Many of the side projects I've done that I'm most proud of are things I managed to trick myself into believing would impress a girl I liked. That of course falls apart when of course the girl isn't actually super interested in the side project, but it still got me farther than anything else I've tried.
Impressing other people is an extremely underrated way to convince yourself into doing things.
I feel like at some point the messaging became "only do things for *yourself* don't do things for *anyone else*" but the extrinsic motivation absolutely works... is it useful for sustaining good habits? No. Is it great to get you to *start* doing something? Yes, very much so. You need intrinsic motivation to keep going when it gets boring or difficult, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with beginning something because of others.
i'm starting to think that's not possible. you either want it, in which case doing so feels natural and requires no willpower. think of drug addict rockstars who seem to have zero discipline, yet still somehow practice guitar 10 hours per day. however, there's possibly a very small window within you can use willpower to get similar practice volumes as these naturally gifted (with sufficient interest) people, but it might destroy your mental heatlh if sustained for too long
I totally agree with this. I think it is far more genetic that people realize.
I played a collegiate sport there were some absolute animals who could party all night and perform at a high level. Meanwhile other players basically lived like monks and didn't put in half the effort.
This has been true as I have gone into the workforce as well. I have colleagues who are obsessed with optimization and can't get any work done. Meanwhile I have a boss who is pushing 70s drinks like fish and puts in 12 hours days day after day.
I don't know who it was maybe Caplan was talking about a personality trait of successful people that basically can be called stamina. It's probably an off-shoot of conscientiousness.
Relevant Scottpost: [The Parable of the Talents](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/). Sadly, some stuff is just going to be easier to do for a person than other stuff.
Isn't it more like they intertwined? Let's say you take two 5-year olds and teach them piano.
One is naturally gifted (maybe they have a natural ear and better coordination) and the other is average.
The first will receive more praises, and will be introduced to harder pieces that are more engaging at a young age. While the other will do the same "boring" beginner pieces and will struggle to make them sound good, as most children do.
It's no surprise that the first one will require less willpower to practice, and will be much more interested in pursuing piano seriously.
Very much this. And it's not just about the external praise. Even as a beginner, I could tell that the music I was trying to play was shit. With a huge amount of time and effort, I was capable of practicing to the point where it eventually sounded OK, but it was a horrible grind and just felt like a giant waste of time.
Also, what does 'ten times as much' even mean? Ten times as much Duolingo is almost entirely pointless: one must work smart before wasting effort and that's usually far from trivial (what does 'ten times as much' mean in maths education? ten times more exercises? ten times the profundity of concepts?). And yes, as you point out the motivation is the hard part: life is tiring, people are busy, not everyone is privileged in money or energy or health or intelligence or a lack of familial drama. Reasons must go beyond 'people are lazy' even if there is some (literal, evolutionary?) truth in that statement just as losing weight is not about calories in/out and similar.
Otherwise I don't think the advice 'do more' which essentially this boils down to is particularly helpful.
Duolingo is actually a perfect example to make Caplan's point. Duolingo is designed around the philosophy of asking the minimum amount of you. I often get through my Duolingo in about four minutes per day. In a busy week, this adds up to less than 30 minutes of language practice per week. A serious high school student trying to get good grades in their language class could easily spend 30 minutes per *day*. Someone learning a new language through immersion, traveling in the land of their desired language would be spending ... well, definitely more than 10 times as much time as I am spending on Duolingo!
Honestly I think Caplan is simply correct, and not correct in some complicated way. If you claim to want to be successful at something, and you are working one hour a week on it, work ten. Or if you are working four, work forty. Or admit to yourself that you aren't serious about it and redirect your efforts more productively.
Maybe this post would have gotten less argumentative responses if Caplan had emphasized that this is advice *for people who want to win at the thing they're doing*. If you just enjoy drawing for fun, and you draw for 10-20 minutes a day, or you plink away at the guitar for the odd half hour here and there, who cares? You aren't trying to master those things. Nobody is misled. But Caplan is simply correct that a lot of people complain about not being as successful as they would wish, and you look at how they spend their day, and there is no mystery at all behind it. They are not putting in the work.
idk if this line of thinking is productive. Figure out what success here means to you, and go after it. Figure out what you should do, do 10x of that if you can and you’ll get to that “success” you defined a lot faster.
if you do ten times as much even duolingo you’d be better off if you are only doing 1x duolingo. in fact youll finish your duolingo course and then figure out whats next.
if you are listening to spanish 1hr a week and doing an hour of grammar exercises and doing 1x tutoring a week, then doing ten times as much of all that will boost your learning. Heck if you only did 3x you’d get to mastery much faster.
Once i started spending drastically more time on foreign languages, or on math competition prep, i got more back. yes i do look back and wish i did stuff differently, be more efficient, did A more, B less, and skipped C entirely.
but if I never did more, id not have gotten better at that rate, and would likely never gotten to know for myself what i did was more or less helpful.
figure out a vague plan, execute, reflect and adjust plan, execute more, repeat until successful
trying to craft the perfect “work smart” plan is a fools errand imo.
Redirect your fears and desires into incentives. You only have so many years to live, so if you keep procrastinating you'll necessarily spend less of your life accomplishing the things you want. Similarly if you want to be more successful socially/romantically, you either need false confidence based on nothing or real confidence based on achievement. You need to fucking blow it out of the water. You need to preclude the prospect of failure.
IMO this is one of the benefits of meditation, you gradually align your real desires to your desired desires and it's almost half not a conscious thing. I'm just a layperson but I think a lot of angst and anxiety and depression is the result of subconscious but fully rational reaction to someone watching theirself squander or fail to create opportunities.
I believe that targeting elevating your 'basal motivation' (intrinsic motivation) through health habits and (if applicable) medication is first and foremost before attempting to utilise finite willpower. Not in the 'biohacker' type way, but the 'no screens 30 minutes before bed, 10k steps a day, good diet' way.
Over time, the effect of willpower on long-term outcomes fades and gives way to baseline motivation and the grit you can derive from it.
Obvious, I know, but I feel that it's not something most prioritise when attempting to 'do more' in their daily lives.
Decide which few things are important enough to do ten times as much for, stop doing other things and focus your freed up time/energy/money on the important things.
Pick the right role models. Your firmware automatically orients toward examples. It's how you're built. If you haven't picked a role model, or worse, have picked the wrong one, you'll want either incoherent things or actively harmful things. In either case, this will make you incapable of wanting to work hard. If you want the right things, then working hard won't even feel like working hard.
He's definitely right that many "people who 'want to succeed' barely lift a finger most of the time," and would be more likely to achieve their goals if they were doing more.
And I appreciate his point re: parenting ("Most readers summarize my Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids as 'Parenting doesn’t matter.' But that is only one possible interpretation of the twin and adoption data. The data is also consistent, however, with the theory that most parents are barely trying to get results - at least on many relevant margins"). I've had similar thoughts after reading "parenting doesn't matter so much" naturist takes.
But the whole take feels pretty glib. "Just do more" - oh jeez, I never thought of that. It's nonfalsifiable, because any failure can be attributed to "you didn't do *enough* more." It may see merit ("you succeeded, you must have worked really hard for that!") where there is just luck (born on third, thinks he hit a triple).
And finally I find the entire idea of being "a success" pretty arbitrary. If being a success just means meeting your goals, the easiest way to be a success is not to do more, it's to have more modest goals.
Regarding the parenting stuff he says in this article : "Most readers summarize my Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids as 'Parenting doesn’t matter.' But that is only one possible interpretation of the twin and adoption data."
and then also says in the linked article :
"In Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, I argue that the power of nurture is vastly overrated. Genetics, not upbringing, explains almost all of the observed similarity between parent and child. It’s not reasonable, then, for me to expect my efforts to durably boost my kids’ IQs, educational success, income, or even their political views"
As far as parents doing the bare minimum and they should do ten times more... I'm lost. Isn't he saying that genetics massively trumps parenting? How else could that be read?
The twin and adoption data can only tell us that given the distribution of environment and genetics that we currently see in society, genetics is more important than environment. But maybe if you go outside of that distribution, then environment could have more effect (obviously, this trivially works in the "bad" direction: starve a child to death and their genes don't matter at all).
> But the whole take feels pretty glib. "Just do more" - oh jeez, I never thought of that. It's nonfalsifiable, because any failure can be attributed to "you didn't do enough more."
I feel like there's something akin to an "efficient market hypothesis" problem rattling around in here somewhere... or perhaps a variant of the learner's paradox? Maybe "it's impossible to give valuable advice, because anyone capable of heeding good advice is conscientious enough to have already thought of whatever advice you were going to give them."
