The Dead Planet Theory

My godson wants to be a storyteller of some kind, either video, or music, and he was fretting about not being good enough. My advice to him was, "look, if you just sit and THINK about what you're going to do before you do it, you're going to be better than 80% of the people out there".

That's about what I've run into in my life. Most people do things on autopilot and don't think about what they're doing, or don't consider it worth thinking about. If you want to do something and be good at it, wanting to be good at it is enough to move you past most people, as long as you have a growth mindset.

There are lots of obligations in life.

And bros in their late 20s / early 30s (as I suspect the author is) tend to underestimate the extent to which that's true.

Kids is the obvious one, but hidden claims on time and capacity are much more common than some think.

> it is simple, but not easy

Mom always taught me the polite way of saying this is that something is then 'straightforward'.

The matrix here is:

Steps are clear, but difficult to take > 'straightforward'

Steps are clear, but easy to take > 'trivial, easy, simple, etc'

Steps are unclear, but difficult to take > 'hard, impossible, non-trivial, etc'

Steps are unclear, but easy to take > 'should be a lark, non-obvious, etc'

Is it worth the effort for any individual poster though? The unreachable segment (read only, doesn't comment) which already makes up the vast majority of audience is practically un-engageable. Among commenters, there's the blend of low-effort 'this'-type posts, soliloquizers (though possible therapeutic for the poster), and lizardman-constant/flame type reactions. It seems that in most venues, the effort to read through all comments and find anything valuable to engage with has a low social ROI.

What sucks about HN in particular for this is that as soon as you start engaging with a thread you are very interested in, getting a lot of replies, etc, you are locked out of commenting due to the flame war rules. Then whenever you are unlocked again later in the day perhaps, you've forgotten all about that discussion and have moved on. Whatever potential discourse that was there nipped in the bud.

Here is a fascinating (and troubling) look at comment manipulation by the platform. Here on TikTok a woman shows the differences between the top comments shown on her account versus her (male) partner's:

https://www.tiktok.com/@elieli0000/video/7446090349551815968

Will second this. It's why I live in the comments, rather than scurry for OP recognition. It's why I invite comment and critique, so I can learn more things from other perspectives I'd not considered (not gonna lie though, that's a rarity on social networks and forums these days, compared to the usual goalpost-movement and general nastiness).

The OP gets the discussion going, but the discussion is in the thread. Sticking to the top level is like judging a book by the Goodreads summary and reviews; to really appreciate the content, you have to read the book.

I guess it depends on the network? From what I've seen, most people are there for the 0.3% getting 99% of the engagement. Whether that 0.3% is the big accounts on Twitter, or whatever is on the main page on Hacker News. Try making a comment on a HN article a couple of hours after it falls off the front page - you're extremely likely to get anyone to notice you. A few days? You may as well be yelling into a void.

There are a handful of exceptions - some small Reddit subs, some old forums. But for the most part, people on social media aren't really interested in something that's not already popular.

>If you read a few books on mathematics you think you're easily going to become one of the top mathematicians?

No - but you will easily become more educated in math than most people. 99.9% of people couldn't tell you the difference between a derivative and a integral.

It's not about becoming an expert. You don't need to be the best in the world to be usefully good at something.

> If you read a few books on mathematics you think you're easily going to become one of the top mathematicians? Many ambitious people try to study math and decades later are disappointed by how they are still mediocre in their field or simply fail to make it into an academic career. Many PhDs in general, actually.

I don't know about being one of the top mathematicians, but I'd argue that actually, fully reading a few graduate level technical books is more than even most PhDs do.

I was once a PhD student in theoretical physics myself and I'd say that we mostly skim over the books or read only the sections that are immediately and obviously relevant to us.

I once did read one of the shorter known-to-be-difficult books of my field fully from cover to cover, and worked out most of the exercises in the book. After this exercise, I realized that I immediately had much better understanding of the somewhat foundational things described in the book than many of the more senior researchers had. And this was a book that everyone in my field knows, but apparently no-one actually reads it.

