I have a cluster of intuitions on this point that are difficult to articulate, but I’ll try:
I agree that in order to achieve things, one has to keep working through the non-fun parts.
My impressions of the best mathematicians is that the situation is not so much that they force themselves to work through the non-fun parts as much as that they’re so obsessed by what they’re working on that they don’t have a choice not to do it. This may be the primary quality that differentiates them from other mathematicians of comparable IQ, education, etc. The physiology here may be similar to that of drug addiction.
Maybe it’s helpful to consider the following analogy. A parent will tend to his or her newborn even when it’s unpleasant. But this doesn’t come from ambition as much as instinct.
It’s important to note that much of scientific and other progress has been unexpected. Isaac Newton spend the industrial revolution by many years, but he didn’t set out to do so: he set out to understand the world. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was probably motivated by a desire to understand the world rather than by a desire to cure disease.
I think that one can have a significantly bigger impact (10x-100x on average?) on the world by being goal-driven in a reflective way than one can by following one’s instincts without reflections. But I don’t think that the quality of being goal-driven accounts for most of the variance in people’s social impact.
I think that one can have a significantly bigger impact (10x-100x on average?) on the world by being goal-driven in a reflective way than one can by following one’s instincts without reflections.
How did you arrive at these numbers, out of curiosity?
One thing that I see as relevant is the impact of funding bed net distribution relative to the impact of usual work, and another thing that I see as relevant is the amount of social value that founding Google produced relative to the founders’ earnings. But these things don’t address small probability edge cases in which specific targeted interventions turn out to be many orders of magnitude more important than most activity.
But I don’t think that the quality of being goal-driven accounts for most of the variance in people’s social impact.
I would have said that it accounts for maybe 10-25%, and random chance/luck accounts for the rest. I expect I was wrong, and that there are other important predictive factors.
However, the mindset of “some people are creative and curious and obsessed with what they do, and do it by instinct even when the going gets tough, and they’re the ones who will change the world” doesn’t seem helpful if you’re not one of those people. Which I’m pretty sure I’m not. (Maybe a little bit for writing fiction). What are you supposed to do if you don’t feel an obsessive need to do anything? How do you decide what to fill your time with?
To take an example in the other direction, passionate love is, also, driven by the quest for discovery. It provides us with a certain kind of understanding known as ‘carnal’ which also restores itself, blossoms forth and grows in depth.
I don’t know what this feeling is. I’m quite possibly some degree of asexual. Being told that “curiosity/obsession is supposed to feel like being passionately in love” is really unhelpful.
I hope I haven’t alienated you — it wasn’t my intention.
I would have said that it accounts for maybe 10-25%, and random chance/luck accounts for the rest. I expect I was wrong, and that there are other important predictive factors.
It depends how broad you’re defining random chance / luck, but some predictive factors (which can be positive or negative depending how pronounced they are, and on the context, and which have effect sizes that depend on the context) are
It’s possible to change on some of these dimensions, or change their significance in one’s life.
However, the mindset of “some people are creative and curious and obsessed with what they do, and do it by instinct even when the going gets tough, and they’re the ones who will change the world” doesn’t seem helpful if you’re not one of those people.
I need to be more careful about how I frame these points. I recognize that my original framing may have come across as elitist and/or having in-group/out-group connotations.
My reason for focusing on outliers is that I think that the factors relevant to success emerge in their most vivid forms in these cases. This is similar to how John Oldham and Lois Morris categorize personality types according to personality disorders. By examining people who vividly exemplify some of one’s characteristics, one can understand oneself better.
Which I’m pretty sure I’m not. (Maybe a little bit for writing fiction).
These things aren’t necessarily immutable.
What are you supposed to do if you don’t feel an obsessive need to do anything? How do you decide what to fill your time with?
It depends on what you value. What do you value? :-)
I don’t know what this feeling is. I’m quite possibly some degree of asexual. Being told that “curiosity/obsession is supposed to feel like being passionately in love” is really unhelpful.
I didn’t know this before.
I think that there’s also overlap with spiritual experiences, which you’ve described yourself as having had. When I first understood class field theory and complex multiplication it induced a several week long state of altered consciousness. I felt a sense of great inner peace, and even the most mundane objects around me seemed to me very beautiful.
Of the factors you put, it seems like peer group is the main one you can influence (which is a large portion of what I’ve done), and you might be able to affect education, meta-cognition, and humility/lack thereof through deliberate effort. Thus, these are what I care about for the purposes of thinking about my own plans, as opposed to having interesting conversations about people who do cool things, or being in a job where you try to predict who will do cool things so you can hire them. In that case, the value of noticing and understanding factors beyond the individual’s control is helpful.
