A couple weeks ago I went by myself for a hike through an old lava tunnel cave. I needed a flashlight because it was pitch black. I found a small nook in the wall about a mile in that I could wedge myself in to. I sat down, turned off my light, and let myself feel the enveloping darkness for a long time. I cried. The only sounds were of small droplets of cold water hitting the floor and my body. I let myself settle in to the sensation of being buried alone under the rock where liquid fire once reigned. I felt at peace. When I finally emerged from the cold tunnel a thrill ran through me as warm air gushed over my skin and the distant sun found me once again. I sat and fed the birds that visited me in the remote wilderness while I listened to the gentle whirl of wind in the trees.
> A writer needs readers. An entrepreneur needs customers. An athlete needs competition. A lover needs someone free to reject him. Any worthy pursuit needs a mat.
Nah. I judge myself by how I progressed from yesterday, not by whether what I am or what I built is useful to others.
Is keeping a diary pointless if you're not planning to make it a memoir?
Is staying healthy pointless if you aren't using that health to compete with others?
It's hilarious to me that the author calls the cave "grinding", when to my eyes the "grindset" guys are the ones always trying to very visibly compete with others about wealth/status/women.
I've never heard of some guy trying to build the best Rimworld colony (in what is probably a very cave-like setting, no less) try to portray it as grinding.
Despite my other comment in this thread I strongly agree with this! I have "stupid" schemes and do "useless" side projects purely for their own sake and for my own enjoyment, and I am very happy with them. Those things are expressed freely, and never came from a cave.
But I think this article is for people who may not be introspective and self-aware enough to know the difference between private, self-satisfied enjoyment and private, self-inflicted suffering. Some people fool themselves into thinking they do something for the joy of it, and remain unsatisfied, because they harbor higher hopes they never admit to themselves.
For Rimworld: some people like making hyperoptimized minmax colonies for their own satisfaction (haven't played it myself, but I do play Factorio so I get it). But you can imagine that some people who _think_ they play for fun, but also really want the validation of posting their killbox on Reddit and having people acknowledge how good it is, and if they don't get that then they retreat to their cave and work on an even "better" colony, and maybe this one will be the one that people will praise [0, maybe? looked for an example]. And so they get wrapped up in a whole meta-argument about their playstyle and how they choose to enjoy the game and can't just simply... enjoy it?
Thank you! The author makes one large assumption about why people do what they do. If I'm doing something for the fun of it, I don't think I need anyone else to see my results in order for me to get exactly what I wanted out of it.
If the take away is supposed to be only other people can set meaningful metrics for you, then their wrestling history had nothing to do with said lesson, because the author offers no evidence that an external metric-setter would have made them more successful.
Ironically, the author deciding on their own that an external mentor/ reviewer is what they needed to succeed (without evidence proving the difference), is the exact same thing as them deciding that they needed technique or conditioning.
The mat is the objective (or at least distinct from your own personal judgement) measure of your goal. If your goal is important to you, an objective measure of your progress towards it is more valuable than your own flawed and biased opinion.
The mat for the diary might be the times you consulted back to it for useful introspection and came out better for it, the mat for your health goal could be your blood test from the doctor, etc.
The point is that the mat doesn't care what you think of yourself. I would ask you: when you judged your progress from yesterday, was it with a mat - a brutally objective test - or was it with something less honest?
Whatever your goals are, if you really, truly care about them, and you understand what your true objective is, you'll value the mat. The mat is not about what other people think, it is about undeniably simple and real feedback on your objective.
I get the intention, but this is still ultimately turning it into a sort of, "only progress towards a fixed goal matters, and progress requires metrics, ergo only things that require metrics matter" view of life.
Sometimes the process is the objective. Put another way, some goals are only achieved by not reaching a terminus.
But that aside, there's an even more important point:
> I would ask you: when you judged your progress from yesterday, was it with a mat - a brutally objective test
There is no such thing.
Even in the author's example of wrestling, their conclusion is incorrect (or at least, not supported by the data they have). Their circuit could have been far above the national average in participant skill, so losing there and concluding "I'm not skilled" is an assessment based on where they subjectively drew their line of comparison.
And given that they never actually gained their supposed "heart" they believe they needed, how do they even know that would have changed anything? They could have fixed their attitude and still always lost!
Anyone who works in IT knows that metrics and measures are anything but objective truth.
So, one thing I do that might be directly relevant to this analogy is to lift weights. My goal when I started was to get stronger. I measure that by whether I can lift more weight today than I did yesterday. The barbell doesn't lie.
Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. Sometimes I even regress a bit. But over time, I have gotten stronger.
Some people at my gym urge me to "compete" but I can't see a reason to do this. I am achieving what I set out to do, by objective measures. Why is what someone else can do in comparison at all relevant? I am stronger than some people. Maybe stronger than most people my age. But there are always going to be people stronger than me. It doesn't bother me, because my goal and motivation was never about that.
As best I can tell, the stoics argued against exactly this. The parable of archer[1] is the best summation of this philosophy - that one’s ultimate aim is to do all in one’s power to shoot straight rather than hit the target.
My side projects all take forever and meander indefinitely. Completing them means they're over. I do them to do them. I pretty much never make anything useful.