The reason why no-one reads actually the difficult books, even when half of their job is reading them, is because it's harsh, gruelling work.

So yeah, maybe you won't become the next Terence Tao by reading three or four graduate level mathematics books, but you can get pretty good if you actually seriously do it without any cheating or skimming.

The difference is between getting into the top 10% vs getting into the top 0.1% (or add as many zeroes as you want).

Top 10% just takes a bit of intentional work, rather than just chasing dopamine hits you might get as a casual. And that’s why the 90% aren’t losers or suckers… they just have different priorities.

> The missing key factor is that you have to find something unpopular and easy which will actually have a payoff

Why?

I found the article refreshing precisely because it didn't assume you're doing it for the money, or otherwise insisting that a hobby only makes sense if you make a business out of it.

I take this article as a reminder of how little time and effort it takes to achieve basic proficiency in just about anything.

I'm fond of the view that the 80/20 rule applies recursively: you can get 64% of value in 4% of effort, or 51% of value in 0.8% of the effort. Applied to "deliberate practice" meme, that gives you 51% of value for 80 hours of deliberate practice. Sounds absurd, but then most people never done 80 hours of deliberate practice in anything at all.

Personally, I round this up and call it a "10-100-10k framework": 10 hours of deliberate-ish practice is not that big of a sacrifice to pick up some random, specific skill, but you can go surprisingly far doing that. 100 hours should give you competence - good investment for few things that matter for you daily. 10k is for stuff you want to be world-class expert in.

> If you read a few books on mathematics you think you're easily going to become one of the top mathematicians?

No, but so what? The guy behind 3Blue1Brown probably isn't one of the top mathematicians of his era. But he's having quite an impact. He turned explaining fairly basic math concepts in mathematics into a lucrative job.

And who wrote the textbooks you're referring to? Probably not any of the top 10 living mathematicians. That doesn't make the work less useful.

Is Linus Torvalds one of the top 10 computer scientists? He probably wouldn't describe himself that way, and respected academics mocked his work. The list goes on. I think this is compatible with the premise of the article: it's not about being best, it's about being better than the average bear - and then putting that knowledge to some productive use.

Soccer

Plus, the premise comes with a broken assumption regarding distribution and goals between social media and actual human activity.

A friend group has 20 people and 3 making an effort. It's easy to stand out. A sports club has 200 members and 5 stars. Social media has 120 million users. And a screen shows 2 posts at a time. Maybe 10-ish if you're using a non-stupid version of a platform.

A lot of people just want the validation of having low stakes engagement. Likes. Upvotes. Views. Shares. Things that happen absentmindedly or even automatically. Just a small indicator that people saw you, and are generally satisfied even with relatively little of it. So what if that a fraction gets 99 bajillion of likes out of the 100 total. The remaining bajillion still means a small time artist who just wants to show their latest work gets to have 100 people who like it and 2 or 3 who comment.

And that's all they'll realistically amount to while being VERY active. To fall for the trap of thinking "it just takes participation to get there" falls straight in the face of the fact it's a competition of scale.

Speaking of which, so is job hunting. Recruiters even get spammed on the phone. I wish job listings had to be on public platforms with a lot more rules honestly.

Why does it matter if it’s popular? This is neoliberal bullshit. It’s not a competition if you want to know more and then go and acquire that knowledge

I feel like 90% of the selection of tribes is only done by groupthink.

People seem to have opinions based on propaganda instead of reason.

Someone deciding which donut to buy in a donut shop is usually making a more informed choice.

And his take on the other 20% doers smells like survivorship bias. But obviously he is right on taking the initiative to increase your chances.

Chances of success or for a fulfilling life is the underlying topic here and whatever connection you can draw to a dead planet.

The article gives off such strong "be a wolf, not a sheep" superiority complex vibes