One thing I think is probably true: unless you’re unusually competent or unusually driven, you should look for areas where you can “charge ahead with reckless abandon”, and you should try to cultivate a sense of quality in those areas, possibly by transfer learning; then, having done so, you can exploit your ability to charge ahead in that direction to effectively build skill. In this model, directions to charge in are not something you can reasonably choose, but rather become available to you through chance. If this holds, not everyone can be “Eliezer writing books on rationality”, but I think a lot more people can be “Eliezer writing HPMoR”. I don’t think those things are unknowable from the outside view; I think you just look for “has a good sense of quality” and “is charging recklessly ahead”. At least for learnable skills, I believe that consumptive volume plus self-criticism plus productive volume = quality.
(Forcing yourself to charge in an arbitrary direction is, I suspect, a field that’s genuinely inexhaustible because if you could repeatably do that, you’d own the self-help sector.)
One thing I think is probably true: unless you’re unusually competent or unusually driven, you should look for areas where you can “charge ahead with reckless abandon”, and you should try to cultivate a sense of quality in those areas, possibly by transfer learning; then, having done so, you can exploit your ability to charge ahead in that direction to effectively build skill. In this model, directions to charge in are not something you can reasonably choose, but rather become available to you through chance. If this holds, not everyone can be “Eliezer writing books on rationality”, but I think a lot more people can be “Eliezer writing HPMoR”. I don’t think those things are unknowable from the outside view; I think you just look for “has a good sense of quality” and “is charging recklessly ahead”. At least for learnable skills, I believe that consumptive volume plus self-criticism plus productive volume = quality.
(Forcing yourself to charge in an arbitrary direction is, I suspect, a field that’s genuinely inexhaustible because if you could repeatably do that, you’d own the self-help sector.)