Exit the Cave
turtlespace.blog
turtlespace.blog
They got sent back. The "Celestial Mechanics" art was a similar era but instead of a new religion, that era was a Renaissance.
We're at a similar point in history where an industrial revolution quietly changed a way of life between living generations
Knowing the truth is how we get free but of what?
Some of us ask to be in order, we use getting free as a launching point to "join the cast, embody principles and accept this place not ourselves.
Some ask to accept themselves and only grow old but never mature.
are you a disney princess?
Nah. I judge myself by how I progressed from yesterday, not by whether what I am or what I built is useful to others.
Is keeping a diary pointless if you're not planning to make it a memoir?
Is staying healthy pointless if you aren't using that health to compete with others?
It's hilarious to me that the author calls the cave "grinding", when to my eyes the "grindset" guys are the ones always trying to very visibly compete with others about wealth/status/women.
I've never heard of some guy trying to build the best Rimworld colony (in what is probably a very cave-like setting, no less) try to portray it as grinding.
The mat for the diary might be the times you consulted back to it for useful introspection and came out better for it, the mat for your health goal could be your blood test from the doctor, etc.
The point is that the mat doesn't care what you think of yourself. I would ask you: when you judged your progress from yesterday, was it with a mat - a brutally objective test - or was it with something less honest?
Whatever your goals are, if you really, truly care about them, and you understand what your true objective is, you'll value the mat. The mat is not about what other people think, it is about undeniably simple and real feedback on your objective.
Sometimes the process is the objective. Put another way, some goals are only achieved by not reaching a terminus.
But that aside, there's an even more important point:
> I would ask you: when you judged your progress from yesterday, was it with a mat - a brutally objective test
There is no such thing.
Even in the author's example of wrestling, their conclusion is incorrect (or at least, not supported by the data they have). Their circuit could have been far above the national average in participant skill, so losing there and concluding "I'm not skilled" is an assessment based on where they subjectively drew their line of comparison.
And given that they never actually gained their supposed "heart" they believe they needed, how do they even know that would have changed anything? They could have fixed their attitude and still always lost!
Anyone who works in IT knows that metrics and measures are anything but objective truth.
Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. Sometimes I even regress a bit. But over time, I have gotten stronger.
Some people at my gym urge me to "compete" but I can't see a reason to do this. I am achieving what I set out to do, by objective measures. Why is what someone else can do in comparison at all relevant? I am stronger than some people. Maybe stronger than most people my age. But there are always going to be people stronger than me. It doesn't bother me, because my goal and motivation was never about that.
This also relates to my interp of the article. There's grinding/training and then there's "having that dog in ya". He's trying to remind people to do the latter.
But I think this article is for people who may not be introspective and self-aware enough to know the difference between private, self-satisfied enjoyment and private, self-inflicted suffering. Some people fool themselves into thinking they do something for the joy of it, and remain unsatisfied, because they harbor higher hopes they never admit to themselves.
For Rimworld: some people like making hyperoptimized minmax colonies for their own satisfaction (haven't played it myself, but I do play Factorio so I get it). But you can imagine that some people who _think_ they play for fun, but also really want the validation of posting their killbox on Reddit and having people acknowledge how good it is, and if they don't get that then they retreat to their cave and work on an even "better" colony, and maybe this one will be the one that people will praise [0, maybe? looked for an example]. And so they get wrapped up in a whole meta-argument about their playstyle and how they choose to enjoy the game and can't just simply... enjoy it?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/1v0nwg4/alright_y...
The author isn’t placing a moral judgement on certain goals or whether the result of reaching that goal has a large enough audience.
They are warning against doing things that work against achieving our goals in ways that are hard for us to notice by ourselves.
If the take away is supposed to be only other people can set meaningful metrics for you, then their wrestling history had nothing to do with said lesson, because the author offers no evidence that an external metric-setter would have made them more successful.
Ironically, the author deciding on their own that an external mentor/ reviewer is what they needed to succeed (without evidence proving the difference), is the exact same thing as them deciding that they needed technique or conditioning.
Also, jogging and swimming, drawing, playing musical instrument.
I never advertise my grind details.
Not long afterwards, roughly the same recipe was being heralded as some hardcore millionaire stoicism business, which amused me to no end.
For me this one is the most important, which I always suspected but only now being able to follow through:
- Rule 1: Work every day. No skipping days. But I only need to work 1 hour.
Show up everyday.
> It is not the one who suffers the most during preseason who prospers when the winter comes, but he who gets the most aerobically fit.
and Tyler Cowen on Nervous Nellies [1]:
> Yes. Because ultimately the nervous Nellies, they're not philosophically sophisticated, they're overindulging in their own neuroticism when you get right down to it. So it's not like there's some brute 'let's be a builder' view and then in contrast there's some deeper wisdom that the real philosophers pursue. It's: you be a builder or you're a nervous Nelly. Take your pick. I say be a builder.
and the classic Teddy Roosevelt speech [2]:
> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
The Cave is fine, but at some point you need to test the thing you're in there for. At some point, refusing to test an untested belief is just protecting a fantasy.