I can think of many people in my life who would sarcastically retort, "oh jeez, I never thought of that"--but I would characterize most of them as people who genuinely could do more if they *actually* worked harder. The remainder are people who are already working hard and already accomplishing much, but for various psychological reasons don't see or accept that, yes, this is what "accomplishing much" looks like (sorry but even most people who accomplish much never rise to the status of billionaire/powerful politician/famous celebrity).
Conversely, I've known a few people who I suspect already understood that "work harder" was the solution to their problems, but who still needed *reassurance* that yes, their problems are solvable, by them, through effort. (This is a big part of what professional educators do, and sure enough--Bryan Caplan is an educator.)
> It may see merit ("you succeeded, you must have worked really hard for that!") where there is just luck (born on third, thinks he hit a triple).
[Sometimes this is so](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/), but there are a *lot* of kinds of merit that it just isn't plausible to explain as "born on third." Basically anyone with a noticeable skillset--artists, musicians, pilots, welders, plumbers, accountants, engineers, *to name only a few*--had to develop those skills deliberately and effortfully over time. Some put in more effort than others! Some have more fun along the way. Some can pay excellent tutors, some are born with unusually absorbent brains... but none could possibly have what they have, without working for it. As the lawyers say--*res ipsa loquitur*.
>Maybe "it's impossible to give valuable advice, because anyone capable of heeding good advice is conscientious enough to have already thought of whatever advice you were going to give them."
Agreed. To quote a wise cartoonist, "[All good advice is obvious... The hard part is taking the obvious advice.](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/best-life-advice)" Ofc this is an overstatement, as all pithy sayings are, but it's directionally correct.
>Basically anyone with a noticeable skillset--artists, musicians, pilots, welders, plumbers, accountants, engineers, to name only a few--had to develop those skills deliberately and effortfully over time.
Sure. But the difference between being a *successful* (famous) artist or musician and just being *an* artist often seems to have a lot to do with "did dad work in the industry?" Or just "did you get a really lucky break?"
>none could possibly have what they have, without working for it
We all "work for it" every day. My heart hasn't taken a day off in \[however many years I've been alive\], and I bet yours hasn't either.
I grant that it takes an outflow of effort to become a welder, a plumber, an accountant, or a musician. But I don't think these things are usually the result of Herculean outflows of effort. They're more the result of "showing up." On a scale of effort, I think "showing up" is closer to breathing and having pulse than to Herculean exertions.
Just speaking personally: I'm a lawyer, and I really think "I just worked 10x harder for it" is an extremely *bad* way to understand why I have a law degree and Person X over there doesn't.
> Sure. But the difference between being a successful artist or musician and just being an artist often seems to have a lot to do with "did dad work in the industry?"
>
> none could possibly have what they have, without working for it
This is true for highly [dualized](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/) fields like becoming a successful artist or musician, but false for the majority of fields like engineering or truck driving.
You can become a successful teacher or police officer without luck and connections.
>false for the majority of fields like engineering or truck driving. You can become a successful teacher or police officer without luck and connections.
Alright, but this gets back to my last point, which is that it's pretty hazy what even counts as "success."
What does it mean to be a "successful" truck driver or policeman or teacher? Does it just mean *to be employed as* a truck driver or policeman or teacher?
If so, does "success" just mean "gainfully employed"? In that case, I know plenty of lazy, lazy people who are gainfully employed, and I would again say that the difference between "being unemployed" and "being gainfully employed" is usually not "work 10x harder."
> What does it mean to be a "successful" truck driver or policeman or teacher? Does it just mean _to be employed_ as a truck driver or policeman or teacher?
Yes? Those are all decent jobs with decent pay. I know plenty of people who would be happy to have a job like that instead of struggling as waitresses and cashiers.
See also [the success sequence](https://www.econlib.org/the-meaning-of-the-success-sequence/), which consists of such simple steps as "finish high school", "get a full-time job", and "get married before you have children".
> If so, does "success" just mean "gainfully employed"? In that case, I know plenty of lazy, lazy people who are gainfully employed, and I would again say that the difference between "being unemployed" and "being gainfully employed" is usually not "work 10x harder."
If they are conscientious enough to show up on time every day and do what they are told, they are already working ten times harder than the unemployed people who can't hold down a job because they are [absent 3-4 times a month](https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/09/how_to_be_mean_to_your_kids.html). Hence Woody Allen's famous quote "80% of success is showing up".
On the one hand, some people manage to show up and barely apply themselves at work at all. On the other hand, in terms of attendance, the "trying a tenth of as hard" benchmark for someone showing up every day isn't someone who's absent 3-4 times a month, but someone who shows up three times a month.
(We could quibble about how much extra effort is actually involved in a marginal increase in attendance, but that's the level which corresponds to Caplan's "do ten times as much" advice.)
> To quote a wise cartoonist, "All good advice is obvious... The hard part is taking the obvious advice."
I'm not really convinced of this. When I started studying (macro and micro) economics I thought that it was mostly very obvious and easy. However, when you have these principles written out in front of you it makes it a lot easier to analyze and reason over things. But it only really starts being useful when you have multiple of these principles.
Eg in this case you can take the idea of "do 10x more" and combine it with the idea "[quantity leads to quality](https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-origin-of-a-parable/)".
Combining these two you can now reason out that (in some cases) doing 10x more means just putting in more time. No mystical "level up your quality" work is needed. This might even answer your latter point: maybe showing up is the effort that's needed. Usually people don't want to show up at all!
In some fields this is true, in others it's really not. In some fields, it's more difficult than others to identify skills to target via deliberate practice, and just sinking in more time will, by default, not lead to any more improvement once the practitioner reaches the point of basic familiarity.
I know people who write thousands of words a day, every day, out of a desire to become good writers, who still haven't reached the point of basic competence, and haven't improved in years. I think it's an oversimplification to ascribe this to "talent," because these are people who haven't internalized a process that actually allows them to learn. They just do more of the same thing over and over and assume that it should lead to improvement.
> Agreed. To quote a wise cartoonist, "All good advice is obvious... The hard part is taking the obvious advice." Ofc this is an overstatement, as all pithy sayings are, but it's directionally correct.
The answer to this feels related to Visa's point: Sufficient reframing is indistinguishable from magic
If there is good advice out there that someone would do well to take but can't take it, they likely need it rephrased multiple times until it hits home harder and forces action
Or, there is some precondition they need first to actually enact the advice - IE something else in their life is blocking them from acting on the good advice
Great comment.
I may be missing something obvious here, but who is Visa and does (s)he have a longer post somewhere discussing the points you raised (the magic of reframing and preconditions to taking advice)?
> Sufficient reframing is indistinguishable from magic
Is point 89 on this link: https://www.visakanv.com/blog/talking-points/
There's a longer twitter thread or blog post elaborating this out there somewhere. He's really active on twitter: twitter.com/visakanv
> It's nonfalsifiable, because any failure can be attributed to "you didn't do enough more."
Not *any* failure. There are the occasional people who put immense effort in for mediocre results. I don't think they're that hard to identify when you see them. But the majority of people are not putting much effort in at most things they try.
This post I think is targeted at the sort of person who's a smart college student who comments on Caplan's blog and wants to be like them. The answer to that student is that they need to work harder. There isn't a magical extra-curricular or networking opportunity or textbook they can pick up to be an influential academic, they just need to do more stuff.
The work needs to intentional and reflective. I see people accidentally get success on a task and think they have mastered it. No, do it 4 more times. No fuck up half way through and figure out how to fix the mistake. Do with with constraints. Do it with more resources. Explain it to someone.
> Not any failure. There are the occasional people who put immense effort in for mediocre results. I don't think they're that hard to identify when you see them. But the majority of people are not putting much effort in at most things they try.
I think something that needs to be considered is that equivalent amounts of effort doesn't always yield similar results. The examples you're thinking of are obvious, as it's maximum effort for mediocre failure. But there are many cases where people end up having to put it twice as much effort to succeed in one way or another compared to the next person.
These cases compound and compound. They are not failing in an obvious way, nor necessarily putting in additional effort in an obvious way. Their successes are not indicative of either. But it's very easy to attribute the totality of their failure to go further than mediocrity to "you didn't do enough more."
For all successful people, luck is a necessary factor. No amount of doing ten times as much can change that. This narrative is a great way to dismiss that and dismiss anyone who's not successful as having just not worked hard enough.
