I enjoyed the East vs. West discussion in the article. I grew up in the "East" (India), and even by those standards, the importance of "making a desperate all-out effort as if your own life were at stake" was drilled into my head from a pretty early age. It's one of the things I've chosen to keep, even as I've discarded most things the East gave me, like religion.

When I moved to America, I realized that this notion sounded or would sound pretty absurd to most people around me. Inevitably, I was drawn to entrepreneurship, because that's where I found like minded people.

"...making a desperate all-out effort as if your own life were at stake..." This may be specific to your (extended) family. While it is foolhardy to speak of any unified cultural milieu for India, I think it is fair to say that predestination has largely been accepted and reveals itself in the way our culture gave rise to rigid class stratification. And predestination, almost by definition, discourages risk-taking.

Within these class boundaries, you do have people striving to reach conventional goals, but rarely at risk to the family (which tends to be established early).

Also, the largest nurturing family structure, the Indian bureaucracy (where most of the educated Indian workforce was employed until the nineties) instills passivity and "do-just-enough-ness".

These value are changing, but the change is really glacial outside the few, truly cosmopolitan, western influenced cities and social strata.

No, it's not just a family thing. I'm not going to argue about abstract cultural values and philosophical systems. I'm just pointing out what actually happens.

I went to one of the IIT's. Unless you've been through the system, it's hard to imagine the level of parental and peer pressure the kids who train for the entrance exam face and the kind of work ethic it fosters in you. How many countries in the world do you think there are where it is common to go to boarding school for two years and forgo any kind of social life and a normal childhood just to have a shot at getting into a specific college? Pretty much just Japan, Korea and India.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of kids attempt the IIT. But that was just an example. In general, competition for resources is so scarce that it is common to make a Herculean effort to get things that are taken for granted in the developed world. Like a car.

I'm willing to admit that this might be an entirely urban phenomenon, and that rewards for hard work were much harder to come by in socialist India, until the early 90s. But we live in the new century, and a third of the country is now urban, where social stratification has largely broken down. That's more than the total population of the U.S.

Ah, well, I studied at an IIT too, (Madras [Ganga] 98-02 shoutout! :) ) and I do agree that the pressure to jump examination hurdles is rather intense, but this again is a case of striving for very conventional goals, and for a limited period of time.

How many have kept up the effort, after getting through (or not)?

As I said before, a conventional trajectory passing through a marriage in the mid-twenties, is also one that makes the uptake of risk (and consequently effort) much harder in life. I keep bringing up risk because effort without the possibility of significant success is rather pointless. And without risky opportunities that afford that kind of success, people reach for the cruise control after just-enough.

Malthusian scarcity should reward and select for effort, ( and also voluntary birth control and later marriage) as it did in the period right before Industrial England (([1] ; descriptive review: [2])), but, in India, it strangely doesn't! Predestiny, passivity, and fatalism, all predate socialist India. Our mythology reflects this.

I do agree that we are turning a new chapter and we are host to a whole new set of cultural ideas, but the numbers aren't, unfortunately, high enough. Yes, while about 300 million people, are (or were in 2001) technically urban, 50 million are slum dwellers; I'd wager that only a tiny slice is literate enough to accept cultural transmissions.

Still, I hope that this tiny slice of a humongous pie proves to be big enough....

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Princet...

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/science/07indu.html?pagewa...

i think i've seen you around :)

good to see a co-alum here!, even if such an occurrence should be entire predictable :) ...

> How many countries in the world do you think there are where it is common to go to boarding school for two years and forgo any kind of social life and a normal childhood just to have a shot at getting into a specific college? Pretty much just Japan, Korea and India.

China as well, iirc.

Quite possibly. At any rate, it's an "Eastern" thing :-)

I think your statement sums up exactly why people from the west should fear people from the east taking over the world.

Pure psycho-babble.

"If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon."

Only if it were a pretty poster and a cute saying.

