Noticing Panic
In Competent Elites @Eliezer Yudkowsky discusses “executive nature,” which he describes as the ability to “function without recourse,” to make decisions without some higher decision maker to fall back on.
I do not have executive nature.
I like to be well prepared. I like to read every word of every chapter of a textbook before a problem set, take a look, give the last chapter another skim, and then start working.
Being thrust into a new job and forced to explore a confusing repository and complete an open ended project is… stressful. The idea of founding a startup terrifies me (how could I settle on one business idea to throw years of my life at? And just thinking about the paperwork and legal codes that I would have to learn fills me with dread).
There’s a particular feeling I get just before freezing up in situations like this. It involves a sinking suspicion that failure is inevitable, a loss of self confidence, and a sort of physical awkwardness or even claustrophobia, like trying to claw my way up the sheer wall of a narrow shaft. In a word, it is panic.
I believe that this is, for me, the feeling of insufficient executive nature.
It may sound a little discouraging, but the very consistency of this feeling is, perhaps, a key to overcoming my limitations.
The rationalist technique that I’ve found most useful is probably noticing confusion. It is useful because it is a trigger to re-evaluate my beliefs. It is a clue that an active effort must be made to pursue epistemic rigor before instinctively brushing over important evidence. In a way, “noticing confusion” is useful because it links my abstract understanding of Bayes with the physical and emotional experience of being a human. It is not, by itself, a recipe for correct epistemic conduct, but it provides a precious opportunity to take hold of the mind and steer it down a wiser path.
Perhaps noticing panic is for planning and acting what noticing confusion is for belief.
So how should one act when noticing panic?
I do not know yet. But I do have a guess.
I think that I panic when there are too many levels of planning between me and an objective.
For instance, a simple task like performing a calculation or following a recipe has zero levels of planning. Solving a more difficult problem, for instance a routine proof, might have one level of planning: I do not know how to write down the proof, but I know I can (typically) come up with it by rereading the last couple of sections for definitions and reasoning through their conclusions. Solving a harder problem might require an unknown approach; I might have to consider which background I need to fill in to prepare myself to undertake it, and the correct route to a proof may not be clear; this is of course the third level. At the fourth level, I might not even know how to reason about what background I might need (sticking with mathematical examples, if a very difficult problem remains open for long enough, conventional approaches have all failed, and becoming an expert in any mainstream topic is unlikely to be sufficient—one strategy for succeeding where others have failed is to specialize in a carefully chosen esoteric area which no one else has realized is even related. Of course mathematicians usually only do this by accident).
I actually suspect that many engineering tasks are pretty high up this hierarchy, which may be one reason I am less comfortable with them than theoretical work. Though much of an engineer’s work is routine, roadblocks are often encountered, and after every out-of-the-box solution fails, it’s often unclear what to even try next. A lot of mucking about ensues until eventually a hint (like a google-able line in a stack trace) appears, which… leads nowhere. The process continues for an indeterminate amount of time until something works. It’s hard to say in advance how many levels of planning are even needed in this example.
Founding a startup sounds like it’s at a level of nearly unbounded depth.
My intuition is that highly competent executives are able to weather these depths by calmly assessing the number of levels of planning between themselves and a solution, and then working through each level without worrying about the later ones. In a sense, this transforms a level n problem into a level 0 problem: a sequence of steps. The first step might be something like “figure out how best to learn how to invent new rocket designs.” Obviously, this doesn’t trivialize the problem because each step may be very tricky, requiring various forms of competence and intelligence. But I think that when a highly competent executive fails, it’s usually not because they face several levels of planning, conclude the problem is beyond them, and panic. It’s usually because they just don’t do one of the steps well enough.
In this sense, executive nature might put a person functionally on level infinity.
(If this is true, there’s a kind of “planning competence escape velocity.” I’ve sometimes toyed with the hypothesis that deeply understanding the recursion theorem is a litmus test for “complex concept understanding escape velocity.” Perhaps a person who combines the two would be robustly agentic).
Breaking a problem down in this way is a technique it should be possible to refine and deploy when I notice panic.
Hmmm, where to start. Something of a mishmash of thought here.
Actually a manager, not yet clear if I’m particularly successful at it. I certainly enjoy it and I’ve learned a lot in the past year.
