-As others have said, some of the objectives in here can and should be pursued simultaneously. I say ‘should’ partially because you can use pursuing one objective as a break from pursuing another, which I think the human brain likes.
-I think that you severely overestimate the impact of knowing lots of languages considering the costs (including opportunity costs) of learning them. Hm, I think I’m being overconfident, since I have no relevant experience and am purely going on intuition. How long do you anticipate it would take to learn, say, German, if you were starting fresh, how much do you think it would change the required timespan to throw different amounts of money at the problem, and how do you think learning it would help you? What about Mandarin?
-You mention money in steps 1 and 3, and you even note in step 3 that money is more secure and less vulnerable than other sources of power, but I’m getting an odd vibe here. It reminds me of Dune, and of this (especially this comment), sorta like ‘our tribe’s going to do cool ninja stuff, wield power from the shadows, and take over the world’. Or maybe I’m misreading. Anyways, I think that simply making money and x-risk/rationality outreach will yield more results than attempting to gain a significant voice of authority in most fields, with the exception being those academic fields most closely related to x-risk. This paragraph of mine feels kinda unclear, so tell me if you want me to clarify.
How long do you anticipate it would take to learn, say, German, if you were starting fresh, how much do you think it would change the required timespan to throw different amounts of money at the problem, and how do you think learning it would help you?
It has taken me three months total of intensive, immersive language courses to learn enough German to read the newspaper decently and be able to decipher about half the stuff I hear at the radio. I would say that three more months would have me able to write decent fiction.
What about Mandarin?
It’s tough, but manageable. You know, it all comes down to how much you want to communicate and express yourself. For someone like me, who loves to reach out to others and has an irrepressible drive to share their thoughts and feelings, and whose equally irrepressible curiosity leads to wanting to understand others as deeply and completely as possible, learning languages is very easy, because I really really want to use them. It’s all a matter of motivation.
This paragraph of mine feels kinda unclear, so tell me if you want me to clarify.
Please do.
I find the conquering rome examples to be surprising, in that, from my experience, in backwater countries with weak law-enforcement and a corrupt, authoritarian government, you will find people opposing you merely on the principle of you making them look bad by setting an example. And by “opposing you” I mean “being ready to ruin you by all means necessary, up to and including assassination”. I’d expect that roman farm to be burned by mysterious strangers at night before the third year, and I certainly wouldn’t expect Rome to authorize the construction of the air guns, were they to find out.
People who want to do great good in a self-sustaining, permanent way, must be ready to face massive, vicious opposition. They mess up the game, see, they are trouble. To all the incompetent, the corrupt, the indolent, the lazy, the nepotistic… fair competition is the worst thing you can throw at them. Brilliance, energy, and enterprise shine upon them like an injury, highlighting their rotten faces away from the darkness that kept them cushy and warm and hidden. I’m not repeating Rand memes, I’m talking about stuff I’ve seen with my own eyes.
To clarify, I think that the important objectives here are:
-Seek ways to improve mental ability, and mental/physical health.
-Learn whatever skills you believe are necessary to making lots of money—my guess is that it would help to have read a good deal about startups so you have some knowledge of what to/what not to do, some technical skills in order to create product, and some level of interpersonal skill. (I am not attempting to construct a comprehensive list here.)
-Figure out how to maximize your incoming cash flow and do so.
-Donate however much you don’t need to live comfortably to the most effective charity you can find. (Note that this involves the hard problem of how much to invest versus how much to donate to maximize effectiveness.)
I’ve tried to hit the main individual objectives for people who aren’t already working directly on things which pertain to x-risk/efficient charity—there’s significant utility to be gained with achieving some group objectives as well, such as ‘get everyone working who is working on x-risk and effective charity to work together effectively’ (I don’t know how much room for improvement there is here.)
I don’t really see how spending time learning lots of languages will cause you to control enough more money to counteract the opportunity costs. (A few of the major ones, perhaps, but not “as many as you can”.) I don’t think that a PhD will either, and am uncertain about a Masters’ degree. I don’t think that as much focus on developing soft skills as you seem to advocate is profitable, but I am not very confident about this.
With the acquired technical knowledge and skills, and the help of the contact network and the better understanding of human nature that learning so many languages and exploring so many cultures and travelling so much will have netted me, use the remaining money to start a business, one that involves as many people as possible in a way such that I can train them to be a Chaos Legion.
Emphasis mine. My understanding of starting businesses is that you want to keep the number of people to a minimum in order to minimize personnel costs, so I don’t understand the benefit of the bolded bit. (Rather, I can see that you might want as many people as possible generating you money, but I don’t think the focus should be on the number of people—many people may lose you money. It seems like the focus would be better placed on improving hiring practices to maximize profit per amount of available capital.)