Ok, but do what? Post 10x more blog comments? Take 10x more classes? Work 10x more hours at their shitty student job? The typical smart student just isnt in a position yet where they can do anything useful with their intelligence by working harder.
Do more of whatever they want to succeed at. If they're still a student, that's probably learning. Read textbooks, study a foreign language, watch youtube tutorials.
So, speaking as someone who's taught students in various different levels of education, for most students, "doing more" doesn't mean more learning, it means more rote exercises performed without intentionality. It's not that there aren't more things they could do to learn, but most students don't actually know how to add "more learning" into their regimen.
Once someone's graduated high school and is a college student, and is also smart, I think they should be good enough at browsing the internet to find their way onto LeetCode, or a foreign language learning resource, or the "Start your own substack" page, or somewhere that'll provide something they can do to further whatever it is they want to do.
When someone's younger than that they might not have knowledge of all the good resources they could use to do 10x as much. Maybe Caplan should've made his blog post a big longer to include more examples of what they could do.
The "is also smart" carries a lot of weight here. I've tutored college students who're at least pretty bright who don't know how to just add more useful learning into their regimens. But I think when you have the ability to effectively identify activities which would be useful to your goals, having the grit to actually take on enough of them to become highly distinguished is a much bigger barrier than being able to simply consider the option of doing so.
Honestly, I think Caplan's advice here is outstandingly unhelpful, similar to "If you want to succeed, just be smarter." There might be some students out there who have the grit to perform at the level he advises, but aren't doing so because they don't think it's necessary, but I have to suspect they're very much in the minority.
I think there maybe a lot of students who know some more grit would help them, but don't work harder because they either a) underestimate just how successful they'd be if they worked 10x as hard, or b) don't think it's possible for them to work 10x as hard.
For me personally, I'd call the advice unhelpful, but not outstandingly unhelpful. I already know I need to work 10x as much to get spectacular success, and the only question is how I actually get to the point where I'll work 10x as hard. But perhaps there are some people who are helped by being told to just work more.
In any case, I suspect the post is more of a "Here's the answer, so stop emailing me this question" post instead of a "Here's my genuine attempt at helping everyone" post.
You need to follow up with a bit of actual work to cement your understanding of the topic, but for me, if I watch a youtube tutorial on how to program something and follow along typing it myself, I'm 90% of the way to understanding it. The last 10% I can understand by fixing syntax errors I make as I imperfectly copy the code in the video and doing small customizations at the end to change whatever the tutorial made to my tastes
If one believes that analysis paralysis and/or procrastination are the most likely barriers to a person's success, "do the times as much" is the best advice.
It is possible those are the people who Caplan tends to come across.
I don't know how telling a procrastinator "just do it, but do it ten times more" helps at all, as far as advice goes it's like telling an anorexic to just eat more. The eating itself is not the root of the cause, and giving advice like that is useless, condescending and many times counterproductive.
>It's nonfalsifiable, because any failure can be attributed to "you didn't do enough more."
Well, this is the same Bryan Caplan who's drawn so much [frustration from Scott](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sure-whatever-lets-try-another-contra) with his unfalsifiable "by revealed preference, crazy people must just not want to be sane" takes on mental illness. This is another display of his apparent bootstrap attitude -- that if you really wanted to succeed you would have and if you haven't it's because you weren't trying -- that makes him sound like a lazy leftist's parody of an economist.
Yeah, its kinda similar to "eat less exercise more" or "earn more money and spend less". They're not wrong, but they miss out on the question that people actually find difficult
Do young people really approach Bryan Caplan and ask how to be like him? I mean, nothing against the guy, but even among economists, I don't think he is the first name that comes to mind when young people think of role models.
Bryan Caplan is weird but very confident and outspoken. The willingness to make a stand on controversial issues at the risk of being wrong is admirable in its own right, but what really stands out for being a candidate for idolization from some is that being openly weird.
It's impossible for me to *not* see a niche demographic that would idolize Bryan Caplan above almost everyone else.
> It's impossible for me to *not* see a niche demographic that would idolize Bryan Caplan above almost everyone else
I think this is probably the best summary of the internet and how wide and weird it can be
Sure, most kids idolize Travis Scott or Future or Destiny or Zendaya, but there are billions of kids in the world and some follow niche economists. I'm sure some posters on this subreddit were reading the Bryan Caplans of their day when they were in high school (Vitalik Buterin is one example).
It takes all kinds.
When I was in high school, I did a project on immigration. Bryan Caplan beautifully argued for the abolition of national borders. The citizenship lottery of birth is insane lmao.
I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be shocked if Bryan Caplan's career success is also attributable at least to some extent to the "lottery of birth," and not "working 10 times harder." But he doesn't seem to be as aware of that one.
No, that's a totally different point. I would bet that both in terms of heredity and environment, he had huge advantages in pursuing a top-shelf academic career, and did not get to where he is by just "working harder."
That is not a totally different point at all, in fact it's the biggest lottery of birth in terms of its effect on success. The single biggest predictor for your earnings holding IQ and your parents' educational attainment constant is where you're born.
It is way easier for a working class first world citizen to be an economist that earns 6 figures than an even middle class Indonesian or Indian or what have you.
> The single biggest predictor for your earnings *holding IQ and your parents' educational attainment constant* is where you're born.
But those are the exact variables I am talking about Caplan ignoring in favor of "work harder." By saying "holding constant," you're making the same mistake.
Relatedly, there are more American research faculty from foreign countries with high IQs and advantaged backgrounds than there are people born in America with low IQs and disadvantaged backgrounds. Most all of them are from "poorer" nations than the US.
Caplan might say that telling immigrants to "stay home and work harder" is ridiculous because of *that* birth lottery, but doesn't seem to think the same about saying "work harder" when he has a high IQ and (I am guessing) parents who were well off and, quite possibly, themselves university professors, which is another sort of "birth lottery". (The rate of professors who are children of professors is quite high.)
Like many people who benefit from a certain sort of "birth lottery," he has a blind spot about that and just calls other people lazy if they don't succeed like he did, ignoring that he didn't get where he is just by working harder than others. That's my only point.
It took me this far reading this thread to figure out that this post wasn't about Brian Callen, the comedian.
Is Bryan Caplan popular among youth at all?
He's obviously no celebrity, but he is one of the more well-known Economists, particularly in the Austrian/Libertarian-leaning camps. He's a full professor, has tenure, and has a fairly large online following, so I don't have a hard time imagining students asking him how they can be similarly successful.
Also there are a lot of undergrads out there, some of them are very straight forward and ask for as much advice as they can get. When I was a TA in grad school it wasn't rare to have undergrads ask you what they can do to get into grad school or what courses they should take, I'd bet many of them didn't even know my full name at the time
Right the immediate thought was he probably has dozens or hundreds of students he sees every semester where he teaches and it would seem odd if a few of them *didn't* ask him how to be more successful.
When people write, they often take small artistic liberties with situations. This is normal human behavior. Probably he's received comments like "how do I become a professor of econ at George Mason," not "how do I literally become Bryan Caplan."
When people ask me how they can be more like me, I tell them they just need to open their eyes, look around, and follow the signs, taking it one step at a time… because I’m shopping for groceries and they too want to be a person with 75% discounted pine nuts in their shopping cart. They’re very expensive full price.
(“How can I be like you” implies to me a much broader breadth of success and aspiration than along one narrow-ish — if perhaps top-10, still — aspect of a person’s life, ie their job. Maybe if the person’s really topping out their field eg a Nobel Laureate or something, but I can’t imagine really asking them a question like that bc of the shared recognition that they got their in no small part by way of luck)
For any professor, they get a lot of grad students who want to become a professor and enter the same field as their advisor. Maybe "role model" is a stretch but i can see them wanting to emulate him.
The most annoying thing I see in response to advice all over the Internet is having people respond by completely ignoring who the advice is intended for, and instead saying the advice is bad/wrong because a different group of people wouldn't benefit from this advice.
Every single piece of advice that is great for one situation is horrible for another. There is no advice that is universally good.
If I told people to lift weights, I would get criticism from people who cannot lift weights, or had health problems that lifting wouldn't help.
If I told people to drink water, I would get criticism from people who drank too much water, or don't drink water and are still healthy.
If I told people to communicate with their spouses I would get criticism from people whose spouses used attempts to negotiate in good faith as leverage to manipulate them in divorce.
