Curated. This post’s framing resonated a lot with my own framing. I think the questions of how to cultivate impact, agency and taste are some of the more important questions that LessWrong tackles.
Much of this post were phenomena I’d observed myself, but, a few particular framings stood out to me as helpful crystallizations:
The first was “Don’t rely too much on permission or encouragement.” I think a few Lightcone employees have also been slowly learning something along these lines. Our CEO has a lot of taste and vision, but sometimes one of us comes up with an idea that doesn’t immediately resonate with him, and it’s not until we actually build some kind of prototype ourselves that other people start to believe in it.
Another was:
Unfortunately, I am here to tell you that, at least if you are similar to me, you will never feel smart, competent, or good at things; instead, you will just start feeling more and more like everyone else mysteriously sucks at them.
For this reason, the prompt I suggest here is: what does it seem like everyone else is mysteriously bad at? That’s probably a sign that you have good taste there.
I had heard this sort of idea before, but this was the first time I parsed it as a technique you could explore on purpose. (i.e. actively investigate what things people seem mysteriously bad at, and use that to guide where you can maybe trust your taste more).
Finally:
The first domain that I got some degree of taste in was software design, and I remember a pretty clear phase transition where I gained the ability to improve my designs by thinking harder about them. After that point, I spent a lot of time iterating on many different design improvements—most of which I never implemented because I couldn’t come up with something I was happy enough with, but a few of which turned into major wins.
Recently I’ve been exploring the “think real hard about things” paradigm. This paragraph helped flesh out for me that there are some prerequisites for “think real hard” to work. I think some of this are skills that work across domains (i.e. “notice when you can’t actually explain something very clearly” → “you’re still confused, try to break the confusion down”). But, it makes sense that some of it is domain specific.
There’s an important question I previously would have framed: “If you’re tackling an unfamiliar domain, the question is ‘how much mileage can you get from general, cross-domain reasoning skills?”. But, a different question is “what’s the minimum amount of ‘domain specific’ skill you need in order for ‘think about it in advance’ to really help?”.
Curated. This post’s framing resonated a lot with my own framing. I think the questions of how to cultivate impact, agency and taste are some of the more important questions that LessWrong tackles.
Much of this post were phenomena I’d observed myself, but, a few particular framings stood out to me as helpful crystallizations:
The first was “Don’t rely too much on permission or encouragement.” I think a few Lightcone employees have also been slowly learning something along these lines. Our CEO has a lot of taste and vision, but sometimes one of us comes up with an idea that doesn’t immediately resonate with him, and it’s not until we actually build some kind of prototype ourselves that other people start to believe in it.
Another was:
I had heard this sort of idea before, but this was the first time I parsed it as a technique you could explore on purpose. (i.e. actively investigate what things people seem mysteriously bad at, and use that to guide where you can maybe trust your taste more).
Finally:
Recently I’ve been exploring the “think real hard about things” paradigm. This paragraph helped flesh out for me that there are some prerequisites for “think real hard” to work. I think some of this are skills that work across domains (i.e. “notice when you can’t actually explain something very clearly” → “you’re still confused, try to break the confusion down”). But, it makes sense that some of it is domain specific.
There’s an important question I previously would have framed: “If you’re tackling an unfamiliar domain, the question is ‘how much mileage can you get from general, cross-domain reasoning skills?”. But, a different question is “what’s the minimum amount of ‘domain specific’ skill you need in order for ‘think about it in advance’ to really help?”.