My Most Costly Delusion
Suppose there is a fire in a nearby house. Suppose there are competent firefighters in your town: fast, professional, well-equipped. They are expected to arrive in 2–3 minutes. In that situation, unless something very extraordinary happens, it would indeed be an act of great arrogance and even utter insanity to go into the fire yourself in the hope of “rescuing” someone or something. The most likely outcome would be that you would find yourself among those who need to be rescued.
But the calculus changes drastically if the closest fire crew is 3 hours away and consists of drunk, unfit amateurs.
Or consider a child living in a big, happy, smart family. Imagine this child suddenly decides that his family may run out of money to the point where they won’t have enough to eat. All reassurances from his parents don’t work. The child doesn’t believe in his parents’ ability to reason, he makes his own calculations, and he strongly believes he is right and they are wrong. He is dead set on fixing the situation by doing day trading.
What is that if not going nuts? Would those be wrong who ridicule this child and his complete mischaracterization of his own relative abilities? Would it not be an act of benevolence to just stop the child, by any means necessary, from executing his deranged plan and bring him back to the care of his parents?
But now imagine that the child doesn’t live in a big, happy, smart family. He is homeless in a town of other homeless children. There are some adults, like 20 of them, but all of them are occupied with preventing the nearby dam from breaking and flooding the town.
This child doesn’t sit and wait for adults to come and feed him, like a responsible, correctly-estimating-his-own-abilities, non-arrogant, well-behaved entity he is supposed to be in the eyes of people from an alternative reality where towns are populated by big hordes of smart competent adults.
He goes outside, makes some tools to catch birds (tools are dangerous, they may hurt him, and they are just a joke compared to professional hunting equipment) and then lights a fire to cook what he managed to capture (the fire may of course burn his fingers, and there are no safety protocols, it is just a fire in a semi-abandoned post-apocalyptic town, and overall that’s not how experienced adults would do it).
Is he still an arrogant, inappropriate fool?
Are you still in the position to judge his strategy?
I knew for a long time about the idea of heroic responsibility.
But to exhibit heroic responsibility, you have to be a hero, right? Right? Or not? When are you “hero enough” to do it?
As one saying goes:
You can just do things.
Can you, really, though?
Many are irritated by the hubris of this phrase. For there are, of course, reasons to be irritated by it.
And yet, as scary as it may sound, you have to just do things, even if you can’t, because no one else is going to do them anyway.
You have to just do things, not because you have some special power to do things, but because you are forced, by societal incompetence, to do things despite lacking special powers.
You have to just do things, as a green schoolboy, because all adults are busy with something even more important.
And those who mock you for being presumptuous enough to think you are capable of solving your problems may very well be right. So what? Does it make you less forced to try solving these problems still?
So my most costly delusion was that I can leave some problems to be solved by other, more competent people.
To be clear, competent people exist. There are just too many problems and they are too severe for the existing competent people to fill all the problem-solving slots.
More concretely, in my case (and it may not be the case for other people) this delusion manifested as the belief that I should focus on tasks corresponding to my “experience” or previous “area of expertise” rather than on the most pressing tasks, because there are already people in the more pressing fields who have competitive advantages over me, and I am not going to add value on top of them.
That was an extremely naive take, resting on the assumption that pressing areas are not in extreme deficit of people.
It is not to say that you don’t need experience and expertise. Of course you need them! My point is that the absence of experience and expertise is not a vindication. You may and you should gain them, especially since it is not as hard as you think to gain them to the level that allows you to add real value. Not because you are super cool and a fast learner (although you may be), but because the bar is set by the supply, and the supply is shockingly thin.
On top of that, because now it is possible to outsource a lot of low-level thinking and tool-level engineering knowledge to AIs, you may be actually plainly underestimating what you are capable of doing.
I totally get that you are incompetent, or rather not competent enough. I am also not competent enough. And in an adequate world, that would be a good argument not to do things.
I thought, as I grew up, I would stop perceiving myself as a child. But what happens in reality when you grow up is that instead of realizing you are an adult, you realize the others are not really adults either, and hence you must do the things yourself, despite being a child.
Being a child is definitely an obstacle, but not an excuse.
Most people in this sphere have some form of impostor syndrome. I mostly don’t these days, because I’ve seen enough of the world to know that the person most people feel like they need to impersonate doesn’t exist, it’s all a bunch of messy humans with skills and weaknesses, and no one really has this situation under control.
Let’s do the best we can as flawed humans.
This may be the case that some kind of special superman is needed, so that it may be simply a fact about the nature of the problem (or may not be, just to be clear). And yet, what else can we do but to try anyway?
join forces to be less wrong together?
“You can just do things,” yes, really, but that doesn’t imply that you always should, or that you have high likelihood of said things causing the results you’d prefer. Even so, the reminder is often valuable that yes, actually, you can, you have the power to choose to do so and the right to determine what to do with your own body, including choosing when to listen to conventional wisdom or to those who consider themselves wiser than you. Power is dangerous, and necessary, and agency is a big part of that.