Reminds me of a couple things: Nils van der Poel (Olympic speed skater record holder) and his How to Skate a 10k [0]:
> It is not the one who suffers the most during preseason who prospers when the
winter comes, but he who gets the most aerobically fit.
and Tyler Cowen on Nervous Nellies [1]:
> Yes. Because ultimately the nervous Nellies, they're not philosophically sophisticated, they're overindulging in their own neuroticism when you get right down to it. So it's not like there's some brute 'let's be a builder' view and then in contrast there's some deeper wisdom that the real philosophers pursue. It's: you be a builder or you're a nervous Nelly. Take your pick. I say be a builder.
and the classic Teddy Roosevelt speech [2]:
> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
The Cave is fine, but at some point you need to test the thing you're in there for. At some point, refusing to test an untested belief is just protecting a fantasy.
It reminds me of an old series of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky[1] where he talked about how there's "doing your best" which is often more like just doing what's expected of you, and then there's really trying, like actually thinking hard about the best way to achieve something and carrying that out, and then even above that there are levels of effort that usually only come into play in extraordinary situations where you become willing to take desperate risks to achieve a goal.
>> you need to test the thing you're in there for. At some point, refusing to test an untested belief is just protecting a fantasy.
"One test is worth a thousand opinions"
Indeed, if the opinions are about yourself or your capabilities, not testing them soon is truly indulging in fantasy. (and nevermind how much you learn from the tests or competition itself)
The only thing worse than 100% inhabiting your own cave is trying to fit into someone else's. I had a conversation this weekend with someone in an emerging startup that I initially wanted to join but increasingly didn't as I realized I had gone from starring cast to somewhere between entourage and sub 1% equity NPC. And at that point, startups are horrible bets when you have any sort of sure thing IMO.
But it was instructive to watch him neg, criticize, and dismiss all of my own ideas that weren't in service of his vision thing, occasionally pivoting to deflecting any criticism of the potential for his own vision to succeed. This week I pitched my vision to my current employer. They loved it. Case closed. Ideas are cheap, it's executions that deliver value. And I have a superb record on that.
Conclusion: if you poke your head up for feedback now and then, there's nothing with spending most of your time in the cave to avoid the samsara of influencers, rage bait, and social media algorithms. Anyone telling you otherwise is 'sus.
It's a bit more complicated than that isn't it? Every time you remove a bottleneck things advance until a new one appears, right? Previously ideas were cheap, good ideas were hard to come by, accurately distinguishing between good and bad without an implementations was an incredibly rare skill that many people wrongly believed themselves to have (the same as how everyone naturally thinks that their preferred language is the most powerful, etc, etc), and implementation was expensive.
Now you can distinguish sufficiently simple ideas by means of slop, but accurately determining what will eventually mesh well with the wider world is still extremely difficult.
There's also a complexity ceiling. It's been raised but it's still there. For example it will presumably be a while yet before a feature complete project on the scale of LLVM can be quickly slopped together.
It's also cheaper than ever to clone a piece of software once someone else has done the hard work of figuring out the general shape it should take. So I'm not sure how viable services without strong network effects will be going forward.
There is a real tension. On the one hand, you need to grind to develop the horse power needed. Without the horse power, it's just not possible. On the other hand, your ideas need to meet reality for things to get steered and stay grounded. I started a business in 2022 and constantly got the advice to first sell, then build. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You can't sell something that's not good enough, but you don't know if there is demand without selling. This is an awkward balance, at least at the beginning. I tried full throttle to sell but the product just wasn't there. Was it a waste of time? Partially, sales can get time consuming. But some of it I'm glad I did because it provided some real field insight that provides that bit of steering that's needed to guide all the building.
AI can help tremendously with the initial leg-up problem of shipping a working prototype -- paradoxically, if you're willing to put in the work. That is, the right kind of work: talking to people, getting suggestions, writing all your own marketing copy by hand, creating a design that has human touch, throwing it away and starting fresh (with less genAI help) when you've learned what the real demand is for, etc.
And hopefully you are honest with your customers that you are selling something that does not yet exist. That makes it even harder. You have to sell the idea of your idea.
Marriage is good if you want kids. Otherwise, there's really no point to it and most people would be happier and better off single. It's also why a lot of married people divorce after their kids are grown.
The data speak very strongly against this conclusion. The data is deep and broad that marriage leads to better outcomes, and is a result of marriage itself, not selection for people who tend to get married, although that also helps. Also, this doesn't mean that every marriage results in better outcomes for every couple, just that it tends to do so.
One study that summarizes previous studies is below, but there are literally hundreds of others.
"Married people are generally healthier than unmarried people, as measured by numerous health outcomes.(1) To investigate the complex relationship between marriage and health, this review scrutinizes recent research, focusing on studies that use rigorous statistical methods to examine whether marriage is a cause of these better health outcomes."
A young Thomas Carlyle was attending church with his mother. Upon returning home, after a lengthy sermon by the minister, Thomas turned to his mother and exclaimed, “If I were the minister, I would simply say: good people, you know what to do, now go and do it!”
His mother replied, “Aye Thomas, but would you tell them how?”
I think they are saying that it’s very easy to say “go do ‘X’ thing” for someone who already knows and experiences ‘X’. Not terribly helpful for people who don’t know how to do that.
