This is a great comment. There are some parts which I think are outright wrong (e.g. drama selects for most-important-disagreements), but for the most part it correctly identifies a bunch of shortcomings of the linear model from my comment.
I do think these shortcomings can generally be patched; the linear model is just one way to explain the core idea, and other models lead to the same place. The main idea is something like “in a high dimensional space, choosing the right places to explore is way more important than speed of exploration”, and that generalizes well beyond linearity.
I’m not going to flesh that out more right now. This all deserves a better explanation than I’m currently ready to write.
Yeah, I anticipated that the “Drama is actually kinda important” bit would be somewhat controversial. I did qualify that it was selected “(if imperfectly)” :p
Most things are like “Do we buy our scratch paper from walmart or kinkos?”, and there are few messes of people so bad that it’d make me want to say “Hey, I know you think what you’re fighting about is important, but it’s literally less important than where we buy our scratch paper, whether we name our log files .log or .txt, and literally any other random thing you can think of”.
(Actually, now that I say this, I realize that it can fairly often look that way and that’s why “bikeshedding” is a term. I think those are complicated by factors like “What they appear to be fighting about isn’t really what they’re fighting about”, “Their goals aren’t aligned with the goal you’re measuring them relative to”, and “The relevant metric isn’t how well they can select on an absolute scale or relative to your ability, but relative to their own relatively meager abilities”.)
In one extreme, you say “Look, you’re fighting about this for a reason, it’s clearly the most important thing, or at least top five, ignore anyone arguing otherwise”.
In another, you say “Drama can be treated as random noise, and the actual things motivating conflict aren’t in any way significantly more important than any other randomly selected thing one could attend to, so the correct advice is just to ignore those impulses and plow forward”
I don’t think either are very good ways of doing it, to understate it a bit. “Is this really what’s important here?” is an important question to keep in mind (which people sometimes forget, hence point 3), but that it cannot be treated as a rhetorical question and must be asked in earnest because the answer can very well be “Yes, to the best of my ability to tell”—especially within groups of higher functioning individuals.
I think we do have a real substantive disagreement in that I think the ability to handle drama skillfully is more important and also more directly tied into more generalized rationality skills than you do, but that’s a big topic to get into.
I am, however, in full agreement on the main idea of “in a high dimensional space, choosing the right places to explore is way more important than speed of exploration”, and that it generalizes well and is a very important concept. It’s actually pretty amusing that I find myself arguing “the other side” here, given that so much of what I do for work (and otherwise) involves face palming about people working really hard to optimize the wrong part of the pie chart, instead of realizing to make a pie chart and work only on the biggest piece or few.
This is a great comment. There are some parts which I think are outright wrong (e.g. drama selects for most-important-disagreements), but for the most part it correctly identifies a bunch of shortcomings of the linear model from my comment.
I do think these shortcomings can generally be patched; the linear model is just one way to explain the core idea, and other models lead to the same place. The main idea is something like “in a high dimensional space, choosing the right places to explore is way more important than speed of exploration”, and that generalizes well beyond linearity.
I’m not going to flesh that out more right now. This all deserves a better explanation than I’m currently ready to write.
Yeah, I anticipated that the “Drama is actually kinda important” bit would be somewhat controversial. I did qualify that it was selected “(if imperfectly)” :p
Most things are like “Do we buy our scratch paper from walmart or kinkos?”, and there are few messes of people so bad that it’d make me want to say “Hey, I know you think what you’re fighting about is important, but it’s literally less important than where we buy our scratch paper, whether we name our log files .log or .txt, and literally any other random thing you can think of”.
(Actually, now that I say this, I realize that it can fairly often look that way and that’s why “bikeshedding” is a term. I think those are complicated by factors like “What they appear to be fighting about isn’t really what they’re fighting about”, “Their goals aren’t aligned with the goal you’re measuring them relative to”, and “The relevant metric isn’t how well they can select on an absolute scale or relative to your ability, but relative to their own relatively meager abilities”.)
In one extreme, you say “Look, you’re fighting about this for a reason, it’s clearly the most important thing, or at least top five, ignore anyone arguing otherwise”.
In another, you say “Drama can be treated as random noise, and the actual things motivating conflict aren’t in any way significantly more important than any other randomly selected thing one could attend to, so the correct advice is just to ignore those impulses and plow forward”
I don’t think either are very good ways of doing it, to understate it a bit. “Is this really what’s important here?” is an important question to keep in mind (which people sometimes forget, hence point 3), but that it cannot be treated as a rhetorical question and must be asked in earnest because the answer can very well be “Yes, to the best of my ability to tell”—especially within groups of higher functioning individuals.
I think we do have a real substantive disagreement in that I think the ability to handle drama skillfully is more important and also more directly tied into more generalized rationality skills than you do, but that’s a big topic to get into.
I am, however, in full agreement on the main idea of “in a high dimensional space, choosing the right places to explore is way more important than speed of exploration”, and that it generalizes well and is a very important concept. It’s actually pretty amusing that I find myself arguing “the other side” here, given that so much of what I do for work (and otherwise) involves face palming about people working really hard to optimize the wrong part of the pie chart, instead of realizing to make a pie chart and work only on the biggest piece or few.