17 ms·

We overestimate our short-term ability, but underestimate our long-term ability

421 points by p44v9n 4y ago

1bent 4y ago
This feels adjacent to something I've done for a long time: I will do a task of moderate complexity by hand, typing several commands as needed, until I've done it enough to get a feel for how it varies, and only then start automating it.
- ctur 4y ago
  My general flow is “do it, teach it, automate it” where the middle step is explaining it to someone else who then also does it then (hopefully) helps, or at least consults, on the automation. This way you can iterate a bit before codifying it and help flush out any bad ideas or assumptions.
voisin 4y ago
Tony Robbins has been saying this for decades. People overestimate what they can do in a year but massively underestimate what they can do in a decade. One implication being that if you take up a hobby (say, playing the piano) after a year you are probably not very good and a lot of people then give it up because their performance doesn’t meet their (over-)expectation. But stick with it, grinding it out year after year, and almost anyone can meet their expectations. The trick, of course, is to only undertake those few things which you think you’ll want to stick with over the long term.
- bitexploder 4y ago
  Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, a grappling martial art, is very much like that. And there was a great post on HN yesterday about this. And I just randomly had a talk with my son about effort and hard work (he is 16, struggling with school, ADHD, just like me). Here are my anecdotes: BJJ: After one year, all but the newest people still make you feel like you don't know anything, they can submit you pretty easily. Train for 10 years and you are at or close to "black belt" (Which takes on average 10-12 years in BJJ, it is not easy to get at all) and you can fold people up on instinct. The funny thing about the 1 year mark, you FEEL like you haven't learned anything, but you can gently fold the average human up now if it comes down to it. Business: We built a business over 8 years. It was hard. The first year we were negative in profit, paying ourselves out of our bank accounts. Overnight success in 8 years. Just keep learning everything that wasn't tech, marketing, people management skills, etc. Eventually we did well got up to like 20 person head count purely with organic growth and were acquired. Skills in general: https://gist.github.com/gtallen1187/e83ed02eac6cc8d7e185 https://gist.github.com/gtallen1187/e83ed02eac6cc8d7e185 "A little slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept". So now when people ask me anything. Career advice. How do I lose weight. How do I get in shape. "Let me tell you about my 10 year plan for you. you can't even imagine how long and hard 10 years is, I know, but that is what it is going to take to make a life long change. do you still want my advice?" Of course many good things happen sooner, but I only talk to people that can at least accept it is going to be hard and I don't hold any secrets about anything other than you have to work really hard and apply effort.
  - matwood 4y ago
    I'm glad someone brought up BJJ. I'm ~4 years in, and it works exactly this way. The day to day doesn't seem like you're learning that much. In fact, I don't even feel like I know that much after 4 years. But, when I roll with high belts now many have to really work to get me. And like you said, if I go against someone who has never grappled before, I can gently fold them up without breathing hard.
    - bitexploder 4y ago
      I am at 4 years. Lay off for COVID. Just starting to get the hang of some things and present problems to higher belts. The interesting thing to me, once I can funnel someone into a dilemma game I know well, there isn't as much difference as I thought there would be between upper belts. I would say tougher black belts have seen it all before and give a really hard fight at each decision point in the attack tree, and can often just escape if technique is a little lose, but it isn't insanely different. I know how to fix things and make it harder every time I find a little gap like that now and they are little gaps. I still just get beat up most of the time, heh, but when things work they really work as I implement more of the game I like. I think that is an interesting place in skill development. Not an expert, but not a novice.
      - matwood 4y ago
        I definitely still get beat up most of the time. Also, within black belts there can be a lot of variation. But to your point, you have enough tools now that if you execute properly and lead a high belt down your path, you could catch them. That simply would never happen until 3-4 years in (and I'm not counting life long wrestlers who show up with 'no' BJJ experience). A big turning point for me was when I would lose and could walk backwards the whole roll in my head and see the root error. BJJ is a lot like chess in this way. When you start you just get beat and see the move that beat you. As you get better you see the chain of events that lead to the finish.
        bitexploder 4y ago
- Spooky23 4y ago
  I think people are wired to seasons and beyond that things get pretty abstract.
revskill 4y ago
Done means perfectable. It means it's not perfect, but there must be a simple way to make it perfect. That's why monopoly, or monothlic architecture eventually failed. They can't scale.
- cosmojg 4y ago
  > That's why monopoly, or monothlic architecture eventually failed. They can't scale. Could you provide some examples? One counterexample: Linux, the world's biggest monolithic kernel, seems to be going pretty strong.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    On the software level the monoliths are going strong, but I guess you could make the argument on the hardware level? IBM system Z revenue is half what it was two decades ago, and every new system is designed to achieve scale and uptime by using multiple smallish servers, instead of one giant earthquake-safe mainframe with hotswappable processors.
  - kzrdude 4y ago
    It's called monolithic but it still has modules
frogulis 4y ago
Why does my mouse say "Visitor" when I hover over the text?
- LorenzA 4y ago
  looks like a "fun" thing there are a couple other states that change the image that gets displayed. Clicking up top on the dark mode to get "night own" or type the Konami Code to get Konami the other 2 cases seem to be disabled
- okal 4y ago
  I keep getting so irritated by the cursor, that my brain completely refuses to process the contents of the page. So irritated, in fact, that I forgot I could switch to Reader Mode. I really wish they'd provided a way to disable it.
  - p44v9n 4y ago
    This is my site — thanks for the feedback!
    - RheingoldRiver 4y ago
      Yeah, please disable the custom cursor. IME custom cursors are something that site designers tend to like, and think are pretty cool, and site visitors end up loathing. The cursor is your interface to the UI and as such isn't exactly a *part* of the UI - it's your way of saying "hey I'm here, I can do things," etc. So for a UI to take hold of it and change it is extremely jarring. (Video games often do change your cursor of course, and part of that is because they're indeed trying to be immersive, and you're here for that experience. But such is not the case on a website.)
    - okal 4y ago
      Happy to help!
- dgb23 4y ago
  It's basically a div that is positioned next to your cursor when you move it. It's also slightly buggy because it doesn't recognize whether the cursor is actually moving across the view-port or not. No idea why they did that.
js8 4y ago
