I have a pet theory about how people become ambitious and agenty.
I was about to write up some insight porn about it, and then was like “you know, Raemon, you should probably actually think about about this for real, since it seems like Pet Psychology Theories are one of the easier ways to get stuck in dumb cognitive traps.”
“How do people get ambitious and agenty” seems to be something people should have actually tried to study before. I’m thinking something as simple as “interviewing lots of people and checking for common patterns.”
2 seconds spent on google scholar suggested I could use better keywords.
Curious if anyone has looked into this (either reviewing existing literature, or conducting interviews themselves or otherwise trying to tackle the question in a serious way)
For clarity, the two phenomena I want to understand better are:
Ambition. How do people end up having plans (which they realistically expect to achieve) that affect at least thousands, and preferably millions of people?
Agency. How do people generally gain the capacity to be self-motivated, think through plans, and decide how to pursue goals that will change the world (changing it in small ways is fine)
Tongue-in-cheek: “when their pathological need to do something outweighs their pathological need to do nothing.”
In more detail: there are several different kinds of deep-rooted psychological needs that ambition might be powered by, and I think the resulting different kinds of ambition are different enough to discuss as distinct entities (in particular, they vary in how prosocial they are). Some possibilities off the top of my head, not mutually exclusive, inspired by Enneagram types:
1. Reinforce a particular identity / self-narrative (e.g. “I’m special” → strive to become a celebrity or w/e, see Instagram influencers); Enneagram 4
2. Get people to like you (again see Instagram influencers); Enneagram 3
3. Have power over people (some politicians, maybe); Enneagram 8
4. Have fun to avoid feeling bad; Enneagram 7
(One way to probe this in a given ambitious person is to look at what coping mechanisms they turn to when they fail. E.g. if it’s about reinforcing a given identity through some ambitious project, when that project fails do they start reinforcing that identity in other ways?)
Then there’s genuine compassion, which is the cleanest power source for ambition I’ve found so far, and arguably the most prosocial (there might be others, e.g. childlike joy and wonder). I am quite concerned that most of the ambition in the rationality / EA space is not being powered by genuine compassion; personally, most of the time I’ve been here I’ve been powered by a combination of #1 and #2.
There are also several different kinds of deep-rooted psychological needs that lack of ambition might be powered by. Again, some possibilities off the top of my head, inspired by Enneagram types:
1. Not drawing criticism / pissing people off; Enneagram 2, Enneagram 3, or Enneagram 9
2. Avoiding the feeling of not knowing what to do; Enneagram 5, Enneagram 6
3. Sense that ambition is morally wrong / corrupting; Enneagram 1
4. Sense that ambition is not your place / not the sort of thing people like you are allowed to do; Enneagram 2, Enneagram 3, Enneagram 4
Historically I think a lot of my lack of ambition was powered by a combination of #1, #2, and #4, although it’s hard to disentangle. There were also less psychological obstacles, e.g. I was tired all the time because I was eating, sleeping, and exercising poorly, and had an awful social life; real hard to be ambitious or agentic in that state.
To summarize, I mostly relate to ambition as a relatively surface-level psychological phenomenon that’s being powered by deeper dynamics, and I think at least as much in terms of obstacles to ambition as in terms of ways to cultivate ambition.
Epistemic status: based on lots of personal development work and looking at other people’s psychology and personal development, e.g. via circling; especially, noticing my own level of ambition increase drastically the more work I do on myself, and looking at what seem to be the gears of that.
Thanks. This is a different lens than my pet theory but seems pretty compatible with it.
My pet theory was specifically “one contributor towards people becoming ambitious is having someone they respect tell them that they believe in them (credibly signaling it by spending at least a few hours talking to them about their projects and goals and how to achieve them).” This is based on what happened to me and a few other people I know who gained certain kinds of ambition.
[This comes with some background beliefs that ambition is generally good, in particular when the ambition is of the form ‘create something’, rather than ‘be the best at something’ (which is zero-sum). This may be a different lens than you’re currently looking through]
This seems somewhat downstream of the sort of thing you’re point at here, which seems to be pointing at two clusters:
What sort of personality do you need to have for “become ambitious” to be a live option (including healthy and unhealthy mechanisms)
What sort of things could actively harm your capacity for ambition.
Both of which suggest much earlier interventions than what I was thinking about. I basically want all the interventions going on, but at the earlier stages, it’s not obvious that the right thing for a person is to become ambitious. Rather, I want them to have a psychologically outlook that lets them be generally physically and emotionally healthy and reasonably productive (because these are generally good things).
Once they get to that stage, maybe the right thing for them is to tackle ambitious projects, maybe not. But it seems better to think of interventions at that stage to be more oriented towards ‘help the person become generally healthy’ rather than ‘help them become ambitious.’
For people just reaching the stage where they’re considering an ambitious project (either one that’ll directly accomplish something, or help them grow) I think having a someone give them a few hours of encouragement and guidance is a fairly high-value-for-low-cost.
