I’m guessing these responses really reflect people’s weighted averages (age*current average effort fraction) though I kept it simple and asked for just averages.

I suspect a healthy weighted average should be ~ (age-20)/2. So a 30 year old should be at 5, a 40 year old at 10, a 50 year old at 15 etc.

Standard deviation should be ~average/3 maybe, so distribution spreads as you age and accumulate projects and get better at them.
Other things being equal, people get good at starting in their 20s, at follow through in 30s, at finishing in 40s.

No point learning food follow through until you’ve found a few good starts to bet on. No point getting good at finishing until a few projects have aged gracefully.
I’m in the 7+ range myself. Probably 8-9. Slightly less than healthy for my age.
I suspect most self-judgments on being good starters/follow-through-ers/finishers are really flawed because of the non-ergodicity of project management skill learning. You can’t learn good practices for the 3 phases in an arbitrary order. On,y one order actually works.
My oldest live project, rather appropriately is probably “time studies.” Ongoing since at least 2003. 17y old.

Second oldest is ribbonfarm at 13 years old.

Then sparring-style consulting-fu, 10 years old.

Breaking smart, 6 years old.

My portfolio is getting long in the tooth
Most projects worth pursuing long term don’t even actually start until they come alive after a year or two of futzing around and tinkering. Ribbonfarm took to years to get to ignition. My interest in time took 3 years to get to ignition with a journal paper (2004-07).
The “ignition” moment is when an opinionated understanding of the thing meets enough stuff on the canvas already so you can see where you’re going. “Vision” requires not a blank canvas but an incoherently full one, the detritus of sufficient futzing, muddling, trial and error.
Being a good starter in ambiguous, uncertain domains is about having a calibrated sense of how many false starts you can expect vs how many you can afford, to make commitment decisions. If it’s going to take 2y+10 false starts and you only have 1 y/5 starts in you, don’t bother.
Good follow through is about getting “married” to a project and committing to it long term, once you decide you’re off to a good start. https://t.co/yeswAStdYm
Good finishing (n=4 experience, all in the 2-5 year range) is about caring enough to stick the landing elegantly. I’d rate myself a B- on this, though I’ve never yet fumbled an important finish when it mattered.
While I rarely choke or quit on a finish, I also don’t have that magic strong-finish switch some seem to. Maybe 1 in 4 finishes I’ll get that closer-energy burst and sprint to the finish line, but 3 of 4 times I’ll kind huff and puff and stagger across the finish line.
Quitting is a strength if you typically do it early, but a weakness if you typically do it late. If you’re gonna quit, do it before the ignite moment. For me the trigger is realizing something will take more false starts than I care to invest.

More from Venkatesh Rao

Both this thread and the outraged response threads are... something.


This is why I never wanted kids. Way too much responsibility for another human’s development. Depending on the child, this might either be the day they discovered who they were or the day that traumatized them into a lifelong fuckup. Either way I don’t want to direct the show.

As far as the can opener goes, it wouldn’t even occur to me to try and turn it into a teachable moment. That sounds vaguely quixotic. I’d just show them how immediately. I think my default is to try and instruct clearly but not demonstrate unless the person is truly disoriented.

I think there’s basically a right answer here: show the kid. If the kid has the aptitude they’ll enjoy the mechanism so much they’ll develop the figure-it-out skill with other devices. If not, it’s a training data point that will build remedial levels of intuition more slowly.

I think perseverance is both misframed and over-rated as a virtue. Misframed as in: everybody has potential for it in some areas and lacks it in others. Aptitude is those areas where perseverance comes easily to you. Meta-skill of knowing where/why you persist is more important.

More from For later read

1. The death of Silicon Valley, a thread

How did Silicon Valley die? It was killed by the internet. I will explain.

Yesterday, my friend IRL asked me "Where are good old days when techies were


2. In the "good old days" Silicon Valley was about understanding technology. Silicon, to be precise. These were people who had to understand quantum mechanics, who had to build the near-miraculous devices that we now take for granted, and they had to work

3. Now, I love libertarians, and I share much of their political philosophy. But you have to be socially naive to believe that it has a chance in a real society. In those days, Silicon Valley was not a real society. It was populated by people who understood quantum mechanics

4. Then came the microcomputer revolution. It was created by people who understood how to build computers. One borderline case was Steve Jobs. People claimed that Jobs was surrounded by a "reality distortion field" - that's how good he was at understanding people, not things

5. Still, the heroes of Silicon Valley were the engineers. The people who knew how to build things. Steve Jobs, for all his understanding of people, also had quite a good understanding of technology. He had a libertarian vibe, and so did Silicon Valley
I’ve asked Byers to clarify, but as I read this tweet, it seems that Bret Stephens included an unredacted use of the n-word in his column this week to make a point, and the column got spiked—maybe as a result?


Four times. The column used the n-word (in the context of a quote) four times. https://t.co/14vPhQZktB


For context: In 2019, a Times reporter was reprimanded for several incidents of racial insensitivity on a trip with high school students, including one in which he used the n-word in a discussion of racial slurs.

That incident became public late last month, and late last week, after 150 Times employees complained about how it had been handled, the reporter in question resigned.

In the course of all that, the Times' executive editor said that the paper does not "tolerate racist language regardless of intent.” This was the quote that Bret Stephens was pushing back against in his column. (Which, again, was deep-sixed by the paper.)

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