It depends on what you value. What do you value? :-)
I value a world that contains interesting conversations, beautiful things, a society with helpful traditions and rituals, and people who do useful things for sane reasons. All else being equal, I value fewer people dying. I value less total pain. I value a society with mechanisms that allow it to change and progress in useful ways. On a personal level, I want to do something important and relevant. I think this is a basic human need.
I think a big part of “having ambitions” (as opposed to “being ambitious”) is the HMPOR concept of “responsability.” You look at a situation and think “this needs to change, and to make it change, this needs to be done.” And you go out and try things until the change happens. I didn’t used to think like this at all. Now I do a bit more, even if I don’t always act accordingly.
I think that there’s also overlap with spiritual experiences
Oh! That’s what he’s talking about! I totally know that feeling. I’ve even had it with respect to math and science. Is this actually what romantic passion feels like to most people?
Of the factors you put, it seems like peer group is the main one you can influence (which is a large portion of what I’ve done), and you might be able to affect education, meta-cognition, and humility/lack thereof through deliberate effort. Thus, these are what I care about for the purposes of thinking about my own plans, as opposed to having interesting conversations about people who do cool things, or being in a job where you try to predict who will do cool things so you can hire them. In that case, the value of noticing and understanding factors beyond the individual’s control is helpful.
But learning about the factors that drive success in general is a sort of education, and one that I’ve found to have been helpful for my own personal development (though I recognize that my introspection may be faulty, and that my own situation may not generalize).
In particular, it’s relevant to understanding one’s comparative advantage. For example, I recently learned that my fluid intelligence lower than that of the average person in my peer groups, and that my ability to develop crystalized intelligence is probably higher than that of the average person in my peer groups. This suggests that I should work in a field where crystalized intelligence is more important to success than fluid intelligence is.
I value a world that contains interesting conversations, beautiful things, a society with helpful traditions and rituals, and people who do useful things for sane reasons. All else being equal, I value fewer people dying. I value less total pain. I value a society with mechanisms that allow it to change and progress in useful ways.
Would you describe yourself as basically utilitarian in philosophical outlook? The degree to which you’re cause agnostic makes a difference in what’s optimal.
On a personal level, I want to do something important and relevant. I think this is a basic human need.
“I think that’s partly what interests me in people, that we don’t just wish to feed and sleep and reproduce then die like cows or sheep. Even if they’re gangsters, they seem to want to tell themselves they’re good gangsters and they’re loyal gangsters, they’ve fulfilled their ‘gangstership’ well. We do seem to have this moral sense, however it’s applied, whatever we think. We don’t seem satisfied, unless we can tell ourselves by some criteria that we have done it well and we haven’t wasted it and we’ve contributed well. So that is one of the things, I think, that distinguishes human beings, as far as I can see.” — Kazuo Ishiguro
I think a big part of “having ambitions” (as opposed to “being ambitious”) is the HMPOR concept of “responsability.” You look at a situation and think “this needs to change, and to make it change, this needs to be done.” And you go out and try things until the change happens. I didn’t used to think like this at all. Now I do a bit more, even if I don’t always act accordingly.
To clarify where I’m coming from, in the past, I placed too much emphasis on far mode thinking about how to make the world a better place in the abstract, as opposed to focusing on locally optimizing for personal growth, which would help me make the world a better place in the long run. I think that a good heuristic is to focus on what one can do best in the short-run, rather than focusing on what seems most important in the abstract. It’s often the case that the way in which one ends up having the most impact is different from what one would have imagined at the outset.
I recognize that my prior failure mode may not be relevant to your situation – just raising it as a point for consideration.
Oh! That’s what he’s talking about! I totally know that feeling. I’ve even had it with respect to math and science. Is this actually what romantic passion feels like to most people?
His analogy with romantic passion is imperfect — I would guess that more than anything else, he was trying to highlight the intensity of the emotion involved (in order to contrast it with popular conceptions of mathematical activity). Religious experience may be as close or closer. But religious experience probably doesn’t come with the same obsessive “drive” that romantic passion does.
Here is another quotation of his that might clarify what he was trying to say:
The year 1955 marked a critical departure in my work in mathematics: that of my passage from “analysis” to “geometry”. I well recall the power of my emotional response ( very subjective naturally); it was as if I’d fled the harsh arid steppes to find myself suddenly transported to a kind of “promised land” of superabundant richness, multiplying out to infinity wherever I placed my hand in it, either to search or to gather… This impression, of overwhelming riches has continued to be confirmed and grow in substance and depth down to the present day. The phrase “superabundant richness” has this nuance: it refers to the situation in which the impressions and sensations raised in us through encounter with something whose splendor, grandeur or beauty are out of the ordinary, are so great as to totally submerge us, to the point that the urge to express whatever we are feeling is obliterated.