It’s like telling a depressed person to just “not be depressed” and expect that to be helpful. Don’t you think if the depressed person had that lever they would pull it? They don’t know HOW to not be depressed. Ergo, stuck in the cave.
TFA is saying that what you think you may be doing is likely something else. Not publishing your work, not challenging yourself in the arena, etc. isn’t really about trying to make yourself good enough to succeed, it’s an avoidance of the bad feelings when you expect to fail.
So the message is rather simple, just go out and challenge yourself. Again, easy to do if you know how to mentally and emotionally handle the bad feelings. Seemingly insurmountable if you think the bad feelings will destroy you.
Ironically, the only way to know if they will or not is to actually dive in and experience the thing you’re afraid of failing at.
Tangent inspired by the first half of the article: wasting time on the Internet, in front of screens being akin to Plato's Cave is a useful framing device I wish I could internalize. Two or three decades ago getting acquainted with the nascent web felt like escaping the cave to a brand new world, just to now feel discovered we have been trapped into a worse one, and now wishing to escape back to the real world. You know, the one that actually matters.
Let's say that what I need today is found outside of the Internet, but my brain has been wired to find an escape from reality online, and it's become a very unhealthy coping mechanism.
'Putting yourself out there' is really only a necessity if the validation you seek through your pursuits is external in nature.
Those who seek internal validation need not exit the cave, for it is not a coward's cage; it is merely another space to pursue one's own enlightenment and holds no power over its occupant.
Another word for 'cave' is 'echo chamber'. If you don't care much about whether what you believe is true or not, there's no need to test it, but in that case what's the point of believing things?
Another word for 'going outside the cave' is 'seeking external validation'. If you need other people to tell you if what you believe is true or not, do you actually believe anything?
Other people are one of many ways you can test what you believe to be true but, yes, sometimes other people might have figured something out that you haven't, believe it or not.
The bar for what is worth bringing out of the cave gets higher every day. Unless you have a huge network of fans or a small network of foolhardy VCs, screaming into the market, with two million other voices, may as well be the void.
I've slowly gotten more comfortable with the void, you put something out, allegedly 50 clicks received and not a single comment or conversion. 700 views of a video, no comments and 3 likes.
You don't get told if it's good or bad you'll just get indifferent silence.
So now I don't wait until it's perfect because I know likely nobody will say anything.
I do wonder if people are more fatigued with all the AI content being put out.
This resonates with me. I think it takes balls to leave the comfort zone and test our assumptions against the real world, to get actual feedback, good or bad. I think now it’s easier than ever to just stay in our caves surrounded by nothing else but our customised feeds that reinforce our beliefs and the sycophantic AI agents that yes-and all our ideas.
> Better to be pinned in public with courage than to train endlessly in private like a coward. Ship that product
Funny, I didn't read this as career advice, but social advice. Like, get off the apps, get off the couch, go sit at a bar alone, ask someone to hang out.
Sitting at the bar alone might lead to a serendipitous meeting with someone that enriches your life. None of it can happen if you don't let the chaos of the world happen unto you.
I also don't see a strong link between training at a competitive activity, and releasing a product. Obviously, training against real opponents is crucial.
But the world is full of half-baked products, especially software. If you show up to your first tournament and lose pathetically in the first round, no one is going to prevent you from attending the second tournament. But people will permanently write off your product if it is half-baked. Or even if your product is good but the release process is half-baked.
And some people win the first tournament they attend. Again, flubbing your first tournament is much less persistent than flubbing a product release. Significantly different risk profiles.
I play a character who is a little like Thomas Jefferson at Colonial Williamsburg and practically I practice a kind of "outside-in" acting where I inhabit the character and half-ass it if I must [1] and then feed back my experience towards preparing to do better next time.
I am in the middle of writing my own version of a "legendary" story where over the course of centuries years of retelling a fireteam of 3 men becomes an army of 80,000, fictional sources don't agree on who exactly was involved, people who speculate about real life people the story might be based on left an obvious suspect out, etc. I am in the middle of writing up a rather long document which tells the story in such a way that I can memorize the names, the dates, the places and be absolutely confident about the details -- and of course I have to be able to speak authoritatively about the historical period and explain what people believed, why they did what they did, etc.
At the moment the story is getting harder to tell but I'm practicing at starting with the most bombastic story first and working towards a historical explanation but it is worth it because it's a personally meaningful story which is the centerpiece of a backgrounder for my character.
My wife says "don't tell the story to people until you get it right" and I just blow that off because I've been telling this story for a while and doing all the work because I want to do it better. And it's going to be the foundation of how I do all the writing for this character.
[1] e.g. rule one is to break character before I get seriously flustered and talk about my immediate experience
Frighteningly, I've also found that you can be in the cave together with a group of people. I went to an MMA gym for a long time, and it was very common to see overconfident 'experienced' new members start sparring and get their ass handed to them. It was always someone from a small town or a gym that didn't participate in the larger MMA community. Those smaller gyms followed the same ruleset, but are made up of individual egos that always want their own hand raised. You can go for years in a group that has collectively agreed to hide from actually bumping up against the limits of their abilities.
I like this article, but on some level I vehemently disagree with it?
The summary is this:
> A writer needs readers ... Any worthy pursuit needs a mat.
> ... Better to be pinned in public with courage than to train
> endlessly in private like a coward.
