A Rant About Motivation

I don't like grit. It's coarse and rough and it gets everywhere

Part 1 - Grit in the Engine

I hate the idea of "grit". In theory, it sounds about right. Kids wrongly believe school success is correlated with intelligence, when really it's correlated with inputs, like doing homework. So we don't want to tell kids that they're intelligent (even if they are), otherwise they get in trouble once intelligence alone is not enough.

We want to tell them that they're hardworking, so that when they encounter difficulty, they keep trying. Extrapolate to grownups.

In practice, "grit" is a completely degenerate idea. I mean, yeah, if you feel discouraged by failure, maybe it can make you try a few more times, and that kind of helps. But if we keep trying to start our engines because it's stalled again, maybe just starting our engines isn't enough.

Maybe we should ask why the engine is not continuing to run (absence of positive feedback loops) and why it keeps stopping (presence of negative feedback loops).

"Grit" doesn't allow you to learn this, or anything really. Whatever the problem is, the solution is to add more grit to it.

Sooner or later, instead of thinking you're not intelligent enough when you get stuck (which you'd still be thinking anyway, since the idea of "grit" dances around the obvious evidence of intelligence), now you also think you're not hardworking enough. And both traits are strongly genetic, right?

The counterargument is that, oh, common sense applies, grit can't turn an art student into an astrophysicist etc., but then the idea of grit explains literally nothing! And we're back to the idea of innate talent and intelligence.

Part 2 - The Shallows

I like playing video games. Once I get into a certain mood, I always end up playing through the night.

You could explain that behaviour with the modern Luddite's argument that, you know, we live in an age of distraction, full of super-stimuli and selfish corporations who design Skinner-box mobile games and rage-inducing social media to entrap us.

Then the usual self-improvement spiel will be that because we live in such a distracting environment, we need to be more disciplined, develop routines, motivation is fleeting etc. etc.. "Discipline" is just the same thing as grit, with a slightly more conservative flavour. "Develop routines" is better, but as often used always avoids the most important question.

Why?

Because I play video games the most when I'm trying to avoid doing something I don't want to do. It has nothing to do with the difficulty of what I "should" be doing, or the addictive design of video games. When I'm in the middle of a really good book or writing about something I'm excited about, I don't want to stop to play video games.

When I'm in those moods, video games are actively boring and unappealing!

It's not that I'm super good at not getting distracted. It's that I literally can't stop what I'm doing, even if I wanted to stop to do reasonable things like eat! (Parable of Talents by Scott Alexander is a great essay on this, and while you're on that blog go read everything else - he's brilliant.)

Which comes down to the idea of interest.

And, in a sense, it's kind of obvious. Do the things you're interested in, not the things you're not interested in. Everybody knows this. Everybody struggles to do it. So it's not actually obvious. Because in our heads, there's two choices, right?

1. Do fun and easy things we're interested in, and have no money

2. Do hard things only weird people are interested in, and have lots of money

Since we don't belong to the second group, the only conclusion we can draw is that we have to struggle through things we don't care about.

There's also the cynicism of, to do well in school and work you have to do bullshit things with no inherent meaning. There's an advanced version of this cynicism where, if you want to do interesting things, first you have to check the boxes and climb the ladder, then you get to do interesting things.

So we get stuck at the bottom rungs because checking boxes is mind-numbingly boring and we don't want to do it. The only alternative is to take a huge personal risk and follow our interests outside the system.

But is that true?

Part 3 - Emergent Order

In economics, the price of say, wheat, is not just the money that a buyer gives to the seller for a bundle of wheat.

It's an aggregate of information from everywhere: weather conditions around the world, expected future weather, population booms here, demand shifts there etc.. It's a coordinating mechanism, which brings together people who, if you told them to get together into a room and agree to a decision, there's no way you could get them to do it.

But because everyone is coordinating independently with this thing called "price", everything (mostly) works smoothly. That's emergent order.

I think "interest" is the same. If we're trying to read a book, we're most interested when the book explains something we don't quite get, or contradicts what we know and forces us to think hard about why. We're most interested when it deals with a problem we're already dealing with, and gives us new tools to deal with it.

We're most interested when our eyes don't glaze over from dense bricks of jargon, or when we don't have to look up every other word.

In other words, we're most interested in doing something when the expected value of success is high, and when we expect a high probability of success.

Part 4 - Communism on the Brain

If none of those things are happening, we shouldn't be reading the book just because it's the "smart" thing to do! Even if we slog through it and write pretty notes, we will remember literally nothing! And then we'll feel bad for remembering nothing!

