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The introductory placeholder post vaguely sketching out what this newsletter is going to be about (answer: "idk lol"). https://t.co/kXfy8Ofv0l
Total Work #1: In which I examine the idea of productivity, and suggest that much of the time we should step out of the frame of things as productive or unproductive, and instead regard them as nonproductive (their productiveness is irrelevant) https://t.co/EacHmz8H5y
Total Work #2: In which I examine the emotion of *acedia*, a felt inability to care about things you would normally expect to care about, and suggest that it arises partly from a sustained excess of caring and that this is a lot of what burnout is. https://t.co/Ole8GYd35U
In which I write about my experiences doing a PhD, and use this as a worked example of applying some of the skills of emotional debugging that I've been talking about on the notebook. https://t.co/bKytxwrKDz
Total Work #3: In which I talk about how complaining is very good and you should do more of it. I speculate that this will likely reduce burnout, and sketch out what a healthy culture of complaint in the workplace looks like. https://t.co/Fj9DtMJ2I1
In which I talk about how we all have a really weird and eclectic skillset, and this means that most general advice (which can't assume any particular skillset) may be poorly suited to you in particular because it misses out on easier things you can do. https://t.co/X9trdcx8SE
Total Work #4: In which I suggest that possibly work is actually very good, but we're looking for it in the wrong places. Based on articulating a distinction between work and job from some of Thomas F. Green's early work. https://t.co/wbpQ16VsH9
Interest is a felt sense that a subject is worth thinking about. Whether it *is* worth it is dependent on many things which help us maintain interest. Discussing it with others is a big one, so it is hard to maintain niche interests. https://t.co/Oxp8cJFuPk
Different subject areas differ greatly in how much prerequisite knowledge they require, and if you've not experienced what it's like to have a really long chain of prerequisites it may be fairly unrelatable. This week I attempt to explain what it's like. https://t.co/sxumk0cFPQ
The problem with having interesting ideas is that once you've implemented them they stop being interesting, which feels like a loss. I talk through some of the emotional dynamics of that for me and what seems to work for solving this. https://t.co/AMSI9gHhkH
As well as writing to communicate it's also worth learning and using writing techniques that are for your own understanding and whose output you will probably never share with other people. This week I discuss how those work and give some examples. https://t.co/xsgBH4be8a
I chickened out of sending the very grumpy newsletter I wrote yesterday, so instead here's a link post drawing together a thread in some of my past writing about how to take into account the cost of acquiring knowledge in order to make better decisions. https://t.co/FSBJT0hD2D
There's a significant gap between what behaviour is responsible and what behaviour gets viewed by others as responsible, but our feelings (and thus moral intuitions) tend to track the latter not the former. https://t.co/NtE6LtqUzG
Often it's too much work to do something ethically, so we let someone else do it unethically for us so we can have plausible deniability while judging them for it. We should probably stop doing that, but unfortunately it's a major basis for the economy. https://t.co/4MgvJpLL6B
It's really great to have environments in which every problem is your fault, because it means you can just solve problems instead of having to do a lot of politics to persuade people to take them seriously. Unfortunately this is often not viable. https://t.co/gCKVLf469J
Oh I forgot to post last week's newsletter on the thread, which was a short piece telling people about the concept of "positive deviance" and a offering an invitation to commenters to contribute examples. https://t.co/w64od8NZfQ
Overthinking has a bad reputation, but actually overthinking is very good and you're probably just bad at it and using it inappropriately as a result. You should probably overthink things more until you get better at it. https://t.co/02LIaKrZ79
I forgot to tweet a link to this this morning, which I suppose is only appropriate given that this week's newsletter is about half arsing. TLDR it's good. https://t.co/VAXXPWJgPS
A rather late and deliberately over-complicated post about how we should sometimes refuse to learn to adapt to our environment and instead force our environment to adapt to us. https://t.co/1DpVeudlq1
I went off-script and this week's newsletter is a brief introduction to shadow work - exploring parts of yourself that you'd prefer not to admit were there - centred around an exercise we did as a group this Sunday. https://t.co/7L4trckI0N
