Solving quagmires. I’ve been in a lot of quagmires in my life. Like, imagine a quagmire that has quagmires for fingers and toes—and THOSE quagmires have quagmires for eyes! I have developed my problem-solving abilities to the point where I tend to get myself out of ugly quagmires. Give me a paperclip and some duct tape, ask me to do something impossible and see what happens.
BS detector going off like crazy… To start, have you learned to not get into quagmires in the first place?
If you’re playing the biggest game you can, you should keep getting into quagmires by continually putting your limits to the test. A favorite quote of mine from the cofounder of the coaching school and leadership program I attended:
“If you’re not failing half the time, you’re not trying hard enough.”
If you’ve never been slowly and publicly tortured to death and then resurrected in order to experience it again, due to having pissed off Mexican drug lords, the Pope, the International Red Cross, the Chinese Communist Party, 4chan, the CIA, Clippy, an FAI, Lord Voldemort, the goddess Takhisis, and whoever it is that’s running our simulation, all at once, you’re too risk averse.
(Crappy may not be the best word, though, because it’s not always a bad thing: a country where whoever shares copyrighted material (e.g. on a P2P) without the consent of the copyright holder ends up in prison with probability 1 minus epsilon would be a helluva dystopia IMO.)
If you think of “crappy” in terms of “bad”, and bad in terms of “not instrumentally rational”, then an anti-crappy law enforcement seems like it wouldn’t do something this twisted and society-disrupting.
Well, let’s say that in the great-grandparent by crappy I meant “not instrumentally rational for its own (stated) goals (i.e. enforcing the law)”, and then I replied to myself pointing out that what’s not instrumentally rational for its own stated goals can still be instrumentally rational for the goals of humanity.
Failure doesn’t imply risk. You can fail at challenging your friends to seemingly impossible debates or thinking of solutions to seemingly impossible problems. If you fail at those, you’ve lost nothing—the time is a valid investment in intellectual development. Have you never tried to solve a problem that seems impossible, Eliezer?
Ooh. I like it. Thanks. Say, do you know if Eliezer has posed any impossible challenges to the group? It would be REALLY fun to solve them as a team. (:
Yes, I have a pretty high risk tolerance. I have a strong desire to have as large of an impact in the world as I can. I am also quite optimistic that I will succeed in doing interesting and impressive things if I keep trying, because I think I’m in a position of having a lot of the right resources and the correct mindset for success.
I try to assess what I actually need to stay safe, and make sure I have that, and then play big beyond that. Living in a 1st world country at this point in time, I don’t think my life is in danger nearly as much as the lizard aspects of my mind like to tell me. I try to evaluate as logically as I can about risk, with the knowledge that people are much more motivated to avoid pain than pursue pleasure, and making conscious corrections for this - I aim to maximize utility as accurately as I can.
Agreed about running into unexpected failure modes repeatedly being a red flag. I like strategies with high payoff potentials, which often have high likelihood of failure in expected ways. However, there are often a lot of positive externalities to trying and failing, so the likelihood of getting positive utility is much higher than that of success of what I am specifically attempting.
For example, I have already gotten a very interesting email from someone who is considering offering me an opportunity that I am excited about as a result of this article, although it is yet to be seen if any businesses will actually be created or improved.
Oooh. That’s a more direct assumption. Let’s scrutinize this:
“if you keep running into unexpected failure modes, you are not doing your homework.”
Do you agree with any of the following, if so, which ones:
There is a limit to the amount of problem-solving effort that life demands of people.
People are always able to predict which problems they’re going to have in advance.
There is a limit to the complexity of problems and it happens to match human limitations.
Diligent people are in some way protected from other people’s problems spilling over onto them.
That expecting a problem will automatically guarantee it gets solved (that the resources will always be available, that multiple other problems won’t rob you of the necessities to solve upcoming disasters in advance).
If you disagree with even one of those statements, why do you assume that if a person is presented with multiple quagmires, they didn’t do their homework? This is reality and reality doesn’t care about you. Life may give you problems more complex than you can figure out, other people’s problems will create problems for you, sometimes life gives you more problems than you can process at once, nobody sees everything coming, and even when you do see something coming, nothing guarantees you’ll have the resources to stop it.