This is why the idea of "grit" is so terrible. And why I hate productivity Youtube channels, which have a facile "you can do it, if you learn this one simple trick :)" approach, without addressing the main issue. If you're struggling so much, you're probably doing the wrong thing!

It's the central planning fallacy, where we think planning things out gives us the better outcome, but that's very often not true. Communism failed because it's impossible to effectively plan a complex economy with a billion moving parts and still respond quickly to a million different changes spreading independently across the system.

When the top-down decision-making part of our brains decides to ignore the bottom-up sense-making part of our brains saying we're doing the wrong thing, or we're not in the right mental state, we end up tripping over our own feet.

When we try to set silly goals like "I want to read a fancy book about Anthropology I've picked up randomly off the shelf in a bookstore" because we feel guilty about not being "well-read", it doesn't matter if the goal is set in a S.M.A.R.T. way e.g. reading the book for 20 mins a day for two weeks; We've already failed!

First, why Anthropology? What question do we want answered? If we don't have a question, the book has no value. A pile of facts has no value. And if all we honestly wanted was a pile of facts, we should've gone to Wikipedia.

Second, why a book? The same ideas about Anthropology can be found on Wikipedia, Youtube, magazine articles etc. Because we want the ideas to be packaged interestingly, and Wikipedia is kind of boring? Any random Youtube video has a higher production value than any random book.

Because we want to trust that the ideas come from a reliable source, with lots of details backing them up? There are plenty of reliable Youtubers with science backgrounds, and plenty of unreliable authors (even from fancy schools!) We don't know anything about Anthropology, do we really care enough that the details make any difference?

Third, why 20 mins a day for two weeks? Because that's the time we have to spare, and how much time we need to finish the book based on the book's length and our reading speed? What if the book's more interesting than expected, and we want to think about it more? What if it's less interesting? More difficult? Repeats information we already know?

What if we get new obligations and have less time than expected? What do we consider as having "finished" the book? When our eyes have glazed over the pages from cover to cover? When we've made notes and summarised the book? When we're able to repeat enough talking points to prove to others we've read the book? 

We don't answer these questions, because our goal isn't to learn. Our goal is to feel educated. And then we don't read the book, because, you know, just buying the book makes us feel educated, so why do the work? Or, we try to force ourselves, and then waste weeks slogging away, before giving up anyway.

I like to think of myself as a decent writer. On reddit's r/writing, a common thread always comes up. "I want to write, but I don't know what to write, pls advise :(". And the same advice is always given. What do you want to write about? Otherwise you're just someone who likes the idea of being the writer, not the act of writing.

So it goes for reading books, or doing anything else.

Part 5 - A Greedy Algorithm

Start from the shallows. You have nothing to prove.

If we're just a little bit interested, we can watch a short Youtube video. Somewhat interested, listen to a podcast. Poke around on Wikipedia, just the first couple paragraphs. Read a book, jump to the interesting bits, then drop it when it gets too boring or too difficult. Go to events, then just sit there and contribute absolutely nothing.

The goal isn't to get anywhere in particular. Chances are, if you're reading this, you don't know where to go, let alone how to get there. Setting a blind course from feeling the wind once and sailing into the horizon isn't going to get us anywhere good.

(If you do know, carry on dude! That's the "exploit" half of explore-exploit.) 

The world is too complex to understand, let alone chart a path through. But we can make reasonable approximations. If we're interested in doing something, it's probably important to us, and it's probably within our ability to do. And if doing something is good, then doing more of it is probably also good.

So we have a blueprint of how to keep our engines running, and how to make sure we're going in approximately the right direction. We want to keep the costs of doing things low. (Conveniently, this also keeps our personal risk low.) Only do things which are immediately interesting, with quick pay-offs. If our to-do list is getting a bit too long, junk everything except the few most interesting things at the moment, even if it's "important".

It doesn't matter how "important" something is, if we don't want to do it, it's not happening.

On the other hand, if something is interesting to us, and we've exhausted the shallows, we'll naturally want to go deeper and do more difficult things. And sometimes things which were not interesting before, we'll start to find interesting once we get a bit more used to it, and get a bit more skilled at it.

And if something's still not interesting after splashing around in the shallows, why bother going further?

There's so many other interesting things to do.

Part 6 - Shared Knowledge

But still, an anxious voice whispers. I need to do this now, or I'll never catch up.

Look at that person, born with a silver spoon in their mouth, leisurely climbing upwards on the golden escalator of meritocracy. I have to work twice, no, three times as hard to get on the same level.

