I did a session yesterday with @moonlight, which went pretty well. I ended up consolidating some notes that seemed good to share with new assistants, and then he wrote the introduction he’d personally have preferred.
I generally work out of google docs that serve as shared-external-working-memory, with multiple tabs.
Moonlight’s Intro
[Written by the first thinking assistant working with Ray, writing here what I’d have liked to read first]
Important things:
Ray is currently sick, so put some effort into speaking more softly and slowly.
There is no interview or anything similar, you’ll begin assisting him straight away.
By default, just watch him work (coding/planning/writing/operations), and occasionally give signs you’re still attentive, without interrupting.
Write moment to moment observations which feel useful to you, as well as general thoughts, down in the Assistant Notes tab. This helps you feel more proactively involved and makes you focused on noticing patterns and ways in which you could be more useful as an assistant.
The Journal tab is for his plans and thoughts about what to generally do. Read it as an overview.
This Context tab is for generally useful information about what you should do and about relevant strategies and knowledge Ray has in mind. Reading this helps you get a more comprehensive view on what his ideal workflow looks like, and what your ideal contributions look like.
For the structure of this document:
Collapse sections when reading. It helps traverse the document.
This part has my thoughts for onboarding. Under it, you can find Ray’s onboarding section. Read these two first.
The “Ray Facts” section has important information about logistics and operations. Currently it has only his work location. [edited out in this comment]
In “Ray’s Metacognitive Engine” and below, you can find the strategies and knowledge I’ve mentioned above. You can read these after, they’re not mandatory at the very start.
Ray’s First Draft Intro Materials
Strategic Overview
Goal: End the acute risk period, and ensure a flourishing human future.
I’ve recently finished a bunch of grieving necessary to say “all right I’m ready to just level up into an Elon-Musk-but-with-empathy-and-cyborg-tools type”, as well as the minimum necessary pieces of a cognitive engine that (I think) is capable of doing so).
I want to be growing in capacity at an exponential rate, both in terms of my personal resources, and the resources available to the x-risk ecosystem that are accomplishing things I think need accomplishing.
This means having a number of resources that are compounding, that are synergistic, which include:
Money (either mine, or ability to spend Lightcone’s)
Skills
Meta personal skills, like ability to learn, and understand things, or be strategic
Meta interpersonal skills, such as the ability to outsource labor or make use of assistants,
Object level skills like programming, UI design, Event running
Ability to work with employees who can take on tasks I want done
Capital
Relationships with people I work well with
Tools I can re-use
Things I actually do most days:
Coding on LessWrong
Coding on random other projects
Planning my Cybercognition Agenda, which includes workshops, cybernetic tools, and upskilling people around me.
UI design, trying to figure out important complex things I want people to interact with in a way that feels simple to them.
Thinking strategically about what needs to be done next
Instructions for Thinking Assistants
Things I would like you to do:
By default, be quiet and attentive and just help me focus by being a real human who’s staring at me
Develop skills for tackling sort of arbitrary ops or research or coding tasks, such that I can outsource small things to you.
Advice
This is tricky because I have a good enough model of myself that a lot of advice isn’t that helpful. It’s still useful to have my blindspots pointed out. But, if I interrupt you (either with words or with a hand gesture) that probably means I want to move on to a different thread. (Ideally, you feel comfortable bringing up ideas, with no hard feelings if it doesn’t work out)
I would like to end up with a series of if-then habits you can help me execute. I will mostly write these myself, but as you get to know me well enough to say useful things, you can make suggested-edits
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.
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.
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).
Ray’s Metacognitive Engine
Twice a day, asking “what is the most important thing I could be working on and why aren’t I on track to deal with it?”
you probably want a more specific question (“important thing” is too vague). Three example specific questions (but, don’t be a slave to any specific operationalization)
what is the most important uncertainty I could be reducing, and how can I reduce it fastest?
what’s the most important resource bottleneck I can gain, or contribute to the ecosystem, and would gain me that resource the fastest?
what’s the most important goal I’m backchaining from?
Have a mechanism to iterate on your habits that you use every day, and frequently update in response to new information
for me, this is daily prompts and weekly prompts, which are:
optimized for being the efficient metacognition I obviously want to do each day
include one skill that I want to level up in, that I can do in the morning as part of the meta-orienting (such as operationalizing predictions, or “think it faster”, or whatever specific thing I want to learn to attend to or execute better right now)
The five requirements each fortnight:
be backchaining
from the most important goals
be forward chaining
through tractable things that compound
ship something
to users every fortnight
be wholesome
(that is, do not minmax in a way that will predictably fail later)
spend 10% on meta (more if you’re Ray in particular but not during working hours. During working hours on workdays, meta should pay for itself within a week)
Correlates:
have a clear, written model of what you’re backchaining from
have a clear, written model of how you’re compounding
The general problem solving approach:
breadth first
identify cruxes
connect inner-sim to cruxes / predictions
follow your heart
see how your predictions went
Random ass skills
napping
managing working memory, innovating and applying on working memory tools
grieving
Generalizing
Skill I’m working on that hasn’t paid off yet but I believe in:
At least once a day or so, when you notice a mistake or surprise, spent a couple minutes asking “how could I have thought that faster” (and periodically do deeper dives)
each day/week, figure out what you’re confused or predictably going to tackle in a dumb way, and think in advance about how to be smart about it the first time
I did a session yesterday with @moonlight, which went pretty well. I ended up consolidating some notes that seemed good to share with new assistants, and then he wrote the introduction he’d personally have preferred.
