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: The Feeling of Idea Scarcity, published by johnswentworth on December 31, 2022 on LessWrong.

Here’s a story you may recognize. There's a bright up-and-coming young person - let's call her Alice. Alice has a cool idea. It seems like maybe an important idea, a big idea, an idea which might matter. A new and valuable idea. It’s the first time Alice has come up with a high-potential idea herself, something which she’s never heard in a class or read in a book or what have you.

So Alice goes all-in pursuing this idea. She spends months fleshing it out. Maybe she writes a paper, or starts a blog, or gets a research grant, or starts a company, or whatever, in order to pursue the high-potential idea, bring it to the world.

And sometimes it just works!

. but more often, the high-potential idea doesn’t actually work out. Maybe it turns out to be basically-the-same as something which has already been tried. Maybe it runs into some major barrier, some not-easily-patchable flaw in the idea. Maybe the problem it solves just wasn’t that important in the first place.

From Alice’ point of view, the possibility that her one high-potential idea wasn’t that great after all is painful. The idea probably feels to Alice like the single biggest intellectual achievement of her life. To lose that, to find out that her single greatest intellectual achievement amounts to little or nothing. that hurts to even think about. So most likely, Alice will reflexively look for an out. She’ll look for some excuse to ignore the similar ideas which have already been tried, some reason to think her idea is different. She’ll look for reasons to believe that maybe the major barrier isn’t that much of an issue, or that we Just Don’t Know whether it’s actually an issue and therefore maybe the idea could work after all. She’ll look for reasons why the problem really is important. Maybe she’ll grudgingly acknowledge some shortcomings of the idea, but she’ll give up as little ground as possible at each step, update as slowly as she can.

And this is where a bunch of the standard advice from the sequences comes in. Once you’ve chosen the idea, the only way to improve it is to change the idea or choose a new idea; finding arguments that it’s a good idea will not actually make it better. You won’t make real progress until you give up, say “oops” and move on, so do that quickly rather than slowly. What is true is already so; owning up to it will not make it worse.

. but that advice doesn’t make it much less painful. Trying to forcibly abandon her one high-potential idea can easily leave Alice demotivated, in despair, feeling like she’s failed as a person. Or, Alice notices herself failing to abandon the idea, and that makes her feel like she’s failed as a person. I’ve seen people really tie themselves into knots this way.

An Alternative Path

Alice’ story makes it seem like an emotional attachment to her idea is the main problem, the main thing preventing her from moving on to greener pastures. And that is true, in a sense. But then the obvious response is to directly fight the emotional attachment. And that, I claim, is usually a mistake.

Why a mistake? Because most people do not actually have that level of control over their emotions. “Just fight the emotional attachment” is a plan which pretends Alice can control something which she probably cannot actually control. (A fabricated option, in Duncan’s terminology.) And when it turns out Alice does not have that level of control, she’ll be back where she started, with a whole additional reason to feel like shit.

Worse, it’s a very common mistake to think one has that level of emotional control. Like Hazard’s story:

So young me is upset that the grub master for our camping trip forgot half the food on the menu, and all we have for breakfast is milk. I couldn't "fix it" gi...