Comment by useful | Hacker News Reader

Comment by useful | Hacker News Reader

It feels good to learn something at the intro/hobby level. It provides an easy dopamine hit.

In order to become an expert in the population it requires a mastery that is hard. It requires a few orders of magnitude more effort with less and less reward as you become more and more competent.

Collectors of basic intro knowledge could be looking for something they enjoy but there are a large portion of people who do it because it feels good to learn. This is a trap for smarter people and I'm sure everyone knows the career academic with a multitude of academic degrees or a friend with a new hobby every month.

I think everyone should try to be a in the top 1-10% of some pursuit at some point in their lives to see the amount of effort and planning it takes to be at the top of something. You don't have to stay at the top. It makes you appreciate the people at the top of things more because you more easily recognize the effort it takes to be great. Too much of society is focused on the natural ability or luck involved to be at the top. It could be argued that a PHD is this, but I believe that its sort of forced because there are economic and structural motivations that are available that aren't the same as only having a personal motiviation.

When I was in high school I was playing World of Warcraft arena competitively and got top .5% (the highest general rank) in seasons 1-4, later on multiple characters in multiple brackets.

As I approached college I realized that I had done something that, if I had dedicated myself to almost anything else, would have resulted in me being a masterful expert at it. By the time I was 17 (I played WoW from 13-17, 2004-2008) I had put over 8,000 hours into that game. I spent a quarter of my life playing it for that four year period.

It was, of course, an insanely massive waste of time in hindsight. I went from scripting and building custom maps in Neverwinter Nights to playing in Blizzards theme park for a few years where the most coding I managed was hex editing the game models and changing a few labels in addon scripts. I was a directionless dysphoric teenager who had an interest in computers but no real ambition or friends at the time so distraction was tantalizing. It absolutely cost me opportunities to go to more prestigious universities I could have likely qualified for it if I had applied myself to the discipline of getting into elite schools instead of topping ladder ranks.

I like to think I came out of that black hole of my life at least knowing the value of dedication. Its only really more recent that I finally came to terms with the total realities of distraction, including writing this post on HN right now. At least this is at the tail end of my 30 minute break from coding this afternoon, so now I'll be getting back to work.

> In order to become an expert in the population it requires a mastery that is hard.

I think that it's not just that it's hard, it's that it's psychologically painful.

If you're good at anything, you get filtered into a group of people who are also good. And not everyone will continue to be top of the class. If you tied your identity to being good at this thing, suddenly you are going to have a reckoning.

Anecdotally it's often the people who can deal with this that get further, not just the ones who were already further ahead.

You'll hear this story often if you come across interviews with sports people. At some point, they got put in a group at a level that was competitive, and they had to deal with not being the shining star.

This is a wonderful insight. I had a few jobs and had been through college before I realized just how superficial my knowledge (and really most people's knowledge) was on most subjects. Really specializing in any subject would take years of intense work. I had made it to my late 20s before ever undertaking anything like that, and it began to dawn on me that many intelligent people could get through their whole life without ever really dealing with complexity.

It was at this point that I realized what Plato's Allegory of the Cave was really about; the apparent complexity of the world and the actual complexity of the world diverge strongly.

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