You can practically predict who wins a competitive cycling race based on their watts per kilogram. Descending and aerodynamic positioning play a minor role, but mostly it’s just watts per kilogram. But there’s no equivalent for words.
Words seem like a poor substitute for ideas. (I once had a boss who criticized a colleague for his low word-to-meaning ratio; he wasn’t wrong, unfortunately.) Maybe it’s not even ideas, but something like “the right idea expressed just so at the perfect moment in a way that changes someone’s behaviors and improves their well-being.” That’s so hard to do on Substack (when it happens, we probably never hear about it) and more likely through mentorship, marriage, or management.
Increasing my watts makes me a better cyclist. But increasing my words won’t make me a better writer or manager.
I think about how the Industrial, Scientific, and Computing revolutions devalued watts. Lately I’ve been reading about the role that horses played in Spain’s conquest of Mesoamerica — like some advanced alien technology from 3 Body Problem. One horsepower equals 735.5 watts while brain can perform the equivalent of an exaflop of operations with 20 watts.
The steam engine made the horse a rich person’s hobby, and brain power took over.
For now. These words are coming from my brain. But how long until I train an agent on all of the comments I’ve left on the Internet and instruct it to leave comments in my style on the latest posts of the 100 writers I admire the most — and another 10,000 who write like them? And then instruct it to send me a digest of the five most interesting comment threads to see how other people’s agents have interacted with my agent?
Sigh. For now, like you, I’ll keep focusing on my watts more than my words.
If you like the Anti-Mimetic book and you have any patience at all for comix, I suggest checking out MIND MGMT by Matt Kindt (also inspired a cool board game)
Thanks for this way of thinking about different activities. It's helpful for a fellow aging guy.
Wow this wattage scale maps to so many things I've been musing on, great post.
Career growth for nurses vs software engineers.
Text vs book, image vs photograph, music vs musician playing. Disembodied media.
Current skills of AI vs potential AGI (The Lifecycle of Software Objects from Chiang fits nicely here too, high wattage).
And on the Lifecycle note, parenting seems clearly a high wattage activity, it's definitely one of my current major power draws. But I think parenting would be pretty high leverage? Well, it has the potential of really, really high leverage, but it's probably more correct to consider the expected value 😅
One "number" I was thinking about lately was "entropy", especially in the sense how Schrödinger talks about life as a process that sustains a constant amount of entropy. There are processes in my life that basically require such a constant amount to function: too much entropy and they become out of control and fail, too little and they die off, petrify.
But the thing about it is that this doesn't mean a consistent level of energy for me to invest in the process, nor any schedule. E.g. a particular process can be mostly sustained exogenously by external deadlines, interesting conversations, cheap habits, etc, that allow me to basically autopilot through it for long stretches of time. Only when the entropy level seems wrong I do something: slow down and say "no" if it's too much, or find new external sources if there's too little. I learned that a process that requires regular injections of willpower is typically unsustainable for me, and also it's too isolated from the outside world to really be interesting. So I try to keep willpower injections for the meta-level of energy-source regulation, but not for the regular functioning of each process.
I think this distinction between energy being wilful and not is very important. I am pretty sure the physical metaphor can be extended to accommodate this distinction, but I am not there yet, probably won't ever be
This phrasing, “my life is so many watts and so many words/day and my story is my measure of the universe, not the universe’s measure of me.”, as you often do, puts words to thoughts I hadn't yet articulated.
I had come at this from a different angle, of expanding the Boydian "To be or To do" and added a third option: "to understand", but I think it was lacking some agency that "authoring" adds in, which I love.
Welcome back. I enjoyed “There is No Anti-Mimetic Division” as well.
You can practically predict who wins a competitive cycling race based on their watts per kilogram. Descending and aerodynamic positioning play a minor role, but mostly it’s just watts per kilogram. But there’s no equivalent for words.
Words seem like a poor substitute for ideas. (I once had a boss who criticized a colleague for his low word-to-meaning ratio; he wasn’t wrong, unfortunately.) Maybe it’s not even ideas, but something like “the right idea expressed just so at the perfect moment in a way that changes someone’s behaviors and improves their well-being.” That’s so hard to do on Substack (when it happens, we probably never hear about it) and more likely through mentorship, marriage, or management.
Increasing my watts makes me a better cyclist. But increasing my words won’t make me a better writer or manager.
I think about how the Industrial, Scientific, and Computing revolutions devalued watts. Lately I’ve been reading about the role that horses played in Spain’s conquest of Mesoamerica — like some advanced alien technology from 3 Body Problem. One horsepower equals 735.5 watts while brain can perform the equivalent of an exaflop of operations with 20 watts.
The steam engine made the horse a rich person’s hobby, and brain power took over.
For now. These words are coming from my brain. But how long until I train an agent on all of the comments I’ve left on the Internet and instruct it to leave comments in my style on the latest posts of the 100 writers I admire the most — and another 10,000 who write like them? And then instruct it to send me a digest of the five most interesting comment threads to see how other people’s agents have interacted with my agent?
Sigh. For now, like you, I’ll keep focusing on my watts more than my words.
If you like the Anti-Mimetic book and you have any patience at all for comix, I suggest checking out MIND MGMT by Matt Kindt (also inspired a cool board game)
Thanks for this way of thinking about different activities. It's helpful for a fellow aging guy.
Wow this wattage scale maps to so many things I've been musing on, great post.
Career growth for nurses vs software engineers.
Text vs book, image vs photograph, music vs musician playing. Disembodied media.
Current skills of AI vs potential AGI (The Lifecycle of Software Objects from Chiang fits nicely here too, high wattage).
And on the Lifecycle note, parenting seems clearly a high wattage activity, it's definitely one of my current major power draws. But I think parenting would be pretty high leverage? Well, it has the potential of really, really high leverage, but it's probably more correct to consider the expected value 😅
One "number" I was thinking about lately was "entropy", especially in the sense how Schrödinger talks about life as a process that sustains a constant amount of entropy. There are processes in my life that basically require such a constant amount to function: too much entropy and they become out of control and fail, too little and they die off, petrify.
But the thing about it is that this doesn't mean a consistent level of energy for me to invest in the process, nor any schedule. E.g. a particular process can be mostly sustained exogenously by external deadlines, interesting conversations, cheap habits, etc, that allow me to basically autopilot through it for long stretches of time. Only when the entropy level seems wrong I do something: slow down and say "no" if it's too much, or find new external sources if there's too little. I learned that a process that requires regular injections of willpower is typically unsustainable for me, and also it's too isolated from the outside world to really be interesting. So I try to keep willpower injections for the meta-level of energy-source regulation, but not for the regular functioning of each process.
I think this distinction between energy being wilful and not is very important. I am pretty sure the physical metaphor can be extended to accommodate this distinction, but I am not there yet, probably won't ever be
This phrasing, “my life is so many watts and so many words/day and my story is my measure of the universe, not the universe’s measure of me.”, as you often do, puts words to thoughts I hadn't yet articulated.
I had come at this from a different angle, of expanding the Boydian "To be or To do" and added a third option: "to understand", but I think it was lacking some agency that "authoring" adds in, which I love.