I’ve never played or watched any competitive sport, and I haven’t played a lot of competitive games either. I did play NetHack quite a bit though. Maybe that’s a good substitute?
More seriously, these days I think of competition as more of a problem than a solution. Some of the most important x-risks (e.g., advanced AI) are x-risks mainly because of competitive dynamics. If people weren’t competing for the prestige/power/money of being first to create AGI or to make advances in AI in general, we’d be able to solve AI safety problems at leisure.
It’s also not clear that it’s a good idea to push people to be more competitive or to try to climb hierarchies, on the current margin. I attribute my abilitytorecognizeimportantproblems earlier than most people in part to a distaste for competition and climbing hierarchies. I feel like both myself and the world would be worse off if I had just been someone trying to climb the standard hierarchies in academia or industry. The world seems to have plenty of people trying to compete in the traditional arenas. Don’t we actually want more people to look for important problems that don’t have any established competitive hierarchies built around them yet?
This is a good point. In fact, I wrote an essay for Ribbonfarm about avoiding competition where you can, such as in education, careers, and dating.
This is not a contradiction. This post is about building *traits* that let you be competitive. That’s why sports is the best place to learn them: it’s a very benign and rule-bound form of competition, very unlike cutthroat politics, academia, AI startups etc. Building skills that allow you to compete doesn’t mean you have to seek out zero-sum contests to grind your life away at, but it does mean that you won’t get scared away from a field if it becomes competitive and starts forming a hierarchy. It lets you choose where to compete.
Example: MIRI can work on AI safety at its leisure because it successfully competed for a high rank in the hierarchy of EA organizations. MIRI has to compete for donations and employees, and sportsmanship values let it do so without destroying other EA orgs along the way.
I am currently getting a Page Not Found response from Putanumonit through that link. It seems that the link includes ” avoiding competition where you can” in the address, but shortening it back to winning-is-for-losers works.
Where are we going to learn coordination from? It won’t be from our community; no one has those any more. It won’t be from academics or employment, both of which only serve to drive home how much working in groups really sucks and how much better it would be if we never had to do that.
The list of things which involve working on a team and are not straight misery is very short. At the moment I can come up with nothing that isn’t competitive.
This is bothering me. I’m going to have to give it a full five minutes somewhere over the weekend.
The list of things which involve working on a team and are not straight misery is very short. At the moment I can come up with nothing that isn’t competitive.
Marriage and a family, if you do it right. Spouses have very aligned incentives, along with the added bonus of sexual attraction and outside expectations of working together. It’s tragic when couples turn marriage from cooperation to competition, but it’s not at all inevitable.
I agree that marriage and a family are great cooperative endeavors, but I am deeply skeptical it is a good idea to learn coordination after getting married. My marriage is great, and my wife and I both put down the lion’s share of the difference between our experience and that of others to being specific about coordinating and being on the same team about everything. It really helps to have these concepts ready to work with before jumping in.
I would be interested to hear more about this. Can you perhaps describe the most important concepts/skills for cooperation/coordination in a post, as well as the benefits that come from having learned them? E.g., what does a family that has mastered them look like, compared to one that hasn’t? I understand that reading about the concepts/skills isn’t a substitute for having some place to practice them but it would be better than nothing?
This is an interesting question. It makes me wonder if I missed something important by not playing a team sport or something of that nature, but at the same time I’m somewhat skeptical that the coordination skills you learn from those places would transfer to more productive activities. Do you have anything further to say about this, or want to suggest some articles or blog posts on the topic?
I’m going to have to give it a full five minutes somewhere over the weekend.
Disclaimer: did not do 5 minutes by the clock. Did do 10-15 minutes of discussion and intermittent thinking since.
Desiderata:
Learn how to work with other people towards a goal
Requires skills which can be improved
Short feedback loops
Clear outcomes
Minimally competitive
The best candidate I have come up with is FIRST, the robotics team. This is still a national competition, but the competition is effectively just a show and the competitive activity is tiny compared to the cooperative activity. The goal is to build a robot as a team, so it lends itself instantly to improvable skills, short feedback loops, and clear metrics. It is cooperative mostly in the division-of-labor sense—you can’t expect one or two kids to be able to do all the work. It also strongly incentivizes skill transfer, because the less skilled kids want to succeed and the more skilled kids need them to succeed for the robot to work.
