Of the posts I’ve delayed writing for years, I maybe regret this one the most.
I think more people (x-risk focused people in particular) should consider becoming (and hiring) metacognitive assistants. This is the single largest performance boost I know of – hire someone to sit with you and help you think. It doesn’t help me (much) when I’m at my peak, but I’m not at my peak most of the time.
There are four types of assistants I’m tracking so far:
Body Doubles
Metacognitive Assistants
Tutors
Partners/Apprentices
Body doubles just sit in the room with you, periodically looking at your screen, and maybe saying “hey, do you endorse being on facebook?”. They’re a kind of brute force willpower aid. The person I know who uses them the most (Alex Altair) has them just sit in the same room (I believe while doing pomodoros, each of them working on different things). He guesses that they 2x his productivity (which is around what I’ve gotten)
A metacognitive assistant is a step beyond, where they are dedicating their attention to you, noticing when you are getting stuck, and gently intervening. (I assume people vary in how they like to be intervened on, but for people doing nuanced cognitive work, I think not disrupting someone’s thought process is very important. You need to feel safe with a metacognitive assistant). My experience is that this is a 1.5x to 2x multiplier on my output.
The next two types are both more involved than Metacognitive Assistants, but in different ways.
Tutors pay attention to you, but are particularly modeling how you are approaching a particular skill (programming, math, etc). They notice when you seem to be tackling the skill in a confused or inefficient way, and ask questions about your thought process so as to figure out what subskills or concepts you need to develop.
Partners or apprentices are full on “pairing” – they actively collaborate with you on your task. Hiring a partner/apprentice is a very hard task, it requires tons of chemistry and intellectual compatibility, so it’s not really a shortcut to anything, but if you find the right person it seems great.
(John Wentworth says his research partner David Lorell multiplied his productivity by 3x, largely by raising John’s floor performance. His earlier estimates were higher, and he says the current 3x takes into account that the trend of value-estimate has been downward. He does flag that the reduction-in-value-estimate included “dealing with some burnout” at times when he ended up pushing himself harder than he’d have naturally done if working on his own. He’s since iterated on how to deal with that).
This post is mostly focused on Metacognitive Assistants, because I think they a) require some upfront investment to turn into a functioning niche of the rationalsphere (moreso than body doubles), b) feel achievable to scale up (whereas Tutors/Partners are both pretty advanced roles).
Pricing here varies wildly. I believe Alex Altair mostly hires UC Berkeley grad students for ~$15/hr, I’ve worked with people in more dedicated Metacognitive Assistant roles for $40-$80/hr depending on circumstances. Research assistants and tutors are probably much more bespoke.
Executive Assistants
I’m contrasting “Thinking Assistants” with “Executive Assistants.” They do involve many of the same skillsets. I see executive assistants’ job as a) handling your general metacognition across all the domains other than your core competency, and often handling various other personal-or-professional tasks that free up your time to focus on your core competency.
I think executive assistants are also great, and maybe they should blend with the Thinking Assistant role, since you realistically don’t need a Thinking Assistant all the time and do need this other stuff dealt with and they probably collectively are worth one fulltime hire. But it is a different job.
Core Skills of a Metacognitive Assistant
I assume people will vary in what works for them. But, what I want out of a Thinking Assistant is:
By default, be quietly but visibly attentive.
Every now and then (~5-10 minutes, or when I look actively distracted), briefly check in (where if I’m in-the-zone, this might just be a brief “Are you focused on what you mean to be?” from them, and a nod or “yeah” from me).
When I need to think something through, they rubber duck (i.e. listen as I talk out loud about it, and ask clarifying questions)
Build a model of my thought process (partly by me explaining it to them, partly by observing, partly by asking questions)
Ideally, notice when my thought process seems confused/disoriented/inefficient.
Ideally, have a large repertoire of cognitive tools they can suggest if I seem to be missing them. (Robin Goins, one of the people I’ve hired in this capacity, at some point said “I notice you’re not writing things down while you think. How intentional is that?” and it was one of the more important life-upgrades I got, via expanding my working memory).