If you know all of this, why do you say such things?
I certainly am much more optimistic about odds than a lot of people on certain topics. For example, the odds I give of at least one successful business happening because of something in this post are quite divergent from the person who placed odds the other direction, who is someone whose intelligence I respect a lot.
Given the divergent opinions, I asked him to make predictions for several different specific/measurable outcomes for various scenarios, and we discussed what updates that he’d make to his belief system if the results are as I predict.
I highly recommend doing this—if people commit to updates based on probability they assign before hindsight bias, the updates are much more extreme than they otherwise would be; the updates might not happen much at all without the person really getting clear about how much they disagree ahead of time.
Mention all problems anticipated with p>.5. Do nothing more than simply mentioning them, if questioned claimed you don’t know what could be done about them. Once problems happen, reveal that you knew it all along, and that now, having seen it happen, a flash of genius tells you how to resolve it immediately and prevent it from happening again.
I’ve seen this pattern in use. The Darth deliberately waits for the problem to happen, ready to be the first to jump on it (and its low-cost solution). Sometimes, they even subtly try to nudge things towards the problem happening. Even if there are lives at stake.
If you can anticipate problems your company can’t, in addition to career growth you can also make extra money: create a new company that will fix this kind of problem and when the time comes, recommend it as a solution. Repeat if necessary.
(This may be technically illegal, but the fixing company may technically belong to someone else than you.)
I just realized, this might actually have been intended as being in support to me, not a continuation of shminux’s line of thought. I don’t know why I interpreted it that way in hindsight. Maybe it was that I had a 6 hour night of sleep the night before. Sorry if I misinterpreted.
I like this comment enough that I’ve decided to make it into an article. So that there aren’t multiple copies of the same information, I have removed it.
“BS detector going off like crazy… To start, have you learned to not get into quagmires in the first place?”
Challenge me directly. Don’t imply that you’re assuming that I got myself into those quagmires and then down-vote me for my completely warranted presumption that you’re assuming that the quagmires were my own fault. You want to tell me you think I probably brought all the quagmires onto myself? Do it. And support your point.
This person saying that their BS detector is going off is actually very useful for people reading and not something that I personally want to discourage. When one person says something like this, there are usually many who are thinking it and not saying it.
It takes courage and effort to actually say—this person is giving feedback, knowing that it will likely cause a negative backlash. It is very valuable when people step into the fire like that. While it is easier to respond to when people package their feedback in kind ways, giving feedback at all is a gift.
So, what do you want?
If you want to learn how to not set off the BS detectors of people like this, this person has just offered you information, and would likely be willing to unpack more if responded to with curiosity. I would imagine that would be much more valuable to you personally than winning an argument, and if you express curiosity and hear the other person out, they’ll be more likely to be interested in and listen to your points as well.
For examples of my walking my talk, here are a couple of cases where someone said something critical of the goals I’m shooting for, and I thanked them and asked the to elaborate:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/e26/who_wants_to_start_an_important_startup/77e3
This post is about starting start-ups, and her comment discusses reasons why it might be a bad idea. I easily could have gotten defensive and argued with her. What I did instead was to recognized that a lot of people have similar doubts, and to thank her for expressing those doubts and trying despite them, validating that she was trying despite her concerns—my hope was to encourage more people with similar concerns.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/e26/who_wants_to_start_an_important_startup/78ij
This is another example of someone talking on this post I started with the goal of starting start-ups, about how most start ups fail. Also in this case, I expressed gratitude, and it gave the the chance to elaborate a response to concerns that many people have, without invalidating the concern.
Also, as noted in the comments on that second link, I had several people give me very harsh feedback while I was in the process of writing this post. As an example, a friend predicted:
“No startup cofounder at any point in the future will say that their ideas were partially inspired by this post, unless it’s an extremely distant relation. To a first approximation, nothing happens.”
Largely because of the training I’ve had in how to deal with negative feedback, I did not get (very ;) defensive, and I quizzed these people about what I could do that would give the post the best chance of working. I do think it is because of my doing this, and these people being kind enough to give me their honest feedback even though they were concerned about what my reactions might be, that this post has been as successful as it has been. Its early yet to see if start-ups succeed, but I know of several people taking initial steps, and I’m optimistic that these discussions that are happening will have positive impact on a lot of people.
