Now, it's just a matter of surviving

Scott Alexander S., who was born kind, has been blogging a lot about Growth Mindset recently. He thinks it's pretty much a complete farce. I'm not sure I agree with him.

Let me start out with a disclaimer:
Most of the virtue-ish concepts I've tested in life have proved to be terrible ideas. Trying out unconditional love or (worse) unconditional forgiveness will ruin your life and the lives of the people you care about. When I ran that experiment the results were disastrous. Trusting people more than you think is prudent is not prudent. It's the opposite of prudent, and has all sorts of negative consequences. There was a time when I bet my life on the belief that living virtuously was the right way to live, and I had to quit because if I didn't it would have killed me. I'm completely serious and not exaggerating. But that's a story for another time.

Growth mindset is virtue-ish enough of a mentality that I think the default approach to it ought to be extreme skepticism. These kinds of ideas usually screw you when you play with them.

I'm starting to believe that the way I view myself is important and that it's way better to view myself as someone who is just gets stuff done than it is to view myself as someone particularly talented or intelligent. (This change in mentality is thanks to Gabe Newell. I would not have attempted to adopt this mindset from the psych literature. I decided it was worth testing when Gabe said in his LBJ School talk -- on YouTube -- that he really hates the word "talent" because of the way it's usually used. He uses it anyways because he doesn't have a better word. He uses it to mean "the ability to be productive," and he measures "the ability to be productive" largely in raw output. The programmer who can write 5000 lines of code a day (and he says there is one at Valve) is a lot more talented than the one who writes 500 lines a year (and he claims that that's industry average which strikes me as absurd, but I've heard 2-4 lines of day numbers from so many sources that I'm starting to believe even though it sounds completely ridiculous)).

So I've started aiming to increase my raw productivity over the last few months, and it's been working. And it's been good.

I'm starting to feel like I have a bit of momentum built up in life.

This is a wonderful feeling. I'm starting to feel like if I just survive long enough and keep up some of the things that I'm doing, I'll end up succeeding at my efforts.

I've finally started putting some code together that I think I'll be able to continue to write making some slow steady progress for the next several years. (I wrote about 150 lines today, but once I have a job, I don't think I'll continue to make that kind of progress into the future, but I should be able to manage 20-50 even once I have a job again I think.)

I've got my own IP. I have some papers I can post a link to on LinkedIn as publications as soon as I've got that set up again and done a little editing. Obviously, I have my blogs. I'm not filling them up quite as quickly as I'd like, but I'm making progress. I finished writing the book that's been on my mind for the past several years.

I still need to learn how to view getting through bureaucracy, formatting, and other mundane grind as a form of productivity. I need to get my book up on Amazon over the weekend (or tomorrow, it's bed time tonight and I do have some more formatting and a bit of editing before I actually publish it). That's been in a state of completed-but-not-yet-used for way too long.

I just started work on inventing my own dialect of English to use in my novels. Really different from normal English. I think it's exciting. I'm working on a few novels and some short stories -- not high priority for me but they are fun to write.

I've got music that I've written, a few songs I'm really proud of. I'll record it in the next couple weeks. I'm going to meet with the guy in the studio tomorrow, and will be able to post videos of myself singing soon afterwards.

I'm mainly to the point that I just need to handle the bureaucracy of it all. Create a LinkedIn again. Link to my stuff. Cut and paste sections of a few of my white papers so that I can present them as publications on LinkedIn. (Some of the stuff is too targeted to work for a general white paper so it needs to be excised.)

In the mean time, I've got some job interviews lining up with some companies that excite me way more than anyone I've interviewed with in the past.

I'm probably spread a little bit too thin. Everything I'm working on is pulling me every which way. But life is becoming much more manageable for me than it was two or three years ago. I've really emphasized increasing my own productivity as my biggest priority in the time that I've had since I left Adaptasoft late last year.

It's been a really good decision. Raw output is what progress is actually made up of. All of the thought in the world isn't worth a little bit of completion. It's a pretty big shift for me to go from a life based on reflection and thinking and taking pride in how clever the ideas I can come up with are to a life more oriented towards getting stuff done where what I take pride in is the amount I can actually accomplish in one day, but I'm convinced it's worth the effort.

Viewing yourself as intelligent is a really bad self-image in my opinion. (I didn't think this when I was in high school or college; it's only something I've started to believe in the time since I graduated.) Viewing yourself as extremely capable and able to just get stuff done is a much better self-image to have if you want to succeed in life. (I think... we'll see. The "I'm smart" self image really didn't take me very far. I haven't tested this change for long enough to see where it leads, but I'm expecting positive results, and I have way more to show for the past six months of my life than I did for the last time I took a break from my work -- actually, that last break was longer too.)

