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HTML The appropriate amount of effort is zero
bsindicatr69 wrote 13 hours 9 min ago:
> "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." â Lao Tzu
Ok, while Iâm into this sort of thing, and there are other way of
saying this that I agree with- this is inaccurate. Some animals,
insects, etc. do sometime hurry. Scare any animal or insect and it will
hurry.
directevolve wrote 1 day ago:
The important point here is that you can become much more effective by
cutting wasted activity.
Wasted motion and power saps your time, energy, and motivation. It
obscures your vision. It creates unnecessary risk. It decreases your
awareness and adaptability.
Examples from my own life:
- Teach kids to self-assess using an explicit rubric, instead of
delivering feedback yourself every step of the way.
- Move slower and use the minimum power possible when doing chores.
- Jog more slowly and stay in zone 2, where you feel like you can go
forever.
- Determine the smallest software performance test scale that makes the
issue youâre trying to resolve reliably apparent.
- Resolve as much uncertainty as you can about new software features
through separately scripted spikes before attempting to orchestrate
them in the full codebase.
- Invest passively in index funds.
- Strip down presentations and pause a few seconds after most
sentences. That lets the message sink in, gives you space to decide if
you need to say more, and gives the audience a chance to respond if
youâre not addressing their confusion effectively.
absoluteunit1 wrote 1 day ago:
I wish this was the case but I have found that almost any success in my
life took enormous amounts of effort.
However, to some extent I do agree. For example, when learning to play
the guitar, itâs important to learn to exert just the right amount of
effort to place on the strings. When typing on a keyboard, I have a
habit of pressing way too hard and I realized this lead to a lot of
hand pain.
So saying zero effort might be an incorrect title - maybe saying
âusing just the right amount of effortâ would be more accurate
prmph wrote 1 day ago:
Hell no, the amount of problems caused by people half-assing everything
they do is enormous. The write fails to take onto account that the
question of just how much effort us required is often highly
subjective. It's more a matter of values than anything objective.
How well do you care about something to figure out just how well you
could possibly do, when doing better matters in outcomes?
Taking the advice of TFA to heart confirms an attitude of never really
caring to do anything well.
Of course, for many things, it is probably not productive to spend too
much effort on it.
victorronin wrote 1 day ago:
I know we (Westerners) are often fascinated by Eastern philosophies and
all these "sounds of clap of one hand".
However, this article crossed a line... by a mile.
"turning a steering wheel.... all need exactly the amount of energy
that they need"
In theory, it's true. In practice, there are activities like "holding a
cup". if you do not have enough grip, you may unfortunately spill the
coffee on the floor. If you don't have enough grip while doing a sharp
turn, it could be literally fatal. As a result, it is wise for the
absolute majority of people in high-risk situations to exert more power
than necessary. The energy investments are small, but changes in
probabilities are significant.
And the rest of the article pretty much prophesies a flow slate. Yeah,
in this state, things feel effortless. However, it misses two things.
To learn how to get to this flow state, like a lot of people pointed
out, you need TONS and TONS and TONS of practice where you exert WAY
more than you minimally need. Oh... And on top of that, in the flow
state, you perceive that things are effortless. And this is mostly
about a perception rather than reality. Yes, if you are extremely
experienced and get to flow state, you are spending less energy than an
absolute beginner, but not zero... again, by a mile.
lastFitStanding wrote 14 hours 29 min ago:
I don't think the article is necessarily saying to have a softer grip
at the steering wheel, which I agree it can be fatal.
It says: "There is an appropriate amount of energy required for each
activity."
I'm sure there are many activities where nothing bad happens when
applying less effort. For example, typing on a keyboard or signing a
document.
dpark wrote 23 hours 17 min ago:
People also mistake the appearance of effortlessness with the
reality. I used to play the trumpet and there was always this
drumbeat of âdonât press the mouthpiece into your mouth so
hardâ. I think every instructor I ever had told me some variant of
that. Supposedly new learners press way too hard trying to hit the
high notes, while professionals hit those notes without that level of
force.
Turns out nope. Someone did a study and measured the force and it was
basically the same across skill levels. The professionals just make
it look easy because they are used to it and more skilled.
Which makes sense, right? Highly skilled people often make things
look effortless even when they objectively are extremely difficult
tasks.
Miraltar wrote 1 day ago:
> if you do not have enough grip, you may unfortunately spill the
coffee on the floor. If you don't have enough grip while doing a
sharp turn, it could be literally fatal. As a result, it is wise for
the absolute majority of people in high-risk situations to exert more
power than necessary. The energy investments are small, but changes
in probabilities are significant.
Yes but there's still a sweet spot to find, you're not gripping your
cup or your wheel as hard as you can. Over-gripping in uncertain
conditions can be good but only to a certain extent.
I still agree with you though, a good example of this is climbing
stairs â if you have strong legs it's much less effort to go 2 by 2
but I'd never tell someone struggling to do that, it would make no
sense.
iicc wrote 1 day ago:
>Let me share my slightly unusual definition of âeffortâ: itâs
the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity
requires
How about finding a word that actually captures your meaning, or
defining a new one?
I asked an LLM - it came back with "overexertion".
>Using this definition, itâs clear that the appropriate amount of
[overexertion] for any activity is zero.
actionfromafar wrote 1 day ago:
But overexertion means using up more than was available. ("Running on
fumes" etc.)
Expending more than an activity requires may or may not mean you have
more power reserves left.
dare944 wrote 1 day ago:
Yep. All done to create a manipulative title.
chantepierre wrote 1 day ago:
Re : running relaxed, it is said that the real marathon is the training
you put in, and the race itself should feel like a celebration. I am
not anywhere near elite level but felt that for a lot of races. The
hardships of the training enables a state of deep calm, joy and feeling
like you are flying the morning of the actual race. Nights before races
are often very bad, like a last storm before everything clears and your
mind is finally empty when you get into the corral. Then, with a clear
mind, you proceed to run with joy despite being physically tired by the
training and sleepless night.
ChrisMarshallNY wrote 1 day ago:
I mostly agree, but I also find that deliberately using more effort
than "necessary," sometimes helps me to "feel" the relationship with my
task more effectively.