I also claim that people overestimate the effort needed but underestimate the time needed. Perhaps we mostly do not take learning (and efficiency that comes with it) into account. Longer real projects are more an S-curve than straight line where time = effort.
- SunghoYahng 4y ago
  Then my hypothesis is that if someone actually puts as much effort into the goal as they estimate, they will achieve it in as little time as they estimate.
  - shanebellone 4y ago
    I agree with this. I'd venture a guess that we overly value our time which translates to overestimating the impact of applying that time. However, we also underestimate the true scope of longer timeframes.
  - mberger 4y ago
    I wonder if it's because of the decline in neuroplasticity as we age. We take a week to learn a new video game and expect that peace to continue when we get older. It can be a hit to the ego that it may take a little longer, that we aren't quite as 'smart' as we thought.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      Biggest effect is that your standards get higher. As a kid learning a game just meant learning to play it at a kids low skill level. Kids till spend years to get good. But as an adult who has played a lot of games you have gotten pretty good at many of them, then when you play a new game getting to that level again will take a lot of effort and time. For example, you see the world records in factorio aren't held by kids. Kids has better reflexes which is crucial for some games, but their ability to learn isn't much higher than a young adults.
    - user_7832 4y ago
      While possible, I am not so sure of that. I am in my early/mid 20s (so hopefully no major cognitive decline!) but I still find things taking longer than expected. Part of it may be the work I’m doing today is tougher in some ways. I also have adhd though so that may also affect this.
SunghoYahng 4y ago
Well, then if I'm only interested in getting results in the short term and don't care about getting results in many years from now when I'm old, what could I do? A psychotherapist? Denying reality and dooming myself?
- elSidCampeador 4y ago
  > Well, then if I'm only interested in getting results in the short term and don't care about getting results in many years from now when I'm old, what could I do? become good at learning from your mistakes quickly
- michaelbuckbee 4y ago
  Something to consider is that if things go well, you'll get old. So the big choices are really about where you want to be when you are old. Short term I feel like this article is still useful advice as it helps to avoid the trap of working on something for a small amount of time and feeling like it was a waste when it was really stacking bricks to make a larger effort.
  - SunghoYahng 4y ago
    >Something to consider is that if things go well, you'll get old. So the big choices are really about where you want to be when you are old. It feels like shit vs more shit
    - esperent 4y ago
      This is a sign of depression or something similar. Usually people will suggest therapy in these situations, have you considered it? It's far from the only path though. There's many possible causes of depression and even more possible solutions. Find one that works for you. You deserve more than shit. As someone who's been deep in that shit more than once, you can claw your way out and once you do, the world is a beautiful place that's worth growing old in. Then you'll end up in the shit again but each time climbing out gets easier. Personally it took me moving country, changing career more than once until I found one that gave me a sense of purpose, finding a beautiful and totally surprising partner, and lots more to find my present stability. That's what worked for me. What will work for you? You need to find that out. You only have one life, if it's shitty now them what have you got to lose by making every possible effort to change that? I mean, what could possibly be more important than making that effort? Certainly not a shitty career or a shitty relationship or a shitty family. Leave them if you need to. Nothing controls you except you. And physics, and the law and immigration officers and so on. But there's always room to maneuver.
retrac 4y ago
Learning another (human) language is like that. Almost anyone can do it. It requires no special skills, training, or experience. There are some tricks that you can use, but mostly it's just an enormous amount of work, not particularly challenging work either, that you need to persist at for years, even decades. I'd like to think this is common knowledge, but I have many times talked with people who hope to learn French to fluency in six months, and people who are convinced they could never learn it no matter what. Both types are terrible with estimating their abilities.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  >people who are convinced they could never learn it no matter what Do these people actually believe that it would be impossible for them, or merely that they would give up before success. i.e. do they think that they would not be able to learn the language in five years if they were offered a billion dollars? Because personally I doubt I will ever learn a second language, but I'm sure I could given enough time and the right incentive.
  - retrac 4y ago
    Some do think that. Often an impression formed from no obvious progress after a few weeks.
  - malshe 4y ago
    I am one of those people who think it is impossible for me to learn a new language!
  - w0m 4y ago
    I could learn another language. But I can't learn a second language insofar-as I can't foresee a situation where I"d be willing or able to dedicate the mental capital toward the task.
  - HPsquared 4y ago
    I think most people who say that probably consider it "not economically viable". That is, their assessment is that the expected reward doesn't justify the expected investment.
diceduckmonk 4y ago
Same as how cumulative effects and exponential are unintuitive.
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > Same as how cumulative effects and exponential are unintuitive. Indeed, I'd argue that cumulative effects are unintuitive because (if done right! … or badly wrong, I suppose) they're exponential.
xianshou 4y ago
Very similar to Amara's Law, the equivalent for technology - we overestimate short-term impact while underestimating long-term. Funny how this phenomenon crops up at both the societal and the individual scale: https://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/amaras-law https://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/amaras-law
- p44v9n 4y ago
  Ooo sweet. Thanks for sharing!
neontomo 4y ago
I think this also leads to taking on more projects than we can manage.
thenerdhead 4y ago
I think there’s a point where the opposite is true in your life too. Especially when you’ve past the “productivity is bullshit” phase. Parkinson’s law tends to be more true for people who want to be more efficient than productive.
- quenix 4y ago
  What is the "productivity is bullshit phase"?
  - thenerdhead 4y ago
    That productivity hacks are temporal at best and you can be plenty efficient by just focusing on one thing at a time. That you can get more done in a day than most people get done in a week or month this way. That productivity gurus are not the people to look for answers from, but rather yourself. That overestimating your short term is limiting given people have wonder years through their personal development where they get more done in a single year than a decade. Etc. That people like the author might be doing too much and could benefit from doing less making them more efficient in both the short and long term.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      I'm confused. Which paragraph is the incorrect take, and which the correct one?