Intelligent enough that they can pretty easily understand the gist of what I’m working on.
Ability to pick things up from context so I don’t need to explain things in too much detail.
Ideally, when my bottlenecks are emotional, also be at least fairly emotionally attuned (i.e. project a vibe that helps me worth through it, or at least doesn’t add extra friction or emotional labor demands from me), and ideally, basically be a competent therapist.
In general, own the metacognition. i.e. be taking responsibility for keeping track of things, both on a minute-to-minute timescale, and the day-to-day or week-to-week timescale.
Ability to get out of the way / quickly drop things if it doesn’t turn out to be what I need, without it being a big deal.
There are also important outside-the-container skillsets, such as:
Be responsive in communication, so that it’s easy to schedule with them. If it’s too much of a pain to schedule, it kinda defeats the point.
Potentially: proactively check in remotely during periods where I’m not actively hiring them. i.e. be a professional accountability buddy, maybe paid some base rate to briefly check in each day, with the ability to upsell into “okay today is a day that requires bigger metacognitive guns than Raemon has at the moment”)
Even the minimum bar (i.e. “attentive body double”) here is a surprisingly skilled position. It requires gentleness/unobtrusiveness, attentiveness, a good vibe.
A thing that feels a bit silly to me is that this isn’t something I’ve been able to make work very well at Lightcone with other Lightcone employees. Sometimes we actively pair on tasks and that works well. But, our hiring process sort of filters for ornery opinionatedness, which is kinda the opposite of what you want here. I think even the simplest version of this is a specialized role.
The skill ceiling, meanwhile, seems quite high. The most skilled versions of this are the sort of therapist or executive coach who would charge hundreds of dollars an hour. The sort of person who is really good at this tends to quickly find their ambitions outgrowing the role (same with good executive assistants, unfortunately).
Pitfalls
Common problems I’ve run into:
Having trouble scheduling with people. If you want to specialize in this role, it’s often important for people to contact you on a short timeline (i.e. I might notice I’m in a brainfoggy state and want someone to assist me like right now, or tomorrow), so, having a communication channel you check regularly so people can ping you about a job.
Asking questions in a way that is annoying instead of helpful. Since the point is to be giving me more time, if I have to spend too much time explaining the situation to someone, it undoes the value of it. This requires either them being good at picking things up quickly without much explanation, or good at reading nonverbal cues that the current thread isn’t worth it and we should move on.
Spending too much time on unhelpful advice. Sometimes an assistant will have ideas that don’t work out, and maybe push them more than appropriate. There’s a delicate balance here because sometimes I am being avoidant or something and need advice outside of my usual wheelhouse, but generally if advice isn’t feeling helpful, I think the assistant should back off and observe more and try to have a few other hypotheses about what to suggest if they feel that the assistee is missing something.
Navigating weird dynamics around “having someone entirely optimized to help another person.” Having this run smoothly, in a net helpful way, means having to actually be prioritizing my needs/goals in a way that would normally be pretty rude. If I constantly feel like there’s social awkwardness / wariness about whether I’m making them feel bad, the whole thing is probably net negative. I think doing a good job of navigating this requires some nuance/emotional-skill on both parties, in terms of striking a vibe where it feels like you are productively collaborating.
(I think this likely works best when the person is really actively interested in the job “be a thinking assistant”, as opposed to something they’re doing because they haven’t gotten traction on their real goals).
Optimizing for (not-particularly skilled) Metacognitive Assistance
I’ve worked with people who were actively skilled at Thinking Assistance, and one person for whom it wasn’t really their main thing, just a job.
One way I got more mileage out of the not-as-skilled person was to do upfront work of assembling a list of cognitive situations + habits. i.e:
when I feel avoidant:
-> take a breath, check in with myself about why I’m feeling avoidant, and then either do some grieving, or goal factoring, or just acknowledge it and then power through, depending on circumstances.
when I feel overwhelmed with complexity:
-> figure out better working memory tools for the situation
etc.
