If you get 1% better every day without ever getting worse, then after 365 days you’ll be 30 times better (1.01^365 > 30). 10 minutes is 1% of a day’s waking hours. 5 minutes is one Yoda Timer interval.
To the extent that skills are like money, we can apply model of compound interest. But I’ve actually never encountered a skill that you can consistently get 1% better at forever. I think that there are diminishing marginal returns to the time and effort a person devotes towards improving skills.
Maybe if I start doing as many push-ups as I can once per day, I will have a surprising improvement in my ability to do push-ups at first, but the daily improvements will taper off with time. If I can bench-press 134 pounds, I don’t think my body can increase that by 1% every day. Eventually my progress will slow and even hit a physical limit. I’m skeptical that any skills exist that can be scaled up like this. I’m actually not sure there are any human skills that can be scaled up like this. Can you think of any examples? Maybe memorizing vocabulary?
Upvoted. I was deliberately vague about “1% better every day” because the idea was the person becomes 1% better as a whole; my thinking on this wasn’t complete.
Now that I’ve read your comment, I can make the concept more nuanced: the person becomes 1% better by improving a skill by 1% and moving on to a different skill as they approach diminishing returns.
So they would do 1% more push-ups, then as they started hitting diminishing returns they spend more time on memorizing vocabulary, then linear algebra, then security mindset, then integrating bayes theorem deeply into their thoughts, then data science, then reading Christiano’s papers, then networking, etc.
It seems that your original comment no longer holds under this version of “1% better”, no? In what way does being 1% better at all these skills translate to being 30x better over a year? How do we even aggregate these 1% improvements under the new definition?
Anyway, even under this definition it seems hard to keep finding skills that one can get 1% better at within one day easily. At some point you would probably run into diminishing returns across skills—that is, the “low-hanging fruit” of skills you can improve at easily will have been picked.
I definitely agree- the calculation that I had in mind, and physically wrote, clearly had in mind the 1% compounding on itself.
I have two defenses that it is still a helpful way of looking at it:
This was a heuristic, and getting a little better every day will still stack in the way that I and the reader had in mind when reading/writing the quote, even if the math wasn’t completely accurate for something like a daily 1% yielding something towards a 30x improvement per year.
Getting better at different tasks over the course of the year will still multiply, such as getting better at different tasks related to working on/thinking about/solving AI alignment.
If you get 1% better every day without ever getting worse, then after 365 days you’ll be 30 times better (1.01^365 > 30). 10 minutes is 1% of a day’s waking hours. 5 minutes is one Yoda Timer interval.
To the extent that skills are like money, we can apply model of compound interest. But I’ve actually never encountered a skill that you can consistently get 1% better at forever. I think that there are diminishing marginal returns to the time and effort a person devotes towards improving skills.
Maybe if I start doing as many push-ups as I can once per day, I will have a surprising improvement in my ability to do push-ups at first, but the daily improvements will taper off with time. If I can bench-press 134 pounds, I don’t think my body can increase that by 1% every day. Eventually my progress will slow and even hit a physical limit. I’m skeptical that any skills exist that can be scaled up like this. I’m actually not sure there are any human skills that can be scaled up like this. Can you think of any examples? Maybe memorizing vocabulary?
EDIT: I corrected a mis-spelling.
Upvoted. I was deliberately vague about “1% better every day” because the idea was the person becomes 1% better as a whole; my thinking on this wasn’t complete.
Now that I’ve read your comment, I can make the concept more nuanced: the person becomes 1% better by improving a skill by 1% and moving on to a different skill as they approach diminishing returns.
So they would do 1% more push-ups, then as they started hitting diminishing returns they spend more time on memorizing vocabulary, then linear algebra, then security mindset, then integrating bayes theorem deeply into their thoughts, then data science, then reading Christiano’s papers, then networking, etc.
It seems that your original comment no longer holds under this version of “1% better”, no? In what way does being 1% better at all these skills translate to being 30x better over a year? How do we even aggregate these 1% improvements under the new definition?
Anyway, even under this definition it seems hard to keep finding skills that one can get 1% better at within one day easily. At some point you would probably run into diminishing returns across skills—that is, the “low-hanging fruit” of skills you can improve at easily will have been picked.
I definitely agree- the calculation that I had in mind, and physically wrote, clearly had in mind the 1% compounding on itself.
I have two defenses that it is still a helpful way of looking at it:
This was a heuristic, and getting a little better every day will still stack in the way that I and the reader had in mind when reading/writing the quote, even if the math wasn’t completely accurate for something like a daily 1% yielding something towards a 30x improvement per year.
Getting better at different tasks over the course of the year will still multiply, such as getting better at different tasks related to working on/thinking about/solving AI alignment.