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Example: @QiaochuYuan and @visakanv contra the dude being retweeted https://t.co/CVdHrGTRfX
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv Origins of my PAE: Seeded by rustic american dad Nurtured in Boy Scouts (you can't dream your way out of setting up camp) Fanned by https://t.co/BBDVg61ftS "harsh truths" Exploded via Deep Work Cult Supernova from reading about go-getter start up types
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv "No one (my peers in school) does stuff nearly as cool as the people I'm reading about online. All the people I see online are PAE. Also I can easily imagine these people shit talking me if I'm not working hard. Just the only way to heaven is PAE"
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv Quick Aside on how FUCKING WILD it is that through highschool and college I judged my actions based on a made up peer group of people I'd never met in my life. "What would David Wong think?" "Would Time Ferriss approve?" "What would Eliezer Yudowsky do?"
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv Good shit from PAE: There are simple things you just need to DO. All of the tasks in boy scouts are great examples. If you don't set up your tent, you sleep in the rain. If you don't make a good menu, you eat shit food. I think this was great training on baseline competency.
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv Boy Scouts was the first time I lived in an environment with direct feedback / connections between my actions and quality of life. School/home was always "Do the thing so the big people treat you well" Scouts was "do the thing because it makes life better" v useful
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv Bad Shit: Couldn't deal with stuff I didn't see a path to learn how to solve. Big dreams? Not if you don't know how to execute. If you kept wanting them, you'd be one of those punks who just WISHES but never helps make it happen. Like kevin. Fuck kevin.
Claim: the PAE stance exists to prevent resources from being given to people who won't deliver on their promises, and to prevent status from flowing to those who haven't "paid their dues like I have" fundamentally, it's an interface for being taken seriously
^if it evolved under those pressures, you shouldn't expect it to be optimized for "getting you want you want"! Now, there's a legit problem you need to solve if you want to coordinate with people, but first i wanna think about how PAE can break down just applied to ur own shit
"If you don't do it, no one will do it for you" 1). what if it's not worth doing in the first place? 2). lol, a large amount of things can toooooooootally work out by chance / sometimes people WILL do it for you https://t.co/yL3yGnnhUR
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv Good shit from PAE: There are simple things you just need to DO. All of the tasks in boy scouts are great examples. If you don't set up your tent, you sleep in the rain. If you don't make a good menu, you eat shit food. I think this was great training on baseline competency.
aaaagh, again, the reason thinking here is so hard is because PAE is really about defending from mooches and "what's socially useful to tell people to do" yet is supposedly talking about "what is the best way to succeed?" https://t.co/TPX1AT0CNL
yeah, this isn't about "Don't work hard" fresh morning eyes, new angle when I was in the full throttle of PAE I thought "You're not allowed to want anything unless you have legible 12 point plan laying out how it will happen with high probability https://t.co/iSx1Ao2g69
(see how this is motivated by PAE as a coordination tool) I can't think about if writing a book would be cool unless I'm writing one AS WE SPEAK I can't think it would be cool to have my own business unless I'm building it RN, or am showing myself sufficient ENTHUSIASM
i love doing a LOT of things. in highschool, I was beginning to feel the weight of being into so much shit, because I felt like i couldn't let anything go. i had so many things I was trying to do "for just 20 minutes a day" that it was eating up the whole day :(
"don't half ass them, drop shit!" in the PAE mindset I had, dropping an activity meant I COULD NEVER COME BACK TO IT EVER AGAIN! "I love magic! I'm just taking a break for a year to do other cool things" "FUCKING POSER! WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?!?!?!"
i could only enjoy something if I had a legible trace of working towards inevitable mastery that was totes gonna succeed hmm, that's exactly what's useful to signal "seriousness"! ,y PAE was *secretly* about credibility and coordination, not you living a good life
with needing this legible inevitable success myth, i only conceive of dropping something if i had some "reliable" system to refresh things. cuz i loved so many things, i was shacking myself with these unholy "spaced repetition" systems, slowly sacrificing all degrees of freedom
My PAE didn't let me go "I'll put magic on pause I get pulled into it again" because there's no legible story about when that will happen. but after a lot of self work, I did take an intentional indefinite break from magic. and then came back! and then took a break again!
my PAE was insidious and meta "blah blah lean, failure is important!" duh. the moral I took was "you're allowed to fail, but only if it's in a well defined subsection of you inevitable success myth" sure you can "fail", but you're not allowed to actually fail
even more insidious: legible plans require legible goals legibility is an iron grip that can easily crush delicate thing that is taste/values the earlier on, and the more legible the goal, the more likely it will diverge from your values
because PAE is about being a Reliable Tool To Others, it can't endorse changing the goal, iterating on what you care about, refining your mission and directive that's not in the contract, and fulfilling the contract is all important.
@QiaochuYuan @visakanv Other PAE origins: online forums about close up magic. "I spent years learning these skills. I deserve status in our community. Fuck these newbs that don't put in the work and are trying to get lots of respect and status. You ain't shit unless you WORKING." Some good, some bad