You see this with musicians, all the time. They "throw" themselves into
their performance; even when sitting in a studio, in sweats. It helps
them to "feel" their output.
Artists also frequently have idiosyncrasies that seem to be impediments
to performance.
I can't remember which bestselling author it was, but I heard of an
author that writes everything by hand, on legal pads. They pay someone
to transcribe it to electronic form.
Rhiannon Giddens is known for performing barefoot. I suspect that she
even did that, at her White House gig[0] (note the very long dress).
I'm pretty sure that it helps her to "feel" her music.
[0]
HTML [1]: https://www.pbs.org/video/-performance-rhiannon-giddens-perfor...
Mc_Big_G wrote 1 day ago:
The best example of this for me is playing drums. It's a very physical
thing to do and extremely easy to get caught up in the fun of it. You
find yourself playing very hard with a lot of tension everywhere. The
problem is that it's very difficult to do this for long periods and if
you want to play a series of fast notes accurately, it's
counterproductive. So, I'm constantly telling myself to play as soft
and loose as possible until one day it hopefully becomes automatic.
booleandilemma wrote 1 day ago:
This attitude is antithetical to corporate America, at least in
software. Try going into a scrum and saying nature does not hurry and
you'll get laughed out of the room. Your boss expects you to be filling
your time with work, even when there's nothing to work on.
captainbland wrote 1 day ago:
> Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished
I don't know, you ever seen a video of a cheetah hunting a gazelle?
Lots of hurrying going on there.
nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote 1 day ago:
Thats a lot of work for tbe cheetah, especially at a cellular level.
But not much effort at all.
Do you have a dog? Does it look like effort when it runs around? It
is effort for it NOT to run!
Nature is the laziest fuck of them all. Lets shine this sunlight and
let entropy/quantum fluctuations take care of the rest. Might get
life form in one in every billion planets.
dr_dshiv wrote 1 day ago:
âThe Strength of Easeâ â a mantra I tell myself
wiseowise wrote 1 day ago:
> "Money don't matter", - rich people
> "Looks don't matter", - attractive people
> "Just relax", - world class champions
zdkaster wrote 1 day ago:
If you have experienced in racing, motocycle racing in particular, you
can relate this message very well.
Trying too hard can really reduce performance or laptime, similar to
run the marathon.
You have to feel very relax to get better result. And, feeling relax in
death-pace or very risky situation like racing is something you need to
work on overtime.
The appropriate amount of effort is the key.
sph wrote 1 day ago:
Serendipitous, I recently wrote about my controversial interpretation
of wu wei, which, in modern terms, is erasing effort by leveraging
habits and other automatisms. If you have to be conscious about it,
youâre doing it wrong. Nice to see Lao Tzu quoted in a post about
(non-)effort. [1] âGoverning [ourselves] is like cooking small
fish.â â Lao Tzu, paraphrased.
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46267098
block_dagger wrote 1 day ago:
The article reminds me of the similarly ridiculous take in Effortless
Mastery. These authors are selling your own hopium to you. The
appropriate amount of effort is as much as possible - just donât do
it in such a dumb awkward way.
jjpones wrote 1 day ago:
One of the more recent experience I've had pushing a skill from
conscious competence to unconscious competence is in a multiplayer
video game that involved very large scale fights that literally
hundreds of players participate in (and I'm using the word literally
literally here). Imagine Starcraft or a Civilization game, but rather
than one player controlling an army of units, each unit is 1-is-to-1
controlled by a player.
I clearly recall how I started out, I was lost in a deluge of character
models and health bars surrounding my screen, moving about, particles
flashing from abilities. I had a difficult time listening to calls by
the leader of my group (effectively, everyone is being coordinated by 1
person in a voice call) while trying to make sense of what's around me.
I couldn't tell when I was in danger, or where I was supposed to be
relative to the rest of the group. It was intense trying to parse
everything around me.
But after years of practice (playing at a decently competitive level
with other like-minded players who wanted to truly dedicate time to
something they found worthwhile), everything in those fights just
becomes clear. There's no friction in the hundreds of character models
as they enter and exit my screen, reading the flow of combat is as easy
as reading a cozy piece of fiction.
I think the way I'd describe the whole experience of learning this part
of the game is I learned how to separate important states to
non-states. When I started out, I did not know what information to
immediately prune out. I was busy juggling a network of useless
information and made a mesh of "non-states" that filled my mental
capacity. The more I learned, the more I could actually build an
intuition of real or important states to be aware of. This one flash of
red means I'm in danger. This flash of yellow from an ally means I
should advance more aggressively, etc.
If anyone's interested at what I'm describing, here's someone's
gameplay:
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaZhda3rWvU
TheCapeGreek wrote 1 day ago:
As alluded to in another comment, this post kind of makes a lot more
sense if you've read The Inner Game of Tennis.
It kind of glosses over competence of practice, but the TL;DR is once
you've built up some competence with a skill, staying in a constant
state of effortful tension won't give you better results. Entering flow
state requires getting into "unconscious competence" effectively.
...which is effectively a reframe of how The Inner Game of Tennis says
it: to practice your still with non-judgement while you do it.
popalchemist wrote 1 day ago:
Wu wei.
udave wrote 1 day ago:
that's true for some folks out there. But, ultimately its about these 3
questions:
- what you are?
- what you want to be?
- when you want to be there?
I think if you don't have an answer to the last question, you should be
fine with 0 efforts.
scrubs wrote 1 day ago:
Half of all math proofs are guys walking around in nature or sitting in
it. The last one I read was Ken Ono's breaththrough on partition
numbers ... he was on a hike with a friend.
I might also add hard work gets you to a frustration point you might
need first before it comes in its time ... IOW I'm not 100% sold on it
just comes for free ... maybe better expressed as know when it's time
to take a break too.
sph wrote 1 day ago:
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_effect
andreareina wrote 1 day ago:
That's only when the breakthrough happened and misses all the rest of
the time spent on the problem.
fredrikholm wrote 1 day ago:
And nothing says they weren't thinking about the problem when it
happened.