If I improve 1% compounding every day, then by the end of the year, I've grown 37.78 times, so the saying goes.

And if I haven't improved 1% every day, then someone else has accelerated away from me.

Chill.

Chill.

Chill.

There aren't incremental Supermen running around 1,000,000 times better than us because they've made 30 years of continuous daily improvements. Which, if we think about it, is just incredibly silly. Nothing grows constantly forever, and no one is puttering along highways on Ford Model Ts when they could just take a plane.

We see developing countries grow faster than developed countries, because developing countries can copy existing technologies, while developed countries have to innovate, and it's much easier to copy than to innovate. We see them go from telegraphs to mobile phones, skipping over land lines. (Which is another reason why it's a bad idea to get stuck doing things in a rigid order - there's no guarantee it's the right order!)

We see Phds spend years and years advancing collective knowledge a tiny bit.

Everyone hits a wall at the frontier of human knowledge. Even before that there are bottlenecks everywhere. Ten years at the same job doesn't make you much better than the new guy who's only had it for two. And if you know you're not much better than the new guy, then what makes you think the old guy is much better than you?

The average high schooler who sleeps during their classes probably knows more calculus than Pythagoras. Unlike how we're taught in school, knowledge isn't just sand poured into your head and the more you have of it the smarter you are. Sometimes the sand spontaneously self-organises into complex super-structures, and it's obvious what is true.

Or, consider this. Ford started the automobile industry, then got wrecked by Japanese carmakers. IBM made computers mainstream, then lost in every major battle it fought - Mobile, Cloud, AI etc.. Japan was going to take over the world, and today only Toyota is in the list of top fifty companies in the world by market cap.

Does this look like a world where if you're ahead, you stay ahead forever?

Once we're in the right place at the right time, say, in the right job, or the right industry, or knowing the right group of weird friends - we'll understand the meaning of things happen slowly, then all at once. And if we're not in the right place yet, what's the point of killing ourselves trying to dig for oil in a barren field?

The real work is finding the right thing to do.

Addendum 1 - For Effort's Sake

I remember getting stuck on maths problems and thinking to myself: I can't look up the answer, because, you know, that's cheating. I won't be able to cheat and look up answers in real life. I have to develop my problem-solving skills.

So I ended up playing video games.

Trying to do things the "right" way sounds noble and disciplined, but really it's incredibly reactionary. Taking the long view, there's an uncountable number of books to read and maths problems to solve, and we're never going to read or solve all of them.

To allow ourselves to get stuck is to make a very strong claim that this particular book or this particular problem is the most important book or maths problem out of all these other ones, and that's obviously not true! Even if we skip something that turns out to be super important, backtracking when we already know what we're missing is much more efficient than trying to do everything, getting stuck, and then also realising most of what we did while trying to get unstuck was completely irrelevant.

If we have two people we're considering to hire for a job, one person who has a high IQ test score (which we assume is strongly correlated to doing the job well), and another person who has done the job well before, we hire the second person. Because the predictor with the strongest correlation to actual job performance is actual job performance!

If our goal is to get better at reading interesting books or solving real problems, we should read interesting books or solve real problems!

Addendum 2 - The Valley

With greedy algorithms, we understand that they're generally correct, but not always. And they can be wrong in important ways. I bring this up because there's an important way the "interest algorithm" I described above is broken. (That's how you know I'm not selling you snake oil - the claims I make are falsifiable.)

It's entirely possible for the next step to develop our interests to be too steep, where there's no small step we can take that gets us anywhere interesting. Maths is the classic example - try to learn it on your own and you'll quickly go cross-eyed. I've always thought I was interested in maths, but I'm also interested in video games and video games are much easier.

I haven't fully figured out how to solve this problem yet, but I think I've figured out One Clever Trick™: Don't do it on my own.

Self-sufficiency is overrated. I could slog through confusing maths proofs on my own and get tangled up in a knot of misunderstanding, or I could just hire a tutor to point out that this definition is badly named and really means that, that theorem is amusing but not really used anywhere so don't waste time learning it, this intuition might make sense with these cases, but it falls apart when we consider those cases etc. etc..

I'm not Pythagoras. I don't have to prove two millennia of mathematical knowledge to show I'm "good at maths".

Why do we pointlessly insist on doing things on our own? Because we should be able to? By what reasoning? If we fail to do hard things on our own, and we see other people fail to do hard things on their own, isn't that enough evidence we shouldn't be able to?

Sure, some unusual person with some unusual circumstance might be able to. But why should we try to prove ourselves equal to every random person who is better than us at some random thing?