I intentionally picked examples dated prior to your post. Usually I would not bother to justify myself like this but I’ve decided that I like you.
Of course there are times when I disagree, also, and will continue to disagree until somebody gets somewhere or the discussion is lost to the sands of time. But I will not continue disagreement I don’t see a way to make the disagreement constructive. If I don’t think that it’s likely for me to get through to a person, I will choose my battles with them.
Shannon, thank you. I see what you’re trying to do here. However, in this particular case, I don’t feel the criticism is getting anyone anywhere. Shminux is essentially jumping to conclusions. Hearing them out is not going to change the fact that Shminux is jumping to conclusions, and it won’t convince me of anything. I hold myself to higher standards than that—I won’t allow myself to jump to conclusions with new people, so I don’t do like Shminux does and I do not particularly want to learn this jumping to conclusions technique. In hindsight, I saw that it’s probably a common bias. If you hadn’t noticed, I changed my wording a long time ago. I tried to point out Shminux’s bias once. That didn’t work. I liked my attempt, so I saved it for later. If getting a person to be aware of their bias doesn’t work, I move on. I see policing Shminux’s biased perceptions as Shminux’s responsibility. I tried it once, which was nice of me. I shouldn’t have to do it for them.
If you think there’s something I could learn here other than “Shminux is biased, which is a sign that other people might have the same bias, so it’s best not to trigger that particular bias.” then you’re going to have to be really clear because it does not look to me like there is any further to learn from Shminux’s comment.
BS detector going off like crazy… To start, have you learned to not get into quagmires in the first place?
If you’re playing the biggest game you can, you should keep getting into quagmires by continually putting your limits to the test. A favorite quote of mine from the cofounder of the coaching school and leadership program I attended:
“If you’re not failing half the time, you’re not trying hard enough.”
If you’ve never been arrested, you’re too law-abiding.
If you’ve never been slowly and publicly tortured to death and then resurrected in order to experience it again, due to having pissed off Mexican drug lords, the Pope, the International Red Cross, the Chinese Communist Party, 4chan, the CIA, Clippy, an FAI, Lord Voldemort, the goddess Takhisis, and whoever it is that’s running our simulation, all at once, you’re too risk averse.
http://abstrusegoose.com/47
http://abstrusegoose.com/312
Your list is conspicuously lacking the scariest entity. I would rather get tortured by all of those at once than give the slightest insult to God.
I agree, God is kind of a dick that way.
Oh crap!
I think Lesswrong is a pretty cool guy. eh downvotes christains and doesnt afraid of god.
Or law enforcement in your country is too crappy.
Then you should be even less law-abiding.
(Crappy may not be the best word, though, because it’s not always a bad thing: a country where whoever shares copyrighted material (e.g. on a P2P) without the consent of the copyright holder ends up in prison with probability 1 minus epsilon would be a helluva dystopia IMO.)
If you think of “crappy” in terms of “bad”, and bad in terms of “not instrumentally rational”, then an anti-crappy law enforcement seems like it wouldn’t do something this twisted and society-disrupting.
Well, let’s say that in the great-grandparent by crappy I meant “not instrumentally rational for its own (stated) goals (i.e. enforcing the law)”, and then I replied to myself pointing out that what’s not instrumentally rational for its own stated goals can still be instrumentally rational for the goals of humanity.
If you’ve never never been arrested, you’re too law-breaking. #umeshumeshisms
Failure doesn’t imply risk. You can fail at challenging your friends to seemingly impossible debates or thinking of solutions to seemingly impossible problems. If you fail at those, you’ve lost nothing—the time is a valid investment in intellectual development. Have you never tried to solve a problem that seems impossible, Eliezer?
Try it. It’s a blast.
Now that you mention it.
Ooh. I like it. Thanks. Say, do you know if Eliezer has posed any impossible challenges to the group? It would be REALLY fun to solve them as a team. (:
Edit: I made one.
I agree. However, I would question the wisdom of such actions. Depends on your risk tolerance, of course.
And I would add that “if you keep running into unexpected failure modes, you are not doing your homework.”