Continuing the theme of working with feelings, I suggest that a lot of what people need to get better at this is to just find their emotional state intrinsically interesting and worth thinking about. https://t.co/6YyoIsuS5F
You know that thing where something is both weirdly widespread and weirdly bad? Often that's because of something I think of as "monocropping", where the producers of the thing have optimised for it to be as widespread as possible, trading against quality https://t.co/ZRFxABJKEg
Smartness is mostly being good at a bunch of stuff, and a lot of that stuff is things you can train or rely on external support for, so most people can probably be a lot smarter if they want to and have the time to sink into the problem. https://t.co/UUWii5c6fz
Common knowledge is something that everyone knows, and everyone knows that everyone knows, etc. Often the purpose of conversations about feelings in relationships is not to share knowledge of those feelings, but to make that knowledge common among you. https://t.co/5IA54iGY2m
When things are unexpectedly hard, our instinct is to try harder. This is almost always a mistake, especially for things which were previously manageable. Instead we should put some effort in to figuring out why the thing is hard and making it easier. https://t.co/iq69CTiSzX
Often when you have a problem that feels intractable, it's really useful to ask yourself "How would I solve this problem if I had an absurd amount of money to throw at it?" Generally you don't have said money, but the answers are revealing anyway. https://t.co/czKSzmUcIP
There's an unfortunate feedback loop where you don't like doing something, so you don't become good at it, so it becomes extra aversive. You can probably break this feedback loop by just learning to be good at the thing so that it stops being scary. https://t.co/2GFEJzL9SZ
Today's newsletter is about what I think "emotionally healthy" looks like. I suggest it means more or less just having your emotions well integrated into your everyday life, and having your life improved by that. https://t.co/k6kvKN7MWr
When we have a giant backlog of tasks it's tempting to think we have to get on top of the backlog. This makes all the individual tasks seem too large to deal with. One way out of this is to explicitly decouple those tasks so they seem their true size. https://t.co/gV2F3MeGXU
Today's newsletter is a slightly cleaned up version of my @threadapalooza thread about how trust works from yesterday. https://t.co/9eK0ILj71Q
There are problems which seem like they should be easy, and yet we can't solve them because to do so we first have to become the sort of person for whom they are easy. This is good, actually, because it gives us concrete access to emotional difficulties. https://t.co/z6Gn5lQnhZ
I was a day late in writing this, so I thought I'd use the opportunity to reflect on 2020 and what I need to get my shit together on in 2021 on - mostly my PhD. https://t.co/6egeDf1gO4
If you're like me, you start and then drop a lot of habits. This might actually be perfectly reasonable behaviour: A lot of habits have reasons that the cost-benefit analysis of doing them gets worse over time, so they later become not worth it. https://t.co/33avJJhOUF
I'm completely failing to write newsletter posts this week so I put together a newsletter version of my book recommendation thread for posterity. https://t.co/TRiMTCJLDk
Putting the newsletter on a very short hiatus. Skipping this week and next, to resume on February 3rd, possibly with a slightly reduced frequency of writing for a while, so I can focus on my PhD slightly better. https://t.co/Zyajlxsc6r
With any skill you reach a point where you can't improve without learning subskills you've neglected so far. Unfortunately this requires you to start again, and spend some time being bad at the thing you think of yourself as being good at, which sucks. https://t.co/9jDyzLroqY
It's much easier to try potentially unpleasant things if you're allowed to stop if they're as bad as you expect. Unfortunately, you probably grew up hearing this from adults who were lying when they said it, so it's hard for this to feel true. https://t.co/AWeCBOykNR
Knowledge is social, in that our basic understanding of the world relies on things other people tell us. Unfortunately, many of those people are lying, and their knowledge of the world is in turn also based on people lying to them. https://t.co/8vCOuyeJ7R
New format, where I post a selection of shorter fragments of things I'm thinking about. Today, I talk a bit about why the tail end of the pandemic feels hard, the skills of reading, and why writing is great despite my current difficulties with it. https://t.co/QrbZsN3PEr
Fragments on the theme of "Intellectual DIY" and how we synthesise knowledge from the store of intellectual resources available to us. (I was going to edit this more, but what with vaccine side effects that's not happening, and I think it's fine as is) https://t.co/xwaJOvS1qM