In what world does it make sense to do what we think "should" work instead of what actually works?

In part, it's an ideal inferred from the purpose of the education system. Crying babies are useless, so we train them up in schools, make them self-sufficient. Invest once, pay off forever. We're not supposed to have to ask for help again - with the very illogical exception of Masters and Phds, which look like schools, so they're okay.

But, you know, if you go to the gym for six months and get really ripped, does it make sense to say you're now self-sufficient in gym-going and shouldn't need to go to the gym anymore?

There's the matter of money. Why put a few hundred dollars a month into a tutor when I could put it into an index fund at 6% p.a.? It took me a long time to make that decision. One way I thought about it was, the smartest kids in school, half of the great geniuses of history - they all had private tutors. If they're smart because of the knowledge they got from private tutors when they were kids, what difference does it make if I got that knowledge now rather than when I was a kid?

We're willing to invest in private tutors for kids because doing well in school sends a signal, and that signal tells the Giant Claw Machine in the Sky to pick up the kid and put them on the golden escalator of meritocracy. If that's the only kind of benefit we're willing to pay for, it makes no sense to pay for tutors as an adult.

What if that's wrong? What if actual learning is an undervalued asset that I can pick up for cheap? I've always believed having broad, deep technical knowledge will give me opportunities no one else has. What if instead of paying $50,000 for four years of med school, I hire a Phd student for $50/hour and learn whatever the hell I want to learn? It won't make me a doctor, but it would make me great at med-tech. 

Putting my decision to hire a tutor in those terms makes it sound more justifiable, but in the end I don't think calling it an investment is right. I can't honestly say knowing more maths will pay off in any way.

I made my decision because I want deeply to be good at maths, and I can't do it on my own. That's enough reason for me.

Addendum 3 - Premature Optimisation

What if I'm not intelligent enough?

You don't know. I don't mean that in the (gag) the fish doesn't know how well it can swim if it's judged by how well it can climb trees way. I mean we literally don't know, one way or the other.

Are we not intelligent enough, or were our parents not educated enough to give us intellectual stimulation as kids? Not rich enough to give us private tutors? Were we unlucky enough to have bad teachers? Bad jobs? Do we merely lack the confidence to speak well? Or lack familiarity with a topic? Maybe the environment we're in isn't interesting enough to stir us to thought.

What even is intelligence, anyway? Is it one thing, or many things? Is it a trait, or a skill? If it's a trait, to what degree is it heritable? Changeable? How do we even begin to measure it, when we have so many conceptual and practical unknowns?

It may well be that I'm not intelligent enough to be an astrophysicist. But my lack of astrophysicist-ability also could be due to a hundred other things, and it's pointless - and impossible - to try and figure out what is "true".

If I explore my interests naturally, I will end up an astrophysicist if I'm suitable for it and it's suitable for me. Instead of trying to calculate the world state, whether I'm intelligent enough, and maths-oriented enough, and there's enough jobs, and... I can just follow the signal of "interest", which broadly covers everything I care to measure, and is also easier to measure.

If it's impossible to measure intelligence accurately, and measuring it doesn't help us make better decisions, then why measure it?

Addendum 4 - The Forgetting Curve

I've read somewhere once that forgetting is like pooping: Everybody does it, and there's no shame in doing it. But it's easy to learn something, forget it, realise we've forgotten it, and then have an existential crisis, where we feel like we're trying to scoop up sand with our fingers and it keeps slipping through.

First, as mentioned earlier, knowledge isn't just sand. It has structure, and it has meaning. Once we grasp the structure, it stops falling apart at a stiff breeze.

Second, imagine you're working at your desk and every second some annoying person adds a piece of paper on top of it. Some of the papers are useful, and some are... not. There's too many papers to sort, and when you try, you keep getting interrupted by new papers. Frustrated, you carry off the whole stack to the shredder, and by the time you come back there are even more papers on your desk!

But, you start to notice a pattern. Some of the papers are the same as before! And the papers which are the same tend to be the useful ones! That's what our brains are doing when it's doing this.

So when we get frustrated about having to learn something twice, thrice, etc., maybe we should be asking why we're trying to learn something so uninteresting and pointless we're not willing to learn it again.

The second time we learn something is always easier than the first, and the third even easier than the second. With each time I learn something again, I find I develop a deeper understanding, where I realise I was assuming something without thinking about it, or where I get to put the things I'm re-learning in the context of new things I've learnt since.

We can't say we want to memorise something instead of just saving a link somewhere because we want to process it deeply - and then turn around and say processing it deeply is too much work!