It's amazing to me how much better I feel right now than I did this time six days ago. Very little of what's changed has happened in the last six days, except for the fact that I've started coding more again. (I love it again, which is great! I had started to hate writing code while I was at Adaptasoft. I hope my renewed enthusiasms lasts. For some reason, I expect it to.)

That's all.

I'm just happy right now, and sort of wanting to reflect on why...

That's another interesting contrast. When I had the self-image of viewing myself primarily as someone who was much more intelligent than average (which is true), reflecting on that tended to make me very unhappy and angry. I always felt like intelligence should be worth more than it is. Getting stuff done translates way better into being a reward in itself.

When I first graduated from college and started to earn some money, I loved the feeling of freedom that came from deciding how I was going to spend it. I loved the feeling of ownership. I have way more of that right now, reflecting back on what I've done, and the things I've made than I ever did from just having money.

The things I just mentioned are actually something of my own. And it feels wonderful to have them.

(This is not to say that I don't want to make money. It's not an either/or. I want to both create a lot on my own, and create work I get payed for.)

So anyways, I'd say it's reasonably likely that having a lot of natural ability causes people to value having that ability, but that the mentality of valuing natural ability rather than valuing the process of accomplishing is a destructive mentality. If that's the case, Scott's observation that growth-mindset isn't overrepresented among successful individuals is moot. A priori, it should be underrepresented among successful people, because people with ability ought to place more value on having that ability. (This is one of the reasonably widely accepted explanations of the phenomenon of illusory superiority and the one I personally find the most compelling.) Scott does throw out this hypothesis as a possible explanation, so I'm not pointing out anything new. I'm just saying that I believe that particular hypothesis more than I believe his deconstruction of growth mindset.

My evidence is anecdotal/personal.

But I weigh personal experience and anecdotal evidence quite a bit more highly in my evaluation of reality than most rationalists do. I'm very skeptical of the validity of anything unless I see evidence that there is strong selective pressure forcing it to become increasingly valid. I don't see that for late 20th century science, particularly any of the soft sciences.

I think there's a little bit more of that in personal experience than there is in science. (And way more of it in the economy than there is in personal experience. Hence Gabe's opinion trumps my experience trumps scientific research. That's just the way it goes.)

Planning for Less Wrong posts

I've got quite a few posts that I plan to eventually post on Less Wrong, I might as well make a list of them too, so that I have at least a superficial overview of pretty much everything I'm trying to write in the reasonably near future up somewhere, so that I don't have to keep any of it in memory.

I've been thinking quite a bit about a few optical illusions and how the human mind processes them. I have a theory that suggests that we see more than one often contradictory things when we look at something. For instance, I think we can see the same color in two different places in an image and see exactly the same thing in both places, perceive both colors accurately, but still see one color as being significantly darker than the other. When square A looks darker than square B, I don't think that that means that square A looks like it is a color that is a darker color than the color of square B. I think both colors look like the color that they are, but square A looks darker anyways. I can formalize my meaning by describing an experiment to test it.

I think somebody needs to write a sequence on semantics, morality, and all that, focusing not on what people should mean when they talk about ethics but instead what they do mean. Almost all of the discussions I see of ethics focus on what people should mean when they talk about ethics (object-level discussion of meta-level ethical intuitions), and I think people ought to talk more about what people empirically are trying to say when they describe their moral sense. (Meta-level discussion of object-level ethics). Consequentialism is rather inconsistent with most moral feelings. (Among other things, moral feelings are distinctively about "human actions" and emphasize intent. People have less of a moral reaction to a hurricane that kills 10,000 people than a terrorist who kills 10.)

Someone also needs to take on Occam's razor. I've started to take a stab at it on Informed Dissent, but I need to work through my thoughts more thoroughly before I post them.

I'd also like to post my book on LessWrong, after I've published it on Amazon, begin to get some feedback, and also begin to describe in more detail some of my motivation behind writing that book.

I'm also hoping to contribute quite a bit towards the whole idea of both the craft and the community as well as the idea of winning, and help organize a community of people who are actively trying to help each other succeed. That might be a while in coming, but it has a lot of tie-ins with my book.

Then I'd also like to get people involved in talking more about investing, and possibly business designs, and related ideas.

So much to do. But I have many years before I need to be done with everything I've been hoping to work on.

Today's book reviewing marathon.

I have a pile of 16 books beside me.

My goal for today is to go through this pile and write at least a one paragraph review of each book... which I will later extend as I see fit (not today).

[Edit: I failed, but I did get through four books, with quite a bit more than a paragraph for each.]