“But how does Nemamel grow up to be Nemamel? She was better than all her living competitors, there was nobody she could imitate to become that good. There are no gods in dath ilan. Then who does Nemamel look up to, to become herself?”
… If she’d ever stopped to congratulate herself on being better than everyone else, wouldn’t she then have stopped? Or that’s what I remember her being quoted as saying. Which frankly doesn’t make that much sense to me? To me it seems you could reach the Better Than Everybody key milestone, celebrate that, and then keep going? But I am not Nemamel and maybe there’s something in there that I haven’t understood yet.”
… It was the pride of the very smart people who are smarter than the other people, that they look around themselves, and even if they aren’t the best in the world yet, there’s still nobody in it who seems worthy to be their competitor, even the people who are still better than them, aren’t enough better. So they set their eyes somewhere on the far horizon where no people are, and walk towards it knowing they’ll never reach it.”
… And that’s why when people congratulated her on being better than everybody, she was all, ‘stop that, you only like me that much because you’re thinking about it all wrong’, compared to some greater vision of Civilization that was only in her own imagination.”
I first learned this lesson in my youth when, after climbing to the top of a leaderboard in a puzzle game I’d invested >2k hours into, I was surpassed so hard by my nemesis that I had to reflect on what I was doing. Thing is, they didn’t just surpass me and everybody else, but instead continued to break their own records several times over.
Slightly embarrassed by having congratulated myself for my merely-best performance, I had to ask “how does one become like that?”
My problem was that I’d always just been trying to get better than the people around me, whereas their target was the inanimate structure of the problem itself. When I had broken a record, I said “finally!” and considered myself complete. But when they did the same, they said “cool!”, and then kept going. The only way to defeat them, would be by not trying to defeat them, and instead focus on fighting the perceived limits of the game itself.
To some extent, I am what I am today, because I at one point aspired to be better than Aisi.
More wisdom from Eliezer (from a quote I found via Nevin’s comment):
I first learned this lesson in my youth when, after climbing to the top of a leaderboard in a puzzle game I’d invested >2k hours into, I was surpassed so hard by my nemesis that I had to reflect on what I was doing. Thing is, they didn’t just surpass me and everybody else, but instead continued to break their own records several times over.
Slightly embarrassed by having congratulated myself for my merely-best performance, I had to ask “how does one become like that?”
My problem was that I’d always just been trying to get better than the people around me, whereas their target was the inanimate structure of the problem itself. When I had broken a record, I said “finally!” and considered myself complete. But when they did the same, they said “cool!”, and then kept going. The only way to defeat them, would be by not trying to defeat them, and instead focus on fighting the perceived limits of the game itself.
To some extent, I am what I am today, because I at one point aspired to be better than Aisi.