I think both “jog, don’t sprint” and “sprint, don’t jog” is too low-dimensional as advice. It’s good to try to spend 100% of one’s resources on doing good—sorta tautologically. What allows Johannes to work as hard as he does, I think, is not (just) that he’s obsessed with the work, it’s rather that he understands his own mind well enough to navigate around its limits. And that self-insight is also what enables him aim his cognition at what matters—which is a trait I care more about than ability to work hard.
People who are good at aiming their cognition at what matters sometimes choose to purposefwly flout[1]various social expectations in order to communicate “I see through this distracting social convention and I’m willing to break it in order to aim myself more purely at what matters”. Readers who haven’t noticed that some of their expectations are actually superfluous or misaligned with altruistic impact, will mistakenly think the flouter has low impact-potential or is just socially incompetent.
By writing the way he does, Johannes signals that he’s distancing himself from status-related putative proxies-for-effectiveness, and I think that’s a hard requirement for aiming more purely at the conjunction of multipliers[2] that matter. But his signals will be invisible to people who aren’t also highly attuned to that conjunction.
I think the post uses an odd definition of “conjunction”, but it points to something important regardless. My term for this bag of nearby considerations is “costs of compromise”:
there are exponential costs to compromising what you are optimizing for in order to appeal to a wider variety of interests
I think both “jog, don’t sprint” and “sprint, don’t jog” is too low-dimensional as advice. It’s good to try to spend 100% of one’s resources on doing good—sorta tautologically. What allows Johannes to work as hard as he does, I think, is not (just) that he’s obsessed with the work, it’s rather that he understands his own mind well enough to navigate around its limits. And that self-insight is also what enables him aim his cognition at what matters—which is a trait I care more about than ability to work hard.
People who are good at aiming their cognition at what matters sometimes choose to purposefwly flout[1] various social expectations in order to communicate “I see through this distracting social convention and I’m willing to break it in order to aim myself more purely at what matters”. Readers who haven’t noticed that some of their expectations are actually superfluous or misaligned with altruistic impact, will mistakenly think the flouter has low impact-potential or is just socially incompetent.
By writing the way he does, Johannes signals that he’s distancing himself from status-related putative proxies-for-effectiveness, and I think that’s a hard requirement for aiming more purely at the conjunction of multipliers[2] that matter. But his signals will be invisible to people who aren’t also highly attuned to that conjunction.
“flouting a social expectation”: choosing to disregard it while being fully aware of its existence, in a not-mean-spirited way.
I think the post uses an odd definition of “conjunction”, but it points to something important regardless. My term for this bag of nearby considerations is “costs of compromise”: