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This is sort of what I mean by being against lifelong learning. What most people actually end up with is a kind of limited life training. A finite bag of tricks that stabilizes by ~35 and backstops you under the mounting pressure of a median life.
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“When you’re under pressure you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training.” -Navy Seals saying
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Life is growing pressure. At a certain point, it collapses your learning curve, and you are a robot governed by your “training” — conditioned already learned adaptive behaviors. Every OODA eventually turns into an O_ODA. It’s a when, not an if.
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Think of it as adaptation reserves. It’s a race to accumulate as much as you can before the pressures of human condition turn you into a non-orienting robot. If you’re lucky, your learning curve cruising altitude will be comfy one with jet stream tailwind. FU$ is a good altitude.
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If you’re *really* lucky you’ll be able to preserve the illusion that you’re still learning. Nah. If there’s no open-ended adaptation stakes with non-diminishing marginal risk, you’re just chasing pleasant stimulation, not learning.
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Typo 3 tweets up: O_DA, not O_ODA A non-orienting OODA loop. Like “learning” to solve sudokus at 70 while comfortably retired is stimulation seeking, not learning in hard sense lifelong learning people act like they’re doing. You could call that lifelong learning but it’s weak.
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Only 3 kinds of people believe in lifelong learning Young people who aren’t done learning yet and don’t realize winter’s coming People growing richer (or otherwise succeeding in life-adaptive ways) faster than they’re aging, outrunning the growing pressure okayable boomers™
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My claim is roughly that whether you’re growth or fixed mindset, in the median case, life pressures will balance and eventually overwhelm your motivation to learn. You can only hope you’ll level off in a good place by then. Again, when, not if.
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Joke interlude. This is the only original joke I’ve made up in my life.
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Replying to @literalbanana
Doctor: you only have a few hours to live I’m afraid, how would you like to spend them? Patient: Bring...me...startup...podcast...at...8x...speed
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This whole thread plus original snark inspired by noticing how little learning the learning LARPers are actually doing. They’re creating an illusion of learning. There are derpy people I know who are the same they were 10 years ago who claim to be “constantly learning”
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Some replies asking me what definition of learning I’m using. You’re welcome to your own, but if you’re not changing in ways that alter your adaptive fit into your environment, you’re not learning by my definition. You’re larping learning or seeking stimulation.
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It’s odd that it’s okay to be a champion of excellence as “meritorious” or a champion of the left-behind/oppressed as “unfortunate”, but noticing the conditions and adaptations of the vast middle is taboo. Mediocrity, self-delusion, finite learning... modalities of the middle.
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Societal grand narratives are driven by a wishful hobbesian false Darwinism. A world of absolute winners and utter losers. No hanging on, treading water, sinking to training, surviving, good-enoughing, wing-and-prayering. The great 1-sigma blindspot in societal self-images.
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“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” — Edward Abbey. Original context was an environmentalist critique of the logic of capitalism. “Lifelong learning” is actually the same ideology at a personal life level.
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It’s even a contradiction in terms. Immortalist learning would be a better term. By definition “life” is finite, with non-learning boundary conditions. Lifelong learning implies a sawtooth wave discontinuity at the end of life. As in my joke a few tweets up.
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The arguments against endless-growth capitalism are different (resource limits, mounting externalities) but that too is endless learning. But at least there it’s kinda well-posed since the economy might be immortal for all we know. The market might really be an eternal learner.
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If you had enough money you could hire a permanent Chinese translator. Money solves learning if it’s only a means rather than an end in itself.
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I do think some people, like for instance is doing "lifelong learning" in a meaningful sense - games/graphics, then rockets, now AI. But it could also be that the core knowledge like math, physics, programming is widely applicable across different fields.
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