(This does seem like something that might be most relevant for people motivated by approval of others, although I think might also fit with other motivation clusters. Possible exception that people motivated by power seem least likely to need someone else to believe in them to pursue power?)
Yeah, I agree that at the earlier stages it’s not clear that ambition is a thing to aim for, and I would also advise people to prioritize health broadly.
I agree that encouragement and guidance is good, and more generally think that mentorship is really, really deeply important. I am not about this “individual rationality” life anymore. It’s group rationality or nothing.
The literature on learned helplessness describes how to destroy ambition. That suggests that any good answer should resemble moving away from those situations.
What is good literature on learned helplessness?
Seems to me like what happens is that redirection of sex or survival drives get caught up in some sort of stable configuration where they can never be satisfied yet the person doesn’t notice that aspect of the loop and thus keeps Doing the Thing far past the time normal people notice. Essentially they’ve goodharted themselves in a way that creates positive externalities for others.
Right, this is the kind of thing I had in mind with the phrase “pathological need to do something.” Cf. people who are obsessed with making way more money than they could ever possibly spend.
This seems roughly right… with some kind of tomato/to-mah-to outlook thing.
There’s a thing I’ve found myself saying, recently, which is “Hey, you know how the only two things that matter are the elimination of unnecessary suffering, and runaway sexual selection games?”
Which I don’t quite believe (in particular since it was pointed out that regular selection also is one of the sources of value in the world). But, it does seem like most of the things I value most are sexual selection competition run amok. And this certainly is goodharting the original “intended” behavior but I’m not sure that’s the frame it makes most sense to me to look through.
It’s goodharting from the point of view of natural selection’s values but it doesn’t have to be goodharting from the point of view of your values. We can enjoy art even if art is in some sense goodharting on e.g. being in beautiful places or whatever.
I was reminded of this anecdote of how the US Marines train agency. The part about encouragement from superiors in areas where the recruits are the weakest, sounds somewhat similar to your theory of mysterious old wizards.
An article about the same thing references the training program as targeting one’s locus of control:
Thanks! This seems quite relevant!
I haven’t looked at this in a serious way, but have thought about.
I think basically all of the ways people become more ambitious have to do with increasing either the self-efficacy of the person expecting to be able to do big things, or the reward that the person would get from doing big things. Here are some common examples I’ve seen in biographies and acquaintances:
1. Success spirals. They have small successes which make them think they can do a little bit more, which makes them think they can do more. This is basically a path to increasing self-efficacy.
2. Change in support structures/expectation. They meet a mentor or become part of a group that has big goals and is very agenty, and believes that they can be to. This is increasing both expectancy and reward.
3. Change in ontology. People often become much more agenty and ambitious as they transition from Kegan 3 to Kegan 4, they begin to realize that the world is a large system and that they can affect it, rather than looking at their immediate emotions.
4. Removing large emotional blocks, Sometimes people have lots of internal conflict that is holding them back. If one of the major blocks to action is removed, from the outside they suddenly become much more ambitious and agenty.
5. Adding emotional scarring. Sometimes, the opposite of the above happens. People are relatively content with the status quo and don’t feel the need to prove themselves. Then, something bad happens to them that makes them feel the need to prove themselves, thus raising their ambition.
Further Braindump:
Goal: I’m interesting specifically in unambitious people who become ambitious. (Mostly because this seems like the most useful/interesting lever to push on. The broader goal is figure out ‘what would help people become more ambitious in a healthy/productive way at scale’).
Some people seem “born ambitious” but there’s not a lot I can change my actions based on that.
Related questions:
What’s a list of people who “are ambitious”? Potentially including:
people I know who seem ambitious
think for 5 minutes listing famous people
how do I get non-famous people? are famous people representative?
Rich people (Forbes 500 list)
Startup Founders
People who launch movements (see wikipedia list of movements. Who founded them, and/or took over them?)
People who have biographies written about them
Might conflate people who “have an ambition” vs “people who are generically ambitious” but that might be fine for now
Is there a procedure you can easily do to check biographies for “what was their main causal factors towards ambition” at moderate scale?
Who has thought about ambition through this lens?
Paul Graham and other YCombinator folk probably have.
What has Paul Graham has written about this topic?
Cities and Ambition
Anatomy of Determination (in which he claims ambition is an important element of determination)
How easy it is to ask him about different angles on questions he’s previously explored? Does he respond on Twitter or email or whatev?
What is the existing literature on ambition?
Scan through google scholar or whatever
Who in the rationality community has already thought about this a bunch?
How many startups have gotten a million users?
How many songs or youtube videos have gotten a million unique views?
As Tracey Davis would say, that’s not true! And what’s it mean?
Seems like there’s power over others and power over things to happen. To become ambitious about the first kind, most people only need a chance to taste and realize what it is they’re tasting. The setting might be for the greater good, the reflection might discourage the pupil, but the option will be on the table.
As to the power over things to happen, it requires serious autonomy (an ability to pick the real dependencies between things and to keep a roof over one’s head meanwhile) and/or serious despair (as in people who might survive cancer).
