“Genius is 1 percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration,” said Thomas Edison, and he should’ve known: It took him hundreds of tweaks to get his incandescent light bulb to work well, and he was already building on the work of 22 earlier inventors of incandescent lights.
If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search. [...] His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened… [...] I was almost a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.
Even allowing for a significant bias against Edison on Tesla’s part, it does seem like he relied on perspiration to an extraordinary degree among high achievers. Of course, even that diligence wouldn’t have been of much use if it hadn’t come together with a very considerable talent.
More generally, there are two problems with the general message of this article:
It is delusional for most people to believe that they can contribute usefully to really hard problems. (Except in trivial ways, like helping those who are capable of it with mundane tasks in order to free up more of their time and energy.) There is such a thing as innate talent, and doing useful work on some things requires an extraordinary degree of it.
There is also a nasty failure mode for organized scientific effort when manpower and money are thrown at problems that seem impossibly hard, hoping that “hacking away at the edges” will eventually lead to major breakthroughs. Instead of progress, or even an honest pessimistic assessment of the situation, this may easily create perverse incentives for cargo-cult work that will turn the entire field into a vast heap of nonsense.
It is delusional for most people to believe that they can contribute usefully to really hard problems.
It’s damaging to repeat this though, since most bright people who are 1 in 10,000+ think they are 1 in 10 due to Dunning-Krugger effects.
Except in trivial ways, like helping those who are capable of it with mundane tasks in order to free up more of their time and energy.
Mundane work is not trivial. For instance, I’ve watched lukeprog spend more of his days moving furniture at Singularity Institute in the past 6 months than anyone else in Berkeley… including dozens of volunteers and community members in the area all of whom could have have done it, none of whom considered trying. For most tasks, hours really are fungible. If otherwise smart people didn’t think mundane work was trivial, we’d get so much more done. Nothing is harder for me to get done at Singularity Institute than work that “anybody could do”.
As another example, I’ve had 200 volunteers offer to do work for Singularity Institute. Many have claimed they would do “anything” or “whatever helped the most”. SEO is clearly the most valuable work. Unfortunately, it’s something “so mundane”, that anybody could do it… therefore, 0 out of 200 volunteers are currently working on it. This is even after I’ve personally asked over 100 people to help with it.
SEO is clearly the most valuable work. Unfortunately, it’s something “so mundane”, that anybody could do it.
I actually think you have it backwards there. The reason people aren’t engaging in this activity is because it is the opposite of mundane. It is confusing, difficult, and requires previous skills.
General Evidence: There are lots of postings for Search Engine Optimizers, and they all want applicants to already have experience doing SEO. If it was something that was so mundane that anyone could do it with a couple hours of training, what you’d see instead are “no experience necessary” job postings for SEO where the company is willing to take an hour or two to train a schlub that they can then pay minimum wage too.
(Speaking of minimum wage, if you guys are spending a significant amount of your time doing menial tasks like moving furniture, it might be time to get a schlub of your own. You can pay someone $8/hr to do menial tasks 20 hrs/ week, for a total of about $8000 / year.)
Personal Anecdotal Supporting Evidence: I clicked on your link, and the thought in my head wasn’t “oh, this is too mundane”, but rather was “wtf?? This looks super-complex and confusing. It must be the type of thing that “computer people” know how to do. Not something for me. I don’t have the knowledge or skill-set”
The reason people aren’t engaging in [SEO] is because it is the opposite of mundane. It is confusing, difficult, and requires previous skills.
Not really. The link-building tutorial page Louie links to at the Singularity Volunteers site contains several examples of link-building tasks that require little experience:
Comment on blogs and in forums. Although some blogs still utilize “nofollow” tags on outbound comment links, it is not a trend that I foresee continuing as long as comment spam protection keeps improving. Therefore, I recommend leaving high-quality insightful comments on other blogs, which will create a backlink and could entice blog owners to link back to your site in the future. Also, you have a far better chance of acquiring a back link if you’ve contributed something to someone else’s blog first.
[Submit] your website to various niche, local, and general directories...
The other pages linked at the bottom of that page provide lots of other examples.
Also, Louie is entirely right about this:
Mundane work is not trivial. For instance, I’ve watched lukeprog spend more of his days moving furniture at Singularity Institute in the past 6 months than anyone else in Berkeley… including dozens of volunteers and community members in the area all of whom could have have done it, none of whom considered trying. For most tasks, hours really are fungible… Nothing is harder for me to get done at Singularity Institute than work that “anybody could do”.
