Unusual Foundations
Hi everyone.
I’ve been finding the newsletter so far a bit depressing, haven’t you? Hopefully the productive sort of depressing which helps us fix the depressing bits but not, you know, not depressing.
So I thought I’d talk about something a bit more uplifting this week.
Backstory
A thing I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is how advice works.
The majority of advice you hear is not tailored for you. It’s advice that is designed for “most people” - people repeat advice that worked for them and that is simple enough to spread to others, and so “good” advice spreads through the population.
In order to be successful it has to useful for enough people that they want to share it, and it has to be simple enough to share easily. Advice that fails to fit either of these criteria will tend to be hard to come by even if it’s exactly what you need - somebody might be able to give you that advice, but you won’t necessarily find them.
A consequence of this is that most advice works for “enough” people but it very rarely works for everyone, because as you make advice more general it starts to become harder to communicate because you have to add all of the caveats and preconditions (Do X, unless you have problem Y, in which case it might be worth trying Z…) and the communication stalls.
So, when receiving advice, it’s important to bear in mind that this advice might not be well suited to you. If it doesn’t work for you, that’s not necessarily a sign that the advice is bad (there might be people for whom the advice is very good) and it’s definitely not a sign that there’s something wrong with you, it’s just a bad fit between you and the advice.
The core reason I’ve been thinking about here is that a lot of advice fails to take into account that some things might be unusually hard for you. For example if you’ve got flat feet or joint problems, don’t do Couch to 5K without modification because it’s not designed to be safe for you. If you’ve got ADHD, don’t follow a standardised meditation course because it’s designed for people who find it easier to focus.
But I’ve been addressing some of the problems I talked about in “Why am I not working on my PhD?” and it’s caused me to realise something interesting: Another reason why advice can fit you badly is that sometimes something can be unusually easy for you, and the advice designed for the majority of people is telling you to do it the hard way.
Why does this happen?
It happens because you’re good at things that the audience for the advice are not. This might be because you have some unrelated but applicable expertise, it might be due to some sort of natural talent, you might have resources they lack, or you might be at a different stage in your life than most people learning. There are probably other reasons this happens, bu those are the ones that come to mind.
What this will often mean is that things that the other people in this situation find to be the hardest part of it are comparatively hard are actually very easy for you, and there are opportunities for you to take advantage of that.
Sometimes this can happen to entire communities. For example, when I started my PhD I had a bunch of people telling me to use Zotero or another reference manager for tracking all of my citations. It was sold to me as vital, super important, it would change my life and I would curse my past self if I didn’t do it.
I did not understand this advice at all. These tools seemed baffling to me - they were clunky and solved a problem that I thought was trivial in a way that was far more complicated than it needed to be. Eventually I figured it out: This advice was coming from people who weren’t computer scientists.
If you’re a computer scientist you’re probably using a version control system and storing all of your references in bibtex (a text format for citations, used with the LaTeX typesetting language which, for our sins, most of us will be using), and you have good tools for working with text, so a lot of the problems that these reference managers are solving just aren’t there for us.
There’s nothing intrinsic to computer science about using version control and bibtex. Certainly most mathematicians will also be using bibtex. But computer scientists are generally also programmers, and (most) programmers have just internalised the idea that of course you write things in plain text formats and put your text files in version control, so this is a very natural fit.
There’s nothing stopping you using these things if you’re not a computer scientist, but the trade offs are different: We’ve already sunk the cost of learning to use a version control system, and for a mix of good and bad cultural reasons LaTeX is essentially forced on us, so these things are essentially free. They are available to us, so we might as well use them. For other people the cost to acquire these skills may not be worth the benefits (or may not seem it), so their advice (use Zotero) is tailored for that different set of trade offs.
Case Studies
I’d like to tell you about two examples of this for me.
The first is all of this writing and general personal development I’ve been doing. I’ve grounded a lot of the work I’m doing in practices of reading and writing, and take a very practical / rational approach to a lot of subjects that I think are usually a lot fuzzier, and I’m able to explain a number of things more clearly than I think they are typically explained.
This isn’t because I’m uniquely clever compared to everyone else who has tried to do this. I’m just quite a lot older than most people are when they figure out a lot of the things I’m currently in the process of figuring out - I think people typically start learning a lot of this in their 20s or earlier, or never learn it at all. I am now in my, ugh, late 30s, so I’ve got a fair bit of background that most people learning about this sort of material don’t necessarily have.
Essentially, I’ve built a self-therapy practice on top of about a decade of learning communication and problem solving skills in a professional context first. I’m making use of foundations I’ve already laid in one context, which allows me to short circuit a lot of difficult steps: I already know how to look at problems, understand and explain them clearly, and then solve them, I’m just learning how to apply those in a new domain.
Secondly, the solution I’m currently working on for the problems I talked about my PhD is that I’m building a lot of infrastructure for running experiments, independently of any paper, with the goal of making it easy to ask interesting research questions. The basic goal is to get it so I can just run novel experiments for fun, possibly turning them into blog posts, possibly turning them into papers on the Arxiv, or possibly turning them into “official” papers.
