Answering a slightly broader question of “how does one level up at rationality”, which a bias towards ways that include exposure to people more skilled than you:
For the first 3 years of exposure to the NYC rationalist community, my improvements were a mixed bag (I think I benefited from overall exposure to the memes of “try things!” and “try to solve your problems on purpose” and “it’s okay to tackle big projects.” I got weaker from overly relying on specific other people to do my thinking for me when I had complex problems to solve)
I got my most serious level-ups from working on concrete, difficult projects where I cared a lot about the outcome, and there was no one else I could defer to. (Most of the benefit from “Early Years In Person Rationality” came from the “try difficult projects” meme being prevalent)
I think there are ~10 people I’ve got specific benefits from interacting with. Most of this was in the form of them sharing specific skills with me, when I ran into problems that they either wanted to help me with, or that we were both working on. In some cases I didn’t exactly gain a “skill”, but gained a way of looking at the world which would later help me. Most of the value came from ~5 of them. Of those, I only interacted with 3 for a prolonged period of time.
Answering a slightly broader question of “how does one level up at rationality”, which a bias towards ways that include exposure to people more skilled than you:
For the first 3 years of exposure to the NYC rationalist community, my improvements were a mixed bag (I think I benefited from overall exposure to the memes of “try things!” and “try to solve your problems on purpose” and “it’s okay to tackle big projects.” I got weaker from overly relying on specific other people to do my thinking for me when I had complex problems to solve)
I got my most serious level-ups from working on concrete, difficult projects where I cared a lot about the outcome, and there was no one else I could defer to. (Most of the benefit from “Early Years In Person Rationality” came from the “try difficult projects” meme being prevalent)
I think there are ~10 people I’ve got specific benefits from interacting with. Most of this was in the form of them sharing specific skills with me, when I ran into problems that they either wanted to help me with, or that we were both working on. In some cases I didn’t exactly gain a “skill”, but gained a way of looking at the world which would later help me. Most of the value came from ~5 of them. Of those, I only interacted with 3 for a prolonged period of time.