Figuring out who the cool people are. (Similarly, figuring out what the cool ideas are.) Being able to identify cool people has made my life significantly more awesome than it otherwise would have been, and led me to learn skills like guitar, chess, hiking, rationality subskills and so on that I wouldn’t have bothered to or been able to develop on my own. It made high school an amazing experience. It got me laid by hot chicks. It led me to lots of good music. It lets me easily distinguish between meh philosophers/authors/artists and cool philosophers/authors/artists, so I don’t waste time. It also alerts me to the existence of communities like LessWrong and the Singularity Institute and to cool intellectual cultures or academic fields like algorithmic information/probability theory (and thus universal AI) and Bayesian computational cognitive science. It lets me know which AI approaches are going nowhere and which might actually be dangerous. It also allows me to feel justified in ignoring people who don’t think I’m cool, since I have a good sense for coolness and I think I’m cool, and if others don’t have a good sense for coolness then they probably aren’t cool and won’t become cool—this obviously isn’t a perfect test but it’s useful.
It’s not necessary to do so, but once you figure out who the cool people are it is very helpful to befriend them or get into correspondence with them. Since the age of 15 or so I’ve identified the coolest person in my community and then tried to establish a friendship where I’m slightly lower status than them, such that it’s easy/natural for them to teach me lots of stuff. (And the coolest people always have cool friends; becoming best friends with the Homecoming King in high school allowed me to meet all kinds of cool people who I otherwise wouldn’t have realized were cool. If I were attending university then befriending a really popular (ideally intellectual) person would be one of my top priorities.) I am extremely happy with how well this strategy has worked. Of course, it wouldn’t have worked if I didn’t have high CHA, but if you can train charisma then training the “recognizing cool people” skill would give you lots of added benefits. I think it’s related to general “taste” as in aesthetic taste, so cultivating your sense of aesthetics might also benefit your coolness-recognizing algorithms. I’m also not sure that general aesthetic taste is trainable but I think it is.
There’s the music appreciation algorithm: listen to the people the people you listen to listen to. More generally, bootstrap from your current algorithms to better ones. I likely wouldn’t have been alerted to various academic subfields if SingInst folk hadn’t pointed them out, and I wouldn’t have been alerted to SingInst if I hadn’t been alerted to LessWrong via RationalWiki, and I wouldn’t have been alerted to RationalWiki if I hadn’t been alerted to Carl Sagan by my high school friends, and I wouldn’t have made those friends if I hadn’t been a friend of their friends, et cetera. Nowadays I have a rather low opinion of Carl Sagan and RationalWiki, I’m very meh about LessWrong, and my opinion of SingInst isn’t as sky-high as it once was, but I think the process tends to be self-correcting.
While I’m sympathetic to this view, I don’t think it is without problems. See modern art for an example of how this kind of approach can fail. I think the problem is that as you go up the chain you get people who have less interaction with reality outside their specialty. This is the same problem that can occur when climbing to many meta-levels, i.e., one looses sight of the object level or even forgets that it exists.
Edit: Also, I can think of a number of people I (at least somewhat) respect, but most definitely don’t respect the people they respect.
Right, definitely not fail-safe and you probably need some measure of luck to start out with the right dispositions (though my starting out a RationalWiki-esque leftist and ending up a pseudo-reactionary is evidence that at least sometimes it’s not super important), but the most obvious alternative is just getting stuck being boring doing boring things.
That said, I generally have had ridiculous amounts of sheer luck—no, general positive outlook and so on really does not explain it, trust me—and so I generally don’t know what’s safe to recommend. Vladimir_M’s told a story about how listening to the advice of someone high status ended up hurting him a lot, and what he did sounds sorta similar to what I’m recommending, so major disclaimers apply.
This sounds frighteningly similar to my usual procedure. I noticed a few months ago that I am in a habit of “using up” my information sources and LessWrong has hit that point that I am not learning that much more. Since I assume you consider yourself a cool person and do not like Sagan and LessWrong, what are some ressources you could point us to?
The Homecoming King in question took philosophy classes at university while in high school, so he’s sort of special. But yeah, this “coolness” I speak of is pretty broad, and means roughly the same thing as “generally desirable to know/affiliate-with/learn/&c.”, with some moderate measure of personal contingency.
Do you advise associating with those who can form a mentor/student relationship or do you advise focusing on a high status friend/ lower status friend relationship?