I think your opinion is very defensible. Certainly the languages bit is a matter of marginal utility: the more languages you learn, the easier it is to pick up new ones, and the easier it is to branch out internationally and achieve a global impact. However, the more languages you have learned, the fewer people there will be left that you can’t directly communicate with or media that you can’t access, the smaller the gain in acquiring them. Nevertheless, it is also common knowledge, and my experience confirms it, that the rarer a languages is as second language, the more pleased its native speakers are at meeting someone who actually bothered to learn it. It’s instant brownie points. And if you have actually mastered their language at a level higher than their own, it turns from approval to outright admiration (and they freak out a little too). So, for example, English will practically open the world to you, but you won’t be ingratiating yourself to anyone because English speakers tend to assume you will talk to them in their language.
Aaaah, it’s all a matter of weighting and pondering stuff that is neither quantifiable nor easy to predict. What a headache.
As for “involving as many people as possible”, employing people gives you the kind of leverage that startups don’t. Your decisions, which no-one can stop you from making (depending on how you justify them) can alter the economic status and employment numbers of large population centres. It will not do for the politicians to get on your bad side. If facebook closes, there are other similar services, and their employees are highly qualified and will find jobs in no time. If amazon closes, there are still tons of libraries, both virtual and real.
If Ikea, Wall Mart, El Corte Inglés, Carrefour, or METRO, close down even one office, it’s an entire municipality that will suffer horribly. If they fall bankrupt, it’s a national catastrophe.
And then don’t get me started about banks (you don’t have as many employees, but you have debtors, which is almost the same thing, except they can’t resign until the contract is over).
The point is to become interests that are too big to fail, so that even their enemies will go out of their way to help, because they have become necessary.
I’m not interested in profit so much as in increasing people’s dependency. If having one more employee gives me zero profit (accounting for all expenditures having and handling them may cost) but also costs me zero, I vote in favour of hiring them.
Once you have a large number of people dependent on you not, say, closing your offices, what do you intend to accomplish with that state of affairs? Governments sometimes offer bailout money (for a price, I believe) to corporations about to go bankrupt which are considered ‘too big to fail’, but I don’t immediately see how you could effectively make demands without appearing hostile.
You don’t need to make demands or threats, not if you’re even reasonably good at stage 2 (or if your stage 3 clout has reached critical mass). Once you have enough clout, people who would benefit from associating with you will go out of their way to accommodate your preferences out of their own initiative. It’s the people that will want to move against you that will need to use threats and aggression and protests and strikes.
Hm, in fact Bruce Wayne is a pretty good model of what I have in mind, now that I think of it. This reminds me of something I saw a few days ago… (rummages in TV Tropes)… here, look what I found
-As others have said, some of the objectives in here can and should be pursued simultaneously. I say ‘should’ partially because you can use pursuing one objective as a break from pursuing another, which I think the human brain likes.
-I think that you severely overestimate the impact of knowing lots of languages considering the costs (including opportunity costs) of learning them. Hm, I think I’m being overconfident, since I have no relevant experience and am purely going on intuition. How long do you anticipate it would take to learn, say, German, if you were starting fresh, how much do you think it would change the required timespan to throw different amounts of money at the problem, and how do you think learning it would help you? What about Mandarin?
-You mention money in steps 1 and 3, and you even note in step 3 that money is more secure and less vulnerable than other sources of power, but I’m getting an odd vibe here. It reminds me of Dune, and of this (especially this comment), sorta like ‘our tribe’s going to do cool ninja stuff, wield power from the shadows, and take over the world’. Or maybe I’m misreading. Anyways, I think that simply making money and x-risk/rationality outreach will yield more results than attempting to gain a significant voice of authority in most fields, with the exception being those academic fields most closely related to x-risk. This paragraph of mine feels kinda unclear, so tell me if you want me to clarify.
It has taken me three months total of intensive, immersive language courses to learn enough German to read the newspaper decently and be able to decipher about half the stuff I hear at the radio. I would say that three more months would have me able to write decent fiction.
It’s tough, but manageable. You know, it all comes down to how much you want to communicate and express yourself. For someone like me, who loves to reach out to others and has an irrepressible drive to share their thoughts and feelings, and whose equally irrepressible curiosity leads to wanting to understand others as deeply and completely as possible, learning languages is very easy, because I really really want to use them. It’s all a matter of motivation.
Please do.
I find the conquering rome examples to be surprising, in that, from my experience, in backwater countries with weak law-enforcement and a corrupt, authoritarian government, you will find people opposing you merely on the principle of you making them look bad by setting an example. And by “opposing you” I mean “being ready to ruin you by all means necessary, up to and including assassination”. I’d expect that roman farm to be burned by mysterious strangers at night before the third year, and I certainly wouldn’t expect Rome to authorize the construction of the air guns, were they to find out.