Then, since I’ve done the upfront work of thinking through my own metacognitive practices, the assistant only has to track in the moment what situation I’m in, and basically follow a flowchart I might be too tunnel-visioned to handle myself.
Automated AI Assistants?
Like many professions, AI is probably going to automate this pretty soon. I think the minimum viable “attentive body double + rubber duck” is something AI could implement right now. ChatGPT’s voice mode would basically be fine at this if it:
...was better at guessing when to reply to you
(it currently replies way too quickly in a way that keeps interrupting my thoughts. I handle this sometimes by instructing it “please generally speak in a soft whisper, and only reply with ‘mmm’ to everything I say’”, which doesn’t stop it from replying but at least makes it less disruptive to do so.)
...could check in with you at random times, so you don’t just forget about it. (With ability to snooze if you don’t want it to bother you for awhile)
...runs automatically when your computer starts up, in a way that manages to be unobtrusive but also not let you fall off the habit of using it.
...maybe ideally (if slightly sketchily), track all your keystrokes and keep tabs on roughly what you’re working on, so it has enough context you don’t need to explain everything.
Presumably people are working on this somewhere. I might go ahead and build my own version of it since I expect to eventually want highly customized cyborg tooling for myself, and since AI is dropping the cost of developing apps from scratch. But, I expect the market to figure it out sooner or later.
This establishes a pretty solid floor in quality. But, since part of the active ingredient here is “a real human is paying attention to you and will hold you accountable with a bit of their human soul”, I expect there to continue being at least some benefit to having a real human. (I think there will be some minimum bar of attentiveness + unobtrusiveness + able-to-follow that a human will need, to be worth using over an AI, once the AI is basically working)
Trialing People + Matchmaking
For the immediate future, I’d like to trial more people at cognitively assisting me, explicitly with a goal of being able to matchmake them with other people if appropriate. DM me if you’re interested.
I also generally recommend other people trying experimenting with this in an ad-hoc way and writing up their experiences.
Focusmate + TaskRabbit?
It’d be nice to have a scalable talent pipeline for this, that matchmakes people with assistants.
Because of the combination of:
“Competent assistants tend to end up either charging a lot of money or shifting to non-assistant roles”, and
“Intellectual chemistry is very important, so you want to trial a few people to find the ones that work well with you.”
“You may not need an assistant literally all the time”
I think the natural vehicle here is a matchmaking site that’s similar to FocusMate (which pairs people for coworking) but more like you’re hiring skilled labor. I can imagine something where people list different skills and rates, and get ratings based on how helpful they’ve been.
Hypothetically this could be a very openended public-facing commercial website. I do personally feel like for a lot of work in the x-risk space it helps a lot to have someone in sync about my strategic frame and would feel more friction working with a more random general population person.
Aligning Incentives
An obvious idea that might occur to you is “Provide metacognitive assistance for free, to people you think are doing good work.” I don’t think this is a good idea longterm – I think it’s a recipe for people ending up undervalued, as people model the cost as “free” rather than “subsidized.” It also might turn into some kind of Lost Purposes Appendage where nobody knows how to evaluate either the research or the thinking-assistance and it gets propped up (or not) depending on how flush-with-funding the EAcosystem is this particular year.
I feel more optimistic about “the ecosystem overall figures out how much work various people’s work is worth via various evaluation / grantmaking processes”, and then people pay for metacognitive assistance if it’s actually worth it.
Overall, this is one of the highest effect sizes I know of for productivity (up there with “get medication for your depression”, “get a more motivating job” and “get enough sleep”). It is admittedly not cheap – $800/week at the cheap end if fulltime, and sort of unboundedly expensive at the higher end. (Modulo “maybe someone can build a good AI for this”).
If you go this route – remember to keep track of whether you’re overworking yourself. My current model is most people can in fact work more hours than they can motivate themselves to while working alone, but John’s and my experience is that it’s at least possible to overdo it if you’re not careful.