Figuring out who the cool people are. (Similarly, figuring out what the cool ideas are.) Being able to identify cool people has made my life significantly more awesome than it otherwise would have been, and led me to learn skills like guitar, chess, hiking, rationality subskills and so on that I wouldn’t have bothered to or been able to develop on my own. It made high school an amazing experience. It got me laid by hot chicks. It led me to lots of good music. It lets me easily distinguish between meh philosophers/authors/artists and cool philosophers/authors/artists, so I don’t waste time. It also alerts me to the existence of communities like LessWrong and the Singularity Institute and to cool intellectual cultures or academic fields like algorithmic information/probability theory (and thus universal AI) and Bayesian computational cognitive science. It lets me know which AI approaches are going nowhere and which might actually be dangerous. It also allows me to feel justified in ignoring people who don’t think I’m cool, since I have a good sense for coolness and I think I’m cool, and if others don’t have a good sense for coolness then they probably aren’t cool and won’t become cool—this obviously isn’t a perfect test but it’s useful.
It’s not necessary to do so, but once you figure out who the cool people are it is very helpful to befriend them or get into correspondence with them. Since the age of 15 or so I’ve identified the coolest person in my community and then tried to establish a friendship where I’m slightly lower status than them, such that it’s easy/natural for them to teach me lots of stuff. (And the coolest people always have cool friends; becoming best friends with the Homecoming King in high school allowed me to meet all kinds of cool people who I otherwise wouldn’t have realized were cool. If I were attending university then befriending a really popular (ideally intellectual) person would be one of my top priorities.) I am extremely happy with how well this strategy has worked. Of course, it wouldn’t have worked if I didn’t have high CHA, but if you can train charisma then training the “recognizing cool people” skill would give you lots of added benefits. I think it’s related to general “taste” as in aesthetic taste, so cultivating your sense of aesthetics might also benefit your coolness-recognizing algorithms. I’m also not sure that general aesthetic taste is trainable but I think it is.
Sounds almost too good to be true. How do you recommend to train this skill?
There’s the music appreciation algorithm: listen to the people the people you listen to listen to. More generally, bootstrap from your current algorithms to better ones. I likely wouldn’t have been alerted to various academic subfields if SingInst folk hadn’t pointed them out, and I wouldn’t have been alerted to SingInst if I hadn’t been alerted to LessWrong via RationalWiki, and I wouldn’t have been alerted to RationalWiki if I hadn’t been alerted to Carl Sagan by my high school friends, and I wouldn’t have made those friends if I hadn’t been a friend of their friends, et cetera. Nowadays I have a rather low opinion of Carl Sagan and RationalWiki, I’m very meh about LessWrong, and my opinion of SingInst isn’t as sky-high as it once was, but I think the process tends to be self-correcting.
While I’m sympathetic to this view, I don’t think it is without problems. See modern art for an example of how this kind of approach can fail. I think the problem is that as you go up the chain you get people who have less interaction with reality outside their specialty. This is the same problem that can occur when climbing to many meta-levels, i.e., one looses sight of the object level or even forgets that it exists.
Edit: Also, I can think of a number of people I (at least somewhat) respect, but most definitely don’t respect the people they respect.
Right, definitely not fail-safe and you probably need some measure of luck to start out with the right dispositions (though my starting out a RationalWiki-esque leftist and ending up a pseudo-reactionary is evidence that at least sometimes it’s not super important), but the most obvious alternative is just getting stuck being boring doing boring things.
That said, I generally have had ridiculous amounts of sheer luck—no, general positive outlook and so on really does not explain it, trust me—and so I generally don’t know what’s safe to recommend. Vladimir_M’s told a story about how listening to the advice of someone high status ended up hurting him a lot, and what he did sounds sorta similar to what I’m recommending, so major disclaimers apply.
This sounds frighteningly similar to my usual procedure. I noticed a few months ago that I am in a habit of “using up” my information sources and LessWrong has hit that point that I am not learning that much more. Since I assume you consider yourself a cool person and do not like Sagan and LessWrong, what are some ressources you could point us to?
What do you mean by “cool”? If you’re including LW and the homecoming king in the same concept, well, that seems very broad.
The Homecoming King in question took philosophy classes at university while in high school, so he’s sort of special. But yeah, this “coolness” I speak of is pretty broad, and means roughly the same thing as “generally desirable to know/affiliate-with/learn/&c.”, with some moderate measure of personal contingency.
Do you advise associating with those who can form a mentor/student relationship or do you advise focusing on a high status friend/ lower status friend relationship?