It's sometimes hard to convey in a sentence what we mean, especially something translated, so we take a whole blog post.

I think it is necessary in some cases to work extraordinarily hard, or perhaps even over a long period of time. But that in itself shouldn't really be a criteria for anything, IMHO, b/c it can lead to tunnel vision. At the very least, I keep seeing this mistake in my own approach to things.

Another thing I've noticed is that it also matters how much I like whatever it is I'm working on. If I like it a lot, I will naturally remember thing about it well, have better insight, and learn more about it. However, I may also be less productive because of this, i.e. going off on tangents.

Could this be summed up as Work smarter, not harder?

There's a difference between the notion of "working smarter", and the notion of being willing to leave your comfortable zone and do things outside your usual boundaries, when the ordinary result (or desperate result) isn't good enough.

What does "work smarter" mean operationally? If there were a little switch you could throw in your head, we wouldn't need the Overcoming Bias blog.

I've found that a lot of times there _is_ a little switch in my head. Every once in a while I'll be banging my head against a problem, but if I stop and ask myself "how would a physicist solve this?" I can figure it out.

It takes an effort for me to step back and ask myself what the problem is, rather than just sitting down and working on it.

Usually "just sitting down and working on it" works, which may mean my problems are too easy. :)

Asking yourself "how would a physicist solve this?" is a good example of priming. I can't remember if I read about it in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, but there was an experiment where a couple groups were given a task, with one group told to imagine that they were professors. That group performed significantly better than the other.

But you'll notice that it takes something more specific than "work smarter" to change up the way you approach a problem.

One of the things "work smarter" should mean is: work on something worth working on. Something important enough to you to call out your "extraordinary effort".

Work smarter and harder.

He's definitely advocating both, but reducing the advice to "work smarter and harder" strips out all of the social and cultural context which gives it motivational force.

The idea of making an "extraordinary effort" compels you to define your efforts relative to what's "ordinary", pitting you against not only your own everyday level of effort, but also against the masses. "Work smarter and harder" doesn't.

Granted, the post could've been more concise.

I think what "work smarter and harder" misses the most is not the level of effort you need to make, but that in order to get to that level of "extraordinary effort" you need to take risks.

I think trying to reduce this post to one sentence is probably a bad idea anyways. I thought it was worthwhile reading.

I agree. (Incidentally, I wasn't trying to put down your comment specifically, in case it came across that way. I just replied to it since I didn't want to duplicate the point that working harder was also part of the equation.)

Hah, no problem. This is one of the few sites I assume by default people are trying to be positive.

The "Trying to Try"[1] post linked to early in this article has an answer to that: The slightest effort suffices to convince ourselves that we have done our best.

    Work smarter and harder.

Couldn't you, in your head, convince yourself that you are working "harder", simply by imagining that you could work less hard than you currently are? Couldn't you do that, regardless of you current level of work? So does "work harder" even mean anything?

[1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/10/trying-to-try.html

What's the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary? It's that little bit extra.

Hey, Yudkowsky quoted from Batman!

That's nothing, three days ago I quoted Card Captor Sakura and no one called me on it.

Off topic, but, regarding your research, do you know if anyone has determined the characteristics of problems that AI has historically been most effective in solving, vs problems that humans have been best at solving?

Last week he had a couple of Star Wars posts.

"It is essential for a man to strive with all his heart, and to understand that it is difficult even to reach the average if he does not have the intention of surpassing others in whatever he does."

Only a wretch would aspire to surpass others. This guy's epitaph pegs him as shallow and insecure, and the rest of the post only further showcases his ignorance.

"Only a wretch would aspire to surpass others"

If you are just trying to compete randomly then you end up lost, with no direction of your own, and easily manipulated.

But if you have a goal, getting there may require that you surpass others. If it is a large goal, it almost certainly will. You have to leave the village to get to the top of the mountain.

"It is not a sin to be second-rate. The only sin is not to try to be first-rate."

Only a wretch would aspire to be mediocre.