      - thenerdhead 4y ago
        There is no correct take because it changes with time over one's personal development. If you're getting more done with the limited time you have each day, you are in the productivity camp. If you're getting more done with less time each day, you are in the efficiency camp. If you're getting the right things done with less time each day, you're in the effectiveness camp. I am just pointing out that this author talks about all the stuff(productivity) they accomplished in a short period of time to then talk about overestimating their ability? If anything they are underestimating it. Imagine what they could do if they did one thing fully(efficiency) and not a handful of things partially? That's the productivity trap in my opinion. Take it one step further, if they knew the one thing they were doing is the right thing to be doing(i.e. YouTube), they would be especially effective.
alexyz12 4y ago
this is why I don't like school. It squeezes everything you need to know into a semester and you feel dumb for not understanding it right away. At least I do. But if you just had a little more time it would be totally fine.
kerblang 4y ago
All good, but esp. in the tech industry people tend to make 1001 excuses for 100% short-term thinking at the complete exclusion of long-term thinking, and that means a mountain of unresolved always-just-barely-worked as well as an organic journey that lands you in a random spot instead of an ideal one. Put differently, consecutive short-term investment payoffs do not add up to the same value as long-term investment over the same period. The long play is harder with greater rewards accordingly. So you balance "keeping the lights on" with "where do I wanna be in 10 years?"
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Hard_Space 4y ago
I have a number of personal development projects that I consider critical for my existence. One is to learn the language of the country I'm in; another is to go to the gym 3-4 times a week (75% of my sessions are currently with a trainer, because I'm new to it, started about three months ago). And a recent 'wear away the stone' project was to earn X$ per month writing about AI, which took five years, beginning from some very humble pay checks. But these are not 'vanity' projects: the latter was obviously pivotal to my survival, as I'm not independently wealthy, and had no job when I migrated; my motivation for the gym is that I have suffered from depression for forty years, and pushing myself physically and engaging with my body is the most effective treatment (albeit found late in life) I have ever come across to massively alleviate this (hence looking better, muscles, etc. is just collateral benefit); and the need to speak the language of my adopted country is obvious. Sure, there are other things I have persisted in and improved in because they massively accord with my interests and enthusiasm, but those three projects are my demonstration to myself that persistence, while not a magic bullet (some people are never going to make it in Hollywood, for instance), is as near to a magic bullet for personal transformation as most of us are ever likely to have access to. The gym is the one that fascinates me most at the moment; I look around me, as a relative newcomer, and wonder at the motivation behind the incredible bodies you see there. Are they all sprouting out from some deep psychological need? Even if it's 'just' vanity, it would have to qualify as pathological - as my own reason for being there is. So I am interested in people who will go through these kind of pain and boredom barriers for less intense reasons, if indeed they exist.
- ovulator 4y ago
  When I first started hitting the gym, it was because of a horrible break up. So there was a psychological need (I found it better than any therapist I was trying at the time). But then, it just became habit. I went today because I went yesterday. Nothing more to it. Then covid hit, and that habit broke. I've been getting back into it, but in fits and starts because I've lacked that initial push.
  - anthomtb 4y ago
    I would say this is a difference between a short-term habit (going to the gym) and a long-term goal (being fit). Habits can be long term of course, but likely to fade if they don't resolve around some long term goal. If your goal is fitness and the gym isn't interesting, you will find some other way to obtain fitness. Maybe martial arts, maybe a physical team sport, maybe an individual sport. Then at some point you'll plateau at your sport, or the offseason hits, or you need more strength or endurance, and there's your reason to get back in the gym. Rinse and repeat for as long as you want to stay fit.
deepsun 4y ago
Sounds like author just promotes their YouTube channel.
fsckboy 4y ago
> We overestimate our short-term ability, but underestimate our long-term ability. In a short timeframe, this guy started a whole bunch of projects that he didn't finish. In the short term, he overestimates his long term ability. And perhaps he underestimated his short term ability because he's impressed with starting so many projects, more than he could finish with his overestimated long term abilities. but don't listen to me, glass half empty sounds optimistic ("I've identified the problem, I can see room for improvement! I know how to fix this!") and glass half full sounds like you're trying to convince yourself you don't need to do anything, that everything is going to be OK.
grep_name 4y ago
I think the former leads to the latter. I can't count the number of times I set myself up to do a ton of different projects at once, only to end up slowly paring it down to just whatever the most critical project was and spending more time than the entire estimate for the rest of the projects on that one thing. If that happens to you enough times, you'll start to extrapolate the pattern to long-term estimations of what you can do and it can really mess with your self esteem. Interestingly, I find this only happens with personal projects. At work I just overestimate everything to protect myself. So, it may also be that for things outside of work I simply underestimate how many of my life resources (time, energy, willpower) are eaten up by work and that confounds my estimates. I'm honestly not sure which thing is the bigger factor.
credit_guy 4y ago
Indeed, a good example is that people overestimate how many pounds they can lose in the short term, and underestimate how many pounds they can gain in the long term.
- cloverich 4y ago
  Best example I ever saw was doing my family practice rotation. Patient was complaining they'd gained 10 lbs. Physician asked "You add a can of soda to your lunch or dinner last year?". They said (paraphrasing) "Yes lol how did you know". They did the math. Keep everything constant. Add ONE can of soda a day. One year will add 10lbs. Was mind boggling for the patient and me at the time.
avgcorrection 4y ago
I can’t speak to my own accomplishments, but: I am not quite as often impressed by what some people manage to do in a couple of weekends, but I am more often impressed by the things that they do in a matter of months or years.
JoshCole 4y ago