Hire (or become) a Thinking Assistant / Body Double
Of the posts I’ve delayed writing for years, I maybe regret this one the most.
I think more people (x-risk focused people in particular) should consider becoming (and hiring) metacognitive assistants. This is the single largest performance boost I know of – hire someone to sit with you and help you think. It doesn’t help me (much) when I’m at my peak, but I’m not at my peak most of the time.
There are four types of assistants I’m tracking so far:
Body Doubles
Metacognitive Assistants
Tutors
Partners/Apprentices
Body doubles just sit in the room with you, periodically looking at your screen, and maybe saying “hey, do you endorse being on facebook?”. They’re a kind of brute force willpower aid. The person I know who uses them the most (Alex Altair) has them just sit in the same room (I believe while doing pomodoros, each of them working on different things). He guesses that they 2x his productivity (which is around what I’ve gotten)
A metacognitive assistant is a step beyond, where they are dedicating their attention to you, noticing when you are getting stuck, and gently intervening. (I assume people vary in how they like to be intervened on, but for people doing nuanced cognitive work, I think not disrupting someone’s thought process is very important. You need to feel safe with a metacognitive assistant). My experience is that this is a 1.5x to 2x multiplier on my output.
The next two types are both more involved than Metacognitive Assistants, but in different ways.
Tutors pay attention to you, but are particularly modeling how you are approaching a particular skill (programming, math, etc). They notice when you seem to be tackling the skill in a confused or inefficient way, and ask questions about your thought process so as to figure out what subskills or concepts you need to develop.
Partners or apprentices are full on “pairing” – they actively collaborate with you on your task. Hiring a partner/apprentice is a very hard task, it requires tons of chemistry and intellectual compatibility, so it’s not really a shortcut to anything, but if you find the right person it seems great.
(John Wentworth says his research partner David Lorell multiplied his productivity by 3x, largely by raising John’s floor performance. His earlier estimates were higher, and he says the current 3x takes into account that the trend of value-estimate has been downward. He does flag that the reduction-in-value-estimate included “dealing with some burnout” at times when he ended up pushing himself harder than he’d have naturally done if working on his own. He’s since iterated on how to deal with that).
This post is mostly focused on Metacognitive Assistants, because I think they a) require some upfront investment to turn into a functioning niche of the rationalsphere (moreso than body doubles), b) feel achievable to scale up (whereas Tutors/Partners are both pretty advanced roles).
Pricing here varies wildly. I believe Alex Altair mostly hires UC Berkeley grad students for ~$15/hr, I’ve worked with people in more dedicated Metacognitive Assistant roles for $40-$80/hr depending on circumstances. Research assistants and tutors are probably much more bespoke.
Executive Assistants
I’m contrasting “Thinking Assistants” with “Executive Assistants.” They do involve many of the same skillsets. I see executive assistants’ job as a) handling your general metacognition across all the domains other than your core competency, and often handling various other personal-or-professional tasks that free up your time to focus on your core competency.
I think executive assistants are also great, and maybe they should blend with the Thinking Assistant role, since you realistically don’t need a Thinking Assistant all the time and do need this other stuff dealt with and they probably collectively are worth one fulltime hire. But it is a different job.
Core Skills of a Metacognitive Assistant
I assume people will vary in what works for them. But, what I want out of a Thinking Assistant is:
By default, be quietly but visibly attentive.
Every now and then (~5-10 minutes, or when I look actively distracted), briefly check in (where if I’m in-the-zone, this might just be a brief “Are you focused on what you mean to be?” from them, and a nod or “yeah” from me).
When I need to think something through, they rubber duck (i.e. listen as I talk out loud about it, and ask clarifying questions)
Build a model of my thought process (partly by me explaining it to them, partly by observing, partly by asking questions)
Ideally, notice when my thought process seems confused/disoriented/inefficient.
Ideally, have a large repertoire of cognitive tools they can suggest if I seem to be missing them. (Robin Goins, one of the people I’ve hired in this capacity, at some point said “I notice you’re not writing things down while you think. How intentional is that?” and it was one of the more important life-upgrades I got, via expanding my working memory).