Yes, I have a pretty high risk tolerance. I have a strong desire to have as large of an impact in the world as I can. I am also quite optimistic that I will succeed in doing interesting and impressive things if I keep trying, because I think I’m in a position of having a lot of the right resources and the correct mindset for success.
I try to assess what I actually need to stay safe, and make sure I have that, and then play big beyond that. Living in a 1st world country at this point in time, I don’t think my life is in danger nearly as much as the lizard aspects of my mind like to tell me. I try to evaluate as logically as I can about risk, with the knowledge that people are much more motivated to avoid pain than pursue pleasure, and making conscious corrections for this - I aim to maximize utility as accurately as I can.
Agreed about running into unexpected failure modes repeatedly being a red flag. I like strategies with high payoff potentials, which often have high likelihood of failure in expected ways. However, there are often a lot of positive externalities to trying and failing, so the likelihood of getting positive utility is much higher than that of success of what I am specifically attempting.
For example, I have already gotten a very interesting email from someone who is considering offering me an opportunity that I am excited about as a result of this article, although it is yet to be seen if any businesses will actually be created or improved.
Oooh. That’s a more direct assumption. Let’s scrutinize this:
Do you agree with any of the following, if so, which ones:
There is a limit to the amount of problem-solving effort that life demands of people.
People are always able to predict which problems they’re going to have in advance.
There is a limit to the complexity of problems and it happens to match human limitations.
Diligent people are in some way protected from other people’s problems spilling over onto them.
That expecting a problem will automatically guarantee it gets solved (that the resources will always be available, that multiple other problems won’t rob you of the necessities to solve upcoming disasters in advance).
If you disagree with even one of those statements, why do you assume that if a person is presented with multiple quagmires, they didn’t do their homework? This is reality and reality doesn’t care about you. Life may give you problems more complex than you can figure out, other people’s problems will create problems for you, sometimes life gives you more problems than you can process at once, nobody sees everything coming, and even when you do see something coming, nothing guarantees you’ll have the resources to stop it.
If you know all of this, why do you say such things?
Thank you for understanding. (:
Do you ever play at trying to do things that appear to be impossible?
I certainly am much more optimistic about odds than a lot of people on certain topics. For example, the odds I give of at least one successful business happening because of something in this post are quite divergent from the person who placed odds the other direction, who is someone whose intelligence I respect a lot.
Given the divergent opinions, I asked him to make predictions for several different specific/measurable outcomes for various scenarios, and we discussed what updates that he’d make to his belief system if the results are as I predict.
I highly recommend doing this—if people commit to updates based on probability they assign before hindsight bias, the updates are much more extreme than they otherwise would be; the updates might not happen much at all without the person really getting clear about how much they disagree ahead of time.
As the saying goes, intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.
If you solve an urgent problem, you are a hero; if you anticipate a problem before it becomes urgent, you are a troublemaker.
Dark Arts For Career Growth variant:
Mention all problems anticipated with p>.5. Do nothing more than simply mentioning them, if questioned claimed you don’t know what could be done about them. Once problems happen, reveal that you knew it all along, and that now, having seen it happen, a flash of genius tells you how to resolve it immediately and prevent it from happening again.
I’ve seen this pattern in use. The Darth deliberately waits for the problem to happen, ready to be the first to jump on it (and its low-cost solution). Sometimes, they even subtly try to nudge things towards the problem happening. Even if there are lives at stake.
If you can anticipate problems your company can’t, in addition to career growth you can also make extra money: create a new company that will fix this kind of problem and when the time comes, recommend it as a solution. Repeat if necessary.
(This may be technically illegal, but the fixing company may technically belong to someone else than you.)
I just realized, this might actually have been intended as being in support to me, not a continuation of shminux’s line of thought. I don’t know why I interpreted it that way in hindsight. Maybe it was that I had a 6 hour night of sleep the night before. Sorry if I misinterpreted.
I like this comment enough that I’ve decided to make it into an article. So that there aren’t multiple copies of the same information, I have removed it.
Downvoted for unwarranted presumptions and incoherent ranting.
I’ll try another approach. You said:
“BS detector going off like crazy… To start, have you learned to not get into quagmires in the first place?”