I think we do overestimate short term things and underestimate long term things. However, I think it is important to clarify that it would be a mistake to think of this tendency in a pejorative way. It is, best as I can tell, more correct than the alternative. Some reasons for that: - Conjunction of events is less than the probability of its individual constituents and unless the events were certain to occur is always less than the probability that they occurred given that they occurred. - Making an estimate out of multiple different approximations with unknown error bounds you should have decreasing confidence in your approximation because you have increasing confidence of error in your approximation. - Modeling with the bellman equations such that overestimation of true utilities in short term and bad underestimation of true utilities in the long term can produce superhuman cognitive abilities in many decision making contexts. - We ought to see overestimation and underestimation: given a coin that is biased, it does not follow that you bet on that coin with probability proportional to the bias, but rather to the rounding. So we should see actions that correspond with rounding up in the short term which is more likely to be less conjuncted and therefore higher probability and we should see rounding down in the long term wherein there is more conjunction and therefore lower probability. This all leads me to suspect that a framing around faith being justified, not around whether we overestimate or underestimate, might be a more correct framing. This is actually exceedingly true in the cooperative regime wherein other agents force underestimation of probabilities due to the potential for competition, but in which a cooperative environment supports overestimation. To get at what I mean by that, consider that no one must teach you proper form such that you do not injure yourself at a gym, so your probability of injury is actually pretty high if you are estimating using only the things you can control, yet in practice you will probably get high quality advice to avoid injury if someone cooperative notices you are likely to hurt yourself - it is not sufficient to point at the ability to learn this information yourself to refute this, because all the information available to you is a function of a cooperative society. So the going to the gym and avoiding injury while doing so should use a non-cooperative creature like an octopus going to an open location and doing exercise there in sight of predators: they don't have access to books to help them, they have access to sharks. As an aside, lots of people are so surrounded by the waters of cooperation they can hardly notice they are swimming, which is kind of interesting to contrast with the octopus with adaptive camouflage that is more prone to death the moment it become visible. But now we are getting into a defense for bad estimation - because we are starting to get into estimates that are predicated on self-reference: agent one observes agent two and makes a decision based on their policy, but agent one is also making observations of agent two and deciding policy based on that! This is a regime wherein we start getting paradoxes like the halting problem, godel's incompleteness proof, or the linguistic paradox of heterological classification. In other words, we find strong evidence for the need for some other concept than yes or no, something more like the idea of mu or the idea of undecidability. So here we reach another reason to disagree with the idea: how can an answer which isn't even well defined because it is undedicable be an overestimate or an underestimate?
aerhardt 4y ago
I don't always code as much as I'd like to in my job, and following some advice here, I've started coding an hour every morning, first thing in the morning, since Jan 1st. I've only missed one day, which reminds me of my own falibility, but the habit has otherwise been transformative and liberating. I'll be writing a post about it once I hit the two or three-month mark for a little bit more of street cred when talking about the experience, but if anyone's interested I can give you a few preview points here.
- reb 4y ago
  I'll bite: what do you think?
  - aerhardt 4y ago
    Things that have helped in sticking to it thus far: - I do it before work, right after my normal wake-up routine (get dressed, meditate, coffee). No excuses on this one. Been waking up 30min / 1 hour earlier. - It has to be programming. Can't be reading books, watching videos, anything that's consumption and not creation. Naturally, reading my own code and reflecting on design count as production. - On the latter, while reflection may be about 80% of coding, I'm trying to cultivate a working style where I write more instinctively and faster, and edit later. - It cannot be HTML or CSS. I enjoy front-end work but it's not what I'm looking to improve. - Likewise, for the moment, and as much as I love these activities, initial architecture and project planning don't count. I've found free time for that elsewhere thus far. - If I don't have a project (work or hobby) that's interesting, immediately resort to Leetcode, Advent of Code, or anything and everything that gets me coding. - Python is helping. I like many languages, but I know I can pick Python up at any time without too much ceremony. Good standard lib (including testing), good ecosystem, easy syntax, decent type system. Occasional hiccups with dependency and environment management make me want to throw the computer out of the window, but the positives far outweigh this, and such is programming. - Kept a simple to-do file at the root of the project with an ordered product backlog. Keeping it more or less groomed has helped me jump immediately back into the action every morning. - Liberal use of ChatGPT and Copilot. They're far from perfect and I see them derail often, but they've helped somewhat to keep motivation high by removing some of the grunt work.
kmt-lnh 4y ago
In April 2021 I started to read 4 pages a day from big books I always wanted to read, but never had time for it. 4 pages and stop even if I get into the flow, 4 pages even if I'm falling asleep because it's so boring. Not even 2 years in, I've already read the Bible, the Elements of Euclid, Zeldovich's Intro to Higher Math, and am in the middle of Das Kapital. The Great Books canon never looked more approachable. Just 4 pages a day. It really adds up.
- soupfordummies 4y ago
  Totally! This translates too. I've had a home office conversion project going on the back burner for a while and always put it off because its so "monumental". I've started just working 10mins a day on it and the progress I made in two weeks was really astounding to me. I would say, maybe DON'T stop if you get in the flow but don't feel bad if you can ONLY manage the 4 pages/ten minutes.
- munificent 4y ago
  My dumb but astonishingly effective life hack: I leave a big non-fiction book in the bathroom and don't take my phone in there. I've made my way through so many textbooks one bowel movement at a time because even the most boring one is more fun that reading the shampoo bottle.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    How do you disinfect
    - xboxnolifes 4y ago
      You don't. People have been reading in the bathroom for decades. You're getting little shit particles in your nose regardless of whether you read in there.
      - pmdr 4y ago
        Plus that's the only way to realize your brother-in-law is actually a drug lord.
sharadov 4y ago
I see this most often with people who get all gung-ho about working out, they get themselves into these hours-long intense workout regimens and then either run out of steam or hurt themselves. Rather just do a 30 min routine 3-4 days a week and look at yourself after 1/3/6 months. You will have built a habit and achieved a lot more.
Thespian2 4y ago
If this is a continuous function, that implies there is some time horizon between short-term and long-term where our ability estimates are spot-on. Finding that precise time horizon is an exercise left for the reader.
augustk 4y ago
Got me thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare

421 points by p44v9n 4y ago

This feels adjacent to something I've done for a long time: I will do a task of moderate complexity by hand, typing several commands as needed, until I've done it enough to get a feel for how it varies, and only then start automating it.

ctur 4y ago
My general flow is “do it, teach it, automate it” where the middle step is explaining it to someone else who then also does it then (hopefully) helps, or at least consults, on the automation. This way you can iterate a bit before codifying it and help flush out any bad ideas or assumptions.

voisin 4y ago

Tony Robbins has been saying this for decades. People overestimate what they can do in a year but massively underestimate what they can do in a decade. One implication being that if you take up a hobby (say, playing the piano) after a year you are probably not very good and a lot of people then give it up because their performance doesn’t meet their (over-)expectation. But stick with it, grinding it out year after year, and almost anyone can meet their expectations. The trick, of course, is to only undertake those few things which you think you’ll want to stick with over the long term.

bitexploder 4y ago
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, a grappling martial art, is very much like that. And there was a great post on HN yesterday about this. And I just randomly had a talk with my son about effort and hard work (he is 16, struggling with school, ADHD, just like me). Here are my anecdotes: BJJ: After one year, all but the newest people still make you feel like you don't know anything, they can submit you pretty easily. Train for 10 years and you are at or close to "black belt" (Which takes on average 10-12 years in BJJ, it is not easy to get at all) and you can fold people up on instinct. The funny thing about the 1 year mark, you FEEL like you haven't learned anything, but you can gently fold the average human up now if it comes down to it. Business: We built a business over 8 years. It was hard. The first year we were negative in profit, paying ourselves out of our bank accounts. Overnight success in 8 years. Just keep learning everything that wasn't tech, marketing, people management skills, etc. Eventually we did well got up to like 20 person head count purely with organic growth and were acquired. Skills in general: https://gist.github.com/gtallen1187/e83ed02eac6cc8d7e185 https://gist.github.com/gtallen1187/e83ed02eac6cc8d7e185 "A little slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept". So now when people ask me anything. Career advice. How do I lose weight. How do I get in shape. "Let me tell you about my 10 year plan for you. you can't even imagine how long and hard 10 years is, I know, but that is what it is going to take to make a life long change. do you still want my advice?" Of course many good things happen sooner, but I only talk to people that can at least accept it is going to be hard and I don't hold any secrets about anything other than you have to work really hard and apply effort.
- matwood 4y ago
  I'm glad someone brought up BJJ. I'm ~4 years in, and it works exactly this way. The day to day doesn't seem like you're learning that much. In fact, I don't even feel like I know that much after 4 years. But, when I roll with high belts now many have to really work to get me. And like you said, if I go against someone who has never grappled before, I can gently fold them up without breathing hard.
  - bitexploder 4y ago
    I am at 4 years. Lay off for COVID. Just starting to get the hang of some things and present problems to higher belts. The interesting thing to me, once I can funnel someone into a dilemma game I know well, there isn't as much difference as I thought there would be between upper belts. I would say tougher black belts have seen it all before and give a really hard fight at each decision point in the attack tree, and can often just escape if technique is a little lose, but it isn't insanely different. I know how to fix things and make it harder every time I find a little gap like that now and they are little gaps. I still just get beat up most of the time, heh, but when things work they really work as I implement more of the game I like. I think that is an interesting place in skill development. Not an expert, but not a novice.
    - matwood 4y ago
      I definitely still get beat up most of the time. Also, within black belts there can be a lot of variation. But to your point, you have enough tools now that if you execute properly and lead a high belt down your path, you could catch them. That simply would never happen until 3-4 years in (and I'm not counting life long wrestlers who show up with 'no' BJJ experience). A big turning point for me was when I would lose and could walk backwards the whole roll in my head and see the root error. BJJ is a lot like chess in this way. When you start you just get beat and see the move that beat you. As you get better you see the chain of events that lead to the finish.
      - bitexploder 4y ago
Spooky23 4y ago
I think people are wired to seasons and beyond that things get pretty abstract.

revskill 4y ago

Done means perfectable. It means it's not perfect, but there must be a simple way to make it perfect. That's why monopoly, or monothlic architecture eventually failed. They can't scale.

cosmojg 4y ago
> That's why monopoly, or monothlic architecture eventually failed. They can't scale. Could you provide some examples? One counterexample: Linux, the world's biggest monolithic kernel, seems to be going pretty strong.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  On the software level the monoliths are going strong, but I guess you could make the argument on the hardware level? IBM system Z revenue is half what it was two decades ago, and every new system is designed to achieve scale and uptime by using multiple smallish servers, instead of one giant earthquake-safe mainframe with hotswappable processors.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  It's called monolithic but it still has modules

frogulis 4y ago

Why does my mouse say "Visitor" when I hover over the text?

LorenzA 4y ago
looks like a "fun" thing there are a couple other states that change the image that gets displayed. Clicking up top on the dark mode to get "night own" or type the Konami Code to get Konami the other 2 cases seem to be disabled
okal 4y ago
I keep getting so irritated by the cursor, that my brain completely refuses to process the contents of the page. So irritated, in fact, that I forgot I could switch to Reader Mode. I really wish they'd provided a way to disable it.
- p44v9n 4y ago
  This is my site — thanks for the feedback!
  - RheingoldRiver 4y ago
    Yeah, please disable the custom cursor. IME custom cursors are something that site designers tend to like, and think are pretty cool, and site visitors end up loathing. The cursor is your interface to the UI and as such isn't exactly a *part* of the UI - it's your way of saying "hey I'm here, I can do things," etc. So for a UI to take hold of it and change it is extremely jarring. (Video games often do change your cursor of course, and part of that is because they're indeed trying to be immersive, and you're here for that experience. But such is not the case on a website.)
  - okal 4y ago
    Happy to help!
dgb23 4y ago
It's basically a div that is positioned next to your cursor when you move it. It's also slightly buggy because it doesn't recognize whether the cursor is actually moving across the view-port or not. No idea why they did that.

js8 4y ago

I also claim that people overestimate the effort needed but underestimate the time needed. Perhaps we mostly do not take learning (and efficiency that comes with it) into account. Longer real projects are more an S-curve than straight line where time = effort.

