(tid bit from some recent deep self examination I’ve been doing)
I incurred judgment-fueled “motivational debt” by aggressively buying into the idea “Talk is worthless, the only thing that matters is going out and getting results” at a time where I was so confident I never expected to fail. It felt like I was getting free motivation, because I saw no consequences to making this value judgment about “not getting results”.
When I learned more, the possibility of failure became more real, and that cannon of judgement I’d built swiveled around to point at me. Oops.
This seems to be a specific instance of a more general phenomena that Leverage Research calls “De-simplification”
The basic phenomena goes like this:
1. According to leverage research, your belief structure must always be such that you believe you can achieve your terminal values/goals.
2. When you’re relatively powerless and unskilled, this means that by necessity you have to believe that the world is more simple than it is and things are easier to do than they are, because otherwise there’d be no way you could achieve your goals/values.
3. As you gain more skill and power, your ability to tackle complex and hard problems become greater, so you can begin to see more complex and difficulty in the world and the problems you’re trying to solve.
4. If you don’t know about this phenomena, it might feel like power and skills don’t actually help you, and you’re just treading water. In the worst case, you might think that power and ability actually make things worse. In fact, what’s going on is that your new power and ability made salient things that were always there, but which you could not allow yourself to see. Being able to see things as harder or more complex as actually a signal that you’ve leveled up.
This is a very useful frame! Is the blog on Leverage Research’s cite where most of there stuff is, or would I go somewhere else if I wanted to read about what they’ve been up to?
There’s not really anywhere to go to read what leverage has been up to, they’re a very private organization. They did have an arm called paradigm academy that did teaching, which is where I learned this. However leverage recently downsized, and I’m not sure about the status of Paradigm or other splinter organizations.
(tid bit from some recent deep self examination I’ve been doing)
I incurred judgment-fueled “motivational debt” by aggressively buying into the idea “Talk is worthless, the only thing that matters is going out and getting results” at a time where I was so confident I never expected to fail. It felt like I was getting free motivation, because I saw no consequences to making this value judgment about “not getting results”.
When I learned more, the possibility of failure became more real, and that cannon of judgement I’d built swiveled around to point at me. Oops.
This seems to be a specific instance of a more general phenomena that Leverage Research calls “De-simplification”
The basic phenomena goes like this:
1. According to leverage research, your belief structure must always be such that you believe you can achieve your terminal values/goals.
2. When you’re relatively powerless and unskilled, this means that by necessity you have to believe that the world is more simple than it is and things are easier to do than they are, because otherwise there’d be no way you could achieve your goals/values.
3. As you gain more skill and power, your ability to tackle complex and hard problems become greater, so you can begin to see more complex and difficulty in the world and the problems you’re trying to solve.
4. If you don’t know about this phenomena, it might feel like power and skills don’t actually help you, and you’re just treading water. In the worst case, you might think that power and ability actually make things worse. In fact, what’s going on is that your new power and ability made salient things that were always there, but which you could not allow yourself to see. Being able to see things as harder or more complex as actually a signal that you’ve leveled up.
This is a very useful frame! Is the blog on Leverage Research’s cite where most of there stuff is, or would I go somewhere else if I wanted to read about what they’ve been up to?
There’s not really anywhere to go to read what leverage has been up to, they’re a very private organization. They did have an arm called paradigm academy that did teaching, which is where I learned this. However leverage recently downsized, and I’m not sure about the status of Paradigm or other splinter organizations.