[0] https://www.howtoskate.se/
[1] https://x.com/JosephNWalker/status/1452772819792642054
[2] https://www.worldfuturefund.org/Documents/maninarena.htm
>> you need to test the thing you're in there for. At some point, refusing to test an untested belief is just protecting a fantasy.
"One test is worth a thousand opinions"
Indeed, if the opinions are about yourself or your capabilities, not testing them soon is truly indulging in fantasy. (and nevermind how much you learn from the tests or competition itself)
But it was instructive to watch him neg, criticize, and dismiss all of my own ideas that weren't in service of his vision thing, occasionally pivoting to deflecting any criticism of the potential for his own vision to succeed. This week I pitched my vision to my current employer. They loved it. Case closed. Ideas are cheap, it's executions that deliver value. And I have a superb record on that.
Conclusion: if you poke your head up for feedback now and then, there's nothing with spending most of your time in the cave to avoid the samsara of influencers, rage bait, and social media algorithms. Anyone telling you otherwise is 'sus.
I agree 100%.
Now you can distinguish sufficiently simple ideas by means of slop, but accurately determining what will eventually mesh well with the wider world is still extremely difficult.
There's also a complexity ceiling. It's been raised but it's still there. For example it will presumably be a while yet before a feature complete project on the scale of LLVM can be quickly slopped together.
It's also cheaper than ever to clone a piece of software once someone else has done the hard work of figuring out the general shape it should take. So I'm not sure how viable services without strong network effects will be going forward.
I truly do not understand the mindset that defends the status quo and its ridiculously wealthy overlords. They're going to screw you anyway, it's the American way after all, but embracing AI toolchains and mastering them is a near sure thing path out of the poverty trap.
As a controversial example, somewhere out there is the Robert Rodriguez of AI filmmaking. And it's going to be amazing when they emerge. And oh the bellyaching that will ensue from the bottom of the film industry foodchain, but it will not change the outcome that people who master the tools now will be the next generation of overlords tomorrow, equally in need of overthrow by revolution when that day comes.
AI can help tremendously with the initial leg-up problem of shipping a working prototype -- paradoxically, if you're willing to put in the work. That is, the right kind of work: talking to people, getting suggestions, writing all your own marketing copy by hand, creating a design that has human touch, throwing it away and starting fresh (with less genAI help) when you've learned what the real demand is for, etc.
The answer is you start with the sale. Once you’ve sold it, you build it. Ideally, you sell it to customers first. Less ideally, to investors.
Most are. I’ve always been. Preörders are real.
They don’t even need much cash to change hands. Just the commitment.
Building before selling is ultimately art and hobby.
A young Thomas Carlyle was attending church with his mother. Upon returning home, after a lengthy sermon by the minister, Thomas turned to his mother and exclaimed, “If I were the minister, I would simply say: good people, you know what to do, now go and do it!”
His mother replied, “Aye Thomas, but would you tell them how?”
It’s like telling a depressed person to just “not be depressed” and expect that to be helpful. Don’t you think if the depressed person had that lever they would pull it? They don’t know HOW to not be depressed. Ergo, stuck in the cave.
TFA is saying that what you think you may be doing is likely something else. Not publishing your work, not challenging yourself in the arena, etc. isn’t really about trying to make yourself good enough to succeed, it’s an avoidance of the bad feelings when you expect to fail.
So the message is rather simple, just go out and challenge yourself. Again, easy to do if you know how to mentally and emotionally handle the bad feelings. Seemingly insurmountable if you think the bad feelings will destroy you.
Ironically, the only way to know if they will or not is to actually dive in and experience the thing you’re afraid of failing at.
As G. K. Chesterton said,
> Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1718/pg1718-images.html...
One study that summarizes previous studies is below, but there are literally hundreds of others.
The Effects of Marriage on Health: A Synthesis of Recent Research Evidence. Research Brief (https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/effects-marriage-health-synthes... Note: an official US government web site.)
"Married people are generally healthier than unmarried people, as measured by numerous health outcomes.(1) To investigate the complex relationship between marriage and health, this review scrutinizes recent research, focusing on studies that use rigorous statistical methods to examine whether marriage is a cause of these better health outcomes."
The idea is that unexecuted ideas can actually become addictive. You keep telling yourself, "boy, that thing is going to be amazing whenever I get around to making it!"
And the more you tell yourself this, the more you become petrified that it won't be great, making you even less likely to actually work on it.
Funny, I didn't read this as career advice, but social advice. Like, get off the apps, get off the couch, go sit at a bar alone, ask someone to hang out.
But the world is full of half-baked products, especially software. If you show up to your first tournament and lose pathetically in the first round, no one is going to prevent you from attending the second tournament. But people will permanently write off your product if it is half-baked. Or even if your product is good but the release process is half-baked.
Sitting at the bar alone might lead to a serendipitous meeting with someone that enriches your life. None of it can happen if you don't let the chaos of the world happen unto you.