SunghoYahng 4y ago
Then my hypothesis is that if someone actually puts as much effort into the goal as they estimate, they will achieve it in as little time as they estimate.
- shanebellone 4y ago
  I agree with this. I'd venture a guess that we overly value our time which translates to overestimating the impact of applying that time. However, we also underestimate the true scope of longer timeframes.
- mberger 4y ago
  I wonder if it's because of the decline in neuroplasticity as we age. We take a week to learn a new video game and expect that peace to continue when we get older. It can be a hit to the ego that it may take a little longer, that we aren't quite as 'smart' as we thought.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    Biggest effect is that your standards get higher. As a kid learning a game just meant learning to play it at a kids low skill level. Kids till spend years to get good. But as an adult who has played a lot of games you have gotten pretty good at many of them, then when you play a new game getting to that level again will take a lot of effort and time. For example, you see the world records in factorio aren't held by kids. Kids has better reflexes which is crucial for some games, but their ability to learn isn't much higher than a young adults.
  - user_7832 4y ago
    While possible, I am not so sure of that. I am in my early/mid 20s (so hopefully no major cognitive decline!) but I still find things taking longer than expected. Part of it may be the work I’m doing today is tougher in some ways. I also have adhd though so that may also affect this.

SunghoYahng 4y ago

Well, then if I'm only interested in getting results in the short term and don't care about getting results in many years from now when I'm old, what could I do? A psychotherapist? Denying reality and dooming myself?

elSidCampeador 4y ago
> Well, then if I'm only interested in getting results in the short term and don't care about getting results in many years from now when I'm old, what could I do? become good at learning from your mistakes quickly
michaelbuckbee 4y ago
Something to consider is that if things go well, you'll get old. So the big choices are really about where you want to be when you are old. Short term I feel like this article is still useful advice as it helps to avoid the trap of working on something for a small amount of time and feeling like it was a waste when it was really stacking bricks to make a larger effort.
- SunghoYahng 4y ago
  >Something to consider is that if things go well, you'll get old. So the big choices are really about where you want to be when you are old. It feels like shit vs more shit
  - esperent 4y ago
    This is a sign of depression or something similar. Usually people will suggest therapy in these situations, have you considered it? It's far from the only path though. There's many possible causes of depression and even more possible solutions. Find one that works for you. You deserve more than shit. As someone who's been deep in that shit more than once, you can claw your way out and once you do, the world is a beautiful place that's worth growing old in. Then you'll end up in the shit again but each time climbing out gets easier. Personally it took me moving country, changing career more than once until I found one that gave me a sense of purpose, finding a beautiful and totally surprising partner, and lots more to find my present stability. That's what worked for me. What will work for you? You need to find that out. You only have one life, if it's shitty now them what have you got to lose by making every possible effort to change that? I mean, what could possibly be more important than making that effort? Certainly not a shitty career or a shitty relationship or a shitty family. Leave them if you need to. Nothing controls you except you. And physics, and the law and immigration officers and so on. But there's always room to maneuver.

retrac 4y ago

Learning another (human) language is like that. Almost anyone can do it. It requires no special skills, training, or experience. There are some tricks that you can use, but mostly it's just an enormous amount of work, not particularly challenging work either, that you need to persist at for years, even decades. I'd like to think this is common knowledge, but I have many times talked with people who hope to learn French to fluency in six months, and people who are convinced they could never learn it no matter what. Both types are terrible with estimating their abilities.

sebzim4500 4y ago
>people who are convinced they could never learn it no matter what Do these people actually believe that it would be impossible for them, or merely that they would give up before success. i.e. do they think that they would not be able to learn the language in five years if they were offered a billion dollars? Because personally I doubt I will ever learn a second language, but I'm sure I could given enough time and the right incentive.
- retrac 4y ago
  Some do think that. Often an impression formed from no obvious progress after a few weeks.
- malshe 4y ago
  I am one of those people who think it is impossible for me to learn a new language!
- w0m 4y ago
  I could learn another language. But I can't learn a second language insofar-as I can't foresee a situation where I"d be willing or able to dedicate the mental capital toward the task.
- HPsquared 4y ago
  I think most people who say that probably consider it "not economically viable". That is, their assessment is that the expected reward doesn't justify the expected investment.

diceduckmonk 4y ago

Same as how cumulative effects and exponential are unintuitive.

JadeNB 4y ago
> Same as how cumulative effects and exponential are unintuitive. Indeed, I'd argue that cumulative effects are unintuitive because (if done right! … or badly wrong, I suppose) they're exponential.

xianshou 4y ago

Very similar to Amara's Law, the equivalent for technology - we overestimate short-term impact while underestimating long-term. Funny how this phenomenon crops up at both the societal and the individual scale: https://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/amaras-law https://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/amaras-law

p44v9n 4y ago
Ooo sweet. Thanks for sharing!

neontomo 4y ago

I think this also leads to taking on more projects than we can manage.

thenerdhead 4y ago

I think there’s a point where the opposite is true in your life too. Especially when you’ve past the “productivity is bullshit” phase. Parkinson’s law tends to be more true for people who want to be more efficient than productive.

quenix 4y ago
What is the "productivity is bullshit phase"?
- thenerdhead 4y ago
  That productivity hacks are temporal at best and you can be plenty efficient by just focusing on one thing at a time. That you can get more done in a day than most people get done in a week or month this way. That productivity gurus are not the people to look for answers from, but rather yourself. That overestimating your short term is limiting given people have wonder years through their personal development where they get more done in a single year than a decade. Etc. That people like the author might be doing too much and could benefit from doing less making them more efficient in both the short and long term.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    I'm confused. Which paragraph is the incorrect take, and which the correct one?
    - thenerdhead 4y ago
      There is no correct take because it changes with time over one's personal development. If you're getting more done with the limited time you have each day, you are in the productivity camp. If you're getting more done with less time each day, you are in the efficiency camp. If you're getting the right things done with less time each day, you're in the effectiveness camp. I am just pointing out that this author talks about all the stuff(productivity) they accomplished in a short period of time to then talk about overestimating their ability? If anything they are underestimating it. Imagine what they could do if they did one thing fully(efficiency) and not a handful of things partially? That's the productivity trap in my opinion. Take it one step further, if they knew the one thing they were doing is the right thing to be doing(i.e. YouTube), they would be especially effective.

alexyz12 4y ago

this is why I don't like school. It squeezes everything you need to know into a semester and you feel dumb for not understanding it right away. At least I do. But if you just had a little more time it would be totally fine.

kerblang 4y ago

All good, but esp. in the tech industry people tend to make 1001 excuses for 100% short-term thinking at the complete exclusion of long-term thinking, and that means a mountain of unresolved always-just-barely-worked as well as an organic journey that lands you in a random spot instead of an ideal one. Put differently, consecutive short-term investment payoffs do not add up to the same value as long-term investment over the same period. The long play is harder with greater rewards accordingly. So you balance "keeping the lights on" with "where do I wanna be in 10 years?"

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Hard_Space 4y ago

I have a number of personal development projects that I consider critical for my existence. One is to learn the language of the country I'm in; another is to go to the gym 3-4 times a week (75% of my sessions are currently with a trainer, because I'm new to it, started about three months ago). And a recent 'wear away the stone' project was to earn X$ per month writing about AI, which took five years, beginning from some very humble pay checks. But these are not 'vanity' projects: the latter was obviously pivotal to my survival, as I'm not independently wealthy, and had no job when I migrated; my motivation for the gym is that I have suffered from depression for forty years, and pushing myself physically and engaging with my body is the most effective treatment (albeit found late in life) I have ever come across to massively alleviate this (hence looking better, muscles, etc. is just collateral benefit); and the need to speak the language of my adopted country is obvious. Sure, there are other things I have persisted in and improved in because they massively accord with my interests and enthusiasm, but those three projects are my demonstration to myself that persistence, while not a magic bullet (some people are never going to make it in Hollywood, for instance), is as near to a magic bullet for personal transformation as most of us are ever likely to have access to. The gym is the one that fascinates me most at the moment; I look around me, as a relative newcomer, and wonder at the motivation behind the incredible bodies you see there. Are they all sprouting out from some deep psychological need? Even if it's 'just' vanity, it would have to qualify as pathological - as my own reason for being there is. So I am interested in people who will go through these kind of pain and boredom barriers for less intense reasons, if indeed they exist.

ovulator 4y ago
When I first started hitting the gym, it was because of a horrible break up. So there was a psychological need (I found it better than any therapist I was trying at the time). But then, it just became habit. I went today because I went yesterday. Nothing more to it. Then covid hit, and that habit broke. I've been getting back into it, but in fits and starts because I've lacked that initial push.
- anthomtb 4y ago
  I would say this is a difference between a short-term habit (going to the gym) and a long-term goal (being fit). Habits can be long term of course, but likely to fade if they don't resolve around some long term goal. If your goal is fitness and the gym isn't interesting, you will find some other way to obtain fitness. Maybe martial arts, maybe a physical team sport, maybe an individual sport. Then at some point you'll plateau at your sport, or the offseason hits, or you need more strength or endurance, and there's your reason to get back in the gym. Rinse and repeat for as long as you want to stay fit.

deepsun 4y ago

Sounds like author just promotes their YouTube channel.

fsckboy 4y ago

> We overestimate our short-term ability, but underestimate our long-term ability. In a short timeframe, this guy started a whole bunch of projects that he didn't finish. In the short term, he overestimates his long term ability. And perhaps he underestimated his short term ability because he's impressed with starting so many projects, more than he could finish with his overestimated long term abilities. but don't listen to me, glass half empty sounds optimistic ("I've identified the problem, I can see room for improvement! I know how to fix this!") and glass half full sounds like you're trying to convince yourself you don't need to do anything, that everything is going to be OK.

grep_name 4y ago

I think the former leads to the latter. I can't count the number of times I set myself up to do a ton of different projects at once, only to end up slowly paring it down to just whatever the most critical project was and spending more time than the entire estimate for the rest of the projects on that one thing. If that happens to you enough times, you'll start to extrapolate the pattern to long-term estimations of what you can do and it can really mess with your self esteem. Interestingly, I find this only happens with personal projects. At work I just overestimate everything to protect myself. So, it may also be that for things outside of work I simply underestimate how many of my life resources (time, energy, willpower) are eaten up by work and that confounds my estimates. I'm honestly not sure which thing is the bigger factor.

credit_guy 4y ago

Indeed, a good example is that people overestimate how many pounds they can lose in the short term, and underestimate how many pounds they can gain in the long term.

cloverich 4y ago
Best example I ever saw was doing my family practice rotation. Patient was complaining they'd gained 10 lbs. Physician asked "You add a can of soda to your lunch or dinner last year?". They said (paraphrasing) "Yes lol how did you know". They did the math. Keep everything constant. Add ONE can of soda a day. One year will add 10lbs. Was mind boggling for the patient and me at the time.

avgcorrection 4y ago

I can’t speak to my own accomplishments, but: I am not quite as often impressed by what some people manage to do in a couple of weekends, but I am more often impressed by the things that they do in a matter of months or years.

