It's easier to become good at restricted ways of interacting with the world than it is to grasp it in its full complexity. This is fine and good, but sometimes leads to limiting conceptions of the world that we need to be able to break out of.
This made me think of the excellent paper, The Mundanity of Excellence[1], the major point of which is that ultra-elite athletes are not the best because they train more or longer, it is exactly because they know *what* to focus on to achieve the results they want (Olympic gold medals in this case).
That seems to be exactly what you’re describing here, and exactly what the Pedros did. Your post has sparked some new thoughts on a subject that has consumed a lot of my idle thinking time already: how to get better at non-game pursuits where performance is hard to measure in a sane way (physics in industry settings), but the outcomes are consequential (pay, promotions, etc). One important facet seems to be to define what success even looks like for you, and then think about how to get there in a reasonable way.
This old blog post (https://bldgblog.com/2010/01/nakatomi-space/) on "Nakamoto Space" (no connection to Bitcoin) has a great real world example of literally "walking through walls" during war:
> Worthy of particular emphasis is Weizman’s reference to a technique called “walking through walls”:
>
> 'Furthermore, soldiers used none of the streets, roads, alleys, or courtyards that constitute the syntax of the city, and none of the external doors, internal stairwells, and windows that constitute the order of buildings, but rather moved horizontally through party walls, and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors.'
> In it, he argues that games are an art form whose medium is agency - they create art by creating systems of actions that you can perform to play the game.
Learning to walk through walls
This made me think of the excellent paper, The Mundanity of Excellence[1], the major point of which is that ultra-elite athletes are not the best because they train more or longer, it is exactly because they know *what* to focus on to achieve the results they want (Olympic gold medals in this case).
That seems to be exactly what you’re describing here, and exactly what the Pedros did. Your post has sparked some new thoughts on a subject that has consumed a lot of my idle thinking time already: how to get better at non-game pursuits where performance is hard to measure in a sane way (physics in industry settings), but the outcomes are consequential (pay, promotions, etc). One important facet seems to be to define what success even looks like for you, and then think about how to get there in a reasonable way.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/202063
This old blog post (https://bldgblog.com/2010/01/nakatomi-space/) on "Nakamoto Space" (no connection to Bitcoin) has a great real world example of literally "walking through walls" during war:
> Worthy of particular emphasis is Weizman’s reference to a technique called “walking through walls”:
>
> 'Furthermore, soldiers used none of the streets, roads, alleys, or courtyards that constitute the syntax of the city, and none of the external doors, internal stairwells, and windows that constitute the order of buildings, but rather moved horizontally through party walls, and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors.'
A real-life example of the Cohen approach, inspired by very similar thinking to what you describe here: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/walking-through-walls
> In it, he argues that games are an art form whose medium is agency - they create art by creating systems of actions that you can perform to play the game.
This reminds me of Sid Meier's dictum that a game is a curated series of interesting decisions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WggIdtrqgKg