Had to take a mushroom chocolate to fully grasp my head around the concept of Dimension Overtruncation!
Kidding aside, the "token/prompt maxxing" theme that is weaved throughout the essay may be somewhat limited to your social circle/NYC Gen Z hardo's. I can only imagine being around this cohort and everyone is flexing on each other about the degree & complexity of bots and simulations they are running - sounds terrible. I'm sure SF is well represented in this phenomenon as well. The essay feels like it casts a wide net of those that subscribe to this behavior, but in reality this may be a tiny sliver of the populace and confined to the alphas/hardos/ultra competitive that tend to flock to the urban cores vs. representative of society writ large...but that could just be the boomer in me.
You may be slightly jaded given you run in these circles, and I can sympathize with your predicament: on one hand these kids (including yourself) are all super bright to leverage these technologies in new & novel ways to achieve maximalist outcomes. They are all motivated, driven, smart and will go on to achieve great things...these are the types of people that you want to hang around! But on the other hand it all sounds pretty insufferable.
I wonder what kind of street cred you get from this cohort that you wrote a book, something that would historically bring laud & accolades from ones peers, but may incite a bit of a yawn from this demographic. I hope that's not the case.
The comments about instant gratification being a societal norm is on point though...people can't even sit through a red light in their cars anymore without checking Insta.
When starting a project takes almost no effort, it's easy to collect half-started ideas. Picking one thing to stay with is the harder part, and usually the one worth it.
Jack, your can versus should piece has stayed with me. Most change fails in exactly that gap: what someone can do once, and what their days will still hold on day ninety. I wrote a 94 day protocol about building the second kind. If a copy is ever useful to you, it is yours. ∞+1
The bandwidth research underneath this: when Mullainathan and Shafir measured people under scarcity, the cognitive tax was equivalent to roughly 13 IQ points — not because they got dumber, but because the open loop kept drawing on the same finite pool. AI has made that tax self-inflicted. Every started-but-unfinished project is a small scarcity running in the background, and the bill comes due in the one currency that was supposed to compound: sustained attention on a single thing. "Can" is now free. "Should" is the only filter left, and it's the expensive one.
I think this is a great point to bring up when it comes to talking about how people try to make themselves look busy without actually doing anything. It reminds me of that meme of that food seller making his hand move and shake really fast but not actually doing anything.
The thing that I'm curious about is: is this really a new phenomenon or is this just something that appears because we have a new tool to do it? I think people have always tried to get the spark notes or the TL;DR on stuff, especially books or lessons and talks. I think that's going to be a subset of the population but I will say that there's another subset that I think, or at least hope, would find better use cases for it when reducing friction in their lives.
Those people who were saying they're busy doing all these agents are the same people who said that they're going to get in shape this year and they're going to change their entire life in one summer. They’ll be the same people who cognitively surrender to the tools of the moment rather than using them to go deeper. It’s lazy system 2 thinking.
I think what's interesting here is the idea of this other cohort who can keep their cognitive defenses up enough to defend that free time for them to learn things in a deep and slow manner. At the same time they recognize how to delegate out that repetitive monotonous stuff that generally is not helpful to them. This is exactly what you're talking about when you mention System 1 and System 2 by Daniel Kahneman. He mentions that this cognitive load is not unlimited with System 2 and that's where we tend to make most of our mistakes and errors.
If we can reduce that in some capacity, we can spend more time getting really into the weeds of what we care about. How do we protect that though?
Well this was a pretty thought provoking one!
Had to take a mushroom chocolate to fully grasp my head around the concept of Dimension Overtruncation!
Kidding aside, the "token/prompt maxxing" theme that is weaved throughout the essay may be somewhat limited to your social circle/NYC Gen Z hardo's. I can only imagine being around this cohort and everyone is flexing on each other about the degree & complexity of bots and simulations they are running - sounds terrible. I'm sure SF is well represented in this phenomenon as well. The essay feels like it casts a wide net of those that subscribe to this behavior, but in reality this may be a tiny sliver of the populace and confined to the alphas/hardos/ultra competitive that tend to flock to the urban cores vs. representative of society writ large...but that could just be the boomer in me.
You may be slightly jaded given you run in these circles, and I can sympathize with your predicament: on one hand these kids (including yourself) are all super bright to leverage these technologies in new & novel ways to achieve maximalist outcomes. They are all motivated, driven, smart and will go on to achieve great things...these are the types of people that you want to hang around! But on the other hand it all sounds pretty insufferable.
I wonder what kind of street cred you get from this cohort that you wrote a book, something that would historically bring laud & accolades from ones peers, but may incite a bit of a yawn from this demographic. I hope that's not the case.
The comments about instant gratification being a societal norm is on point though...people can't even sit through a red light in their cars anymore without checking Insta.
Enjoyed the essay Jack, thanks for writing.
When starting a project takes almost no effort, it's easy to collect half-started ideas. Picking one thing to stay with is the harder part, and usually the one worth it.
Jack, your can versus should piece has stayed with me. Most change fails in exactly that gap: what someone can do once, and what their days will still hold on day ninety. I wrote a 94 day protocol about building the second kind. If a copy is ever useful to you, it is yours. ∞+1
The bandwidth research underneath this: when Mullainathan and Shafir measured people under scarcity, the cognitive tax was equivalent to roughly 13 IQ points — not because they got dumber, but because the open loop kept drawing on the same finite pool. AI has made that tax self-inflicted. Every started-but-unfinished project is a small scarcity running in the background, and the bill comes due in the one currency that was supposed to compound: sustained attention on a single thing. "Can" is now free. "Should" is the only filter left, and it's the expensive one.
— ∞+1
Great post, nailed a lot of great thoughts.
Reminds me of this short Nick Saban press conference answer that you may enjoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0CAAlMo3f8
I think this is a great point to bring up when it comes to talking about how people try to make themselves look busy without actually doing anything. It reminds me of that meme of that food seller making his hand move and shake really fast but not actually doing anything.
The thing that I'm curious about is: is this really a new phenomenon or is this just something that appears because we have a new tool to do it? I think people have always tried to get the spark notes or the TL;DR on stuff, especially books or lessons and talks. I think that's going to be a subset of the population but I will say that there's another subset that I think, or at least hope, would find better use cases for it when reducing friction in their lives.
Those people who were saying they're busy doing all these agents are the same people who said that they're going to get in shape this year and they're going to change their entire life in one summer. They’ll be the same people who cognitively surrender to the tools of the moment rather than using them to go deeper. It’s lazy system 2 thinking.
I think what's interesting here is the idea of this other cohort who can keep their cognitive defenses up enough to defend that free time for them to learn things in a deep and slow manner. At the same time they recognize how to delegate out that repetitive monotonous stuff that generally is not helpful to them. This is exactly what you're talking about when you mention System 1 and System 2 by Daniel Kahneman. He mentions that this cognitive load is not unlimited with System 2 and that's where we tend to make most of our mistakes and errors.
If we can reduce that in some capacity, we can spend more time getting really into the weeds of what we care about. How do we protect that though?
Good post, gave me alot to think about