JoshCole 4y ago

I think we do overestimate short term things and underestimate long term things. However, I think it is important to clarify that it would be a mistake to think of this tendency in a pejorative way. It is, best as I can tell, more correct than the alternative. Some reasons for that: - Conjunction of events is less than the probability of its individual constituents and unless the events were certain to occur is always less than the probability that they occurred given that they occurred. - Making an estimate out of multiple different approximations with unknown error bounds you should have decreasing confidence in your approximation because you have increasing confidence of error in your approximation. - Modeling with the bellman equations such that overestimation of true utilities in short term and bad underestimation of true utilities in the long term can produce superhuman cognitive abilities in many decision making contexts. - We ought to see overestimation and underestimation: given a coin that is biased, it does not follow that you bet on that coin with probability proportional to the bias, but rather to the rounding. So we should see actions that correspond with rounding up in the short term which is more likely to be less conjuncted and therefore higher probability and we should see rounding down in the long term wherein there is more conjunction and therefore lower probability. This all leads me to suspect that a framing around faith being justified, not around whether we overestimate or underestimate, might be a more correct framing. This is actually exceedingly true in the cooperative regime wherein other agents force underestimation of probabilities due to the potential for competition, but in which a cooperative environment supports overestimation. To get at what I mean by that, consider that no one must teach you proper form such that you do not injure yourself at a gym, so your probability of injury is actually pretty high if you are estimating using only the things you can control, yet in practice you will probably get high quality advice to avoid injury if someone cooperative notices you are likely to hurt yourself - it is not sufficient to point at the ability to learn this information yourself to refute this, because all the information available to you is a function of a cooperative society. So the going to the gym and avoiding injury while doing so should use a non-cooperative creature like an octopus going to an open location and doing exercise there in sight of predators: they don't have access to books to help them, they have access to sharks. As an aside, lots of people are so surrounded by the waters of cooperation they can hardly notice they are swimming, which is kind of interesting to contrast with the octopus with adaptive camouflage that is more prone to death the moment it become visible. But now we are getting into a defense for bad estimation - because we are starting to get into estimates that are predicated on self-reference: agent one observes agent two and makes a decision based on their policy, but agent one is also making observations of agent two and deciding policy based on that! This is a regime wherein we start getting paradoxes like the halting problem, godel's incompleteness proof, or the linguistic paradox of heterological classification. In other words, we find strong evidence for the need for some other concept than yes or no, something more like the idea of mu or the idea of undecidability. So here we reach another reason to disagree with the idea: how can an answer which isn't even well defined because it is undedicable be an overestimate or an underestimate?

aerhardt 4y ago

I don't always code as much as I'd like to in my job, and following some advice here, I've started coding an hour every morning, first thing in the morning, since Jan 1st. I've only missed one day, which reminds me of my own falibility, but the habit has otherwise been transformative and liberating. I'll be writing a post about it once I hit the two or three-month mark for a little bit more of street cred when talking about the experience, but if anyone's interested I can give you a few preview points here.

reb 4y ago
I'll bite: what do you think?
- aerhardt 4y ago
  Things that have helped in sticking to it thus far: - I do it before work, right after my normal wake-up routine (get dressed, meditate, coffee). No excuses on this one. Been waking up 30min / 1 hour earlier. - It has to be programming. Can't be reading books, watching videos, anything that's consumption and not creation. Naturally, reading my own code and reflecting on design count as production. - On the latter, while reflection may be about 80% of coding, I'm trying to cultivate a working style where I write more instinctively and faster, and edit later. - It cannot be HTML or CSS. I enjoy front-end work but it's not what I'm looking to improve. - Likewise, for the moment, and as much as I love these activities, initial architecture and project planning don't count. I've found free time for that elsewhere thus far. - If I don't have a project (work or hobby) that's interesting, immediately resort to Leetcode, Advent of Code, or anything and everything that gets me coding. - Python is helping. I like many languages, but I know I can pick Python up at any time without too much ceremony. Good standard lib (including testing), good ecosystem, easy syntax, decent type system. Occasional hiccups with dependency and environment management make me want to throw the computer out of the window, but the positives far outweigh this, and such is programming. - Kept a simple to-do file at the root of the project with an ordered product backlog. Keeping it more or less groomed has helped me jump immediately back into the action every morning. - Liberal use of ChatGPT and Copilot. They're far from perfect and I see them derail often, but they've helped somewhat to keep motivation high by removing some of the grunt work.

kmt-lnh 4y ago

In April 2021 I started to read 4 pages a day from big books I always wanted to read, but never had time for it. 4 pages and stop even if I get into the flow, 4 pages even if I'm falling asleep because it's so boring. Not even 2 years in, I've already read the Bible, the Elements of Euclid, Zeldovich's Intro to Higher Math, and am in the middle of Das Kapital. The Great Books canon never looked more approachable. Just 4 pages a day. It really adds up.

soupfordummies 4y ago
Totally! This translates too. I've had a home office conversion project going on the back burner for a while and always put it off because its so "monumental". I've started just working 10mins a day on it and the progress I made in two weeks was really astounding to me. I would say, maybe DON'T stop if you get in the flow but don't feel bad if you can ONLY manage the 4 pages/ten minutes.
munificent 4y ago
My dumb but astonishingly effective life hack: I leave a big non-fiction book in the bathroom and don't take my phone in there. I've made my way through so many textbooks one bowel movement at a time because even the most boring one is more fun that reading the shampoo bottle.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  How do you disinfect
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    You don't. People have been reading in the bathroom for decades. You're getting little shit particles in your nose regardless of whether you read in there.
    - pmdr 4y ago
      Plus that's the only way to realize your brother-in-law is actually a drug lord.

sharadov 4y ago

I see this most often with people who get all gung-ho about working out, they get themselves into these hours-long intense workout regimens and then either run out of steam or hurt themselves. Rather just do a 30 min routine 3-4 days a week and look at yourself after 1/3/6 months. You will have built a habit and achieved a lot more.

Thespian2 4y ago

If this is a continuous function, that implies there is some time horizon between short-term and long-term where our ability estimates are spot-on. Finding that precise time horizon is an exercise left for the reader.

augustk 4y ago

Got me thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare