I’m not sure I’m thinking about the same thing you are, so let me know what you thing of these examples:
“Become a well known writer/blogger”
“Start a popular meetup for Y topic”
“Get respected in a community”
“Make a viral video”
Me phrasing what I think is your point:
Some of the most readily imaginable “things to do” are identified by their effects on social reality (make something popular, be respected). Learning to shape social reality is a skill in itself, but if you mistakenly believe that you are learning how to shape reality you will hit problems when you are confronted with a problem that requires shaping reality.
Thanks for the specific examples. I’m more worried about subtler cases, that aren’t overtly about social reality, but where feedback is mediated through it.
For instance, people like Taleb often name entrepreneurship as an especially “real” thing you can do, but founding a startup can look more like passing a series of tests where you’re supposed to look like VCs’ consensus idea of a business, than figuring out how to make a product you can sell profitably. And success in the corporate world is often even sillier (see just about any story from Moral Mazes for details—or Dilbert for the fictional version), even in firms that make useful physical products. If you’re not careful about what kinds of feedback you respond to or incentive gradients you follow, you may learn to conflate the symbolic representation of the thing (optimized to get approval) with the thing itself.
Acting on social reality is an important skill for many projects, but not all ways of interacting with social reality are the same. In particular, coordinating to manage appearances and stories is very different from coordinating to do something in objective reality. (The engineer and the diplomat, Actors and scribes, words and deeds, On Drama, and Blame games all touch on this.)
I’m not sure I’m thinking about the same thing you are, so let me know what you thing of these examples:
“Become a well known writer/blogger”
“Start a popular meetup for Y topic”
“Get respected in a community”
“Make a viral video”
Me phrasing what I think is your point:
Some of the most readily imaginable “things to do” are identified by their effects on social reality (make something popular, be respected). Learning to shape social reality is a skill in itself, but if you mistakenly believe that you are learning how to shape reality you will hit problems when you are confronted with a problem that requires shaping reality.
Thanks for the specific examples. I’m more worried about subtler cases, that aren’t overtly about social reality, but where feedback is mediated through it.
For instance, people like Taleb often name entrepreneurship as an especially “real” thing you can do, but founding a startup can look more like passing a series of tests where you’re supposed to look like VCs’ consensus idea of a business, than figuring out how to make a product you can sell profitably. And success in the corporate world is often even sillier (see just about any story from Moral Mazes for details—or Dilbert for the fictional version), even in firms that make useful physical products. If you’re not careful about what kinds of feedback you respond to or incentive gradients you follow, you may learn to conflate the symbolic representation of the thing (optimized to get approval) with the thing itself.
Acting on social reality is an important skill for many projects, but not all ways of interacting with social reality are the same. In particular, coordinating to manage appearances and stories is very different from coordinating to do something in objective reality. (The engineer and the diplomat, Actors and scribes, words and deeds, On Drama, and Blame games all touch on this.)