Conversation

If you don’t switch to hard mode by 35, life switches to impossible mode for you by 45. Middle-class privilege + mediocre intelligence + decent strategic thinking = incentives are heavily loaded in favor of getting addicted to playing in easy mode by like 19
54
1,587
Replying to
Plenty of adult life decisions have the same choice architecture — basically bucking the Lebowski theorem but for humans… bothering with a task that’s harder than hacking the reward function attached to it. Choosing not to hack even though you are capable of it.
Quote Tweet
The Lebowski theorem: No superintelligent AI is going to bother with a task that is harder than hacking its reward function
Show this thread
2
255
Money, dating, fame, status, publications, awards (all the way up to Nobel) there’s always a reward function you can hack. Hard mode is when by default you choose not to. But it has to be a choice. Not having or understanding the option is clueless mode.
5
203
Hard mode is not pain-fetishizing or ritual monastic discipline mode though. If someone else creates it for you, it’s not really a hard mode but a kind of religion mode. Hard mode isn’t so much a choreographed structure of soul-cleansing difficulty as it is a way of seeing.
2
142
It’s like having always noticing the hacks but rarely using them, and positioning yourself so you don’t get played by the people who do use them. You avoid using them not out of any misplaced sense of honor or fair play, but because life gets nihilistically dull if you do.
2
158
Fitness is perhaps the clearest example. There really is no point “cheating” your way to records/awards or target weights etc. And the impossible mode that kicks in if you neglect it enough is irreversible slide into middle-aged chronic ill-health
3
156
Oh yeah, I remember seeing this now. Possibly where I unconsciously picked up the idea from. version is basically the same concept.
Quote Tweet
Replying to @vgr
Your "hard mode" concept has some parallels with this thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/26/pla
2
63
Ignoring the temptations of Goodhart’s law systematically basically. Which means you have to learn to see them reliably first.
2
52
Easy mode is actually very hard if you have low tolerance for arbitrary bullshit because that’s what you have to get good at. Like getting good at Jeopardy at top level is about buzzer reaction speed apparently not trivia knowledge.
4
105
Some similarities with “do the work” but that’s usually about piously pursuing a specific goal with a Noble Heart and True Spirit. Hard mode is less directed, and has no particular spiritual prescription attached.
5
47
Several people mentioning #75hard so I looked that up. Definitely not what I’m on about. The point here is indefinite partial immunity to temptations of easy mode. My version of hard mode can work with lazy/slow lane. The hard part is saying no and doing nothing a lot of the time
1
20
If you don’t want much and aren’t very ambitious, hard mode can be pretty easy in absolute terms. If you have lots of appetite for life, hard mode will be absolutely hard and the temptations of easy hacks ver high. Easy to be honest if you want $10k. Hard if you want $10 billion.
2
28