And then I think of various shut-in artists that I admire. Take, for example, Henry Darger[1]. He clearly did not seek public recognition; he never showed his work to anyone. But I find it beautiful and fascinating. He was dealing with various internal issues through his art, and I feel lucky to observe it, even long after his death.
If I produced art like Darger (or Van Gogh or Kafka or others who did not try to push their work into the public view), I would be happy with myself.
But, on the other hand, I do appreciate some aspect of this article's thesis.
"Putting yourself out there" does have value. This line from the article resonates with me:
> Yet the Cave, despite its darkness of solitude and dampness from
> sweat and suffer-porn, is comfortable. It lets us tinker with
> our own delusions.
There is a certain risk of complacency when you spend a long time in your own bubble.
Knowing that you'll be under the public eye does help dissolve that complacency, I find.
But it's not necessarily the solution. Some people get addicted to public recognition, and it twists their work for the worse.
Some people know they've done something good, put it out for people to see, but don't receive the recognition they wish they had, and get depressed. Nick Drake comes to mind.
I think it really comes down to your own personality and which of these traps you're prone to fall for. Once again, "know thyself" is the real nut worth cracking.
Yeah, I think the distinction is just the underlying purpose. If you are doing art for arts sake then just do your thing. (and there is nothing wrong with that) It may even be where you spend the majority of your time if you are lucky enough to do that.
But if you are labouring under the belief that your art has human value to others, you must put it out in the world, and often the sooner the better!
How far out into the world? Tolkien wrote The Hobbit for his kids, after dabbling in writing stories for the preceding 10 years or maybe longer, and he showed them to his friends sometimes, and a friend showed it to her friend who showed it to her boss, who published books, and this chain of events led to Tolkien having to write The Lord of the Rings. He wasn't exactly shielding his work from criticism, by writing for friends and family, but he wasn't throwing himself to the lions either, because why?
By "human value", do you actually mean "monetary value"?
Many of the most famous artists were unknown or unappreciated in their time, and if they'd asked the people around them whether their art had value we'd likely not have half of the Louvre.
The idea is that unexecuted ideas can actually become addictive. You keep telling yourself, "boy, that thing is going to be amazing whenever I get around to making it!"
And the more you tell yourself this, the more you become petrified that it won't be great, making you even less likely to actually work on it.
> > “See, it’s easy to ignore trouble, when you’re living in a bubble.”
With respect to the problem of trouble in bubbles, my mind goes to a very different song...
If you're livin' in a bubble and you haven't got a care
Well, you're gonna be in trouble 'cause we're gonna steal your air
'Cause what you got is what we need
and all we do is dirty deeds
We're the Spaceballs!
Watch out, 'cause we're the Spaceballs
Looking forward to the sequel. Moving on...
> But I had made the comfortable mistake of believing that because I could measure and control them, they must determine the outcome.
This seems related to the McNamara Fallacy [0], although not so specifically quantitative.
I've done this experience several times using Meta Quest. It really is awe-inspiring being at one with nature. The world is a beautiful place, if only more people felt engaged enough to get out there and explore.
I think this is a bit of cynical take, but that entire article to me seems to be the author as trying to just say "you didn't want it bad enough". A position I've always hated because it makes every failing a personal one. If that's the learning took away from their wrestling career, it's the wrong one.
But I did like the idea of them not being entirely clear about their own motivations, even to themselves - and that is a dangerous cave to play it.
You ever spend a decade working on something really great? I mean something truly brilliant and clever and next-level. And you bring it all the way to solid results. And it's real and beautiful. And nobody cares.
A couple weeks ago I went by myself for a hike through an old lava tunnel cave. I needed a flashlight because it was pitch black. I found a small nook in the wall about a mile in that I could wedge myself in to. I sat down, turned off my light, and let myself feel the enveloping darkness for a long time. I cried. The only sounds were of small droplets of cold water hitting the floor and my body. I let myself settle in to the sensation of being buried alone under the rock where liquid fire once reigned. I felt at peace. When I finally emerged from the cold tunnel a thrill ran through me as warm air gushed over my skin and the distant sun found me once again. I sat and fed the birds that visited me in the remote wilderness while I listened to the gentle whirl of wind in the trees.
> birds that visited me
are you a disney princess?
This gave me a hearty laugh!
Why, are you looking for one?
Every sensible person is looking for a Disney princess.
What happens if your flashlight craps out?
Thanks for sharing
Jesus and Mohammed supposedly did this for 40 days. They figured it was where an outcast should die.
They got sent back. The "Celestial Mechanics" art was a similar era but instead of a new religion, that era was a Renaissance.
We're at a similar point in history where an industrial revolution quietly changed a way of life between living generations
> I sat and fed the birds
Please don't do this.
Yeah, it's much better to be standing so you can toss the bag of food into the subway car right before the doors close.
> A writer needs readers. An entrepreneur needs customers. An athlete needs competition. A lover needs someone free to reject him. Any worthy pursuit needs a mat.
Nah. I judge myself by how I progressed from yesterday, not by whether what I am or what I built is useful to others.
Is keeping a diary pointless if you're not planning to make it a memoir?
Is staying healthy pointless if you aren't using that health to compete with others?
It's hilarious to me that the author calls the cave "grinding", when to my eyes the "grindset" guys are the ones always trying to very visibly compete with others about wealth/status/women.