Noticing Panic is a great Step 0, and I really like how you contrast it to noticing confusion.
I used to experience ‘Analysis Paralysis’ - too much planning, overthinking, and zero doing. This is a form of perfectionism, and is usually rooted in fear of failure.
I expect most academics have been taught entirely the wrong (in the sense of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) heuristics around failure.
My life rapidly became more agentic the more I updated toward the following beliefs:
Failure is cheap
You have an abundance of chances to get it right
Plans are maps, reality is terrain. Doing happens in reality. Thus you can offload a bunch of cognitive work to reality simply by trying stuff; failing is one of the most efficient ways of updating your map, and can sometimes reward you with unexpected success (take a look around at all the ‘stupid’ stuff that actually works/succeeded).
Thus my management strategy is something like:
Have a goal
Build a model of the factors that contribute to that goal
Determine my constraints (e.g. do I have a rigid deadline)
Notice my affordances (most people always underestimate this)
What resources do I have, e.g.
Who can I ask for help?
What work has already been done that I can use (don’t reinvent the wheel)
What actions are available to me
What is the smallest meaningful step I can take toward my goal?
What is the dumbest thing I can do that might actually work?
Prioritize my time
What needs to be done today vs this week vs this month vs actually doesn’t need to be done
So I’ve reduced a combinatorially explosive long term goal into a decent heuristic for prioritizing actions, and then I apply it to the actions I can actually take at different timescales… which is usually an easy choice between a handful of options.
Then I do stuff, and then I update/iterate based on the results.
And sometimes stuff just happens that moves me towards my goal (or my goal towards me) - life is chaotic, and if you’re rigidly following a plan then that chaos is always working against you. Whereas if you’re adaptable and opportunistic—that chaos can work for you.
I guess all of this boils down to: invest in your world model, not your plan.
Great comment. I also like Nate Soares’ Dive in:
Some of the examples you gave of what you think of as easy is difficult for others. It looks a bit like Typical Mind Fallacy. I don’t think the number of levels you are dealing with is the main problem.
You write:
Managers don’t work thru levels from high to low. Neither do soldiers in battle work from high to low. But “without worrying about the later ones” is right. You do what immediately needs to be done.
I think one can get better at that. Five Minute Timers has some on that.
I don’t mean to imply that levels of planning are objective. I think that solving math problems usually has relatively few levels of planning involved, but requires domain specific competency and a pretty high level of fluid intelligence. Also, the levels of planning required depends on the person—at a low level of mathematical maturity, each recursive level of chasing definitions might feel like a level of planning, though for me “chasing definitions” is itself effectively one step. I do think that in mathematics it can be easier to compartmentalize the levels of planning, which perhaps is one of a combination of factors that makes me good at it. This note is probably worth adding to the post, thank you.
I did not that executives who don’t panic at many levels of planning can still fail because they lack domain specific competency. Difficulty and levels of planning are not identical.
I think you are still thinking about your own actions when solving math problems etc. in near mode—because you know them intimately, but about management in far more, i.e. abstractly in terms of planning levels etc. In practice, managers don’t plan as much as you seem to think. Too much planning is not working in practice. Much of it is responses to situations that are learned and become automatic in the same way as dealing with your math problems.
I wonder if there is not an element of trust (either in others or in one’s own ability to assess others) is not part of the skill set/attitude for executive nature.
The most competent executive/managers I’ve worked with don’t seem to think they have to solve every planning level themself even though the do take ownership of the results. I wonder if simply being will to say “the buck stop here” even when a lot of the work and planning (outside some strategic level planning—which I think is what successful startups get right) is delegated to others.
Yes, this is a good point. Confidence in delegation is probably a panic reducing factor. In a way delegating to one’s future self can be viewed as a special case.
Upvoted because it really makes me think, and I can relate with it a lot. The other day, I was wondering about executive function (the psychology concept that encompasses Eliezer’s ‘executive nature’ but also things like mustering the ability to focus on your homework for more than five seconds). Not sure if it is relevant, but executive function seems to include “emotional regulation”, so there’s probably some psychology research on the question of how panic can reduce our ability to get things done, even beyond actual panic disorders.