I've had a lot of "aha" moments not sitting by my desk, but that
doesn't mean that I wasn't thinking of the problem. When people say
they had an idea in the shower, I suspect it's precisely because
they were undistracted enough to focus on the problem.
zkmon wrote 1 day ago:
> These scripts team up with one of the core principles of Alexander
Technique: Faulty Sensory Appreciation
Someone mentioned to me that we have a disease of hard-working. The
article correctly identifies it as a sensory problem.
I would go further inquiring why this happens. The motivation that
propels you towards too much effort is incorrect. You should question
your ambitions, the need and your value system that values your effort
vs returns and justifies the effort.
voidhorse wrote 1 day ago:
Confusion of effect for cause. Unconscious or effortless processing by
the brain is usually way more accurate and reliable than conscious
processing, but outside of being "gifted" you only get to consistent
unconscious processing after years of training and conscious practice
that ingrain muscle memory etc.
netbioserror wrote 1 day ago:
"You don't get your best performances by trying harder" is just another
way of saying that our talents come so naturally that they don't feel
like work.
Does that mean that if you're trying, you're fighting a losing uphill
battle against something you'll never excel at? I think many skills are
learned and must be earned with discipline. But the culture places
excessive weight on excelling in specific fields that most people
simply can't brute-force. Hence the prevalence of chemical assistance
at the highest ends of productivity, intellectual competition, and
athletics.
We probably need to place more emphasis on doing things that come
naturally to us. Emphasis on doing. But also enjoy downtime and
not-doing occasionally.
dmitshur wrote 1 day ago:
Iâve noticed something like this while playing the game Hollow
Knight: Silksong. Most of the time when I was trying to beat a
difficult boss, I wasnât trying to beat it while itâs hard and
would take a lot of effort. Instead I was working on making beating the
boss easy (which was hard). So typically by the time I would beat a
boss, it did feel like comparatively little effort was being expended.
nathan_compton wrote 1 day ago:
This is the worst kind of post. If you read it carefully it barely says
anything and the thing it does say is highly suspect or just wrong. I
suspect most of the time when someone wins a race, for example, they
aren't exerting zero effort, although the author has found an anecdote
or two to the contrary, for example.
DavidPiper wrote 1 day ago:
> When you try so hard all the time, that level of effort feels
familiar and you stop noticing it.
> Put another way, years of overdoing mis-calibrate your senses so
effort feels right and ease feels wrong. ...
This is the first time I've seen in writing something I've felt deeply
for a long time.
I have a long history of (sub-clinical) stress and anxiety problems and
experimenting with mindfulness and embodied exercises etc it hit me so
strongly that it feels alien/wrong to be relaxed, and that very fact
makes it harder to be so.
It sucks.
marcus_holmes wrote 1 day ago:
Same, though my problem is more about overthinking and "trying too
hard" than anxiety. When I manage to relax into something it tends to
go well, but getting to that relaxed state is very hard, and my
natural inclination is to try harder, which usually doesn't go well.
It's like the thing of "slow is smooth, smooth is quick" when I'm
trying to do something in a hurry.
mapontosevenths wrote 1 day ago:
This reminds me of Anxiety Culture. There is some wisdom buried in this
ancient website (and some malarky).
HTML [1]: https://www.anxietyculture.com/
karlitooo wrote 1 day ago:
woahhhh it's still up!
tobyjsullivan wrote 1 day ago:
Has the author redefined âeffortâ such that the amount of effort
required to carry a boulder up a mountain is, by his own definition,
always zero?
> Let me share my slightly unusual definition of âeffortâ: itâs
the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity
requires
strogonoff wrote 1 day ago:
A way of making an argument is to craft a statement that at first
shockingly contradicts a basic dictionary definition of a word but at
a closer look highlights a characteristic you want to bring to
readerâs attention, creates a finer distinction between vaguely
similar terms. Itâs probably the oldest form of clickbait, and
perhaps the most useful oneâwhen done correctly, it provides a lot
of food for thought in a single sentence, and can present an old
truth in a catchy way that is more likely to be internalised by the
reader.
For example, âyou should not spend effort to achieve somethingâ
is a weird thing to say at first. It poses a paradox and invites the
reader to experiment: letâs pretend we canât spend effort; but we
can still do things, we can spend energy, we can end up having
achieved something. Are there examples of how people do things and
spend energy, but without spending effort?
This highlights a particular elusive quality of âeffortâ that,
like many ideas in human psychology, may not have a specific
dictionary word assigned to it. Having drawn such a stark distinction
between spending energy and spending effort makes it easier to recall
that quality, even if it doesnât have a convenient term that rolls
off the tongue.
(Iâd postulate that if carrying heavy boulders up a hill is your
hobby or something you can bring yourself to enjoy doing, there is
certainly a way in which you can do even that without spending effort
in this revised definition. By contrast, doing something you loathe
may always be full of effort, no matter how little energy it requires
from you.)
Could the same point be expressed in a more conservative way, like
âyou should not spend too much effort to achieve somethingâ?
Sure. However, for many people it wouldnât be as easily
internalised.
krzat wrote 1 day ago:
These ideas are probably as old as humanity, which is I guess why
author did not bother to explain further.
The trick is that perceived effort != actual effort.
So the big question is: how much you can reduce this perceived
effort?
pdonis wrote 1 day ago:
Looks like it, yes.
robaato wrote 1 day ago:
This is certainly relevant to aikido, and in particular the somewhat
nebulous concept of "aiki". Unnecessary tension in a technique creates
a reaction in your partner which tends to block things. Skilled
practitioners make things look effortless, and use much less tension -
they are more relaxed. It's a fascinating study - and lots of fun.
Very different sport - but check Shane Benzies and his books and videos
on running and technique - how technique makes a huge difference, with
less effort.
tshaddox wrote 1 day ago:
Grip seems like a bad example since in most cases gripping something a
little bit stronger will make your grip a little more robust to an
unexpected perturbance (e.g. you stumble, or someone bumps into you).
Unless you have good data on how common such perturbances are, how
changes in grip strength affect robustness in the face of perturbance,
and what drop rate is acceptable, how would you know whether you're
gripping things too strongly?
didibus wrote 1 day ago:
I agree with this. I think a lot of people try too hard, and it
backfires, as exhaustion, or strain, that end up contributing more to
failure than success.
