An individual human is limited by only having 24 hours a day, a large part of that taken by “maintenance” (sleep, job, exercise, preparing food; all the things that you need to do regularly even if they are not your expertise), and only what is left can be spread across the things you want to become great at.
And while some people are good at collecting lots of money quickly, which allows them to skip (job) or outsource (preparing food) some of the maintenance, they are ultimately still limited by the 24 hours.
I think the strongest reason for why the original narrative was changed/abandoned is simply that the average rationalist got older than in the days of Sequences. Generalizing from my own example, when you are a student, it seems like you have unlimited time and energy, the only problem is to focus it on something useful (study science instead of pseudoscience, avoid getting politically mindkilled, etc.). When you later get a job, it may consume most of your time and energy, and when you have kids, they will take the rest. Suddenly your options get very limited, and you must rely on the existing infrastructure (e.g. many people send their kids to schools, because they need two incomes, which is incompatible with homeschooling).
Also, you will notice that many specialists on self-improvement are actually only good at talking about self-improvement. Which feels like a scam. (For example, Kiyosaki is famous for giving advice on how to run your own business, but in reality all his businesses have failed, except for the “making money by talking about being a successful businessman” business.) They are experts at “talking about X”, without being experts at “X”. Even the spiritual superstars these days often sexually abuse their students, because “talking about moral behavior” and “moral behavior” are two different specializations, and it is difficult to be an expert on both at the same time.
Many successful rationalist get invisible—they spend so much time and energy doing whatever they are successful at, that they don’t have much left for blogging. (Perhaps someone should specialize at interviewing them?) Also, having mastered the basic general lessons, they move into technical details of the thing the specialize at; but those technical details are less interesting for those who chose a different specialization. The visible rationalists are those whose specialization is blogging, because being visible is a part of their job. There is nothing wrong with successful blogging, but I think it is worth noticing explicitly that it is mostly the bloggers who become famous.
LessWrong is a communication infrastructure. Lighthaven is a physical implementation of it. They help a lot. The obvious question is whether we could go further in this direction. What other pieces of infrastructure could be build?
People used to talk a lot about group houses. Having rationalists live close to each other seems like a great thing. But then we got a lot of drama. Or maybe it’s just a selection bias, that the failures became famous, and the successes remain unnoticed? I don’t know.
...I probably won’t write anything smart here, but I share the intuition that the next needed thing is some piece of infrastructure, in the wide sense. We are not a set of individuals that will individually become superheroes, but we could have a few heroes who will improve themselves and create tools that will allow others to be 10% more efficient (but creating and maintaining the tool becomes the hero’s full-time job, so we will need another hero for another tool, and maybe we are bottlenecked on human talent), and perhaps this effect could accumulate.
Sounds interesting, but I would like to see some specific examples. I don’t mean examples of useful things that the authors choose to classify as protocols, but examples of when the act of classifying something as a protocol made it easier to solve.
Yes.
An individual human is limited by only having 24 hours a day, a large part of that taken by “maintenance” (sleep, job, exercise, preparing food; all the things that you need to do regularly even if they are not your expertise), and only what is left can be spread across the things you want to become great at.
And while some people are good at collecting lots of money quickly, which allows them to skip (job) or outsource (preparing food) some of the maintenance, they are ultimately still limited by the 24 hours.
I think the strongest reason for why the original narrative was changed/abandoned is simply that the average rationalist got older than in the days of Sequences. Generalizing from my own example, when you are a student, it seems like you have unlimited time and energy, the only problem is to focus it on something useful (study science instead of pseudoscience, avoid getting politically mindkilled, etc.). When you later get a job, it may consume most of your time and energy, and when you have kids, they will take the rest. Suddenly your options get very limited, and you must rely on the existing infrastructure (e.g. many people send their kids to schools, because they need two incomes, which is incompatible with homeschooling).
Also, you will notice that many specialists on self-improvement are actually only good at talking about self-improvement. Which feels like a scam. (For example, Kiyosaki is famous for giving advice on how to run your own business, but in reality all his businesses have failed, except for the “making money by talking about being a successful businessman” business.) They are experts at “talking about X”, without being experts at “X”. Even the spiritual superstars these days often sexually abuse their students, because “talking about moral behavior” and “moral behavior” are two different specializations, and it is difficult to be an expert on both at the same time.
Many successful rationalist get invisible—they spend so much time and energy doing whatever they are successful at, that they don’t have much left for blogging. (Perhaps someone should specialize at interviewing them?) Also, having mastered the basic general lessons, they move into technical details of the thing the specialize at; but those technical details are less interesting for those who chose a different specialization. The visible rationalists are those whose specialization is blogging, because being visible is a part of their job. There is nothing wrong with successful blogging, but I think it is worth noticing explicitly that it is mostly the bloggers who become famous.
LessWrong is a communication infrastructure. Lighthaven is a physical implementation of it. They help a lot. The obvious question is whether we could go further in this direction. What other pieces of infrastructure could be build?
People used to talk a lot about group houses. Having rationalists live close to each other seems like a great thing. But then we got a lot of drama. Or maybe it’s just a selection bias, that the failures became famous, and the successes remain unnoticed? I don’t know.
...I probably won’t write anything smart here, but I share the intuition that the next needed thing is some piece of infrastructure, in the wide sense. We are not a set of individuals that will individually become superheroes, but we could have a few heroes who will improve themselves and create tools that will allow others to be 10% more efficient (but creating and maintaining the tool becomes the hero’s full-time job, so we will need another hero for another tool, and maybe we are bottlenecked on human talent), and perhaps this effect could accumulate.
On that last bit, it’d be interesting to get your reaction to the emerging protocol scene (institute, magazine, the old summer of protocols program, and I guess the natural starting point to all this, The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols).
Sounds interesting, but I would like to see some specific examples. I don’t mean examples of useful things that the authors choose to classify as protocols, but examples of when the act of classifying something as a protocol made it easier to solve.