This works for versions of “do something” that mainly interact with objective reality, but there’s a pretty awful value-misalignment problem if the way you figure out what works is through feedback from social reality.
So, for instance, learning to go camping or cook or move your body better or paint a mural on your wall might count, but starting a socially legible project may be actively harmful if you don’t have a specific need that’s meeting that you’re explicitly tracking. And unfortunately too much of people’s idea of what “go do something” ends up pointing to trying to collect credit for doing things.
Sitting somewhere doing nothing (which is basically what much meditation is) is at least unlikely to be harmful, and while of limited use in some circumstances, often an important intermediate stage in between trying to look like you’re doing things, and authentically acting in the world.
I’m not sure I’m thinking about the same thing you are, so let me know what you thing of these examples:
“Become a well known writer/blogger”
“Start a popular meetup for Y topic”
“Get respected in a community”
“Make a viral video”
Me phrasing what I think is your point:
Some of the most readily imaginable “things to do” are identified by their effects on social reality (make something popular, be respected). Learning to shape social reality is a skill in itself, but if you mistakenly believe that you are learning how to shape reality you will hit problems when you are confronted with a problem that requires shaping reality.
Thanks for the specific examples. I’m more worried about subtler cases, that aren’t overtly about social reality, but where feedback is mediated through it.
For instance, people like Taleb often name entrepreneurship as an especially “real” thing you can do, but founding a startup can look more like passing a series of tests where you’re supposed to look like VCs’ consensus idea of a business, than figuring out how to make a product you can sell profitably. And success in the corporate world is often even sillier (see just about any story from Moral Mazes for details—or Dilbert for the fictional version), even in firms that make useful physical products. If you’re not careful about what kinds of feedback you respond to or incentive gradients you follow, you may learn to conflate the symbolic representation of the thing (optimized to get approval) with the thing itself.
Acting on social reality is an important skill for many projects, but not all ways of interacting with social reality are the same. In particular, coordinating to manage appearances and stories is very different from coordinating to do something in objective reality. (The engineer and the diplomat, Actors and scribes, words and deeds, On Drama, and Blame games all touch on this.)
I don’t think that all your feedback needs to come from predominantly social sources; that said, I do think that maintaining at least *some* degree of alignment with social reality is pretty important—one failure mode that I’ve seen is people who go out there, develop very strange views, don’t reconcile them with others, and basically end up in schism from the community, unable to bridge the inferential distance that their time away has created.
I’m not saying that their views are always wrong, and I am certainly not saying that social consensus is always right—I have very substantial disagreements with many views that are locally popular here! But what I do know is that, if you move too far out of contact with social reality, even if you find great insights they may become insights that you are unable to articulate or bring to others.
Yes, feedback from social reality shouldn’t be your only tool—but it’s still important!
This works for versions of “do something” that mainly interact with objective reality, but there’s a pretty awful value-misalignment problem if the way you figure out what works is through feedback from social reality.
So, for instance, learning to go camping or cook or move your body better or paint a mural on your wall might count, but starting a socially legible project may be actively harmful if you don’t have a specific need that’s meeting that you’re explicitly tracking. And unfortunately too much of people’s idea of what “go do something” ends up pointing to trying to collect credit for doing things.
Sitting somewhere doing nothing (which is basically what much meditation is) is at least unlikely to be harmful, and while of limited use in some circumstances, often an important intermediate stage in between trying to look like you’re doing things, and authentically acting in the world.
I’m not sure I’m thinking about the same thing you are, so let me know what you thing of these examples:
“Become a well known writer/blogger”
“Start a popular meetup for Y topic”
“Get respected in a community”
“Make a viral video”
Me phrasing what I think is your point:
Some of the most readily imaginable “things to do” are identified by their effects on social reality (make something popular, be respected). Learning to shape social reality is a skill in itself, but if you mistakenly believe that you are learning how to shape reality you will hit problems when you are confronted with a problem that requires shaping reality.
Thanks for the specific examples. I’m more worried about subtler cases, that aren’t overtly about social reality, but where feedback is mediated through it.
For instance, people like Taleb often name entrepreneurship as an especially “real” thing you can do, but founding a startup can look more like passing a series of tests where you’re supposed to look like VCs’ consensus idea of a business, than figuring out how to make a product you can sell profitably. And success in the corporate world is often even sillier (see just about any story from Moral Mazes for details—or Dilbert for the fictional version), even in firms that make useful physical products. If you’re not careful about what kinds of feedback you respond to or incentive gradients you follow, you may learn to conflate the symbolic representation of the thing (optimized to get approval) with the thing itself.
Acting on social reality is an important skill for many projects, but not all ways of interacting with social reality are the same. In particular, coordinating to manage appearances and stories is very different from coordinating to do something in objective reality. (The engineer and the diplomat, Actors and scribes, words and deeds, On Drama, and Blame games all touch on this.)
I don’t think that all your feedback needs to come from predominantly social sources; that said, I do think that maintaining at least *some* degree of alignment with social reality is pretty important—one failure mode that I’ve seen is people who go out there, develop very strange views, don’t reconcile them with others, and basically end up in schism from the community, unable to bridge the inferential distance that their time away has created.
I’m not saying that their views are always wrong, and I am certainly not saying that social consensus is always right—I have very substantial disagreements with many views that are locally popular here! But what I do know is that, if you move too far out of contact with social reality, even if you find great insights they may become insights that you are unable to articulate or bring to others.
Yes, feedback from social reality shouldn’t be your only tool—but it’s still important!