The Dead Planet Theory
arealsociety.substack.com
arealsociety.substack.com
One is the peer effect. Who you surround yourself with absolutely matters. This applies to the content consumption, and this applies to your surroundings too. This can be as simple as going to the library, having surrounded by other people working and researching is great, even if it's just schoolwork. Beyond that, I have found I enjoy spending time with people who are deeply interested in some kind of a craft. Listening to someone talking about a piece of software they are working on, or a music album they are recording, is absolutely interesting. It sets sort of a benchmark for yourself too.
The other one is the point about how 'little' time it actually takes and how easy it is. This is a point that is both true and false, in many ways. If you have general software development expertise, finishing[doing the exercises as well] a single book on a language/technology/framework will absolutely get you to the intermediate level on that piece of technology. Finishing a book isn't hard, you can do it in a weekend.
At the same time, as easy as it is, it is also hard. There are lots of obligations in life. You probably have somewhere to go that weekend. You are also a bit tired, you have been working during the week. And well you have to socialize a bit to be healthy, so shutting yourself off every weekend isn't something you want to do either. I find occasional, short retreats healthy for this reason. That seems to be a nice balance.
In the end, it is simple, but not easy, that's the word I was looking for. It can be achievable if you plan ahead and are purposeful in your actions.
That's about what I've run into in my life. Most people do things on autopilot and don't think about what they're doing, or don't consider it worth thinking about. If you want to do something and be good at it, wanting to be good at it is enough to move you past most people, as long as you have a growth mindset.
I'm trying to write fiction at the moment. It's far, far harder than technical writing, programming, writing a reply on HN, or anything else that's remotely similar. I'm not used to it, at all. My brain suggests things that just aren't good ideas, and then I spend time eliminating those bad ideas, and then my brain suggests more things, and I find one good one, and so we continue. I have to work in ten minute stretches and then go for a walk to clear my head.
I think this is how most skills are learnt. You try something ("write the first chapter of a novella"), you analyse what went well and what went poorly ("I felt my writing was boring, and I noticed that nothing really happened because all I wrote was description and exposition"), you deliberately practice ("I read through the first chapter of some books I enjoy and tried rewriting my first chapter with similar interactions and events"), and then you go back to the base task and get a little further ("the first chapter was compelling but I didn't leave any story hooks and don't know where to go for a second").
And bros in their late 20s / early 30s (as I suspect the author is) tend to underestimate the extent to which that's true.
Kids is the obvious one, but hidden claims on time and capacity are much more common than some think.
Mom always taught me the polite way of saying this is that something is then 'straightforward'.
The matrix here is:
Steps are clear, but difficult to take > 'straightforward'
Steps are clear, but easy to take > 'trivial, easy, simple, etc'
Steps are unclear, but difficult to take > 'hard, impossible, non-trivial, etc'
Steps are unclear, but easy to take > 'should be a lark, non-obvious, etc'
Clarity and difficulty? If so what are examples?
- Clarity high, difficulty high: Iron Man
- Clarity high, difficulty low: online shopping
- Clarity low, difficulty low: ??
- Clarity low, difficulty high: starting a new business
Difficulty of the next achievement/step vs. the ability to know what that next step is
> - Clarity low, difficulty low: ??
I'd say navigation here. Like, finding that new restaurant or traveling overland without maps. Easy to just drive/walk there, hard to find the place though.
Kinda relates to David Epstein's kind vs. unkind learning environments too.
Especially for new or young networks, a lot of people are truly starved for engagement & don't see the pattern of being engaged with. Engagement has to be bootstrapped, by people individually deciding to look through & find & engage with others who are putting themselves out there.
The opposite of the curve shown here is the "who is engaged with" curve. And it's like 0.3% of people (made up number) getting 99% of the engagement. It's a tyranny of popularity, and it legitimizes everyone elses dead quiet, their non-activity. We ought engage more robustly. Not just with the popular magnets.
The OP gets the discussion going, but the discussion is in the thread. Sticking to the top level is like judging a book by the Goodreads summary and reviews; to really appreciate the content, you have to read the book.
If so, that's a clever design.
There are a handful of exceptions - some small Reddit subs, some old forums. But for the most part, people on social media aren't really interested in something that's not already popular.
https://www.tiktok.com/@elieli0000/video/7446090349551815968
I agree with your idea to engage down-thread.
The missing key factor is that you have to find something unpopular and easy which will actually have a payoff if you become an expert. Risky and easier said than done.
