Last year, I wrote Higher power, about the idea that, since your own decisionmaking is fallible, there are times you might need to rely on something else. And when that moment comes, you'll need to ignore your own decisions. Later on I wrote Unfreedom, about the idea that being able to enter into a contract or any other other voluntary restriction means giving up complete freedom, even in some kind of otherwise libertarian utopia.
There's an interesting generalisation of these ideas, that I think of as involition: using your ability to make decisions to give up your ability to make decisions. You ultimately have some set of preferences, values, or goals that govern the choices you make. But what about when it would be beneficial to not have those preferences? Why would that be useful? And can you even actually do it?
For the first part, there definitely seem to be situations you would gain a lot from being in, but would never choose. Lots of kids want to be Batman, but not a lot would choose to have their parents killed in an alley. You can learn a lot from hardship and challenge, but there is some question as to why you would pick hardship and challenge if the alternative is an option. Even if you rationally decide to take on hardship, going back to no hardship seems like an easy choice in the moment.
There are also reasons to occasionally defy your decisionmaking in the interests of creativity and exploration. I wrote a bit about this in Control, The stability tradeoff and Tourism. Your values might say travelling is boring, but maybe deep inside you is a profound love for Japanese culture that you will never find out about unless you accidentally end up there. How do you discover these values without a meta-value that aims to probe at the unknowns in your existing values? Occasionally that might mean committing to things that defy those values.
But in all of this there is a problem: how do you give up control when you still have control? I mean, you can pretend that you're going to act against your preferences, but deep down you know you can stop at any time, so why wouldn't you? You can say "I'm going to throw a dart at an atlas and go wherever it says", but if it lands on Syria you'll probably throw again. Maybe that's the smart thing, but on the other hand if you're going to decide what outcomes are acceptable, what was the point of giving up your decisions in the first place?
I'm reminded of Paul Romer's charter cities, which suffer quite severely from this problem. The idea was that a country would give up a small area to be an independent region with its own laws, in the hope that it would yield interesting developments or results unattainable in the rest of the country. Unfortunately, as the hodgepodge of tribal sovreignty has shown us, sovreignty-within-sovreignty doesn't really work. A government considers itself responsible for everything within its borders, so the best a charter city can do without complete independence is some subset of the host country's values.
Ultimately, the challenge here is to find controlled ways to exercise involition. One option would be to build incentives that are big enough to make you act against your regular preferences (big fines if you break the deal are a common approach). Another option is to make irreversible (or difficult to reverse) decisions, like selling all your stuff or moving to a different country and figuring it out when you get there. There may also be an approach where you build a value of trust or faith (that's the Higher Power idea) strong enough to overcome your other values, which is perhaps the easiest but also the most dangerous.
"Now?" The Doctor looms over him with a mad gleam in his eyes. He chuckles, a light laughter tinged with mania. His brows furrow as he stares intently over the thick rims of his spectacles. "Let's go practise medicine".
Practice has a curious double-meaning in English. We say it for something we are doing for real, as in "put into practice". But we also use it as in "practise violin" meaning without an audience, and preferably in a room with thick walls. This contradictory shift is fairly straightforward; it started with doing, then it became learning by doing, and finally just became learning, whether or not it involves putting your skill into actual use.
French doesn't have this issue, their equivalent only applies in the "putting into practice" sense. You can't pratique by staying in your room, you pratique by going out and doing it. The other things are called training or exercise. We have those words too, but unfortunately in English they also got somehow mixed in to our word for putting a skill into practice.
Far from being an etymological problem, this reflects a fundamental issue about practice. The slide of practice away from being practical is actually a slight-of-hand, a kind of goal substitution. Instead of learning the actual skill, you learn the training skill instead. If those are very similar, great, but the further away from the real thing you are, the less useful your practice is. In other words, it all hinges on whether your practice has intention.
Training is a way of dealing with our limitations as far as optimising lots of things at once. Having to hit the ball and get the footwork right and follow your opponent and think strategically about your shots is a lot to do at once. We can feed the optimiser by giving it simpler forms of the problem. But the crucial thing about training is that it's meant to be an approximation to true practice, as close to practical as possible given the constraints. Too often it takes on a life of its own and ends up in pointless drills that teach you nothing.
Education gets this wrong a lot. It's well-reported that the best way to study for a test is to practise taking the test in test-like conditions. Yet the structure used for teaching usually revolves around practice problems or textbook study completely detached from the ultimate test conditions. Equally, you could ask, why the test at all? The actual situations in which you need to use skills or knowledge bear nearly no resemblance to test conditions. It's completely non-practical.
