Good read... I challenge you to rethink your binary assessment of either working in the right direction or working in the wrong direction. When the target is unknown, any direction work is done in is useful in that it allows us to discover parts of the map we didn't know existed before doing the work. No matter what you are looking for, getting familiar with the map that surrounds the work you do can hardly hurt. You are bound to either discover that you think you're working in the right direction, or that you think you're working in the wrong direction. Either way, the work isn't lost, because the knowledge gained lives on... at least until dementia kicks in, then you're toast.
I think youre right but I don’t think I overlooked that. Implicit in the idea that your goal is uncertain is the notion that your efforts in an arbitrary direction might produce positive results. I would be careful to say that there is no such thing as a wrong direction though. There are clearly things we don’t want and things we do want.
The ‘map’ that surrounds you is not 1 dimensional Good/Bad, it is likely N or Infinite dimensional. So, if we assume that the “good” direction can be represented by some arbitrary vector in this space, [which might be assuming too much, it might be that “good” is an entire subspace of this domain, or some more complicated collection of points in the space, but for sake of simplicity i call it a single vector] then if we were to pick any other arbitrary vector in the space as our “working” direction, there is a very high likelihood that the dot product “good vector” • “work vector” has some non-zero value, which means that the work direction has some overlap with the good direction. It could be a negative value, but i think our general common sense and social contracts steer us away from the negative side of the possible directions. [it is clear that working towards a career as a roulette gambler is likely in the opposite direction of the good direction]
There are many more nuances to be added. I think the key point is that i have not really defined the good direction in any way. Just that there *is* a direction that is good, and that it is uncertain which direction that is. This inherent uncertainty is an unavoidable boogeyman that haunts any effort and forces us to question our choice of direction, and necessarily opens us up to risk. The risk is often not that things are a binary win/lose, but that there are activities where you can expend extreme amounts of energy and just get a small lesson out of it. I can lose my lifes savings at the roulette table, and learn a valuable lesson about proper money management. But was that the most efficient way to learn that lesson? If not, there was some wasted energy in that process, which is bad.
Good read... I challenge you to rethink your binary assessment of either working in the right direction or working in the wrong direction. When the target is unknown, any direction work is done in is useful in that it allows us to discover parts of the map we didn't know existed before doing the work. No matter what you are looking for, getting familiar with the map that surrounds the work you do can hardly hurt. You are bound to either discover that you think you're working in the right direction, or that you think you're working in the wrong direction. Either way, the work isn't lost, because the knowledge gained lives on... at least until dementia kicks in, then you're toast.
Thank you for attention and comment my dear friend
I think youre right but I don’t think I overlooked that. Implicit in the idea that your goal is uncertain is the notion that your efforts in an arbitrary direction might produce positive results. I would be careful to say that there is no such thing as a wrong direction though. There are clearly things we don’t want and things we do want.
The ‘map’ that surrounds you is not 1 dimensional Good/Bad, it is likely N or Infinite dimensional. So, if we assume that the “good” direction can be represented by some arbitrary vector in this space, [which might be assuming too much, it might be that “good” is an entire subspace of this domain, or some more complicated collection of points in the space, but for sake of simplicity i call it a single vector] then if we were to pick any other arbitrary vector in the space as our “working” direction, there is a very high likelihood that the dot product “good vector” • “work vector” has some non-zero value, which means that the work direction has some overlap with the good direction. It could be a negative value, but i think our general common sense and social contracts steer us away from the negative side of the possible directions. [it is clear that working towards a career as a roulette gambler is likely in the opposite direction of the good direction]
There are many more nuances to be added. I think the key point is that i have not really defined the good direction in any way. Just that there *is* a direction that is good, and that it is uncertain which direction that is. This inherent uncertainty is an unavoidable boogeyman that haunts any effort and forces us to question our choice of direction, and necessarily opens us up to risk. The risk is often not that things are a binary win/lose, but that there are activities where you can expend extreme amounts of energy and just get a small lesson out of it. I can lose my lifes savings at the roulette table, and learn a valuable lesson about proper money management. But was that the most efficient way to learn that lesson? If not, there was some wasted energy in that process, which is bad.