I’ve spent enough time cleaning rooms and moving boxes and furniture and so on at Singularity Institute (including an entire day just last week) that I could have written and published 1-3 more papers by now if I hadn’t done any of that.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when people get the idea that mundane work is “trivial.”
If you want to do mundane tasks for me so I can write more papers on Friendly AI like this one, please contact me: luke [at] singularity.org.
Props to John Maxwell for being the latest person to actually do something mundane and high value for me, freeing up my time so I can work on an intelligence explosion book chapter tonight.
Probably quite a few. Wikipedia records roughly 2,000 daily readers for that article; someone already familiar with SIAI probably isn’t going to be going there thinking ‘what was that “singularity” thing again?’
I do know that SIAI thinks “technological singularity” is a search string it’s valuable to SEO for, since it’s on their list of search strings to SEO for.
In principle, “good” SEO is not entirely zero-sum: it improves the quality of search results, by making sites, and pages within those sites, which are relevant to the user’s query more likely to show up in results than irrelevant sites and pages, and the results for those pages to be more clear about what they’re about.
Successful SEO is zero-sum to the degree that it is done by sites competing against each other which are fungible to the searcher, as TheOtherDave hints. There’s also a lot of advice and offers for doing this sort of SEO because that’s where the perceived money is.
There’s making your site look good (to the search engine), and then there’s making your site be good.
Ok, I’ve added you to joeant and “rateitall” directories. You were already in dmoz, and IPL2 is no longer taking submissions. The other ones don’t seem as appropriate: thegoodwebguide is UK-only, craigslist requires you to post something that’s more like an ad, and the others are blogrolls and “local business directories”—which singinst is not (neither local, nor a business).
Let me know if there are other, better lists of directories to which you should be submitted.
joeant submission has been approved. It’ll appear in the directory when the weekly update occurs. I also added a link in the sidebar of my blog which occasionally gets a surprising amount of linkjuice… might as well spread the love around :)
Have you thought about studying the persuasive and motivational arts in an attempt to increase this batting average? I’m always fascinated how watching videos by Internet marketer Eben Pagan makes me want to buy his stuff, forgetting the fact that I could probably get comparable knowledge from much cheaper library books. Sometimes I wish all of the advice I read came in an Eben Pagan format.
For what it’s worth, I just submitted Less Wrong and its articles to 2 subreddits, 3 link directories, and Hacker News… and now I’m resting easy in the knowledge that I’ve saved trillions of future lives in expected value. (Only mentioning this in case anyone else is interested in saving trillions of lives, of course. Reddit is probably a good place to start, especially if you already have an account; my reddit submission rate is throttled severely.)
See what I tried to do there? ;)
I suspect the first step is to transition from blame-oriented language to opportunity-oriented language.
I agree that intelligence is not needed to make useful contributions. However...
It’s damaging to repeat this though, since most bright people who are 1 in 10,000+ think they are 1 in 10 due to Dunning-Kruger effects.
I doubt this. Standardized tests are common (tests for CTY, SATs, etc.), and usually include percentiles. If you see “99.9+%” enough times, you’ll notice. And 1 in 10,000 is a lot. (400 college friends) × (5% of people smart enough to go to your college) = not enough people for a 1 in 10,000 person to know anyone brighter than they are.
It is delusional for most people to believe that they can contribute usefully to really hard problems.
This seems more and more like the most damaging meme ever created on LessWrong. It persistently leads to people that could have made useful contributions (to AI safety) making no such contribution. Would it be a better world in which lots more people tried to contribute usefully to FAI and a small percentage succeeded? Yes, it would, even taking into account whatever cost the unsuccessful people pay.
There are many ways to do, even small, contributions for everyone. The easiest is giving money (to someone whom you believe is trying to address the “really hard problems”). But there are many others. I would take two examples of things I do (or plan to do in the short future) : I’m helping with the French translation of HP:MoR and I’ll (try to at least, nothing serious done yet) help SIAI with migrating their publication to their new LaTeX template (see http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/9d3/new_si_publications_design/ ). Both are tiny contributions, but which can in the hand help in various ways the SIAI to tackle the really hard problems. A lot of people doing those small things can allow the great things to happen much faster.