Ultimately, it's just a question of doing things the right way round. If you start with the idea of "I want to learn", it's easy to learn a bunch of useless nonsense, memorise random facts with no practical value, or end up worrying about macronutrient balance when really you just need to lift more. On the other hand, if you start with "I want to do", you quickly realise you're not good enough to do that yet, and you go about fixing the biggest obstacles to getting there.
It's a very confronting feeling, knowing that other people are watching you, judging you. It's the main thing that makes performance challenging, despite its many benefits. It might seem like that feeling of judgement is something to get past, a distraction that stops you from receiving the other benefits of performance like learning to act under time pressure or calibrating your risk sensitivity. However, I actually think being judged is valuable in its own right.
When you know that people are listening, you speak differently. When you know people are reading, you write differently. When you know that the things you make aren't going into a desk drawer, but rather out into the hands of real people, it changes your thought process. You start to visualise them, their reactions. What are they thinking as they see what you've done? Do they laugh? Do they struggle to understand something? Do they get bored partway through?
When you internalise that audience, it becomes a kind of superego, an oversight body that you bounce things off. Hey, audience, what if I mix up the style a little bit here? You're probably getting bored of plain old prose and want something a bit adventurous. No? Too meta? Okay, no problem. The very nature of that feeling of judgement becomes useful as a tool to hone your work before it even reaches an audience.
On top of that, there is a sense in which an audience makes things real, crushes them against hard reality. While your perfect special snowflake can exist in your head untarnished by contact with real people, deep down a part of you wonders... well, if your imaginary friend is so amazing, why is nobody else allowed to see them? Pitting your work against audience judgement is a trial by fire but, if it passes, you can feel justifiably proud.
It's for this reason, the usefulness of judgement, that I think building an audience is important. It's worth making sure that the things you make get seen, read, heard or used – even if you're not making the work for the audience. The value of what you do isn't necessarily how it's judged, but something that is bad is definitely be more likely to be judged harshly. Knowing that your work will be judged lets you judge it yourself, and makes you hold it to a higher standard.
Though one thing to remember is that this is an essential difference between creation and creativity; although your creation can and should be judged, both by your audience and by yourself, I think that judgement hurts creativity. Nobody likes venturing an idea in a room full of people ready to tear it to shreds. The idea needs time to grow before it can be judged fairly, but there comes a time – sooner than you think – where it must take that first halting step into the limelight.
When we say a machine or an electrical component is inefficient, we mean two things. The first is that it's not being as effective as it could be; it's wasting energy. But the second, and perhaps less obvious, is that it's putting energy somewhere we don't want it. Energy can't be created or destroyed, so it has to go somewhere. The only way a machine can be inefficient is if it's turning energy into something you don't want. Usually, that's waste heat.
It's worth thinking about this by analogy to personal efficiency, which I wrote about in The right place at the right time. Mostly, we think of personal efficiency in terms of how much we get done, how effectively we turn the resources we have into the outcomes we want. But to say we are inefficient also implies that some of the resources we have go into outcomes we don't want. What does that look like?
One example is misformed habits. If we want to be working but we're actually goofing off on the internet, we're feeding our optimiser with the inputs necessary for it to become an effective internet timewaster. Over time we begin to get better and better at it, until it becomes easier than other work. Internet timewasting is an easy target, but working as a carpenter when you want to be a jazz pianist is the same; the energy that could be going to improving your scales is going to improving your biscuit joints.
Another is strategies built up around inefficency. We can draw lines that are straight in the first place, or we can get so good at wobbly lines that they start to work well enough. If we know we're not going to succeed at our task, we find strategies to make failure more palatable. Similarly, if we know we're going to perform our task inefficiently, we find ways to make up for it. If we build our road in the wrong direction, curving it around to the right direction is easier than starting over. Eventually we get really good at curvy roads, but no better at straight ones.
Yet another, and perhaps the best analogy for waste heat, is frustration. It even feels like a kind of mental heat. When you're trying to achieve something, but you can't bring your resources to bear on it properly, often those resources turn into frustration. The more you put into it, the more frustrated you become. If you're asked to design a nuclear reactor, probably you're not going to feel frustrated when it's not very good. But when you know you had the resources, but you couldn't use them effectively, that's heat.
This is the frustration of screwing up a simple task because you rushed it, trying to manipulate a tiny screw with a big clumsy hand, or being stuck in traffic with a car that just wants to go. It's all that energy pumped into an inefficient machine; some tiny proportion sunk into the task, and the rest vented into the air.
For the next little while I'm going to try something new. I've been thinking a lot about Squaring the circle: you can control quality or time but not both. For regular habits, like my writing here, I need to be willing to control time at the expense of quality. So what I'll be doing is giving myself 30 minutes to write. I can plan and outline first, no problem, but once I start writing it's a 30 minute clock and I put up whatever's done by the end.
I'll probably relax the time restriction to 1 hour later, but I think 30 minutes is a good place to start.