I’m having trouble parsing this comment (in part because I can’t tell which part of my comment this is replying to). Could you restate it?
Sorry, I often have this problem.
I mean that ‘ambitious’ people might be ‘just generally ambitious’ - I see some of them when they come to buy books on self-help or startups or esoteric things. They might be ‘ambitious, as in wanting to have power over other people’, & then they buy books on, say, romantic relationships or English for two-year-olds, or planners; but largely it’s also a hobby. Some of them do get to wield this power and are content with it. Some do collect thousands of likes on Facebook or Youtube, and are visible, and therefore counted ambitious by others.
And then there are people who want power over things, over events in the world. The least ‘personal’ example is a scientist, but the volunteer who sends winter clothes to families living on occupied land and the sniper who crouches on the roof above a demonstration, they also belong to this species. And I have yet to peg them down when they enter my bookstore. They are… invisible.
I think the category I’m most interested in is something like “ambitious creators”, and I’d expect them to buy books related to whatever thing they’re trying to create. (They would probably buy some books on self help and entrepreneurship, and they’d also buy books about music or math or programming or whatever)
Hmm, they must be rare. Most likely, shopping online and in English… one side of ambitiousness would be then ‘willingness to pay’, maybe even ‘willingness to pay to become known as such a person’.
I remain confused about your definitions. From the Paul Graham article:
This would suggest a definition of “ambition” as it is commonly used: the tendency to choose big goals. On the other hand, you say:
Okay, now I have a little insight into your motivations for thinking about this: you want to become more “ambitious” yourself. But this suggest “ambitious” to mean rather something like “capable of achieving big goals”—you don’t need to attain the “tendency to choose big goals”, because that’s trivially easy, and anyway, if you care about this topic, that means you already have big goals.
So, does your question in the OP mean something along the lines of “how do people become capable of achieving big goals”?
I think you’re equivocating between two possible meanings of “choose” here. There’s “choose” as in you start telling people “I want to write a book” and then there’s “choose” as in you actually decide to actually write the book, which is quite different. I think Ray is asking about something like how to cultivate the capacity to do the latter. It is not at all trivially easy. Most goals are fake; making them real is a genuine skill.
Ah, yes, when I say “choose”, I mean system-2-choose (i.e. the former meaning in your comment). Learning how to
(i.e. how to work with setting intentions, or in general, how to overcome akrasia) would already be a to-do included on the big to-do list called “achieving goal X”.
In any case, if I understand it correctly, the question still is: how do people become capable of achieving big goals, including whatever system-1 manipulation, intention-setting, habit-forming, incentive-landscape-shaping, motivation-hacking, etc. is necessary to achieve these goals?
[WIP] Review of paper “On the value of Aiming High – The causes and consequences of ambition”
Link to PDF
Partial summary:
They discuss a bunch of ways they might define ambition, from a common sense or psychology standpoint. Eventually they define it thus:
This isn’t quite the thing I meant, but seems relevant enough to be interesting and keep reading.
Hypotheses
They go on to make some hypotheses:
Antecedents of ambition:
Hypothesis 1: Conscientiousness will be positively related to ambition.
2. Extraversion will be positively related to ambition.
3. Neuroticism will be negatively related to ambition.
4. General mental ability will be positively related to ambition.
5. Parents’ occupational prestige will be positively related to ambition.
Consequences of ambition
6a. Ambition will be positively related to the quantity of educational attainment.
6b. Ambition will partially mediate a significant part of the relationship of the distal attributes to educational attainment
7a. Ambition will be positively related to income
7b. Ambition will partially mediate a significant part of the relationship of the distal attributes to income.
8a. Ambition will be positively related to occupational attainment.
8b. Ambition will partially mediate a significant part of the relationship of the distal attributes to occupational attainment.
Will write up more as I find time.
Ruby recently wrote this, which seems relevant: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k2KwBEq4ToXnvZSbz/on-the-nature-of-agency
I’ve been reading lesswrong on and off for about 7 years (hpmor is great). I realized today that I’ve never had Agency (My life has been a haphazard mess, but I’m lucky to be in an okay place). It’s funny to see this question pop up today of all days.
A guess to an answer to your question: They’d need to realize that intelligence is a thing, they’d need to see from outside of themselves that the brain is this thing that thinks and does and is weird. Theeeen they would need some values or goals to pursue. Values like “self improvement” and goals like “I want to be able to afford the best food in the world 24/7″
How do people end up having plans (which they realistically expect to achieve) that affect at least thousands, and preferably millions of people?
The first thing is to realize that society makes this very difficult for very good reasons. If it was easy to affect thousands or millions of lives, then thousands or millions of people would constantly be affecting your life. This would be undesirable; without stability there can be no successful planning.
So I’d say Step 1 is: Realize that you are going to have to spend an incredible amount of effort to make even very modest changes to society, and that you are very likely to fail, and that that’s as it should be.