I first considered things that were not sports, like drama or dance. These turn out to be extremely competitive, but at the front end; you need to win the role or a position on the team before the coordination even begins.
I considered intellectual activities, like Math Olympiad or Chess, but these tend to be highly individual and so entail minimal coordination—even team events are mostly just aggregations of individual performance. They largely consist of people just being measured against one another.
There are explicitly social, group activities like Model U.N, but these are plagued by being unclear about the skills involved, have unclear outcomes and no short feedback loops. Even stuff like the Boy Scouts really only do coordination by teaching that being cooperative is a virtue.
Lastly there are clubs of various kinds, which often relax the competitive aspect but usually also abandon any specific notion of skill development or feedback; they are just people hanging out who all enjoy the same thing.
On the flip side of the coin, this is a really good point:
I’m somewhat skeptical that the coordination skills you learn from those places would transfer to more productive activities.
I noticed while thinking about this that the things I think are the most valuable about sports—apart from the exercise and the concept of the team—were either not emphasized or not articulated at all. Stuff like how to think about working with someone else and how to beat something that is thinking about beating you weren’t really a factor. This makes me wonder if there is an entirely different way to present sports that would improve their transfer-ability. Sports is still about hierarchy; it’s only transferable value is that it shifts the perspective from hierarchy-among-individuals to hierarchy-among-groups.
There seems to be an opportunity to add value here, but it is not clear how.
I do think there exist work teams that don’t suck (and/or if they are framed properly they’re a lot more reasonable. When I worked at a large corporation and had to interface both with my team and with HR in order to build an automated-HR-system, I had an initial period of being frustrated by my boss and and the HR contacts I worked with. But I enjoyed working with my coworkers, I eventually got a different boss, and I built a better relationship with the HR person which resulted in a much smoother experience.
And that seemed fine.
I learned coordination at various other jobs over time, and (admittedly less generalizable) group houses full of rationalists.
I’ve never played or watched any competitive sport, and I haven’t played a lot of competitive games either. I did play NetHack quite a bit though. Maybe that’s a good substitute?
More seriously, these days I think of competition as more of a problem than a solution. Some of the most important x-risks (e.g., advanced AI) are x-risks mainly because of competitive dynamics. If people weren’t competing for the prestige/power/money of being first to create AGI or to make advances in AI in general, we’d be able to solve AI safety problems at leisure.
It’s also not clear that it’s a good idea to push people to be more competitive or to try to climb hierarchies, on the current margin. I attribute my ability to recognize important problems earlier than most people in part to a distaste for competition and climbing hierarchies. I feel like both myself and the world would be worse off if I had just been someone trying to climb the standard hierarchies in academia or industry. The world seems to have plenty of people trying to compete in the traditional arenas. Don’t we actually want more people to look for important problems that don’t have any established competitive hierarchies built around them yet?
This is a good point. In fact, I wrote an essay for Ribbonfarm about avoiding competition where you can, such as in education, careers, and dating.
This is not a contradiction. This post is about building *traits* that let you be competitive. That’s why sports is the best place to learn them: it’s a very benign and rule-bound form of competition, very unlike cutthroat politics, academia, AI startups etc. Building skills that allow you to compete doesn’t mean you have to seek out zero-sum contests to grind your life away at, but it does mean that you won’t get scared away from a field if it becomes competitive and starts forming a hierarchy. It lets you choose where to compete.
Example: MIRI can work on AI safety at its leisure because it successfully competed for a high rank in the hierarchy of EA organizations. MIRI has to compete for donations and employees, and sportsmanship values let it do so without destroying other EA orgs along the way.
I am currently getting a Page Not Found response from Putanumonit through that link. It seems that the link includes ” avoiding competition where you can” in the address, but shortening it back to winning-is-for-losers works.
I have a counter-question.
Where are we going to learn coordination from? It won’t be from our community; no one has those any more. It won’t be from academics or employment, both of which only serve to drive home how much working in groups really sucks and how much better it would be if we never had to do that.