Of course, you can replace SIAI with anyone you think could solve the hard problems—other kind of research, charity, political party if you believe a given one is doing more good than harm, …
The hardest part in that is probably in identifying who is more likely to actually help in solving the really hard problems. I tend to “invest” my energy and money in different kind of entities, hoping at least one of them will do something good enough on the long run.
I agree. But compared to where we are right now, I think more people should actually go work directly on the core FAI problem. If the smartest half of each LW meetup earnestly and persistently worked on the most promising open problem they could identify, I’d give 50% chance that at least one would make valuable progress somewhere.
On the other hand, Nikola Tesla had this to say about Edison’s methodology:
Even allowing for a significant bias against Edison on Tesla’s part, it does seem like he relied on perspiration to an extraordinary degree among high achievers. Of course, even that diligence wouldn’t have been of much use if it hadn’t come together with a very considerable talent.
More generally, there are two problems with the general message of this article:
It is delusional for most people to believe that they can contribute usefully to really hard problems. (Except in trivial ways, like helping those who are capable of it with mundane tasks in order to free up more of their time and energy.) There is such a thing as innate talent, and doing useful work on some things requires an extraordinary degree of it.
There is also a nasty failure mode for organized scientific effort when manpower and money are thrown at problems that seem impossibly hard, hoping that “hacking away at the edges” will eventually lead to major breakthroughs. Instead of progress, or even an honest pessimistic assessment of the situation, this may easily create perverse incentives for cargo-cult work that will turn the entire field into a vast heap of nonsense.
It’s damaging to repeat this though, since most bright people who are 1 in 10,000+ think they are 1 in 10 due to Dunning-Krugger effects.
Mundane work is not trivial. For instance, I’ve watched lukeprog spend more of his days moving furniture at Singularity Institute in the past 6 months than anyone else in Berkeley… including dozens of volunteers and community members in the area all of whom could have have done it, none of whom considered trying. For most tasks, hours really are fungible. If otherwise smart people didn’t think mundane work was trivial, we’d get so much more done. Nothing is harder for me to get done at Singularity Institute than work that “anybody could do”.
As another example, I’ve had 200 volunteers offer to do work for Singularity Institute. Many have claimed they would do “anything” or “whatever helped the most”. SEO is clearly the most valuable work. Unfortunately, it’s something “so mundane”, that anybody could do it… therefore, 0 out of 200 volunteers are currently working on it. This is even after I’ve personally asked over 100 people to help with it.
I actually think you have it backwards there. The reason people aren’t engaging in this activity is because it is the opposite of mundane. It is confusing, difficult, and requires previous skills.
General Evidence: There are lots of postings for Search Engine Optimizers, and they all want applicants to already have experience doing SEO. If it was something that was so mundane that anyone could do it with a couple hours of training, what you’d see instead are “no experience necessary” job postings for SEO where the company is willing to take an hour or two to train a schlub that they can then pay minimum wage too.
(Speaking of minimum wage, if you guys are spending a significant amount of your time doing menial tasks like moving furniture, it might be time to get a schlub of your own. You can pay someone $8/hr to do menial tasks 20 hrs/ week, for a total of about $8000 / year.)
Personal Anecdotal Supporting Evidence: I clicked on your link, and the thought in my head wasn’t “oh, this is too mundane”, but rather was “wtf?? This looks super-complex and confusing. It must be the type of thing that “computer people” know how to do. Not something for me. I don’t have the knowledge or skill-set”
Not really. The link-building tutorial page Louie links to at the Singularity Volunteers site contains several examples of link-building tasks that require little experience:
The other pages linked at the bottom of that page provide lots of other examples.
Also, Louie is entirely right about this:
I’ve spent enough time cleaning rooms and moving boxes and furniture and so on at Singularity Institute (including an entire day just last week) that I could have written and published 1-3 more papers by now if I hadn’t done any of that.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when people get the idea that mundane work is “trivial.”
If you want to do mundane tasks for me so I can write more papers on Friendly AI like this one, please contact me: luke [at] singularity.org.
Props to John Maxwell for being the latest person to actually do something mundane and high value for me, freeing up my time so I can work on an intelligence explosion book chapter tonight.
With payroll taxes and insurance, I would expect this to cost at least $12000 a year.
Good point! I would still say it is worth it, though.
SEO has to be hard for the simple reason that it’s zero-sum. You’re competing against all the other people doing SEO.
This is probably less relevant for “technological singularity” than it is for, say, “cheap air fare.”
