15. “Too Stupid to Work” is Too Stupid to Work

(You might want to refer briefly back to post 4, “Seven-ish Words from My Thought-Language”, for the concept of [vanilla-obvious]ness.)

I used to find myself repeatedly running into the problem of neglecting to do something of real value because I thought it might be too obvious or stupid to do. I still sometimes do, mind, I just used to have this problem way worse. The problem is in the heuristic that something can just plain be too stupid to work, which is, itself, much too stupid to work and in fact often fails badly. To that end, let me quickly describe a few things that I think solidly fall into the reference class of “things that feel too dumb to work, but totally work”.

First off, write things down if you want to remember them much later on. This can be anything - conversations you have with people, notes to yourself, shower thoughts, events that have happened that you were a part of. If you want to remember anything more than broad strokes in a year’s time, write explicit notes about them. This can be on physical paper, with pencil or pen, or it can be on some flavor of notetaking program - anything from Notepad to Obsidian to Telegram self-messages. “The palest ink surpasses the strongest memory”.

For another, practice things deliberately. Again, this can be anything - even tiny things. The more you practice some action or activity, the more confident you will become. Practice tiny motions, like pen-spinning or flushing a particularly tricky toilet. Practice pronouncing words, especially people’s names. Practice writing by way of a slew of jumbled blog posts about things you care about. As you do more practice on things you care about, you will get better and smoother at doing them. Even practicing something once or twice will leave you better off than not doing a dry run at all!

Here’s a pair of rationalist-favored “too stupid to work” best-practices that I won’t go too deep into, because you can read more about them elsewhere: “trigger-action plans” and “buying more copies”. A trigger-action plan is the mental action of, in advance, setting some precise triggering condition on which you will take a specific action. For example, you could pick the trigger of “(whenever) I stop by the refrigerator” and actions like “check the water pitcher for fullness and fill it if needed”, or “eat a piece of fruit”, or “check if I’ve eaten today”. The goal is to make choices in advance while you have more choice-juice and can make better and more intentional choices, and then end up actually taking the actions you want to take. “Buy more copies” is fairly self-explanatory, but the key here is to remember that physical objects wear out over time, especially if well-loved and thus heavily-used, but opportunities to purchase things can sometimes dry up. Accordingly, if you find something that you like or that you find yourself consistently needing, buy several copies. This can be things like phone chargers, clothing (hats, shoes, hoodies), condiments and other long-storing foods, tools, and generally anything that can stand being stashed away for a year or so.

One more object-level one: saying the obvious thing to say, or especially asking what feels like a dumb or silly or overly basic question. Briefly: say more of those things, because in my experience that’s ended up being valuable. Frequently, the obvious thing to say is simply the correct earnest thing to say, and the silly or basic question to ask will end up being a deeply valuable question about foundational aspects of the topic – even one that other people around you might have wanted to ask and, not having heard this advice, failed to! Even if that’s not the case, it’s still worth filling in gaps in your knowledge, and the best way to do that is often to ask questions of a relative expert.

All of these suggestions tie back to one of the terms I defined earlier, [vanilla-canonical]ness. All of these practices are [vanilla-canonical] sorts of actions to take, which you might neglect to take because they feel too obvious, or too on the nose. You second-guess yourself, or feel foolish, and thus you lose out. Worse yet, you might fail to realize that your experience of the world - your reality-tunnel, as it’s called - can be very different in any of a large number of ways from others’ reality-tunnels; directly downstream of this, what you consider to be easy or obvious may well not be easy or obvious to other people - so don’t rule out courses of action just on those grounds! It can be terribly corrosive to write off everything you’re good at as being easy, just because you’re good at them - maybe debucket those categories? For another bucket worth cracking apart, even if a course of action really is easy or obvious, that doesn’t at all mean that it’s without value. Drinking water and going to sleep and taking walks are probably all fairly easy and obvious for you, if you’re lucky enough to be reading this post, but they are all nonetheless extremely good ideas. The same can hold true of other easy, obvious courses of action: low-hanging fruit is real and can help you; similarly, it’s worth it to keep in mind that one person’s meat is another person’s poison - what may be easy and obvious and beneficial for you might not still be as beneficial for someone else. This is especially helpful to keep in mind when wrestling with meta-level hangups around doing a [vanilla-canonical]-seeming thing: if you notice yourself asking yourself why it is some obvious, easy, beneficial-seeming course of action isn’t simply what everyone is doing, it might be any combination of: “they already are and it’s just hard to notice”, “it’s not actually that obvious to or easy for everyone”, “it’s not actually that beneficial to everyone”, “they are getting hung up on unhelpful meta-level social considerations”, and probably many other similar mitigating factors. Just do the thing, if you find it that strongly indicated! The world will let you know very quickly if it’s not as good as you expected.

NS has elsewhere commented on the value of doing the obvious/[vanilla-canonical] things. Let me paraphrase his post - it’s important to spend some time (an actual literal 5 minutes, say) thinking about the obvious helpful things to do about any problem you encounter or goal you aim yourself at, and then to actually go do those [vanilla-canonical] things; importantly, don’t do the obvious things wrongly - do them correctly instead. Make sure to check that your plan will do what you want, too!

For a closing comment, it’s not just the case that the knowledge or ideas or actions which are obvious to you are also potentially non-obvious to other people - it’s entirely possible that you find yourself to be a rare example of someone in the overlap of two very different reference classes, such that people in reference class A find some knowledge or approaches obvious, while people in reference class B find some other very different knowledge or approaches obvious, and there are gains to be captured in being the rare person who is in both classes A and B. In such situations there is plenty of free gain to be had, and the [vanilla-canonical] thing to do is to go scoop it up.


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