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.
Heh, one thing the nyt piece managed was to do a Cunningham's law nerdsnipe-wmd at newspaper scale... now a bunch of people are energetically trying to post the right answer.


IMO trying to correct whatever the NYT writer thought he knew/understood is futile. "Willing to be misunderstood by the NYT" should be the default stance unless you want to waste a lot of time correcting an obsolete 2013 map for people who don't care.

The thing is, the NYT still has enough normative cultural power, even as it has fallen from newspaper-of-record, that it takes a particular sort of heretical self-confidence to sort of ignore whatever they happen to be wrong about on any given week, whether or not it concerns you

A subtle shift has occurred in the workings of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. It used to be an individual private amnesia re: media ("I'll believe myself when I am certain they got it wrong because I'm an expert, but still believe them when I am not"). Now it's a collective effect

A sort of common-knowledge threshold has been crossed lately. "Everybody knows that everybody knows the NYT is wrong on X across largish subcultures." It's no longer mutual beliefs being validated occasionally 1:1.

More from For later read

Wow, Morgan McSweeney again, Rachel Riley, SFFN, Center for Countering Digital Hate, Imran Ahmed, JLM, BoD, Angela Eagle, Tracy-Ann Oberman, Lisa Nandy, Steve Reed, Jon Cruddas, Trevor Chinn, Martin Taylor, Lord Ian Austin and Mark Lewis. #LabourLeaks #StarmerOut 24 tweet🧵

Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, launched the organisation that now runs SFFN.
The CEO Imran Ahmed worked closely with a number of Labour figures involved in the campaign to remove Jeremy as leader.

Rachel Riley is listed as patron.
https://t.co/nGY5QrwBD0


SFFN claims that it has been “a project of the Center For Countering Digital Hate” since 4 May 2020. The relationship between the two organisations, however, appears to date back far longer. And crucially, CCDH is linked to a number of figures on the Labour right. #LabourLeaks

Center for Countering Digital Hate registered at Companies House on 19 Oct 2018, the organisation’s only director was Morgan McSweeney – Labour leader Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. McSweeney was also the campaign manager for Liz Kendall’s leadership bid. #LabourLeaks #StarmerOut

Sir Keir - along with his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney - held his first meeting with the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM). Deliberately used the “anti-Semitism” crisis as a pretext to vilify and then expel a leading pro-Corbyn activist in Brighton and Hove

You May Also Like

The YouTube algorithm that I helped build in 2011 still recommends the flat earth theory by the *hundreds of millions*. This investigation by @RawStory shows some of the real-life consequences of this badly designed AI.


This spring at SxSW, @SusanWojcicki promised "Wikipedia snippets" on debated videos. But they didn't put them on flat earth videos, and instead @YouTube is promoting merchandising such as "NASA lies - Never Trust a Snake". 2/


A few example of flat earth videos that were promoted by YouTube #today:
https://t.co/TumQiX2tlj 3/

https://t.co/uAORIJ5BYX 4/

https://t.co/yOGZ0pLfHG 5/