How many people who aren’t already familiar with SIAI search for “technological singularity”?
Probably quite a few. Wikipedia records roughly 2,000 daily readers for that article; someone already familiar with SIAI probably isn’t going to be going there thinking ‘what was that “singularity” thing again?’
I don’t know.
I do know that SIAI thinks “technological singularity” is a search string it’s valuable to SEO for, since it’s on their list of search strings to SEO for.
In principle, “good” SEO is not entirely zero-sum: it improves the quality of search results, by making sites, and pages within those sites, which are relevant to the user’s query more likely to show up in results than irrelevant sites and pages, and the results for those pages to be more clear about what they’re about.
Successful SEO is zero-sum to the degree that it is done by sites competing against each other which are fungible to the searcher, as TheOtherDave hints. There’s also a lot of advice and offers for doing this sort of SEO because that’s where the perceived money is.
There’s making your site look good (to the search engine), and then there’s making your site be good.
Ok, I’ve added you to joeant and “rateitall” directories. You were already in dmoz, and IPL2 is no longer taking submissions. The other ones don’t seem as appropriate: thegoodwebguide is UK-only, craigslist requires you to post something that’s more like an ad, and the others are blogrolls and “local business directories”—which singinst is not (neither local, nor a business).
Let me know if there are other, better lists of directories to which you should be submitted.
joeant submission has been approved. It’ll appear in the directory when the weekly update occurs. I also added a link in the sidebar of my blog which occasionally gets a surprising amount of linkjuice… might as well spread the love around :)
Is SIAI putting any money towards hiring an SEO company? If SEO is really that valuable, it seems it should be worth putting some money toward.
Have you thought about studying the persuasive and motivational arts in an attempt to increase this batting average? I’m always fascinated how watching videos by Internet marketer Eben Pagan makes me want to buy his stuff, forgetting the fact that I could probably get comparable knowledge from much cheaper library books. Sometimes I wish all of the advice I read came in an Eben Pagan format.
For what it’s worth, I just submitted Less Wrong and its articles to 2 subreddits, 3 link directories, and Hacker News… and now I’m resting easy in the knowledge that I’ve saved trillions of future lives in expected value. (Only mentioning this in case anyone else is interested in saving trillions of lives, of course. Reddit is probably a good place to start, especially if you already have an account; my reddit submission rate is throttled severely.)
See what I tried to do there? ;)
I suspect the first step is to transition from blame-oriented language to opportunity-oriented language.
I agree that intelligence is not needed to make useful contributions. However...
I doubt this. Standardized tests are common (tests for CTY, SATs, etc.), and usually include percentiles. If you see “99.9+%” enough times, you’ll notice. And 1 in 10,000 is a lot. (400 college friends) × (5% of people smart enough to go to your college) = not enough people for a 1 in 10,000 person to know anyone brighter than they are.
Hello,
Is it too late to volunteer for SEO work? I have no experience with the subject. However, for the brief future, I will have a good amount of time.
This seems more and more like the most damaging meme ever created on LessWrong. It persistently leads to people that could have made useful contributions (to AI safety) making no such contribution. Would it be a better world in which lots more people tried to contribute usefully to FAI and a small percentage succeeded? Yes, it would, even taking into account whatever cost the unsuccessful people pay.
There are many ways to do, even small, contributions for everyone. The easiest is giving money (to someone whom you believe is trying to address the “really hard problems”). But there are many others. I would take two examples of things I do (or plan to do in the short future) : I’m helping with the French translation of HP:MoR and I’ll (try to at least, nothing serious done yet) help SIAI with migrating their publication to their new LaTeX template (see http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/9d3/new_si_publications_design/ ). Both are tiny contributions, but which can in the hand help in various ways the SIAI to tackle the really hard problems. A lot of people doing those small things can allow the great things to happen much faster.
Of course, you can replace SIAI with anyone you think could solve the hard problems—other kind of research, charity, political party if you believe a given one is doing more good than harm, …
The hardest part in that is probably in identifying who is more likely to actually help in solving the really hard problems. I tend to “invest” my energy and money in different kind of entities, hoping at least one of them will do something good enough on the long run.
I agree. But compared to where we are right now, I think more people should actually go work directly on the core FAI problem. If the smartest half of each LW meetup earnestly and persistently worked on the most promising open problem they could identify, I’d give 50% chance that at least one would make valuable progress somewhere.