I believe it's because working hard is actually easier than having good
discipline, so people attempt to make up for their lack of "actually
having made any progress", by trying to "make a ton of progress really
fast" to catch up for it.
QuercusMax wrote 1 day ago:
A lot of folks never really learned to effectively study over the
course of weeks or months. One of the keys I've learned is to give
yourself enough time to soak in new concepts and for practice to
crystallize in your mind. I used to get frustrated at this process,
but finally in my 40s I've learned to embrace how my brain and body
learn new skills.
I've recently started a new job, and I've been thrown a ton of
materials and systems to study. Lots of new terms, systems, etc., and
only vague ideas of where everything fits in. So here's my rough
process if I'm handed a product spec for a system I'm going to be
building / working on:
- Skim the entirety of whatever document / deck / codebase you've
been given. Make a couple notes about things you didn't understand,
and plan to look into. Maybe a couple key concepts. Not too much.
You're just dipping your toes. It's going to be really annoying and
frustrating and you're going to want to quit. That's OK - your brain
/ body are telling you you're working hard and expending a lot of
energy. Think of it like lifting mental weights - it's meant to be
hard work.
- Come back in a couple days and read it again, after you've done
this process with a bunch of other things. You might realize this
document has answers to questions you had about other things! You're
just starting to make connections.
- Make yourself a reminder to check back in another week, and in the
mean time go and ask your questions to the document author, your
manager, your team, etc.
- By the next week, you probably understand what's going on enough to
write a 1-pager for your plans; give it another week and you should
be able to right a proper tech design.
wat10000 wrote 1 day ago:
What a bunch of nonsense. Top performers arenât top performers
because theyâre relaxed and donât put in extra effort. Theyâre
relaxed and donât put in extra effort because theyâre top
performers. This is like saying that the way to run fast is to put a
gold medal around your neck, since thatâs what the fastest runners
do. Itâs a complete reversal of cause and effect.
arjie wrote 1 day ago:
When I was a child, I learned badminton from a friend[0]. He was a
fairly highly ranked player in our nation and so was very good. One of
the first things he said was "Don't be stiff. Relax your muscles and
hit the shuttlecock fluidly not rigidly.". I couldn't. When I finally
could, it's because I was much better than I was when I started. The
fluidity came after some degree of unconscious muscular competence,
rather than prior to.
This aligns with what I know about Flow State: it requires some degree
of unconscious competence before you can access it. When playing
table-tennis, I could not access it when I was rubbish, but when I
reached some degree of skill I wasn't thinking while I was playing, I
was playing instinctually.
Over the years, many people have given me the same "don't be stiff;
relax your muscles; move fluidly" and some of the time it has worked,
but it has never worked when I did not have competence because I did
not even know what it was to relax something.
So perhaps after one has acquired a base amount of skill at something,
someone could "expend no effort", but that's just being in flow state.
0: not as a coach-student relationship but so that he could have
someone to play against.
QuercusMax wrote 1 day ago:
This is very accurate to me. In the last few years I've been learning
ukulele / guitar / bass / mandolin / banjo, and it took a LOT of time
and practice before I could control my muscles well enough to use
less effort. When you're starting you just don't have the necessary
dexterity, and it's very easy as an expert to forget about those
early days, especially if you learned very young.
I learned piano starting around age 6, and I vaguely remember the
first few years were spent largely on learning to control my fingers,
stretch to play larger chords (as a child with fairly small hands, I
couldn't stretch my hand to play an octave until around age 10 or
11), and so forth. I was learning to do this at the same time I was
learning to write cursive, or hold a paintbrush, use a kitchen knife,
etc - all kinds of basic childhood learning stuff.
Learning a new skill as an adult is like going back to grade school
or even infancy in some cases. You can tell a small child not to grip
their pencil so tightly, but until you've practiced handwriting for
several years, your fingers simply don't have the control necessary
to avoid using a heavy grip.
"Use a lighter touch" is fantastic advice for an intermediate or
advanced student but incredibly frustrating for a beginner. Over the
course of several decades of playing keyboard in bands I picked up
the bad habit of playing with more force than necessary, which
started to cause me problems. I had to practice playing with a
lighter touch and that was actually a big help.
agumonkey wrote 1 day ago:
Might be a neurological process. First phase involves low
resolution control of direction and intensity. Second phase allows
for tweaking. (Third phase being abstraction, where you can reflect
on how to blend different ideas and movements to create a whole new
pattern)
QuercusMax wrote 1 day ago:
That makes a ton of sense to me. It's like telling a baby who's
learning to walk that they need to pay attention to how they're
putting weight on the ball of their foot vs their heel, as it
will give them better speed or something.
alexjplant wrote 1 day ago:
> This is very accurate to me. In the last few years I've been
learning ukulele / guitar / bass / mandolin / banjo, and it took a
LOT of time and practice before I could control my muscles well
enough to use less effort. When you're starting you just don't have
the necessary dexterity, and it's very easy as an expert to forget
about those early days, especially if you learned very young.
Every time I learn a new instrument I'm reminded of the fact that
many things just need to be drilled into your brain stem. I know
how to play piano and sight read music for it but I can't do either
because I haven't put the seat time in to do it in real time. I'm
learning (electric) upright bass right now and there are a dozen
technique issues I've noticed that I have to fix but I can only
focus on a few of them at once.
Putting forth zero effort is how one ends up sloppy and stagnant.
You instead need to be aware of your cognitive and parasympathetic
bandwidth and how to utilize each to practice to a meaningful end.
QuercusMax wrote 1 day ago:
I've wanted to be able to play boogie-woogie piano for a long
time, and as a pianist who took a decade of lessons and has
played for another 30 years after that, I feel like I should know
how to play just about anything, right?
Of course that's ridiculous. Boogie-woogie piano has very strong
rhythm in the left hand which needs to be drilled until you can
play it without any thought - and then for the right hand, you
need to learn how to play all the little bluesy riffs, runs, etc.
None of this is especially difficult in isolation (one hand at a
time), but doing two complicated new things at once is just too
much.