If you read a few books on mathematics you think you're easily going to become one of the top mathematicians? Many ambitious people try to study math and decades later are disappointed by how they are still mediocre in their field or simply fail to make it into an academic career. Many PhDs in general, actually.
No - but you will easily become more educated in math than most people. 99.9% of people couldn't tell you the difference between a derivative and a integral.
It's not about becoming an expert. You don't need to be the best in the world to be usefully good at something.
Just like examples in the post it self, sure you can get better fast, but if no one cares why bother? Oh you got a bit better ELO in chess, nice, what now? Now your average friends don’t want to play you and you aren’t good enough to beat anyone at the chess club. So either you quit or you have to dedicate yourself.
Same with the shooter game. Do you really want to play a video game competitively? If yea then go ahead but you need to do more than just play to get good which again probably means switching friend circles
> I have an engineering degree and I can’t remember the difference
Really? I realized I forgot the mechanics of computing the closed-form solutions (like you, I used this type of calculus for maybe four years of my life), but the idea of derivatives being the rate of change stuck with me.
What I am trying to say is that you should get better at things that matter to you. I am sure you could get better than most people at making sand castles put of feces real fast, but is that something you should do.
No, but so what? The guy behind 3Blue1Brown probably isn't one of the top mathematicians of his era. But he's having quite an impact. He turned explaining fairly basic math concepts in mathematics into a lucrative job.
And who wrote the textbooks you're referring to? Probably not any of the top 10 living mathematicians. That doesn't make the work less useful.
Is Linus Torvalds one of the top 10 computer scientists? He probably wouldn't describe himself that way, and respected academics mocked his work. The list goes on. I think this is compatible with the premise of the article: it's not about being best, it's about being better than the average bear - and then putting that knowledge to some productive use.
Textbooks used in college coursework are usually written by academics, for obvious reasons. Plenty of independent learning / pop textbooks are written by "normal people" who aren't tenured professors.
> Plenty of independent learning / pop textbooks are written by "normal people" who aren't tenured professors.
Idk, Simon Singh is one very well known example of "pop maths" and he has a PhD in particle physics, that's quite a bit more than just "do the reading for a year". Other examples like Eugenia Cheng and Ian Stewart are similarly credentialed.
It's the same in other fields, really. Yes, you can learn to play simple tunes on the piano relatively quickly, but even just being able to play the full Für Elise just takes so much more than that. Or you can learn Hiragana relatively quickly which I guess means that you understand more about Japanese than 95% of people, but it'll still not be enough for you to engage with Japanese in any meaningful way.
The beginner stage is always the easiest. It's after that that it gets really hard.
0.01%ers in one field tend towards monomaniacal obsession.
Sometimes that's useful. But having mostly depth, and enough breadth to balance it out, is better in most cases than depth only.
People who are all breadth, no depth are worse. Those traits give you MBAs and politicians. That doesn't mean breadth is inherently bad, it's about balance.
The sweet-spot is typically to get inside the top 1% and get 75th or 90th percentile people skills or communication skills. Those can take a lot of different forms, good writers / managers / youtubers / teachers are all in that class but there's not necessarily that much overlap.
A friend group has 20 people and 3 making an effort. It's easy to stand out. A sports club has 200 members and 5 stars. Social media has 120 million users. And a screen shows 2 posts at a time. Maybe 10-ish if you're using a non-stupid version of a platform.
A lot of people just want the validation of having low stakes engagement. Likes. Upvotes. Views. Shares. Things that happen absentmindedly or even automatically. Just a small indicator that people saw you, and are generally satisfied even with relatively little of it. So what if that a fraction gets 99 bajillion of likes out of the 100 total. The remaining bajillion still means a small time artist who just wants to show their latest work gets to have 100 people who like it and 2 or 3 who comment.
And that's all they'll realistically amount to while being VERY active. To fall for the trap of thinking "it just takes participation to get there" falls straight in the face of the fact it's a competition of scale.
Speaking of which, so is job hunting. Recruiters even get spammed on the phone. I wish job listings had to be on public platforms with a lot more rules honestly.
Top 10% just takes a bit of intentional work, rather than just chasing dopamine hits you might get as a casual. And that’s why the 90% aren’t losers or suckers… they just have different priorities.
Why?
I found the article refreshing precisely because it didn't assume you're doing it for the money, or otherwise insisting that a hobby only makes sense if you make a business out of it.
I take this article as a reminder of how little time and effort it takes to achieve basic proficiency in just about anything.
