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Replying to
This addresses my main problem with waldenponding. To the extent *any* kind of thinking requires an input stream to work with, you can't arbitrarily decide a certain degree of retreat from "live" and a certain "deep work project" will be a net positive returns portfolio.
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I have never had a problem with social media being a "distraction". My gonzo retreat/approach radar for intuitively calibrating how to balance my temporal leverage portfolio has been pretty good. And more importantly, requires no "addiction management" type behaviors.
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I find that when I do get sucked into a longer project, I naturally retreat exactly as much as needed to "feed" that project the info stream it needs. If I need to spend more time with 10-year-old books I naturally do that.
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This isn't a superpower. It's evidence the addiction hypothesis is much weaker than it looks. And that for nearly any subject, there is a shit ton more signal in the GSCITC than you might assume. Sign: output from "deep work" is generally very underwhelming.
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I have been generally very unimpressed with the work people seem to generate when they go waldenponding to work on supposedly important things. The comparable people who stay more plugged in seem to produce better work.
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My kindest reading of people who retreat so far it actually compromises their work is that it is a mental health preservation move because they can't handle the optimum GSCITC immersion for their project. Their work could be improved if they had the stomach for more gonzo-nausea.
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My harshest reading is that they're narcissistic snowflakes who overvalue their work simply because they did it.
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So my recommendations would be: develop an intuitive ability to tune your GSCITC immersion from full-retreat if you got a big grant to do some work only 3 other people in the world understand... to full-speed-ahead gonzo immersion if you need 2y oracular foresight
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If you find your natural brain has a comfort zone, then build a second brain that equilibrates it there, and use it more or less as you need to wander from that set-point.
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One reason I haven't invested in building as strong a BASB as many is simply that my comfort set-point is mostly near the gonzo edge. I need the full 2+ year foresight potential of the GSCITC for the thinking I'm most effective at. If it means continuous partial PTSD so be it.
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Replying to
And also, I need a better term than GSCITC... but something without baggage. Hive mind, borg, AGI, efficient narrative marketplace... all the terms I've been able to think of have inappropriate or misleading connotations.
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The cost of being in gonzo mode online is admittedly quite high. The effect on more retreated modes of production (essays, books, products) is very noticeable. My best thinking in the last few years has been on twitter, but the reach is far lower than my blog or newsletter
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Final point: you are almost certainly overvaluing information from history and undervaluing information being processed live in the GSCITC for *any* project you take on. Why do I think that? At some point AlphaGoZero discarded all human history of Go playing and went full gonzo
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This is a form of temporal egotism. We have identities anchored in personal/collective history, and we like to think distribution we are attached to is the distribution of input value. Chances are, an AI approaching any given problem you take on will throw away most of history.
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Final final point. I flagged conversational media eating authorial media. This has been my personal ego challenge. It is hard to admit, having spent 10y building up an identity/vanity around my longform, that my conversational thinking embedded in the GSCITC is better quality.
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Replying to
Wrote this in early 2012: "…writing restricted mostly to the “tip of the spear”, the most relevant, most current, most…insightful take or connection of dots possible. Because that is where value, if there be any at all, can still be created"
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