Challenge me directly. Don’t imply that you’re assuming that I got myself into those quagmires and then down-vote me for my completely warranted presumption that you’re assuming that the quagmires were my own fault. You want to tell me you think I probably brought all the quagmires onto myself? Do it. And support your point.
This person saying that their BS detector is going off is actually very useful for people reading and not something that I personally want to discourage. When one person says something like this, there are usually many who are thinking it and not saying it.
It takes courage and effort to actually say—this person is giving feedback, knowing that it will likely cause a negative backlash. It is very valuable when people step into the fire like that. While it is easier to respond to when people package their feedback in kind ways, giving feedback at all is a gift.
So, what do you want?
If you want to learn how to not set off the BS detectors of people like this, this person has just offered you information, and would likely be willing to unpack more if responded to with curiosity. I would imagine that would be much more valuable to you personally than winning an argument, and if you express curiosity and hear the other person out, they’ll be more likely to be interested in and listen to your points as well.
For examples of my walking my talk, here are a couple of cases where someone said something critical of the goals I’m shooting for, and I thanked them and asked the to elaborate:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/e26/who_wants_to_start_an_important_startup/77e3 This post is about starting start-ups, and her comment discusses reasons why it might be a bad idea. I easily could have gotten defensive and argued with her. What I did instead was to recognized that a lot of people have similar doubts, and to thank her for expressing those doubts and trying despite them, validating that she was trying despite her concerns—my hope was to encourage more people with similar concerns.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/e26/who_wants_to_start_an_important_startup/78ij This is another example of someone talking on this post I started with the goal of starting start-ups, about how most start ups fail. Also in this case, I expressed gratitude, and it gave the the chance to elaborate a response to concerns that many people have, without invalidating the concern.
Also, as noted in the comments on that second link, I had several people give me very harsh feedback while I was in the process of writing this post. As an example, a friend predicted:
“No startup cofounder at any point in the future will say that their ideas were partially inspired by this post, unless it’s an extremely distant relation. To a first approximation, nothing happens.”
Largely because of the training I’ve had in how to deal with negative feedback, I did not get (very ;) defensive, and I quizzed these people about what I could do that would give the post the best chance of working. I do think it is because of my doing this, and these people being kind enough to give me their honest feedback even though they were concerned about what my reactions might be, that this post has been as successful as it has been. Its early yet to see if start-ups succeed, but I know of several people taking initial steps, and I’m optimistic that these discussions that are happening will have positive impact on a lot of people.
I do:
Please critique
You had a good point in your suggestion so I changed my “100% good” statement.
Oops sorry.
You’re going against the grain—not a bad thing but it means you’re going to have to really lay out your reasons if you want to change the way the wind is blowing. Elaborate, please.
I invite brutal honesty on everything I wrote there.
I intentionally picked examples dated prior to your post. Usually I would not bother to justify myself like this but I’ve decided that I like you.
Of course there are times when I disagree, also, and will continue to disagree until somebody gets somewhere or the discussion is lost to the sands of time. But I will not continue disagreement I don’t see a way to make the disagreement constructive. If I don’t think that it’s likely for me to get through to a person, I will choose my battles with them.
Shannon, thank you. I see what you’re trying to do here. However, in this particular case, I don’t feel the criticism is getting anyone anywhere. Shminux is essentially jumping to conclusions. Hearing them out is not going to change the fact that Shminux is jumping to conclusions, and it won’t convince me of anything. I hold myself to higher standards than that—I won’t allow myself to jump to conclusions with new people, so I don’t do like Shminux does and I do not particularly want to learn this jumping to conclusions technique. In hindsight, I saw that it’s probably a common bias. If you hadn’t noticed, I changed my wording a long time ago. I tried to point out Shminux’s bias once. That didn’t work. I liked my attempt, so I saved it for later. If getting a person to be aware of their bias doesn’t work, I move on. I see policing Shminux’s biased perceptions as Shminux’s responsibility. I tried it once, which was nice of me. I shouldn’t have to do it for them.
If you think there’s something I could learn here other than “Shminux is biased, which is a sign that other people might have the same bias, so it’s best not to trigger that particular bias.” then you’re going to have to be really clear because it does not look to me like there is any further to learn from Shminux’s comment.