I’m a bit surprised that most of the previous discussion here was focused on the “okay, so how do you actually motivate people?” aspect of this post.
This post gave me a fairly strong “sit bolt upright in alarm” experience because of it’s implications on epistemics, and I think those implications are sneaky and far reaching. I expect this phenomenon to influence people’s ability to think and communicate, before you get to the point where you actually have a project that people are hitting the hard parts of.
People form models of what sort of things they can achieve, and what sort of projects to start, and how likely their friends are to succeed at things, and (I expect) this backpropagates through their entire information system.
The problem may not just affect the people on a given project – it could affect the people nearby (and the people nearby them in turn), in terms of what sort of feedback you can easily give each other.
I’ve struggled with deciding whether to give people feedback that I don’t think their project is likely to work, when I nonetheless think the project is the right thing to be working on, either for EV reasons or longterm-growth-as-a-person reasons, i.e. their next project will benefit from the skills they’re gaining here. I know there are some people who’d lean hard into the “information is a key bottleneck, definitely don’t withhold info like that.” And they may be right. But if so, that still leaves us with a deep, crucial question of how to integrate epistemics and actual success on hard, long problems that lets you actually win at the instrumental part.
(I don’t think the “pay people a lot” is actually sufficient, although it obviously helps. I think lack-of-clear-path-to-victory can be demoralizing even if you have plenty of money – that seems to be where a lot of 20th century ennui comes from. Also, many of the key projects here are early-stage where it’s just hard to convince people to give you enough money to escape scarcity mindset)
I notice I don’t have a very explicit model of what’s going on – this comment felt more like I was ranting than clearly explaining things, not sure how it comes across to others.
I hope to flesh this out (and hopefully make some empirical predictions) during the review phase.
I’m a bit surprised that most of the previous discussion here was focused on the “okay, so how do you actually motivate people?” aspect of this post.
This post gave me a fairly strong “sit bolt upright in alarm” experience because of it’s implications on epistemics, and I think those implications are sneaky and far reaching. I expect this phenomenon to influence people’s ability to think and communicate, before you get to the point where you actually have a project that people are hitting the hard parts of.
People form models of what sort of things they can achieve, and what sort of projects to start, and how likely their friends are to succeed at things, and (I expect) this backpropagates through their entire information system.
The problem may not just affect the people on a given project – it could affect the people nearby (and the people nearby them in turn), in terms of what sort of feedback you can easily give each other.
I’ve struggled with deciding whether to give people feedback that I don’t think their project is likely to work, when I nonetheless think the project is the right thing to be working on, either for EV reasons or longterm-growth-as-a-person reasons, i.e. their next project will benefit from the skills they’re gaining here. I know there are some people who’d lean hard into the “information is a key bottleneck, definitely don’t withhold info like that.” And they may be right. But if so, that still leaves us with a deep, crucial question of how to integrate epistemics and actual success on hard, long problems that lets you actually win at the instrumental part.
(I don’t think the “pay people a lot” is actually sufficient, although it obviously helps. I think lack-of-clear-path-to-victory can be demoralizing even if you have plenty of money – that seems to be where a lot of 20th century ennui comes from. Also, many of the key projects here are early-stage where it’s just hard to convince people to give you enough money to escape scarcity mindset)
I notice I don’t have a very explicit model of what’s going on – this comment felt more like I was ranting than clearly explaining things, not sure how it comes across to others.
I hope to flesh this out (and hopefully make some empirical predictions) during the review phase.