Does… he have any advice on how to find good consultants? This disagrees so much with my experience that I am confused. The difference might be that he either works on stuff that has many more people with expertise he can consult, or that he has some consultant-finding skill I am lacking.
Consultants are easy to find for the sorts of things he does, with the resources he has. You have to remember that he makes second-screen videos for children. The sorts of consultants he actually needs are relatively cheap, relatively lacking in prestige, and generally less competitive than the ones that people in different fields would need.
The difficulty of finding a consultant scales exponentially against the quantifiability of your goal.
“Make the biggest cake.” → discrete and quantifiable goal, with pre-existing records (so you can tell at a glance who is the best at what they do, based on the simple comparison of a single number).
“Do good management.” → very difficult! Consultants are usually kids without management experience (McKinsey). Those who aren’t aren’t necessarily good at management; how do you know? Very difficult to quantify except by means of using proxy measures, very difficult to find a good consultant.
“Invent a (good) new field of philosophy.” → much harder; requires you to already understand things at at least a high level so that you have the taste to know who has succeeded in this and who hasn’t in recent memory (to override the fact that it’s at least in part a matter of taste and therefore unquantifiable), and requires them to be willing to actually help you out, but it’s an academic field, so quite competitive.
“Write good rationalist fanfiction.” → impossible; never been done before; everyone who has tried is only an aspiring good rationalist fanfiction author; consultant pool of zero.
I’m very sold that it makes sense to talk to the cake size champion in exactly the scenario he described. Throughout that document (which I love and have posted repeatedly to Redwood slack) the examples are constantly insane, and it’s hard for me to tell how much that’s because Mr Beast productions are actually insane and how much it’s because he’s using weird examples.
“the person who made the previous world’s largest slice of cake”
Mr. Beast himself
Neither of these two people are people who you’ll find at a consulting firm. Ie maybe the attitude prescribed here is less “go look for people who market themselves as consultants” and more “go find someone who’s among the best in the world at the thing you’re trying to do and pay them to talk to you”. That sounds like a good idea to me if you can tell who’s good and if they’re affordable.
Does… he have any advice on how to find good consultants? This disagrees so much with my experience that I am confused. The difference might be that he either works on stuff that has many more people with expertise he can consult, or that he has some consultant-finding skill I am lacking.
Consultants are easy to find for the sorts of things he does, with the resources he has. You have to remember that he makes second-screen videos for children. The sorts of consultants he actually needs are relatively cheap, relatively lacking in prestige, and generally less competitive than the ones that people in different fields would need.
The difficulty of finding a consultant scales exponentially against the quantifiability of your goal.
“Make the biggest cake.” → discrete and quantifiable goal, with pre-existing records (so you can tell at a glance who is the best at what they do, based on the simple comparison of a single number).
“Do good management.” → very difficult! Consultants are usually kids without management experience (McKinsey). Those who aren’t aren’t necessarily good at management; how do you know? Very difficult to quantify except by means of using proxy measures, very difficult to find a good consultant.
“Invent a (good) new field of philosophy.” → much harder; requires you to already understand things at at least a high level so that you have the taste to know who has succeeded in this and who hasn’t in recent memory (to override the fact that it’s at least in part a matter of taste and therefore unquantifiable), and requires them to be willing to actually help you out, but it’s an academic field, so quite competitive.
“Write good rationalist fanfiction.” → impossible; never been done before; everyone who has tried is only an aspiring good rationalist fanfiction author; consultant pool of zero.
I’m very sold that it makes sense to talk to the cake size champion in exactly the scenario he described. Throughout that document (which I love and have posted repeatedly to Redwood slack) the examples are constantly insane, and it’s hard for me to tell how much that’s because Mr Beast productions are actually insane and how much it’s because he’s using weird examples.
Personally I am reading him as saying “if you’re doing something for the first time, talk with someone who has done it before”.
Seems noteworthy that in the two examples:
“the person who made the previous world’s largest slice of cake”
Mr. Beast himself
Neither of these two people are people who you’ll find at a consulting firm. Ie maybe the attitude prescribed here is less “go look for people who market themselves as consultants” and more “go find someone who’s among the best in the world at the thing you’re trying to do and pay them to talk to you”. That sounds like a good idea to me if you can tell who’s good and if they’re affordable.