There’s a family of interesting related arguments:
“You are not enough people” (Vonnegut theory of marital conflict)
“Reality has a surprising amount of detail” (John Salvatier theory of physical reality)
“Everything is harder than it looks” (David Wong theory of effort shock)
Conversation
I cite these a lot, but in case you haven’t seen these ideas before, go read them now. Links:
goodreads.com/quotes/300997-
johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/real
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These are all in some sense the opposite of “unreasonable effectiveness of X” arguments.
Instead of surprisingly more leverage than you think, X gives you unsurprisingly *less* leverage than you hope.
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If you haven’t seen the “unreasonable effectiveness” genre of philosophizing, links:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unrea
static.googleusercontent.com/media/research
karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn
arxiv.org/abs/1801.03924
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Vonnegut: being married gets you a smaller fraction of the social connection you need than you hope
Salvatier: Foundational first-principles knowledge tells you less about the world than you hope
Wong: Having a worthy goal and talent is a smaller part of “doing” than you hope
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These are all special cases of “the entirely reasonable ineffectiveness of hope”
Entirely reasonable ineffectiveness of true love
Entirely reasonable ineffectiveness of true knowledge
Entirely reasonable ineffectiveness of true purpose
Each “true X” is a hope in disguise.
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You’ll often see the hope articulated in lofty sentimental assertions.
“Love is all you need”
“Truth conquers all”
“Unwavering purpose overcomes all”
Each is of course reversible by a satirical truth. No hope survives first contact with the associated reality intact.
Replying to
Overloading Wong’s notion of effort shock, and his reference to training montages, each of these hopes is a sort of montage shock. In a movie, the shocking part would be a wishful montage sequence. The grind turns to 5 minutes of fun set to music.
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It’s a basic trick of narrative engineering: validate false hopes by obscuring entirely reasonable hard parts with musical montages.
I don’t know what to do with this generalization. This is the entirely reasonable ineffectiveness of mere tweeting.
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Vaguely rhyming principle: reality is far less sexy than aesthetes hope.
Conceptual fantasy art is dripping with 10x more sexiness than reality.
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