

Make an Extraordinary Effort - ivank
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/10/isshokenmei.html

======
randomwalker
I enjoyed the East vs. West discussion in the article. I grew up in the "East"
(India), and even by those standards, the importance of "making a desperate
all-out effort as if your own life were at stake" was drilled into my head
from a pretty early age. It's one of the things I've chosen to keep, even as
I've discarded most things the East gave me, like religion.

When I moved to America, I realized that this notion sounded or would sound
pretty absurd to most people around me. Inevitably, I was drawn to
entrepreneurship, because that's where I found like minded people.

~~~
ChaitanyaSai
"...making a desperate all-out effort as if your own life were at stake..."
This may be specific to your (extended) family. While it is foolhardy to speak
of any unified cultural milieu for India, I think it is fair to say that
predestination has largely been accepted and reveals itself in the way our
culture gave rise to rigid class stratification. And predestination, almost by
definition, discourages risk-taking.

Within these class boundaries, you do have people striving to reach
conventional goals, but rarely at risk to the family (which tends to be
established early).

Also, the largest nurturing family structure, the Indian bureaucracy (where
most of the educated Indian workforce was employed until the nineties)
instills passivity and "do-just-enough-ness".

These value are changing, but the change is really glacial outside the few,
truly cosmopolitan, western influenced cities and social strata.

~~~
randomwalker
No, it's not just a family thing. I'm not going to argue about abstract
cultural values and philosophical systems. I'm just pointing out what actually
happens.

I went to one of the IIT's. Unless you've been through the system, it's hard
to imagine the level of parental and peer pressure the kids who train for the
entrance exam face and the kind of work ethic it fosters in you. How many
countries in the world do you think there are where it is common to go to
boarding school for two years and forgo any kind of social life and a normal
childhood just to have a shot at getting into a specific college? Pretty much
just Japan, Korea and India.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of kids attempt the IIT. But that was just
an example. In general, competition for resources is so scarce that it is
common to make a Herculean effort to get things that are taken for granted in
the developed world. Like a car.

I'm willing to admit that this might be an entirely urban phenomenon, and that
rewards for hard work were much harder to come by in socialist India, until
the early 90s. But we live in the new century, and a third of the country is
now urban, where social stratification has largely broken down. That's more
than the total population of the U.S.

~~~
ChaitanyaSai
Ah, well, I studied at an IIT too, (Madras [Ganga] 98-02 shoutout! :) ) and I
do agree that the pressure to jump examination hurdles is rather intense, but
this again is a case of striving for very conventional goals, and for a
limited period of time.

How many have kept up the effort, after getting through (or not)?

As I said before, a conventional trajectory passing through a marriage in the
mid-twenties, is also one that makes the uptake of risk (and consequently
effort) much harder in life. I keep bringing up risk because effort without
the possibility of significant success is rather pointless. And without risky
opportunities that afford that kind of success, people reach for the cruise
control after just-enough.

Malthusian scarcity should reward and select for effort, ( and also voluntary
birth control and later marriage) as it did in the period right before
Industrial England (([1] ; descriptive review: [2])), but, in India, it
strangely doesn't! Predestiny, passivity, and fatalism, all predate socialist
India. Our mythology reflects this.

I do agree that we are turning a new chapter and we are host to a whole new
set of cultural ideas, but the numbers aren't, unfortunately, high enough.
Yes, while about 300 million people, are (or were in 2001) technically urban,
50 million are slum dwellers; I'd wager that only a tiny slice is literate
enough to accept cultural transmissions.

Still, I hope that this tiny slice of a humongous pie proves to be big
enough....

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-
Princet...](http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-
Princeton/dp/0691121354)

[2]
[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/science/07indu.html?pagewa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/science/07indu.html?pagewanted=print)

~~~
randomwalker
i think i've seen you around :)

~~~
ChaitanyaSai
good to see a co-alum here!, even if such an occurrence should be entire
predictable :) ...

------
anon-e-moose
Pure psycho-babble.

"If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you
probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon."

~~~
iamwil
Only if it were a pretty poster and a cute saying.

It's sometimes hard to convey in a sentence what we mean, especially something
translated, so we take a whole blog post.

------
yters
I think it is necessary in some cases to work extraordinarily hard, or perhaps
even over a long period of time. But that in itself shouldn't really be a
criteria for anything, IMHO, b/c it can lead to tunnel vision. At the very
least, I keep seeing this mistake in my own approach to things.

Another thing I've noticed is that it also matters how much I like whatever it
is I'm working on. If I like it a lot, I will naturally remember thing about
it well, have better insight, and learn more about it. However, I may also be
less productive because of this, i.e. going off on tangents.

------
MicahWedemeyer
Could this be summed up as _Work smarter, not harder_?

~~~
Eliezer
There's a difference between the notion of "working smarter", and the notion
of being willing to leave your comfortable zone and do things outside your
usual boundaries, when the ordinary result (or desperate result) isn't good
enough.

What does "work smarter" mean operationally? If there were a little switch you
could throw in your head, we wouldn't need the Overcoming Bias blog.

~~~
teaquaffer
I've found that a lot of times there _is_ a little switch in my head. Every
once in a while I'll be banging my head against a problem, but if I stop and
ask myself "how would a physicist solve this?" I can figure it out.

It takes an effort for me to step back and ask myself what the problem is,
rather than just sitting down and working on it.

Usually "just sitting down and working on it" works, which may mean my
problems are too easy. :)

~~~
walterk
Asking yourself "how would a physicist solve this?" is a good example of
priming. I can't remember if I read about it in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, but
there was an experiment where a couple groups were given a task, with one
group told to imagine that they were professors. That group performed
significantly better than the other.

But you'll notice that it takes something more specific than "work smarter" to
change up the way you approach a problem.

------
coglethorpe
What's the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary? It's that
little bit extra.

------
akkartik
Hey, Yudkowsky quoted from Batman!

~~~
Eliezer
That's nothing, three days ago I quoted Card Captor Sakura and no one called
me on it.

~~~
yters
Off topic, but, regarding your research, do you know if anyone has determined
the characteristics of problems that AI has historically been most effective
in solving, vs problems that humans have been best at solving?

------
Alex3917
"It is essential for a man to strive with all his heart, and to understand
that it is difficult even to reach the average if he does not have the
intention of surpassing others in whatever he does."

Only a wretch would aspire to surpass others. This guy's epitaph pegs him as
shallow and insecure, and the rest of the post only further showcases his
ignorance.

~~~
dhbradshaw
"Only a wretch would aspire to surpass others"

If you are just trying to compete randomly then you end up lost, with no
direction of your own, and easily manipulated.

But if you have a goal, getting there may require that you surpass others. If
it is a large goal, it almost certainly will. You have to leave the village to
get to the top of the mountain.