The list of things which involve working on a team and are not straight misery is very short. At the moment I can come up with nothing that isn’t competitive.
This is bothering me. I’m going to have to give it a full five minutes somewhere over the weekend.
Marriage and a family, if you do it right. Spouses have very aligned incentives, along with the added bonus of sexual attraction and outside expectations of working together. It’s tragic when couples turn marriage from cooperation to competition, but it’s not at all inevitable.
I agree that marriage and a family are great cooperative endeavors, but I am deeply skeptical it is a good idea to learn coordination after getting married. My marriage is great, and my wife and I both put down the lion’s share of the difference between our experience and that of others to being specific about coordinating and being on the same team about everything. It really helps to have these concepts ready to work with before jumping in.
I would be interested to hear more about this. Can you perhaps describe the most important concepts/skills for cooperation/coordination in a post, as well as the benefits that come from having learned them? E.g., what does a family that has mastered them look like, compared to one that hasn’t? I understand that reading about the concepts/skills isn’t a substitute for having some place to practice them but it would be better than nothing?
Yes, I can do that. I estimate ~1 week or so; could I send you a draft then to see if I’m going in a useful direction?
+1 to being interested in reading this :)
This is an interesting question. It makes me wonder if I missed something important by not playing a team sport or something of that nature, but at the same time I’m somewhat skeptical that the coordination skills you learn from those places would transfer to more productive activities. Do you have anything further to say about this, or want to suggest some articles or blog posts on the topic?
Did you come up with anything?
Disclaimer: did not do 5 minutes by the clock. Did do 10-15 minutes of discussion and intermittent thinking since.
Desiderata:
Learn how to work with other people towards a goal
Requires skills which can be improved
Short feedback loops
Clear outcomes
Minimally competitive
The best candidate I have come up with is FIRST, the robotics team. This is still a national competition, but the competition is effectively just a show and the competitive activity is tiny compared to the cooperative activity. The goal is to build a robot as a team, so it lends itself instantly to improvable skills, short feedback loops, and clear metrics. It is cooperative mostly in the division-of-labor sense—you can’t expect one or two kids to be able to do all the work. It also strongly incentivizes skill transfer, because the less skilled kids want to succeed and the more skilled kids need them to succeed for the robot to work.
I first considered things that were not sports, like drama or dance. These turn out to be extremely competitive, but at the front end; you need to win the role or a position on the team before the coordination even begins.
I considered intellectual activities, like Math Olympiad or Chess, but these tend to be highly individual and so entail minimal coordination—even team events are mostly just aggregations of individual performance. They largely consist of people just being measured against one another.
There are explicitly social, group activities like Model U.N, but these are plagued by being unclear about the skills involved, have unclear outcomes and no short feedback loops. Even stuff like the Boy Scouts really only do coordination by teaching that being cooperative is a virtue.
Lastly there are clubs of various kinds, which often relax the competitive aspect but usually also abandon any specific notion of skill development or feedback; they are just people hanging out who all enjoy the same thing.
On the flip side of the coin, this is a really good point:
I noticed while thinking about this that the things I think are the most valuable about sports—apart from the exercise and the concept of the team—were either not emphasized or not articulated at all. Stuff like how to think about working with someone else and how to beat something that is thinking about beating you weren’t really a factor. This makes me wonder if there is an entirely different way to present sports that would improve their transfer-ability. Sports is still about hierarchy; it’s only transferable value is that it shifts the perspective from hierarchy-among-individuals to hierarchy-among-groups.
There seems to be an opportunity to add value here, but it is not clear how.
I do think there exist work teams that don’t suck (and/or if they are framed properly they’re a lot more reasonable. When I worked at a large corporation and had to interface both with my team and with HR in order to build an automated-HR-system, I had an initial period of being frustrated by my boss and and the HR contacts I worked with. But I enjoyed working with my coworkers, I eventually got a different boss, and I built a better relationship with the HR person which resulted in a much smoother experience.
And that seemed fine.
I learned coordination at various other jobs over time, and (admittedly less generalizable) group houses full of rationalists.