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Academia values Big Answers, and doesn’t value solving micro-problems. The world cares about having solved the little problems, and doesn’t care about your Big Answers. https://t.co/HEF9AFIUtD
The interesting part is guruship (~= helping people change their lives) often combines both: - a concrete framework, that solved the micro-problems in the process - and a vague sense of a “New Big Idea” that gets people excited (it doesn’t have to be very novel or big) https://t.co/SueootNkO9
I’ve seen this a lot in helping people change their screentime habits. If they’re tried it a dozen times before, or read articles about it, they don’t believe this time can be that particularly different, and so it isn’t.
(i.e., there’s some non-trivial emotional work, some non-trivial self-signalling work, in maybe partly the same way psychedelics do, of “change is possible. this is one of those environments/times to accept change” https://t.co/FPuVY9iLJ3
It’s real in the same sense the placebo effect is *literally* real and will *literally* help you. If you ignore it, you will literally get worse outcomes in your life because you refuse to acknowledge reality: the placebo effect worked. It did something. https://t.co/0L47nYGHJa
on the word New: It has to be/feel new to the people receiving it. It doesn’t have to be new or novel to the world. how did it take young Yatharth so long to figure this about the world https://t.co/pKfBIKJRTk
@Kirsten3531 @mechanicalmonk1 Ok Kirsten I’m going to be really honest This is one of the biggest insights I have discovered this year *Reinventing the wheel is very fucking useful to other people* In fact I would argue It’s the vast majority of being useful to other people
that’s not a mystery, of course. the reason is this https://t.co/KyzMaW8x7D
Nerds live in a STEM world, where what counts is being smart. Once you’ve figured out how to do it smarly, it is done. It’s v diff from the real world, where stuff takes *time.* Where the actual *doing* of it that counts. It’s extraordinarily different. https://t.co/xr9BC8smrY