I'm fond of the view that the 80/20 rule applies recursively: you can get 64% of value in 4% of effort, or 51% of value in 0.8% of the effort. Applied to "deliberate practice" meme, that gives you 51% of value for 80 hours of deliberate practice. Sounds absurd, but then most people never done 80 hours of deliberate practice in anything at all.
Personally, I round this up and call it a "10-100-10k framework": 10 hours of deliberate-ish practice is not that big of a sacrifice to pick up some random, specific skill, but you can go surprisingly far doing that. 100 hours should give you competence - good investment for few things that matter for you daily. 10k is for stuff you want to be world-class expert in.
I don't know about being one of the top mathematicians, but I'd argue that actually, fully reading a few graduate level technical books is more than even most PhDs do.
I was once a PhD student in theoretical physics myself and I'd say that we mostly skim over the books or read only the sections that are immediately and obviously relevant to us.
I once did read one of the shorter known-to-be-difficult books of my field fully from cover to cover, and worked out most of the exercises in the book. After this exercise, I realized that I immediately had much better understanding of the somewhat foundational things described in the book than many of the more senior researchers had. And this was a book that everyone in my field knows, but apparently no-one actually reads it.
The reason why no-one reads actually the difficult books, even when half of their job is reading them, is because it's harsh, gruelling work.
So yeah, maybe you won't become the next Terence Tao by reading three or four graduate level mathematics books, but you can get pretty good if you actually seriously do it without any cheating or skimming.
Heh, I chuckle because understanding the mechanics of what is happening in that anecdote one is one of the high-payoff learning curves the the article was talking about up to that point.
The dynamics of how a group makes decisions is not particularly intuitive and favours small knots of high-performing decision makers in a small geographical area. An interesting follow up observation is democracy actually leverages that really well in practice, but most people who notice get annoyed because they have a naive view that all the voters in a democratic polity are meant to have equal sway and impact in practice. The reality is the democratic process picks which tribe of decision makers gets control of the army and boots tribes when they descend into groupthink.
People seem to have opinions based on propaganda instead of reason.
Someone deciding which donut to buy in a donut shop is usually making a more informed choice.
Considering how rare genuinely original ideas are… it’s likely even the 90th percentile HN reader will be regurgitating and parroting until middle age, at least.
Does it? Everything I know indicates that the #1 deciding factor in how much influence you can get (within a modern liberal democracy) is how much money you have to begin with.
> people who notice get annoyed because they have a naive view that all the voters in a democratic polity are meant to have equal sway and impact in practice
I don't think people have (nearly as much of) an issue with e.g. people who caucus getting more sway than your average voter. But even the most devoted party volunteer will struggle to out-influence even a relatively disinterested large donor.
In any case, I think a big barrier to starting things can often also just be the fear of failure or of wasting time. I spent a lot of time making electronic music as a hobby, and am probably better than most people at understanding and playing music, but for music to play a meaningful impact in my life I would need to put in a lot more work still.
On the other hand, I studied physics and mathematics far beyond the average person (getting a PhD and publishing multiple papers), but I had the support of the university and the academic environment to give me that extra push to do it.
There are so many things I would like to pursue in my free time. Building a small startup, writing a book, making YouTube videos, etc. I know that the most important thing is to just start, but the decision paralysis, and uncertainty about whether it will work out in the end can definitely be a barrier, since I can also just go out with friends and enjoy my life instead of spending time solitary.
Promotion often comes with more work, more responsibilities, more meetings, more commute to office... with only marginal pay increase. In reality you lose salary (as dollars per hour).
I turned down promotion a few years back. I would "manage" three people, in reality doing their work. I would lose home office, and have to find babysitter. I would spend 80 minutes in traffic every day, paying for my own car and my own gas! No time left for cooking, so food delivery! All for generous pay increase of 20%!
This "promotion" would ruin my family life, and reduce my disposable income by half!
I'm not an SME in anything specific. The fact I know this, already puts me in the top 50% of IT Professionals. The fact I can identify my level of expertise in specific fields or subjects ("I know what I know, I know what I don't know, and I'm willing to admit the latter") probably bumps me into the top 25%. Even if you're a "C student" in your career, being a C student in multiple related knowledge domains will make you far more valuable than a B student in a single domain, and that's my approach to things.
I'm not CKA-certified, but I can still grep what value Kubernetes brings to the Enterprise and engage with it because I did the reading. I'm not certified on any of the VMware product line, but I've built some degree of tenancy into the product without spending a dime on their Automation suite, because I did the reading, because I dove into the product line and put in the work. I'm no AWS-certified Architect, but I've moved global datacenters into AWS because I did the reading.