To clarify where I’m coming from, in the past, I placed too much emphasis on far mode thinking about how to make the world a better place in the abstract, as opposed to focusing on locally optimizing for personal growth, which would help me make the world a better place in the long run. I think that a good heuristic is to focus on what one can do best in the short-run, rather than focusing on what seems most important in the abstract. It’s often the case that the way in which one ends up having the most impact is different from what one would have imagined at the outset.
The fact that this has been your main flawed-heuristic-to-overcome is probably the source of almost all of our disagreement. My flawed heuristic was very close to the opposite; I was exposed to career-self-help books like “What Color is your Parachute” in my early teens, to the concepts of SMART goals, et cetera. I wouldn’t have called it ‘comparative advantage’, but this was basically my reasoning for not going into physics–I didn’t think I was good enough at math to be more than mediocre. I trained my brain to reject goals that weren’t specific, measurable, clearly attainable, etc–it wasn’t even that I thought about them and chose not to pursue them, but I didn’t think they were goals at all. Daydreams, maybe, but goals were things where you could see every step of the way and then walk out and achieve it, without too much uncertainty introduced by the behaviour of other people.
This model helped me–I am quite good at “taskifying” goals, making them specific and measurable and all the rest, and maybe as a consequence, I’m good at doing them. But it limits the goals I can work on, and I’ve started to notice that people in real life can (sometimes) accomplish goals that start out big and vague and impossible-seeming...even if they only accomplish 1/10th of the goals they attempt, that might still be more total accomplishments than the person who started with easy achievable goals. Thus I should try it.
I have a cluster of intuitions on this point that are difficult to articulate, but I’ll try:
I agree that in order to achieve things, one has to keep working through the non-fun parts.
My impressions of the best mathematicians is that the situation is not so much that they force themselves to work through the non-fun parts as much as that they’re so obsessed by what they’re working on that they don’t have a choice not to do it. This may be the primary quality that differentiates them from other mathematicians of comparable IQ, education, etc. The physiology here may be similar to that of drug addiction.
Maybe it’s helpful to consider the following analogy. A parent will tend to his or her newborn even when it’s unpleasant. But this doesn’t come from ambition as much as instinct.
It’s important to note that much of scientific and other progress has been unexpected. Isaac Newton spend the industrial revolution by many years, but he didn’t set out to do so: he set out to understand the world. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was probably motivated by a desire to understand the world rather than by a desire to cure disease.
I think that one can have a significantly bigger impact (10x-100x on average?) on the world by being goal-driven in a reflective way than one can by following one’s instincts without reflections. But I don’t think that the quality of being goal-driven accounts for most of the variance in people’s social impact.
How did you arrive at these numbers, out of curiosity?
I don’t have a tight argument.
One thing that I see as relevant is the impact of funding bed net distribution relative to the impact of usual work, and another thing that I see as relevant is the amount of social value that founding Google produced relative to the founders’ earnings. But these things don’t address small probability edge cases in which specific targeted interventions turn out to be many orders of magnitude more important than most activity.
I hope to write about this more in the future.
I would have said that it accounts for maybe 10-25%, and random chance/luck accounts for the rest. I expect I was wrong, and that there are other important predictive factors.
However, the mindset of “some people are creative and curious and obsessed with what they do, and do it by instinct even when the going gets tough, and they’re the ones who will change the world” doesn’t seem helpful if you’re not one of those people. Which I’m pretty sure I’m not. (Maybe a little bit for writing fiction). What are you supposed to do if you don’t feel an obsessive need to do anything? How do you decide what to fill your time with?
I don’t know what this feeling is. I’m quite possibly some degree of asexual. Being told that “curiosity/obsession is supposed to feel like being passionately in love” is really unhelpful.
I hope I haven’t alienated you — it wasn’t my intention.
It depends how broad you’re defining random chance / luck, but some predictive factors (which can be positive or negative depending how pronounced they are, and on the context, and which have effect sizes that depend on the context) are
IQ
Big Five personality traits.
Early childhood environment
Educational background
Peer group
Susceptibility to herd mentality or lack thereof
Meta-cognition
Genuine humility or lack thereof
It’s possible to change on some of these dimensions, or change their significance in one’s life.
I need to be more careful about how I frame these points. I recognize that my original framing may have come across as elitist and/or having in-group/out-group connotations.
My reason for focusing on outliers is that I think that the factors relevant to success emerge in their most vivid forms in these cases. This is similar to how John Oldham and Lois Morris categorize personality types according to personality disorders. By examining people who vividly exemplify some of one’s characteristics, one can understand oneself better.
These things aren’t necessarily immutable.
It depends on what you value. What do you value? :-)
I didn’t know this before.
