On Writing
Idea Debt
Check it out: Imagining your future projects is holding you back. (h/t PG on twitter)
When you build a to-do list of ideas and keep fantasizing about them, you feel they’re awesome and thus put pressure on yourself to express them as well as they seem in your mind. Which means you won’t work on them at all. The unfulfilled potential of your ideas weighs you down (as Michael Nelsen pointed out in the comments).
This is similar to my idea of net potential benefits: in our mind, we feel like we’ve got the benefits of an idea or technique even when, in reality, we have achieved nothing. Just knowing about the idea is enough to give us a feeling of productivity (look at all the “lifehack” blogs out there). You don’t have to actually do the hard work of executing it to feel good. Plus, because it’s all in your head, you can amp it up as much as you like. More feels!
The downside, however, is that you don’t get any benefits in real life - you have little motivation to work on your product (you’ve got the rewards as far as your mind is concerned) and even if you try to, your work will pale next to your visions of grandeur. Better don’t let that horrible, inchoate thing ever see the light of day.
PG on grand vision vs harsh reality:
Another test you can use is: always produce. … As long as you’re producing, you’ll know you’re not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you’re actually writing.
How to look at notes:
The notebook and pen are professional equipment, as it were. Though actually there is something druglike about them, in the sense that their main purpose is to make me feel better. I hardly ever go back and read stuff I write down in notebooks. It’s just that if I can’t write things down, worrying about remembering one idea gets in the way of having the next. Pen and paper wick ideas.
How to look at your past list of ideas:
accumulate notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file; don’t feel obliged to cover any of them;
Don’t commit to yourself that you’re going to work on all those ideas that your past self was excited about. You’re not the same person anymore. Do it only if it’s worthy. Don’t promise to pay off your idea “debt”. It’s just a bunch of mental cues lying around, not blueprints for monuments. There’s nothing in there.
Don’t fantasize about those idea stubs in your notes file. They’re not the real thing. The information they have is nowhere near enough to actually make them work, but enough to make you feel they do. Just like with ideas for startups, ideas for projects are worthless. The value (and the information and the scarcity power) is in the execution.
Choices
Choices force you to make fine-grained utility comparisons.
For example, in the climax of “Fathers Secretly Watching Game of Thrones”, the fathers have to choose between keeping up their images as sanskaari dads and avoiding a major GoT spoiler. Until that happened, they might have thought their culture was far more important than any TV show spoiler. When it did happen, they were forced to contemplate their true values.
We all believe that life is better than death. But how much better? How much would you pay for one more year of life? Medical decisions force you to make up your mind. Take the risky surgery and get one more year or accept just the medicines and die much sooner.
Choices can also force you to realize your true probability estimates. For example, towards the end of S02E22: “Forever”, House tells Foreman to use his newfound “every day is a blessing” attitude to convince the patient to accept surgery. Foreman already wants the patient to undergo the surgery. If he believes that his argument is more convincing than her guilt over her delusional acts, he should do it. If not, he shouldn’t. This was a potent dilemma because he had been acting all day like his positive attitude could trump anything. The choice compelled him to come to terms with the limits of his attitude.
Corollary: This is probably how humans compute probabilities - not through mathematical calculation, but by comparing one option to another to see which one wins.
For all you know, your preference for something could be unbounded. It’s only by comparing it to something else that you figure out how much you care about it.
Competition also helps you clarify your values. How much are you willing to fight for your parking space or the bench press machine? You don’t know by default. It’s only when a rival appears that you have to choose. Competition also tells you how powerful you are. If you can’t get anyone to go to a movie with you, then you aren’t very powerful. Or if someone else consistently gets the better of you in verbal battle, then you’re weak.
What Interests People
The average adult can usually enjoy something only if it relates to what he knows already, and what he knows about science is in many cases pitifully inadequate. What almost everybody is familiar with is the vagaries of personal behaviour. People find it much easier to appreciate stories of competition, frustration, and animosity, against a background of parties, foreign girls, and punting on the river, than the details of the science involved.
– Francis Crick (attributed)
That goes for House, Suits, Breaking Bad, and The Social Network, among others. I knew nothing about medicine and yet I enjoyed watching House solve cases and piss others off with his games.
Reversing an Opinion
Hypothesis: One thing we find funny is an inconsistent utility function.
Take, for example, JK Rowling’s description of Mandrakes:
Professor Sprout had made it look extremely easy, but it wasn’t. The Mandrakes didn’t like coming out of the earth, but didn’t seem to want to go back into it either. They squirmed, kicked, flailed their sharp little fists, and gnashed their teeth; Harry spent ten whole minutes trying to squash a particularly fat one into a pot.
– Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
If Mandrakes don’t like coming out of the earth, it implies that they feel being inside is better than being outside. That’s reasonable enough. But when they resist going in too, it says that they feel being outside is better than being inside. Make up your mind! There’s something we find inherently funny about that. Either being outside is better or being inside is. It can’t be both.
Conflicting inner goals play to the same theme. For example, when Sonia Agarwal walks away from Kathir at the bus stop in 7G Rainbow Colony and then comes back to him, we find it funny because she didn’t have a clear idea of her utility function. She should have either walked away for good because he’s a ruffian unworthy of her time or she should have stayed with him because she likes him. Not both.
Perhaps just doing the exact opposite of what you did before is funny. For example, in The Dark Knight, the accountant Coleman Reese walks into Fox’s office planning to extort a cozy retirement from the Batman but then walks out defeated five minutes later once Fox explains how things would really go. Why did I find that amusing? I think doing the exact opposite of a past action means that you were wrong about your utility function (or wrong about your facts). We probably find it funny to see someone put money on a wrong proposition and nothing indicates wrong knowledge like a reversal of opinion.
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