Andy Matuschak: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Where in many fields, the things you're regularly doing is the thing you need to reinforce. It makes a lot of sense that if you're a researcher, the long tail of events that might come up is a thing, it might happen once every few months but the regularity is not a thing that matters, right? It's [unclear] on your work. Here's a question I actually have. When we were doing the quantum mechanics textbook, it was like three hours and afterwards, I was just exhausted. I was actually surprised that you went the entire three hours without interruption. Afterwards, I was packing up and you're like, “Hey, I'm about to actually go to my piano lesson.” I was so confused at how you had the stamina to keep going. Is the stamina just inherent in you? Or is that something you did to develop? One of the things that I think is funny about stamina is first off, there's some kind of weird grass is always greener kind of situation where, I often feel struck by other people's stamina and feel like I have very little of it. I struggle with energy. I've actually written extensively about all my struggles with energy and ways of managing energy. I spent a lot of time thinking about it, managing the energy levels and structuring my day around it. So I think there is something where one often feels maybe lower stamina than one actually is because one misapprehends other's stamina. Okay, in that particular situation, how do I explain why three hours of studying, etc. First off, social. So if I were alone and studying that book for three hours, and I weren't effectively trying to perform for you Dwarkesh, it wouldn't have been nearly as energizing for me. And I definitely would have taken breaks. I still would have been able to go for three hours, I think. Part of the reason for that is that it's simply way less hard than things I normally do. In some sense, learning quantum mechanics should be much harder and it kind of is cognitively demanding in a lot of ways. It's much more cognitively demanding in kind of a direct way than what I actually do day to day. But it's much less demanding on what William James calls the Energies of Men, which is something like a life force that permits you to act according to your will or something like that. Maybe it's gumption, maybe it's willpower, maybe some people call it [unclear], these aren't all the same thing exactly. But sitting and staring at a page and deciding what you should do next on a research project is incredibly draining on that resource. The sitting and not knowing is the hardest thing that I do in my work. It's a wonderful vacation to be presented with, “Oh great, somebody else is going to tell me what to do. This is great.” So although it might be less demanding than our usual work, it is definitely more demanding than the way in which I or most people approach textbooks or other material in the sense that, I would just read through and then once I get to the exercise, I'm like, “let's see what I didn't understand.” Whereas just the attention and the intensity to go through sentence by sentence and constantly being paying attention seems to be way more exhausting.…

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