Curt Jaimungal: Why You Are Brighter Than You Think
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Why do I constantly feel like my writing is worse than it actually is?
I was just watching this video about the various signs that you're a better writer than you think. I'm assuming YouTube recommended it to me because ever since I signed this book deal with Penguin Press, I've had the pleasant thoughts of every sentence I write is utter garbage. What the F is wrong with me? Trending in my mind like Opalite meets Snape. As I watched that video, I realized almost verbatim these tips can be applied to you as a self-learner, as a student, as a researcher, someone who watches this channel, for instance. If you're trying to sincerely understand math, physics, philosophy, whatever your field is, it's likely that you feel that you're not good enough, but that's okay. The structure of intellectual life is set up to vaporize your confidence, and once these are
pointed out, you won't be able to unsee them. Tally it up. How many rejections have you accumulated? Whether it's journals or grants or graduate programs or job applications, even innocuous comments here or posts on YouTube. Think about how ferocious the response was versus how many genuine, specific compliments you received about your thinking. For most people, animate versions outnumber compliments by an absurd margin. But this is just also numbers game. A competitive journal rejects ninety-five percent of submissions. A top graduate program does the same. Even Terry Tao talked about getting rejected over here. You could genuinely be remarkable and still collect a skyscraper of put downs. Just as we have a positivity bias, there's also a negativity bias, where if three people tell you your talk was insightful, you don't care about that as much as the one reviewer who wrote that the authors demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the literature.
I didn't understand this until recently. Think about it. By the time something of yours is published, it's ancient. By the time you put out a piece on Substack and get feedback, it's a draft from weeks or even months ago. There's resubmission and revision purgatory.
Why does my old work keep feeling like a ghost that still criticizes me?
By the time you put out content, any content, even here on YouTube, you've moved on. You think it's a piece of That's because your thinking is sharper, your knowledge has grown, and you just notice the flaws. It's like being judged by not sticking to whatever it was when you said, it's not a phase, mom. Personally, I cringe at anything of mine that's three months old. Every three months I feel like a different person in terms of my Veltan Shaoung, my articulation. I say this on the podcast all the time. So when someone critiques something that that I published a year ago, for instance, they're critiquing a ghost. But the critiques that this doppelganger accumulates, they hurt equally. The ghost is is see through and so the bullets they land just as hard.
Your current understanding almost always outpaces the last thing that anyone saw from you. And that lag is something that only you see. I interviewed mathematician David Besses, who has an article on dual braid monoids, and it was stuck in a pre publication editorial phase for years. literally just trying to find an editor who could grok it. And during that entire time his thinking kept advancing, while the world waited to judge a frozen snapshot of where he'd been. Any half-serious intellectual work requires unceasing criticism. You write an argument, you pace around, you find the gap, you s you scratch it out, you hate yourself, you yell at that lady in the elevator with a dog who licked your glove and she's fine with it because dog owners think everyone loves their dog just as much as they do.
Brutally questioning your analysis is par for the course for anything cerebral. The willingness to throw out months of work because you found a single flaw is a minimum requirement to understanding or to producing anything in in math and physics and philosophy. Now of course the cost is the recalcitrant loop of looking at your work and thinking this is horrible, this is horrible. And it just it stays in your vein, moves from acute to chronic, from something localized to systemic.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why do I constantly feel like my writing is worse than it actually is?
0:00–2:03
2
Why does my old work keep feeling like a ghost that still criticizes me?
2:03–4:19
3
Why does studying brilliant thinkers like Tao make me doubt my own abilities?
4:19–5:51
4
How does the academic feedback loop affect self‑learners and students?
5:51–6:58
5
How can unseen acts of kindness influence my intellectual growth?
6:58–9:00
6
Do metrics such as impact factor or H‑index really measure my worth?
9:00–11:03
7
What four conditions cause imposter syndrome to emerge in academia?
11:03–12:45
8
Why do I feel I don’t deserve a place in the academic archive?
12:45–14:38
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
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Tanya Luhrmann: The Experience Is Real. But Is God?
Tim Maudlin: Quantum Nonlocality Explained FROM SCRATCH
Adrian Owen: Awake. Aware. Unable to Move.
Peter Godfrey-Smith: This Scientist Found Earth’s “Alien” Minds
Jacob Tsimerman: He Won Math's Highest Prize. Then Announced the End