Impressedness and Causal Pathways

Inspired by a comment by Sophie.

There was that wonderful essay from oh-so-long-ago in the terrible high-school-university-entrance-optimize-y days about how the impressiveness of a "thing" is linked to how easy it is for you to simulate yourself in that position doing that thing. How much you can see the causal pathway.

A few consequences:

The things you do not seem that impressive because you know how you BS-ed and faked your way through some of the hard parts. You're also aware of how good it could've been, and how far you were from achieving that best version. This is why I'm sure some of the Oscar winners / Nobel Laureates think their work is good, yes, but not particularly special.

Other people who are in other fields always do impressive seeming things. An increasing amount of my impressedness is therefore reserved for those in fields that I do not fully understand — the artists, the deeply technical.

There are still things that are objectively impressive because the causal pathway is conceivable but still hard — I know roughly the steps it would take me to become an IMO-person (though it may just be out of the reach of this lifetime's power-level), but I'm still very impressed. In contrast, I think it's very possible to imagine me raising a startup at a $1M valuation.

There may be hard to conceive, effortful things, but I may still not care, because I don't actually care about the status ladder in which that person is competing (though this tends to be less true over time).

As I get more exposed to people and things over time, I notice myself increasingly less impressed by things that other people do (I have a better sense for what is BS, like some "youth boards" or "aliens of extraordinary ability", and what is still real). I trust my awareness of various categories of things, such that I know what I don't know, and can try to get calibrated accordingly.

This also explains the phenomenon of the most ignorant not being very impressed at all. I did not do enough math competitions good, but did do enough to appreciate what it is like to have been good. In contrast, I do no sports, and therefore do not, instinctively, think getting an Olympic medal in a sport, or playing college sports, can be that hard.

This is also why people feel the need to qualify select more details that put even more constraints on your imagination of the causal pathways, not less. People always put "At 17", or "Despite growing up in a village in X." No one will ever say "My Dad is the CEO, which is how I become the youngest C-suite executive in history" — the more details in this case illuminate the causal pathway.

Notably the impressedness that I am of ideas is not correlated by this — in some senses it is the opposite — I'm so impressed by ideas that are easy to understand on first glance, and are obvious in retrospect, but are meaningfully powerful — predictive of some way that the world is, or retroactively the obvious explanation. Maybe because I don't have an easy causal explanation of how to write simply.

I do wonder what function impressedness actually serves. I would argue it primarily serves to spark curiosity, such that you want to know more, and are excited about learning more, so you can help determine how exactly that impressive thing was done (and decide whether you want to copy it), and therefore win whatever status game is in question.