Another side of this that gets discussed here sometimes is: no human actually has enough experience and personal competence in enough things to properly wield the powers the modern world gives us, not by their own strength. It takes a surprising amount of self-awareness to recognize whose fumbling attempts are more likely to go well, but at some level we’re all fumbling around trying to reach beyond ourselves because the alternative is (individual or collective) failure and, sooner or later, death.
I spent the first decade of my adult life paralyzed by indecision and imposter syndrome and leaned helplessness (along with depression and anxiety, which is definitely not entirely separate). I still struggle with this, and probably always will to some degree. It’s very freeing and empowering when I can let go of all that. Honestly, I think the modern world has done us a bit of a disservice by making it possible to (almost) always access knowledge about things before we even take thirty seconds to think for ourselves. And also for structuring kids’ lives to not have much exposure to practical and independent problem solving and, yes, the sometimes devastating consequences of failure. Are we safer? Absolutely. We’re also more fragile, in body and mind. There’s a Discworld quote I’ve always liked about how if you treat children like kittens and puppies, they’ll grow up to be like cats and dogs, when what we want is for them to grow up to be adults.
cf https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BnFuHDueG9vRAYqLd/changing-the-world-for-the-worse
Previously: the law of one player.
Yes, that’s it! Thanks!
This post does not convince me that “I can’t do this thing” is an invalid reason to avoid doing something.
The calculus changes, but not in a way that makes “run unequipped into a burning building” the best option. In the situation you’re describing, the people in the house will die unless competent rescuers appear. If you join them, and there are no competent rescuers around, the odds that you will find-yourself-among-those-needing-to-be-rescued don’t change, but the odds that you’ll die with them go up significantly. The most likely outcome of your attempt to be a hero is one extra tragic, wholly unnecessary death. That’s not to say you should do nothing: your town has systemic fire safety issues, and more will likely die if these aren’t addressed. It’s just that martyring yourself won’t address them, and the best actions you can take are probably much less boldly heroic-seeming.
No, but I don’t think the situations are analogous, because you’ve changed the strategy the child is using. Child A wants to solve his problem by day trading, Child B wants to solve it by hunting for food which can be cooked and eaten. The latter is dangerous, but plausible. The former absolutely would not work. If a homeless child wanted to find food by getting rich day trading, I absolutely would judge this strategy, not because it is arrogant or inappropriate but because I believe it will be unsuccessful. Its odds of success don’t change with how desperate the child is; if anything, Child B is less likely to be a successful day trader, having fewer windows into the world of adult finance.
(On the flipside, if Child A wanted to try hunting and cooking his own food, I wouldn’t judge that either, though I hope he’d ask some of the members of his big, smart, happy family for help first.)
I strongly resist this reframe of “you can just do things”, a phrase which—even if overused—is at least trying to be encouraging. I think feeling personally responsible for things outside your ability to influence is a failure mode of heroic thinking: it benefits nobody and saps resources that might be better spent trying to do things you can do. Similarly, I think “somebody has to and no one else will” is noble and laudable—if the act in question is, itself, something you can do. Otherwise, what is the good of it?
Very much agree. I went down this line of thinking some ten years ago, but it’s a naive view. It’s also more of a vibe / hyping-oneself-up than actual reasoning about the world.
I think that once you start “just doing things” you no longer even think about the world in this way, but instead think about concrete problems that you’re working on. So you’re not thinking “you must do things even if you’re incompetent”, you’re thinking “ok, I need to talk to this person to get to that result” or “I need to make sure this function is applied first” or “I need to get this shipment of humanitarian aid to that location” etc.
But going back to the original subject: there’s thousands and millions of important things that someone should do, and that I cannot do. I obviously should not attempt to do all of them, and am only limited to a small subset of them. If these are in any way difficult problems, my best chances are to work on something that I’m more likely to solve, controlled for personal interest, competing interests, ability to learn, neglectedness, etc. The more I’m capable in a domain, the better my chances. The more incapable, the worse my chances. Therefore, it’s perfectly fine not to attempt things if you cannot do them and it’s going to be exceedingly difficult for you to do them.
Something along this line of reasoning has caused me to abandon my normal career and start self-studying math so that I can directly work in AI alignment.
are there many out there thinking “yeah, i could just do things, but all the haters might laugh at me!”?
Mostly I think that I could just do things but I am very bad at finding ways for those things to earn me the money I need to stay alive. So I spend most of my time doing other things (and sometimes despairing at how badly those things are being organised/managed and how much effort is wasted by this).
yes, this seems like the more correct posture (not sure time spent despairing is valuable, though). there is not “others will judge me unworthy”, there is only “this is within / not within my capabilities to effect”.
For support in self-actualization situations, there is therapy. For support in emergency situations, there is the heavy internal screaming of an even deeper terror than that of public humiliation. (And there is also therapy.)