Artyom Kazak/Sketches/21-04-30: Tactics

21-04-30: Tactics

I have started playing chess recently. Some of the most important things for a chess beginner are

  1. noticing tactics (easy short-term wins),
  2. and avoiding obvious blunders.

I want to generalize this to everything in life.

If you have a lot of money/luck/etc, you might be able to start a business easily. If you are super funny/kind/useful/etc, you might be great at conversations. However, if you have an average amount of resources, talent, and luck — you need to notice tactics and avoid blunders.

Tactics are the 1% improvements (not even 5%). Tactics are the small things. Each tactic translates into a tiny raise in the expected outcome. The crucial thing is: since you need practice to get good at <anything>, tactics are great in the long run because they make your practice richer.

Paying attention to tactics is one of the ways to slowly get yourself out of a bottomless pit. Since tactics are so small, you need a ton of them.

I will give examples.

Social life tactics

Here's an example:

THING = social life. TACTIC = responding to a witty comment with another witty comment.

Using the tactic will make some people have slightly more fun when talking to you. So they will spend slightly more time with you — e.g. if they have a choice between Netflix and talking to you, maybe having to respond to your witty comment will snap them out of Netflix (even if just once). In the short term, you get a bit more social life; in the long term, maybe they will introduce you to somebody else, or maybe they will take you to a party, or wherever else, and you'll be able to use that to level up. Social life compounds.

More random examples:

  • In the lockdown times: knowing bars / coffee shops that allow indoors dining.
  • Knowing a good bookshop.
  • Being able to organize a mountain trip. (I just went to a mountain trip once and now can do it on my own.)
  • Knowing a single good and unusual cheese (in my case Tête de Moine), and knowing where to get that cheese.
  • Being able to create a meme by putting text on a picture, however poorly.
  • Giving interesting small challenges to people. Being able to do such challenges, too.

There are also things that are.. more like "avoiding blunders" than "tactics". Tactics raise your chances a bit, blunders lower your chances a bit. If you're a beginner playing chess, it's not enough to have tactics, you also need to stop making blunders.

A few random examples of social life blunders:

  • Being so fucking negative all the time.
  • Replying to messages inconsistently or with giant pauses.
  • Food preferences (e.g. being vegan, or gluten-intolerant, or just super picky) that you haven't efficiently accommodated to.
    • E.g. if you're vegan but don't know how to quickly find a vegan restaurant in an unfamiliar town, traveling with you is going to be a hassle. Psst: HappyCow. The app costs $4 and is worth it.
  • Putting the other person in a position where you depend on them.
    • E.g. if you accidentally say "will you go on the mountain trip with me? otherwise I'll sit at home and watch Netflix all weekend, again", it's risky to be around you. You are easy to hurt. Better not to interact with you at all, or else I will feel like I have to go to the mountains with you even if I suddenly don't feel like it, and that sucks.

Writing tactics

If you have a lot of cool things to say, you don't need tactics and some people will read you even if you're fucking impenetrable. Otherwise, you guessed it, TACTICS.

Scott Alexander's Nonfiction Writing Advice is a great collection of easy to use tactics. My favorite is microhumor — the purest imaginable example of a tactic. Using microhumor is like "+5% chance that somebody will finish your piece even if they weren't going to otherwise".

Here is the very first paragraph of The Last Psychiatrist's latest book, Watch What You Hear. I have highlighted the microhumor bit:

It is likely unsurprising to classicists, or anyone, that psychoanalysis has failed to offer useful insights into Penelope’s famous dream of twenty geese from Homer’s Odyssey. But the deployment of psychoanalytic theory against literary mysteries is an established practice not merely for text elucidation but for the greater purpose of exploring human nature. As the Odyssey is already one of the oldest and most reliable texts on the human condition, it is thus remarkable how little psychoanalysis has been able to make of it.