I generally work out of google docs that serve as shared-external-working-memory, with multiple tabs.
Moonlight’s Intro
[Written by the first thinking assistant working with Ray, writing here what I’d have liked to read first]
Important things:
Ray is currently sick, so put some effort into speaking more softly and slowly.
There is no interview or anything similar, you’ll begin assisting him straight away.
By default, just watch him work (coding/planning/writing/operations), and occasionally give signs you’re still attentive, without interrupting.
Write moment to moment observations which feel useful to you, as well as general thoughts, down in the Assistant Notes tab. This helps you feel more proactively involved and makes you focused on noticing patterns and ways in which you could be more useful as an assistant.
The Journal tab is for his plans and thoughts about what to generally do. Read it as an overview.
This Context tab is for generally useful information about what you should do and about relevant strategies and knowledge Ray has in mind. Reading this helps you get a more comprehensive view on what his ideal workflow looks like, and what your ideal contributions look like.
For the structure of this document:
Collapse sections when reading. It helps traverse the document.
This part has my thoughts for onboarding. Under it, you can find Ray’s onboarding section. Read these two first.
The “Ray Facts” section has important information about logistics and operations. Currently it has only his work location. [edited out in this comment]
In “Ray’s Metacognitive Engine” and below, you can find the strategies and knowledge I’ve mentioned above. You can read these after, they’re not mandatory at the very start.
Ray’s First Draft Intro Materials
Strategic Overview
Goal: End the acute risk period, and ensure a flourishing human future.
I’ve recently finished a bunch of grieving necessary to say “all right I’m ready to just level up into an Elon-Musk-but-with-empathy-and-cyborg-tools type”, as well as the minimum necessary pieces of a cognitive engine that (I think) is capable of doing so).
I want to be growing in capacity at an exponential rate, both in terms of my personal resources, and the resources available to the x-risk ecosystem that are accomplishing things I think need accomplishing.
This means having a number of resources that are compounding, that are synergistic, which include:
Money (either mine, or ability to spend Lightcone’s)
Skills
Meta personal skills, like ability to learn, and understand things, or be strategic
Meta interpersonal skills, such as the ability to outsource labor or make use of assistants,
Object level skills like programming, UI design, Event running
Ability to work with employees who can take on tasks I want done
Capital
Relationships with people I work well with
Tools I can re-use
Things I actually do most days:
Coding on LessWrong
Coding on random other projects
Planning my Cybercognition Agenda, which includes workshops, cybernetic tools, and upskilling people around me.
UI design, trying to figure out important complex things I want people to interact with in a way that feels simple to them.
Thinking strategically about what needs to be done next
Instructions for Thinking Assistants
Things I would like you to do:
By default, be quiet and attentive and just help me focus by being a real human who’s staring at me
Develop skills for tackling sort of arbitrary ops or research or coding tasks, such that I can outsource small things to you.
Advice
This is tricky because I have a good enough model of myself that a lot of advice isn’t that helpful. It’s still useful to have my blindspots pointed out. But, if I interrupt you (either with words or with a hand gesture) that probably means I want to move on to a different thread. (Ideally, you feel comfortable bringing up ideas, with no hard feelings if it doesn’t work out)
I would like to end up with a series of if-then habits you can help me execute. I will mostly write these myself, but as you get to know me well enough to say useful things, you can make suggested-edits
From “Hire or become a Thinking Assistant”
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.
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.
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).
Ray’s Metacognitive Engine
Twice a day, asking “what is the most important thing I could be working on and why aren’t I on track to deal with it?”
you probably want a more specific question (“important thing” is too vague). Three example specific questions (but, don’t be a slave to any specific operationalization)
what is the most important uncertainty I could be reducing, and how can I reduce it fastest?
what’s the most important resource bottleneck I can gain, or contribute to the ecosystem, and would gain me that resource the fastest?
what’s the most important goal I’m backchaining from?
Have a mechanism to iterate on your habits that you use every day, and frequently update in response to new information
for me, this is daily prompts and weekly prompts, which are:
optimized for being the efficient metacognition I obviously want to do each day
include one skill that I want to level up in, that I can do in the morning as part of the meta-orienting (such as operationalizing predictions, or “think it faster”, or whatever specific thing I want to learn to attend to or execute better right now)
The five requirements each fortnight:
be backchaining
from the most important goals
be forward chaining
through tractable things that compound
ship something
to users every fortnight
be wholesome
(that is, do not minmax in a way that will predictably fail later)
spend 10% on meta (more if you’re Ray in particular but not during working hours. During working hours on workdays, meta should pay for itself within a week)
Correlates:
have a clear, written model of what you’re backchaining from
have a clear, written model of how you’re compounding
The general problem solving approach:
breadth first
identify cruxes
connect inner-sim to cruxes / predictions
follow your heart
see how your predictions went
Random ass skills
napping
managing working memory, innovating and applying on working memory tools
grieving
Generalizing
Skill I’m working on that hasn’t paid off yet but I believe in:
At least once a day or so, when you notice a mistake or surprise, spent a couple minutes asking “how could I have thought that faster” (and periodically do deeper dives)
each day/week, figure out what you’re confused or predictably going to tackle in a dumb way, and think in advance about how to be smart about it the first time