This resonates with me. I think it takes balls to leave the comfort zone and test our assumptions against the real world, to get actual feedback, good or bad. I think now it’s easier than ever to just stay in our caves surrounded by nothing else but our customised feeds that reinforce our beliefs and the sycophantic AI agents that yes-and all our ideas.
It's getting hard to even get a shrug.
I've slowly gotten more comfortable with the void, you put something out, allegedly 50 clicks received and not a single comment or conversion. 700 views of a video, no comments and 3 likes.
You don't get told if it's good or bad you'll just get indifferent silence.
So now I don't wait until it's perfect because I know likely nobody will say anything.
I do wonder if people are more fatigued with all the AI content being put out.
The internet/social media is designed to give us the feeling that we're the focus, yet everyone, every single person (and now AI too) is given this very same feeling so everyone is expecting everyone else to be amazed by them and just them - alone.
That's simple not the case and also not possible - by design and by sheer volume of amazing and talented individuals out there. We're living in a magical time where content producers outnumber and outproduce the content consumers.
But I don't actually think that's the issue here.
The issue is perhaps the failed distribution systems. The slightly better than random way that content is distributed to the consumers. Search algorithms pretend to get it right but if they did that, would folks search less and see less advertising?
If we as a society improved the content distribution (and I mean search, notifications, comments, etc etc - the whole gamut of content distribution) and the placement of that content, then perhaps it would be more than 50 clicks, perhaps 75! ;)
Keep on doing what you're doing and don't think that 50 clicks is a judgement on your work, it's a symptom of a broken system.
Those who seek internal validation need not exit the cave, for it is not a coward's cage; it is merely another space to pursue one's own enlightenment and holds no power over its occupant.
By your own story, they did just leave their cave and experience the wider world by getting their ass kicked.
The summary is this:
> A writer needs readers ... Any worthy pursuit needs a mat.
> ... Better to be pinned in public with courage than to train
> endlessly in private like a coward.
If I produced art like Darger (or Van Gogh or Kafka or others who did not try to push their work into the public view), I would be happy with myself.
But, on the other hand, I do appreciate some aspect of this article's thesis. "Putting yourself out there" does have value. This line from the article resonates with me:
> Yet the Cave, despite its darkness of solitude and dampness from
> sweat and suffer-porn, is comfortable. It lets us tinker with
> our own delusions.
But it's not necessarily the solution. Some people get addicted to public recognition, and it twists their work for the worse. Some people know they've done something good, put it out for people to see, but don't receive the recognition they wish they had, and get depressed. Nick Drake comes to mind.
I think it really comes down to your own personality and which of these traps you're prone to fall for. Once again, "know thyself" is the real nut worth cracking.
Anyway, good article. Made me think (:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger also see various images of his work at: https://www.wikiart.org/en/henry-darger
But if you are labouring under the belief that your art has human value to others, you must put it out in the world, and often the sooner the better!
Many of the most famous artists were unknown or unappreciated in their time, and if they'd asked the people around them whether their art had value we'd likely not have half of the Louvre.
I am in the middle of writing my own version of a "legendary" story where over the course of centuries years of retelling a fireteam of 3 men becomes an army of 80,000, fictional sources don't agree on who exactly was involved, people who speculate about real life people the story might be based on left an obvious suspect out, etc. I am in the middle of writing up a rather long document which tells the story in such a way that I can memorize the names, the dates, the places and be absolutely confident about the details -- and of course I have to be able to speak authoritatively about the historical period and explain what people believed, why they did what they did, etc.
At the moment the story is getting harder to tell but I'm practicing at starting with the most bombastic story first and working towards a historical explanation but it is worth it because it's a personally meaningful story which is the centerpiece of a backgrounder for my character.
My wife says "don't tell the story to people until you get it right" and I just blow that off because I've been telling this story for a while and doing all the work because I want to do it better. And it's going to be the foundation of how I do all the writing for this character.
[1] e.g. rule one is to break character before I get seriously flustered and talk about my immediate experience
Or, put another way:
> I don't see how you can hate from outside of the club. You can't even get in!
I recall recently reading an essay by a woman who described at one point how important simply trudging through was.
Not sure that "masculine" is apposite here
> > “See, it’s easy to ignore trouble, when you’re living in a bubble.”
With respect to the problem of trouble in bubbles, my mind goes to a very different song...
If you're livin' in a bubble and you haven't got a care
Well, you're gonna be in trouble 'cause we're gonna steal your air
'Cause what you got is what we need
and all we do is dirty deeds
We're the Spaceballs!
Watch out, 'cause we're the Spaceballs
> But I had made the comfortable mistake of believing that because I could measure and control them, they must determine the outcome.
This seems related to the McNamara Fallacy [0], although not so specifically quantitative.
I have. I think that's the dev parallel here.
But I did like the idea of them not being entirely clear about their own motivations, even to themselves - and that is a dangerous cave to play it.
It was only half..