So I've just been practicing the pieces individually until I can
do them automatically - my brain becomes more like a conductor
telling my hands to play specific macros.
epolanski wrote 1 day ago:
Flow is generally achieved when the challenge is appropriate, not too
easy, not too hard.
selimthegrim wrote 1 day ago:
The Inner Game of Tennis has entered the chat
falcor84 wrote 1 day ago:
> "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." â Lao Tzu
> Nature is an enormous flow of energy, yet nature makes no effort.
I don't get these. What are they referring to? The nature I'm looking
at, at all scales, from viruses, to animals, to storms, it's all so
violent. Is it just that it's all in the eye of the beholder?
phantasmish wrote 1 day ago:
One way to read it: nature as a whole makes no effort. It wouldnât
even make sense to say that it does. Does a star make an effort? Yet
nature encompasses all that happens.
Another interpretation may be connected to Luke 12:27 (yeah I had to
look it up, I actually thought it was from Ecclesiastes, lol), which,
paraphrased, is that flowers do not work to be beautifulâthatâs
just what they are. They canât (be generous with the reading of
âcanâtâ, if you would) be otherwise.
To expand: humans want what they are not, and that creates work, and
stress, and so on. I want to be pretty like a flower. But Iâm a
person. So now I must spin cloth, and do a bunch of other work, to
attain that want, or else suffer unmet desire. Animals and plants
(perhaps) have wants (like: a rabbit may want food, or not to be
killed and eaten) and pain and such, but donât work in that sense.
They just are what they are, and do what something like them does.
This may fall apart in particular examples, but the broad poetic
sense isnât so bad.
(Yes you can nitpick this to death with stuff like âbut maybe what
humans are is animals that want very very much to be what theyâre
not, so that is their natureâ but câmon)
[edit] cf Vonnegutâs (serious? Joking? Half-joking?) suggestion in
Galapagos that humansâ big brains are a curse that causes most of
our trouble, and weâd be better off as something like smartish
seals.
wat10000 wrote 1 day ago:
I think this is a romantic notion of what weâd like nature to be
like, not what it actually is. Nature is in a constant struggle for
survival. When I see a rabbit freeze in abject terror, then flee at
maximum speed because a well-fed 200+lb apex predator is passing
by, it sure looks like work and effort.
throwaway_2494 wrote 1 day ago:
>then flee at maximum speed because a well-fed 200+lb apex
predator is passing by, it sure looks like work and effort.
I think the 'effort' being described in the articleâdespite
using analogies of overgripping and physical strainâis mental
effort.
When the rabbit has escaped, he returns quickly to a relaxed
state. A typical human reaction would be to continue to worry
about the predator, to form plans to rid the whole _world_ of all
predators, to build a fortress with grass to eat on the inside...
This whole saying that "Nature is red in tooth and claw" is
overstated. Most animals have normal, humdrum days like we do.
However, I think it was the Buddhist teacher, Ajan Cha who said:
"We live in a world where we must eat to survive, and some of us
are uncomfortable about being eaten."
But this does not mean that every animal lives a life of
unremitting terror all the time.
Iâm wary of your use of 'romantic' as a descriptor here. It's a
rhetorical shortcut which makes it easy to pre-emptively dismiss
a position as naïve without further examination.
wat10000 wrote 1 day ago:
Only a touch of judgment? I must have been too subtle, then.
Iâm not convinced that most animals have humdrum days. Itâs
hard to judge the ânaturalâ state of an animal when Iâm a
terrifying predator, but even when Iâm pretty sure they
arenât aware of my presence, their lives seem pretty
stressful. The prey animals seem to be constantly worried about
attacks, and the predators are always hungry.
throwaway_2494 wrote 1 day ago:
Come on you can't come up with a single five minute period
when observing animals where they seem to be calm?
That does not fit the evidence.
And besides you can read thousands of articles on HN about
anxiety in humans, a mostly useless anxiety focused on
societal 'threats' which we suffer from just as much.
At least a deer is on the lookout for something real.
Also if you compare animals lives to human ones, with our
propensity for war and torture and persecution, I think the
animals _do_ objectively live calmer lives.
You don't see them systematically tearing each other to
pieces over made up goods like money.
I think this trope that "nature is a constant struggle" is a
projection of human values (or lack of) onto nature.
wat10000 wrote 1 day ago:
> At least a deer is on the lookout for something real.
That is pretty much my point. Humans have the luxury of
being anxious about stuff thatâs not really a threat.
Animals mostly donât.
The ones who do are the ones who have come closest to
achieving human luxury. My cats are often calm. They also
get upset when they want to go outside but itâs cold.
Maybe Iâm just projecting and my perception of animals as
constantly worried about eating or being eaten is not real.
Or maybe youâre projecting and your perception of calm is
not real. Judging the mental state of animals is very
difficult.
phantasmish wrote 1 day ago:
I regard the experience of most animals as being something
like living in a slasher movie their entire lives, and
Lovecraftâs work as coming closest to describing life
writ large, stripped of pleasant lies.
⦠but I still think itâs a notable feature of humanity
that we can escape much of that for long periods, yet
always seem to invent problems for ourselves, can find
trouble and discontent even when they donât seek us out.
A rabbit may contend with predators, with hunger, but it
doesnât seem theyâll drive themselves crazy with worry
and want when sated and resting in their den. They deal
with whatâs in front of them, in rabbit-ways, and
thatâs that. What will they do today? Rabbit stuff. If
theyâre left to do rabbit stuff without external
resistance, will they be content? Yeah. Tomorrow, will they
be upset because theyâre still going rabbit stuff? No.
throwaway_2494 wrote 1 day ago:
I still donât buy the âslasher movieâ framing of
nature at all, and the only function 'pleasant lies'
serves here is just low effort dismissal. :shrug:
Alas, I'm ceding ground by even arguing within your
chosen framing. It's all very self defeating.
phantasmish wrote 1 day ago:
Frequent risk of sudden violent murder. And, like,
credible relatively-high risk, not the âwell a person
might be murdered at any time, tooâ. Like fictional
humans in a slasher-movie universe.
The âpleasant liesâ mostly involve pretending about
meaning, and avoiding thinking about huge scales.
Thatâs the lovecraftian bit. Large-scale reality
dwarfs and overwhelms us. We eke out sanity by ignoring
it, by even being able to forget about or never
thoughtfully engage with it.
