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.
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.