Intelligent enough that they can pretty easily understand the gist of what I’m working on.
Ability to pick things up from context so I don’t need to explain things in too much detail.
Ideally, when my bottlenecks are emotional, also be at least fairly emotionally attuned (i.e. project a vibe that helps me worth through it, or at least doesn’t add extra friction or emotional labor demands from me), and ideally, basically be a competent therapist.
In general, own the metacognition. i.e. be taking responsibility for keeping track of things, both on a minute-to-minute timescale, and the day-to-day or week-to-week timescale.
Ability to get out of the way / quickly drop things if it doesn’t turn out to be what I need, without it being a big deal.
There are also important outside-the-container skillsets, such as:
Be responsive in communication, so that it’s easy to schedule with them. If it’s too much of a pain to schedule, it kinda defeats the point.
Potentially: proactively check in remotely during periods where I’m not actively hiring them. i.e. be a professional accountability buddy, maybe paid some base rate to briefly check in each day, with the ability to upsell into “okay today is a day that requires bigger metacognitive guns than Raemon has at the moment”)
Even the minimum bar (i.e. “attentive body double”) here is a surprisingly skilled position. It requires gentleness/unobtrusiveness, attentiveness, a good vibe.
A thing that feels a bit silly to me is that this isn’t something I’ve been able to make work very well at Lightcone with other Lightcone employees. Sometimes we actively pair on tasks and that works well. But, our hiring process sort of filters for ornery opinionatedness, which is kinda the opposite of what you want here. I think even the simplest version of this is a specialized role.
The skill ceiling, meanwhile, seems quite high. The most skilled versions of this are the sort of therapist or executive coach who would charge hundreds of dollars an hour. The sort of person who is really good at this tends to quickly find their ambitions outgrowing the role (same with good executive assistants, unfortunately).
Pitfalls
Common problems I’ve run into:
Having trouble scheduling with people. If you want to specialize in this role, it’s often important for people to contact you on a short timeline (i.e. I might notice I’m in a brainfoggy state and want someone to assist me like right now, or tomorrow), so, having a communication channel you check regularly so people can ping you about a job.
Asking questions in a way that is annoying instead of helpful. Since the point is to be giving me more time, if I have to spend too much time explaining the situation to someone, it undoes the value of it. This requires either them being good at picking things up quickly without much explanation, or good at reading nonverbal cues that the current thread isn’t worth it and we should move on.
Spending too much time on unhelpful advice. Sometimes an assistant will have ideas that don’t work out, and maybe push them more than appropriate. There’s a delicate balance here because sometimes I am being avoidant or something and need advice outside of my usual wheelhouse, but generally if advice isn’t feeling helpful, I think the assistant should back off and observe more and try to have a few other hypotheses about what to suggest if they feel that the assistee is missing something.
Navigating weird dynamics around “having someone entirely optimized to help another person.” Having this run smoothly, in a net helpful way, means having to actually be prioritizing my needs/goals in a way that would normally be pretty rude. If I constantly feel like there’s social awkwardness / wariness about whether I’m making them feel bad, the whole thing is probably net negative. I think doing a good job of navigating this requires some nuance/emotional-skill on both parties, in terms of striking a vibe where it feels like you are productively collaborating.
(I think this likely works best when the person is really actively interested in the job “be a thinking assistant”, as opposed to something they’re doing because they haven’t gotten traction on their real goals).
Optimizing for (not-particularly skilled) Metacognitive Assistance
I’ve worked with people who were actively skilled at Thinking Assistance, and one person for whom it wasn’t really their main thing, just a job.
One way I got more mileage out of the not-as-skilled person was to do upfront work of assembling a list of cognitive situations + habits. i.e:
when I feel avoidant:
-> take a breath, check in with myself about why I’m feeling avoidant, and then either do some grieving, or goal factoring, or just acknowledge it and then power through, depending on circumstances.
when I feel overwhelmed with complexity:
-> figure out better working memory tools for the situation
etc.