I've never heard of some guy trying to build the best Rimworld colony (in what is probably a very cave-like setting, no less) try to portray it as grinding.
Despite my other comment in this thread I strongly agree with this! I have "stupid" schemes and do "useless" side projects purely for their own sake and for my own enjoyment, and I am very happy with them. Those things are expressed freely, and never came from a cave.
But I think this article is for people who may not be introspective and self-aware enough to know the difference between private, self-satisfied enjoyment and private, self-inflicted suffering. Some people fool themselves into thinking they do something for the joy of it, and remain unsatisfied, because they harbor higher hopes they never admit to themselves.
For Rimworld: some people like making hyperoptimized minmax colonies for their own satisfaction (haven't played it myself, but I do play Factorio so I get it). But you can imagine that some people who _think_ they play for fun, but also really want the validation of posting their killbox on Reddit and having people acknowledge how good it is, and if they don't get that then they retreat to their cave and work on an even "better" colony, and maybe this one will be the one that people will praise [0, maybe? looked for an example]. And so they get wrapped up in a whole meta-argument about their playstyle and how they choose to enjoy the game and can't just simply... enjoy it?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/1v0nwg4/alright_y...
Thank you! The author makes one large assumption about why people do what they do. If I'm doing something for the fun of it, I don't think I need anyone else to see my results in order for me to get exactly what I wanted out of it.
I think the warning in the article is a little more subtle.
The author isn’t placing a moral judgement on certain goals or whether the result of reaching that goal has a large enough audience.
They are warning against doing things that work against achieving our goals in ways that are hard for us to notice by ourselves.
I think they needn't be so subtle in that case.
If the take away is supposed to be only other people can set meaningful metrics for you, then their wrestling history had nothing to do with said lesson, because the author offers no evidence that an external metric-setter would have made them more successful.
Ironically, the author deciding on their own that an external mentor/ reviewer is what they needed to succeed (without evidence proving the difference), is the exact same thing as them deciding that they needed technique or conditioning.
What activities are you engaging in where you can make progress with no interaction with other people?
Speaking for myself: working out, reading, composing music, and journaling.
I'm a grindset man.
I never advertise my grind details.
The mat is the objective (or at least distinct from your own personal judgement) measure of your goal. If your goal is important to you, an objective measure of your progress towards it is more valuable than your own flawed and biased opinion.
The mat for the diary might be the times you consulted back to it for useful introspection and came out better for it, the mat for your health goal could be your blood test from the doctor, etc.
The point is that the mat doesn't care what you think of yourself. I would ask you: when you judged your progress from yesterday, was it with a mat - a brutally objective test - or was it with something less honest?
Whatever your goals are, if you really, truly care about them, and you understand what your true objective is, you'll value the mat. The mat is not about what other people think, it is about undeniably simple and real feedback on your objective.
I get the intention, but this is still ultimately turning it into a sort of, "only progress towards a fixed goal matters, and progress requires metrics, ergo only things that require metrics matter" view of life.
Sometimes the process is the objective. Put another way, some goals are only achieved by not reaching a terminus.
But that aside, there's an even more important point:
> I would ask you: when you judged your progress from yesterday, was it with a mat - a brutally objective test
There is no such thing.
Even in the author's example of wrestling, their conclusion is incorrect (or at least, not supported by the data they have). Their circuit could have been far above the national average in participant skill, so losing there and concluding "I'm not skilled" is an assessment based on where they subjectively drew their line of comparison.
And given that they never actually gained their supposed "heart" they believe they needed, how do they even know that would have changed anything? They could have fixed their attitude and still always lost!
Anyone who works in IT knows that metrics and measures are anything but objective truth.
So, one thing I do that might be directly relevant to this analogy is to lift weights. My goal when I started was to get stronger. I measure that by whether I can lift more weight today than I did yesterday. The barbell doesn't lie.
Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. Sometimes I even regress a bit. But over time, I have gotten stronger.
Some people at my gym urge me to "compete" but I can't see a reason to do this. I am achieving what I set out to do, by objective measures. Why is what someone else can do in comparison at all relevant? I am stronger than some people. Maybe stronger than most people my age. But there are always going to be people stronger than me. It doesn't bother me, because my goal and motivation was never about that.
For you the barbell itself is the mat.
As best I can tell, the stoics argued against exactly this. The parable of archer[1] is the best summation of this philosophy - that one’s ultimate aim is to do all in one’s power to shoot straight rather than hit the target.
1. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/fin3.shtml
My side projects all take forever and meander indefinitely. Completing them means they're over. I do them to do them. I pretty much never make anything useful.
Agree. A good reminder that people project their thoughts as fact in the writing, and our brains accept it faster than coming to our own conclusion.
Reminds me of a couple things: Nils van der Poel (Olympic speed skater record holder) and his How to Skate a 10k [0]:
> It is not the one who suffers the most during preseason who prospers when the winter comes, but he who gets the most aerobically fit.
and Tyler Cowen on Nervous Nellies [1]:
> Yes. Because ultimately the nervous Nellies, they're not philosophically sophisticated, they're overindulging in their own neuroticism when you get right down to it. So it's not like there's some brute 'let's be a builder' view and then in contrast there's some deeper wisdom that the real philosophers pursue. It's: you be a builder or you're a nervous Nelly. Take your pick. I say be a builder.
and the classic Teddy Roosevelt speech [2]:
> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
The Cave is fine, but at some point you need to test the thing you're in there for. At some point, refusing to test an untested belief is just protecting a fantasy.