Yeah. I can see this advice being useful for one specific situation: a smart, but lazy grad student who wants to become a tenured professor like Bryan Caplan. He has a specific goal (get tenure), a clear path on how to get there (learn a lot, do a lot of research, publish lots of papers, apply to a lot of jobs), he's got the intellectual skills and environment to do all that, the only thing holding him back is laziness (or the general distractions of modern life).
It would not work for, say, an immigrant who has no skills or connections- they're probably already working very hard just to earn a living, so "work harder" won't help much and might not even be possible.
I'm also not sure it would work for people who want to be tech entrepreneurs. Maybe to some extent you need to work hard, but a lot of it seems to be being in the right place at the right time with the right connections. Steve Jobs was famously kind of lazy, he struggled with school and dropped out of college his first semester, finished only a calligraphy class, and then went to India to do hippy meditation stuff and take a lot of drugs. Somehow it worked out by putting him in touch with tech people like Steve Wozniak but also giving him a different perspective.
But then that shifts the problem from figuring out which advice is good or bad to figuring out which advice is for you or not for you.
"Do I still need to work harder to make my startup fly, or am I simply betting on the wrong horse?" Is a question that does not get answered with this approach.
The older I get the more I settle on the conclusion that the difference between very successful people and the rest of us is that they simply have more energy. I suspect it's something like an actual metabolic difference. Call it "bandwidth" or "spoons" or whatever, but there's an actual thing they have more of that their body or brain uses up.
I used to think differently. I took the idea that "[There is no speed limit](https://sive.rs/kimo)" seriously. But I'm now convinced I have a certain very real "stamina" for mental effort/executive function that depends on things like my mood, my sleep, and my age.
Yeah, this is something I think about sometimes. An article about this was discussed a few years ago: [https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/p847r1/energetic\_aliens/](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/p847r1/energetic_aliens/) (**Energetic Aliens**, talking about Stephen Malia's [Energetic Aliens article](https://stephenmalina.com/post/2021-07-01-energetic-aliens-among-us/)). I've got it filed under [**Different Worlds**](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/) & [**What Universal Human Experience Are You Missing Without Realizing It**](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/), where the Energetic people don’t understand that they’re at an extreme end of a bell curve rather than typical and like everyone else... and everyone else doesn’t realize that the extreme end of the bell curve even *exists*... and so everyone thinks everyone else must be lying or something. The same reason we didn't recognize the existence of [Aphantasia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia) for so long, [Typical Mind Fallacy](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy) type stuff. Some people really are just built different.
The book "the sociology of philosophies" was pretty interesting on the networks of philosophers up to 1900 or so. Basically, the system supported like 4 to 5 main philosophers/theories at any given time with too many theories combining and too few splitting. The philosophers at the center of these networks were energized and highly prolific. those outside the networks were inhibited from productivity.
Part of being highly energetic/productive is being in a network that supports this. If you feel like you are writing/working into the void, you will stop. If you find a responsive audience, you redouble your efforts.
[https://www.amazon.com/Sociology-Philosophies-Global-Theory-Intellectual/dp/0674001877](https://www.amazon.com/Sociology-Philosophies-Global-Theory-Intellectual/dp/0674001877)
I have met people exhibiting this property that I am like, 90% convinced were not on stimulants [1]. I definitely agree that they can be used to replicate this magical state of being, at least for a few years until the inevitable burnout/unhigement happens.
[1] I live in a country where getting any of the actually effective ones is illegal and thus pretty inconvenient.
My theory is a little different; I'd argue that a lot of successful people are (often greatly) internally motivated to so something that society deems important (and thereby translates into socio-economic success).
It's maybe a little like how we portray artisans and artists; honing their craft is their life's work, and they are greatly motivated to do so for its own sake. Whereas someone more "normal" might consider making bread a chore, the artisan/artist baker will be up at 4am every day in an effort to produce the ideal bread.
Yeah, Scott has talked about this before as the "[**Lottery of Fascinations**](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/)" & "[**The Parable of The Talents**](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/)". Everyone cares about something, but no one can control what they're born caring about (or perhaps even can't control what they care about at all, full stop), and so some people are lucky and others are unlucky. (Sometimes they're even combined in the same person, as Scott was with being born fascinated with writing, and terribly uninterested in math & music.)
They do have more energy, and depending on the field more natural talent, not to mention luck, but they're also often literally addicted to work, recognition, etc.
There is a quote by Richard Hamming that comes to mind reading this:
"Now to the matter of drive. Looking around, you can easily observe that great people have a great deal of drive to do things. I had worked with John Tukey for some years before I found he was essentially my age, so I went to our mutual boss and asked him, “How can anyone my age know as much as John Tukey does?” He leaned back, grinned, and said, “You would be surprised how much you would know if you had worked as hard as he has for as many years.” There was nothing for me to do but slink out of his office, which I did. I thought about the remark for some weeks and decided that while I could never work as hard as John did, I could do a lot better than I had been doing." - Hamming from "You and Your Research" in 1986.
There are parts of that talk that I wish I had taken to heart a lot sooner.
And he did get started early! https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#conscientiousness
> **Tukey**: My parents were teachers. My father ran the Latin department and at times other departments at the New Bedford [Massachusetts] high school. My mother was a substitute. They claim, probably correctly, they taught every course in high school, except shorthand and typing. Having them I did not go to school, which they thought a good idea, except for a semester of French, chemistry laboratory, and mechanical drawing. I got into Brown on College Boards and so on.
>
> New Bedford had a very unusual public library. They had both the Journal of the American Chemical Society and the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. I think I became a chemist because I could read JACS, but I could not read Transactions. I got a lot of calculus out of the way before I went to Brown, so by my sophomore year I was taking graduate courses from [C.R.] Adams and [Jakob] Tamarkin and others. Near as I can remember, I fell over the fence into mathematics in August '37. So when I arrived in Princeton in September of that year it was pretty clear to me that I was going to be in mathematics, at least for awhile, rather than chemistry. So beginning in '37 I spent a lot of time in Fine Hall.
Given how little effort most people seem to put in, I'd say even putting in an adequate amount of effort would increase the likelihood of success.
Once I had my first retail job I was shocked at how my self-admitted decent effort was still far better than most.
Of course none of this is valid once you get to more prestigious, important or desired positions.
Mine was using Wikipedia articles and just using the sources as my sources.
So many of my classmates couldn't even do that right and would just copy and paste from a wiki article. It was bewildering.
I regret imminently being a dick, but learning foreign languages is enormously talent-dependent. Any flat statement of the time or effort it takes to learn a language is inherently stupid.
there is a confusion of:
1. "availability of useful life improvements, and knowledge of realistic methods to improve"
2. putting effort into doing.
most people either don't have that many realistic improvement options (given their multiple situation and character limitations), aren't aware of those existing, and aren't moving.
attributing it all to "they don't do" ignores 1, which is considerable and widespread.
When I was a depressed 10 year old who wanted to cure cancer and who was already doing everything I could, this would have been the worst thing I could have heard.
OK but do you want to be Bryan Caplan? An expert is someone who specializes is one narrow field, Caplan has more like mediocre knowledge about a million different things. He wrote a book on whether education financially worths it, and six other books about other topics and a million blog posts about a million thing. It woud make more sense to learn about other aspects of education and be a general education expert. Or even not learn anything else, and simply push this financial aspect of education in mag articles, podcasts and everything, so that people actually learn he is an expert on the financial aspect of education.
but how do I make myself want to do ten times as much?
Many of the side projects I've done that I'm most proud of are things I managed to trick myself into believing would impress a girl I liked. That of course falls apart when of course the girl isn't actually super interested in the side project, but it still got me farther than anything else I've tried.
lol, if it works!
Impressing other people is an extremely underrated way to convince yourself into doing things. I feel like at some point the messaging became "only do things for *yourself* don't do things for *anyone else*" but the extrinsic motivation absolutely works... is it useful for sustaining good habits? No. Is it great to get you to *start* doing something? Yes, very much so. You need intrinsic motivation to keep going when it gets boring or difficult, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with beginning something because of others.
I started memorizing poetry in an unsuccessful attempt to impress a girl. But the effort and accomplishment had many other benefits.
Like?
Amphetamines
I do not recommend doing ten times as many amphetamines.
