Eliezer noted (in a comment on a blog post I made about Nonprofit Kit For Dummies) that he did in fact buy the book and try to apply it. This suggests the difference was in fact Luke, and that we need How To Be Lukeprog For Dummies, which he is of course posting piecemeal ;-)
Eliezer’s comment doesn’t say he tried to apply the lessons in Nonprofit Kit for Dummies, though some of it he clearly did — e.g. filing the necessary paperwork to launch a 501c3!
But the anti-akrasia techniques we’ve uncovered so far don’t work for everyone, and there are other factors at play. For example, since a young age Eliezer has become cognitively exhausted rather quickly. He has spent years trying different things (diet, exercise, context changes, vitamins, etc.) but still hasn’t found an intervention that lets him do cognitive work for as long as I can. (Luckily, the value of an hour of cognitive work from Eliezer is much higher than the value of an hour of cognitive work from me.)
Also, there was no time in history when it made sense for Eliezer Yudkowsky to spend his time doing Nonprofit Kit for Dummies stuff. (But it would have made sense, I think, for Eliezer to try harder to find someone who could do non-profit management better, or to try harder to find someone who could execute that search more effectively. This is the kind of thing I meant by mentioning a potential “gap in general rationality.”)
P.S. Eliezer’s memory of reading Nonprofit Kit for Dummies “before starting the Singularity Institute in 2000” must be mistaken. The first edition of Nonprofit Kit for Dummies wasn’t published until 2001.
reading a how-to book doesn’t help much unless you actually do what the book recommends. That’s why it’s such an important intervention to figure out How To Actually Do The Stuff You Know You Should Be Doing — also known as How to Beat Procrastination.
I’m confused. You seem to be suggesting that procrastination is one of the main “biases” we need to overcome (or, as I would put it, that the ability to beat procrastination is one of the main “practical skills” we need to develop). But aaronsw disagrees that this is what you yourself believe: “As lukeprog himself says, it wasn’t lack of intelligence or resources or akrasia that kept Eliezer from doing these things, ‘it was a gap in general rationality.’” (emphasis added) Could you clarify?
Eliezer noted (in a comment on a blog post I made about Nonprofit Kit For Dummies) that he did in fact buy the book and try to apply it. This suggests the difference was in fact Luke, and that we need How To Be Lukeprog For Dummies, which he is of course posting piecemeal ;-)
Eliezer’s comment doesn’t say he tried to apply the lessons in Nonprofit Kit for Dummies, though some of it he clearly did — e.g. filing the necessary paperwork to launch a 501c3!
Anyway, reading a how-to book doesn’t help much unless you actually do what the book recommends. That’s why it’s such an important intervention to figure out How To Actually Do The Stuff You Know You Should Be Doing — also known as How to Beat Procrastination.
But the anti-akrasia techniques we’ve uncovered so far don’t work for everyone, and there are other factors at play. For example, since a young age Eliezer has become cognitively exhausted rather quickly. He has spent years trying different things (diet, exercise, context changes, vitamins, etc.) but still hasn’t found an intervention that lets him do cognitive work for as long as I can. (Luckily, the value of an hour of cognitive work from Eliezer is much higher than the value of an hour of cognitive work from me.)
Also, there was no time in history when it made sense for Eliezer Yudkowsky to spend his time doing Nonprofit Kit for Dummies stuff. (But it would have made sense, I think, for Eliezer to try harder to find someone who could do non-profit management better, or to try harder to find someone who could execute that search more effectively. This is the kind of thing I meant by mentioning a potential “gap in general rationality.”)
P.S. Eliezer’s memory of reading Nonprofit Kit for Dummies “before starting the Singularity Institute in 2000” must be mistaken. The first edition of Nonprofit Kit for Dummies wasn’t published until 2001.
I’m confused. You seem to be suggesting that procrastination is one of the main “biases” we need to overcome (or, as I would put it, that the ability to beat procrastination is one of the main “practical skills” we need to develop). But aaronsw disagrees that this is what you yourself believe: “As lukeprog himself says, it wasn’t lack of intelligence or resources or akrasia that kept Eliezer from doing these things, ‘it was a gap in general rationality.’” (emphasis added) Could you clarify?