Efficacy beats efficiency, and other tips: My favourite online mentor, Tim Ferriss, with once again a great video. I’ll watch this every afternoon, to remember the lessons, but some key takeaways:
Efficacy beats efficiency. Do the right thing. Substance vs method.
The magic process for efficay: Wake up, seat with a cup of tea and write 3-5 important things. Ask “if it’s the only thing I accomplish today, would I be satisfied?” and “does moving this forward make all the other todos unimportant or easier to knock off later?”. Choose one that you answered yes and focus on only one for today for an uninterapted block of time for 2-3 items. No social media, no procrastination. For 2-3 hours. Deep work. I can hold my lesser behaviours for a that block of time. Just single task. And if it happens, and I procrastinate, gently come back and foucs. It’s part of the process.
Successful people are also humans. Tim raised his passive income and made huge deals but also hit the snooze button mutlple times and watched porn. He is not superhuman, he is not always winning, he makes mistakes.
Broken Academia: Some resources on why academia is problematic these days. Nobel Prize winner physist Peter Higgs notably says “in today’s hectic academic world he thinks he would never have had enough the time or space to formulate his groundbreaking theory”. Back in his time, he struggled to keep up with developments in particle theory, published so few papers that he became an “embarrassment” to his department, and would never get a job in academia now. Sabine Hossenfelder says that “academia has become a paper production machine that focuses on getting grants. You get a grant for a student, that the professor forces to write chapters of books and proposals, to get more grants. You are not given the time for deep research or to dive into out of the ordinary ideas. You understand how to get grants, work on projects that are, not too mainstream, not too edgy, but mainstream/edgy enough. Back in 1600-2000, the romantic era of research, scientists had debates and time to dive into ideas.”. Essentially, you beg for money, do countless meaningless tasks instead of actual research. It is just a business. This has made many fake researchers scew data to get the results they want like this.
I think most people have the feeling (both in academia and industry) that they are working on the boring stuff. There is not much flexibility to do research in actually interesting problems, only on what is “relevant” / “trendy” / “makes money” / “is mainstream”. You can make stupid services that send data around so a project manager is happy to show more activity so he gets a raise. Without this actually helping clients or traders or anybody. But it’s easy to manipulate people into thinking it is productive.
Prevention >> Treatment: Similar to this neurosurgeon quiting his job, we don’t actually do the impactful things. It’s close to the idea of efficacy vs efficiency I mentioned before. What is the output of a crazy surgery that saves a life of a person for a bit while making it hard for thousands of people to leave a healthy lifestyle? Too much work, so they don’t get enough sleep and they don’t have enough money to buy healthy vegetables. Bombarding them with sugars packed drinks and super salty foods. Similarly in research, we make PhD student do all of unnecessary boring tasks, that are not impactful, wasting their time, just to get more money. Obviously, there is personal responsibility for people to eat healthy, exercise and sweat, sleep well, have friends to talk with. It makes me questions, “what is actually impactful?”. The medical system is set up for treatment, but not prevention. Financially, it makes more sense because pills and surgeries can be charged for while advices and healthy lifestyles do not cost anything. Imo feels like the straws initiative (are actually plastic straws the real problem for the environment? or just a feel-good ‘see what great progress we made’ illusion that distracts from the actual solutions?).
A rebellious ways to run startups here. Midjourney, craigslist, gumroad. indie hackers (run small startups on your own, 1 each month). With AI, this is the way to live.
The Competitive Programmer’s Handbook. My favourite sites to practice is leetcode and codeforces (with weekly and biweekly competitions).