2026-03-03
Productive versus unproductive nerd snipes
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Main
- I think one of the primary reasons I am less productive than is ideal, and hence grow to dislike myself, is that I get caught in a lot more nerd snipes than is ideal. I don't have time for all this shit, world is ending.
- Sometimes the nerd snipes are important actually. For instance my initial confusion around what redaction policy to use led to confusion around my values in generak, which took me to reading about consequentialism and "lesser evil"-type reasoning, which took me to reasoning about coordination inside and outside of members of all the major political ideologies. I think this was actually productive nerd snipe in recent times.
- Sometimes the nerd snipes are not important. For instance I recently considered shifting to a room with more sunlight, but ended up spending half a day writing about optimal general-purpose windows for all of humanity. Someone else in future might find this writeup useful, sure, but for me this a waste, and does not answer the immediate question of whether to shift rooms or not. All the optimal window types. I'm proposing are anyway kinda expensive, I can't just order them from amazon overnight even if I wanted
- The most important thing is whether the whole nerd snipe cashes out into actual actions I take in the real world.
- The politics nerd snipe mentioned above seems important because it could actually affect, for example, what type of cold emails I send to whom, and who I see as allies/neutral/enemies. It could affect my mental health a lot.
- The sunlight nerd snipe mentioned above seems like a waste of time because I know I won't bother to implement any of the ideas. At best I will make a writeup asking someone else to start a company that sells motorized glazed windows or some shit.
- It is a bit hard to know ahead of time which nerd snipes will cash out into important real world actions, and which will not.
- I think just having a tighter feedback loop would help. Like, ideally a more action-oriented cofounder periodically comes and asks me what am I doing, and can I justify this as cashing out into any real world actions or not. Until I have such a cofounder, I should ask myself this, atleast once at the start of each day.
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