It's worth distinguishing problems that are genuinely difficult (in that you might fail) from problems that are "just hard work" (in that they're effortful), because our moods affect each differently, and we can often turn the former into the latter. https://t.co/XJcRbUdS8v
This week's newsletter is mostly personal news, which is that as of last week I've quit my PhD. Because everything is a teachable moment, I also take the opportunity to talk a bit about the process of making difficult decisions. https://t.co/TvugBZs7fH
There's no time to fact check everything, but also we need to learn true things. Managing the balance between these is tricky, but we can mostly solve the problem by learning to make good snap judgements and sharing the load of figuring out relevance. https://t.co/4N1Y5Wyc0Y
How do you decide what to do with your life when it turns out all your very clever decision making strategies rely on avoiding decisions that matter? Unfortunately I have more questions about this than answers, but the questions seem more helpful anyway. https://t.co/uyXkb7jwrz
I woke up *super* cranky this morning, so instead of finishing off the piece I was meant to have out today you get a long rant about why I think telling other people how to live their lives is massive dick move and you should stop it. https://t.co/fJX3rYVdMX
Emerging from depression feels like returning to the world, and apparently this makes me wax poetic. Also I like it here in the world, I think I'll stay this time. (This is a post for paid subscribers only) https://t.co/iJyl9e7txN
We treat disappointment as a huge deal, but everyone (including people we respect) is disappointing some of the time, and we're better off learning healthy ways to navigate that and use it to improve our lives, instead of denying this. https://t.co/EvrJVuu9X2
Life gets much better as an adult once you give yourself permission to be weird, but the way we treat weirdness is complicated, and made worse by bad childhood experiences, so it's worth learning how to navigate that well. https://t.co/m8VDqrzZv4
Often when we want to change our lives, it's useful to think of life as composed of discrete events that we want to change the quantity or quality of. Here are some useful ways of thinking about how to do so. https://t.co/vq6eAPoBt6
I've spent a long time trying to figure out why my health is weird and concluded it was probably mostly depression. Here are some thoughts from that process about the intersection between physical and mental health and the nature of knowledge and science. https://t.co/MR5CSnNffJ
Sometimes when things are hard it really is just that you're missing something, and you can get yourself unblocked by finding out how other people do it. In this week's letter I share a long series of such insights and some general lessons from them. https://t.co/ZlNpAGNd8W
Not really sure how to summarise this one TBH. It's an exploration of how we treat people who are weird and difficult but also too useful to ignore, looking at three examples of such people and how we treat them. https://t.co/7KxUklJhnL
Recording yourself while you talk out loud about what you're doing is a neat trick that may improve your skill more than you're expecting. I did it for Slay the Spire, which worked great, and writing this newsletter which... was interesting. https://t.co/Y00z4OpLSy
There's a useful way to reorder how you work through an inbox that makes them seem less overwhelming. I've ended up explaining it to a bunch of people recently, so here's a more complete explanation of how to do this. https://t.co/ZWMXGgKCrQ
In @vaughn_tan's "Uncertainty Mindset" he talks about "Open-ended style" - a well defined sense of style that still permits innovation within it. This week I start from some of his thoughts on that, and connect it up with some related thoughts. https://t.co/bQGtLLverh
A meditation on how none of us are really "fully grown up", and various parts of ourselves lag behind and may need a lot more help to get unstuck than society seems at all well set up to give them. https://t.co/X3hWHQHmVB
Two things people complain about in modern life are a lack of community and a lack of sense of purpose. This combination is probably not a coincidence, as communities are how we construct the emotional responses that lead to a sense of purpose. https://t.co/rPD5J9i2bj
I'm on a bit of an ethics kick at the moment. Today I talk about how you can't really consider ethical decisions in isolation of your broader life, because the choices that lead to this being the ethical decision you are faced with will often matter more. https://t.co/hE5oZJ6NOp
Ethical thought experiments are weird and seem kinda pointless, but also maybe they're necessary and the real problem is just doing them badly. I compare some interesting papers, and discuss some of the things we can learn from them. https://t.co/v5Z3Mw3tKp
Taking a brief break from the newsletter. Issues will resume in about a week and a half. https://t.co/RsxEUQKi4v