People who want to do great good in a self-sustaining, permanent way, must be ready to face massive, vicious opposition. They mess up the game, see, they are trouble. To all the incompetent, the corrupt, the indolent, the lazy, the nepotistic… fair competition is the worst thing you can throw at them. Brilliance, energy, and enterprise shine upon them like an injury, highlighting their rotten faces away from the darkness that kept them cushy and warm and hidden. I’m not repeating Rand memes, I’m talking about stuff I’ve seen with my own eyes.
To clarify, I think that the important objectives here are:
-Seek ways to improve mental ability, and mental/physical health.
-Learn whatever skills you believe are necessary to making lots of money—my guess is that it would help to have read a good deal about startups so you have some knowledge of what to/what not to do, some technical skills in order to create product, and some level of interpersonal skill. (I am not attempting to construct a comprehensive list here.)
-Figure out how to maximize your incoming cash flow and do so.
-Donate however much you don’t need to live comfortably to the most effective charity you can find. (Note that this involves the hard problem of how much to invest versus how much to donate to maximize effectiveness.)
I’ve tried to hit the main individual objectives for people who aren’t already working directly on things which pertain to x-risk/efficient charity—there’s significant utility to be gained with achieving some group objectives as well, such as ‘get everyone working who is working on x-risk and effective charity to work together effectively’ (I don’t know how much room for improvement there is here.)
I don’t really see how spending time learning lots of languages will cause you to control enough more money to counteract the opportunity costs. (A few of the major ones, perhaps, but not “as many as you can”.) I don’t think that a PhD will either, and am uncertain about a Masters’ degree. I don’t think that as much focus on developing soft skills as you seem to advocate is profitable, but I am not very confident about this.
Emphasis mine. My understanding of starting businesses is that you want to keep the number of people to a minimum in order to minimize personnel costs, so I don’t understand the benefit of the bolded bit. (Rather, I can see that you might want as many people as possible generating you money, but I don’t think the focus should be on the number of people—many people may lose you money. It seems like the focus would be better placed on improving hiring practices to maximize profit per amount of available capital.)
(Edited to fix formatting.)
I think your opinion is very defensible. Certainly the languages bit is a matter of marginal utility: the more languages you learn, the easier it is to pick up new ones, and the easier it is to branch out internationally and achieve a global impact. However, the more languages you have learned, the fewer people there will be left that you can’t directly communicate with or media that you can’t access, the smaller the gain in acquiring them. Nevertheless, it is also common knowledge, and my experience confirms it, that the rarer a languages is as second language, the more pleased its native speakers are at meeting someone who actually bothered to learn it. It’s instant brownie points. And if you have actually mastered their language at a level higher than their own, it turns from approval to outright admiration (and they freak out a little too). So, for example, English will practically open the world to you, but you won’t be ingratiating yourself to anyone because English speakers tend to assume you will talk to them in their language.
Aaaah, it’s all a matter of weighting and pondering stuff that is neither quantifiable nor easy to predict. What a headache.
As for “involving as many people as possible”, employing people gives you the kind of leverage that startups don’t. Your decisions, which no-one can stop you from making (depending on how you justify them) can alter the economic status and employment numbers of large population centres. It will not do for the politicians to get on your bad side. If facebook closes, there are other similar services, and their employees are highly qualified and will find jobs in no time. If amazon closes, there are still tons of libraries, both virtual and real.
If Ikea, Wall Mart, El Corte Inglés, Carrefour, or METRO, close down even one office, it’s an entire municipality that will suffer horribly. If they fall bankrupt, it’s a national catastrophe.
And then don’t get me started about banks (you don’t have as many employees, but you have debtors, which is almost the same thing, except they can’t resign until the contract is over).
The point is to become interests that are too big to fail, so that even their enemies will go out of their way to help, because they have become necessary.
I’m not interested in profit so much as in increasing people’s dependency. If having one more employee gives me zero profit (accounting for all expenditures having and handling them may cost) but also costs me zero, I vote in favour of hiring them.
Once you have a large number of people dependent on you not, say, closing your offices, what do you intend to accomplish with that state of affairs? Governments sometimes offer bailout money (for a price, I believe) to corporations about to go bankrupt which are considered ‘too big to fail’, but I don’t immediately see how you could effectively make demands without appearing hostile.
You don’t need to make demands or threats, not if you’re even reasonably good at stage 2 (or if your stage 3 clout has reached critical mass). Once you have enough clout, people who would benefit from associating with you will go out of their way to accommodate your preferences out of their own initiative. It’s the people that will want to move against you that will need to use threats and aggression and protests and strikes.
You’d be amazed at how much you can get done just by asking nicely, especially once you have something the other person really wants or needs. In comicbook terms, compare Nightwing (who is awesome at all stages) to Batman (who really really sucks at stage 2).
Hm, in fact Bruce Wayne is a pretty good model of what I have in mind, now that I think of it. This reminds me of something I saw a few days ago… (rummages in TV Tropes)… here, look what I found
My priors are somewhat different on that—since your examples were from fiction, do you have some evidence for the claim in your first paragraph?