Other examples include:

  • BREAK THINGS INTO FUCKING PARAGRAPHS
  • Add pictures!
  • Vary the sentence length.
  • If you quote other people, summarize the quote beforehand or highlight the relevant bits, because people hate reading quotes.
  • Drop caps. I don't think they appeared because people were weird back then and did stupid things for no reason. I think they appeared because people knew that variety = higher chance that the reader will keep reading.
Printed inhabited caps
do this

Management tactics

I run a software consultancy. Right now I have a team of five people working on a big project. A small sample of management tactics I have figured out during this time:

  • Do weekly 1:1s with people
  • Take a week's vacation to see which processes will immediately fail in your absence
  • Create a coworking room (e.g. in Discord) for people to hold each other's hand when they have to do hard tasks that they keep procrastinating on
  • Don't message people about work via personal messengers, or else there's a risk of making them miserable and not noticing it
  • Keep talking about what good will come out of the work your team is doing
    • At the two previous jobs I had, I had no fucking idea what good would come out of my work, and eventually I quit both of them
  • If you find yourself in a situation where nobody's responsible for anything, find a single thing that a single person could be responsible for, tell them "you are responsible for doing X from now on", and spend the next two weeks checking that they are indeed doing X
    • Repeat until you no longer have a mess

Etc.

What now?

Here's a thing.

Every once in a while somebody writes a List of Useful Advice. They've been doing the <thing> for a long time and they have figured out a lot of tactics and blunders.

This kind of thing probably works for some people. It doesn't work for me — I read the list and then do nothing. Maybe I will try out one of the hundred tactics, and then will feel bad for not doing the remaining 99.

I am writing all of this for a different reason — to make the concept clearer in my own mind, and to increase the chance that I will spend more time learning tactics.

Like, two weeks ago I replied to someone's witty comment with a witty comment of my own, and then I thought "oh, this is a thing that I should do more often". Usually I don't think stuff like this. Usually I think "this is the thing I should be doing! this will change everything!" or I think "eh, this won't help anyway, just a fluke".

Now that I have the concept of tactics stuck in my head, I do things differently. I notice tactics and keep executing them even though I know it won't bring more than a 5% improvement:

  • I am going to be working in a coffee shop on Monday — because I know I'll get slightly more done this way.
  • I have ordered modafinil — I know I can use it when I have a particularly unproductive and low day.
  • I have a newsletter now — I will use it to make certain things (like tactics!) slightly more stuck in my mind.
  • I have started turning off the lights at 10pm — so that I will be waking up slightly earlier on average (even though this doesn't fix the general huge problem of taking a long time to fall asleep!).
  • I am learning to play chess — I feel that one day it will be useful to have at least competitive fun thing I'm good at.
  • I have a bunch of mood management tactics: "go outside", "hug myself", "always have cookies at home", "light a candle", "make sure I get at least some talking done every day".

If you have any tactics you found recently, please comment on Substack.

P.S.

Other tactics-related stuff that's on my mind:

  • For me, the self-improvement board (The best self-improvement trick so far: a giant board) also serves as a place to keep track of the tactics I want to train.
  • Malcolm Ocean's post Runway lengthens if you’re making money is an example of a tactic.
  • I suppose "doing something even remotely useful whenever you want to procrastinate, instead of actually procrastinating" is a tactic. Cf. structured procrastination.
  • I used to have a very anti-tactics mindset for a long time. It went like this: "the right way to live is to find the perfect plan and achieve it". Found a Google-sized corporation (never ever start any companies that can't become Google-sized). Find the perfect girl to marry (never ever date someone who I wouldn't want to marry). Etc. The same mindset is also responsible for "if I'm going to die, why live?".
  • I guess it could work out for somebody who can actually make a plan and execute it, but it doesn't work for me.
  • Speaking of plans: I think that once I can make plans and execute them, I will shift from tactics to strategies, i.e. "here's what I want, here's how I will get there".
  • In fact, "I will learn some tactics and when I have a rich fast-paced life without immediate obstacles I can start thinking about strategies" is in itself an example of a strategy. Woohoo, I have a strategy.