books like Atlas Shrugged and The Beginning of Infinity. it's not just lack of intellectual skill. these books are serious business and present major world issues, and facing those is a difficult challenge which most people do not wish to voluntarily face. and even people interested in such things limit their exposure, limit what sort of evil and chaos they voluntarily bring into their mind to grapple with.

the more you think through the meaning of important books and ideas, the more you're bringing hard problems into your life and exposing yourself to ongoing tragedies. that's a hell of a thing to do, especially for someone who's life is already chaotic. (my life is very well in order today. but i took on such things in the past when my life was not yet organized. i was pretty damn fearless and this worked out very well for me, but it doesn't work out well for most people who try it – who take seriously a lot of major world problems, and see a lot of the world's folly, without having their own problems and life under control.)

it's difficult because the best way to get your life in order really effectively is to get really good at reason, but learning about reason will reveal to you all kinds of ways the world is irrational and disordered.

what i've done, over time, is keep integrating more and more thinkers into my thinking. in a serious way where the ideas actually make a cohesive whole.

i think this is very rare.

i did David Deutsch first, then Karl Popper, then William Godwin, then Edmund Burke, then Ayn Rand, then Ludwig von Mises, then Richard Feynman, then Thomas Szasz, then Ann Coulter, then David Horowitz, then Leonard Peikoff, then Jordan Peterson.

That's roughly the order, though I worked on some people at the same time. Putting them in linear order is a loose approximation. I read some initial Rand before Burke. Rand is a particularly long project that's still ongoing.

That's a reasonably complete list of thinkers I've engaged with in a BIG way who lived after ancient Rome, and who are public figures. i've done lots of smaller projects like reading a couple good things from someone, but i'm listing people where i went through tons of material. i've spent hundreds of hours on most of these thinkers. I'd guess Burke or Feynman is the least time on the list, and I've done around 20 book readings for each.

i don't just learn these thinkers as points of view, frameworks, perspectives. i actually learned the ideas for my own use and integrated them into my own thinking, and I integrated all of them into the same single worldview. i made them all compatible (while dropping some errors, but retaining major pieces – if there isn't a major piece i can get major value from then i don't spend this much time on a thinker).

Jordan Peterson has done some of this. He often refers to Jung, Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and others. However, he missed some very important thinkers. He learned some Popper without going into enough depth, and he learned a little Rand and didn't appreciate it very much. Jordan Peterson is aware of Thomas Szasz too, but sadly didn't go into depth – that's a big deal which is directly related to his profession and to public advice he gives about anti-depressants.

Most people only use one thinker at a time. On this issue they are a Kantian, on that issue a Marxist, and on a third issue they've got some environmentalist ideas they picked up at college. They don't learn from a bunch of different thinkers about the same issue and figure out how to put the ideas together into a better whole. It takes a major act of creation to do that. It takes figuring out a new idea which incorporates value from multiple prior thinkers and also stands on its own, and which is overall superior to any of the prior ideas. That's hard but very important.