Seriously, this comes up time and time again, but it always bears repeating: just doing the reading immediately boosts you into the upper echelons of something. Finishing a book on the fundamentals of drawing will make you a more accomplished artist than 90% of your peers. Finishing a book on photography fundamentals, or the exposure triangle itself, will make you a far better photographer than someone using their iPhone on auto. Finishing a course on a specific technology will make you more competent in it than most of your peers, even if you don't get a credential from it.
Do the reading. Always do the reading.
But more than doing the reading itself, you also need to apply the knowledge from reading. That's when the rubber meets the road, when reality encounters ideals and things break, fall apart, or fail. That's when you go from the top 25%, to the top 5%. From there, it's all diminishing returns, so you have to pick-and-choose what brings you joy, what sparks your passion in life, because the "easy growth" is gone. You did the reading, you put it into practice, and that's all you can do until others recognize your expertise for what it is.
But you can get to that top 5% pretty quickly, and pretty easily. It just takes a little bit of reading, and some basic practice.
If you reach that conclusion, it's a cue to look back and work out where you went wrong. And not to give offence unnecessarily.
Chances of success or for a fulfilling life is the underlying topic here and whatever connection you can draw to a dead planet.
It really is true that to reach the top in many fields requires surprisingly little effort. I don't consider myself particularly special, but there are two niche fields where I'm certain I'd rank among the top 1-5% in. All it really takes is consistent effort.
Last year I realized I could memorize every country on a world map and it would only take a few hours over the weekend. Connected it with some wikipedia searches about countries I don't really know over the next few weeks and suddenly I feel so much more knowledgeable about the world and have a new hobby. There's a lot of stuff that everyone has heard of but doesn't know anything about and it doesn't take much time to fix that.
I have been actively working on it, and sticking to one thing and just starting, but i am a creature of habit and love hoarding and finding resources.
I have no idea what percentile I am in... I am absolutely sure someone is tracking/ranking it, because if I were actually training and AI, I would absolutely start at this large collection of bainiacs - but first I would ask permission, which I would guess would be politely declined.
The article itself is fairly mind blowing.
Down vote comment. Nope, only 1 arrow for up, and I am good with that.
Just refreshed, and now I can down vote some comments...
Refresh again... I cannot down vote posts, but can down vote even less comments... someone is watching, and laughing at this. :P
You cannot downvote direct replies to your own comments though if that helps understanding what might be happening here.
You can't downvote replies to your comments and in other circumstances I think.
I recently got to 300 and I saw no change in the UI.
(See how I just excluded 95%?)
In order for me to exercise for 35 minutes undisturbed I wake at 4am.
For mental health I’ll prioritize short 10 minute outdoor walks throughout the day. I snooze work notifications, if the world burns down in those 10 minutes so be it.
This time is sacred to me. No time for alcohol, no time for processed foods.
The hardest piece is consistently getting 7hrs of sleep, this is much harder for parents with newborns.
There are folks in their 60s/70s exercising everyday, have abs, and can deadlift more than probably most of the population in their 20s/30s.
I used to prioritize everything else before physical and mental health. Everything clicked into place after fixing this.
7 quality, consistent hours of sleep is plenty enough for most people, sure, but that means being able to shut your eyes at 9pm to get up at 4, which means having the discipline and energy to get ~everything necessary done by say 8. Avoiding alcohol def helps there.
People in their 60s/70s don't have kids to look after, and in many cases don't have to work full time. For those that make it to that age with themselves and their partner in adequate health, I agree daily exercise is a sound investment.
Sure, do what you get paid for or care about intentionally, but framing it as being in the "top x%" is just so off-putting. I don't want to constantly compare myself to others. I'd rather compare myself today to myself yesterday. Or, you know, just do things I enjoy because I enjoy them.
As for wanting influence, I can't relate at all. I just want sovereignty over my own life.
You don't have to do that with everything in life, but you can do that with the things you care about.
It could be actually practicing chess, it could be following a training plan while running, and it could be rising through the ranks at work.
I like cycling, and I know with a consistent routine I improve a lot more than my friends who just cycle on once or twice a week. I'm not trying to be better than them, I just really enjoy being a good cyclist.
The two points in the article, that 80% is done by 20% and that to get to 20% all you need is relatively little effort, if taken to heart give license to deride those who aren’t in the 20% because clearly if they cared at all they’d just try and be solid at things.
Siddhartha[0] recently was on the front page. I’d highly recommend it as a much more humanist take on “the world isn’t that daunting so long as you are intentional with your actions.”