I think that there’s also overlap with spiritual experiences, which you’ve described yourself as having had. When I first understood class field theory and complex multiplication it induced a several week long state of altered consciousness. I felt a sense of great inner peace, and even the most mundane objects around me seemed to me very beautiful.
I didn’t feel alienated, don’t worry.
Of the factors you put, it seems like peer group is the main one you can influence (which is a large portion of what I’ve done), and you might be able to affect education, meta-cognition, and humility/lack thereof through deliberate effort. Thus, these are what I care about for the purposes of thinking about my own plans, as opposed to having interesting conversations about people who do cool things, or being in a job where you try to predict who will do cool things so you can hire them. In that case, the value of noticing and understanding factors beyond the individual’s control is helpful.
I value a world that contains interesting conversations, beautiful things, a society with helpful traditions and rituals, and people who do useful things for sane reasons. All else being equal, I value fewer people dying. I value less total pain. I value a society with mechanisms that allow it to change and progress in useful ways. On a personal level, I want to do something important and relevant. I think this is a basic human need.
I think a big part of “having ambitions” (as opposed to “being ambitious”) is the HMPOR concept of “responsability.” You look at a situation and think “this needs to change, and to make it change, this needs to be done.” And you go out and try things until the change happens. I didn’t used to think like this at all. Now I do a bit more, even if I don’t always act accordingly.
Oh! That’s what he’s talking about! I totally know that feeling. I’ve even had it with respect to math and science. Is this actually what romantic passion feels like to most people?
But learning about the factors that drive success in general is a sort of education, and one that I’ve found to have been helpful for my own personal development (though I recognize that my introspection may be faulty, and that my own situation may not generalize).
In particular, it’s relevant to understanding one’s comparative advantage. For example, I recently learned that my fluid intelligence lower than that of the average person in my peer groups, and that my ability to develop crystalized intelligence is probably higher than that of the average person in my peer groups. This suggests that I should work in a field where crystalized intelligence is more important to success than fluid intelligence is.
Would you describe yourself as basically utilitarian in philosophical outlook? The degree to which you’re cause agnostic makes a difference in what’s optimal.
“I think that’s partly what interests me in people, that we don’t just wish to feed and sleep and reproduce then die like cows or sheep. Even if they’re gangsters, they seem to want to tell themselves they’re good gangsters and they’re loyal gangsters, they’ve fulfilled their ‘gangstership’ well. We do seem to have this moral sense, however it’s applied, whatever we think. We don’t seem satisfied, unless we can tell ourselves by some criteria that we have done it well and we haven’t wasted it and we’ve contributed well. So that is one of the things, I think, that distinguishes human beings, as far as I can see.” — Kazuo Ishiguro
To clarify where I’m coming from, in the past, I placed too much emphasis on far mode thinking about how to make the world a better place in the abstract, as opposed to focusing on locally optimizing for personal growth, which would help me make the world a better place in the long run. I think that a good heuristic is to focus on what one can do best in the short-run, rather than focusing on what seems most important in the abstract. It’s often the case that the way in which one ends up having the most impact is different from what one would have imagined at the outset.
I recognize that my prior failure mode may not be relevant to your situation – just raising it as a point for consideration.
His analogy with romantic passion is imperfect — I would guess that more than anything else, he was trying to highlight the intensity of the emotion involved (in order to contrast it with popular conceptions of mathematical activity). Religious experience may be as close or closer. But religious experience probably doesn’t come with the same obsessive “drive” that romantic passion does.
Here is another quotation of his that might clarify what he was trying to say:
The fact that this has been your main flawed-heuristic-to-overcome is probably the source of almost all of our disagreement. My flawed heuristic was very close to the opposite; I was exposed to career-self-help books like “What Color is your Parachute” in my early teens, to the concepts of SMART goals, et cetera. I wouldn’t have called it ‘comparative advantage’, but this was basically my reasoning for not going into physics–I didn’t think I was good enough at math to be more than mediocre. I trained my brain to reject goals that weren’t specific, measurable, clearly attainable, etc–it wasn’t even that I thought about them and chose not to pursue them, but I didn’t think they were goals at all. Daydreams, maybe, but goals were things where you could see every step of the way and then walk out and achieve it, without too much uncertainty introduced by the behaviour of other people.
This model helped me–I am quite good at “taskifying” goals, making them specific and measurable and all the rest, and maybe as a consequence, I’m good at doing them. But it limits the goals I can work on, and I’ve started to notice that people in real life can (sometimes) accomplish goals that start out big and vague and impossible-seeming...even if they only accomplish 1/10th of the goals they attempt, that might still be more total accomplishments than the person who started with easy achievable goals. Thus I should try it.
Typo: s/spend/sped/