[0] https://www.howtoskate.se/
[1] https://x.com/JosephNWalker/status/1452772819792642054
[2] https://www.worldfuturefund.org/Documents/maninarena.htm
It reminds me of an old series of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky[1] where he talked about how there's "doing your best" which is often more like just doing what's expected of you, and then there's really trying, like actually thinking hard about the best way to achieve something and carrying that out, and then even above that there are levels of effort that usually only come into play in extraordinary situations where you become willing to take desperate risks to achieve a goal.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/s/3szfzHZr7EYGSWt92
YUP.
>> you need to test the thing you're in there for. At some point, refusing to test an untested belief is just protecting a fantasy.
"One test is worth a thousand opinions"
Indeed, if the opinions are about yourself or your capabilities, not testing them soon is truly indulging in fantasy. (and nevermind how much you learn from the tests or competition itself)
The only thing worse than 100% inhabiting your own cave is trying to fit into someone else's. I had a conversation this weekend with someone in an emerging startup that I initially wanted to join but increasingly didn't as I realized I had gone from starring cast to somewhere between entourage and sub 1% equity NPC. And at that point, startups are horrible bets when you have any sort of sure thing IMO.
But it was instructive to watch him neg, criticize, and dismiss all of my own ideas that weren't in service of his vision thing, occasionally pivoting to deflecting any criticism of the potential for his own vision to succeed. This week I pitched my vision to my current employer. They loved it. Case closed. Ideas are cheap, it's executions that deliver value. And I have a superb record on that.
Conclusion: if you poke your head up for feedback now and then, there's nothing with spending most of your time in the cave to avoid the samsara of influencers, rage bait, and social media algorithms. Anyone telling you otherwise is 'sus.
Missed out a crucial word: there's nothing - wrong - with spending most of your time in the cave.
I agree 100%.
A small correction though. Because of AI I'd argue that execution is cheap while the best ideas are valuable.
No, ideas are still cheap. Now implementation is cheap. So, software will be worth less than ever.
It's a bit more complicated than that isn't it? Every time you remove a bottleneck things advance until a new one appears, right? Previously ideas were cheap, good ideas were hard to come by, accurately distinguishing between good and bad without an implementations was an incredibly rare skill that many people wrongly believed themselves to have (the same as how everyone naturally thinks that their preferred language is the most powerful, etc, etc), and implementation was expensive.
Now you can distinguish sufficiently simple ideas by means of slop, but accurately determining what will eventually mesh well with the wider world is still extremely difficult.
There's also a complexity ceiling. It's been raised but it's still there. For example it will presumably be a while yet before a feature complete project on the scale of LLVM can be quickly slopped together.
It's also cheaper than ever to clone a piece of software once someone else has done the hard work of figuring out the general shape it should take. So I'm not sure how viable services without strong network effects will be going forward.
There is a real tension. On the one hand, you need to grind to develop the horse power needed. Without the horse power, it's just not possible. On the other hand, your ideas need to meet reality for things to get steered and stay grounded. I started a business in 2022 and constantly got the advice to first sell, then build. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You can't sell something that's not good enough, but you don't know if there is demand without selling. This is an awkward balance, at least at the beginning. I tried full throttle to sell but the product just wasn't there. Was it a waste of time? Partially, sales can get time consuming. But some of it I'm glad I did because it provided some real field insight that provides that bit of steering that's needed to guide all the building.
> It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem.
AI can help tremendously with the initial leg-up problem of shipping a working prototype -- paradoxically, if you're willing to put in the work. That is, the right kind of work: talking to people, getting suggestions, writing all your own marketing copy by hand, creating a design that has human touch, throwing it away and starting fresh (with less genAI help) when you've learned what the real demand is for, etc.
> you don't know if there is demand without selling. This is an awkward balance
The answer is you start with the sale. Once you’ve sold it, you build it. Ideally, you sell it to customers first. Less ideally, to investors.
And hopefully you are honest with your customers that you are selling something that does not yet exist. That makes it even harder. You have to sell the idea of your idea.
> you are honest with your customers that you are selling something that does not yet exist. That makes it even harder
Most are. I’ve always been. Preörders are real.
They don’t even need much cash to change hands. Just the commitment.
Building before selling is ultimately art and hobby.
> A lover needs someone free to reject him
As G. K. Chesterton said,
> Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1718/pg1718-images.html...
Marriage is good if you want kids. Otherwise, there's really no point to it and most people would be happier and better off single. It's also why a lot of married people divorce after their kids are grown.
The data speak very strongly against this conclusion. The data is deep and broad that marriage leads to better outcomes, and is a result of marriage itself, not selection for people who tend to get married, although that also helps. Also, this doesn't mean that every marriage results in better outcomes for every couple, just that it tends to do so.
One study that summarizes previous studies is below, but there are literally hundreds of others.
The Effects of Marriage on Health: A Synthesis of Recent Research Evidence. Research Brief (https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/effects-marriage-health-synthes... Note: an official US government web site.)