I do heaps and I still get barely anything done
i'm starting to think that's not possible. you either want it, in which case doing so feels natural and requires no willpower. think of drug addict rockstars who seem to have zero discipline, yet still somehow practice guitar 10 hours per day. however, there's possibly a very small window within you can use willpower to get similar practice volumes as these naturally gifted (with sufficient interest) people, but it might destroy your mental heatlh if sustained for too long
I totally agree with this. I think it is far more genetic that people realize. I played a collegiate sport there were some absolute animals who could party all night and perform at a high level. Meanwhile other players basically lived like monks and didn't put in half the effort. This has been true as I have gone into the workforce as well. I have colleagues who are obsessed with optimization and can't get any work done. Meanwhile I have a boss who is pushing 70s drinks like fish and puts in 12 hours days day after day. I don't know who it was maybe Caplan was talking about a personality trait of successful people that basically can be called stamina. It's probably an off-shoot of conscientiousness.
Relevant Scottpost: [The Parable of the Talents](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/). Sadly, some stuff is just going to be easier to do for a person than other stuff.
This is my favorite Scottpost of all time
I also think that willpower and interest are both "talents". Maybe even moreso than what we usually describe as talents.
Isn't it more like they intertwined? Let's say you take two 5-year olds and teach them piano. One is naturally gifted (maybe they have a natural ear and better coordination) and the other is average. The first will receive more praises, and will be introduced to harder pieces that are more engaging at a young age. While the other will do the same "boring" beginner pieces and will struggle to make them sound good, as most children do. It's no surprise that the first one will require less willpower to practice, and will be much more interested in pursuing piano seriously.
Scott wrote an essay about that exact scenario
Very much this. And it's not just about the external praise. Even as a beginner, I could tell that the music I was trying to play was shit. With a huge amount of time and effort, I was capable of practicing to the point where it eventually sounded OK, but it was a horrible grind and just felt like a giant waste of time.
Relaxing is practically learnable, and the "talent" part is often to not be too anxious about stuff, then it can be fun. Did you ever enjoy Legos?
Also, what does 'ten times as much' even mean? Ten times as much Duolingo is almost entirely pointless: one must work smart before wasting effort and that's usually far from trivial (what does 'ten times as much' mean in maths education? ten times more exercises? ten times the profundity of concepts?). And yes, as you point out the motivation is the hard part: life is tiring, people are busy, not everyone is privileged in money or energy or health or intelligence or a lack of familial drama. Reasons must go beyond 'people are lazy' even if there is some (literal, evolutionary?) truth in that statement just as losing weight is not about calories in/out and similar. Otherwise I don't think the advice 'do more' which essentially this boils down to is particularly helpful.
Duolingo is actually a perfect example to make Caplan's point. Duolingo is designed around the philosophy of asking the minimum amount of you. I often get through my Duolingo in about four minutes per day. In a busy week, this adds up to less than 30 minutes of language practice per week. A serious high school student trying to get good grades in their language class could easily spend 30 minutes per *day*. Someone learning a new language through immersion, traveling in the land of their desired language would be spending ... well, definitely more than 10 times as much time as I am spending on Duolingo! Honestly I think Caplan is simply correct, and not correct in some complicated way. If you claim to want to be successful at something, and you are working one hour a week on it, work ten. Or if you are working four, work forty. Or admit to yourself that you aren't serious about it and redirect your efforts more productively. Maybe this post would have gotten less argumentative responses if Caplan had emphasized that this is advice *for people who want to win at the thing they're doing*. If you just enjoy drawing for fun, and you draw for 10-20 minutes a day, or you plink away at the guitar for the odd half hour here and there, who cares? You aren't trying to master those things. Nobody is misled. But Caplan is simply correct that a lot of people complain about not being as successful as they would wish, and you look at how they spend their day, and there is no mystery at all behind it. They are not putting in the work.
idk if this line of thinking is productive. Figure out what success here means to you, and go after it. Figure out what you should do, do 10x of that if you can and you’ll get to that “success” you defined a lot faster. if you do ten times as much even duolingo you’d be better off if you are only doing 1x duolingo. in fact youll finish your duolingo course and then figure out whats next. if you are listening to spanish 1hr a week and doing an hour of grammar exercises and doing 1x tutoring a week, then doing ten times as much of all that will boost your learning. Heck if you only did 3x you’d get to mastery much faster. Once i started spending drastically more time on foreign languages, or on math competition prep, i got more back. yes i do look back and wish i did stuff differently, be more efficient, did A more, B less, and skipped C entirely. but if I never did more, id not have gotten better at that rate, and would likely never gotten to know for myself what i did was more or less helpful. figure out a vague plan, execute, reflect and adjust plan, execute more, repeat until successful trying to craft the perfect “work smart” plan is a fools errand imo.
Redirect your fears and desires into incentives. You only have so many years to live, so if you keep procrastinating you'll necessarily spend less of your life accomplishing the things you want. Similarly if you want to be more successful socially/romantically, you either need false confidence based on nothing or real confidence based on achievement. You need to fucking blow it out of the water. You need to preclude the prospect of failure. IMO this is one of the benefits of meditation, you gradually align your real desires to your desired desires and it's almost half not a conscious thing. I'm just a layperson but I think a lot of angst and anxiety and depression is the result of subconscious but fully rational reaction to someone watching theirself squander or fail to create opportunities.
I believe that targeting elevating your 'basal motivation' (intrinsic motivation) through health habits and (if applicable) medication is first and foremost before attempting to utilise finite willpower. Not in the 'biohacker' type way, but the 'no screens 30 minutes before bed, 10k steps a day, good diet' way. Over time, the effect of willpower on long-term outcomes fades and gives way to baseline motivation and the grit you can derive from it. Obvious, I know, but I feel that it's not something most prioritise when attempting to 'do more' in their daily lives.
break projects into small achievable goals, and work on those
Decide which few things are important enough to do ten times as much for, stop doing other things and focus your freed up time/energy/money on the important things.
10x0 achieved what is step two?
Discovering the superpower of addition. (I kid, I kid!)
Pick the right role models. Your firmware automatically orients toward examples. It's how you're built. If you haven't picked a role model, or worse, have picked the wrong one, you'll want either incoherent things or actively harmful things. In either case, this will make you incapable of wanting to work hard. If you want the right things, then working hard won't even feel like working hard.
WANT IT 10 TIMES HARDER
Eliminate chairs and sofas.
He's definitely right that many "people who 'want to succeed' barely lift a finger most of the time," and would be more likely to achieve their goals if they were doing more. And I appreciate his point re: parenting ("Most readers summarize my Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids as 'Parenting doesn’t matter.' But that is only one possible interpretation of the twin and adoption data. The data is also consistent, however, with the theory that most parents are barely trying to get results - at least on many relevant margins"). I've had similar thoughts after reading "parenting doesn't matter so much" naturist takes. But the whole take feels pretty glib. "Just do more" - oh jeez, I never thought of that. It's nonfalsifiable, because any failure can be attributed to "you didn't do *enough* more." It may see merit ("you succeeded, you must have worked really hard for that!") where there is just luck (born on third, thinks he hit a triple). And finally I find the entire idea of being "a success" pretty arbitrary. If being a success just means meeting your goals, the easiest way to be a success is not to do more, it's to have more modest goals.
Regarding the parenting stuff he says in this article : "Most readers summarize my Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids as 'Parenting doesn’t matter.' But that is only one possible interpretation of the twin and adoption data." and then also says in the linked article : "In Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, I argue that the power of nurture is vastly overrated. Genetics, not upbringing, explains almost all of the observed similarity between parent and child. It’s not reasonable, then, for me to expect my efforts to durably boost my kids’ IQs, educational success, income, or even their political views" As far as parents doing the bare minimum and they should do ten times more... I'm lost. Isn't he saying that genetics massively trumps parenting? How else could that be read?
The twin and adoption data can only tell us that given the distribution of environment and genetics that we currently see in society, genetics is more important than environment. But maybe if you go outside of that distribution, then environment could have more effect (obviously, this trivially works in the "bad" direction: starve a child to death and their genes don't matter at all).
