The appropriate amount of effort is zero

That said, I do think this article frames its advice in a clickbaity way by handwaving cumulative effort while talking about instantaneous effort

Although the training takes lots of energy and time, it needn't be driven by striving towards abstract goals. Rather the training can be a playful/fun practice for the sake of doing it well in the moment. This makes it feel easier to practice a lot, and also makes the practice more "productive" by freeing up attention from distractions of purpose and self.

It's hard to say if most elite athletes are able to do this all the time, but they probably don't have as bad a time of it as normies when it comes to physical exertion.

Perhaps you should try reading the article, because it doesnt say that. Its a 5 minute read, although perhaps you shouldn't bother because most others dont appear to have either.

Edit: actually, I daresay the contention of the article is the exact opposite: its likely that ledecky put in the least effort out of anyone.

"I guess about 30%?"

Yes but there's still a sweet spot to find, you're not gripping your cup or your wheel as hard as you can. Over-gripping in uncertain conditions can be good but only to a certain extent.

I still agree with you though, a good example of this is climbing stairs — if you have strong legs it's much less effort to go 2 by 2 but I'd never tell someone struggling to do that, it would make no sense.

Turns out nope. Someone did a study and measured the force and it was basically the same across skill levels. The professionals just make it look easy because they are used to it and more skilled.

Which makes sense, right? Highly skilled people often make things look effortless even when they objectively are extremely difficult tasks.

It says: "There is an appropriate amount of energy required for each activity."

I'm sure there are many activities where nothing bad happens when applying less effort. For example, typing on a keyboard or signing a document.

Not only that but while driving you might have to react very fast if something happens and you need to divert to avoid a crash, if you need to grip harder in the middle that are precious milliseconds that you could have saved. At least if you at high speed.

I learned piano starting around age 6, and I vaguely remember the first few years were spent largely on learning to control my fingers, stretch to play larger chords (as a child with fairly small hands, I couldn't stretch my hand to play an octave until around age 10 or 11), and so forth. I was learning to do this at the same time I was learning to write cursive, or hold a paintbrush, use a kitchen knife, etc - all kinds of basic childhood learning stuff.

Learning a new skill as an adult is like going back to grade school or even infancy in some cases. You can tell a small child not to grip their pencil so tightly, but until you've practiced handwriting for several years, your fingers simply don't have the control necessary to avoid using a heavy grip.

"Use a lighter touch" is fantastic advice for an intermediate or advanced student but incredibly frustrating for a beginner. Over the course of several decades of playing keyboard in bands I picked up the bad habit of playing with more force than necessary, which started to cause me problems. I had to practice playing with a lighter touch and that was actually a big help.

The Inner Game of Tennis (1970s)

As for the topic, getting good at anything requires repetition, attention to detail, and discipline. At the same time, "you're trying too hard" can sometimes be useful advice.

The author's idiosyncratic definition of "effort" is banal and unhelpful.

Expending more than an activity requires may or may not mean you have more power reserves left.

Do you have a dog? Does it look like effort when it runs around? It is effort for it NOT to run!

Nature is the laziest fuck of them all. Lets shine this sunlight and let entropy/quantum fluctuations take care of the rest. Might get life form in one in every billion planets.

- you need to have clarity on the what the goal is

- then you can adjust your effort to meet the goal

no one can tell you what your goals are.

Such a clear fallacy of definition in the opening paragraphs that it renders the rest of the article a pointless read.

Yes, if you arbitrarily redefine terms you can reach arbitrary conclusions.

You put more effort into your team presentation just in case there are guests. You cannot suddenly have a better presentation instantaneously when you arrive and see the CTO. In sports, such as bouldering, you will grip a hold slightly harder than strictly required in case you suddenly slip or just to easily accommodate the dynamics necessary as you shift your weight without requiring ultra precision which is a different form of effort.

The additional effort you expend is based on your estimation of the risk. As you master whatever skill it is, then you are better able to estimate the risks and the need or lack thereof for additional effort. Novices expend more effort than masters because they cannot gauge the need, but they will also make more mistakes by correctly guessing the correct effort but not accommodating for the risk.

The appropriate (over)effort is never 0 because there is always some context dependent risk.

I've recently started a new job, and I've been thrown a ton of materials and systems to study. Lots of new terms, systems, etc., and only vague ideas of where everything fits in. So here's my rough process if I'm handed a product spec for a system I'm going to be building / working on:

- Skim the entirety of whatever document / deck / codebase you've been given. Make a couple notes about things you didn't understand, and plan to look into. Maybe a couple key concepts. Not too much. You're just dipping your toes. It's going to be really annoying and frustrating and you're going to want to quit. That's OK - your brain / body are telling you you're working hard and expending a lot of energy. Think of it like lifting mental weights - it's meant to be hard work.

- Come back in a couple days and read it again, after you've done this process with a bunch of other things. You might realize this document has answers to questions you had about other things! You're just starting to make connections.

- Make yourself a reminder to check back in another week, and in the mean time go and ask your questions to the document author, your manager, your team, etc.

- By the next week, you probably understand what's going on enough to write a 1-pager for your plans; give it another week and you should be able to right a proper tech design.

I'm close to some kind of mastery with cello, and broadly we tell students to play with zero tension.

This is useful to say (often they have way too much tension and need to really dial it back), but in reality there is _some_ tension in everything:

- left hand: the fingers are basically a conduit for your back weight, but they need enough strength to stand up and _act_ as a conduit, otherwise they'd collapse. (but they needn't do more)

- right hand: weight flows from the back, down the arm, into the index finger, and all power derives from that + bow speed + how close you are to the bridge. However, the thumb needs to engage enough to counterbalance the weight on top of the stick, otherwise the bow would clumsily fall over.

The key is, as you say, doing the bare minimum.

of course this might need some tweaking, because if someone is really good at pickpocketing maybe some effort would put them on a much better long-term trajectory?

Another interpretation may be connected to Luke 12:27 (yeah I had to look it up, I actually thought it was from Ecclesiastes, lol), which, paraphrased, is that flowers do not work to be beautiful—that’s just what they are. They can’t (be generous with the reading of “can’t”, if you would) be otherwise.

To expand: humans want what they are not, and that creates work, and stress, and so on. I want to be pretty like a flower. But I’m a person. So now I must spin cloth, and do a bunch of other work, to attain that want, or else suffer unmet desire. Animals and plants (perhaps) have wants (like: a rabbit may want food, or not to be killed and eaten) and pain and such, but don’t work in that sense. They just are what they are, and do what something like them does. This may fall apart in particular examples, but the broad poetic sense isn’t so bad.

(Yes you can nitpick this to death with stuff like “but maybe what humans are is animals that want very very much to be what they’re not, so that is their nature” but c’mon)

[edit] cf Vonnegut’s (serious? Joking? Half-joking?) suggestion in Galapagos that humans’ big brains are a curse that causes most of our trouble, and we’d be better off as something like smartish seals.

The trick is that perceived effort != actual effort.

So the big question is: how much you can reduce this perceived effort?

For example, “you should not spend effort to achieve something” is a weird thing to say at first. It poses a paradox and invites the reader to experiment: let’s pretend we can’t spend effort; but we can still do things, we can spend energy, we can end up having achieved something. Are there examples of how people do things and spend energy, but without spending effort?

This highlights a particular elusive quality of “effort” that, like many ideas in human psychology, may not have a specific dictionary word assigned to it. Having drawn such a stark distinction between spending energy and spending effort makes it easier to recall that quality, even if it doesn’t have a convenient term that rolls off the tongue.

(I’d postulate that if carrying heavy boulders up a hill is your hobby or something you can bring yourself to enjoy doing, there is certainly a way in which you can do even that without spending effort in this revised definition. By contrast, doing something you loathe may always be full of effort, no matter how little energy it requires from you.)

Could the same point be expressed in a more conservative way, like “you should not spend too much effort to achieve something”? Sure. However, for many people it wouldn’t be as easily internalised.

It's like the thing of "slow is smooth, smooth is quick" when I'm trying to do something in a hurry.

And the more furious you are about wall proliferation more likely head banging will result in unwanted consequences.

Effort would be the extra strength applied past what is needed to get a reasonable grip. It is “effort” when you squeeze hard enough to bend the lid.

I see other comments talking about dropping a cup if you don’t hold it tight enough but the idea is the baseline is “hold the cup tight enough to have it secure in your hand under normal reasonable conditions” but our default state may be “grip it hard enough all the time so a coworker couldn’t muscle it out of your hands” or “if a door opened in your face and hit it you still hold the cup” and that is the effort - the above and beyond that you don’t need to always apply which can screw up our baseline.

Like the message is we need to be mindful of not going full throttle on everything when low or medium energy / focus / brain activation / muscle activation will do.

Meditation/mindfulness was growing in popularity in the 2010s and this stuff is just further along the tech tree. It was already well known with actors but the cross-over with meditation-like practices is pretty obvious if you look into both.

The (post) Rationalists you mention are mostly exploring technologies/methods around the connection between mind/body/emotion. There's no single figure pushing it along.