On Really Trying (2009)
On Really Trying politics, mental energy, willpower, small groups, transhumanism What are the true limits to motivation? Yasutani: First of all, you must be convinced you can do so. The conviction creates determination, and the determination zeal.
- ▪On Really Trying politics, mental energy, willpower, small groups, transhumanism What are the true limits to motivation?
- ▪Yasutani: First of all, you must be convinced you can do so.
- ▪The conviction creates determination, and the determination zeal.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Gwern |
| Canonical URL | https://gwern.net/on-really-trying |
| Publication time | Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:58:44 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-09T08:10:54.277Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-09T08:10:54.277Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
On Really Trying politics, mental energy, willpower, small groups, transhumanism What are the true limits to motivation? 2009-06-23–7y2016-09-16 notes certainty: unlikely importance: 9 backlinks similar bibliography Useful Child Abuse On The Absence Of True Fanatics See Also The Programmers’ Credo: we do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy Maciej Cegłowski Student: How can one realize his Self-nature? I know so little about the subject. Yasutani: First of all, you must be convinced you can do so. The conviction creates determination, and the determination zeal.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gwern.
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