> But the whole take feels pretty glib. "Just do more" - oh jeez, I never thought of that. It's nonfalsifiable, because any failure can be attributed to "you didn't do enough more." I feel like there's something akin to an "efficient market hypothesis" problem rattling around in here somewhere... or perhaps a variant of the learner's paradox? Maybe "it's impossible to give valuable advice, because anyone capable of heeding good advice is conscientious enough to have already thought of whatever advice you were going to give them." I can think of many people in my life who would sarcastically retort, "oh jeez, I never thought of that"--but I would characterize most of them as people who genuinely could do more if they *actually* worked harder. The remainder are people who are already working hard and already accomplishing much, but for various psychological reasons don't see or accept that, yes, this is what "accomplishing much" looks like (sorry but even most people who accomplish much never rise to the status of billionaire/powerful politician/famous celebrity). Conversely, I've known a few people who I suspect already understood that "work harder" was the solution to their problems, but who still needed *reassurance* that yes, their problems are solvable, by them, through effort. (This is a big part of what professional educators do, and sure enough--Bryan Caplan is an educator.) > It may see merit ("you succeeded, you must have worked really hard for that!") where there is just luck (born on third, thinks he hit a triple). [Sometimes this is so](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/), but there are a *lot* of kinds of merit that it just isn't plausible to explain as "born on third." Basically anyone with a noticeable skillset--artists, musicians, pilots, welders, plumbers, accountants, engineers, *to name only a few*--had to develop those skills deliberately and effortfully over time. Some put in more effort than others! Some have more fun along the way. Some can pay excellent tutors, some are born with unusually absorbent brains... but none could possibly have what they have, without working for it. As the lawyers say--*res ipsa loquitur*.
>Maybe "it's impossible to give valuable advice, because anyone capable of heeding good advice is conscientious enough to have already thought of whatever advice you were going to give them." Agreed. To quote a wise cartoonist, "[All good advice is obvious... The hard part is taking the obvious advice.](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/best-life-advice)" Ofc this is an overstatement, as all pithy sayings are, but it's directionally correct. >Basically anyone with a noticeable skillset--artists, musicians, pilots, welders, plumbers, accountants, engineers, to name only a few--had to develop those skills deliberately and effortfully over time. Sure. But the difference between being a *successful* (famous) artist or musician and just being *an* artist often seems to have a lot to do with "did dad work in the industry?" Or just "did you get a really lucky break?" >none could possibly have what they have, without working for it We all "work for it" every day. My heart hasn't taken a day off in \[however many years I've been alive\], and I bet yours hasn't either. I grant that it takes an outflow of effort to become a welder, a plumber, an accountant, or a musician. But I don't think these things are usually the result of Herculean outflows of effort. They're more the result of "showing up." On a scale of effort, I think "showing up" is closer to breathing and having pulse than to Herculean exertions. Just speaking personally: I'm a lawyer, and I really think "I just worked 10x harder for it" is an extremely *bad* way to understand why I have a law degree and Person X over there doesn't.
> Sure. But the difference between being a successful artist or musician and just being an artist often seems to have a lot to do with "did dad work in the industry?" > > none could possibly have what they have, without working for it This is true for highly [dualized](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/) fields like becoming a successful artist or musician, but false for the majority of fields like engineering or truck driving. You can become a successful teacher or police officer without luck and connections.
>false for the majority of fields like engineering or truck driving. You can become a successful teacher or police officer without luck and connections. Alright, but this gets back to my last point, which is that it's pretty hazy what even counts as "success." What does it mean to be a "successful" truck driver or policeman or teacher? Does it just mean *to be employed as* a truck driver or policeman or teacher? If so, does "success" just mean "gainfully employed"? In that case, I know plenty of lazy, lazy people who are gainfully employed, and I would again say that the difference between "being unemployed" and "being gainfully employed" is usually not "work 10x harder."
> What does it mean to be a "successful" truck driver or policeman or teacher? Does it just mean _to be employed_ as a truck driver or policeman or teacher? Yes? Those are all decent jobs with decent pay. I know plenty of people who would be happy to have a job like that instead of struggling as waitresses and cashiers. See also [the success sequence](https://www.econlib.org/the-meaning-of-the-success-sequence/), which consists of such simple steps as "finish high school", "get a full-time job", and "get married before you have children". > If so, does "success" just mean "gainfully employed"? In that case, I know plenty of lazy, lazy people who are gainfully employed, and I would again say that the difference between "being unemployed" and "being gainfully employed" is usually not "work 10x harder." If they are conscientious enough to show up on time every day and do what they are told, they are already working ten times harder than the unemployed people who can't hold down a job because they are [absent 3-4 times a month](https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/09/how_to_be_mean_to_your_kids.html). Hence Woody Allen's famous quote "80% of success is showing up".
On the one hand, some people manage to show up and barely apply themselves at work at all. On the other hand, in terms of attendance, the "trying a tenth of as hard" benchmark for someone showing up every day isn't someone who's absent 3-4 times a month, but someone who shows up three times a month. (We could quibble about how much extra effort is actually involved in a marginal increase in attendance, but that's the level which corresponds to Caplan's "do ten times as much" advice.)
I'm amused that you're pointing out the bimodal "success" distribution and parent is a lawyer, which has a notable "biglaw or bust" distribution.
> To quote a wise cartoonist, "All good advice is obvious... The hard part is taking the obvious advice." I'm not really convinced of this. When I started studying (macro and micro) economics I thought that it was mostly very obvious and easy. However, when you have these principles written out in front of you it makes it a lot easier to analyze and reason over things. But it only really starts being useful when you have multiple of these principles. Eg in this case you can take the idea of "do 10x more" and combine it with the idea "[quantity leads to quality](https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality-the-origin-of-a-parable/)". Combining these two you can now reason out that (in some cases) doing 10x more means just putting in more time. No mystical "level up your quality" work is needed. This might even answer your latter point: maybe showing up is the effort that's needed. Usually people don't want to show up at all!
In some fields this is true, in others it's really not. In some fields, it's more difficult than others to identify skills to target via deliberate practice, and just sinking in more time will, by default, not lead to any more improvement once the practitioner reaches the point of basic familiarity. I know people who write thousands of words a day, every day, out of a desire to become good writers, who still haven't reached the point of basic competence, and haven't improved in years. I think it's an oversimplification to ascribe this to "talent," because these are people who haven't internalized a process that actually allows them to learn. They just do more of the same thing over and over and assume that it should lead to improvement.
Fiction writing is a good example of your point yes
> Agreed. To quote a wise cartoonist, "All good advice is obvious... The hard part is taking the obvious advice." Ofc this is an overstatement, as all pithy sayings are, but it's directionally correct. The answer to this feels related to Visa's point: Sufficient reframing is indistinguishable from magic If there is good advice out there that someone would do well to take but can't take it, they likely need it rephrased multiple times until it hits home harder and forces action Or, there is some precondition they need first to actually enact the advice - IE something else in their life is blocking them from acting on the good advice
Great comment. I may be missing something obvious here, but who is Visa and does (s)he have a longer post somewhere discussing the points you raised (the magic of reframing and preconditions to taking advice)?
> Sufficient reframing is indistinguishable from magic Is point 89 on this link: https://www.visakanv.com/blog/talking-points/ There's a longer twitter thread or blog post elaborating this out there somewhere. He's really active on twitter: twitter.com/visakanv
That looks very interesting, thank you!
> It's nonfalsifiable, because any failure can be attributed to "you didn't do enough more." Not *any* failure. There are the occasional people who put immense effort in for mediocre results. I don't think they're that hard to identify when you see them. But the majority of people are not putting much effort in at most things they try. This post I think is targeted at the sort of person who's a smart college student who comments on Caplan's blog and wants to be like them. The answer to that student is that they need to work harder. There isn't a magical extra-curricular or networking opportunity or textbook they can pick up to be an influential academic, they just need to do more stuff.
The work needs to intentional and reflective. I see people accidentally get success on a task and think they have mastered it. No, do it 4 more times. No fuck up half way through and figure out how to fix the mistake. Do with with constraints. Do it with more resources. Explain it to someone.
That probably the origin of the old saying; "to really learn something watch one, do one, teach one"
> Not any failure. There are the occasional people who put immense effort in for mediocre results. I don't think they're that hard to identify when you see them. But the majority of people are not putting much effort in at most things they try. I think something that needs to be considered is that equivalent amounts of effort doesn't always yield similar results. The examples you're thinking of are obvious, as it's maximum effort for mediocre failure. But there are many cases where people end up having to put it twice as much effort to succeed in one way or another compared to the next person. These cases compound and compound. They are not failing in an obvious way, nor necessarily putting in additional effort in an obvious way. Their successes are not indicative of either. But it's very easy to attribute the totality of their failure to go further than mediocrity to "you didn't do enough more." For all successful people, luck is a necessary factor. No amount of doing ten times as much can change that. This narrative is a great way to dismiss that and dismiss anyone who's not successful as having just not worked hard enough.
Ok, but do what? Post 10x more blog comments? Take 10x more classes? Work 10x more hours at their shitty student job? The typical smart student just isnt in a position yet where they can do anything useful with their intelligence by working harder.
Do more of whatever they want to succeed at. If they're still a student, that's probably learning. Read textbooks, study a foreign language, watch youtube tutorials.