My point is just that I largely agree with the other
poster on the ânature of natureâ as it were, but
still find insight in the quoted passages. I donât
think they demand we regard nature as particularly safe
or easy, for them to work.
wat10000 wrote 1 day ago:
Donât forget terrible diseases, constant problems
from parasites, etc.
Thereâs an ancient debate over whether wild animals
age in the way humans do, or indeed at all. Of course
they do, but this isnât at all obvious since few
wild animals live long enough to die of age, or even
long enough for aging effects to become obvious.
phantasmish wrote 1 day ago:
I think itâs mostly an observation about unforced discontent,
which is a notable (defining?) feature of human existence
thatâs apparently (at least) much rarer in the rest of nature.
I doubt people much closer to nature, death, and killing than
most modern OECD-state humans werenât aware that animals
suffer, nor that they must sometimes run to catch their food.
It might be worth interrogating the original language of the
work, which Iâve not done. The translator may be depending on
the readerâs cooperation here.
wat10000 wrote 1 day ago:
I do think thatâs true, but largely because animals mostly
donât have the luxury of being out of survival mode. They
canât have unforced discontent when itâs constantly being
forced.
Iâm sure the ancients were aware that animals suffer. I think
itâs noteworthy that the passage in Luke was talking about
plants, not animals. Itâs hard to imagine effort and
discontent in an organism with no brain.
In any case, Iâm definitely not taking life advice from an
apocalyptic cult telling me not to plan for the future and give
away all my possessions because their god will provide.
pas wrote 1 day ago:
effort might mean going against the flow, so if you go where the
resistance is the smallest that is likely your niche
of course this might need some tweaking, because if someone is really
good at pickpocketing maybe some effort would put them on a much
better long-term trajectory?
falcor84 wrote 1 day ago:
If so, what does it mean that "nature makes no effort" but humans
do? Is the claim then that non-humans are literally incapable of
"going against the flow"? Is it a religious argument, about us
having some mental/metaphysical capacity that nothing else in
nature has?
cryzinger wrote 1 day ago:
I've seen a lot of references to this "Alexander Technique"[1] lately
but no indication that it's anything other than the latest trendy
pseudoscience that you can conveniently use to explain just about
anything. (There seems to be a fair amount of overlap between it and
what I can only describe as "rationalists who think they invented
meditation".) Does anyone know why it's so popular now or who's behind
the push?
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_technique
karlitooo wrote 1 day ago:
The author of the blog produced one of the first online courses in AT
and is active on twitter. When that launched, he was the first person
I saw talking about it a lot online.
Meditation/mindfulness was growing in popularity in the 2010s and
this stuff is just further along the tech tree. It was already well
known with actors but the cross-over with meditation-like practices
is pretty obvious if you look into both.
The (post) Rationalists you mention are mostly exploring
technologies/methods around the connection between mind/body/emotion.
There's no single figure pushing it along.
singron wrote 1 day ago:
This is a completely obvious conclusion with an unexpected definition
of "effort" to justify a click-bait title.
BlackFly wrote 1 day ago:
Except that the conclusion is wrong because you need tolerance. A
bridge is designed to tolerate a certain weight, then you factor in
some large tolerance for special circumstances, the same is true of
effort.
You put more effort into your team presentation just in case there
are guests. You cannot suddenly have a better presentation
instantaneously when you arrive and see the CTO. In sports, such as
bouldering, you will grip a hold slightly harder than strictly
required in case you suddenly slip or just to easily accommodate the
dynamics necessary as you shift your weight without requiring ultra
precision which is a different form of effort.
The additional effort you expend is based on your estimation of the
risk. As you master whatever skill it is, then you are better able to
estimate the risks and the need or lack thereof for additional
effort. Novices expend more effort than masters because they cannot
gauge the need, but they will also make more mistakes by correctly
guessing the correct effort but not accommodating for the risk.
The appropriate (over)effort is never 0 because there is always some
context dependent risk.
ytoawwhra92 wrote 1 day ago:
Right?
Such a clear fallacy of definition in the opening paragraphs that it
renders the rest of the article a pointless read.
Yes, if you arbitrarily redefine terms you can reach arbitrary
conclusions.
rikthevik wrote 1 day ago:
I think Aldous Huxley said it well:
HTML [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/614121-it-s-dark-because-you-...
cm2012 wrote 1 day ago:
Yes its great to be in flow state where everything is peachy. But
people who have tried to build something know that you will constantly
bang your head against different walls that need effort and solving.
And you dont know how much effort is required until the task is done.
karlitooo wrote 1 day ago:
When you are cheerfully and methodically banging your head against
walls, the solutions come more fluidly than when you are in a rush.
And the more furious you are about wall proliferation more likely
head banging will result in unwanted consequences.
dustractor wrote 1 day ago:
This is my problem when I try to open a jar with a stuck lid. In the
act of gripping the lid well enough to have traction to turn it, I end
up squeezing the lid so hard that it deforms and becomes harder to
turn.
axC0r30x wrote 1 day ago:
I think your reply feels like what I got from the piece;
Effort would be the extra strength applied past what is needed to get
a reasonable grip. It is âeffortâ when you squeeze hard enough to
bend the lid.
I see other comments talking about dropping a cup if you donât hold
it tight enough but the idea is the baseline is âhold the cup tight
enough to have it secure in your hand under normal reasonable
conditionsâ but our default state may be âgrip it hard enough all
the time so a coworker couldnât muscle it out of your handsâ or
âif a door opened in your face and hit it you still hold the cupâ
and that is the effort - the above and beyond that you donât need
to always apply which can screw up our baseline.
Like the message is we need to be mindful of not going full throttle
on everything when low or medium energy / focus / brain activation /
muscle activation will do.
sfink wrote 1 day ago:
Appropriate amount of effort for what purpose? Is it appropriate for me
to use ChatGPT on my mathematics test because it is the least effort
required to pass the test? Or is it inappropriate because the goal
should have been to learn the material?
Even something as straightforward as picking up a coffee mug runs into
this. Just enough effort to be able to lift it without dropping, or
enough to hang onto it if someone happens to bump into me?
I'm not disagreeing with the article, just pointing out that there is
nuance that is easy to miss.
