Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Almost everyone I've met would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on, published by Henrik Karlsson on January 6, 2024 on LessWrong.
Almost everyone I've ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. - Sam Altman
In May 2020, we parked two moving trucks in the harbor and carried everything we owned from one to the other. Johanna, Maud, and I were leaving Sweden, and Covid restrictions meant we were forbidden from returning once we boarded the ferry. Hence the second truck, which we had gotten a stranger to ferry from the island to us: the Swedish truck had to stay in Sweden.
The motivation to leave was that we wanted to homeschool Maud, who was 3. In Sweden, this is illegal, so most Swedish homeschoolers end up on one of two islands in the Baltic Sea. On our island, we knew no one. We had no jobs awaiting. We were leaving something, more than going somewhere. The life we had grown piecemeal over 30 years disappeared overnight. We had to figure out what to replace it with.
Life is a multi-armed bandit
The moldy apartment we rented as we looked for a house has a view of the sea. Every day, deep into winter, I'd walk down to the water and dive from the cliffs. Swimming in the channels between the rocks, I realized I could model our situation using a concept from probability theory.
It was a
multi-armed bandit problem. This problem, which, under a different name, had
first been studied by the biologist
William R. Thompson in 1933, centers on a rather surreal thought experiment. A gambler faces a slot machine ("a one-armed bandit"), except this machine doesn't have one arm - following some twisted dream logic, it has k arms, arms sticking out in every direction. Some of these arms have a high probability of paying out the jackpot, others are worse. But the gambler does not know which is which.
The problem is pulling the arms in an order that maximizes the expected total gains. ("Gains" could be anything. Early on, the problem was used to design drug trials. There, the jackpot was defined as finding a successful treatment. If you are looking for a partner, talking to people is how you pull the multi-armed bandit and the resonance (or lack thereof) is the payoff.)
The gambler needs to learn new knowledge about the machines and simultaneously use what they have already learned to optimize their decisions. In the literature, these two activities are referred to as exploring and exploiting. You can't do both things at the same time. When you explore, you are pulling new arms on the bandit trying to figure out their expected payout. When you exploit, you pull the best arm you've found. You need to find the right balance.
If you spend too little time exploring, you get stuck playing a machine with a low expected payoff. But if you spend too much time exploring, you will earn less than you would if you played the best arm. This is the explore/exploit trade-off.
People tend to gravitate to different sides of the explore/exploit spectrum. If you are high on openness, like I am, exploring comes easy. But it is harder to make a commitment and exploit what you've learned about yourself and the world. Other people are more committed, but risk being too conventional in their choices. They miss better avenues for their effort. Most, however, tend to do less than optimal of both - not exploring, not exploiting; but doing things out of blind habit, and half-heartedly.
First, I'll say a few words about exploration and exploitation in real life. Then I'll return to the question of how to navigate the tradeoff between them.
Explore: doggedly looking for what makes you feel alive
There are two kinds of people. Those who do not understand how complex the world is, and those who know that they do not understand how complex the world is.
To navi...

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