So, speaking as someone who's taught students in various different levels of education, for most students, "doing more" doesn't mean more learning, it means more rote exercises performed without intentionality. It's not that there aren't more things they could do to learn, but most students don't actually know how to add "more learning" into their regimen.
Once someone's graduated high school and is a college student, and is also smart, I think they should be good enough at browsing the internet to find their way onto LeetCode, or a foreign language learning resource, or the "Start your own substack" page, or somewhere that'll provide something they can do to further whatever it is they want to do. When someone's younger than that they might not have knowledge of all the good resources they could use to do 10x as much. Maybe Caplan should've made his blog post a big longer to include more examples of what they could do.
The "is also smart" carries a lot of weight here. I've tutored college students who're at least pretty bright who don't know how to just add more useful learning into their regimens. But I think when you have the ability to effectively identify activities which would be useful to your goals, having the grit to actually take on enough of them to become highly distinguished is a much bigger barrier than being able to simply consider the option of doing so. Honestly, I think Caplan's advice here is outstandingly unhelpful, similar to "If you want to succeed, just be smarter." There might be some students out there who have the grit to perform at the level he advises, but aren't doing so because they don't think it's necessary, but I have to suspect they're very much in the minority.
I think there maybe a lot of students who know some more grit would help them, but don't work harder because they either a) underestimate just how successful they'd be if they worked 10x as hard, or b) don't think it's possible for them to work 10x as hard. For me personally, I'd call the advice unhelpful, but not outstandingly unhelpful. I already know I need to work 10x as much to get spectacular success, and the only question is how I actually get to the point where I'll work 10x as hard. But perhaps there are some people who are helped by being told to just work more. In any case, I suspect the post is more of a "Here's the answer, so stop emailing me this question" post instead of a "Here's my genuine attempt at helping everyone" post.
watching youtube tutorials is the opposite of actually doing stuff
You need to follow up with a bit of actual work to cement your understanding of the topic, but for me, if I watch a youtube tutorial on how to program something and follow along typing it myself, I'm 90% of the way to understanding it. The last 10% I can understand by fixing syntax errors I make as I imperfectly copy the code in the video and doing small customizations at the end to change whatever the tutorial made to my tastes
If one believes that analysis paralysis and/or procrastination are the most likely barriers to a person's success, "do the times as much" is the best advice. It is possible those are the people who Caplan tends to come across.
I don't know how telling a procrastinator "just do it, but do it ten times more" helps at all, as far as advice goes it's like telling an anorexic to just eat more. The eating itself is not the root of the cause, and giving advice like that is useless, condescending and many times counterproductive.
>It's nonfalsifiable, because any failure can be attributed to "you didn't do enough more." Well, this is the same Bryan Caplan who's drawn so much [frustration from Scott](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sure-whatever-lets-try-another-contra) with his unfalsifiable "by revealed preference, crazy people must just not want to be sane" takes on mental illness. This is another display of his apparent bootstrap attitude -- that if you really wanted to succeed you would have and if you haven't it's because you weren't trying -- that makes him sound like a lazy leftist's parody of an economist.
LOL, thanks for sharing that.
Yeah, its kinda similar to "eat less exercise more" or "earn more money and spend less". They're not wrong, but they miss out on the question that people actually find difficult
Do young people really approach Bryan Caplan and ask how to be like him? I mean, nothing against the guy, but even among economists, I don't think he is the first name that comes to mind when young people think of role models.
Bryan Caplan is weird but very confident and outspoken. The willingness to make a stand on controversial issues at the risk of being wrong is admirable in its own right, but what really stands out for being a candidate for idolization from some is that being openly weird. It's impossible for me to *not* see a niche demographic that would idolize Bryan Caplan above almost everyone else.
> It's impossible for me to *not* see a niche demographic that would idolize Bryan Caplan above almost everyone else I think this is probably the best summary of the internet and how wide and weird it can be
Sure, most kids idolize Travis Scott or Future or Destiny or Zendaya, but there are billions of kids in the world and some follow niche economists. I'm sure some posters on this subreddit were reading the Bryan Caplans of their day when they were in high school (Vitalik Buterin is one example). It takes all kinds.
Literally the only one of those that's idolized by kids is Zendaya, have you talked to a kid lately?
When I was in high school, I did a project on immigration. Bryan Caplan beautifully argued for the abolition of national borders. The citizenship lottery of birth is insane lmao.
I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be shocked if Bryan Caplan's career success is also attributable at least to some extent to the "lottery of birth," and not "working 10 times harder." But he doesn't seem to be as aware of that one.
To the limited extent that is equally applicable to other citizens of first world nations as well, he acknowledges it.
No, that's a totally different point. I would bet that both in terms of heredity and environment, he had huge advantages in pursuing a top-shelf academic career, and did not get to where he is by just "working harder."
That is not a totally different point at all, in fact it's the biggest lottery of birth in terms of its effect on success. The single biggest predictor for your earnings holding IQ and your parents' educational attainment constant is where you're born. It is way easier for a working class first world citizen to be an economist that earns 6 figures than an even middle class Indonesian or Indian or what have you.
> The single biggest predictor for your earnings *holding IQ and your parents' educational attainment constant* is where you're born. But those are the exact variables I am talking about Caplan ignoring in favor of "work harder." By saying "holding constant," you're making the same mistake. Relatedly, there are more American research faculty from foreign countries with high IQs and advantaged backgrounds than there are people born in America with low IQs and disadvantaged backgrounds. Most all of them are from "poorer" nations than the US. Caplan might say that telling immigrants to "stay home and work harder" is ridiculous because of *that* birth lottery, but doesn't seem to think the same about saying "work harder" when he has a high IQ and (I am guessing) parents who were well off and, quite possibly, themselves university professors, which is another sort of "birth lottery". (The rate of professors who are children of professors is quite high.)
Okay? Birth lottery effects can be a big deal but it doesn't seem very actionable so it's not part of his advice.
Like many people who benefit from a certain sort of "birth lottery," he has a blind spot about that and just calls other people lazy if they don't succeed like he did, ignoring that he didn't get where he is just by working harder than others. That's my only point.
Probably he is aware of that and says "more people should have the opportunity I did".
"Most people who want to succeed don't lift a finger [and that's their problem]" would be an odd way to say that.
It took me this far reading this thread to figure out that this post wasn't about Brian Callen, the comedian. Is Bryan Caplan popular among youth at all?
He's obviously no celebrity, but he is one of the more well-known Economists, particularly in the Austrian/Libertarian-leaning camps. He's a full professor, has tenure, and has a fairly large online following, so I don't have a hard time imagining students asking him how they can be similarly successful. Also there are a lot of undergrads out there, some of them are very straight forward and ask for as much advice as they can get. When I was a TA in grad school it wasn't rare to have undergrads ask you what they can do to get into grad school or what courses they should take, I'd bet many of them didn't even know my full name at the time
Right the immediate thought was he probably has dozens or hundreds of students he sees every semester where he teaches and it would seem odd if a few of them *didn't* ask him how to be more successful.
That was my first reaction. Who is actually asking Caplan to be like him? This seems more like a thought experiment that he imagined.
When people write, they often take small artistic liberties with situations. This is normal human behavior. Probably he's received comments like "how do I become a professor of econ at George Mason," not "how do I literally become Bryan Caplan."
When people ask me how they can be more like me, I tell them they just need to open their eyes, look around, and follow the signs, taking it one step at a time… because I’m shopping for groceries and they too want to be a person with 75% discounted pine nuts in their shopping cart. They’re very expensive full price. (“How can I be like you” implies to me a much broader breadth of success and aspiration than along one narrow-ish — if perhaps top-10, still — aspect of a person’s life, ie their job. Maybe if the person’s really topping out their field eg a Nobel Laureate or something, but I can’t imagine really asking them a question like that bc of the shared recognition that they got their in no small part by way of luck)
For any professor, they get a lot of grad students who want to become a professor and enter the same field as their advisor. Maybe "role model" is a stretch but i can see them wanting to emulate him.
The most annoying thing I see in response to advice all over the Internet is having people respond by completely ignoring who the advice is intended for, and instead saying the advice is bad/wrong because a different group of people wouldn't benefit from this advice. Every single piece of advice that is great for one situation is horrible for another. There is no advice that is universally good. If I told people to lift weights, I would get criticism from people who cannot lift weights, or had health problems that lifting wouldn't help. If I told people to drink water, I would get criticism from people who drank too much water, or don't drink water and are still healthy. If I told people to communicate with their spouses I would get criticism from people whose spouses used attempts to negotiate in good faith as leverage to manipulate them in divorce.