"Married people are generally healthier than unmarried people, as measured by numerous health outcomes.(1) To investigate the complex relationship between marriage and health, this review scrutinizes recent research, focusing on studies that use rigorous statistical methods to examine whether marriage is a cause of these better health outcomes."
hahah what a weird take! You don't have any biological imperatives for sex, and dare I say affection? Must be quite the peaceful life indeed!
Those needs don't require marriage. Nor do they exclude monogamy, in case you think I'm implying that.
Posts like this remind me of a story:
A young Thomas Carlyle was attending church with his mother. Upon returning home, after a lengthy sermon by the minister, Thomas turned to his mother and exclaimed, “If I were the minister, I would simply say: good people, you know what to do, now go and do it!”
His mother replied, “Aye Thomas, but would you tell them how?”
I don’t get it
I think they are saying that it’s very easy to say “go do ‘X’ thing” for someone who already knows and experiences ‘X’. Not terribly helpful for people who don’t know how to do that.
It’s like telling a depressed person to just “not be depressed” and expect that to be helpful. Don’t you think if the depressed person had that lever they would pull it? They don’t know HOW to not be depressed. Ergo, stuck in the cave.
TFA is saying that what you think you may be doing is likely something else. Not publishing your work, not challenging yourself in the arena, etc. isn’t really about trying to make yourself good enough to succeed, it’s an avoidance of the bad feelings when you expect to fail.
So the message is rather simple, just go out and challenge yourself. Again, easy to do if you know how to mentally and emotionally handle the bad feelings. Seemingly insurmountable if you think the bad feelings will destroy you.
Ironically, the only way to know if they will or not is to actually dive in and experience the thing you’re afraid of failing at.
Tangent inspired by the first half of the article: wasting time on the Internet, in front of screens being akin to Plato's Cave is a useful framing device I wish I could internalize. Two or three decades ago getting acquainted with the nascent web felt like escaping the cave to a brand new world, just to now feel discovered we have been trapped into a worse one, and now wishing to escape back to the real world. You know, the one that actually matters.
Have you hit the end of the internet? I mostly have. This thread though is pretty decent.
Let's say that what I need today is found outside of the Internet, but my brain has been wired to find an escape from reality online, and it's become a very unhealthy coping mechanism.
'Putting yourself out there' is really only a necessity if the validation you seek through your pursuits is external in nature.
Those who seek internal validation need not exit the cave, for it is not a coward's cage; it is merely another space to pursue one's own enlightenment and holds no power over its occupant.
Another word for 'cave' is 'echo chamber'. If you don't care much about whether what you believe is true or not, there's no need to test it, but in that case what's the point of believing things?
Another word for 'going outside the cave' is 'seeking external validation'. If you need other people to tell you if what you believe is true or not, do you actually believe anything?
You need to go out and observe the world to test your theories and hypotheses.
Other people are one of many ways you can test what you believe to be true but, yes, sometimes other people might have figured something out that you haven't, believe it or not.
The bar for what is worth bringing out of the cave gets higher every day. Unless you have a huge network of fans or a small network of foolhardy VCs, screaming into the market, with two million other voices, may as well be the void.
It's getting hard to even get a shrug.
> It's getting hard to even get a shrug.
I've slowly gotten more comfortable with the void, you put something out, allegedly 50 clicks received and not a single comment or conversion. 700 views of a video, no comments and 3 likes.
You don't get told if it's good or bad you'll just get indifferent silence.
So now I don't wait until it's perfect because I know likely nobody will say anything.
I do wonder if people are more fatigued with all the AI content being put out.
The answer is to aim for a much smaller audience. Solve a problem for one other person/company.
> let reality teach me what it required
This resonates with me. I think it takes balls to leave the comfort zone and test our assumptions against the real world, to get actual feedback, good or bad. I think now it’s easier than ever to just stay in our caves surrounded by nothing else but our customised feeds that reinforce our beliefs and the sycophantic AI agents that yes-and all our ideas.
> Better to be pinned in public with courage than to train endlessly in private like a coward. Ship that product
Funny, I didn't read this as career advice, but social advice. Like, get off the apps, get off the couch, go sit at a bar alone, ask someone to hang out.
We should strive for somewhat higher than sitting at the bar alone.
"80% of success is showing up"
Sitting at the bar alone might lead to a serendipitous meeting with someone that enriches your life. None of it can happen if you don't let the chaos of the world happen unto you.
Gotta start somewhere.
I also don't see a strong link between training at a competitive activity, and releasing a product. Obviously, training against real opponents is crucial.
But the world is full of half-baked products, especially software. If you show up to your first tournament and lose pathetically in the first round, no one is going to prevent you from attending the second tournament. But people will permanently write off your product if it is half-baked. Or even if your product is good but the release process is half-baked.
At the same time lots of half-baked products are successful and generate real value for the users and the creators.
And some people win the first tournament they attend. Again, flubbing your first tournament is much less persistent than flubbing a product release. Significantly different risk profiles.
I play a character who is a little like Thomas Jefferson at Colonial Williamsburg and practically I practice a kind of "outside-in" acting where I inhabit the character and half-ass it if I must [1] and then feed back my experience towards preparing to do better next time.
