Fascinating! I want to ask “well, why didn’t it take then?”, but if I were in Eliezer’s shoes I’d be finding this discussion almost unendurably painful right now, and it feels like what matters has already been established. And of course he’s never been the person in charge of that sort of thing, so maybe he’s not who we should be grilling anyway.
Obviously we need How to be Lukeprog for Dummies. Luke appears to have written many fragments for this, of course.
Beating oneself up with hindsight bias is IME quite normal in this sort of circumstance, but not actually productive. Grilling the people who failed makes it too easy to blame them personally, when it’s a pattern I’ve seen lots and lots, suggesting the problem is not a personal failing.
Agreed entirely—it’s definitely not a mark of a personal failing. What I’m curious about is how we can all learn to do better at the crucial rationalist skill of making use of the standard advice about prosaic tasks—which is manifestly a non-trivial skill.
The Bloody Obvious For Dummies. If only common sense were!
From the inside (of a subcompetent charity—and I must note, subcompetent charities know they’re subcompetent), it feels like there’s all this stuff you’re supposed to magically know about, and lots of “shut up and do the impossible” moments. And you do the small very hard things, in a sheer tour de force of remarkable effort. But it leads to burnout. Until the organisation makes it to competence and the correct paths are retrospectively obvious.
That actually reads to me like descriptions I’ve seen of the startup process.
The problem is that there are two efficiencies/competences here, the efficiency as in doing the accounting correctly, which is relatively easy in comparison to the second: the efficiency as in actually doing relevant novel technical work that matters. The former you could get advice from some books, the latter you won’t get any advice on, it’s a harder problem, and typical level of performance is exactly zero (even for those who get the first part right). The difference in difficulties is larger than that between building a robot kit by following instructions vs designing a ground breaking new robot and making a billion dollars off it.
The best advice to vast majority of startups is: dissolve startup and get normal jobs, starting tomorrow. The best advice to all is to take a very good look at themselves knowing that the most likely conclusion should be “dissolve and get normal jobs”. The failed startups I’ve seen so far were propelled by pure, unfounded belief in themselves (like in a movie where someone doesn’t want to jump, other says yes you can do that!! then that person jumps, but rather than sending positive message and jumping over and surviving, falls down to instant death, while the fire that the person was running away from just goes out). The successful startups, on the other hand, had very well founded belief in themselves (good track record, attainable goals), or started from a hobby project that gone successful.
Judging from the success rate that VCs have at predicting successful startups, I conclude that the “pure unfounded belief on the one hand, well-founded belief on the other” metric is not easily applied to real organizations by real observers.
Mm. This is why an incompetent nonprofit can linger for years: no-one is doing what they do, so they feel they still have to exist, even though they’re not achieving much, and would have died already as a for-profit business. I am now suspecting that the hard part for a nonprofit is something along the lines of working out what the hell you should be doing to achieve your goal. (I would be amazed if there were not extensive written-up research in this area, though I don’t know what it is.)
Fascinating! I want to ask “well, why didn’t it take then?”, but if I were in Eliezer’s shoes I’d be finding this discussion almost unendurably painful right now, and it feels like what matters has already been established. And of course he’s never been the person in charge of that sort of thing, so maybe he’s not who we should be grilling anyway.
Obviously we need How to be Lukeprog for Dummies. Luke appears to have written many fragments for this, of course.
Beating oneself up with hindsight bias is IME quite normal in this sort of circumstance, but not actually productive. Grilling the people who failed makes it too easy to blame them personally, when it’s a pattern I’ve seen lots and lots, suggesting the problem is not a personal failing.
Agreed entirely—it’s definitely not a mark of a personal failing. What I’m curious about is how we can all learn to do better at the crucial rationalist skill of making use of the standard advice about prosaic tasks—which is manifestly a non-trivial skill.
The Bloody Obvious For Dummies. If only common sense were!
From the inside (of a subcompetent charity—and I must note, subcompetent charities know they’re subcompetent), it feels like there’s all this stuff you’re supposed to magically know about, and lots of “shut up and do the impossible” moments. And you do the small very hard things, in a sheer tour de force of remarkable effort. But it leads to burnout. Until the organisation makes it to competence and the correct paths are retrospectively obvious.
That actually reads to me like descriptions I’ve seen of the startup process.
The problem is that there are two efficiencies/competences here, the efficiency as in doing the accounting correctly, which is relatively easy in comparison to the second: the efficiency as in actually doing relevant novel technical work that matters. The former you could get advice from some books, the latter you won’t get any advice on, it’s a harder problem, and typical level of performance is exactly zero (even for those who get the first part right). The difference in difficulties is larger than that between building a robot kit by following instructions vs designing a ground breaking new robot and making a billion dollars off it.
The best advice to vast majority of startups is: dissolve startup and get normal jobs, starting tomorrow. The best advice to all is to take a very good look at themselves knowing that the most likely conclusion should be “dissolve and get normal jobs”. The failed startups I’ve seen so far were propelled by pure, unfounded belief in themselves (like in a movie where someone doesn’t want to jump, other says yes you can do that!! then that person jumps, but rather than sending positive message and jumping over and surviving, falls down to instant death, while the fire that the person was running away from just goes out). The successful startups, on the other hand, had very well founded belief in themselves (good track record, attainable goals), or started from a hobby project that gone successful.
Judging from the success rate that VCs have at predicting successful startups, I conclude that the “pure unfounded belief on the one hand, well-founded belief on the other” metric is not easily applied to real organizations by real observers.
Mm. This is why an incompetent nonprofit can linger for years: no-one is doing what they do, so they feel they still have to exist, even though they’re not achieving much, and would have died already as a for-profit business. I am now suspecting that the hard part for a nonprofit is something along the lines of working out what the hell you should be doing to achieve your goal. (I would be amazed if there were not extensive written-up research in this area, though I don’t know what it is.)