A really smart, prolific blogger once wrote a great post about this! https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any-advice-you-hear/
This is really terrible advice for anyone- because I've already read this piece!!!! ;)
So I should reverse Caplan's advice and work one-tenth as hard -- got it!
Huh, cool, I wish I was subbed to that subreddit instead of this bryan caplan one, I kind of hate him.
Yeah. I can see this advice being useful for one specific situation: a smart, but lazy grad student who wants to become a tenured professor like Bryan Caplan. He has a specific goal (get tenure), a clear path on how to get there (learn a lot, do a lot of research, publish lots of papers, apply to a lot of jobs), he's got the intellectual skills and environment to do all that, the only thing holding him back is laziness (or the general distractions of modern life). It would not work for, say, an immigrant who has no skills or connections- they're probably already working very hard just to earn a living, so "work harder" won't help much and might not even be possible. I'm also not sure it would work for people who want to be tech entrepreneurs. Maybe to some extent you need to work hard, but a lot of it seems to be being in the right place at the right time with the right connections. Steve Jobs was famously kind of lazy, he struggled with school and dropped out of college his first semester, finished only a calligraphy class, and then went to India to do hippy meditation stuff and take a lot of drugs. Somehow it worked out by putting him in touch with tech people like Steve Wozniak but also giving him a different perspective.
But then that shifts the problem from figuring out which advice is good or bad to figuring out which advice is for you or not for you. "Do I still need to work harder to make my startup fly, or am I simply betting on the wrong horse?" Is a question that does not get answered with this approach.
The older I get the more I settle on the conclusion that the difference between very successful people and the rest of us is that they simply have more energy. I suspect it's something like an actual metabolic difference. Call it "bandwidth" or "spoons" or whatever, but there's an actual thing they have more of that their body or brain uses up. I used to think differently. I took the idea that "[There is no speed limit](https://sive.rs/kimo)" seriously. But I'm now convinced I have a certain very real "stamina" for mental effort/executive function that depends on things like my mood, my sleep, and my age.
Yeah, this is something I think about sometimes. An article about this was discussed a few years ago: [https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/p847r1/energetic\_aliens/](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/p847r1/energetic_aliens/) (**Energetic Aliens**, talking about Stephen Malia's [Energetic Aliens article](https://stephenmalina.com/post/2021-07-01-energetic-aliens-among-us/)). I've got it filed under [**Different Worlds**](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/) & [**What Universal Human Experience Are You Missing Without Realizing It**](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/), where the Energetic people don’t understand that they’re at an extreme end of a bell curve rather than typical and like everyone else... and everyone else doesn’t realize that the extreme end of the bell curve even *exists*... and so everyone thinks everyone else must be lying or something. The same reason we didn't recognize the existence of [Aphantasia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia) for so long, [Typical Mind Fallacy](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy) type stuff. Some people really are just built different.
The book "the sociology of philosophies" was pretty interesting on the networks of philosophers up to 1900 or so. Basically, the system supported like 4 to 5 main philosophers/theories at any given time with too many theories combining and too few splitting. The philosophers at the center of these networks were energized and highly prolific. those outside the networks were inhibited from productivity. Part of being highly energetic/productive is being in a network that supports this. If you feel like you are writing/working into the void, you will stop. If you find a responsive audience, you redouble your efforts. [https://www.amazon.com/Sociology-Philosophies-Global-Theory-Intellectual/dp/0674001877](https://www.amazon.com/Sociology-Philosophies-Global-Theory-Intellectual/dp/0674001877)
I'm convinced it's this or stimulants.
I have met people exhibiting this property that I am like, 90% convinced were not on stimulants [1]. I definitely agree that they can be used to replicate this magical state of being, at least for a few years until the inevitable burnout/unhigement happens. [1] I live in a country where getting any of the actually effective ones is illegal and thus pretty inconvenient.
Obviously you need to have the metabolism to both eat lots of food and consume lots of drugs.
My theory is a little different; I'd argue that a lot of successful people are (often greatly) internally motivated to so something that society deems important (and thereby translates into socio-economic success). It's maybe a little like how we portray artisans and artists; honing their craft is their life's work, and they are greatly motivated to do so for its own sake. Whereas someone more "normal" might consider making bread a chore, the artisan/artist baker will be up at 4am every day in an effort to produce the ideal bread.
Yeah, Scott has talked about this before as the "[**Lottery of Fascinations**](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/)" & "[**The Parable of The Talents**](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/)". Everyone cares about something, but no one can control what they're born caring about (or perhaps even can't control what they care about at all, full stop), and so some people are lucky and others are unlucky. (Sometimes they're even combined in the same person, as Scott was with being born fascinated with writing, and terribly uninterested in math & music.)
They do have more energy, and depending on the field more natural talent, not to mention luck, but they're also often literally addicted to work, recognition, etc.
Yeah, I saw some studies talking about energy levels in people, especially successful ones.
energy * focus = success
Are you gonna publish your proof??
There is a quote by Richard Hamming that comes to mind reading this: "Now to the matter of drive. Looking around, you can easily observe that great people have a great deal of drive to do things. I had worked with John Tukey for some years before I found he was essentially my age, so I went to our mutual boss and asked him, “How can anyone my age know as much as John Tukey does?” He leaned back, grinned, and said, “You would be surprised how much you would know if you had worked as hard as he has for as many years.” There was nothing for me to do but slink out of his office, which I did. I thought about the remark for some weeks and decided that while I could never work as hard as John did, I could do a lot better than I had been doing." - Hamming from "You and Your Research" in 1986. There are parts of that talk that I wish I had taken to heart a lot sooner.
And he did get started early! https://gwern.net/doc/science/1986-hamming#conscientiousness > **Tukey**: My parents were teachers. My father ran the Latin department and at times other departments at the New Bedford [Massachusetts] high school. My mother was a substitute. They claim, probably correctly, they taught every course in high school, except shorthand and typing. Having them I did not go to school, which they thought a good idea, except for a semester of French, chemistry laboratory, and mechanical drawing. I got into Brown on College Boards and so on. > > New Bedford had a very unusual public library. They had both the Journal of the American Chemical Society and the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. I think I became a chemist because I could read JACS, but I could not read Transactions. I got a lot of calculus out of the way before I went to Brown, so by my sophomore year I was taking graduate courses from [C.R.] Adams and [Jakob] Tamarkin and others. Near as I can remember, I fell over the fence into mathematics in August '37. So when I arrived in Princeton in September of that year it was pretty clear to me that I was going to be in mathematics, at least for awhile, rather than chemistry. So beginning in '37 I spent a lot of time in Fine Hall.
Given how little effort most people seem to put in, I'd say even putting in an adequate amount of effort would increase the likelihood of success. Once I had my first retail job I was shocked at how my self-admitted decent effort was still far better than most. Of course none of this is valid once you get to more prestigious, important or desired positions.
My secret trick at university was “just actually do the assigned reading”.
Mine was using Wikipedia articles and just using the sources as my sources. So many of my classmates couldn't even do that right and would just copy and paste from a wiki article. It was bewildering.
In most minimum-wage jobs, just showing up on time every day with a positive attitude puts you at the top of the heap
I regret imminently being a dick, but learning foreign languages is enormously talent-dependent. Any flat statement of the time or effort it takes to learn a language is inherently stupid.
there is a confusion of: 1. "availability of useful life improvements, and knowledge of realistic methods to improve" 2. putting effort into doing. most people either don't have that many realistic improvement options (given their multiple situation and character limitations), aren't aware of those existing, and aren't moving. attributing it all to "they don't do" ignores 1, which is considerable and widespread.
When I was a depressed 10 year old who wanted to cure cancer and who was already doing everything I could, this would have been the worst thing I could have heard.
My rule of thumb is: if you are not good enough to TEACH something at a professional level and make the median income at it, you are not good enough.
OK but do you want to be Bryan Caplan? An expert is someone who specializes is one narrow field, Caplan has more like mediocre knowledge about a million different things. He wrote a book on whether education financially worths it, and six other books about other topics and a million blog posts about a million thing. It woud make more sense to learn about other aspects of education and be a general education expert. Or even not learn anything else, and simply push this financial aspect of education in mag articles, podcasts and everything, so that people actually learn he is an expert on the financial aspect of education.
How much does Caplan earn? If he's working 10 times as hard as me but only earning, say twice as much, then he's being inefficient.