I am in the middle of writing my own version of a "legendary" story where over the course of centuries years of retelling a fireteam of 3 men becomes an army of 80,000, fictional sources don't agree on who exactly was involved, people who speculate about real life people the story might be based on left an obvious suspect out, etc. I am in the middle of writing up a rather long document which tells the story in such a way that I can memorize the names, the dates, the places and be absolutely confident about the details -- and of course I have to be able to speak authoritatively about the historical period and explain what people believed, why they did what they did, etc.
At the moment the story is getting harder to tell but I'm practicing at starting with the most bombastic story first and working towards a historical explanation but it is worth it because it's a personally meaningful story which is the centerpiece of a backgrounder for my character.
My wife says "don't tell the story to people until you get it right" and I just blow that off because I've been telling this story for a while and doing all the work because I want to do it better. And it's going to be the foundation of how I do all the writing for this character.
[1] e.g. rule one is to break character before I get seriously flustered and talk about my immediate experience
Frighteningly, I've also found that you can be in the cave together with a group of people. I went to an MMA gym for a long time, and it was very common to see overconfident 'experienced' new members start sparring and get their ass handed to them. It was always someone from a small town or a gym that didn't participate in the larger MMA community. Those smaller gyms followed the same ruleset, but are made up of individual egos that always want their own hand raised. You can go for years in a group that has collectively agreed to hide from actually bumping up against the limits of their abilities.
But that’s the exact opposite.
By your own story, they did just leave their cave and experience the wider world by getting their ass kicked.
I like this article, but on some level I vehemently disagree with it?
The summary is this:
And then I think of various shut-in artists that I admire. Take, for example, Henry Darger[1]. He clearly did not seek public recognition; he never showed his work to anyone. But I find it beautiful and fascinating. He was dealing with various internal issues through his art, and I feel lucky to observe it, even long after his death.If I produced art like Darger (or Van Gogh or Kafka or others who did not try to push their work into the public view), I would be happy with myself.
But, on the other hand, I do appreciate some aspect of this article's thesis. "Putting yourself out there" does have value. This line from the article resonates with me:
There is a certain risk of complacency when you spend a long time in your own bubble. Knowing that you'll be under the public eye does help dissolve that complacency, I find.But it's not necessarily the solution. Some people get addicted to public recognition, and it twists their work for the worse. Some people know they've done something good, put it out for people to see, but don't receive the recognition they wish they had, and get depressed. Nick Drake comes to mind.
I think it really comes down to your own personality and which of these traps you're prone to fall for. Once again, "know thyself" is the real nut worth cracking.
Anyway, good article. Made me think (:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger also see various images of his work at: https://www.wikiart.org/en/henry-darger
Yeah, I think the distinction is just the underlying purpose. If you are doing art for arts sake then just do your thing. (and there is nothing wrong with that) It may even be where you spend the majority of your time if you are lucky enough to do that.
But if you are labouring under the belief that your art has human value to others, you must put it out in the world, and often the sooner the better!
How far out into the world? Tolkien wrote The Hobbit for his kids, after dabbling in writing stories for the preceding 10 years or maybe longer, and he showed them to his friends sometimes, and a friend showed it to her friend who showed it to her boss, who published books, and this chain of events led to Tolkien having to write The Lord of the Rings. He wasn't exactly shielding his work from criticism, by writing for friends and family, but he wasn't throwing himself to the lions either, because why?
By "human value", do you actually mean "monetary value"?
Many of the most famous artists were unknown or unappreciated in their time, and if they'd asked the people around them whether their art had value we'd likely not have half of the Louvre.
Nope, not necessarily! That's a good example!
You must have skin in the game. The real shame shall be cast upon those without the courage to try, not those who fail.
Or, put another way:
> I don't see how you can hate from outside of the club. You can't even get in!
I'm reminded of Ze Frank's "Brain Crack:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sHCQWjTrJ8
The idea is that unexecuted ideas can actually become addictive. You keep telling yourself, "boy, that thing is going to be amazing whenever I get around to making it!"
And the more you tell yourself this, the more you become petrified that it won't be great, making you even less likely to actually work on it.
Whoa, Ze Frank! Forgot all about him.
> I find Paramore playing in my head.
> > “See, it’s easy to ignore trouble, when you’re living in a bubble.”
With respect to the problem of trouble in bubbles, my mind goes to a very different song...
Looking forward to the sequel. Moving on...> But I had made the comfortable mistake of believing that because I could measure and control them, they must determine the outcome.
This seems related to the McNamara Fallacy [0], although not so specifically quantitative.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
I've done this experience several times using Meta Quest. It really is awe-inspiring being at one with nature. The world is a beautiful place, if only more people felt engaged enough to get out there and explore.
Puts one in the mind of Plato.
I think this is a bit of cynical take, but that entire article to me seems to be the author as trying to just say "you didn't want it bad enough". A position I've always hated because it makes every failing a personal one. If that's the learning took away from their wrestling career, it's the wrong one.
But I did like the idea of them not being entirely clear about their own motivations, even to themselves - and that is a dangerous cave to play it.
'This masculine urge to “grind”'
I recall recently reading an essay by a woman who described at one point how important simply trudging through was.
Not sure that "masculine" is apposite here
You ever spend a decade working on something really great? I mean something truly brilliant and clever and next-level. And you bring it all the way to solid results. And it's real and beautiful. And nobody cares.
I have. I think that's the dev parallel here.
What did you build? Can’t find on your profile/submissions