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If you don’t switch to hard mode by 35, life switches to impossible mode for you by 45. Middle-class privilege + mediocre intelligence + decent strategic thinking = incentives are heavily loaded in favor of getting addicted to playing in easy mode by like 19
Hard mode is gamer lingo, but the default examples in my mind are: 1. Seeing the path to easy straight A’s/4.0 gpa but taking the hard subjects that actually interest you and getting Bs/Cs 2. Studying the subject with enough interest that you don’t have to study for the test
Plenty of adult life decisions have the same choice architecture — basically bucking the Lebowski theorem but for humans… bothering with a task that’s harder than hacking the reward function attached to it. Choosing not to hack even though you are capable of it.
Money, dating, fame, status, publications, awards (all the way up to Nobel) there’s always a reward function you can hack. Hard mode is when by default you choose not to. But it has to be a choice. Not having or understanding the option is clueless mode.
I haven’t read this book, but I like the title… proper hard-mode signaling. I don’t know if it loves up to the title though https://t.co/frSxQQH2Sx
Hard mode is not pain-fetishizing or ritual monastic discipline mode though. If someone else creates it for you, it’s not really a hard mode but a kind of religion mode. Hard mode isn’t so much a choreographed structure of soul-cleansing difficulty as it is a way of seeing.
It’s like having always noticing the hacks but rarely using them, and positioning yourself so you don’t get played by the people who do use them. You avoid using them not out of any misplaced sense of honor or fair play, but because life gets nihilistically dull if you do.
Fitness is perhaps the clearest example. There really is no point “cheating” your way to records/awards or target weights etc. And the impossible mode that kicks in if you neglect it enough is irreversible slide into middle-aged chronic ill-health
Easy mode is actually very hard if you have low tolerance for arbitrary bullshit because that’s what you have to get good at. Like getting good at Jeopardy at top level is about buzzer reaction speed apparently not trivia knowledge.
Several people mentioning #75hard so I looked that up. Definitely not what I’m on about. The point here is indefinite partial immunity to temptations of easy mode. My version of hard mode can work with lazy/slow lane. The hard part is saying no and doing nothing a lot of the time
If you don’t want much and aren’t very ambitious, hard mode can be pretty easy in absolute terms. If you have lots of appetite for life, hard mode will be absolutely hard and the temptations of easy hacks ver high. Easy to be honest if you want $10k. Hard if you want $10 billion.
@vgr I've been addicted to hard mode for a long time. Sometimes it seems like a mistake. Maybe I could really push the needle on something meaningful and important for myself and others if I'd just let myself run with strengths more often.
@vgr Your "hard mode" concept has some parallels with this https://t.co/Ao2nE1Lel1
@vgr Funnily there is a parallel in ML :) If you train it to perform a "harder" task like predicting the next word for all sentences on the internet, it becomes good at many downstream easy tasks like classifying sentiments (maybe escaping goodharts law)
@vgr this at all related to this? https://t.co/jf54dJxYfv