(dec2023: title of this post is a catchy tweet, but do I want it to be a post? idk. maybe i’ll expand on it.)

Reflecting on my own life experience, I think reducing one’s cowardice by half creates far more utility than tripling or quadrupling one’s analytical intelligence

practically speaking, you only really need to be smart enough to make sense of the analysis of others. once you can do that, you can reap more benefits from making friends with genius analysts than by trying to be a genius analyst yourself. life is co-op, y’know

of course if you deeply enjoy analysis and you want to get better at analysis because you love the joy of analysis, go for it, enlighten us all. but if you hate your life and you think more + better analysis will help with that… may I suggest considering an alternate approach.

once you notice you’re fallen into a pile of shit, you don’t really need to subject the shit to elaborate testing. you don’t need to taste the shit to confirm that it is shit. rather, you need to get out of the shit.

worse, if you sit in shit for too long you stop smelling it