The basic reasoning behind this approach was an emotional one: It turns out that the core, central, problem I’m having with my entire PhD is that writing papers has a massive ugh factor around it (writing the newsletter about this was very helpful). I like learning things, which is basically what research is, I like writing about things I’ve learned (you might have noticed), and those are both valuable and interesting parts of the PhD process, but the actual paper writing I find awful.
Unfortunately, the paper writing was poisoning everything else: paper writing had become the criterion for success, which meant that all research work seemed awful. This project is to decouple that: Research succeeds independently of whether a paper gets written about it, but provides a platform for which I can also write papers on, with significantly less emotional investment in the paper itself because it’s just about “selling” an idea.
Of course, I hate sales, so it’s possible that I won’t find paper writing any easier, but if “all” I achieve is creating interesting tools and a large body of useful research that happens not to have made it into the formal literature, that’s still a lot better than I’m currently doing.
This is an example in two different ways.
The first is that I don’t think I would have figured out this problem two years ago. If you’d held my hand and guided me through the solution I would have gone “Oh yes, that’s very sensible” but I doubt I would have figured it out on my own. The skills of using emotional reflection in practical contexts are very much part of the skill set I’ve developed through the self-therapy skills I’ve been working on.
The second is that it’s building on a foundation of software development skills that I acquired in my career before my PhD. Building this sort of platform for the project of research is something that probably most people would benefit from, but I’m not sure the approach I’m taking would have been an accessible one without my particular idiosyncratic collection of skills I acquired first.
How likely is this?
Do you, personally, in fact have these kinds of unusual skills and talents you can bring to bear on problems?
My money is on yes. People have a lot of complexities to them - hobbies, career changes, different individual strengths, or even different individual weaknesses that we’ve had to learn to overcome.
A friend sent me this article on Being the (Pareto) Best in the World a while back, and I think it provides a good model for this problem: It is, essentially, impossible for you to be the best at any given thing in the world. There are just too many people out there to compete with, and not that many (important) things to focus on. You’re never going to be the best writer in the world - there are seven and a half billion other writers you’re competing with (or a mere 1.5 billion if you’re only competing for writing in English). But you might have some other speciality - a hobby of interest say - and have Pareto-best across that and writing: That is, there is nobody out there who both knows more about your hobby and is better at writing than you. This makes you ideally placed to write about your hobby.
This pattern is likely to repeat over and over again, because there are a lot more pairs of things than there are individual things (the number of pairs of things is roughly proportional to the square of the number of things - so e.g. if there are a thousand things to be good at there are about half a million pairs of things to be good).
Even if you’re not Pareto-best at anything globally, it’s also much easier to be the best in a smaller pool. You may not be (indeed, obviously aren’t) the best writer in the world, but there’s a decent chance of being the best writer in your company. Or, if not writing, some other skill.
Downsides
The big downside of building on unusual foundations is that it requires you to ignore other people’s advice and go your own way. This can be scary, leaves you potentially without support when things go wrong, and is weird so tends to trigger the social obligation to be bad at things. People love to tell you that they told you so when you ignore their advice.
There are a couple of ways you can avoid this: The first is to mostly experiment this in safe environments. Try different things, and don’t tell anyone about them until they worked. You can also take advantage of strengths in ways that are complementary to rather than replacements for the advice people are giving you - a “Yes, and” to it rather than a “No, but”.
Another way to offset this problem is that in many cases, the expertise you’ve developed results in strategies that you can share, and you can use this to try to create a group of people to join you in your new approach. This is a large part of why I’m so keen on getting people to start a writing practice - it creates a group of people who are using the same tools as I am.
Ultimately though, anything that takes advantage of your own individual characteristics will require you to set out on your own and make your own decisions separately from the group, and that’s going to be scary.
Something to try
A good place to start would be to look for things you are good at that other people working on the problem are not. Ideally relevant things you are good at.
This can be quite hard to notice, but there’s a trick to it: Instead of looking for what you’re good at, look for things that you’re surprised that other people are bad at. Those are probably a sign of expertise you have that is not commonly shared in the group, and it’s worth thinking about what that expertise is and where you learned it.
Once you’ve done that, it may be helpful to start thinking about better ways to take advantage of that expertise - if it’s not widely shared in the group, there are probably a number of easy applications for it that are not currently being taken advantage of. You could try to sit down and literally write a list of those. You might be surprised what you come up with.
Postscript
Unrelated to the subject of this letter, but I’m finding the newsletter format oddly difficult to write, so I think I’m going to start playing around with the format and my workflow a bit more. You might get some filler posts for the next few weeks (I’m thinking book summaries / reviews) while I work this out. (Using some of my reading habits as a foundation for the newsletter, albeit not a particularly unusual one).
Also feel free to let me know if there’s anything in particular you’d really like out of the newsletter. I can’t promise I’ll do it, but at the very least I’m more likely to do it if I know what it is than if I don’t!