(Ok, I got a little triggered by the title, since I was just thinking
about how 80% of my kid's mathematics class made it through by using
ChatGPT for all of the homeworks, quizzes, and even the tests. The
teacher doesn't want to police it, the administration doesn't care, and
those kids learned almost nothing. "Zero effort == good" is a dangerous
statement out of context.)
dbalatero wrote 1 day ago:
I think part of this is:
- you need to have clarity on the what the goal is
- then you can adjust your effort to meet the goal
no one can tell you what your goals are.
bonyt wrote 1 day ago:
"Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was
everything I thought it could be."
- Office Space (1999)
ivanjermakov wrote 1 day ago:
Appropriate amount of effort is the least required to make it work.
Without effort object would fall to the floor because grip was too
weak.
One reason why performance of a master (art, music, sport, whatever)
looks so effortless is because of crude and unforgiving practice.
lnkl wrote 1 day ago:
"Let me share my slightly unusual definition of âeffortâ: itâs
the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity
requires, like tensing your brow when you try to understand
something, or the excess tension in your hand when you hold your
phone...Using this definition, itâs clear that the appropriate
amount of effort for any activity is zero."
dbalatero wrote 1 day ago:
Your definition is more correct.
I'm close to some kind of mastery with cello, and broadly we tell
students to play with zero tension.
This is useful to say (often they have way too much tension and need
to really dial it back), but in reality there is _some_ tension in
everything:
- left hand: the fingers are basically a conduit for your back
weight, but they need enough strength to stand up and _act_ as a
conduit, otherwise they'd collapse. (but they needn't do more)
- right hand: weight flows from the back, down the arm, into the
index finger, and all power derives from that + bow speed + how close
you are to the bridge. However, the thumb needs to engage enough to
counterbalance the weight on top of the stick, otherwise the bow
would clumsily fall over.
The key is, as you say, doing the bare minimum.
saulpw wrote 1 day ago:
After you've spent a lot of time exerting yourself, then you can let go
and let your non-doing take over. I've experienced this myself with
coding and music and language. Once you've got it "in your fingers",
learning to relax is a big part of the Inner Game of Whatever.
But don't tell me that Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of
effort in her training before her world-class swimming performances.
That's a lie, guaranteed to mislead many people to not trying anything
because it feels like effort.
animal531 wrote 1 day ago:
Gary Player (an old golf player) once quipped that the more he
practiced the luckier he got!
Brian_K_White wrote 1 day ago:
If only they had explicitly defined how they will be using the word
effort for the rest of the article, to address exactly this obvious
and silly reaction.
saulpw wrote 21 hours 54 min ago:
I read the article before I commented, and I reread the definition
just now, and I still think that effort/exertion/tension/whatever
you want to call it, is a necessary stage along the journey to
mastery. Maybe Mozart or whatever preternatural prodigy from birth
managed to fit this stage into preconsciousness, but I can
virtually guarantee that Katie Ledecky had to over-exert in order
to build herself into the powerhouse she became. There is no way
she expended "zero effort", either by normal use of the word
"effort", or by the definition in the article.
dominicrose wrote 1 day ago:
Yes the expert brain anticipates and thus can be more relaxed. Music
doesn't sound good until it's effortless, because trying hard is
hearable.
28304283409234 wrote 1 day ago:
Sammy Hagar interviewing Eddie van Halen for Guitar World a few
decades back: "Ed, what percentage of notes do you actually play
consciously?"
"I guess about 30%?"
kryogen1c wrote 1 day ago:
>But don't tell me that Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of
effort
Perhaps you should try reading the article, because it doesnt say
that. Its a 5 minute read, although perhaps you shouldn't bother
because most others dont appear to have either.
Edit: actually, I daresay the contention of the article is the exact
opposite: its likely that ledecky put in the least effort out of
anyone.
majormajor wrote 1 day ago:
The contention of the article is premised on using a nonstandard
definition.
And THAT is done to let them make a clickbait title.
One might say - by their definition? - that if you need to resort
to a clickbait title to get engagement, you're putting in too much
effort!
micromacrofoot wrote 1 day ago:
Sustained effort is required for muscle memory to take over, at which
point throughput increases dramatically.
jamesgill wrote 1 day ago:
"Let me share my slightly unusual definition of âeffortâ: itâs
the felt experience of expending energy beyond what an activity
requires, like tensing your brow when you try to understand
something, or the excess tension in your hand when you hold your
phone...Using this definition, itâs clear that the appropriate
amount of effort for any activity is zero."
jfreds wrote 1 day ago:
The problem with this whole argument is that you can easily reframe
the definition of the activity to suit any specific agenda.
Going with the swimming analogy: If youâre attempting to cross a
pool, you can just dead manâs float and eventually youâll get
there. If youâre attempting to cross it using crawl stroke you
can do slow slowly and lazily. If your goal is to build Olympic
tier swimming fitness, well then you need to pull exactly as hard
as you need to to optimally build muscle / neural pathways /
whatever.
By the way, overgripping is proven to boost effective strength.
Next time youâre struggling for a last rep, try squeezing the bar
harder.
My point isnât that we shouldnât burn ourselves out, itâs
just that itâs very hard to know what the amount of energy an
activity actually ârequiresâ is
ytoawwhra92 wrote 1 day ago:
This is a fallacious argument.
didibus wrote 1 day ago:
What is fallacious about it?
The claim seems to be that we often try even harder than is
required to succeed. By trying too hard, we wear ourselves down,
and might even cause us to fail in the process.
Therefore, putting effort beyond what is needed, by their
definition, is excess and should be avoided.
Now I don't know if sometimes going a bit above what is needed
can help in some ways, so I'm not saying it's true, but I don't
see what is fallacious about it? The rationale seems to hold.
ytoawwhra92 wrote 1 day ago:
That's not the lexical definition of effort.
It's a stipulative definition that allows the author to reach a
conclusion that's inherently provocative when read by people
who are using the lexical definition.
> Therefore, putting effort beyond what is needed, by their
definition, is excess and should be avoided.