Then, since I’ve done the upfront work of thinking through my own metacognitive practices, the assistant only has to track in the moment what situation I’m in, and basically follow a flowchart I might be too tunnel-visioned to handle myself.
Automated AI Assistants?
Like many professions, AI is probably going to automate this pretty soon. I think the minimum viable “attentive body double + rubber duck” is something AI could implement right now. ChatGPT’s voice mode would basically be fine at this if it:
...was better at guessing when to reply to you
(it currently replies way too quickly in a way that keeps interrupting my thoughts. I handle this sometimes by instructing it “please generally speak in a soft whisper, and only reply with ‘mmm’ to everything I say’”, which doesn’t stop it from replying but at least makes it less disruptive to do so.)
...could check in with you at random times, so you don’t just forget about it. (With ability to snooze if you don’t want it to bother you for awhile)
...runs automatically when your computer starts up, in a way that manages to be unobtrusive but also not let you fall off the habit of using it.
...maybe ideally (if slightly sketchily), track all your keystrokes and keep tabs on roughly what you’re working on, so it has enough context you don’t need to explain everything.
Presumably people are working on this somewhere. I might go ahead and build my own version of it since I expect to eventually want highly customized cyborg tooling for myself, and since AI is dropping the cost of developing apps from scratch. But, I expect the market to figure it out sooner or later.
This establishes a pretty solid floor in quality. But, since part of the active ingredient here is “a real human is paying attention to you and will hold you accountable with a bit of their human soul”, I expect there to continue being at least some benefit to having a real human. (I think there will be some minimum bar of attentiveness + unobtrusiveness + able-to-follow that a human will need, to be worth using over an AI, once the AI is basically working)
Trialing People + Matchmaking
For the immediate future, I’d like to trial more people at cognitively assisting me, explicitly with a goal of being able to matchmake them with other people if appropriate. DM me if you’re interested.
I also generally recommend other people trying experimenting with this in an ad-hoc way and writing up their experiences.
Focusmate + TaskRabbit?
It’d be nice to have a scalable talent pipeline for this, that matchmakes people with assistants.
Because of the combination of:
“Competent assistants tend to end up either charging a lot of money or shifting to non-assistant roles”, and
“Intellectual chemistry is very important, so you want to trial a few people to find the ones that work well with you.”
“You may not need an assistant literally all the time”
I think the natural vehicle here is a matchmaking site that’s similar to FocusMate (which pairs people for coworking) but more like you’re hiring skilled labor. I can imagine something where people list different skills and rates, and get ratings based on how helpful they’ve been.
Hypothetically this could be a very openended public-facing commercial website. I do personally feel like for a lot of work in the x-risk space it helps a lot to have someone in sync about my strategic frame and would feel more friction working with a more random general population person.
Aligning Incentives
An obvious idea that might occur to you is “Provide metacognitive assistance for free, to people you think are doing good work.” I don’t think this is a good idea longterm – I think it’s a recipe for people ending up undervalued, as people model the cost as “free” rather than “subsidized.” It also might turn into some kind of Lost Purposes Appendage where nobody knows how to evaluate either the research or the thinking-assistance and it gets propped up (or not) depending on how flush-with-funding the EAcosystem is this particular year.
I feel more optimistic about “the ecosystem overall figures out how much work various people’s work is worth via various evaluation / grantmaking processes”, and then people pay for metacognitive assistance if it’s actually worth it.
Overall, this is one of the highest effect sizes I know of for productivity (up there with “get medication for your depression”, “get a more motivating job” and “get enough sleep”). It is admittedly not cheap – $800/week at the cheap end if fulltime, and sort of unboundedly expensive at the higher end. (Modulo “maybe someone can build a good AI for this”).
If you go this route – remember to keep track of whether you’re overworking yourself. My current model is most people can in fact work more hours than they can motivate themselves to while working alone, but John’s and my experience is that it’s at least possible to overdo it if you’re not careful.