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Anyone find it difficult to "work hard" for reasons that essentially boil down to disbelief? For example, I play some multiplayer games, mostly RTS and MOBA games. I can see some interesting ways to improve at those games. For the RTS games, some of the ideas I had involved a spreadsheet, of course, and an autohotkey script that would make an additional save game every time I pressed the build worker key so that I could easily compare different decision branches while hill climbing toward an optimal build order. I can see some experiments I could perform in Dota 2, such as running a custom game on 2 computers to explore how I could take advantage of blind spots in enemy vision, or doing some mathematical modeling and running a solo game to figure out the exact patterns of how waves of enemy creeps cascade and yoyo from losing to overwhelming the enemy creeps.
But then I think, hardly anyone even bothers to consistently watch replays. At least, that's my perception. These ideas I'm having, they're weird. I've never heard anyone talk about doing this sort of thing. Would someone really try this hard to win at a video game? Well, eventually, I had the chance to join some high skill discords, and, yes, they made spreadsheets, the were timing things down to the second, they were re-running test ideas dozens of times until perfect, they'd spend hours testing and looking for bugs. Turned out that really was how some people got good. I had the right ideas, but I couldn't believe in them because I couldn't believe others were trying that much because up to that point, I hadn't been trying that much so that must be how others acted too, because otherwise they'd have talked about the extra things they did.
It's all these soft spaces where you can take the time to figure out best ways of getting upvotes on reddit, best ways to get lots of clicks on youtube and it's hard to believe that someone would resort to something like giving their comments an initial boost through alt-accounts so they can ride their initial higher visibility to thousands of upvotes, but that was exactly what incredibly reddit popular and actual scientist Unidan did.
Which all kind of circuitously leads me to the following point here. If it's so easy to have such a bias like "nah, everyone's just playing it straight for the most part" even in the face of seeing that sort of belief overturned multiple times, how much are we discounting the possibility of various conspiracies by a similar kind of bias in favor of ordinariness? If these sorts of weird and trying too hard kinds of tactics are effective at getting you to, say, the top .1% in some endeavor, then even if people willing to bend the rules or go to insane lengths are rare, they could easily make up a substantial proportion of such a small sample of people. For example, could Epstein have actually been running a business model of offering up underage girls to the rich and powerful, surreptitiously recording it, and then blackmailing them? It seems insane, it seems something at least 95% of people wouldn't even dare try, it seems high risk, but if you could pull it off, would you not be a rich man?
To be honest, your initial instinct of "only losers would spend so much effort at something that matters so little" was completely right. I myself don't spend all that effort on all my ideas to improve trivial things in games because the time and energy that would go into that is so much better spent improving other things in my life. I suppose you should have one, maybe two "useless" hobbies where you spend this much effort to improve things, but no more. Money matter a lot to a lot of people, so it's not surprising at all that you'd get crazy effort going into optimizing its generation, and it's also why there aren't many easy-to-think-about ideas for making lots of money, but there's loads of those for getting better at stuff nobody cares about.
Well, partly true. The instinct's not really connected to anyone being a loser. I mean, I've spent considerably more time playing those games casually since the time when some practice ideas had occurred to me than it would have taken to see them through. Assuming those efforts had paid off and future games become more satisfying, it would have probably been worth it. But that feeling of disbelief occurs all the time. Sometimes disbelief that Problem N really requires time-intensive Method C to solve. Sometimes disbelief someone "up high" would really seed a rumor somewhere in the blogosphere so that eventually tabloids quote it, then next tier up newspapers quote it, and then good ones talk about it until it looks legit to anyone not willing to do a deep dive to investigate the dependencies.
Everything I listed could make you money. Optimizing youtube views absolutely can get you paid loads, especially if you got in on it early. Getting really good at a game can get you paid as a streamer, booster, or coach. Getting super popular on reddit for what Unidan was doing definitely got him some job offers to be a vsauce type guy. feel like once something becomes a job you can't really perceive its basic weirdness anymore because it comes across as just so. You know, there just happen to be workplaces, located real close to stock exchanges, paying people millions to come up with more ways to act faster on price data from exchanges. There are also people who buy up a bunch of ASICs to have them calculate hashes all day for money. You can experience the weirdness and the conspiracy aspect only in the stage where you're not yet sure if you or anyone else could be making money doing [weird overly tryhard thing].
Like, maybe there's an unexploited niche of finding a bunch of cheap, unknown onlyfans models from whom you order videos to your specs that you dub over with your own male voice through a good voice changer and then you use those videos to legitimize multiple financial dominatrix accounts to the right people on twitter who then will pay you large amounts because you demanded it and even larger amounts when you berate them for being worthless paypig slime.
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The problem with making money, such as on drop-shipping on Alibaba or Amazon, is it's inherently adversarial and returns tend to be lopsided. Learning a skill or a hobby is not.
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