By qualifying with "beyond what is needed" you've made it clear
that you're using the lexical definition of "effort". I think
that should drive home how absurd the author's definition of
"effort" is. They've been careful not to make it a clearly
circular definition (effort = effort beyond what is required)
but they are awfully close.
the_snooze wrote 1 day ago:
The most reliable way you get ahead is boring: small levels of
effort, done consistently over time. You don't notice the progress
day-to-day. You don't get much to brag about on social media. But it
adds up.
johnfn wrote 1 day ago:
But what OP is saying, and what I agree with, is that I don't think
Katie Ledecky put in small levels of effort consistently over time.
xkcd-sucks wrote 1 day ago:
> Katie Ledecky didn't put in a huge amount of effort in her training
before her world-class swimming performances.
Although the training takes lots of energy and time, it needn't be
driven by striving towards abstract goals. Rather the training can be
a playful/fun practice for the sake of doing it well in the moment.
This makes it feel easier to practice a lot, and also makes the
practice more "productive" by freeing up attention from distractions
of purpose and self.
It's hard to say if most elite athletes are able to do this all the
time, but they probably don't have as bad a time of it as normies
when it comes to physical exertion.
BobaFloutist wrote 23 hours 58 min ago:
I've noticed that for most hobbies, there comes a point where to
improve you need to do the boring part. Yes, to a certain extent,
practice can be play, but unless you're the one-in-a-million
prodigy who's just obsessed day and night, it's not going to be
much fun drilling scales, or practicing your serve, or crimping on
a hangboard, or whatever.
Once you get to a certain level, you stop being able to just easily
add new skills and capabilities and have to cycle between adding
skills and polishing skills. And once you get far enough, adding
skills becomes a much smaller portion of time you spend on the
activity than polishing, until one day you've mostly added all the
skills you're going to and the only thing left to do is polish them
to perfection.
And that's why I don't strive for excellence in most any of my
hobbies -- they stop being as fun when I'm no longer getting to do
new things and only ever pushing against my limit to improve things
I'm already doing.
eszed wrote 12 hours 37 min ago:
I don't know about that. I've only ever been properly good at one
thing in my life - I'm a dilettante at everything else, including
my current career - but in my experience (in common with even
more talented artists with whom I've worked) is that the
polishing is where the fun begins. You get to a point where
you're working at such a finely detailed level that only you, and
others equally invested, will ever notice, and you're pursuing
perfection that you know isn't ever possible, but you get moments
where it's just... Yes: that was it, and then you're chasing that
feeling again. I dunno, there's maybe something egoistic about
that, and you obviously have to really care about what you're
working on, but I've never experienced anything else remotely as
satisfying. I can easily imagine that generalizing to swimming,
or writing code, or driving a racecar, or pretty much any other
activity that humans engage in.
rob74 wrote 1 day ago:
Well yeah, it helps to become a good (even world-class) swimmer if
you actually like swimming and do a lot of it from an early age.
Same as you are more likely to become a good developer if you
actually enjoy programming rather than just thinking "I want to be
a developer someday because I want to earn $$$".
_carbyau_ wrote 1 day ago:
Sounds like a "train the motivation" approach.
If a person wants to do a thing then they will engage with it on
their terms. But getting that initial "hook" and then growing it is
the trick.
I will never go to any physical training that involves a trainer
shouting "pain is gain!". If it hurts, why would I do that? Why are
we focusing on how much it hurts?!
Get me hooked on the Gain, let the pain happen naturally depending
on how hard I want that Gain.
xarope wrote 1 day ago:
âIf you want to build a ship, donât drum up the men to gather
wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to
yearn for the vast and endless sea.â
â Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I do a lot of stuff that people think is "hard work", but as they
say, physical pain is fleeting, and I typically have a half-dozen
or more small and large goals that I am working towards, that
requires such "hard work". So, perhaps I yearn for the vast and
endless.... something?
rob74 wrote 1 day ago:
That's... actually the exact opposite of what GP suggested,
isn't it? They wrote that "training doesn't need to be driven
by abstract goals", and you are suggesting abstract goals to
work towards. Not saying that can't work too, just that it's
something different...
nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote 1 day ago:
Yep yearning doesnt work for me. But joy does. I try to enjoy
the work. For progrmmers, big hint: do one thing at a time.
Keep slack off for an hour. Get hooked on a task.
harrall wrote 1 day ago:
Reminds me of when I first tried to learn guitar. I tried doing
fingering practices. It was so boring. I gave up after like a week.
I thought that playing music just wasnât for me.
Many years later, I picked up a friendâs guitar next to me and
just tried to play one of my favorite songs just by ear. I got
enough right that it was fun and I got hooked.
dominicrose wrote 1 day ago:
I like repeating something someone else created until I master
it. Playing just a little bit better after every attempt is
motivating, playing well after training is also motivating.
Creating is not motivating because I compare myself to others.
You have to feel that you could do something unique enough or
good enough to be motivated.
Electric guitar can be really fun but I always end up playing the
piano because it's easier. The keys are in order in front of you,
not arranged in weird ways on strings.
advael wrote 1 day ago:
I think a major problem with advice for a general audience is that
different people need different advice. I agree with you that a path
to mastery usually involves putting in a lot of effortful practice
and then learning to operate without conscious effort, to let muscle
memory and such take over. I think people fail at this in different
ways, however. I'm sure a lot of people fall off of mastery because
they mistake the feeling of effort for lack of an innate talent or
the endeavor being futile, and a lot of people fail to achieve
fluency because they're unable to let go of the effortful, conscious
mode of thinking. Advice for either of those groups is probably going
to be counterproductive for the other
That said, I do think this article frames its advice in a clickbaity
way by handwaving cumulative effort while talking about instantaneous
effort
RossBencina wrote 1 day ago:
Reminds me of this quote from Walter Murch, from In the Blink of an
Eye I think:
"Most of us are searching-consciously or unconsciously- for a
degree of internal balance and harmony between ourselves and the
outside world, and if we happen to become aware-like Stravinsky- of
a volcano within us, we will compensate by urging restraint. By
that same token, someone who bore a glacier within them might urge
passionate abandon. The danger is, as Bergman points out, that a
glacial personality in need of passionate abandon may read
Stravinsky and apply restraint instead."
scrubs wrote 1 day ago:
Well said.
DIR <- back to front page