One thing I've learned as an adult that I didn't realize as a kid is how precisely you have to aim at a goal to hit it. If you choose to optimize something even slightly off to the side, you'll sometimes achieve almost nothing toward your intended goal.
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Can you please explain a bit further with an example... Very curious to understand
For example, if you want to learn a lot, but the thing you choose to optimize is grades. Many people implicitly treat learning and getting good grades as identical, but they are surprisingly far apart. http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
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Thanks for explaining..! Applying to regular life where people have a goal of happiness/freedom/security but end up optimizing for status/money/job etc.. nothing wrong with going for whatever one wants but make sure not optimizing for wrong goal...
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I have been trying to explain this to academics for so long...unfortunately this is how higher ed works. Trying to build knowledge in a particular area has a greater search space compared to answering what’s on the exam
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Agree on this example big time(this is why most interesting people I know where terrible students) . But as long as you know what the goal is and can step back occasionally it's fine as it's better than over optimizing for precision at start. Pretty sure you knew that though
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But how many terrible students became interesting ppl doing interesting things? It’s a very risky strategy not optimizing for grades in school unless you come from significant privilege that renders your grades irrelevant to your life trajectory.
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if you learn to get higher grades and only later you realize grades were not the point, it's easier to fill in the needed knowledge than if you had learned nothing because you thought grades don't matter
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“learned nothing”? where’s that assumption coming from?
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Great essay, and gets at big difference between startups vs big companies. At big companies, the test is performance reviews and getting promoted. Very “hackable”.
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Thought that was pretty insightful and put an idea I've had for a while in words in a way that i couldn't Tho endnote 10 is pretty clearly self-serving and you're looking at it backwards to come to that conclusion, but thats understandable
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In high school in South Africa in the 1980s, I clashed all the time in history class and would get sent to the office for a stern word or a caning, depending on the mood. /1
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It ended in a lecture from a head of department who blatantly said it didn’t matter what I was being taught was wrong; I had to learn it because I would be tested on it during final exams. That was the day I gave up on high school. Frigging clown act. /2
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