Team environments contain lots of activities (meetings, answering questions, reports, etc) which are quite tricky because they’re *sometimes* very valuable. And that makes it easy not to notice when you’re only doing them to hide when feeling aversion to tough creative problems.
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I’ve noticed that displacement activities are much more obvious when working alone. There’s no mailing list of questions to answer, so hiding often look more like surfing the internet, cleaning the house, etc. It’s much harder to accidentally convince yourself that that’s work!
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Related: Was reading earlier Hamming's book. May or may not lead to interesting output (Braben's book did inspire a whole series of posts at Nintil!). Am I tricking myself into thinking that this is work just because I like the book or is it genuine work?
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The true answer depends on *why* you read it. (Are you dodging your core work and fooling yourself?) But given that your core creative work involves analyzing and writing about “the means of scientific production,” my priors would be pretty optimistic.
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The why is background thinking that "A policy of reading such and such kind of work will on average lead to interesting output even if only 10% of candidate books are that stimulating", there's the aspect of tracking retrospectively if the policy is successful in the long term
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So... maybe I should only worry too much if restrospectively I see that the useful/read ratio goes down worryingly I think
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What you’re talking about is really a strategic question (“is reading these books a good strategy for achieving my goals?”); what I’m talking about is more an emotional question (“am I reading this book in response to aversive impulses when doing hard work?”). Both relevant!
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Admittedly there was a bit of the latter, not feeling very generative lately, so it's both hiding+may be useful. Today I woke up in a creative mood and back to writing so 🤔🤷♂️