I tend to value predictability of behaviour in cases where others don't, and as a result people often think I'm apologising when I'm not, and I get cranky when people blindside me, so I thought I'd explain why this matters and why people should do it more. https://t.co/wiRySItnEn
I have pretty bad taste in some things, and I'd like to have better taste in some of them, so I'm interested in the question of how one goes about doing that and thought I'd talk through some of my thoughts on the subject. (This is a paid issue) https://t.co/PQI8uUMUW4
People are bad at giving advice. Here is some advice on how to be good at giving advice, which starts by comparing you unfavourably to a rubber duck. https://t.co/9nwJWw2r1P
If you're struggling to get better at something, you might have some bad habits to unlearn, and need to practice in a context where those habits don't apply. Based on a good conversation about learning strategies I had with @ejames_c the other day. https://t.co/459UNUT502
First of hopefully many paid issues which are a glimpse into stuff I'm thinking about at the moment. This week it's about caffeine withdrawal, my upcoming plans to do more work with companies, and the book "The Good Jobs Strategy" https://t.co/teWajzE86o
Oh, I forgot to post this when it went out. Another current thinking issue for paid subscribers, this one about the link between play and self-improvement, and how it's hard to get better at something if you can't have fun with it. https://t.co/dcphhNUOAC
A problem I, and seemingly a lot of other people I know, have is that it's very hard to work on whatever you want when given time to do so. This problem also crops up with building in slack time at work. Why does this happen and what can we do about it? https://t.co/tDN3QaV6Jl
Many decisions in life are much easier than we treat them as, and as a result getting good at recognising and making easy decisions is very life improving. Here's some partial advice on how to do that. https://t.co/lB2wEzJhgb
I don't really know how to explain what this one is about, sorry. https://t.co/srCHxkQSLC
@DRMacIver > they make your life happier and simpler, and all you have to do to obtain that is give up things that matter to you. reminds me of something @jameswjesso quoted from a book on 1920s Jazz musicians: "heroin is great. it turns all your problems into 1 problem: get more heroin"
I have a working theory that one of the reasons people struggle with understanding their emotions is that nobody has clearly explained to them how understanding your emotions is supposed to work. Here's my attempt to fix that. https://t.co/nA3PTVnh8k
I'm not writing the newsletter this month while I do the daily writing on my notebook, so I sent out a short notice to that effect that describes a little more about what I'm doing there. https://t.co/ZJhCiRW53A
People don't actually work 40 hour work weeks and I regularly have to explain this to friends who are breaking themselves trying, so I figured I should write this down somewhere. https://t.co/OHawG2pxAP
@DRMacIver Interestingly I’ll put my partner up as a counter example of this, in that when she is on she is *on* and will crank out 40-50 solid hours week after week, barely stopping for lunch it terrifies me honestly, some people just are able to focus like that
@DRMacIver I know you address this in the post of course, but I guess I want to make clear that a vast number of those people manage it, don’t in fact exaggerate and don’t burn out It does have consequences of course, that’s undeniable
@DRMacIver I guess the point is that your advice is useful in domains where the premise is true, but a whole different survival strategy is required in spaces where people really actually do work those hours consistently
You can try to understand the behaviour of groups of people by thinking about how individual people would act, or as the result of incentives, but it really goes much better if you combine the two by combining user personas with economics-style thinking. https://t.co/JDY9yi3Pej
Also apparently based on feedback this is a really good explanation of user personas. I mostly included it because I needed people who weren't software developers (or hadn't done user experience work) to understand this post, but it's probably useful for that too.
Some sorts of problems produce an embarrassment of riches. e.g. Bell Labs basically invented half of modern computing. I think it's down to the structure of the problem they faced, and there are plenty more problems like it. https://t.co/BR99RBrSDm
Today I will teach you a very useful skill that will definitely improve your life: Reading ROT13. Joking aside, learning to read ROT13 is interesting, and illuminates some things about learning in general. https://t.co/j2HtTs48Si
@DRMacIver Dope post! Made me think of this, which takes a similar look at sourcing immortality https://t.co/T5P1jSSh9s